Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 31
Interpretation is anybody's business
by
Joan Altabe
You have to stop expecting me to see things the way you do. The '50s film Rashomon – a tale of rape and murder through flashbacks of four witnesses, none of whom saw it the same way – is a demo lesson in the impossibility of objective truth.
Sample scene:
PRIEST: A man's been murdered.
COMMONER: So what? Only one? Why, up on top of this gate, there's always five or six bodies. No one worries about them.
PRIEST: I, for one, have seen hundreds of men dying like animals, but even I've never before heard anything as terrible as this. Horrible, it's horrible! There’s never been anything, anything as terrible as this, never! It's worse than fires, wars, epidemics, or bandits!
No wonder artists in the East, say, 15th century Japanese painter and Zen priest Seshu, implied rather than specified imagery. They knew to invite the viewer to fill in the blanks.
Of course, filling in the blanks means exposing one's life experience – ego and all. Art critics, historians, curators are like the witnesses in Rashomon. We don't stand for objective truth. Consider these interpretations from art experts:
In Peter Paul Rubens Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus – two unclothed females seized by a pair of burly men on horseback – Rubens authority Kerry Downes has written that romance, not rape, is the subject of the painting.
Apparently oblivious to the fevered pitch of a scene that can have one imagine full-throated screams, Downes compared it to a free-standing sculpture, isolated in space by the low horizon and distant landscape, and touching the ground only at a few points of balance. Never mind that one of those points of balance is an arm of a woman reaching for the ground as she's yanked upward.
In a similar way, art historian Anthony Janson describes Jan Steen's Rape of the Sabine Women – a pictorial of smirking males tearing women from their husbands and children – as "an ebullient action" representing "human folly with endless good humor."
You can tell by my tone here that I don't see what Downes and Janson saw. But the thing is, I don't begrudge them their view. Artists who balk at my interpretations ought to consider the Oriental artist's approach. While classical artists of the West were fixated on representing the visible world, classical artists in the East were content with mere suggestions of a few basic facts, leaving interpretation wide open. Looking at the world around them with a non-photographic eye, Asians were able to capture the spiritual reminders of it with a minimal number of brushstrokes.
If you're looking for a way out of this interpretation brouhaha, then, Minimalism may be for you; that is, if the only thing you see in a cube-shaped object is a cube, enjoy your hexahedron moment. Nothing more is asked of you.
By the way, while Minimalism was born in the USA, its lineage is Asian. No surprise there. We in the west can be so literal, don’t you think?
— by Joan Altabe | July 10, 2007
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