Eden Richman Week 9 - Art is Subjective

    Does every art piece have one specific meaning? I always thought the answer to that was yes. An artist makes a piece with a specific goal and message to the viewer, and that is the meaning of the work. Ever since I started my A.P. 3D art portfolio, I have started to shift my views on the meaning of art.

    I have an agenda while making my pieces. I make shapes organic and put them next to sharp geometric shapes to create contrast and invoke slight feelings of unease. I try to make an abstract shape suggest a certain thing in the world. I try to control where the eye moves through the way I shape the clay and use the glaze colors. What I have realized is that no matter how hard I try to force a person to see my art a certain way, someone will always have a different idea about it - and that doesn't make them wrong. 

    I am in the ceramics room a lot, and sometimes the lower school has classes during my free periods, and they will come in and walk by me while I am working on something. I was once working on a piece that was supposed to look like a sea anemone, and a little boy came up and went "WOW! is that an octopus!?" I told him that I wasn't trying to make it an octopus, but he was already walking away. Another time I was working on an abstract piece, and another little kid asked me if I was making a ghost from the ghostbusters movie. I said that it is whatever he wanted it to be. He went and told his friends that I was making a ghost; They were very impressed. I recently showed my sister a stalactite cave piece I finished with a metallic glaze on the top and bottom. She said it looked like a hydraulic press being pushed apart by the cave formations. I really liked that interpretation, and it also went along with the theme I was trying to convey. 

    An artist only has so much control over their work. Art becomes complete when people finally view it, and see whatever they want in it, even if it wasn't the intended meaning. I see this sometimes when I read literature too. In Frankenstein, I will see something and then tell myself that Shelly didn't mean to convey a certain message. I tell myself that I'm seeing something that was never meant to be seen. Hearing different interpretations of my artwork has allowed me to see things in other works without telling myself that the artist didn't mean what I am seeing. Do you ever find yourself holding back interpretations because you don't want to be "wrong?"