(photo of Foley's earlier work "Winged Harvest" from fineartforum.org)I've wanted to talk about intention in sculpture for a while now, and didn't quite know how to anchor it. But I'm a child of the sixties and a fan of the "New Criticism" which, effectively, states that an artwork is what it is. Seems clear. It doesn't matter what the artist's intent was, what was happening in her life at the time she made it or what was happening in the world around her. The piece stands on its own and each viewer interprets it as s/he sees fit.
Now, I think that artists' intentions and biographies are mighty interesting and they can open new ideas to those of us who observe the work. But that's all they are. Interesting. Intent and interpretation is for proposal committees and art history critics. Those who make a living out of words. The work is the work.
And today's news tells a grand tale of just that.
Seems there's an Aboriginal sculptor by the name of Fiona Foley in Australia who was commissioned to make art works for the new Brisbane Magistrates Court. Her accepted proposal indicated that the pieces she made were her elegy to the environments that had been destroyed by fire and floods in Queensland. She installed bronze lotus lilies and glass made from ash among other things, stating that they represented the ecosystems that were destroyed.
But today she changed her tune. She says that the pieces were really encoded messages remembering the aboriginal victims of European domination. They really indicated the ways in which the bodies of the victims were disposed of- through fire and drowning. The plaques with the names of 94 places around Australia were tributes to the sites of massacres. She said she didn't originally state this in her proposal because she was afraid it would be turned down if Queensland really knew what the works represented. So for months they've been installed without fuss and fury and people have observed them or not without comment. Now that they've been accepted as works of art, she says, it's time to fess up. And the government says fine.
Does her revelation change the work? No.
Does it change the interpretation of her work? Maybe. If you've read her statements about it.
But the work is the work and nothing can change that.
A piece of sculpture, like anything else, changes with different lighting, be that lighting photons or information. Knowledge changes my world view. One of the things I love about creating art objects is that potential of change that lies within each piece. One may argue that the piece always contained the artists intentions and so, hasn't changed a bit. But I say, through this revelation of the sculptures' impetus, the artist continued to work on it long after the physical objects were in place. The objects only being a container for the art. Time is a big factor here too. It's like meeting a pleasent young man then months later finding out he's been in prision for murder. Now you see him differently. He IS a different person.
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