Memory

In a recent meeting with some MFA students we discussed memory and its function in creating art…. Making connections with personal histories. 

In the 7/6 issue of the Wall Street Journal was a story about the Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang. The article said, “Memory is the central theme of Mr. Zhang’s art – what we choose to remember, forget, or distort.” Zhang went on to state “Art helped me transcend a miserable situation.”  Zhang studied western art in one of China’s Art Colleges. The WSJ piece went on:

            In 1989, Mr. Zhang painted a red woman sitting on the banks of the Lethe, the mythical Greek sea of forgetting. Several months later he watched the student protests in Tiananmen Square.  By that point, he decided to abandon the western motifs he had been exploring and go hunting for some way to capture China’s collective identity.

            He found it in an empty box of cookies. While visiting his parents in 1992 after his first trip to Europe, he noticed his mother dumping a batch of Black-and-white family photographs into a leftover bakery box. As he sifted through the images, he realized he had never seen himself as a baby or his parents as their younger, livelier selves. He had just become a father himself, and he felt more closely to the unfamiliar faces in the photos. The juxtaposition proved to be his epiphany: China after the Cultural Revolution, was one big dysfunctional family, too.

It is part of that personal connection that I was talking about in looking for memorable events (or signposts) in your life.  It is the personal connection that will in the end make your work stronger. We often look outside ourselves for direction, however, it is when we make the journey home we make big discoveries…             

Interpretation

Recently I asked a group of students pursuing their MFA degree to read the essay "Against Interpretation" by the late Susan Sontag.

Wikipedia introduces this work with the following notes:

Against Interpretation and Other Essays is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag published in 1966. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "On Style," "Notes on 'Camp'," and the titular essay "Against Interpretation." In the last, Sontag argues that in the new critical approach to aesthetics the spiritual importance of art is being replaced by the emphasis on the intellect. Rather than recognizing great creative works as possible sources of energy, she argues, contemporary critics were all too often taking art's transcendental power for granted, and focusing instead on their own intellectually constructed abstractions like "form" and "content." In effect, she wrote, interpretation had become "the intellect's revenge upon art." The essay famously finishes with the words, "in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art".

There were various responses from the group.  I added the following:


I was a part of a group of  a dozen faculty members that worked on developing a new Critical Thinking course for the university. We met over the summer trying to create a course that looked at the ways that various disciplines approach critical thinking and ideas. When it was my turn, I spoke about the viewpoints of the artist and artistic intent in the topic that we were approaching that day. After speaking, a colleague from the English Department said, "He could care less about artists and their intent, all that matters is the interpretation of the viewer."  I found the comment a little shocking, especially from a member of the English Department. He then went on to explain that we will never know what an artist truly intended or was thinking, all the essays by art historians are scholarly guesses at best. He stated that he has read at least thirty-one different interpretations of Tom Sawyer that range from musings on boyish pranks to the novel being a gay fairy tale. In his eyes, it was not important what the artist intended but the response generated by the audience. The artist does not necessarily need to share his or her motivation, what is important is that the work resonates with the audience causing them to be moved. This caused me to think very differently about interpretation.... My thoughts are my own and my own motivation.  Sometimes I will give the viewer an inkling into my inner-thoughts and sometimes will guard my thoughts. The most important thing is not whether or not they feel the same things that I do, but that they are moved. This is a much more liberating method of working. Keep true to your own motivation!  Personal work is always much more powerful!