3.5 The Open Engagement
I analyse engagement with the open work to explore the benefits in expanding beyond the confines of one intended meaning.
The Open Work is the name of a 1989 book on semiotics written by Umberto Eco. In this book Eco argues for polysemy and (with the book’s emphasis on literature) the importance of the reader and his or her response. The concept of an open work strains against the idea that a work has one intended meaning. Applied to the versatility and emotional power of glasswork within the context of Romanticism, the problem with one intended meaning is the shortfall that occurs when enclosure by meaning is matched against the totality that is a work’s potential.
Open to Interpretation
Martin Beaver says he finds that artists are open to different interpretations of their work and do not necessarily want to impose any one interpretation.[1] Different viewers can (and probably will) read the same work differently. Karen O’Clery says viewers’ reactions may be “more visual and more the feeling of the heart”[2] – that is, more affective – and that response may be to composition, form, luminosity, hardness, softness, or to how any or all of those things relate. All these responses are happening at the same time, and they themselves are open to more than one meaning.
A meaning of a work does not equate to its potential for information that is, potential for adding to what we already know.[3] Bruce Metcalf quotes Arthur Danto as saying “art is essentially embodied meaning”;[4] but if it is so, it is meaning that the viewer has attached to the work in response to affective triggers planted in its making (or with diminishing validity, in response to words that surround that work). While meaning delivers closure, information offers potential as possibilities for interpretation. An artwork that is open is a work that does not narrate – it is.[5] If it is contemporary art, the work must offer more than can be enclosed with words used to articulate a singular meaning, for if the work can be wholly expressed as words it is diminished. Those words would make it redundant.
Leaving a Space for the Beholder
The object, in providing opportunities for engagement through its visual form, becomes phenomenological – a thing to be felt. This feeling is aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience is our emotional response and, as a response, it is an event. That event provides information delivered for our conceptualisation, and we re-form the object, and thereby realise its potential through our response. Denise Higgins describes this as leaving open space for the beholder. Higgins says she wants to trigger associations and memories and she uses vibrations in light and sound “to get people to make poetic associations that resonate with their experience”[6].
The viewer’s willingness to participate has limits that are exceeded if the work makes things too clear, or too obscure.[7] But from the Symbolist movement at the beginning of the 1900s, art shifts toward ambiguity. This opens the work to multiple interpretations. The intention of its maker may guide the formal organization of a work through its making, but the finished work provides flexible opportunities for interpretation within the parameters of that formal organization. That formal organization delivers information, and is appropriate to a contemporary society, which feeds on information. As an aspect of its constant change, contemporary society inclines to the indeterminate.[8] Not being anchored in one interpretation allows movement and change. Learning something new will assist us in this movement. The quality that is value-adding with new information is originality and its ability to establish new relationships within the world. There is no advancement in the delivery of what is already known.
Visual Form as a Field of Possibilities
To create an open work, to enhance informational value, to be open to possibility, the conveyed meaning should be imprecise; but visual form remains, even though interpreted from within the liquid metamorphosis of ambiguity.
Drifting, a sculpture installation I created for this project, and it is an example of an open work. It is not anchored by representation and is open to the viewer’s interpretation of meaning. Context provides the frame that can turn disorder into articulation. Within context it is the viewer who conceives meaning from within the rich field of unforeseeable possibilities offered by the work. It is the viewer’s aesthetic response that validates the work through some alignment to the maker’s intention, and there is connectivity as the viewer senses the artist’s presence in the gestures of the work.
If the work is to achieve some alignment between the artist’s intention and the viewer’s interpretation the work must offer structure within a sea of undifferentiated choices. When the symbol is diminished, the work must possess some internal geometry. To provide this, visual form is utilised. Not the ideal form of classical convention, but “form as a field of possibilities”.[9] This form is created from material by the artist’s gesture intrinsic to the work and it is this combination of gesture and symbol that reveals artistic intention. However the artist’s intention does not close the work to other interpretations, which will be revealed through time. Therefore, despite the artist’s intention, the work remains in a state of possibility.
The Benefits of Openness
In the best of circumstances, connections are made in free associations and the work delivers aesthetic information.[10] This may even be constituted as wordless moments of sublime experience – Jessica Loughlin spoke of quietness, and “a sense of boundlessness”.[11] Openness provides these rich opportunities, and delivers what contemporary society most values – potential.
A glasswork’s effectiveness is evident in the aesthetic engagement it has with its viewer. If a work can generate aesthetic experience for a large number of viewers over time and in varying cultural contexts, that is if it is open, then it is effective as an artwork. If a work offers some potential, as possibilities for interpretation that can resonate with its viewers, that is, if a work is open to interpreted meaning, it is more likely to be widely relevant.
To engage the viewer the maker implants triggers in the visual form of the work through technique and his or her unique gesture as a maker, but these triggers are indeterminate. Visual form provides structure and the viewer conceives meaning within the context of the glasswork’s presentation. The viewer’s response to aesthetic information delivered by the work is the aesthetic experience.
[1] Martin Beaver, personal interview, 11/12/09, 5.
[2] Karen O’Clery, personal interview, 08/03/10, 2.
[3] Umberto Eco, The Open Work. Trans. Cancogni, Anna, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989, 93.
[4] Metcalf, “The Glass Conundrum” 20.
[5] Umberto Eco, The Open Work, 90.
[6] Denise Higgins, personal interview, 12/12/09, 4.
[7] Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978, 108.
[8] Umberto Eco, The Open Work, 44.
[9] Ibid., 103.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Jessica Loughlin, personal interview, 19/10/09, 2.
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I analyse engagement with the open work to explore the benefits in expanding beyond the confines of one intended meaning.
The Open Work is the name of a 1989 book on semiotics written by Umberto Eco. In this book Eco argues for polysemy and (with the book’s emphasis on literature) the importance of the reader and his or her response. The concept of an open work strains against the idea that a work has one intended meaning. Applied to the versatility and emotional power of glasswork within the context of Romanticism, the problem with one intended meaning is the shortfall that occurs when enclosure by meaning is matched against the totality that is a work’s potential.
Open to Interpretation
Martin Beaver says he finds that artists are open to different interpretations of their work and do not necessarily want to impose any one interpretation.[1] Different viewers can (and probably will) read the same work differently. Karen O’Clery says viewers’ reactions may be “more visual and more the feeling of the heart”[2] – that is, more affective – and that response may be to composition, form, luminosity, hardness, softness, or to how any or all of those things relate. All these responses are happening at the same time, and they themselves are open to more than one meaning.
A meaning of a work does not equate to its potential for information that is, potential for adding to what we already know.[3] Bruce Metcalf quotes Arthur Danto as saying “art is essentially embodied meaning”;[4] but if it is so, it is meaning that the viewer has attached to the work in response to affective triggers planted in its making (or with diminishing validity, in response to words that surround that work). While meaning delivers closure, information offers potential as possibilities for interpretation. An artwork that is open is a work that does not narrate – it is.[5] If it is contemporary art, the work must offer more than can be enclosed with words used to articulate a singular meaning, for if the work can be wholly expressed as words it is diminished. Those words would make it redundant.
Leaving a Space for the Beholder
The object, in providing opportunities for engagement through its visual form, becomes phenomenological – a thing to be felt. This feeling is aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience is our emotional response and, as a response, it is an event. That event provides information delivered for our conceptualisation, and we re-form the object, and thereby realise its potential through our response. Denise Higgins describes this as leaving open space for the beholder. Higgins says she wants to trigger associations and memories and she uses vibrations in light and sound “to get people to make poetic associations that resonate with their experience”[6].
The viewer’s willingness to participate has limits that are exceeded if the work makes things too clear, or too obscure.[7] But from the Symbolist movement at the beginning of the 1900s, art shifts toward ambiguity. This opens the work to multiple interpretations. The intention of its maker may guide the formal organization of a work through its making, but the finished work provides flexible opportunities for interpretation within the parameters of that formal organization. That formal organization delivers information, and is appropriate to a contemporary society, which feeds on information. As an aspect of its constant change, contemporary society inclines to the indeterminate.[8] Not being anchored in one interpretation allows movement and change. Learning something new will assist us in this movement. The quality that is value-adding with new information is originality and its ability to establish new relationships within the world. There is no advancement in the delivery of what is already known.
Visual Form as a Field of Possibilities
To create an open work, to enhance informational value, to be open to possibility, the conveyed meaning should be imprecise; but visual form remains, even though interpreted from within the liquid metamorphosis of ambiguity.
Drifting, a sculpture installation I created for this project, and it is an example of an open work. It is not anchored by representation and is open to the viewer’s interpretation of meaning. Context provides the frame that can turn disorder into articulation. Within context it is the viewer who conceives meaning from within the rich field of unforeseeable possibilities offered by the work. It is the viewer’s aesthetic response that validates the work through some alignment to the maker’s intention, and there is connectivity as the viewer senses the artist’s presence in the gestures of the work.
If the work is to achieve some alignment between the artist’s intention and the viewer’s interpretation the work must offer structure within a sea of undifferentiated choices. When the symbol is diminished, the work must possess some internal geometry. To provide this, visual form is utilised. Not the ideal form of classical convention, but “form as a field of possibilities”.[9] This form is created from material by the artist’s gesture intrinsic to the work and it is this combination of gesture and symbol that reveals artistic intention. However the artist’s intention does not close the work to other interpretations, which will be revealed through time. Therefore, despite the artist’s intention, the work remains in a state of possibility.
The Benefits of Openness
In the best of circumstances, connections are made in free associations and the work delivers aesthetic information.[10] This may even be constituted as wordless moments of sublime experience – Jessica Loughlin spoke of quietness, and “a sense of boundlessness”.[11] Openness provides these rich opportunities, and delivers what contemporary society most values – potential.
A glasswork’s effectiveness is evident in the aesthetic engagement it has with its viewer. If a work can generate aesthetic experience for a large number of viewers over time and in varying cultural contexts, that is if it is open, then it is effective as an artwork. If a work offers some potential, as possibilities for interpretation that can resonate with its viewers, that is, if a work is open to interpreted meaning, it is more likely to be widely relevant.
To engage the viewer the maker implants triggers in the visual form of the work through technique and his or her unique gesture as a maker, but these triggers are indeterminate. Visual form provides structure and the viewer conceives meaning within the context of the glasswork’s presentation. The viewer’s response to aesthetic information delivered by the work is the aesthetic experience.
[1] Martin Beaver, personal interview, 11/12/09, 5.
[2] Karen O’Clery, personal interview, 08/03/10, 2.
[3] Umberto Eco, The Open Work. Trans. Cancogni, Anna, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989, 93.
[4] Metcalf, “The Glass Conundrum” 20.
[5] Umberto Eco, The Open Work, 90.
[6] Denise Higgins, personal interview, 12/12/09, 4.
[7] Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978, 108.
[8] Umberto Eco, The Open Work, 44.
[9] Ibid., 103.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Jessica Loughlin, personal interview, 19/10/09, 2.
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