Monday, February 26, 2007
Robocop, Pacemakers, and a Urinal
In discussion of Lexia to Perplexia, the idea that a well-known artist once submitted a urinal to an art museum was brought up. If an art museum showcased the urinal I’m sure there gathered a group of spectators wondering about the meaning and trying to decipher the symbolism of the urinal. Perhaps the artist is referring to the misplacement of something in society, maybe the urinal in a traditionally classy place out in the open depicts society in outrage about taboo sexual acts. (Pretty good, huh?) Or maybe the artist was drunk and thought it the ultimate joke! As the museum-goers tilt their heads and squeeze their chins pensively, the artist is slamming a bottle of jack and laughing his ass off! Now I don’t know if any of this is true, but I think reading meaning into a urinal is stupid. My friend attends an art school and the last time I visited him, he had a new painting in his living room: it was a kitchen scene with a man looking straight at the audience. What could it mean? The way the cabinets were washed in color instead of really painted perfectly, perhaps this carries a message. Maybe we should just all calm down about playing detective, take off the Sherlock Holmes get up, and put down the Nancy Drew book. I say the same for Lexia to Perplexia. Someone asked “how do we know this wasn’t created by a schizophrenic with computer access?” I think this is a VERY valid point. Sure it’s weird; but that doesn’t give it supreme meaning. Fortune cookies are weird: they are also mass produced in some warehouse in Ohio. I once dated a guy who thought being “artistic” meant being difficult to understand. First, I’d like to say this strategy gets you no where with the ladies. But, once I asked him what this completely messed up poem he had written was about and what it meant to him. He told me that HE didn’t even know, and I was the first person who ever asked him that. Everyone else apparently felt too much in shadow of his “brilliance” and “creativity” to ask. Sure Lexia to Perplexia has an “edu” site, but maybe the assignment was to make the most cracked out and complex website. If you still feel the need to dig for meaning, let me ask you this, “isn’t trying to pinpoint the one, perfect, exact meaning to something meant to be artistically confusing and intended to give different meanings to each view destroying the author’s true meaning?” (How’s that for trippy, um I mean, meaningful?)
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6 comments:
I like and agree with your thoughts on complexity and weirdness. First off, the urinal in the museum is hilarious. I was thinking about your mention of the artist getting drunk and putting it in there as a joke. I thought it would be equally funny if for some reason, a group of drunken college students went to the museum and mistook the artwork for an actual urinal. Surely, hilarity would ensue. I always looked at those abstract paintings that looked like a 6 year old made them. I try to think of their meaning. Is there one. Is this another example of a drunken artists making sweet bank off of a few random brush strokes?
I agree with you, Miranda. I think this Pollock-style art--art that really anyone could do--is important; it needs to be there, just so we don't start limiting the definition of art too strictly. However, calling the artist who made it a genius, or looking for a universal meaning in the work, seems completely useless.
I don't know how I feel about Pollock's art to be honest, but something interesting to think about, and this is a paraphrasing from a pop art book:
A surveyor of art recently took Pollock's paintings and magnified the edges tenfold. Once enlarged, he claimed that he was able to see that Pollock's paint strokes clearly changed direction at the edges of the canvas, as if Pollock had in fact been mindful of the canvas and the edges, though Pollock claimed to just work on inspiration and not worry about the canvas.
....Weird to think that Pollock's crazy art style was more forced than he would admit.
I think you're right to guard against assering one definitive meaning for Lexia (or a Jackson Pollock painting or Duchamp's urinal installation, for that matter). As our experience with Lexia in particular suggests, these works seem to actively resist fixed and stable meanings, to in effect elude the imperative to generate a neat and tidy understanding. And (to be a bit playful), that resistance to meaning seems to be what some of these works mean.
That said, once meaning is free and open, we (as readers, viewers, web users, etc) have opportunities to construct meaning on our own. In this sense, Lexia performs an interesting inversion--giving the reader/user/viewer the authority to decode the text rather defaulting to the authority of a specially trained critic (this is certainly true for Pollock and Duchamp).
Lastly, I would just add that weirdness or indecipherability is often situational. In other words, what seems totally non-sensical in our class may make (a little) more sense to a reader trained in contemporary philosophy and/or HTML coding. Duchamp, once again, is instructive here. In a men's room, the urinal makes complete sense (no question about its meaning). Once it's placed in a museum, however, meaning seems less stable. We now have to make sense of the urinal, to question its meaning. The only thing that's changed, in this case, is the situation. Same goes for other arts (and virtually all communication), I think.
PS--Your comment thread is set up to only allow registered blogger users. You'll need to change this setting so others in the class who aren't using blogger can comment. (You can change this by logging in to your dashboard, clicking "settings" and then "comments").
Ok---sorry about that all non-blogger users! It should be fixed now and allow all comments!
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