Meaning in Art, part three
Whose meaning is it anyway?
In 1967, a French literary critic called Roland Barthes wrote an essay entitled 'Death of the Author'. In it, Barthes argued that the intentions of the author had nothing to do with how a work was to be interpreted. It mattered not a jot that the writer, artist or poet had declaimed to the world that their work meant x. The meaning of a text was to be discovered and determined by those who engaged with it. Once a book was handed to the publisher, once a painting left the studio, its creator had no privileged control over determining what it meant.
This caused a bit of a stir.
Some artists resented the idea that they no longer owned the meaning of their work; that they could no longer tell the world what s/he was supposed to 'see' in their work.
But there was no turning back. The idea that texts (paintings, books, plays, musical scores and so on) were autonomous swept through academic and critical circles. It has gained such a hold that in some situations (for example, in the translation of ancient writings) scholars have to be reminded not to apply it as a principle.
The implication for you and I (assuming that we agree with Barthes) is that we can legitimately argue for what a painting means.
In fact, Barthes' ideas were not entirely new. From the 1950s something called the intentional fallacy began to evolve. The argument was that we never know the intention of an artist with any confidence.
If the artist was alive and could tell us, could we trust what they said? How do we know they told the truth; or that they knew their own mind that well; or that their intention hadn't changed since the beginning of the work? Similarly, if the artist was dead, could we trust what s/he might have written down?
Consider this painting:
Adam by Barnett Newman
1951
Newman actually wrote a great deal about his work and his intentions. In one essay he wrote
"If people really understood my work it would mean the end of world capitalism"
How much notice should we take of this? We also know a great deal about the political and social world in which he lived. Should that influence our judgement about this painting?
When this painting was displayed in the Tate the caption read:
From the mid-1940s Newman had been preoccupied with the Jewish myths of Creation. The vertical strips in his paintings may relate to certain traditions that present God and man as a single beam of light. The name Adam, which in the Old Testament was given to the first man, derives from the Hebrew word adamah (earth), but is also close to adom, (red) and dam (blood). The relationship between brown and red in this painting may therefore symbolise man's intimacy with the earth.
Perhaps Roland Barthes might not have been too impressed by the reference to Newman's 'preoccupation' but this seems like a fair assessment to me. And it still leaves us with some work to do on what this painting means to us.