A shift: Redefining subject-matter

Doing some readings for Comp class, and considering what was discussed in my first Visual Language class, I found some ideas I liked and want to hang onto.

First, I agree with what Matisse said about "when a painting is finished... the artist himself must have time for understanding it." I've always felt this way, that there is a lot the artist can learn from a completed work. Not all of its meaning is necessarily intentional, and new meaning will continuously be created depending on the artist's changing views from moment to moment, just as for any other viewer. The meaning of the art is such because of the viewer's participation in viewing, and that contribution is inextricable from the meaningfulness of a piece. As Dewey says, a work of art "is recreated every time it is experienced." I agree with him that whatever one can get out of a piece of art, within the context of their own experience, is the meaning of a work of art.

In applying this idea to my project, I also consider Dewey's statement that any work is "universal because it can continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience... [enabling] them to have more intense and fully rounded out personal experiences of their own." This is not far from Tolstoy's quote defining art as external signs that hand “on to others feelings [one] has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.” Works of art are valuable in that they consistently inspire individual reactions in others.

My goal in this project is to achieve that. I want to create pieces that can effect emotional reactions in its witnesses through their own layering on of meaning around what I present. My difficulty last semester was in my approach to this creation of meaning between me and others.

"The artist himself can hardly begin with a subject alone. If he did, his work would almost surely suffer from artificiality." This was me. In this explanation, subject is the external source of inspiration, for me, Emotions. On the other hand, subject-matter is what I and my viewers bring to that subject, our experiences, our connections and layers of what it means. I needed to realize that I could not create a work that would portray and "infect" others with emotions, without tapping into the subject-matter of my own emotional experiences with which I would be giving meaning to my work as it formed. To give it form beyond the shallow work I attempted last semester, I needed to get away from attempting to work around the abstract impersonal idea of universal Emotions, something untouchable, and allow myself to work with what I do know- my own experiences that lead to the emotions I thought to share. ...It might seem obvious, but at the time I really thought that was what I was supposed to do to follow through on my conception of the project. I blamed my choreographic skills, when I had actually trying to be in touch with something that was essentially untouchable from the position I had set myself up in.

As Matisse said "Madam, that is not a woman; that is a picture [of a woman]" so I will stop pursuing disembodied Emotions, and begin to live and dance with my own subject-matter that I have to bring, so that others have something to relate to and share in as well.

Resource: Dewey, J. (1958). Art as Experience. Capricorn Books.
ch VI, pp. 106-115