3.7 A Theory of Aesthetic Response
I analyse the viewer’s role in the act of engagement. By exploring the aesthetic response and its implication for the meaning we may derive from a glasswork, I validate the relevance of Romanticism as the world filtered through our perception.
Wolfgang Iser proposes that “… the significance of the work does not lie in the meaning sealed within the text, but in the fact that that meaning brings out what had previously been sealed within us”.[1] In The Act of Reading Iser references text and the reader. In this thesis I overlay the term text with the terms made object - object or work, the term reader with the term viewer, however it is not my intention to imply that the viewing of the made object equates to the reading of a text, but rather that Iser’s theory is relevant and applicable.
The viewer is an essential element in engagement with the glasswork, and the term viewer implies an action. The word viewer is more dynamic than its synonym audience. It is the viewer who consummates the creative act by interpreting the glasswork.
The Viewer as a Creator of Form
I now close on the event that is our engagement with the work. The triangle is complete: artist – glasswork – viewer. Now the focus moves from concepts of address to issues of reception in a relationship bound by response. As Jean-Luc Godard stated, “it takes two to make an image”, and as Merleau-Ponty says: “The accomplished work is thus not the work, which exists in itself like a thing, but the work which reaches its viewer and invites him to take up the gesture which created it”[2].
Making Meaning
The reactions the artist makes tangible in the glasswork are aesthetic triggers that entangle the viewer.[3] The viewer does not just receive the made object, he or she responds to it by seeing it, feeling it and assessing it. Viewers take from a work (or bring to it) that which appeals to them. The glass object presents, and within this presentation the viewer is creating something new in a dialectic relationship with that object. Here the word presents, is used to mean formally making available and presentation is the result when integrated into context. Multiple interpretations are made possible by ‘the plasticity of meaning’.[4] Meaning cannot be absolute because we search for meaning from our own point within a context. This highlights the flaw in seeking the artist’s hidden meaning in the made object. The dialectic between viewers and work resists being closed off to further meaning by any single interpretation conceived by the maker or any one viewer.[5]
Objection to a work having single meaning is most obvious in formal abstraction. Artist Liz Coats described the transparency of her work, saying nothing is concealed, but at the same time it is not telling you that this is a shape representative of something; rather you read a logical progression in depth that comes through colour. Here the relationship is not with an object to be defined, but with an effect to be experienced.[6] In assessing the validity of a work Ross Gibson told me he would look for what it causes in him as well as what he suspects is caused in others who encounter it. He said this would be a shift in his consciousness, and enhancement or intensification of his understanding of something and “... that can and should happen all through your sensorium – your nervous system, in your aesthetic sense and in your intellection and cerebration ... you should feel some shift. That is why it is called art. The etymology is that it is at a join, a turn” [7] As romanticism it points to art being experiential and affective. Derived meaning will be felt rather than calculated.
A Fallacy
That idea that there can be one true meaning to a work is a fallacy.[8] There is no one true meaning that is imbedded in an object’s entity, because meaning is relational. The form mutates in interpretation as it presents us with the possibility of a range of meanings. That possibility relies on the visual form for its delivery as any specific meaning and its delivery is a dynamic happening. Meaning is something that evolves in the process of viewing, and that varies from viewer to viewer. It is as if a photograph of the work were taken. There is selection determined by context. A concept of the glasswork takes shape as the glasswork’s attributes are narrowed into an interpretation that is in reality a new work.
An Event Beyond the Object
What the object formally makes available – what it presents, and how this is re-formed within the context as the object’s presentation – is dependent on the object, but at the same time exists outside the object. Meaning delivered through the viewer’s interpretation also occurs beyond the object, which has been interpreted as something beyond itself. It has produced the form that is its presentation and that form is slave to context.
Presentation takes the object beyond itself, but there still needs to be an event. That event is an interpretation and it is an event because something is happening. The presentation is perceived, and conception balances discrepancies that exist between viewer and object. These discrepancies are adjusted through continual feedback to become a series of merging viewpoints; thus ambiguity in the object intensifies and extends feedback. Within context, object creates the form of its presentation, and through the viewer’s interpretation, presentation becomes process and all is in a dynamic relationship.
It is the viewer who realises the aesthetic object from the presentation through the event of that viewer’s interpretation. It is the viewer who derives aesthetic pleasure from that interpretation in their response. Naturally interpretations and responses will vary, as they are dependant on the viewers’ cultural codes – cultural codes compounded within the context of the viewing,[9] and not necessarily within the object itself.
Revisiting the Event that is the Interpretation of Meaning
The presentation of the work is a fluid thing. Embedded in context, it sits between glass object and the viewer, awaiting the act of interpretation, which may lead to aesthetic experience. But central to the object’s success in providing such an aesthetic experience is its adaptability to the desire of the viewer, and a key element to this adaptability is its ambiguity. This ambiguity is not pre-empted by artistic lucidity, but if the viewer’s desire is to be projected into a presentation then the presentation must allow room for that projection. The work should not signpost the maker’s intent. This would limit any dialogue to an acknowledgement that that intent was understood. Since the conceptual space within a work is the playground provided for the viewer’s imagination, what is left out of a work is as important as what is placed into it. The formal elements of the work are that playground’s parameters, and if the construction of those formal elements leaves gaps, then the viewer’s desire can suppose the filling of those gaps from the implications of those elements. This process is illustrated when Margot Osborne writes in her catalogue introduction to Mind and Matter: “… formal austerity is a means of shifting the viewer’s focus from passive looking to a more reflective encounter with the work … to a more prolonged, intense and meditative way of looking …” [10]
And Osborne adds luminescence to this event with its “inherent proclivity towards an immaterial, numinous dimension”.[11] The viewer is given the right to determine signification in “an intangible poetic resonance”.[12] As Iser writes, “It is the implications and not the statements that give shape and weight to meaning”.[13]
Where is Meaning?
If the work provides the potential of its presentation, and if aesthetic experience is the felt response, where is meaning? Meaning is the conceptualisation of the response. Intellect stands back from what is felt, and from that distance it observes and defines. Intellect articulates meaning from the experience of aesthetic engagement. It articulates meaning from the experience that the presentation stimulates and that we undergo in our encounter with the work.
[1] Iser, The Act of Reading, 157.
[2] Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 88.
[3] Iser, The Act of Reading, ix.
[4] Daston, Things That Talk, 16.
[5] Iser, The Act of Reading, 5.
[6] Ibid., 10.
[7] Ross Gibson, personal interview, 01/12/09, 3.
[8] Iser, The Act or Reading, 21.
[9] Ibid., 93.
[10] Osborne, Mind and Matter, 2.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading, 168.
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I analyse the viewer’s role in the act of engagement. By exploring the aesthetic response and its implication for the meaning we may derive from a glasswork, I validate the relevance of Romanticism as the world filtered through our perception.
Wolfgang Iser proposes that “… the significance of the work does not lie in the meaning sealed within the text, but in the fact that that meaning brings out what had previously been sealed within us”.[1] In The Act of Reading Iser references text and the reader. In this thesis I overlay the term text with the terms made object - object or work, the term reader with the term viewer, however it is not my intention to imply that the viewing of the made object equates to the reading of a text, but rather that Iser’s theory is relevant and applicable.
The viewer is an essential element in engagement with the glasswork, and the term viewer implies an action. The word viewer is more dynamic than its synonym audience. It is the viewer who consummates the creative act by interpreting the glasswork.
The Viewer as a Creator of Form
I now close on the event that is our engagement with the work. The triangle is complete: artist – glasswork – viewer. Now the focus moves from concepts of address to issues of reception in a relationship bound by response. As Jean-Luc Godard stated, “it takes two to make an image”, and as Merleau-Ponty says: “The accomplished work is thus not the work, which exists in itself like a thing, but the work which reaches its viewer and invites him to take up the gesture which created it”[2].
Making Meaning
The reactions the artist makes tangible in the glasswork are aesthetic triggers that entangle the viewer.[3] The viewer does not just receive the made object, he or she responds to it by seeing it, feeling it and assessing it. Viewers take from a work (or bring to it) that which appeals to them. The glass object presents, and within this presentation the viewer is creating something new in a dialectic relationship with that object. Here the word presents, is used to mean formally making available and presentation is the result when integrated into context. Multiple interpretations are made possible by ‘the plasticity of meaning’.[4] Meaning cannot be absolute because we search for meaning from our own point within a context. This highlights the flaw in seeking the artist’s hidden meaning in the made object. The dialectic between viewers and work resists being closed off to further meaning by any single interpretation conceived by the maker or any one viewer.[5]
Objection to a work having single meaning is most obvious in formal abstraction. Artist Liz Coats described the transparency of her work, saying nothing is concealed, but at the same time it is not telling you that this is a shape representative of something; rather you read a logical progression in depth that comes through colour. Here the relationship is not with an object to be defined, but with an effect to be experienced.[6] In assessing the validity of a work Ross Gibson told me he would look for what it causes in him as well as what he suspects is caused in others who encounter it. He said this would be a shift in his consciousness, and enhancement or intensification of his understanding of something and “... that can and should happen all through your sensorium – your nervous system, in your aesthetic sense and in your intellection and cerebration ... you should feel some shift. That is why it is called art. The etymology is that it is at a join, a turn” [7] As romanticism it points to art being experiential and affective. Derived meaning will be felt rather than calculated.
A Fallacy
That idea that there can be one true meaning to a work is a fallacy.[8] There is no one true meaning that is imbedded in an object’s entity, because meaning is relational. The form mutates in interpretation as it presents us with the possibility of a range of meanings. That possibility relies on the visual form for its delivery as any specific meaning and its delivery is a dynamic happening. Meaning is something that evolves in the process of viewing, and that varies from viewer to viewer. It is as if a photograph of the work were taken. There is selection determined by context. A concept of the glasswork takes shape as the glasswork’s attributes are narrowed into an interpretation that is in reality a new work.
An Event Beyond the Object
What the object formally makes available – what it presents, and how this is re-formed within the context as the object’s presentation – is dependent on the object, but at the same time exists outside the object. Meaning delivered through the viewer’s interpretation also occurs beyond the object, which has been interpreted as something beyond itself. It has produced the form that is its presentation and that form is slave to context.
Presentation takes the object beyond itself, but there still needs to be an event. That event is an interpretation and it is an event because something is happening. The presentation is perceived, and conception balances discrepancies that exist between viewer and object. These discrepancies are adjusted through continual feedback to become a series of merging viewpoints; thus ambiguity in the object intensifies and extends feedback. Within context, object creates the form of its presentation, and through the viewer’s interpretation, presentation becomes process and all is in a dynamic relationship.
It is the viewer who realises the aesthetic object from the presentation through the event of that viewer’s interpretation. It is the viewer who derives aesthetic pleasure from that interpretation in their response. Naturally interpretations and responses will vary, as they are dependant on the viewers’ cultural codes – cultural codes compounded within the context of the viewing,[9] and not necessarily within the object itself.
Revisiting the Event that is the Interpretation of Meaning
The presentation of the work is a fluid thing. Embedded in context, it sits between glass object and the viewer, awaiting the act of interpretation, which may lead to aesthetic experience. But central to the object’s success in providing such an aesthetic experience is its adaptability to the desire of the viewer, and a key element to this adaptability is its ambiguity. This ambiguity is not pre-empted by artistic lucidity, but if the viewer’s desire is to be projected into a presentation then the presentation must allow room for that projection. The work should not signpost the maker’s intent. This would limit any dialogue to an acknowledgement that that intent was understood. Since the conceptual space within a work is the playground provided for the viewer’s imagination, what is left out of a work is as important as what is placed into it. The formal elements of the work are that playground’s parameters, and if the construction of those formal elements leaves gaps, then the viewer’s desire can suppose the filling of those gaps from the implications of those elements. This process is illustrated when Margot Osborne writes in her catalogue introduction to Mind and Matter: “… formal austerity is a means of shifting the viewer’s focus from passive looking to a more reflective encounter with the work … to a more prolonged, intense and meditative way of looking …” [10]
And Osborne adds luminescence to this event with its “inherent proclivity towards an immaterial, numinous dimension”.[11] The viewer is given the right to determine signification in “an intangible poetic resonance”.[12] As Iser writes, “It is the implications and not the statements that give shape and weight to meaning”.[13]
Where is Meaning?
If the work provides the potential of its presentation, and if aesthetic experience is the felt response, where is meaning? Meaning is the conceptualisation of the response. Intellect stands back from what is felt, and from that distance it observes and defines. Intellect articulates meaning from the experience of aesthetic engagement. It articulates meaning from the experience that the presentation stimulates and that we undergo in our encounter with the work.
[1] Iser, The Act of Reading, 157.
[2] Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 88.
[3] Iser, The Act of Reading, ix.
[4] Daston, Things That Talk, 16.
[5] Iser, The Act of Reading, 5.
[6] Ibid., 10.
[7] Ross Gibson, personal interview, 01/12/09, 3.
[8] Iser, The Act or Reading, 21.
[9] Ibid., 93.
[10] Osborne, Mind and Matter, 2.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading, 168.
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