Contemporary Aesthetics 2010 - Tate Modern - Notes from Session Five

How relevant are an artist's intentions to our critical assessment and understanding of his or her work?

In the 1950s Wimsatt and Beardsley famously declared in their paper 'The Intentional Fallacy' (Reading 47) that delving into author psychology and other forms of external evidence about an artist's intentions was either not possible (because of lack of evidence) or else otiose (i.e. of no practical use). Although they were writing about poetry, the arguments carry across to the visual arts. Their position is a form of anti-intentionalism.

For them only internal evidence was legitimate and criticism should be based on scrutiny of what is before us. If the artist intended something that wasn't visible, then no amount of special pleading could make it be in the work; if the artist intended something that was in the work, then it should be apparent without any need to consider external evidence. As Stanley Cavell put it (in what's perhaps supposed to be a knock-down argument):

'...it no more counts towards the success or failure of a work of art that the artist intended something other than is there, than it counts when the referee is counting over a boxer that the boxer had intended to duck' (in 'Music Discomposed').

In contrast, other writers such as Richard Wollheim (in 'Criticism as Retrieval' - a supplementary essay to 2nd ed. of his book Art and Its Objects) argue that criticism should be based on retrieval: retrieval of an artist's intentions as much as this is possible, on understanding how the artist made various particular choices in a context. This usually involves considerable imaginative reconstruction.

Alexander Nehamas (Reading 48 'The Postulated Author'), arguing against the pluralism of deconstructionists (who believe that every reading is a misreading, including their own - but they can't really say that consistently, so have to try and show it), maintains that criticism should be aiming at an ideal in which can best explain all features of a work of art. In understanding and judging a work of art we try to understand it as a product of an individual. We postulate an artist/creator who may or may not be the actual historical artist - yet who could plausibly have made this work. Although he believes that all readings fall short of the ideal reading (one which will explain all features of the work in question), this does not mean that all readings have equal status. He does believe that there is such a thing as a correct reading of a work, but that this is not ever going to be achieved, and so it acts as an ideal to aim at rather than a practical possibility.

In Tate Modern we visited Ai Weiwei's installation Sunflower Seeds in the Turbine Hall which consists of approximately 100 million porcelain hand-painted trompe l'oeil 'sunflower seeds' (probably fewer now), all made in a village in China. Weiwei's intention was that the work should be interactive - viewers should have been able to walk on, pick up, sit on, the seeds. This was possible for the first few days of the exhibition, and visitors treated it much like a shingle beach. But health worries about porcelain dust resulted in public access being severely restricted, and the work now appears far more sterile, with viewers kept at a distance behind a rope (in a parallel world, the artist was put under house arrest for expressing views that angered the Chinese authorities). Crushing sunflowers underfoot with every step it would have been difficult not to have interpreted this as a symbol of the suppression of the individual in China...whether or not that was explicitly intended by the artist (if that interpretation wasn't at any level intended by Weiwei, it would have been a serendipitous coincidence that would not have been lost on most viewers/interactors - a public meaning that the work would have generated, and would have fit with the intentions of a plausibly postulated author à la Nehamas). Now that interpretation has to be the result of imagining walking on the seeds, rather than actually doing it. Or possibly by watching videos, like this one, of people walking on the seeds. Notice, too, how the aural element of the work is also lost.

Without 'external' evidence, it is hard to imagine anyone understanding the intended multiple significance of sunflower seeds and their mode of production. For Weiwei, the seeds were symbolic both because for some they were a source of nutrition under famine during the Mao era, but also because Mao himself chose to see his people as sunflowers with their faces following him. A different aspect of the production of the porcelain replicas that is brought out well in the video that accompanies the work - these are all hand painted using traditional methods. As with so many mass-produced objects made in China for the West, the human story behind the production, and the relationship between purchaser and worker isn't immediately apparent. These quotations from the author confirm this intention:

It's a work about mass production and repeatedly accumulating the small effort of individuals to become a massive, useless piece of work.

 China is blindly producing for the demands of the market…My work very much relates to this blind production of things. I'm part of it, which is a bit of a nonsense.

The value of the individual that is in danger of being lost in this vast country is a theme that has surfaced in an earlier piece by Weiwei in which he commemorated the names of all the people who had died in an earthquake.

The idea that we could understand, evaluate and appreciate this work without knowing anything about the artist's intentions apart from what we could somehow 'see' in the work (as if seeing were neutral, not theory-laden anyway), is implausible. This is not to say that the artist is simply an 'oracle' able to declare anything whatsoever about the meaning of this work with complete authority. Works of art become public and accrue their own histories apart from their original context of presentation. But to ignore that this, like all art, is an intentional (though not necessarily fully consciously chosen) act that creates its meaning from the deliberate context of presentation (while also gaining further significance through aspects of the work which may not have been intended at all), would be somewhat perverse.

 

 

Comments

[John]

Surely the supplementary information about Wei Wei's work is a literary art form (not particulary good literary art in thids case)expressing ideas that the artist was not able to do completely in the physical work itself - the physical parts of this and most other visual art is generally not sufficient (however desirable) without literary or other artistic components - art should be seen as invoking a continuum of expressive means, not either painting or music or performance etc. but a combination of all to greater or lesser degrees.

[Mr. Seacrudge]

Interesting. I suspect that those who want to do away with artistic intentionality are following the demands of a market that largely follows "non-esthetic" dictates. A market of "simulated" art as Baudrillard would say. Though on another level, even social climbing, market speculation, politics, etc. could be considered from an esthetic angle.

From the book THE $12 MILLION STUFFED SHARK:

"Sometimes a dealer or an auction house will claim that a work of contemporary art has meaning, that an artist such as Andy Warhol is a social commentator. Critics & curators may debate what a work means; most collectors just want to hang a work that touches their soul. Experienced collectors do not spend much time worrying about meaning. If the work is expensive enough that the dealer or collector is asked, they will probably just invent an elaborate legend." (Pg. 55)

I used to react against the destruction of the idea of inherent value in a work of art. It seems to me a kind of relativizing of value. I don't like the idea that a can of shit suddenly becomes art just because it is placed in a gallery. As if the gallery/museum context has the absolute ability/right to condition perception. I don't like that fact that many activists, finding themselves politically impotent in the realm that they would truly like to influence, are channeled into the arts. And so the "meaning" of the arts gets coopted thru these people.

At the same time, I'm not sure anymore that ANY object can be truthfully considered as seperate from its environment/perciever.

I guess it comes down to a philosophical question of how we define "environment" and "reality". What is the ontological status of the object?

Or at least that's the question we have to ask before we can make any determinations regarding these other questions, it seems to me.