[PAM] Member Blogs

When one looks at an art object, what is the purpose of mentioning intention?  If the artist's intention was successful, then it is in the work.  If the artist's intention failed to achieve its aim, then it is irrelevant because it's not evident in the work. 

 Such is the view of anti-intentionalists.  Anti-intentionalists are essentially formalists who think that viewers, critics, and interpreters should focus on the work and not what the artist is trying to do.  They say all ambiguities should be solved within the formal boundaries of the work and without any deference to the artist.  

 An absolute intentionalist would say that the artwork can only be understood and interpreted correctly if the viewer understands the artist's intention.  If the artist's intent is banished from the equation, the work becomes a pluralistic free-for-all of meaning.  An artwork, as an utterance, is an attempt at communication.  If we don't understand what the utterer is trying to say then we can't comprehend the message.  

 Those are the basics of the intentionalism debate.  It's an argument that has been going on, in this specific manner, since W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's seminal essay "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946) in which they attempted to delineate the boundaries of an artwork excluding any biographical or personal information relative to the aritist.  They made their case in the context of poetry, but the argument extends, albeit in different ways, to the visual arts as well.  

Can an artwork be disconnected from it's creator's biography or any information said creator spouts outside of but in reference to the work? 

 Regretfully, many of these problems can only be resolved situationally.  I mean, in some cases, we don't even know who the author was so how can we put the work in an authorial context?  For example, we don't know who wrote Beowulf.  So, any conception of what we think the intention of the author was comes explicitly from the work.  There's no biographical or personal information that can inform our understanding of it.  In that situation, it's impossible to differentiate between what we think the author meant and what the author actually meant.

 For Felix Gonzales-Torres' Portrait of Ross in L.A. (1991), in which he displayed a pile of candy that exactly matched the weight of his dead lover Ross (175 lbs), it's impossible to separate the artwork from the artist.  The artwork is immediately placed in a biographical context when it is understood and the intentions of the artist are absolutely necessary to the comprehenion of the work.  Without the knowledge that the candy is the exact weight of Ross, one cannot grasp the significance of the artwork.  It's debatable whether that connection can be made solely from the title and the piece or if one needs outside information, but in every case I've witnessed, the "revelation" doesn't occurr without any external assistance.  The fact that the work is a "portrait of Ross" and that it weighs 175 lbs, in my opinion, does not reveal enough information to put the pieces of the puzzle together.  One could argue the opposite but I hold my ground.  Once one understands that 175 lbs was the weight of Ross, it seems obvious...but before?

 Whether you agree with me or not, the work directly leads us to explore the love between Felix and Ross which takes us into the realm of biography and artistic intention.  There's no way around that.  My point is that the degree of relevance of biographical information, artistic context, and artistic intention can only be judged work by work.  

 One could argue that I'm blurring the line between artist's intention and artist's biography too much.  Does an inquiry into intention immediately mean one is searching for information outside of the work?  It seems to me that referencing an artist's intention can only make sense if we go outside the work.  Otherwise, there's no hope of separating the work from the intention.  If we rely purely on the formality of the work as justification for the artist's intention, then we can never know whether we actually understand what the artist was trying to do.  We may think we comprehend what the artist was trying to do but we may be completely wrong.  

 I thought, and so did many other people, that Phoebe Washburn's work was an environmntal commentary.  But if you listen to her, she says he work is about the exact opposite of environmental sensibilities.  She said that her art evolved from "laziness and greed."  Now, Washburn's comments may be made with tongue-in-cheek but she has repeatedly affirmed that her art is not an environmental commentary, that that was never her intention, and that she is really just playing around.  Now, here, if we relied on the collective audience's interpretation of artistic intention, we would have misconstrued artistic intention.  I have LOTS of evidence for the amount of people that thought Washburn's art was environmentally charged but I don't want to make this blog a reference or quote-a-thon.

So, it seems, that intention necessary has to mean outside of the work.  This assertion immediately irritates formalists but who cares.  Isolated formalism doesn't even make sense.  Where can one cut off the stream of variables between artwork and not artwork.  The answer to this question seems intuitive and common sensical but so did the apparent fact that the Sun circled the Earth.  The materials for the piece came from somewhere, the artist's idea is a coalescence of many preexisting components, it's place can determine its significance, it's value is temporally sensitive, the SIZE of the viewer can change the experience of it, etc.  I'm not saying that there is no work but I'm saying that where exactly the work ends and the experience of it or the effect of its context begins isn't crystal clear especially if we're discussing comprehension and interpretation.  If one wants to say, "There's the work.  I can see it.  I know where it begins and where it ends," this statement only solves the problem if we don't talk or don't move it.  

 If the existence of the work is in an indeterminate limbo, then who's to say what informational source is off-limits in terms of interpreting the work?  Who's to say that artists' statements shouldn't be considered when one wishes to comprehend an artwork?  Who's to say that intentions are or aren't relevant?  It seems that none of these problems can really be solved abstractly.