I really had no idea what I wanted to write about. Up until last night I was drawing a blank. A friend actually suggested I write a blog about not writing a blog - I almost surrendered to that idea. So when I went to the
Walker Art Center last night, I bowed down to the art gods for giving me the kind of lightbulb revelation that I needed. Okay, no.. not really, but I almost reached that point.
 |
| A little something like that.. |
I realized that the artist, like the author, has an intention - a story - to share (at least in most cases). Whether or not we think that their intention holds any importance will decide how we interpret the art and determine what we may potentially be missing out on.
I went to the Walker for a performance of
El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco, which although I found extremely crude and surreal, I still ended up loving in a way. There really was no way to react to it; even having already prepared myself for the worse, I didn't know how to respond. So I was surprised that when looking amongst the displays with some free time, there was a really interesting, provocative and oddly profound art display called
Poison & Candy by Frank Gaard. The display features more than 200 works, many of which gave me the same impression as the play - you know there is something deep there, but you are too busy trying to control the mini-explosion in your mind to really find it. I won't go into detail as to what exactly two of these particular painting were of (there's a picture below of the more friendly piece) - because there is no real way to aesthetically describe them without offending someone. But many of the particular "objects" painted had names written on them. And not just any "proper names". These are names of artists, writers and literary theorists that any one who has the mildest peak of an interest in Literature, Philosophy, Psychology or Art (among many other topics) will recognize: Matisse, Picasso,
Lacan,
Nabokov, and ironically, Focault.
 |
| Frank Gaard : Satanic Housekeeping |
There are a few questions that rose from seeing these paintings: Why are the names there? How do I interpret this? Are each of the paintings classifications of a certain genre of artists? And lastly, what is the artist's intention for us to find? The painting to the left, "Satanic Housekeeping", has a few of the artists I mentioned before. We can see that there is Vladimir Nabokov, author of the famous novel Lolita, Jacques Lacan, renowned psychoanalyst and literary theorist, and of course
Michel Focault, theorist and author of
What Is An Author? If I look at these names, I see a certain trend. The question is, are we supposed to recognize this trend? There has to be a reason that the artist chose these particular people - these particular names that hold some meaning. Focault seems to have an idea; he tells us that the "proper name", in relationship to the writer, is not just a proper name. He says, "The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and culture" (Focault 107). In other words, the author's name represents something, a homogeneity or an affiliation with something.
 |
| I really, REALLY, don't get this one. |
I could have looked at the little card that tells you what the
painting is about, but I, unfortunately, was too enthralled and
failed to do that. So, with that said, we can only speculate what it means. Does the meaning of this painting lie in the author's names? I think so, but I can't say so for sure; it is only my interpretation. In my opinion, we can look at it's title "Satanic Housekeeping" and see how that has any significance toward these names. If I look at Gaard's other works in the gallery, personally I see another, less decisive and perhaps a not really understandable concept, which could actually be the authors intention.
But does any of this really matter? Roland Barthes says in his essay,
The Death of the Author, that once the writer is done writing, he figuratively dies. His voice no longer holds any relevance, and his intention - whatever it may have been - holds no purpose because giving a text an author only "[imposes] a limit on that text...to close the writing" (Barthes 147). It is the reader's interpretation that is now important. We can take this theory and say that our interpretation of the art is most important, but I think it is rather presumptuous of us to think that the artist wasn't trying to share something with us. If we listen again to Focault, he also says that, "it is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself" (Focault 104). Without the artist lies the opportunity for false interpretations and rather copious amounts of insignifcant meanings to arise.
 |
| Oh yes, how very profound... |
From another point of view, we can look at a text, or even the particular artwork above, and think that there is nothing there to see. Someone can look at that picture and see just underwear with names on it. I definitely felt that way with a lot of the pieces in the other parts of the gallery: a video of a cat drinking milk, a cardboard box in the middle of the floor, two cigarettes, and my favorite - the frame that framed nothing (which funnily enough, a friend of mine says in response, "How profound!").
There is a phrase attributed to Freud's psychoanalysis theory (although noone really knows for sure if he has even quoted it). It is: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". It's meaning is pretty straight forward - sometimes what you are trying to interpret isn't there at all; there was no meaning intended. Unfortunately, if we look at life that way, everything seems pretty bland, and a lot of authors like Focault and Barthes are no longer relevant either.
