Art as Intentional
The main focus of this week’s session of the Tate Modern course 7 Ways of Thinking About Art was the question, ‘What part should an artist’s expressed intentions play in our interpretation of a work of art?’
Anti-Intentionalists believe that no external evidence should be used to ground an interpretation. An extreme case of an anti-intentionalist is Clive Bell who in his book Art (1914) argued that to appreciate art as art requires us to concentrate on its non-representational aspects: in the case of painting this amounts to patterns of lines, shapes and colours. We are to ignore the subject matter when we are interested in the work as art rather than as illustration. Artists’ intentions are not relevant; nor is the historical context. Art is timeless. To appreciate art requires a sensitive viewer (for more about Clive Bell, see Chapter One of my book The Art Question or read his book Art.The literary theorists Wimsatt and Beardsley put forward a less extreme form of anti-intentionalism in relation to literature. They argued that to base a critical interpretation of a work on external biographical information about intentions was a mistake. What was needed was scrutiny of what was within the work. They coined the label ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ for this kind of mistake. As they put it
‘Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle’
The argument to support the idea that biographical information should not be drawn upon is that it is either misleading or redundant ('otiose' as they put it). It is misleading if it supports an interpretation that can’t be arrived at by consideration of the work in front of the reader/viewer. It is redundant if it simply re-iterates what is already visible in the work.
A related argument was used by Roland Barthes in his article 'The Death of the Author ' which promoted multiple readings unbound by original context and authorial intentions.
Intentionalists, such as the philosopher Richard Wollheim, argue that interpretation involves retrieval (see his essay 'Criticism as Retrieval' which is included in 2nd ed. of his book Art and Its Objects). The viewer of a work of art should attempt to understand how it came to be as it is. The point is to try to appreciate the artist as someone trying to communicate with viewers. This involves finding out about more than just intentions: changes of mind, historical background, relation to other works by the same artist, and so on, all have their part to play.
Virtual Intentionalists argue that it may not matter if the intentions attributed are historically accurate: what counts is that they can be plausibly attributed to the artist. The notion of an implied author may play a larger role in interpretation than that of the actual author.
In the galleries we looked at 3 works in the Tate Modern 'Pop Life' (originally to have been called 'Sold Out') exhibition: Jeff Koons 'Rabbit' (1986) Some useful background about this piece here. (watch a short video about Koons' studio here), Piotr Uklanski's ' The Nazis' and Maurizio Cattelan's dead horse in Room 16 (the Tate Modern wall captions for the Pop Life show are available here).
In each case the question of actual artist's intentions was complicated a) by comparative lack of definitive information and evidence, and b) in Koons' case the suspicion that some of what he has said about his work may be ironic.
But the approach of thinking about what the artist might plausibly have intended by the works seemed appropriate. In each case we believe that the artist's choices aren't arbitrary, and that there is more at stake here than paying attention to patterns of lines shapes and colours...
For example, in the case of 'The Nazis' (a large composite picture, ostensibly made up of photographs of actors playing the role of Nazis in films) the fact that the artist and curator chose not to alert the viewers to the presence of images of at least one actual Nazi (Joseph Goebbels) amongst the image of screen actors playing Nazis (unless I'm mistaken about this) was presumably intentional (paradoxically, any expressed view about this by artist or curator would have eliminated any discovery of the real Nazi with the corresponding jolt of recognition which was, we assume, part of the point of the work). The question then arises what the artist was intending by this action. (I hope I've got this right - Laura Cummings in her Observer review seemed to take it at face value that all the images were of actors) The fact that in Warsaw one of the actors depicted in Nazi role tried to slash the work, presumably because in the context of questions about Polish collusion with Nazism it could be read as having an anti-Polish slant, seems relevant. Yet it could also bye read metaphorically as about the notion of impostors (and in some senses the artist is an impostor here as not obviously central to the history of the post-Pop Art movement). Or it could allude to the theatricality of Nazism. Plausibly too, the artist intended multiple readings of the work - that's why it is a work of art and not a crossword puzzle with a single straightforward solution. It would be interesting to hear what the artist intended by the work, but for most viewers it is the intentions which can plausibly be attributed t the artist that are most important (though we might want to revise these if we learnt something new from the artist's description).
But if, hypothetically, it turned out that this work wasn't even by Uklanski, but by, say Maurizio Cattelan, impersonating another artist (something that scrutiny alone probably wouldnt reveal), then knowing this fact would lead us to change our interpretation radicaly (and foreground the interpretation of this having to do with impostors, the art world, etc. and passing one thing off as another)...in other words, the assumptions we make about intentions occur against a background of beliefs about what it is that we are looking at (given by context, accompanying texts, and so on).
