A Three-Way Street

Alexis Rochman, Pioneers, 2017, oil & alkyd on wood

Each time you consider an artwork in person, you are communing with the artist(s) who made it. That person might be unknown to you, or a revered master from art history, or somebody who lives down the street. But regardless of whether you know the artist or not, by agreeing to spend time in contemplation of the artwork that s/he has made, your attention serves a form of validation of that person’s efforts. The only visible relationship present is between you and the object, but the artist is always there as well -- a kind of shadow figure who haunts your encounter, much like a chef who hovers nearby to gauge your reaction as you take the first taste of the bisque or sauce that has been in preparation for a while. Sometimes the artist might actually be physically present as you consider the product of his or her labors, but the vast majority of times it will be just the two of you, with the artist included as kind of phantom chaperone.

In one sense, the artwork serves as a document of mutual understanding between you and the artist that your attempt to understand and appreciate it will not be entirely in vain. Our implicit awareness that the artist has spent considerable time, effort, imagination, and potentially materials in the attempt to forge a statement that is intended for us to contemplate is in turn a form of recognition that this product exists as the result of a desire to reach across a void of silence and absence in order to produce a meeting of the minds. There is, of course, no guarantee that such a meeting will take place, only that the attempt has been made.

Does this suggest that the viewer is under some form of obligation to honor the artist’s intentions by trying to translate those intentions by way of the object at hand? Not exactly, since our recognition of the artist’s position is not necessarily an affirmation that s/he knows everything there is to know about the work. If, in fact, after a period of musing over its contents, one were to offer an interpretation to the artist about what the work is intended to signify, the possibility that the artist might reject such a perspective in no way invalidates that reading. In this sense, there really is no correct or incorrect way to understand a work of art, except to the degree that over-literalizing its contents seems guaranteed only to foreclose on the possibility of other, less obvious, meanings bubbling up to the surface after the obvious explanations have run dry.

While the artist may be the undisputed author of the work in question, the creative process is such that making art and interpreting it are entirely distinct processes, and the artist is no more in control of how we receive a work than a composer is in charge of the emotions that might be invoked when a piece of music is heard in public. Instead, the artist developing the work is invariably basing certain aspects of it on a long and extensive history of relationships between artists and intellectuals, in which the ability to convey to the artwork’s patron certain ideas and sensations that are entirely separate from what is felt by the untrained onlooker has constituted the suggestive power that resides in all visual images. For a lay person, the painting or sculpture might be nothing more or less than the physical manifestation of an act of faith, in which the collectively held belief that, for instance, the infant Jesus was born in manger with a coterie that included the Virgin, Joseph, a handful of shepherds and three kings is positively reinforced not only by the act of painting, but in the knowledge that countless other artists have depicted the identical scene over the course of history. To the viewer who understands the history of such depictions, by contrast, there is untold knowledge residing just below the work’s surface, from the technical to the theological, and covering all manner of sensations and insights in between.

A fairly clear-cut example of this is the centuries-old practice of incorporating an image of the work’s patron, dressed in period garb, within a group of onlookers or semi-participants in a religious scene. His face might be immediately recognizable by the patron’s inner circle, but is seen by those outside that circle as belonging to an anonymous, invented character. If that patron is dressed in turn as one of the onlookers at a period religious ceremony, then both realities as to their identity are equally valid. The viewer who comes to the experience out of religious devotion sees only the shepherd, while the local elite sees clear evidence of the process of artistic patronage. Neither view is exclusive of the other, but neither is in any way complete.