Relaciones de apego entre el bebé y la gestante

This chapter has shown that appealing to meaning-making has a long historical tradition, has been undertaken with various motivations and was achieved through various methods. One overriding motivation is summarised in Iser’s concept of negation, which generally pertains to questioning social norms

whilst abstaining from outright rejection. Examples discussed include confronting viewers with common preconceptions regarding stigmatised groups of people, policies and their own voyeurism, as well as questioning processes of meaning-making themselves.

To facilitate the viewer’s attitude and readiness to ‘contribute to the creative act’, artists have devised multifarious methods. A key strategy is the stimulation of an emotional response coupled with an appeal to reflection. This is a complex relationship that will be discussed in more detail in later chapters. Another key method is what Iser and Kemp called the employment of blanks. The blank – the unstated – is to be filled by the viewer’s reflection and imagination. Many auxiliary devices like visually concealed details, narrative puzzles, and apparently unrelated titles constitute blanks. Specific methods to refer the viewer back to her/himself (as viewer) include letting characters gaze at the viewer, the use of mirrors, the choice of the venue and their engagement in a relational situation. Having traced a history of strategies used to invite the viewer’s meaning-making in art practice, the next chapter will explore the concept of meaning-making from art theoretical, philosophical and psychological perspectives.

3

CHAPTER THREE:

MEANING AND MEANING-MAKING

When something blows your mind, it can change the way you look at the world, and open it up to meditation and contemplation, and finally to being more aware. This is what an artwork can do; it creates a distance between the common place and the inner space, and lets people think by themselves.

Marie Sester, 20061

The fact that artists like Joseph Kosuth, Victor Burgin and Cindy Sherman, have focussed the prompt to make meaning on the processes of meaning- making itself – asking through their work what it actually means to make meaning – indicates that there is something at stake with the very concept of meaning. Having outlined the history of artists’ interest in and methods used to engage the viewer in meaning-making, I will now consider the definition of meaning and meaning-making per se.

Debates on the concept of meaning most often revolve around the idea that a given symbol, object, situation, or event either does have meaning or does not have meaning, or, that it can be made meaningful through interpretation. Classic examples of meaningful entities are signs, symbols and words, the latter being variously considered a subcategory of either of the former. The word house (the ‘signifier’), for example, signifies (or means) a distinct class of buildings (the ‘signified’). For a person to think of as opposed to something like , would be contentious in this model. When one’s aim is to communicate a certain meaning the challenge is to use the most appropriate signifiers; for example, the term ‘igloo’ instead of ‘house’. Whether the receiver understands the signified is a matter of education and mental ability.2

Linguist Charles K. Ogden and literary critic Ivor A. Richards criticised the assumption that every word or sign has a certain, correct meaning connected with it, referring to this as the ‘proper meaning superstition’ (Ogden & Richards 1960 [1923]). By contrast, Ogden and Richards established that meaning resides in people rather than symbols (including words and texts). This raises

1 _{Sester & Debatty (2006, para.12)}

questions regarding the fact that different people associate different ideas with the same symbols.3 _{Post-structuralist philosophers including Roland Barthes,}

Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, raised further doubts about the ability of verbal language (and images) to represent meaning. They argued that whenever one tries to define the meaning of something, one must recourse to contingent definitions that have been established against a backdrop of cultural and historical contexts and the rules of a given language (vocabulary, grammar, etc.) (Barthes 1989; Derrida 1977a; Foucault 1969). For example, the meaning of any word can only be stated through other words leading to an infinite deferral of meaning. When looking for the meaning of an artwork one will, as evidenced by Guérin’s ‘Return of Marcus Sextus’, Jaar’s ‘Logo for America’ and other examples discussed in chapter two, necessarily make culturally and historically dependent assumptions. Meaning thus resides not only in individual people, but in contingent definitions, languages, and cultural conventions.

With regard to art, it seems particularly contentious to look for meaning. By “asking what art means (to say)”, philosopher Jacques Derrida argued ...

... [one] submits the mark ‘art’ to a very determined regime of interpretation which has supervened in history: it consists, in its tautology without reserve, in interrogating the vouloir-dire of every work of so-called art, even if its form is not that of saying.

(Derrida 1987 [1978], p.22)

This is why questions such as ‘What does the artist want to tell us?’ are problematic. However, both non-expert viewers and art world professionals alike pose such questions. Donald Preziosi criticised fellow art historians’ frequent “logocentric paradigm of signification” and, despite different programmatic premises including iconographic analysis, Marxist social history, and (structuralist) visual semiotics, their shared concern with explaining “how artworks mean” (Preziosi 1991, p.16). Posing this question is akin to asking what art represents, which is to ask how artworks reflect social, cultural and historical issues. By contrast, postmodern philosophers have argued that art is essentially an assault on systems of representation, demanding that, through their openness and appeal to sensual reception it undermines systems of

3 _{Philosopher Emanuel Levinas established: “To seize by inventory all the contexts of language}

and all possible positions of interlocutors is a senseless task. Every verbal signification lies at the confluence of countless semantic rivers” (Levinas 2003 [1972], p.11/12).

conceptual representation. Jean-François Lyotard, for example, held that searching for ways “to impart a stronger sense of the unrepresentable” is the key ethical capacity of art (Lyotard 1984 [1979], p.81). Already in 1946, artist Ad

Reinhardt encapsulated a similar

discontent with the dogma of

representation in one of his cartoons, where a painting returns the viewer’s pretentious question (Fig. 34).

Despite his critique, Derrida saw positive aspects of verbal meaning- making. He suggested that works of art do not escape the system of language because they “cannot help but be caught within a network of differences and references that give them a textual structure” (Derrida et al. 1994, p.15).

Whereas Eco considered the

interpretive instability of art’s symbolic meaning as a central emancipating virtue, Derrida regarded it as “infinitely authoritarian” (Derrida et al. 1994, p.13). The “silent” work with its “untouchable, monumental, inaccessible presence” can be controlled only through a discourse “that is going to relativize things, emancipate itself, refuse to kneel in front of the authority” (Derrida et al. 1994, p.13). Although in this view verbal language with all its constraints functions not as a corset but as a liberator of meaning, meaning nevertheless remains caught up in discourse. Whether meaning as something that can be put in words is an essential attribute of art remains questionable for Derrida.

One possible way to strengthen the notion of meaning in the realm of art would be to deny its strict ties with language. A brief look at Ogden and Richard’s summary of the ‘meaning of meaning’ (reproduced on p.8) of this thesis) indicates that the concept may be understood as exceeding the linguistic realm. An alternative view was presented by Pragmatist philosophers when they argued that meaning resides first and foremost in bodily experience – ‘beneath interpretation’ (Shusterman 1990; Shusterman 2000, chap.five) – and thus precedes all expression in language. In the pragmatist view, for anything to have meaning it must relate to human needs, longings, or fears. Mark Johnson

Fig. 34: Ad Reinhardt, What Do You Represent? (from the series How to Look at Modern Art in America), cartoon

published in PM, June 2, 1946 Licensed by Bildrecht, Vienna, 2013 (©)

pointed out that the three things babies need to master in order to function successfully are interaction with others, bodily motion, and the perception, manipulation and use of objects, which are ...

... at once bodily, affective, and social. They do not require language in any full-blown sense, and yet they are the very means for making meaning and for encountering anything that can be understood and made sense of. (Johnson 2008, p.36)

This view upholds the primacy of experience for meaning-making, and this is not limited to infancy.4 _{It is biologically rooted in our desire for well-being,}

survival and the physical interaction with our environment. This may appear as the substitution of one confining structure (language) with another (body), but pragmatists emphasise that experiences are phenomenologically unique and rooted in the individual person’s “characteristics of temperament” and “special manner of vision” (Dewey 2005, p.299 [1934]). Also, Pragmatism does not deny the importance of language. Like Derrida, John Dewey argued that words are “practical devices” as they are “the agencies by which the ineffable diversity of natural existence as it operates in human experience is reduced to orders, ranks, and classes that can be managed” (Dewey 2005, p.244 [1934]). As such, language is an essential tool for orientation and meaning-making but it is not the primary locus of meaning.5 In the pragmatist view, art-related meaning-making concerns bodily experience as well as the analytic mind. According to Richard Schusterman the role of art is to give “a satisfyingly integrated expression to both our bodily and intellectual dimensions” and he added that the sensed “is without meaning if de-contextualized from the intellectual and vice versa” (Shusterman 2000, p.7).6 _{This view will serve as a point of departure when}

investigating ways of making meaning in language while acknowledging the experiential factor.

4 _{Philosopher Crispin Sartwell gave an example: “Think seriously for a minute about what you}

do and what you experience in a day. Better, think about the richness contained in a single glance. Then think, first, about the impoverished character of any human sign system with regard to the content of any glance: how far we are from being able to describe it, how far we are from wanting to, how far we are from needing to” (Sartwell 2000, p.44).

5 _{For a summary and defence of the pragmatist view of meaning, see: Morse (2008). My}

references to Sartwell and Johnson are owed to his account.

Dmitry Leontiev argued that in psychology and the humanities there are only two generally accepted properties to characterise extra-linguistic meaning:

(a) a meaning of an object, event or action exists only within a definite context; in different contexts the same object has different meanings, and (b) meaning always points to some intention, goal, reason, necessity, including desired or supposed consequences, or instrumental utility.

(Leontiev 2005, p.2)

When applied to the interpretation of art, this may be taken to imply that it is the task of the viewer to investigate as thoroughly as possible what the artist’s meaning (intention) was when the work was created. Indeed this is an approach many viewers take to art (see 3.6.1), and it is supported by the philosophical doctrine of ‘Intentionalism’.7 _{Intentionalists aim first and foremost to elucidate}

the artist’s ‘message’ and how s/he made her/his choices in the (socio- historical) context of the work’s production. This approach is largely (although not entirely) inadequate to a theory of meaning-making because it neglects that intentions also reside in the viewer, and that these intentions may or may not converge with those of the artist. The viewer brings to the work her/his own context, not only intellectually but also as s/he undergoes an emotional response. It will be argued that both are closely intertwined with the personal system of values that guide the construction of personal meaning.