Initial Reflection: "To What Extent is Representation an Essential Function of Artworks?"

Representation in Artworks

The representation of other objects – things, places, people – anything that can be considered a subject – within an artwork operates to ground our perceptual experience of the work in a relatable realm. Without relatability artwork fails to connect with an audience and, in a sense, fails to be art as it is nothing more than a vacuous coming together of parts.

A simple example is found in recognize works that one finds little value in. Thinking back to an artwork you found little value you in, if you reflect on it, you may realize that more than any other rational, your inability to find any relation between the artwork and your own experience made you disfavor the work (finding a relatability in the work’s representation does not necessitate that you have an experience that mirrors the representations of the work but, rather, that it is something that can be explored by the observer because what the work is representing is able to be related to by the observer). An innocent example is how music derived from other cultural contexts than the one someone has grown up in sounds foreign and strange to them, while the music of their own culture does not. This does not mean that the listener dislikes the foreign music but it is unfamiliar none-the-less and the result is that the listener does not embrace the music from another culture in the same way he embraces their own. The un-familiarity taken to the extreme causes discomfort for the listener – for example highly artistic forms of music which make use of multiple meters layer on top of one other and no formal sequence of tones causes the listener to feel lost and even those who study such pieces openly remark that they do not do so because the music is pleasurable and that, in fact, the music causes them to have a sense of loss because they have no familiar bearings to hold on to. Taken even further and the music collapses into noise – completely disorganized and unrelatable. The “artwork” at this point could be said to have failed to represent anything at all – if one is so bold as to assert something is represented than they must derive that representation and qualify it – often falling under critical attack for making arbitrary or specious distinctions in order to justify something which is not there. Representation, therefore, functions as the main vehicle within artworks that make them provide a relatable experience.

Here is a perhaps an example of a piece that most people believe to fall outside the category of music:

http://youtu.be/0wgA9L5TN5M

The exact nature of representation, however, is not something which is easily demarcated. Abstract works are often thought to be representative of a range of emotions, ideas, or even physical subjects but those representations are not ostensible in the way they are in works prior to the modern era when abstraction became increasingly popular. Clearly then, representations do not have to be explicit to exist, be effective, or be meaningful. Representations, therefore, are difficult to denote in highly complex and abstract works and the above argument falls short of capturing the degree to which one can truly judge the effectiveness or the absence of a representation. Instead, the observer is the one who discovers the representation (and we therefore find ourselves in a realm of subjectivity). A further sketch of the exact nature of representation is necessary before the function of its involvement in art, beyond its essential character of providing us with the familiar in order to ground ourselves, can be fully elucidated.