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Visible but Obscure - Interpreting a work of art

How do a young artist, fresh out of school, confront the issues of representation and image-making ? How the notions of interpretation of a work of art might perturb the artist ? It is interesting to observe the thought process unveiled by the Hyderabad-based young artist Umesh Unni as he reflects upon the basic ideas of ‘art,’ ‘image’ and ‘meaning.’

This article came from my inability or difficulties, rather than from an attempt to make an intervention or investigation on the subject of ‘interpreting a work of art.’ When I began to write  on my own work, some basic questions aroused in my mind; such as, what is the significance of writing about the painting – if the painting is completed within the canvas itself, then what is the need to explain it or translate it into another language.

Balthus said, “Painting is a language which cannot be translated into any other language.” Balthus himself said a very few words about the painting or his own works, but his works have drawn me into the enigmatic world of paintings. It raises the questions, if the painting is a language, what is the peculiarity that makes it differ from ‘language,’ or is it a language which has all characteristics of ‘language ?’ This statement of Balthus brings me similar statements and definitions of painting from various periods and by various artists.

“They can talk a lot about painting, then why they cannot paint it ?” – Francis Bacon.
There have been words and statements I have been unable to understand or distinguish in relation to interpretation, terms such as understanding a work of art, meaning of work of art, reading a work of art and so on...

Even then, here I am making an attempt to get into certain central issues of interpretation. Generally, when we are interpreting a work of art, we select certain elements of painting or split the painting into its elements, formal elements, as line, colour, arrangement in space and so on, and then it becomes mere appreciation. When we move further, we start looking at the image or the set of images depicted in the painting. Sometimes, the subject matter becomes the focus; sometimes the content becomes the focus.

There is no any single interpretation for a work of art. If there are lots of interpretations for a single work, which one will be truthful to the actual work of art ? Or is it possible, a single interpretation of a work of art which is truthful to it in all senses ?  Is it possible to reproduce the totality of a painting by any kind of interpretation ? Here, the possibility of interpretation varies according to the frame of reference of the interpreter and the nature of the painting which is to be interpreted.

The nature of my way of painting has changed through out the period of my academic course. Along with it, my strategy towards interpretation has also undergone changes. Sometimes it seems that interpretation of my work by myself is a justification of my deeds. Thus, when I trace back to my early work, I executed painting in such a way making sure to avoid the presence of any kind of ambiguity in them, and then, I was able to interpret those works well. I did not have any difficulty to do so because, in my mind, I was clear about what I was going to do. Thus, the idea or the concept behind the painting became more prominent and the image mattered more.

The way I choose to paint, and the image and subject matter I deal in these works seemed to be very rational. When I felt the limitations of it, I moved away and I tried to explore the excluded part, meaning, the emotional self, so my approach towards the way of painting also changed in this second phase. Certain emotions became the contents of these paintings, and the image became secondary; most of the time it became an attempt to recreate certain emotions or feelings rather than an idea or a concept. In the case of this second phase of my painting, most of the time, the images came very unconsciously and it was not preconceived at all.

I like to erase the image within the image, not in the sense of erasing the paint but to erase the image in order to transform it into something else, it deals with the internal world more than the exterior material world, but still there are certain undercurrents of early works which remain without change in feeling or insecurity, violence, fear and so on. I was afraid that the formal interpretation of each work will end up as a failure; it gave way to a refusal, a refusal to the interpretation of each and every element in the work, as I did in the case of my early works. I think that the painting is possible when it demands an understanding of it by feeling , rather than a logical analysis of it, the cerebral analysis of the painting may  eat up the existence of the painting itself. Beauty, truth, immortality, order, harmony are concepts and ideals that have occupied us since the dawn of history. They enrich our lives and encourage us to extend our selves beyond the limit of flesh and blood. Without them, the life would be meaningless. 

The meaning of image in a painting
An image in the painting can be a symbol, or a metaphor. By resolving the symbolic or metaphorical meaning of the image, the painting can be interpreted but when a painting transforms a certain mental state into the pictorial space without loosing the intensity of it, it can never be reproduced in any other medium, thus words become inadequate to explain its meaning. In such cases, the painting becomes the materialisation of certain mental or physical existence of an artist, of a certain period of time. And the way of seeing the painting becomes the dematerialisation of that material presence of the painting. Susan Langer said, “Art is the objectification of feeling and subjectification of nature.”

An image can stand for some meaning, or it can evoke certain feelings without possessing any direct connection with that meaning or feeling. The very possibility of an image in the painting is that it can be symbol or metaphor of itself. In the same way it is possible that an image of sea can stands for the sky, or vice versa. The surrealist Belgian painter Rene Magritte commented on this ever-present gap between image and its verbal meaning in his famous work called ‘This is Not a Pipe.’ We can see an image of pipe in this work at the same time he wrote as ‘This is Not a Pipe,’ just below the image. What does it mean? One way, the image of a pipe is not at all a pipe, that is, it is an image, not a real pipe. Another conceptual artist Joseph Kossuth extends this problem through his work called ‘Three Chairs.’ In his work, he simultaneously displayed a real chair with a photographic image of a chair  and the dictionary meaning of the word ‘chair.’ Here Kossuth  analyses the relation and differences between the reality, image and meaning. Mark Tansey reexamines the reality and its relation with the depicted reality in the painting through his works and his paintings are about the reality of the painting itself. The meaning of things aren’t stable, anything can mean almost anything.

Frame of reference                    
The way we look at a painting varies from person to person according to the change in the frame of reference, thus the understanding and the interpretation also varies from person to person. The experience, knowledge and information of a person are determining the frame of reference – it may be socio-political, it may be philosophical, it may be psychological and so on.

When we look back at the history, we can see certain conceptions about definitions of art dominating in certain periods sand how these conceptions have undergone changes according to the functions or values of art through out history. We must know about the past in order to have a sense of where we are and where we may be going, this argument also holds true for the visual arts; therefore we shall explore the journey of Art from the wall paintings of  Stone Age onwards.

Primitive men lived in the caves and by hunting they gained their food. They had drawn the animals on the rock walls of their natural shelter. They painted those images with natural colours. Those paintings were a part of their magical beliefs. They might have believed that by killing an image of the animal in the painting they could achieve the power to kill the real animal, a super natural power to control the nature. The magical paintings of the primitive predatory human being still remain as a magic in front of the civilised, sophisticated society of ours. Its tremendous crudity and vigour still challenges us.

One of the earliest theoretical conceptions of art came from the Greek philosopher Plato. In his theory of Mimesis he explained that art is an imitation of the imitation, so it will be the degrade version of the absolute reality. He proposed that artists and poets should go away from the Republic, which he had conceived to be an ideal State. According to him all kind of mimetic art will be harmful for the citizens of the ideal Republic. Aristotle countered the argument of Plato, proposing that art can act as a medical purgative on the bad excessive emotions of people.

For a long period, painting tried to be an illusion of the world. The attempt to make the painting as a reflection of the real world (as natural as possible) seemed to be reached its peak in the time of High Renaissance. In the Renaissance conception of painting, it is usually pointed out that, it is like an imaginary window open on to the world. ‘Istoria,’ the theory proposed by the Italian philosopher Leon Battista Alberti, stands for the Renaissance conception of painting. The theory of perspective put forward by Alberti prevailed for along time in the Western history.
After the Renaissance, the second major awakening in the history happened in the time of Modernism. The Renaissance conception of painting as an illusion of the world was changed in the Modernism. Painting itself becomes a reality among all other realities.  Principally the term ‘Modern,’ denotes the period in the history of ideas characterised by the development of man’s self-image as an autonomous rational being, distinct from God who, through reason and sensory knowledge, is able to know and manipulate the world.

‘Modernity’ is the name given to the ‘Modern,’ as it applies to cultural experience and society and, as a period, is generally held to begin with the ‘Industrial Revolution’ in the second half of the 18th Century. Art and aesthetic experience are, of course, not exempt from these social and ontological changes, and the term ‘Modernism’ is used to cover the period in the arts when composers, writers, artists, and performers reacted to and accommodated the dynamics of modernity. In this time, from mid-19th Century onwards, an interesting dialectic of reaction, appropriation, and subversion emerges between art and technology. On the one hand, artists begin to define their out put in terms of what mechanical reproduction is not. One property of Modernist art works is that their significance resides not that so much in ‘what’ they represent as in ‘the way they represent it.’

Modernism paved the way for the birth of many movements in painting, and in art in general. Within the new perception, modern man tried to interpret the art of the past as well as the present. The past is re-read in the context of time and space. Function, value, and nature of the painting was read as a product of historical periods. The birth of the new mode of production and the changes that were brought into the society gave a broad plat form for the development of the consciousness of modern man. Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ (1935) observed that the cult value of the art was changed into the exhibition value, hence the ritualistic function of art of the past has been changed in to the political function of the modern art.

The change in the attitude towards painting as a medium and its value can be understood by examining its functions. Many elaborate the various areas of the medium, and its existence. Here I am trying to examine how art is functioning in various levels, in order to do so, I am looking at major functions of art including the religious, political, and philosophical. Understanding art in this way, may provide us different frames of reference to look at the painting.

Religious:                     
When we look at different art forms of different religions from different times, we can see that art has been performing its religious function in different ways. The reference may go to the mythologies, anecdotes or parables (e.g.: Buddhist narrations of Jataka Tales), it may go to the epics (Mahabharata, Odyssey etc.) and other religious texts (Bible, Puranas etc.).  Most of the time it is considered as spiritual, and it seeks another world, a world beyond the material world. At the same time, we can see that power and spirituality had coexisted in the history (the Divine Kingship). Within the tradition of religious art, we can see particularly two kinds of art, one is High Art and the other is Low Art. While the Classical Art possesses the position of High Art, Folk Art possesses the position of Low Art. In the close reading, the division is a result of the hierarchical structure of the social system. Thus, the Folk Art stands as the art of the common people and the Classical Art stands before the elite class of the society. While Folk Art is retaining the quality of primitive art, High Art tends to refine and idealise itself.

Political: 
In ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ Benjamin observes that the earliest art works originated in the service of ritual – in the realm of magic initially, than that of the religious. He says that the total function of the art is reversed in the age of mechanical reproduction. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

Apart from the change that happens to the function of the art in total in the time of Modernism, we have to look at various relations between art and politics.  Art functions as political when art becomes political as well as non-political. That means, on the one hand, that there are very conscious attempts to be political, to address certain political situations.  On the other hand, there are conscious attempts to be apolitical and to deny all political situations from which the art is coming out. One of the significant things that are visible in the case of most of the modern art movements is the publication of manifestos. Manifestos always say how they are analysing and addressing the historical period to which they belong.  

Realism, as a movement, began to accommodate a newly emerged class of proletarians at the same time when Impressionism revealed the changes that were happening in the life of the middle classes. Futurism begins with the declaration of war and the beauty of violence, at the same time Socialist Realism came up with the hymn of revolution.  Thus political art can be a revealing of a political situation, or it can be a protest, it can be resistance or it can be a propaganda.

Apart from the conscious political intervention, the total history of art can be interpreted as political. Mexican revolutionary painter Diego Rivera said that, “Art has been always been employed by the different social classes who hold the balance of power as one instrument of domination – hence as a political instrument, one can analyse each epoch after epoch – from the Stone Age to our own day – and see then there is no form of art which does not play an essential political role.”

Philosophical:
Philosophy, as stream of knowledge, is generally seeking the answer for some basic questions, such as what is Truth?  What is Being? What is Matter? How does the world exist? And so on …. Philosophy tries to find a certain answer for these questions, by analysing, synthesising, and problematising. Certain art forms are also trying to perform the function of Philosophy as a quest to reveal the truth of the universe, life, being, social being etc. Art can be a medium to understand the totality of being and the existence of being.

The attempt to make art without the mediation of a coded language of representation was reflected as an ideal of authenticity commonly held in the 1960s.  Arte Povera, as an Italian movement, attempted to create a subjective understanding of matter and space allowing for an experience of the ‘primary’ energy present in all aspects of life as directly and not mediated through representation, ideology or codified language.

Psychoanalysis:
The invention of psychoanalysis after Sigmund Freud brought in a great impact on the life of modern man; it changed the way of looking at a work of art. Psycho analysis opened up a new frame of reference. Many 20th Century artists, for example, from Surrealists to the Abstract Expressionists, have been influenced by psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who suggested that primeval forces are at work in the unconscious reaches of the mind. These artists sought to use their art as an outlet for these unconscious forces, the fantasies such as those found in dreams and day dreams or simply in the objects and landscapes that are conceived in the imagination.

The psychoanalytic interpretations of art try to explain the origin of aesthetic experience – that is, the motivation and genesis of the artist’s creativity and the viewer’s response. Discriminating sharply between process and products, the Art Historian Herbert Reed claims that the psychologist / psychoanalyst is interested in the former whereas the critic/ philosopher is concerned with the latter. Again, the contrast seems over simplified; as does the formula that the psychoanalyst is principally concerned with persons whereas the philosopher’s major involvement is with idea and things.

Conclusion:
The questions that I raised at the beginning, remains unanswered, and here I reach a conclusion – that the interpretation of a work of art can possess an autonomous position instead of being an explanation of a single work of art, and it depends on the frame of reference. The ability to understand the reference itself has a decisive role in a successful interpretation – thus each medium is distinct and unique and, so the interpretation also can be a distinct medium. Most of all, interpretation can start from a work of art, in the same way an interpretation can end up with a work of art.   

(Umesh Unni is a Hyderbad-based artist. He graduated from Govt. College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram in 2005 and received post-graduation from SN School of PA, FA and Communication, Central  University, Hyderabad in 2008. Email: umeshunni2008@gmail.com )