Monday, January 14, 2008
Can you hear this noise? you may not be on the same wavelenght... Turn this buton now? Hmm... It seems to me that the conditions are now far better to read this new post. These machines are convenient, aren't they? If you hear a noise, you turn the button and hop! It works! It would be to easy if humans could 'work' the same way.
This post is about the noise that alters the communication between the artist and the viewer... through the artwork. But let's read a bit of theoretical work first:
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. Oil, house paint and crayon on canvas, 11' 4" x 13' 3" (345.5 x 404.3 cm).Menil Collection, Houston.
Contemporary art carries a message emitted by a source (the encoder/artist), encoded through the artwork (code), and received by the viewer (decoder) who decodes the message. Such model also entails a source of ‘interferences’ which is a deterioration of the message within the emision/reception process due to the condition in which the communication act occurs.
Number 1 Jackson Pollock 1948
Such ‘interferences’ or 'noise', lead to the appearance of differences between the meaning interpreted by the viewer in presence of the signifier (the artwork) and the meaning intended by the artist. “If the communication process succeeds, the medium prompts a meaningful closure (a message) in the mind of the receiver that is in accord with the intended meaning (the message) of the sender. Hence, the receiver’s perception of meaning is required to complete the process”.
As seen previously, on a radio reception, if there are too much ‘interferences’, the listener cannot hear his programme because the quality of reception is too bad. In the same way, the comunication process through the artwork channel can fail due to bad communication conditions.
From the emitting side we can first highlight that most, if not all artists intend to convey a specific message by their artworks. Oftentimes the producer’s/artists intention does not match with the viewer’s interpretation of the message emitted by an artwork.
To quote Sturken, M. & Cartwright, L. who worked on the Visual communication: “Finding out a producer’s intention often does not tell us much about the image, since intention may not match up with what viewers actually take away from an image or text. People often see an image differently from how is it intended to be seen, either because they bring experience and association to a particular image that were not anticipated by their producer, or because the meanings they derive are informed by the context (or setting in which an artwork is seen)” .
Therefore, an artist might not be in full control of the meanings that are deducted from his/her produced picture or text. Francis Bacon’s famous “distorted figures” for example has been described as a depiction of the horror of war in the context of the late 1940’s for a long time whereas the intended meaning of his painting was to depict the inner pain inherent to human conditions.
Three studies for a crucifixion - Francis Bacon
In a next post I planned to show you a couple of artworks from Paul McCarthy who masters the use of noise as an integrated part of his artworks, performances and sometimes the whole exhibition. The noise as a medium. It definitely seems that everything can be a medium. It s a shame tha everybody cannot be a genius!
;-)
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