I was inspired this week by artist Louise Lawler and her piece Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry? Lawler purposefully placed two photographs of the same artwork directly across from each other with different titles, which completely changes how you view the same thing. The title of the original piece, Does Marilyn Monroe Make You Cry?, was meant to draw the viewer's focus primarily to the actual painting of the movie star. However, the title Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry? shifts the focus from the woman depicted in the piece to the artist that created that depiction. Each title provokes different interpretations and questions that concern the same piece.
Lawler's work re-contextualizes images and provokes the viewer to consider how art is impacted by who owns it and how it is displayed. It explores how the reception of art is shifted and framed by each person who looks at it. I thought this was a good example of the way in which I want to use language to make my viewers consider the extent to which language influences what they think. The extent to which the titles of Lawler's works implicate different meanings provides a very useful of example of how I hope to showcase the influence of language on our engagement with the world.
Does Marilyn Monroe Make You Cry?
Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry?
This week I attempted to change my approach from having the drip paintings as part of a diptych type setup to creating pieces for my thesis that draw upon other functional artworks I have produced. I made a square composed of small canvases that are meant to formally denote the different perceptions surrounding one object or idea. After completing it, I think this was the most successful piece of this past week because it allows me to play with both color and minimalist aesthetics that I personally enjoy, all while combining these into one work.
However, in this piece I definitely feel like I moved away from a discussion of different languages and instead focused only on English. I wanted to experiment with having words that imply the object represented instead of stating the word itself, which I knew could be easily done using only one language. I think it would be interesting to implement the technique utilized by artist Louise Lawler and switch out the middle piece with some other text to change the meaning of the entire work. I think the challenge for me right now is to figure out how I can make people understand the connotations that may result in languages that they don't understand. Perhaps I can simply state that in my artist's statement or it can be implied in the title.
I'm really interested to see what might happen if you use a variety of languages within text components that are either visually part of the work / arrangement, or within the titles themselves (akin to Lawler). What if, for instance, "Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry" was written in Spanish, or in a language that uses symbols/characters that are less immediately decipherable to an English speaker/reader (or, if the terms you've written on the middle image were varied in this way). I think there is an interesting space to be examined around partial perception/comprehension (for instance, I know enough Spanish to be able to fairly closely interpret a decent amount of - certain forms of - the language as written, and have minimal Italian and French to draw on when I encounter that language as written, but the Russian alphabet is largely incomprehensible to me, as would be Japanese, for instance). And then, how does this correspond to these languages as spoken? There is another / different layer of comprehension/perception involved with hearing rather than reading (time/temporality is at play here). I'm intrigued by what can potentially happen when you break down an image/term in a gridded manner that potentially activates this variety of types of engagement with language. More on this during our next chat...
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