Chapter 2
Narrative and the Expanding Object
In this section I move among the strata that can facilitate or constrict our engagement when we confront a glasswork.
2.1 The Surrounding Mists
I dissect our engagement with the glasswork in terms of what the work is, what the work is said to be, and the meaning we may derive as our understanding of the work. I conclude that the power of any preconception to constrict our response is balanced by the power of the poetic event to increase our affective engagement with the glasswork.
Viewers confronted with a glasswork will engage it through the frame of their own understanding of the world. Viewers construct a narrative that gives account of this thing they are viewing, but that is only one interpretation, and there may be any number of possible interpretations. The interpretations are determined not only by context, but also by what the viewers bring to that context.
A Sea of Words
When we place studio glasswork in the context of artwork, an observation made by American artist Robert Morris becomes relevant. The observation is, “works of art remain afloat on a sea of words”.[1] The art object may trigger a multitude of narratives, and from these narratives a viewer may attach any singular narrative or combination of narratives to interpret meaning from the work. These narratives may be profound or prosaic, but being of a time and place, read as a language and felt as visual form, these narratives can engage us with all the force of culture. The narratives that the artwork makes available inform, fascinate, interrogate and transport us through a narrative’s connection with our needs and longing. The narratives that a viewer attaches to an artwork make that artwork culturally relevant, or cross-culturally intriguing. Narratives reveal our shared humanity, or express our differences.
One is Not the Other
Even though generated by the object through the context of our engagement, the narrative is not the object, but an experience of our own making so bound to the object that we can see narrative and object as the same thing. The interpreted meaning may vary because meaning is dependent on the viewer and the context of the viewing; that is, because it is subject to context the meaning of the artwork can mutate with shifts in context. The narratives we attach as meaning to an object are the mutating signified of connotation.
If we apply narratives as our understandings and make them available for the purpose of our interpretation we can do so because we have absorbed them from our cultural surround. They have been made in another’s history and we interpret them from within our own. Last century Roland Barthes provided a means to separate the strata of an interpretation and in doing so he pointed out the ability of narratives to enmesh the object. The enmeshing is done in the signification of meaning and provides multiple possibilities for understanding, or conversely, a dominant narrative can overpower potential variation in interpretation. This highlights the difference between what is (entity), what is said to be (that which is denoted) and the meaning we derive from them both (what we connote). Sometimes our supposition leads to our unthinking acceptance of one for the other. Barthes pointed out that this substitution is masked by unquestioned cultural assumptions[2] that carry conscious or subliminal narratives. We surround the thing we are viewing with a metaphoric mist. This mist is formed of myths and the myths (as invented stories) are made of words, but these words are not the thing. They are not the complete idea or the sole concept of the thing. They are our language constructions in the form of narrative and, even though we might create our own substitute form made of these constructed narratives, they can never equate to the sum of the original object.
Words as Visual Form
Barthes, in Mythologies,[3] expounded on the word and the power it had to reveal, conceal and give meaning(s) to the thing, which in our case is the glass object, or the practice that made it. Barthes wrote of the power of attached meaning to engage or obstruct engagement. He knew that through the meaning we attach to it, we control and shape our perception of that which has our attention. Even when this attached meaning is a limited or false construct our perception still gives attached meaning the power to create visual form. A corollary of attached meaning shaping our perception of a visual form is that we may approach an object with preconceptions. For most viewers it is easier to engage through meaning attached by others, rather than be open to the object and be confronted with its questions. This uncritical engagement is problematic if it leads to the viewer’s acceptance of some inadequate or false construct as the attached meaning. The order of things is reversed so that our preconceived meaning shapes the thing from which we initially sought meaning. Preconceived meaning disguises words as the thing. This is the case when any assumption (supportive of studio glass or not) becomes a context for engaging a glasswork. When a preconception becomes the context of engagement, myth can solidify our assumptions into visual form, as those assumptions replace the object.
Multiple Meaning and Poetics
The potential for one work to have multiple meanings is an adaptive power given to the work by its engagement from within its context. In this way the work has the potential to be poetic by presenting the viewer with multiple possibilities for its interpretation. Romanticism comes into play because, if we allow time and the glasswork allows us space, we experience vertical movement, deep thought, a wandering meditation. Rather than have the work tell us, we drift through the possibilities it offers us as we feel the work through our own consciousness.
To generate such an engagement we as artists have only one true opportunity and that is during our making of the work. Through our making we structure visual forms to generate engagement and response. We do this by implanting aesthetic triggers (colour, light, ambiguity, simulations) that we hope will stimulate the aesthetic sensibility of a viewer. The work, which is our gesture on material made into visual form, becomes a potential for meaning in what Barthes referred to as a ‘pregnant moment’.[4] If the form’s symbolic capacity allows the viewers’ interpretations to depart in a multiplicity of directions, the work is poetic. Being open to any viewer’s interpretation of its meaning, the work is infinite. This is the art object fulfilling a role in what Barthes called the ‘generation of systems’,[5] now moving on through its own independent existence to engage and re-engage viewers.
If Romanticism has a God, then that God is not a mathematician, that God is a poet. Artists, as priests of this God, ask questions rather than provide answers. We do this by creating poetic work through utilising our aesthetic sensibility and embodied technique. Our success is evidenced in the poetic eloquence we draw from the materiality of glass and the immateriality of light and ideas, rather than the words with which we might define and limit the work’s potential meaning. Words have great culturally based power, but they can enclose and specify and in doing so can limit access to multiple meanings. The art object should not be bound by a singular meaning, or constricted by the viewer’s preconception. The power of an art object is in its aesthetic engagement, due largely to its openness to received meaning. The artwork becomes a mutating signifier moving through time and space, remaking itself as relevant within new context by the infinite possibilities of its engagement. In the best of circumstances those engagements become poetic events. This engagement is not limited by our lucidity as makers; rather it is intensified by it.
Context and the power of words can encumber us with cliché, as can any unquestioned belief we have formed as our preconception. What is said to be, if unquestioned, can overpower, enclose and thus smother the life from the potential that is the work. It can close engagement before it begins. It can stifle critical appraisal. Salvation lies in a work’s possibilities for interpretation. It is engagement and critical appraisal that cuts through preconception and cliché and opens the potential of a work’s poetic nature as it moves through time, always offering the viewer something new. Paraphrasing Ross Gibson,[6] such work keeps on giving through a well-structured incompleteness that never cashes out completely.
Context cannot be separated from the interpretation of an object. Even if the setting is controlled, context comes with the viewer, who cannot avoid bringing his or her embodied experience to bear. Predetermining a categorisation however can be another matter.[7] If it is unconsidered, or inappropriate, or pre-emptive, categorisation is the problematic centre of the art/craft debate, because it has set the context for interpreting the object it precedes. This is the antithesis of romanticism because it determines what is, rather than what could be. It limits engagement, because what is being engaged is constricting myth. If it is the categorisation and not the object that generates meaning, the potential of the object’s multiple narratives is mangled or replaced – the object loses its poetic power as mutating signifier and becomes cliché. As such the viewer is denied the possibility of experiencing the work fully. Our defence against this happening is the discipline to be as open as possible in our engagement with each object and not bind it in pre-conception – that is, romantically engage the work as a potential experience rather than engage any cliché that may constrain experience.
[1] Morris, Continuous Project, 119.
[2] Barthes, Mythologies, 109-110.
[3] Ibid., 109-113. It is never the ‘signifier’, ‘the thing’ that is ambiguous, for it is an entity, but the entity has potential for interpretation, its ‘signification’.
[4] Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Howard, Richard, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, 93.
[5] Ibid ., 150.
[6] Ross Gibson, personal interview, 01/12/09, 4.
[7] Charles Butcher and Cobi Cockburn, Personal interview, 18/01/2010, 1. While Cockburn says, ‘it might be human to place things in boxes and categorise them’,Butcher says ‘at the end of the day you seem to be lumped in with the history of the material as opposed to what you are actually creating’.
Return to contents page
Narrative and the Expanding Object
In this section I move among the strata that can facilitate or constrict our engagement when we confront a glasswork.
2.1 The Surrounding Mists
I dissect our engagement with the glasswork in terms of what the work is, what the work is said to be, and the meaning we may derive as our understanding of the work. I conclude that the power of any preconception to constrict our response is balanced by the power of the poetic event to increase our affective engagement with the glasswork.
Viewers confronted with a glasswork will engage it through the frame of their own understanding of the world. Viewers construct a narrative that gives account of this thing they are viewing, but that is only one interpretation, and there may be any number of possible interpretations. The interpretations are determined not only by context, but also by what the viewers bring to that context.
A Sea of Words
When we place studio glasswork in the context of artwork, an observation made by American artist Robert Morris becomes relevant. The observation is, “works of art remain afloat on a sea of words”.[1] The art object may trigger a multitude of narratives, and from these narratives a viewer may attach any singular narrative or combination of narratives to interpret meaning from the work. These narratives may be profound or prosaic, but being of a time and place, read as a language and felt as visual form, these narratives can engage us with all the force of culture. The narratives that the artwork makes available inform, fascinate, interrogate and transport us through a narrative’s connection with our needs and longing. The narratives that a viewer attaches to an artwork make that artwork culturally relevant, or cross-culturally intriguing. Narratives reveal our shared humanity, or express our differences.
One is Not the Other
Even though generated by the object through the context of our engagement, the narrative is not the object, but an experience of our own making so bound to the object that we can see narrative and object as the same thing. The interpreted meaning may vary because meaning is dependent on the viewer and the context of the viewing; that is, because it is subject to context the meaning of the artwork can mutate with shifts in context. The narratives we attach as meaning to an object are the mutating signified of connotation.
If we apply narratives as our understandings and make them available for the purpose of our interpretation we can do so because we have absorbed them from our cultural surround. They have been made in another’s history and we interpret them from within our own. Last century Roland Barthes provided a means to separate the strata of an interpretation and in doing so he pointed out the ability of narratives to enmesh the object. The enmeshing is done in the signification of meaning and provides multiple possibilities for understanding, or conversely, a dominant narrative can overpower potential variation in interpretation. This highlights the difference between what is (entity), what is said to be (that which is denoted) and the meaning we derive from them both (what we connote). Sometimes our supposition leads to our unthinking acceptance of one for the other. Barthes pointed out that this substitution is masked by unquestioned cultural assumptions[2] that carry conscious or subliminal narratives. We surround the thing we are viewing with a metaphoric mist. This mist is formed of myths and the myths (as invented stories) are made of words, but these words are not the thing. They are not the complete idea or the sole concept of the thing. They are our language constructions in the form of narrative and, even though we might create our own substitute form made of these constructed narratives, they can never equate to the sum of the original object.
Words as Visual Form
Barthes, in Mythologies,[3] expounded on the word and the power it had to reveal, conceal and give meaning(s) to the thing, which in our case is the glass object, or the practice that made it. Barthes wrote of the power of attached meaning to engage or obstruct engagement. He knew that through the meaning we attach to it, we control and shape our perception of that which has our attention. Even when this attached meaning is a limited or false construct our perception still gives attached meaning the power to create visual form. A corollary of attached meaning shaping our perception of a visual form is that we may approach an object with preconceptions. For most viewers it is easier to engage through meaning attached by others, rather than be open to the object and be confronted with its questions. This uncritical engagement is problematic if it leads to the viewer’s acceptance of some inadequate or false construct as the attached meaning. The order of things is reversed so that our preconceived meaning shapes the thing from which we initially sought meaning. Preconceived meaning disguises words as the thing. This is the case when any assumption (supportive of studio glass or not) becomes a context for engaging a glasswork. When a preconception becomes the context of engagement, myth can solidify our assumptions into visual form, as those assumptions replace the object.
Multiple Meaning and Poetics
The potential for one work to have multiple meanings is an adaptive power given to the work by its engagement from within its context. In this way the work has the potential to be poetic by presenting the viewer with multiple possibilities for its interpretation. Romanticism comes into play because, if we allow time and the glasswork allows us space, we experience vertical movement, deep thought, a wandering meditation. Rather than have the work tell us, we drift through the possibilities it offers us as we feel the work through our own consciousness.
To generate such an engagement we as artists have only one true opportunity and that is during our making of the work. Through our making we structure visual forms to generate engagement and response. We do this by implanting aesthetic triggers (colour, light, ambiguity, simulations) that we hope will stimulate the aesthetic sensibility of a viewer. The work, which is our gesture on material made into visual form, becomes a potential for meaning in what Barthes referred to as a ‘pregnant moment’.[4] If the form’s symbolic capacity allows the viewers’ interpretations to depart in a multiplicity of directions, the work is poetic. Being open to any viewer’s interpretation of its meaning, the work is infinite. This is the art object fulfilling a role in what Barthes called the ‘generation of systems’,[5] now moving on through its own independent existence to engage and re-engage viewers.
If Romanticism has a God, then that God is not a mathematician, that God is a poet. Artists, as priests of this God, ask questions rather than provide answers. We do this by creating poetic work through utilising our aesthetic sensibility and embodied technique. Our success is evidenced in the poetic eloquence we draw from the materiality of glass and the immateriality of light and ideas, rather than the words with which we might define and limit the work’s potential meaning. Words have great culturally based power, but they can enclose and specify and in doing so can limit access to multiple meanings. The art object should not be bound by a singular meaning, or constricted by the viewer’s preconception. The power of an art object is in its aesthetic engagement, due largely to its openness to received meaning. The artwork becomes a mutating signifier moving through time and space, remaking itself as relevant within new context by the infinite possibilities of its engagement. In the best of circumstances those engagements become poetic events. This engagement is not limited by our lucidity as makers; rather it is intensified by it.
Context and the power of words can encumber us with cliché, as can any unquestioned belief we have formed as our preconception. What is said to be, if unquestioned, can overpower, enclose and thus smother the life from the potential that is the work. It can close engagement before it begins. It can stifle critical appraisal. Salvation lies in a work’s possibilities for interpretation. It is engagement and critical appraisal that cuts through preconception and cliché and opens the potential of a work’s poetic nature as it moves through time, always offering the viewer something new. Paraphrasing Ross Gibson,[6] such work keeps on giving through a well-structured incompleteness that never cashes out completely.
Context cannot be separated from the interpretation of an object. Even if the setting is controlled, context comes with the viewer, who cannot avoid bringing his or her embodied experience to bear. Predetermining a categorisation however can be another matter.[7] If it is unconsidered, or inappropriate, or pre-emptive, categorisation is the problematic centre of the art/craft debate, because it has set the context for interpreting the object it precedes. This is the antithesis of romanticism because it determines what is, rather than what could be. It limits engagement, because what is being engaged is constricting myth. If it is the categorisation and not the object that generates meaning, the potential of the object’s multiple narratives is mangled or replaced – the object loses its poetic power as mutating signifier and becomes cliché. As such the viewer is denied the possibility of experiencing the work fully. Our defence against this happening is the discipline to be as open as possible in our engagement with each object and not bind it in pre-conception – that is, romantically engage the work as a potential experience rather than engage any cliché that may constrain experience.
[1] Morris, Continuous Project, 119.
[2] Barthes, Mythologies, 109-110.
[3] Ibid., 109-113. It is never the ‘signifier’, ‘the thing’ that is ambiguous, for it is an entity, but the entity has potential for interpretation, its ‘signification’.
[4] Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Howard, Richard, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, 93.
[5] Ibid ., 150.
[6] Ross Gibson, personal interview, 01/12/09, 4.
[7] Charles Butcher and Cobi Cockburn, Personal interview, 18/01/2010, 1. While Cockburn says, ‘it might be human to place things in boxes and categorise them’,Butcher says ‘at the end of the day you seem to be lumped in with the history of the material as opposed to what you are actually creating’.
Return to contents page