Intuitively, my reaction to the question “what role does the artist take in shaping an artwork” is: an essential one. This I say, considering that without the artist, the work and all subsequent interpretations of it would not exist. However, we have seen that various arguments of anti-intentionalist critics and thinkers complicate our initial concept of who is involved in the creation of an artwork. Carroll does an excellent job of fleshing those arguments out and offering counter-arguments of his own, however, I felt that he took the easy way out in part by positing that we can discount the artist’s explicit intentions by assuming that they don’t apply if they don’t immediately seem reasonable. Though Carroll’s intention with this position is to provide a moderate alternative to rejecting undue authorial input without resorting to anti-intentionalism, he doesn’t leave room for the influence of post-modernism and contemporary performance art, which I find surprising considering the paper of his that we read was originally published in 1992.
If anti-intentionalism raises the question of where the work of art ends (in the experience of the viewer/reader/listener rather than the hands of the artist), than contemporary performance art ups the ante considerably. Pieces such as Warhol’s “Eating a Hamburger” (itself only a piece of the full art object consisting of much of his life) illustrate the fact that our notion of what constitutes an artwork has always been, and continues to be flimsy. Some insight indirectly offered by Wollheim by way of his specific definition of artworks (in this case, pieces of music or theater which exist not as any particular instance of performance or in the score or the script, but as an ideal performance never realized) is the fact that “the artwork” may never be what it appears to be, giving us reason to wonder not only whether, as the anti-intentionalist would wish us to, an artwork is merely the work as related to its creator or a conjunction of the work with its many diverse and potential interpretations, but also whether an artwork’s “borders” are defined by traditional means or whether those means are being transgressed against in the construction of an even more complex artwork (regardless of who is responsible for its construction).
If, understanding that our criteria for artworks are inherently loose, we allow contemporary performance art to be a concern, we must always be aware of the artist as a sort of architect who directs the builders (experiencers/participators) in the construction of the artwork. The artwork cannot be evaluated as only the blueprints, nor only as the material without form, but must be as inclusive of the input of the creator as possible with respect to the input of the experiencer. Nehamas’ “postulated author” presents a valuable tool for retaining the influence of authorship while acknowledging the reality and power of readership. By positing an author who is in a sense communicable via interpretation, the postulated author becomes even more than the “writer” (to use Nehamas’ terminology), serving as a nexus of possible authorial intentions. The utility for this usage where the author’s intention cannot be known is readily apparent, but it also has usage for situations in which the author’s input and intention are explicit. For example, in the case of the sculptor who insists that her sculpture is pink instead of blue (although the sculpture is measurably blue), the actual sculptor’s intent can serve as a tool which expands or contracts the scope of the “postulated sculptor’s” possible intentions, but understanding that the true sculptor cannot know the full depths of their subconscious by which they could express a definitive intent for a piece, the “postulated sculptor” serves as a much better gauge than the actual sculptor (alternatively, we could conceive of the artwork not as merely the physical sculpture, but the sculpture in relation to contradictory remarks made by the artist).
As a result of these lines of criticism, a new artistic mentality is arising in artists themselves, although strains of it have been present for centuries, that they, the artists, are not responsible for imparting meaning to their work. This doesn’t just apply to interpretive meaning though, it also applies to original meaning, the meaning which would presumably exist as a teleological map which the artist would follow in the process of creation. Dr. Butler’s sculptures exhibit strains of this thought, not to mention he himself expressed such concepts. He speaks of pieces “finishing themselves,” of “working out their own conclusions” (paraphrasing here, of course). The carving of the plaster molds was not explicitly directed. The artist, at the end of the process, is in the same position as the viewer encountering the artwork for the first time, employing the tool of a “postulated artist” in order to interpret the unknown workings of the subconscious in interplay with matters of chance. In short, the artist plays an instrumental role in the existence of an artwork but hardly more than the experiencer, both attempting to touch upon a perceived wellspring of creative possibilities.
For Your Consideration:
No comments:
Post a Comment