Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 17
by Joan Altabe - 11/19/2006

Download PDF Version (1.76 MB)

Artist's Intent

As a newspaper critic, I don’t answer reader complaints when they’re written for "Letters to the Editor." After all, they're not sent to me. Besides, everyone's entitled to sound off. I hold off even when letter writers make their opinions sound like fact. Everyone's entitled to be wrong, too.

But I made an exception once because readers who objected to a column I wrote unwittingly raised a larger issue that warranted discussion. In the column, I said that a sculpture of five hunched figures, called "Nobody's Listening" fronting a City Hall in Florida, reflected badly on the five city commissioners who worked there.

The sculptor also took exception, arguing that the piece deals with the racial strife and dissension during the Vietnam War in the '60s, when the piece was created.

City officials likewise wrote letters to the editor, saying I hadn’t done my homework because I didn't take into account Cartlidge's intention.

My response? Since when are art lovers obliged to see a work according to an artist's dictate? If they were, then an explanation would need to accompany every work made. Which would make art nothing more than an illustration of a thesis.

I even question the wisdom of titling an artwork. Some years ago, a New Yorker magazine cover showed Art Spiegelman's drawing of a crucified rabbit that had the Catholic League for Religion and Civil Rights up in arms.

The drawing might have been defensible if he hadn't titled his work, "Theology of the Tax Cut." The drawing showed a rabbit dressed in a suit with empty pockets pulled out against a background of Form 1040A. Spiegelman said he drew inspiration from the fact that April 15 — the tax deadline — came the day before Easter.

But if he hadn't given an explanation or title, it could have been defended as a visual pun. After all, crucifixions are not exclusive to Christianity. The Romans used them as a method of capital punishment on their slaves. Apply the ancient concept of crucifixion to paying wages to the IRS and you’ve got slaves being punished by the capitol.

Spiegelman’s drawing could have been defended this way, especially since, unlike Christ's wounds on the cross, the rabbit showed no crown of thorns and no sword-pierced side.

Artists who insist on explaining their symbology not only create problems for their work, but they also miss the point of art. It's not math or science. There's no one answer.

Andres Serrano made the same mistake when he called his now famous photograph of a cross submerged in urine "Piss Christ." If he hadn’t named it, the image could have been a pictorial of Christianity engulfed: in crassness, in commercialism.

Artists who narrow the range of interpretation reduce art to a visual aid. Picasso was guilty of this narrowing. Even though he said, "paintings are instruments for war for attack and defense against the enemy," he insisted that the bull in "Still Life With a Bull," painted in 1938, was not political.

Imagine all those who suffered under fascism who might have seen the bull's brutality as an appropriate symbol of bullies and taken comfort from that, had Picasso not dissuaded them.

If artists insist on answering questions that their art poses, we may as well stay home.

Art shouldn’t have to come with answer sheets. It ought to generate dialogues, not soliloquies, to stand on its own.

And on its own, a five-figure work called "Nobody's Listening" in front of a City Hall suggests the five commissioners who work inside ignore their constituents.

So this is my plea. Either quit complaining when people find their own meaning in your titles or stop titling.

— Joan Altabe | November 19, 2006

Post comments | Print this article |

   

Add Comments
Name:
Email:
Comments:
	Enter alpha/numberic text from image on the left.
NOTE: All comments are reviewed by FAR® before they are posted.

Comments: