Trust the Art and Not the Artist

Apropos of the previous post, I wanted to write something about this principle I learned in school, one of those basic principles for a whole discipline that is also strangely descriptive of human life or behavior in a more general way.

So I studied a lot of history and read a lot of books in school, its obvious from my writing, if you know nothing else about me.  I actually got two B.A.s and a minor in my four and a half years, not that either B.A. is of any value.  In addition to the History degree most people know about, I also got a degree in a department called Comparative Literature, which sounds even more like bullshit than History, right?  What it actually is, and should just be called, for the sake of graduates, just so people fucking know what they studied, is Art Criticism, pure and simple, because what they mean by comparative is contextualizing a piece of art, let's just say a book, for the sake of argument, in the wider thought atmosphere of all culture contemporary to the artist at the time of the piece's creation.  So you're saying what this song meant, not just to music, but to painting at the same time.  How does Edouard Manet sitting and smoking cigarettes with Marcel Proust, his lifelong friend, influence the perspective of the two famous artists?  What do they share?  What do they argue about?  What do they go round and round about, one convincing the other before having his own mind ultimately changed by something his friend said?  What are they working on in their studios when they have the argument?  How does the human story produce the meaning of the 'Objet d'Art' (as it's called)?

So the basic principle I wanted to discuss comes from this discipline, which stresses the factual nature of beauty, even if its description is elusive.  It's the aphorism I used to head this post, that when there comes a time when a literary interpretation of the piece comes into contention with something the artist themself said about their art, or even about the individual piece itself, in looking for the meaning of the art, you trust the art and not the artist.

This is weird, right?  So if John fucking Lennon's corporeal spirit tells you that Imagine is an imperialist anthem meant as a call to arms to go out and conquer the brown people and drive the yellow ones out into space, you can look him in the eye and tell him, "That's all very well and good, John, but the world read it the other way: the meaning that made it art is the pacifist, compassionate love message that derives from a straightforward reading."  Yes, this means that artists can be (and often are) completely wrong about the actual meaning of their own art.  This also means that, for all cultural intents and purposes, a song that has as wide a distribution as Sympathy for the Devil speaks through the actual voice of the devil.  It tells us things we don't want to hear (Anastasia screamed in vain), that even the men on the tanks (the heroes, even the anti-hero, Rommel, of WWII) are symbols of the darker side of man triumphant, and that, lastly of all, maybe, just maybe, its the villain we should be the more concerned about, extending our concern, our investigative reporting, and our care to the guy who came up feeling hard-done-by in a world that doesn't have to be that way.

But that doesn't mean that what the artist thinks or intends or says doesn't matter at all.  In terms of contextualizing and opening a window on how the art is made, the artist's testimony is essential, its only in terms of that final decision on meaning, when all is said and done, and the conflicting, cross-cutting influences have all been weighed, and a social or cultural interpretation must be made, that the rule-of-thumb defaults you toward the interpretive meaning over the stated one.  It puts substantial pressure on the social scientist/humanist doing the interpreting to use very solid theoretical analysis of the symbolism of the objets, but what it comes down to is whether or not you accept that social and cultural realities are as solid a set of laws governing human behavior as physics.  If you do, then you can contextualize many choices, or rule out motivations, based on when the art was created.  An artist can claim that a fortunate coincidence in symbols with another popular icon was intentional, but if the documentable history shows that they did not or could not have known about the symbol at the time the scene was shot, or whatever the art was, you can say for sure that the symbol was put in there for a different reason.  It's likely, however, that the independent choice of two iconic artists to use the same symbol comes from some deeper seated cultural focusing on symbols like it.

Do you see how it works?  The artist says it was just a publicity stunt, look at me, look how smart I am.  The art itself says it wasn't a publicity stunt, he just had a seagull's shadow on the sidewalk for fifteen seconds at the beginning of his music video because he thought the camera shot was badass when they were taping and made sure it ended up in the video.  But from knowing that it was coincidental, we can then say something deeper about the sea-bird, silhouetted on concrete as a symbol for how the society at large wanted to be spoken to at the time, for what feelings and emotions were making connections with audiences.

In a way, since art is a pure distillation of action into value, it's as much as to say that actions speak louder than words, but I think it goes farther, in that it says that even the most studied, sometimes elaborate actions can speak for you in spite of yourself, by signaling subconsciously, and saying things you believe, but never intended to give voice.  And more than that, that what you say or do can mean, to a large number of people, and mean, to the vast majority of them, something entirely unrelated to what it means to you.  Not to just start pulling down famous quotes, but I'm now also reminded of the Gladiator line, "what we do in life, echoes for eternity."  Our actions really do have a butterfly effect on the future, and most of that effect comes from our perception in the eyes of other people.

Trust the art means that, even though what makes art meaningful may be what the artist was thinking when they wrote it, what makes art art, what makes it beautiful, is the reaction it causes the auditor, the interpretation.  There is no art without the perceiver, the audience.  If you allow the projector to give all of the meaning to a piece, simply because they gave it shape, then you silence your own voice expressed in seeing something in the piece and responding to it.  You do not have to respond to it.  I was going to say art, 'you do not have to respond to art,' but that's not true.  You can ignore it, dislike it, be unimpressed by it or whathaveyou, but art causes a reaction.  What you do not have to do is validate every glob of acrylic and pigment slapped on an old rag and called art by reacting to it.  IF its art, and if you're letting it happen, it will cause a reaction.  If it is not, then hopefully its at least pretty.