In Parts I and II of this essay, I said that I have no interest in works of art as commodities or rungs on the social climber’s ladder. I have no interest in works of art as vehicles of social and political messages. I am interested only in art as art. And thus I create a problem for myself, because I seem to be making common cause with Roger Fry and other formalists whose ideal of pure art, disconnected from everything else, is anathema to me. A painter as well as a writer, Fry wrote in 1920, “It’s all the same to me if I represent a Christ or a Saucepan since it’s the form and not the object that interests me.” Nonetheless, he had a great eye. During his short gig as an art advisor, Fry recommended that Henry Frick acquire Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, which is among my top five favorite paintings in New York. But his Christ-saucepan remark is just silly. So I elude the formalist trap by making an obvious point: you can’t look at an image of Christ or saucepan without your sense of the subject affecting your sense of the forms that define it.
Let us say that we comb through the works of Paul Cézanne and find that a certain curve outlines a skull in one painting and an apple in another. Formally, it is the same curve, but it changes as it moves between the two paintings. Why? Because its meaning in the skull painting is different from its meaning in the apple painting. What do I mean by meaning? This question lurks in the vicinity of all these essays, and I hope that, sooner rather than later, I will manage to grapple with it. For now, I’ll appeal to a cluster of synonyms: the meaning of an artwork is its significance, its sense, its import. And because we would never confuse the significance of a skull with that of an apple, we don’t see—or understand—the forms defining outlining them as identical, even if they are literally the same. The literal has no bearing on meaning in art. Meaning is the work of the imagination.
The invention that produces a painting continues as you make sense of it. As you find meaning in it. To look at a work of art is not to look for anything, certainly not for a stable, detachable message, much less an essence of pure form. To look at a work of art is to join in a collaboration the artist invites without knowing who you are or what you will make of what you see. Sometimes I wonder if artists would want me as a collaborator if they knew the sorts of meanings I find in their images. Jackson Pollock said that a painter paints “what he is,” a subject I tend to rush past in my fascination with the unbounded space I see in his swirls of poured and spattered pigments. Would Pollock have objected to my interpretation, which downplays his self-expression and charges his paintings with all the meanings that hover around the idea of the infinite? Who knows?
Of course, a Pollock canvas cannot be infinite; it has edges. The infinite I see in it is something that I make up—that I just make up, if you like. Pollock invents an image and I invent its meaning, responding to sweeping shapes and minute nuances of color with a blend of perception and speculation and memory. Never pure, my seeing is mixed with an empathic response to Pollock’s gesture—or to Agnes Martin’s calm, if I am looking at one of her quietly gridded images. Vision does not live in isolation, any more than we live in isolation from one another. Even hermits have a place in society, for everything is connected—as Proudhon insisted. Not that I have become his disciple. Where he saw connections forged by logic and reinforced by socialist principles, I see connections generated by the play of meaning.
To focus for a moment on language: a word means nothing on its own. It owes its meaning, first, to its place in a vast pattern of other meanings and, next, to the structures of language we employ when we string words together in sentences. That we understand most sentences with ease hides a key point: every utterance, even the simplest, requires interpretation. Usually, it is unconscious. But poetry—or difficult poetry—makes us aware of our interpretive efforts. Fresh images, odd grammar, and unexpected rhythms jolt us awake to the process of making sense of what we are reading. If we stick with it, we come alive to the way words and sentences lend each other meaning, to the way images connect with the world, and to the way the poet mediates between the poem and a world reimagined. I don’t say that we develop a theoretical grasp of all this; rather, we get an intuitive sense of our immersion in shifting patterns of meaning that extend far beyond the poem.
Looking at a painting is an analogous experience, provided we don’t see it as the bearer of a message, a commodity, or an illustration of a formalist theory. Getting into our interpretation, we realize that we are creating meanings, not merely discovering them, and this gives us an idea of ourselves. Who am I, who must I be, to be understanding the painting this way? Who must the painter be to have exposed this particular artwork to the vagaries of my interpretation? Because these questions emerge from an unbounded field of possibility, neither they nor the painting we happen to be contemplating can be corralled in the realm of the purely aesthetic.
Robert Rauschenberg said in 1959 that “painting relates to both art and life” and he wanted to work “in the gap between the two.” I suspect his slogan played a part in inspiring the astonishing agglomerations of odds and ends he called Combines. Still, there is no such gap. Alert to art’s myriad ways of meaning all that it means, we see that it is at the heart of life. And the more self-consciously we make sense of artworks, the more aware we will be of ourselves—and others—as individuals, as members of this or that social group, as citizens. This wide-ranging awareness provides the story with its moral, and as we bring our knack for the creation of meaning not only to the flow of daily life but also to politics, we give the experience of art a pertinence that usually goes unnoticed. We give art a clear way forward, out of the art world and into the world. Which is where it belongs.
“Fresh images, odd grammar, and unexpected rhythms jolt us awake to the process.” I have been thinking about being startled as the best way to describe having your consciousness awakened. The bit of a slap-in-the-face is less gentle than a subdued aha… but sometimes more accurate.
What you say about meaning (which I agree with) does not need scientific buttressing, but as you may know (but don’t mention) your views on meaning are in part ratified by science.
Recent neurological studies by Nobel Prize-winner Eric Kandel his book, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, show that when viewers look at a painting (particularly an abstract painting) several important networks in the brain are engaged in powerful ways, in areas related to memory, emotion, and empathy, to resolve what it is seeing. (Empathetic responses can come from mirror neurons, which operate subliminally.) Kandel calls this “top-down” processing, in which the executive center of the brain is doing high-order work searching for connections to place what we are seeing within the context of our experience and understanding, especially if it is perplexing.
Kandel says this can result in a highly rich and dynamic internal process in which the viewer is creating something novel and personal.