Discussion - Is Context Important?

[unpopular]

art is not about communication

 

[skieur]

art is not about communication

Well, you can believe what you want, BUT among other things, I write the art curriculum that is taught in the school systems and my view is accepted by the art and photographic associations that I associate with, and gather input from on a North American level.

skieur

 

[unpopular]

So you write some art curriculum for the Dog River high school and your local camera club pats you on the back.

Come on Skieur. Give me a break. Your position is about 60 years stale.

 

[Fred Berg]

art is not about communication

If this is true, why does this forum exist? Your own participation in this discussion would seem a little contradictory if you really hold this view.

Of his picture, the one that stood now on his easel, he had at the bottom of his heart one conviction--that no one had ever painted a picture like it. He did not believe that his picture was better than all the pictures of Raphael, but he knew that what he tried to convey in that picture, no one ever had conveyed. This he knew positively, and had known a long while, ever since he had begun to paint it. But other people's criticisms, whatever they might be, had yet immense consequence in his eyes, and they agitated him to the depths of his soul. Any remark, the most insignificant, that showed that the critic saw even the tiniest part of what he saw in the picture, agitated him to the depths of his soul. He always attributed to his critics a more profound comprehension than he had himself, and always expected from them something he did not himself see in the picture. And often in their criticisms he fancied that he had found this.

This passage about the artist Mihailov taken from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina supports the idea that art is indeed about communication and that the opinions of those receiving the work do matter to those who create it. This passage more or less sums up TPF and the reason for joining and taking part.

 

[baturn]

OK! I read to the middle of the second page, and now must decide whether to sleep and tackle all this profundity in the morning, or have another rum and press on. ------------------Rum won!

 

[baturn]

oh yeah! And when did this become a pissing contest between unpopular (a very revealing handle) and skieur?

 

[pgriz]

Started around post 20, I think. Skieur is arguing that an image should be self-contained, whereas unpopular argues that the image must be experienced to be understood, and external knowledge is essential to this understanding. Whatever the merits of Skieur's professional knowledge and experience, Skieur has not presented in this thread his arguements why context is irrelevant. Skieur's statement:

Well, keeping it simple, the photographer is "supposed" to use his skills in the technology and the art/composition understanding to communicate "something" (emotion, humour, understanding, point of view, personality, etc.) to the viewer through the photo. If he/she has been successful then NO CONTEXT is necessary. Everyone sees the "meaning" or whatever of the photo. Explanation is only necessary if the photographer has screwed up and failed.

is an assertion that perceiving the visual content is sufficient in itself to determine the meaning or the communication of the image.

On one level, that is certainly true, and a well-crafted image SHOULD convey enough clues to the viewer to allow them to understand the image. However, the discussion of context goes beyond the individual item (whether it is an image, or a piece of music, or a choreographed performance) to a larger discussion of the environment in which the item was created. The state of mind of the creator of the item, the environment in which the creator lived, the influences of society, and the expression through other items by the artist, all influence what ends up in a particular piece.

To Skieur: I take it as a given that an image should be well crafted. I disagree with you that explanation is never necessary. If a piece was created under the influence of an ideology (not necessarily political), this bias may not be apparent to the viewer, and in fact the creator may work hard to hide that bias, then the viewer will be responding to an image which is on one level false. The image may succeed brilliantly, but the meaning the viewer would associate with the image would be different if they knew the context behind the image creation. Well-executed political/propaganda imagery succeeds by presenting a particular view which biases the viewer who doesn't ask the followup questions. I am sure you know of examples where the choice of crop on an image changed the perceived meaning of the image.

Edit: Perhaps you are referring to captions, which supply additional information, or explain what we are seeing in an image. Certainly, if captions are necessary to give us a clue as to what's going on, the image is not a strong image. However... providing context goes beyond what may be identified in a caption. The image may give us a snapshot of a particular event, but does not tell us what happened before that may have led to the event, or to the relationship of the people involved in the event. The framing of the image often hides as much as it reveals. What is hidden, why is it hidden, and why this framing and perspective, are things we should be asking when seeking to understand what an image (of an event) is showing us.

 

[unpopular]

oh yeah! And when did this become a pissing contest between unpopular (a very revealing handle) and skieur?

It seems every time skieur has an argument, he backs it up with some sort of vague way to shine himself as an expert in whatever we're talking about. For starters, I hate fallacy, and have zero tolerance for it.

---

I'm not alone in my views, mind you. Nor is Kolchalka. In particular Russian-American philosopher Blücher argues that communication is specific to place and time, while art is timeless, can change meaning and by these virtues makes it timeless - not because it has one specific meaning between one party and another (communication) but because it has many (art).

If art were communicative, then art would be successful only within the group of people who have the experiences and knowledge to decode it. Art is not some kind of codex, it is an experience or object of itself. When you look around you, you experience the world you're in, art is no different. Objects in the world around us do not "communicate" with us, they exist and we experience them. Successful art is not something everyone decodes a unison meaning of precisely what the artist had intended, but rather one that everyone understands and is able to experience.

In fact, if art were exclusively communicative, then all we'd need to do is reduce art to a codex of signs and symbols which could be interpreted with absolute certainty - and in fact we have this in the form of cliche. Is every photo of a sunset then the greatest artwork? We know what it is and what it represents with certainty, and there is no disagreement about the artist's intention.

I do not believe that art is a cheap facsimile of reality, it's not simply some record of what was at one time experienced, but rather an experience unto itself to be interpreted within the context of the audience's own world view.

 

[rexbobcat]

I can see how art isn't about communication.

The best communication comes from conciseness with little room for interpretation. However, art is all about interpretation. I don't mean interpretation on the artist's part, because that happens with communication as well. I mean interpretation from the viewer. If a listener has as much room to interpret a message as a viewer of art does, then the communicator and message must be pretty ineffective/bad. So...I guess that means art is ineffective/bad at communicating? lol

I'm sure that there are exceptions and such that I haven't accounted for, but come on. Since when does anyone enjoy trying to interpret a vague or misleading message.

 

[manaheim]

Aren't we being a little pedantic?

Art isn't, perhaps, communication... but art can and does communicate from time to time.

To some, art is a method of communicating.

To some, communication is received from art.

etc.

 

[amolitor]

If he/she has been successful then NO CONTEXT is necessary. Everyone sees the "meaning" or whatever of the photo. Explanation is only necessary if the photographer has screwed up and failed.

skieur

Taken to the logical extreme, this is manifestly false. If "everyone" includes hypothetical aliens that "talk" with radio waves, that "see" with sound waves, and reproduce by fission, and live on the surface of a star, then you're going to have some trouble even communicating the idea of a photograph to them. If "everyone" includes illiterate members of nomadic tribes in the Sahara and profoundly autistic men in Chicago, you've still got quite a row to hoe.

If by "everyone" you mean "middle class moderately well educated white dudes like me from the USA" then your definition of everyone is pretty narrow.

Photographs are meaningless without some degree of shared culture. It is facile and glib to claim that a photograph should be comprehensible with no context at all, and such a statement suggests that you haven't thought it through to any great extent.

It's really, I am convinced, about the degree of shared culture, of context, that is necessary to render an image accessible.

- Andrew

 

[Derrel]

EVERYTHING WE ENCOUNTER is encountered within **some type** of context. NOTHING that we see, hear, read, touch, or feel, exists in a vacuum. How about the next question we debate is another good one, like, oh, let's just say we debate the question, "Is oxygen needed for humans to live?"