DAY EIGHT

Today's post is in part an addendum to yesterday's where I wrote about the steady accumulation of parts is what makes the whole. I said that perhaps one should not hold too tightly to a vision of the whole, especially in the early stages of a long project.

As I was writing that another thought kept popping into my mind, and that was the idea that sometimes, whatever the originator may have intended the audience to take away from their work, whatever meaning they hoped to imbue or have discerned in their own work, the audience may in fact have its own ideas. Meaning, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. 

 

Does this mean that the creator of a piece should abandon any idea of giving meaning and let things land as they may? Of course not, and I 'm not sure that's even possible. 

 

Jackson Pollock must have had something in mind when doing his drip paintings, don't you think? Even if, (and I don't know what any  'official version' says), he was simply trying to evoke a sense of chaos, or chance, or happenstance, he made choices as he went along - size, colours, direction of 'attack', when to stop, and so on - which meant he was engaged with the work, and to be engaged with anything, is to draw some sense of meaning from it, I think. Not only meaning for oneself, but some sense of how it relates to other artefacts in the world, how it relates to the world into which you intend it to be launched. 

 

And there's the rub - other people have their own ideas about that world, the artefacts in it, the meainings they have in themselves and in relation to each other.

 

When I took the picture above, what I thought I saw was a face, something I thought of as Quasimodo Monkey, (as played by Charles Laughton that is). But actually it's just a bole of a tree that I've imposed a view upon. You may see something different, or nothing at all other than the bole of a tree.

What I want to suggest, tentatively, is that to want to give meaning to something you create, is both human and necessary, but to fixate upon that meaning, or try to hard to have every last bit of the work conform to that meaning, is likely to result in something ultimately a little stale and unfulfilling.

 

Onwards...