Playing with Meaning (session 2) Notes - Tate Modern Course

These notes are from the second session of the course Playing with Meaning, Tate Modern, (by ticket only, sold out).

We continued discussing questions about the meaning of art works, beginning by looking at some of Arthur C. Danto's ideas. Danto, who died, last week, was famous for his 1964 paper 'The Artworld' in which he suggested that 

    'To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry - an atmopshere of artistic theory, a     knowledge of the history of art: an artworld' 

He fleshed this out in his extensive discussions of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes and their significance, and by using a range of thought experiments which demonstrated the non-identity of indiscernibles: most famously in his discussion of 9 apparently identical square canvases painted red - each with different artistic properties, and some not even works of art (e.g. entitled 'Red Square', 'The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea' 'Kierkegaards Mood', and a canvas primed by the artist Giorgione - this last one not a work of art). 

An important feature of Danto's account of art was his emphasis that works of art are about something, they have a subject, and a viewpoint on that subject, a viewpoint that they characteristically express in an elliptical way that gives rise to interpretation.

You can read more about Danto, who was unusual amongst philosophers of art in that he wrote with great style and was also a serious art critic, in these obituaries: New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera  and in his own excellent 'Letter to Posterity'. There's also an audio interview with Danto on Art here (with transcript).

For a fascinating broader discussion of how meaning is communicated, listen to this podcast interview: Stephen Neale on Meaning and Interpretation

Moving to the topic of Play, we discussed both Bernard Suits' ideas about game-playing, what it is and why it is valuable, as argued in his negelected classic The Grasshopper. For more information about this book, read this review, and this interview with Tom Hurka on Suits on Games

We also considered Freud's essay 'The Creative Writer and Daydreaming' in which he suggested that the opposite of play for a child is not seriousness, but reality; that children are not usually confused about the difference between play and reality, but immerse themselves in play with a seriousness that adults would for the most part feel embarrassed to admit if they did it. The worlds that some creative writers create are analogous to the make believe games of children, and get their power from the wish fulfilment of childhood, and the unconscious forces at play then. Adults disguise the real source of power with the surface delight of aesthetic design. But, Freud suggests, it is the powerful emotional world of the child that fuels both the creator and the reader in their engagement with imaginary worlds.  Maria Popova has some extracts and comments on Freud's essay here.

In the Tate Modern gallery we explored some of Paul Klee's playful paintings in the new exhibition Making Visible, some of which are sophisticated doodles in which he takes a line for a walk, others play with abstraction, or experiment playfully with colour. We thought about them both in terms of play and playfulness (his interest in making them, ours in looking at them), and recognizing the range of aesthetic surface pleasures that he used to draw us into the works. In some cases, he deliberately set himself rules, as if playing a game, converting, for example shapes into abstractions in a series of tonally changing moves in his picture of pottery. 

We also discussed how the absence of contextual information about particular images in the exhibition made interpretation in terms of artist's intentions very difficult. Knowing whether a work was, for example, the result of a Bauhaus technical exercise, a caricature of a particular person, or a response to a particular situation, would have helped eliminate anachronistic and inappropriate responses. 

 



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