"Interesting. The Meaning?"
Updated: Mar 4
(Note: This post, like all my work, was created without the use of AI)
A friend relatively unfamiliar with my work wrote this to me recently regarding a piece she saw. A fair question that deserves a thoughtful response, but one that I am seldom asked. Discussions center around my process, its evolution and the reasoning behind it; and aesthetics. Viewers share meanings they find in the work. But if they are curious about any intended meaning, they seldom ask.
Some choices I make with the papers I collect are simply about color, but though colors certainly connote meaning, I doubt my friend is asking as one might the meaning of a Rothko color field painting. More likely, the question relates to the photographic and graphic images, words, letters, and fragments thereof that feature in my work.
Some of these elements have purely personal associations for me: little talismans or souvenirs of sorts. Some carry meaning because they also happen to be symbols: a star, a crown, a crow; but I would caution the viewer with the statement, falsely attributed to Freud, that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Other elements bring specific cultural associations: a photo of a sculpture I placed in a recent piece is, I discovered, of Pythagoras from Chartres cathedral, offering a layer of possible, though unintended, meaning to the knowing viewer just by happenstance.
By allowing elements from the outside world into my work, I run risks of meanings or associations the artist doesn’t control. A graphic from a poster fragment with the number 883 in a lozenge shape turned out to be, I had to be told, the name and logo of an Italian rock group popular in the 80s. Not wanting to invite this specific an association, I changed the “3” to an “8.” My worst case scenario to date was an intriguing, geometric, cross-like image I found. I researched it and discovered it has, God forbid, associations with white nationalism. That shit went right into the trash.
I work intuitively, improvising with these fragments. However purely aesthetic or unconscious my reasons for their inclusion, as multiple images or symbols accumulate in a piece, a viewer might look for meaning to deduce from the interplay between them. I take this into consideration and try to avoid steering the viewer toward particular or specific narratives; anything too “on the nose.” With text, I often rearrange or invert letters until even the original alphabet is no longer recognizable, what to speak of the words. When I do leave text intact, I want to make sure it doesn’t hijack the rest of the piece, exerting too much authority over other elements.
Meaning can have the freedom to arise–to arrive–the way it does from dreams; not weighed down by the narrow demands of our conscious mind.
We look for–and discover–meaning in dreams. The many books on dream interpretation confirm an abiding interest in the subject. Yet we don’t expect them to “make sense.” Wouldn’t dream of it. (Sorry). They’re a confounding mix of the quotidian with wild narratives, characters, moods, places, and dialog that can’t easily be accounted for. Sometimes they reflect familiar experiences, anxieties or desires from our waking hours, but often what resonates deeply remains a mystery, a gift from our unconscious.
By relying on found materials, and by working intuitively, playfully, and, as much as possible, decisively, not asking too many questions of myself as I go along, I reach for that freedom to “just let the mystery be,” in the words of songwriter Iris Dement. I want to make work that invites the viewer to approach it from that perspective; to enter into it as in a dream, go along for the ride, not working to find meaning, and take from it what we take from a dream.
But unlike dreams, two- and three-dimensional artwork can be examined at leisure, again and again. My hope is that my work “makes sense” the way dreams do while we’re dreaming, and that at its best, it can be both rich and enigmatic enough to continue offering possibilities for meaning without ever coming to a conclusion.
I hesitate to name artists whose work best exemplifies this approach to meaning. Perhaps the box constructions of Joseph Cornell, whose imaginative worlds are so rich with connections and possibilities? I do not set out to create dream-like moods or scenarios in my work (Giorgio DiChirico, Odilon Redon come to mind) or shock and amuse viewers through Surrealist incongruity or absurdity (Rene Magritte, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel).
It is easiest for me to find examples from other arts. In my youth, the unhinged poetry of Arthur Rimbaud was a big influence (and in my 20s I once played the role of Rimbaud in a dance theater piece at Dance Theater Workshop in NYC, but that’s another story). Choreographer Merce Cunningham’s work always made sense to me without telling stories, at least ones I could explain; and I absolutely revere the work of the late theater director Richard Foreman, who meticulously created permeable, liminal, hilarious and disturbing worlds in pieces like the perfectly titled WAKE UP, MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD! I was fortunate to see a posthumous production of his opera What To Wear at BAM this season, and am inspired all over again. Dream on!
Still from What To Wear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. photo © Stephanie Berger
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