AbstractThis thesis will propose a framework for interpretation of artworks across large durations. It will explore the effects of time on artworks, and the ways that duration is inferred by observers of the object or experience of the artwork. Given this interpretive setting, the thesis will examine a set of specific artworks through multiple narratives at different temporal interpretive perspectives. These will be synthesized to give a sense of the
lifecycle of each artwork, and ultimately to generate broader conclusions involving artworks of various media.
IntroductionWith the late 20th century movement toward performance and social artworks, the encapsulation of artwork within objects has been severely problematized. The object d'arte has given way to the documenting artifact, and the transition points to a more fruitful way of analyzing works of art. The movement can be summarized as the recasting of art objects into the role of art experiences. Such a dramatic shift in our interpretive frame indicates the local nature of artistic intepretation, and generally suggests the need for a broad framework for this kind of thought.
Artwork & ObjectArt objects fade into oblivion. Their slide into the past is the subject of significant social fear, fear of loss, fear of physical forgetting. Marc Auge suggests that "Oblivion is a necessity both to society and to the individual. One must know how to forget in order to taste the full flavor of the present, of the moment, and of expectation." (Auge 3) But he laments the omnipresence of the fear of forgetting. If forgetting is a precondition for true appreciation, then the current prevailing aesthetic frame is profoundly warped.
Philosopher James Walton gives a founding definition for aesthetics: "Aesthetic value arguably consists in a capacity to elicit in appreciators pleasure of a certain kind, pleasurable experiences," (Walton 12) and so ultimately our fear is of losing future access to these artistic experiences. So in some sense the fear of time's effects on art objects is the fear of disembodying the artwork, of removing its ability to impact future individuals and society. We attempt to maintain the stasis of these artifacts through time in order to retain and encapsulate the brief individual experience of encountering and engaging with the artwork.
What this attitude neglects is the context-dependence of cultural objects; as the ambient musician Brian Eno describes at a conference on long-term digital preservation, "most objects of culture are very much [...] embedded within context and these contexts are embedded within other ones as well. So a characteristic of cultural objects is they're increasingly context-dependent. And they're increasingly embedded in meta-languages." (MacLean & Davis, 51) Even if we attempt to retain the object, the social experience of the artwork will undergo significant changes as society evolves around it.
Nevertheless, our prodigious interest in the fields of museum and library preservation sciences and especially in digitizing cultural artifacts are indicative of our society's dedication to maintaining the physical state of these objects.
In so doing, we choose one form of evolution over another: we ask society to evolve while attempting to fix the set of cultural artifacts that document its past. We demand that objects remain static so that what changes in artistic interpretation over time is not due to decay and material loss in the art object but rather due to human society's attempts to engage with a universe for which it maintains fixity. Norbert Wiener describes the human process as follows: "The organism [...] seeks a new equilibrium with the universe and its future contingencies. Its present is unlike its past and its future unlike its present. In the living organism as the universe itself, exact repetition is absolutely impossible." (Wiener 67)
Sadly, in our attempt to fix the objective context of our social artistic discussions, in trying to perpetuate the superficial objective qualities of the art document, we neglect the powerful experience we might otherwise have of aging alongside our artworks. We are attempting to achieve the impossibility of repeating experience at the cost of a much longer-term coevolution with the works. We intentionally deny ourselves the comprehension of universal movement through time, perhaps because it indicates our own mortality through identification with the mortality of the artwork. Indeed, we constrict our experience of the artwork to a least common denominator, limiting it to only that which can be experienced by all time.
The Body of WorkThe intentional artwork has much in common with the human body. It is, according to philosopher Joseph Margolis, "inseparably incarnate in the physical or biological or similar materials of the natural world; [...] being alterable as a result of historicized interpretation, its attribution affects what we should understand as the 'nature' of anything so characterized." (Margolis 92: http://library.mit.edu/item/000883095) In other words, though generally inanimate, the artwork is perhaps best understood as an embodied intentional act, one that has effects through the audience that encounters it. Its material form empowers the intention.
Sculptor and body theorist Antony Gormley restates this position: "art might not pertain to what is contained in the institution or within the unique object, but within the dynamic between the living and its surrogate body." (Gormley 223: http://library.mit.edu/item/001665328) It is useful and powerful to provide ideas with a conceptual body, since "via our bodily senses the environment enters into the very shape of our thought, sculpting our most abstract reasoning from our embodied interactions with the world." (Johnson & Rohrer 49: We are live creatures, ibid) An art object is the physical shape that results from the intent of an artist made physical. The artwork is the interaction of the body that shape defines with both the artist and society.
The artwork emerges from the interaction of three sets: the artist, the material environment, and the social environment. We can consider the material and social environments to be
The Life of WorkOnce we accept the artwork as embodied intention, we find that it has a temporal progression not unlike a human's. There is an emergence, the birth of the artwork, from the interaction between the artist and the environment within which he works. The environment is always partially social and partly material, with a recent drift in artworks away from material as a primary focus and toward social constructs as their media.
Encoded in this process of creation is an interface or set of interfaces between the artist and his environment. The artist necessarily uses pre-organized materials and pre-existing social organizations to create the work, and these devices amplify intentions that the artist has toward embodiment in the environment. Encoded within this initial creative set is a prescription for the future physical evolution of the artwork. We can categorize and name these types of changes. The physical universe guarantees that the material of the artwork will carry forward in time predictably in the absence of social forces.
Our current social environment seems to be one of frenetic preservation, in the hopes of eliminating these predictive material changes. But ultimately the social environment is entirely unpredictable: as much as there is a present and relatively longstanding desire to keep artworks as static physical objects, there is no guarantee that this institutional mandate will persist in the future. Moreover, as we saw earlier, there is a huge amount of context that the observer brings to the experience of an artwork that unavoidably fluctuates over time.
So while we can construct the prototypical life-cycle of an artwork consisting of birth/creation, feedback, exhibition, discussion, preservation, and so forth on into decay, we can hardly be sure of the furthest reaches of our analysis. We know that the continued integrity of old works was hardly assured at their inception, and given the constant changes of the artwork's social setting, predicting its long-term future with any degree of certainty is impossible at this stage. Our best guess is still decay and decomposition of the artwork's material constituents.
Observation and AssumptionsGiven this apparent mortality of the artwork, perhaps we can see the value in a holistic approach to the artwork by looking at a number of different interpretations that might arise. In other words, fragments of the artwork's body, as it arises through time and as it emerges from social and material co-evolution.
As the proposed social perspective drifts further from the artist's creative perspective, a corresponding deconstruction of the initial interpretive assumptions will take place. The artwork, we will find, becomes less and less legible or aesthetically valuable; therefore, it will be more and more a gesture in a broader social dialog. It will appear as fundamentally human: a temporary bundle of physical and social messages.
