(embiggenable) • iPhone
(embiggenable) • iPhone
(embiggenable) • iPhone
IT IS WHAT IT IS AND THAT IS ALL THAT IT IS.
In her essay, Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag wrote:
"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art.... more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
Sontag suggests that, in the field of art criticism, content, aka: meaning, has taken precedence over form. Roughly translated, my understanding of that assertion is that finding the meaning(s) in a work of art is more important than what the work looks like. And, according to Sontag, that quest for finding meaning, re: the interpretation of work of art, "...is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings'." Hence her statement (with which I emphatically agree):
"...interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.....[I]n place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art....to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more."
All of the above written, you might wonder what my point is....well, it's really quite simple. After years of struggling with the "meaning" to be found in my pictures-even to the point of, is there any meaning in my pictures?-I have arrived at a point where I quite emphatically believe that the visual arts, especially the medium of Photography and its apparatus, are meant to be viewed / experienced for their visual quality / characteristics / merits and the feelings-not the thoughts-that they incite. That is to write, the sensory / sensuous pleasure they bring to the act of seeing, by means of the elevation of form over content, aka: meaning.
To that point, consider this...I do not know the context in which Oscar Wilde offered up the following, an opinion which I find particularly pertinent, not only to Sontag's point, but to the manner in which I practice my picture making:
"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."