I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I talked about my art+writing project with a good friend at our monthly lunch yesterday. He told me how the essays make him think about experiences in his life, make him reflect on relationships he’s been through.
I am finding more and more that my art (both painting and writing) connects with other people in ways I don’t expect. I can’t expect people to find a one-to-one match of their experiences to mine, or their emotions to mine, or their introspections to mine. Instead, my art makes an impact on someone else when there is something in it that creates a reaction in them. The meaning they take away may be totally different than the meaning I brought to the work.
In his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” French literary critic Roland Barthes argues against using aspects of an author’s identity to explain the ultimate meaning of a text. He suggests that each reader brings their own interpretation. The audience co-creates the meaning. And the author’s biography doesn’t matter in art’s interpretation; only the audience response creates the meaning. Hence the “death” of the author.
Barthes writes:
A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.
This applies to visual art, as well. Once a painting is created, the painter’s intentions no longer anchor the meaning. Instead, the painting can have many meanings, based on the diverse reactions it sparks.
German 20th century philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argued in his 1960 book Truth and Method that understanding art is like a dialogue. The work speaks, the audience responds, and meaning arises in that back-and-forth, always situated in time and context. Art, therefore, has an openness to it. Different generations, cultures, or individuals can draw out new truths.
In his 1977 essay “The Play of Art” Gadamer says a work of art isn’t just a static object that people look at; it’s more like a game or a play. Its reality is in the event of being played (or experienced), not in a fixed product. He says a work of art only truly “is” when it is received and responded to.
But that play isn’t located just in the artist’s head or just in the audience’s head. It happens between them, in the ongoing performance of the work. So art’s meaning doesn’t belong exclusively to the artist’s intention or to the spectator’s projection. It emerges in the back and forth.
For Gadamer, art is not just made and then looked at. It is an event of play requiring participants. The work comes alive in its performance, its reception, and its dialogue with each new audience.
This is kind of blowing my mind. One of the TMGM stories I’m working on features my then-boyfriend imposing his own meaning onto my painting. At the time, I wasn’t ready for that, and anyway the painting he was imposing meaning on was just a copy of someone else’s painting. I was following a tutorial to try to reproduce it. It wasn’t really art, but I didn’t get that then.
It was only later I started doing art, producing paintings in my own artistic voice and style.
Barthes and Gadamer were working at the same time (in the twentieth century) but came from two different intellectual traditions.
Barthes was a French literary critic and theorist associated with structuralism and post-structuralism. He was not as concerned with philosophy of truth than with how meaning is constructed through signs, texts, and cultural codes.
Gadamer was a German philosopher rooted in the tradition of continental philosophy. His area of work was philosophical hermeneutics, the theory of understanding, interpretation, and how meaning emerges historically.
Barthes kills the author (or painter) while Gadamer keeps the conversation alive. I’m not sure which view I resonate more with, but possibly Barthes. When my Things Men Gave Me goes out in the world, it becomes the property of the audience, ready for them to impose their understanding and experiences. It doesn’t feel dialogic to me.