Josh Ronsen wrote:
> She wrote: “it is a truism that in order to be meaningful it must, by definition,
>ultimately be classifiable as "art" by an audience”
I kinda think she was being in a hurry and elided a bit, meaning something like "in
order to be meaningful [in a reliable or predictable artworld way] it must, by
definition, be classifiable as "art" by an audience "
One thing I do for a living is line editing, so over a couple decades of this I've
developed a pretty good nose for intention . . .
Thanks for kind words. You also write interesting things, viz:
>
> There is something fishy about the idea that an artist puts meaning into a work
>which is then extracted by a viewer. I would say that in most cases meaning is put
>in, and then in most cases meaning is taken out, but then there doesn’t have to be
>any correlation between the two.
>
I think you're right, in that the transaction is never that reliable, thanks god. The
reason that I dearly love the physicality of artmaking is that that physicality is
always only partially constituted by the artist's intention. There's a huge muteness,
or independent reservoir of meaninglessness/meaning, that always inheres in physical
things, even physical things largely constituted by human intention, look at, for
instance, Kurt Schwitter's collages, layered up of the intentions of manufacturers,
advertisers, buyers and discarders, and finally Schwitters. And still
the color means itself more than it means anything else.
>
> Maybe the “anti-art” I am interested in is whatever cannot be viewed as art.
But why not view it as art? That just means disobedient communication, in my
(admittedly heterodox) book--Why do artists constantly beat up the idea of art? It's
like pissing on your grandmother's grave; fine as a gesture in youthh, but callow as a
habit.
> >Meaning is always
> >dependent on the mutually agreed upon context in which a communication is made.
> >If one person intends the communication to be made and understood in one
> >context, and the other person doesn't know this or disagrees, then confusion
> >results.
>
> But there are many cases where there is no mutually dependent context, and many more
>where that context is generated by someone other than the artist. Consider
>prehistorical rock art or cave paintings. We can speculate what they were trying to
>do, but we don’t know. We can surely appreciate what they did without knowing what
>meaning they had put into it.
But that's another instance in which the physicality of art is so important. We do
know something of what they intended, because we're human, like them; we share a great
deal of life experience with them. Our bodies and their insistences create large areas
of meaning that we share with all other humans. And we cannot rest with mere
"appreciation"--at least I have always speculated about the reasons, the means, the
pleasures, the needs that made those images happen. ( I think that they are evidence
of the primacy of mimesis as a way of learning the world, assimilating
the world--a way of enforcing observation of prey animals, learning them inside out,
you might say [still a practice into modern times by hunting cultures, surviving even
into duck-stamp art, in which accurate mimesis, tinged by the 19th-cent positivism
that is the bedrock of rural culture, is the primary virtue]).
Imagemaking is a technology, predating the species itself, and likely wouldn't
have occurred and remained, universally, all over the world, if it were not an
efficacious technology. Well, I think artmaking is still most interestingly thought of
as a technology at the borders of the inchoate. That is, there is the human world of
designated meaning, a tiny beachhead in the vast realms of the inchoate, of the
material, of the --well--the everything else. and there's artmaking, which
traditionally was the permeable membrane between the known or the peerceivable, and the
inchoate, the unperceivable because unnamed, the other stuff. Nowadays, art also
exists as rhetoric, to promulgate a certain area of culture (say norman rockwell, or
mountain dew ads), or to interpret one cultural realm to others, or etc etc. Sometimes
it exists simply to remember a certain cultural moment, or to comment on it (koons or
grandma moses--).
But for me, as a sculptor and fan of the weird imperatives of the physical, art's
role as the gateway to the mutely resonant world of materiality is its most
interesting aspect. It means that I'm usually bored by smart art, by the strategies of
indirection so popular now, by ironizing gestures. I'm also usually bored by art that
exists solely to ask questions about the role of art, or art's ontological status.
These are questions that can be laid out and answered most productively, I think, not
in terms of the artworld but in terms of culture and communication more
generally.
> I like thinking about situations where the intended will or meaning of the artist is
>completely unknown. Like getting a strange package in the mail full of painted leaves
>with no return address or note. Or, someone just told me about this (but I forget the
>exact details), walking in the forest off trail and finding a huge pile of children’s
>dolls and used ammo clips, or something equally strange. Or maybe finding some
>strangely smooth rock in the wilderness: is it just a rock, or was it at sometime a
>created piece of art with profound mystical meaning for its maker?
>
I like these things too, as you can tell, I'm sure, from the foregoing. A friend of
mine made a great sculpture out of a small mountain of beaver skulls found in the
woods (not that mysterious--an old trapper's pile) and a trove of old photos, combined
with a mysterious set of odd-shaped file drawers--what had they ffiled?
> Perhaps all of this is “confusion” as you say.
Confusion isn't bad. It's just a state of affairs that can exist when one person
intends something the other person isn't aware of. As I mentioned, artists often
exploit this opportunity to make new things happen. Confusion is a cracked door.
Sometimes people get scared by it; sometimes they let new stuff in. You may be more
comfortable with that state than most people.
>
> Maybe we are saying the same thing. But I am interested in the idea of things
>intended to be “art” and not seen as such,
It's harder to do that now. People are much more likely to understand what's going on
and thus, unfortunately (in part because art has such a bad name in this weberian,
puritan, functional society--) they say, "O that's art." and then proceed to ignore
it, because they figure it's just meant to fuck with their heads and they hate that.
>
>
> Please respond Ann! You write interesting things and I only disagree with you to
>make you write more!
>
> -Josh Ronsen
> http://www.nd.org/jronsen
>
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