Project Description (2)

When we consider a work of art, we treat it as a cultural artifact to be interpreted. Works of art can be either physical or they can consist of an action, but in either case, a large part of the interpretive process (that which is not directly related to experience) attempts to fit the work into a physical and social context.

We approach all physical objects with the knowledge that their present state is entirely informed by their physical history. We see time folded onto the present through the history that we infer from the object's spatial properties. This is especially true of artwork, when we attempt to unravel the construction of a sculpture or building, when we consider the layering of a painting, or the setup of a photograph.

In artwork, however, there is a less immediate sense of the history of a work, namely its social context. Interpreting, or assigning a meaning, to an artwork requires a knowledge or at least a conception of the social framework surrounding it. This is, of course, a moving target, both through time and across individual perspectives.

My thesis will attempt to show how current work is conscious of these interpretive processes. I will be considering some current photographers and visual artists, showing how their works can be considered objects of physical and social construction, and drawing insight into their meaning from these arguments.

I will also be producing and presenting a number of smaller projects of my own that will attempt to challenge, manipulate, and expose these components of the interpretive process. I hope to find new meaning from their reception.

Onians, John. "A Brief Natural History of Art." Compression vs. expression. Ed. John Onians. 2006, New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press.
In this short piece, Onians discusses the evolution and emergence of prehistoric art. He begins with prehistoric artifacts, finding biological justification for their aesthetic resonance with early hominids. He rationalizes the emergence of sculpture and the protection of sculptural objects with the following argument:

• Early hominids needed to be socially attracted to the facial features of their tribe and sexually attracted to the secondary sex organs of their potential mates.


• Neural network design reinforces repeated positive stimulation.


• Those early hominids who collected biologically sculptural objects would be more likely to interact sexually and socially with their tribe.


• They would therefore have greater reproductive fitness.

He thus roots the objectification of the body in an argument for the reproductive fitness of early hominids.

This argument he extends to the uniformity of rectangular architectural forms and their influence on aesthetics through the ages.


Le Fur, Yves. "Displaced Objects On Display." Compression vs. expression. Ed. John Onians. 2006, New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press.
This article stood out due to its enumeration of the ostensible reasons for bringing together the artifacts of the world into formal museums:

The goals are not only to further research on various cultures and their history and to foster exploration of values of identity in collaboration with people of the five continents, but also to displace existing categories in order to offer elements for reflexive attitudes to all the various publics and to create a dynamic place that is always open to questioning. [10]

Indeed this seems to be a common practice among avant-garde artists, but at what expense? The collaboration seems to be eternally one sided, and closer to appropriation. Is the exotic historicism mirrored in the perceived facture of the object or is it forgotten?

Summers, David. "World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism." Compression vs. expression : containing and explaining the world's art. Ed. John Onians. 2006, New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press.

This brief article is a summary and response to criticism of Summers' book, Summers, David. Real Spaces. 2003, New York : Phaidon.

He begins with his largest and overarching premise, that the visual arts have been subsumed by what he calls the "spatial arts":

Post-formalist art history replaces the "visual arts" with the "spatial arts", the former having been relegated to the modern Western history of representationalism. Given this change, there is a further distinction between real space and virtual space. Real space is the space we share with other people and things, and in these terms, sculpture is the art of personal space, fundamentally significant relative to the conditions of our own physicality. [222]

This construction is helpful in reconsidering the effects of spatial and societal context on the interpretation of a work of art.

He supports the recontextualization of the discourse of artwork as a progressive evolution from existing modes of thought rather than an evolution *towards* some ideal objectivity. In so doing, he introduces the concept of facture:

Facture is the evidence in a work of its having been made, and it is insistence on this principle that makes the fundamental intepretative change from quasi-symbolic interpretation based on the analogy of texts to indexical reference. [223]

This powerful concept is precisely how we as an audience infuse non-durational artworks with the concept of time. We know that they are made, that they carry general intentionality, and that their form respects their temporal progressive creation.

Moreover, he continues, their physicality (ontic nature) is precisely that which is unambiguous. While we can consider and reconsider our interpretations of the objects, and any distinctions we can draw within them or between them and other social constructs, we are tightly bound by the presented material truth.

Stonehenge may or may not be an elaborate observatory, and it may or may not have been used for one or another purpose, but it does tell us unambiguously that stone was quarried (that is, cut squared) and transported, and that more or less specialized and collective labor was necessary in order for the site to have been made and remade, from which we may infer certain general kinds of social arrangements.[223]

We infer these arrangements, he implies, by the social construction of architecture:

Artifacts are integral with their first spaces of use. [224]

This approach, of course, when extended into the modern painting apparatus, helps to show the extent to which paintings are defined by their galleries and the commerciality of their distribution infrastructure. This argument is drawn out in John Berger's "Ways of Seeing".

Summers ends by encapsulating the more global conception of the art world as a secondary persuit, encouraging a reconsideration based on the pervasive use of the visual as a distinguishing characteristic.

[The standard Western attitude] obscures or conceals the absolute importance of ornament for the definition and distinction of persons, artifacts, and places in major traditions, including our own. [224]

After all, without distinction there could be no individuation, and in this attitude, then, the West finds itself ultimately masochistic.

Margolis, Joseph. What, after all, is a work of art? 1999, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.


Margolis' writing is extremely dense, logically sound, unfocused, and yet still profoundly worthwhile. He generally aims to characterize the work of art and the circumstances surrounding its criticism. Noting the contemporary inflationary attitude towards the definition of art, he writes:

Any theory of art worth its salt must accommodate at least one condition: namely, that whatever is said to be a painting or a work of art -- or, in general, a cultural denotatum -- must count among its properties the salient property of being a historied artifact. [...] for it signifies that (1) cultural entities, but not inanimate natural objects, possess, as an intrinsic property, as part of their "nature", a certain historicality; (2) such historicality can not be sensorily discerned in the way in which purely physical properties can be, (3) the perception of historicality is sui generis to the analysis and understanding of the cultural world; (4) the perception of art and history is an extension of human self-perception, the understanding of oneself and one's society, and (5) The perception of cultural phenomena is inseparable from the perception of physical phenomena. [34]

His work is threaded together loosely by his concept of Intentionality:

[...] artworks possess, where "mere real things" do not, Intentional properties: all representational, semiotic, symbolic, expressive, stylistic, historical, significative properties. If that is granted, then of course artworks cannot be numerically identical with "mere real things." [34-5]

Intentionality is closely tied, then, to the human element in artwork. It is ultimately and precisely what distinguishes artwork from mere object. The meaning of artwork is, by the Intentional act, no longer the meaning of the mere real thing.

Intentional properties [...] designate meanings assignable to certain structures or meaningful structures as a result of the various forms of culturally informed activity (speech, deeds, manufacture, artistic creation), such that suitably informed persons may claim to discern these properties and interpret them objectively. [55]

He continues in an attempt to reconcile this definition with relativism. Critically, informed parties need only *claim* to interpret and discern objectively. Their objectivity is not an absolute objectivity, but a socially sanctioned objectivity: by merit of their existence within a society that considers the work Intentional, they have the power to set forth interpretations of the work that help to carry the meaning of the work.

[...] the very nature of cultural entities and phenomena -- artworks, histories, sentences, actions, societies, persons -- are such that, for obvious ontic and epistemic reasons, they cannot support any objective description or interpretation confined exclusively along bivalent lines. The decisive point is that no one can even say what the logic of criticism should be, unless she or he can also say what the nature of a poem or painting is, relative to discursive and interpretive truth-claims [60-61]

In other words, it is naive to attempt to apply temporally derived objective truth value to the interpretive frames of other time periods. He continues,

Intentional properties [...] cannot be determined criterially, algorithmically, evidentially, except in ways that are already subaltern to the consensual (not criterial) tolerance of the apt agents of the collective practices of a particular society. [62]

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We begin to move towards a broader discursive frame when the prior denotation of artworks is applied to other social constructs. He begins to draw Intentionality into additional complex phenomena: persons, actions...

[...] artworks, (like persons, actions, and sentences) are not fully determinate but are, characteristically, interpretively determinable in Intentional ways, for Intentional properties are not fully determinate. (Only if meanings were properties and at least as determinate as the properties of physical objects would Intentionality be determinate at all. But Intentionality, remember, is a fluxive artifact of history, inherently subject to interpretation and reinterpretation under the historicized conditions of human life.) [65]

The instability of the broader society brings the situation to a head...

It is a perfectly acceptable way of practicing criticism to offer a reading that collects plausibly relevant resources within an interpretive tradition, without attempting (or even being able) to come to terms with the entire history of interpreting the work in question (or related works). [84]

In other words, a critique of a work of art does not necessarily need to involve all past interpretations of it. One would never be able to encompass *all* prior viewpoints on the work. This holds in everyday interpretation: the vast majority of the audience for any given work will likely be unaware of many interpretive frames that have been constructed to consider the work in the past.

Nevertheless, they come to some manner of understanding about the work, and this understanding is nonetheless necessarly a constituent of the work's meaning. And we find that the work that is understood is in fact relatively constant through time, though the reasons for its consideration as artwork often are not.

[...] under interpretive conditions, artworks may change in "nature" without risking a change in "number". [...] the conditions under which they are individuated (and reidentified) as particular denotata are informal enough to secure (without losing descriptive or interpretive rigor) the constancy of their numerical identity, despite debated (interpreted) changes in their "nature." [84]

This constancy, he asserts, is equivalent to their historied nature (not facture) is due to their Intentional properties.

Cultural entities have historied natures, or are histories, because Intentional properties, which form their natures, are themselves historied and alterable as a result of the ongoing practice of reinterpretation, under the condition of historically changing experience [88]

(The historied nature that Margolis brings into the discussion is different from Summers' facture in that it is an epistemic rather than ontic property. The physical construction of the artwork is represented in its facture; its social construction is represented in its history. History requires Intentionality; facture requires interface.)

Margolis ties interpretation not only to temporal set but also individual perspective and milieu;

The valid practices of interpretation are themselves consensual, collective [...], effectively constrained by their own local histories but capable of drawing into their conceptual space indefinitely many diverse traditions [...].[88]

In response to future projection, we find that

No natural telos or ideal asymptotic limit or singular range of tolerance is assignable to the interpretive process itself. [88]

This seems at first glance a questionable assertion, but ultimately it bears out: we assign validity to all interpretations carried out within human society, but are left with the question of the extent of agency in that society (babies' gurgles are an interpretive response, but so are the algorithmic musings of a digital sensor), and the question of who or what can profer an interpretation will be, in turn, as unbounded as our agency.

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He considers the body of the artwork.

[The Intentional is] inseparably incarnate in the physical or biological or similar materials of the natural world; [...] it is sui generis[...; It is] intrinsically interpretable, which is not true of non-Intentional predicables; the distinctions it collects are, peculiarly, artifacts of cultural history and subject accordingly to historical transformation; and [...], being alterable as a result of historicized interpretation, its attribution affects what we should understand as the "nature" of anything so characterized. [92]

Again this is discussing exclusively the social construction of the artwork, not its facture.

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Meaning is the accumulation of all interpretations of a work, both through time and across individual and institutional perspectives. Interpretations are informed by raw experience, by factural inferences, and by historied contextualizations.

In other words:

What [...] is the "meaning" of the arts? [...] overcoming, without quite succeeeding and without quite failing, the ephemeral history of the whole of Intentional life. We build and rebuild the dense structures of our artifactual world, partly out of memory but, more vitally, out of imagined possibilities read as perceived potentialities. We Intentionalize the world, not merely by piling artifact on artifact but by creating and deciphering the intrepretively reflexive (the endlessly reinterpreted) history of that same undertaking. You will find the evidence already in ancient Egypt -- for instance, in Ikhnaton's deliberate redefinition of the temple precincts in the name of his reform: hence, in our productive memory of the enabling precipitates of his own [...] gradual [...] failure.[126]

Finally,

In the midst of obvious flux, we risk the loss of present meaning if we cannot repossess by interpretive fiat [...] the reinterpretation of our entire artifactual past. We need no necessary fixities here; none exist, in any case, to be recovered. Flux is the medium of our life: all that is needed is that change should not be too rapid to be grasped or too slow to fire our vision. The whole of art is, so to say, a society's homeostasis under fluxive history.[126]

Art is an attempt to perpetuate society through compressed symbolic repetition and reconfiguration.


(Kouros' ruinscapes are especially powerful in this light: the fading long tail of intense artistic embodiment.)

Just as selves are embodied in the indivuated members of Homo sapiens, actions are embodied in physical movents; words and sentences in uttered sounds; and sculptures [...] in "uttered" stone. [129-30]

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