The artist is important, but the viewer is equally as important

This week in Art 101 we read a very intellectual article written by Roland Barthes called "Death of the Author".  The author in question is a metaphor for an artist in this case.  I might use the words interchangeably since they are both representing the same concept.

He's killing the author by reading that book!

In Barthes's article, he was conveying to the reader that every individual has his or her own perspective and will have a unique interpretation upon observation or reading of any given piece of art or literature.  

He brings in the analogy of the "death of the author" as a way of saying that even though every author has a specific idea in mind when writing a story or book, the moment he/she stops writing, his/her own interpretation stops (dies) and it is now under the will of the reader to interpret in his/her own way.  No matter what, an individual will always bring meaning to what he/she sees.  Sometimes, even as the author/artist, if you let go of your idea the piece becomes its own thing.  Ty demonstrated the truth of this idea by showing the class a picture of a man with a dog sitting on his lap and asked us to tell her what we saw.  Every single person saw something different, perhaps similar, but not the same.

 

What do you see?

We also watched "Anything is Possible," a very entertaining film about William Kentridge who is an artist and decided to take his drawing abilities to a new level by creating an opera called "The Nose".  He proclaimed that, "My job is to make drawings, not to make sense."  According to what we've learned in class this week, he is exactly correct.  It is the job of each individual viewer to make the sense.  The concept is that the artist is important, but the viewer is equally as important. Without the viewer, what is the point of making art as an expression?

Kentridge's drawings are fully incorporated into the opera.

For Kiki Smith, "art is just a way to think... It can also have meaning to somebody else who can fill it up with their own meaning."  She also says "I'm very attached to needing proof of something, a proof that there has been a change."  Smith compares art to Catholicism.  She says that "both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world, that it's through the physical world that you have spiritual life.  She learns through observation.  "I won't believe things that people tell me until I can see it myself somehow."  She can relate to Bob Dylan's line, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."  I guess as observers of art, that's true for each of us.  We don't need anyone to tell us what something means, because we all have our own interpretations.

Smith makes sculptures of women of every size -- life size to  sculptures small enough to hold in one's hands.  She is particularly taken by the Bodhisattva of  Compassion, Kuan Yin.  She says, "Kuan Yins tell me to pay attention... I saw one the other day and it said pierce me with your eyes.  I like that because you're not sure whether it's telling you to look at it, or you're telling it to look at you."  That perspective so perfectly sums up the relationship between the artist, the piece and the viewer.

 

Kiki Smith's (untitled) Head of Kuan Yin.

Our guest presenter this week was Carla Bengston.  Carla is not only an artist, but also involved in environmental studies.  She asks a lot of questions about humans and their role in nature, particularly as artists.  She told us about something that I have never heard before, but I find hilarious!  She said that at one time, people used to carry around little frames, called cloud lenses, and look through them at the nature all around in order to have a different kind of appreciation of nature's beauty.  I guess that's poetically profound, but I find it ironic that in order to have a better appreciation of nature, one could think it's necessary to use a man-made object that's separate from nature.  One could ask "if culture is always with us when we are in nature, is nature always with us when we are in culture?"    (The answer, of course, is up to your own personal interpretation). 

In 1919, Mondrian asked, "why should we (artists) continue to follow nature when many other fields have left nature behind?"  He then proceeded to transform his paintings from truly resembling nature to progressively more simplified, basic -- almost binary --imagery until it no longer looked like a tree, for example, at all, but only represented the frontal planes.  This concept is self-deceptive because the human eye can interpret a canvas bisected into two different colors as a painting of a horizion.  Even if the intention of the artist is to steer the viewer away from nature, it is still up to the viewer to decide what the painting means to him or her. 

Does it look like a tree?

Bengston also showed us ways in which artists make art inside of nature.  A massive undertaking by Robert Smithson is the Spiral Jetty at Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake.  He brought "mud, salt crystals, rocks, water" together to literally make a spiral-shaped jetty that one can walk on into the lake.  For him, walking out onto the lake in a counter-clockwise direction "takes one back in time", by walking against the direction of the clock, then once a person is out there in the center of the spiral, surrounded by salt water and red algae bloom, that's where the interpretation and introspection can take place.  One has to then spiral back out in a clockwise direction back to the present where one can see bulldozers and other modern day experiences.  Smithson's intention is to bring "real experiences in real spaces in the world".

Another example of art in nature is something we have seen before in this class, Walter DeMaria's lines.  He walks back and forth in grass to create a visible line, a drawing.  DeMaria also created other forms of art in nature such as the "Lightning Field" in which he set up metal poles in a field in Marta, NM where lightning strikes often.  The poles don't actually attract the lightning, but they seem to appear and disappear depending on the light created by the lightning.

DeMaria has also brought nature inside to create art.  In "New York Earth Room", he literally brought earth into a building in New York where people can come and experience the earth, which gets watered daily, as a nice antidote to living in the city.

New York is also the home of "Wheatfield -- A Confrontation" where artist Agnes Denes planted a field of wheat in the rubble of the World Trade Center.  It's beautiful, meaningful, and functional in a place where each of those things is equally important.

There were so many inspiring, thought provoking artists presented by Bengston that it would be impossible to include them all here, but one cannot talk about artists working with nature without mentioning Andy Goldsworthy.  He has a magnificent aesthetic appreciation of nature!  The piece that we focused on in class was his Snowballs in Summer series.  He made 13 huge snowballs in the winter and had them frozen until summer solstice when he placed them in various locations around London.  One of the snowballs was placed in front of BP Headquarters, which led members of Greenpeace to announce on the news that he placed one there in protest as a bring association with the melting of the polar ice caps.  This is one case in which individual interpretation was a problem, because that was not the intention of Goldsworthy, and to announce that with such authority was manipulative.  After that, Goldsworthy decided to no longer contribute any of his proceeds to benefit Greenpeace, as he had done in the past.  As Bengston said, "Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and vice versa"

Snowballs on summer solstice.