My wife Jo and I had a conversation recently about understanding of meaning in art of any and every kind and it was a real head scratcher.
If I paint a picture, I’m creating something to get a message across. The message could just be that I saw a pretty landscape and wanted to show others, but art isn’t always just a photo realistic version of the real world. If you consider the work of Jackson Pollock for example, what do they say? He himself said that they didn’t have any objective meaning and it was the act of looking at them which made you feel what it was you felt so they did what they were supposed to.
Now consider if an artist were to create a similar explosion of colour which had no meaning outside the viewing, but someone comes along and says that they see the work as actually a burning scream for the implementation of eugenics? Our artist says that he didn’t do that and he doesn’t believe that at all. Critic then argues that that just highlights that he’s actually sending the message through unconsciously, so this further reinforces the idea that that original thought from the critic is accurate.
I appreciate that this an extreme example but it was just a part of the trundling my mind went through when I kicked it about.
I wrote my novels to say certain things, but each person could read the books and take very different elements from them. We are the sum of our own lives so may interpret things slightly differently to anyone else but where should we draw the lines in terms of owning those interpretations?
Computer games have narratives which run through them but it’s very easy to recall stories of the moral panic surrounding violence in games and TV shows warping the minds of young people. Music is questioned because ‘someone’ misunderstands or ignores what the artist is trying to say in the work and creates their own story instead and more and more fingers are pointed, truth be damned. In relation to a story of this kind, “It seems to be quite straightforwardly a case of an octopus just being an octopus.”
Everyone can take anything they want out of the art works that they consume, we all do after all, but as an author, I know what I wanted to say when I wrote my books. An outsider may utterly disagree, thinking I was saying the opposite, but just because someone says they think I meant something will never mean that I actually did.
I suppose you then ask about the one making the outlandish claims and have to consider the idea that their individual life has led them, as mine has me, to the point where they see certain things a particular way. After all, ‘To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.
It’s an interesting consideration to have, who decides what it is a work actually means, and to those works of which the creator is no longer available to confirm, it all falls down to a discussion of opinions.
If in doubt about my stuff, please feel free to ask.
Stay safe all.
Owen Elgie 