Intention has been on my mind a lot lately, both in and out of the studio. It’s a topic that often returns to my brain. Outside the studio, my ruminations about intention revolve mostly around language and offense. Inside the studio however, intention takes a different, more ambiguous form.
There is a tension at play when discussing artist intent. On one hand, there’s the idea that artists don’t own the meaning of their work; once a work is put on display for the public, the public’s interpretation of a work is what becomes the meaning of said work. An artist’s job is to make pictures, not to make meaning. I’m paraphrasing both Salts and Kentridge here.
On the other side of the discussion is the idea that an artist’s intention is all that matters. That without artist intent, the work is nothing. That the artist plays the role of sole meaning-maker and author of what a work is about.
There are other thinkers that sit in the middle of this divide. I generally prefer to be in the middle in all things. Nothing is ever black or white. I’m chronically moderate. However, when it comes to artist intent, I find myself swinging back and forth to the extremes on that pendulum, rarely spending much time in the middle.
I like the idea of creating work and confidently putting it out into the world to live and breathe on its own. I have at times made work that didn’t demand one specific reading of the work. I have at time chosen titles that don’t relate to the concept of the work. I have at times made work that doesn’t have a concept at all; whole series with no intention. These pieces are put out into the world with vague ideas attached in the form of titles or series names. And that’s ok. People have talked to me about what they think those works are about. I don’t correct them.
In 2015 a painting of mine wound up on Buzzfeed after being posted to the “mildly infuriating” subreddit. This experience shook me in many ways. I will likely write about that experience more in depth at some point in this journal. For this post, I’ll just focus on the lessons it attempted to teach me about intent. The painting was about social anxiety. It was a low hanging fruit idea, a gray grid on a gray background. One of the squares was slightly misaligned and crooked. The piece was ripped apart in the subreddit feed. What’s important here though, is that very few of the commenters even came close to understanding the intent of the painting. I’d think that the title might have helped this, but the painting was hung in a university sans-title placard.
Why Am I Scared of People In A Room? - 2011, 36” x 48”, latex house paint on canvas
That’s just the thing. Once a work is sold, artists no longer have control over how it is displayed. If the intent of a work is only understood with a title, then the idea resides more in the language of the title than in the work itself. Or maybe the work resides in the combination of the title and the image.
The Buzzfeed painting taught me that I need to be ok letting my art leave my studio without demanding a specific intent. But I can’t do that. I’ve learned over and over that as much as I want to be ok with my intent not being 100% clear for the viewer, I just feel too uneasy with that. There’s something in my practice that doesn’t allow me that freedom. Or I don’t give myself that permission. I’m not sure.
It’s important to distinguish here between when I make work with a clear intent/concept, and when I make work based on aesthetics only.
When my work is about mental health, there’s a little more room to argue for the importance of intent to be attached to the work. When informing the public about suicide or anxiety or self-medication, it’s important that the viewer understand clearly what I’m trying to teach them about. I would imagine it’s the same in other movement-driven art practices, i.e. environmentalism, feminism, politics, etc. You want the viewer to understand your message.
Again, I find myself asking: where does meaning and concept reside? If I make a painting about my struggles with suicide and someone buys it because they think it looks nice, is it still about suicide? Does that meaning stay attached to the work even if the owner doesn’t know it?
What’s my hangup with my non-mental health related work? As I work on this exhibition about my love for the suburbs, I fear that people will see the work as critical of the suburbs rather than a love letter to the suburbs. Does that fear come from a lack of confidence in making my intention clear? Does it come from a fear that people only view the suburbs as a negative space? Does that fear come from a much deeper need to control the way people view me? (I have a feeling it’s all three of these, but mostly the last.)
And don’t even get me started on how this changes with appropriation or curation. Or maybe get me started on that. Perhaps a future post.
I want to explore this more; read Saltz’s view on this, read Monroe Beardsley, read Walter Benn Michaels, read Noel Carroll and W. K. Wimsatt and Steven Knapp. But also, I want to talk to peers and other artists about this. I don’t know how much I value the opinion of critics on this particular topic.