This is one of a series of 30 paintings that I did in the spring of 2001. The paintings were presented in a group exhibition here in Los Angeles on September 15th, just 4 days after the September 11th attacks (the show had been planned months in advance).
Where does the meaning come from in a work of art? Is it contained in the artwork itself, or does it come from somewhere else? Is it permanent, or can it change? How much control does the artist have over what is communicated by their work?
Where does the meaning come from in a work of art? There is no meaning in the work, by itself.
Is it contained in the artwork itself, or does it come from somewhere else? Any meaning is made up by the consumer.
Is it permanent, or can it change? It could be different for every single person and it can change for each person with time, experience, knowledge or some other factor.
How much control does the artist have over what is communicated by their work? Very very little. A picture (say) cannot communicate even very big ideas (‘war is bad’) reliably.
I think I’ll keep quiet now.
I agree with Colin it’s not meaningful to say there’s meaning in the work itself. If one says so I imagine it’s usually a shorthand for the meaning constructed by the viewer, which depends not only on the artwork, but also culture, viewing context, possible knowledge about the artist (artist statement!), and personal narrative gaps (the wonderful term Colin introduced us to). The influence of the artist via the artwork (and title/statement if existing) may easily be overwhelmed by the other influences, especially the last. But although the artist may not always be aware even of his/her own intentions, it would be absurd to say they don’t have a major influence on the meaning for any particular viewer. Of course, the artist may also deliberately court ambiguity.
I think that the meaning of an artwork ultimately comes from people conversing about it. While history and culture provide a necessary background, an interesting work of art can generate new meanings. The conversation can be ongoing, although the participants could also decide to stop. Therefore, the meaning can change. The artist is part of the discussion, important but not all powerful.
The answer is, “It depends.”
Coming from (originally) the music side of things I can say that many works of (musical) art have no intrinsic extra-musical meaning at all. They are what they are.
I also do photography and in most cases I cannot tell you what my photos mean. There are a few exceptions – either I knew when I shot them, I discovered a hidden meaning later, or someone pointed one out to me – but for the most part they are what they are.
However, I’m quite content with the idea that others may find some meaning of their own. I certainly do so when I look/listen at the work of others.
In fact, in some ways the artist is the person least able to discern the full meaning that might be found in a creative work. He/she knows it in a way that no one else ever will, having actually constructed it – and it is very difficult to understand your own work apart from that way of knowing it.
There is a typo in Dan’s link. Go here for Dan’s site.
Dan, I’m planning to post about photography and music on Tuesday. I think that there are some interesting parallels.
We all know how much colors and tones influence one another by local contrast. We know that the name of the artist will influence how we interpret a work. Why should it be a surprise that the context of the work (the textural title, the date when it appears) should be any less influential?
If art is communication, then the picture is a form of coded message. The meaning that is encoded depends on what the artist put into it, and how it is decoded by the viewer. All art might be communication (if we believe Rex), but not all communication is art, obviously.
If you had titled this post “Airplanes of the Early 1960’s”, it never would have occurred to me to link it to 9/11. But your use of “hijack” in the title turns the lovely blues into something sinister; the haze before the planes suggests a frightening unknown. Thus, you demonstrate the importance of the context, the metaphorical frame.
Looking at the picture at a technical level, it is a wonderful study of color. In this respect it would be powerful even without the representational aspect. The yellow of the raven painting is here again, but this time in the minor role. Its seems to me that the large plane’s wing on our left side of the painting is a bit short compared to the one on the other side. When I look closely I can see that the wing extends further than I see at first glance.
Dear David Palmer
As I told you before I like the airplane series because they painted with very nice soothing colors… although I prefer the American dream series I have to say.
How relaxing is for the eyes to just sit down looking at a nice painting of a sky with some airplanes?
I am personally terrified of flying but there is so much tranquility in them it makes me feel secure. They would look fantastic as decor for high class posh airplanes, or a travel agency or simply someone home who likes airplanes…
I understand about some precognition or coincidence that comes into art work, I personally had few experience myself and when I am painting sometimes its like I get into a trance-like state guided by a force from above…
So when you say there is a meaning beyond the artist vision, sure you are right… and it just cannot be put into words…
When I first looked at the picture, I thought those were DC-3’s. Possibly carrying paratroopers into occupied Europe in WWII. I can see the connection to 9/11, but for me, it is forced.
I tihnk all an artist can do is nudge a viewer towards something, it is up to the viewer from there.
Karl: If you had titled this post “Airplanes of the Early 1960’s”, it never would have occurred to me to link it to 9/11. But your use of “hijack” in the title turns the lovely blues into something sinister…Thus, you demonstrate the importance of the context, the metaphorical frame.
Scott: I can see the connection to 9/11, but for me, it is forced.
I didn’t make the connection. It was made for me.
As mentioned above, I painted these in the spring of 2001, before the events of 9/11 occurred. They were inspired by watching planes come in to land at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). An exhibition including the paintings was scheduled, months in advance, to open on Saturday, September 15.
A couple of days after the 9/11 attacks took place, I called the dealer who had curated the exhibit and told him I didn’t think it was a good idea, under the circumstances, to show the paintings. We talked about it, and and he convinced me to go ahead and show them. He felt that even though the images would be disturbing, everyone was walking around in shock, and he felt that seeing them might be cathartic in some sense. I had my doubts, but I agreed to show them.
The exhibition opening was surreal. A lot of people showed up, which in itself surprised me. People were both repelled by the paintings and attracted to them. And they almost all sold. That surprised me too.
But the thing I learned from this experience was how drastically the meaning of a work of art can change, in this case almost immediately. Whether one believes that the meaning in a work of art comes from the artist’s intention, is something inherent in the work itself, or is brought to it by viewers, these paintings took on associations that neither I or anyone else could have predicted even a week before they were shown.
The title of this series of paintings is LAX, named after the airport. The title of this post, however, refers to the effect that the hijackings had on the meanings people found in them. It’s been five years since those hijackings took place, and I think to a large extent people are able to look at airplanes now and not think of 9/11. But showing these paintings, which I originally thought of as tributes to the wonder of flight, less than a week after the attacks, was a lesson to me about how little control I have over the meaning of my work.
People do carry the meaning with them. I love airplanes and Chuck Yeager is one of my heroes. I feel incredibly safe in airplanes and seeing your pictures I think of war. I was present at a bombing attack at the tender age of three weeks. I carry some memory of the event with me that was only confirmed as an air plane attack when I talked about it with my mother a few years ago. It explained to me why I feel safe in planes, after all in a war, it is better to be in the plane than hit by a bomb.
I carry some memory of the event with me that was only confirmed as an air plane attack when I talked about it with my mother a few years ago.
Birgit, I’d be very interested in hearing what you actually remembered or felt before your mother explained what had happened.
“Where does the meaning come from in a work of art? Is it contained in the artwork itself, or does it come from somewhere else? Is it permanent, or can it change? How much control does the artist have over what is communicated by their work?”
The artist has little control, and I think that is a good thing.
The meaning comes from a combination of the work itself (I call them “visual clues”), the larger context (current events for one – your works’ meanings changed with 9/11, clearly. How we all look at airplanes changed), and any statment you make (or the lack of a statment). The most important thing about meaning in strong art work, in my mind, is that it is fluid, unfixed. If it becomes fixed, I will probably lose interest, the work can become stagnant.
On a personal note, these bring up strong memories of going to the National Airport (now Reagan National Airport =0)to paint with Walt Bartman in High school (see the interview posted today). We painted the bellies of planes as they were taking off the runway! Not soemthing you could do today with the security. It was an incredible sensory experience that I hated at the time (it was very loud and smelly). But the paintings students made were fantastic. It really tested your skill to paint from memory. My paintings were horrid, but other students got some of their best work out of the experience!
Leslie, I think a discussion on “visual clues” would be a very interesting one! Would you consider starting one off in a future post? It’s a way of looking at artwork that opens up many possiblities.
David,
Sure, I will give it a whirl – probably next week as I am leaving town for awhile. It seems we are jammed with posts at the moment – it is hard to keep up!
I forgot to say that I love this series of paintings. Both visually and conceptually. The colors are rich and the “barely there” sense of the planes in some of them is very evocative and reads as memory to me. In the same way some Gerhard Richter paintings do. I am fond of works in series, as they feed off eachother. I would be curious as to how they were displayed. I can picture them on one big wall.
Leslie, thanks for the kind words about the paintings, and for mentioning them in the same paragraph as Gerhard Richter’s :)
I basically always work in a series, which can span a couple of months or many years. The LAX series came about because of work I did creating digital planes for the movie Air Force One. There’s an In And Out burger place on the corner of Lincoln and Sepulveda, right across the street from LAX and directly under the flight path of incoming planes. Our effects crew used to go down there for lunch. We’d eat in the little park next to the burger place and watch the planes come in over our heads. I loved watching them appear at the horizon, tiny and barely visible, get almost imperceptibly larger as they approached, and then finally come roaring over, really close.
After the film was released I ended up going back down there repeatedly with my camera, standing with my back against the runway wall, and shooting hundreds of photos (I doubt they’d let me do that now). The paintings weren’t meant to be realistic, but iconic. Both in my studio and in the exhibition they hung on one wall, arranged in a loose grid several paintings high.
David,
I loved watching them appear at the horizon, tiny and barely visible, get almost imperceptibly larger as they approached, and then finally come roaring over, really close.
The road that circles London is known as the M25. The traffic is frequently stationary. There is one spot right under the landing path for Heathrow. Often one can see six planes on the descent – in a stack – from the road. More at night (because of the lights). The one at the front you feel that you can touch. The one at the back is tiny and you are unsure whether it is real. It briefly makes the M25 bearable.
Colin, if you ever come to L.A., we’ll go to the park next to LAX and watch the planes. No need to sit in traffic. I don’t know if the experience of seeing them is art or not, but it’s pretty impressive.
David,
I have looked at this series several times on your website. The way it’s set up, once the pictures all load, one can flip through them slowly or quickly, and I have done both several times.
My very first impression was that you were doing the “Haystack” thing. Monet did not invent the “series” form, but he sure made it famous, and if you don’t mind appearing in the same paragraph as Monet, I am quite sure he would have enjoyed your very modern take on this. The artist selects a simple object or objects, and then makes a bunch of paintings to show various kinds of change. Usually the theme is light and it’s effect on color, but here you’ve capitalized on, in addition to light and color, changes in space. Your theme is well selected. It can be tough to find things sufficiently simple while at the same time sufficiently interesting, and you have accomplished both.
The 9/11 reference would never have occurred to me had you not mentioned it, and had I gone to your show, I would probably asked if there was a quiet time in which I could come back to enjoy these paintings without that terror buzz in the nous-sphere, so I guess you could say that to this series I do bring an understanding of this kind of thing as well as a certain insistence that my mind not be interfered with by “significances” like 9/11.
I like, when I look at art, to strive for an empty mind. I try and tune myself receptivity. Arthur, on his blog’s opening remarks said something not identical but similar, and he said it well, so I’m quoting him here.
I do strive to experience whatever the artist may have intended without preconceived notions, but of course, how perfectly possible is that? Ever? I consider that empty mind to be an ideal but not practically achievable in reality, yet we have to hold to ideals in order to have data of magnitude to make our comparisons.
And speaking of relevant ideals, once again, I am reminded of the Platonic sense of dialog in the purest sense of his meaning — between the words. An idea goes out from the artist and is met by a returning idea, the result is a combination, a meeting of minds, and it’s a new thing which requires at least two minds to exist.
I find this thrilling.
Rex, what an eloquent response to these paintings and my post. Thank you.
I’m of course quite honored to to share a paragraph w/ Monet. You picked up quite exactly on the Haystack nature of the series, and also on the fact that I wasn’t exploring lighting differences but rather something else. In this case the colors were invented, of course, and what I was working with was varying them to see how color affected the psychological and iconic impact of the images.
I also like to approach art (including films and books) with as little pre-knowledge as possible. It’s only afterwards, when I find something that resonates with me, that I want to find out more about what was behind its creation, what the artist has to say, etc.
David, about what I remembered as a 3-week old child: I had the sense that we had gone down into a dark, clammy place at my grandparents’ house and that there was fear associated with it. – In Washington, in the mid eighties, I had a massage by a ‘body man’ who put me into a trance. In one of the session I heard terrifying shrieking noises made airplanes that I had not consciously remembered before. Asking my mother, she told me that we had been in my grandparents’ basement. She freaked out when she heard the planes. My grandmother told her that she was tranferring her panic to her baby in her arms. Before that, my mother had lived in Wilhelmshaven, a submarine navel base that was decimated in WWII. My mother had never been as afraid as in my grandparents house because in WHV, everyone spent the nights protected in safe air raid shelters. – I have only quickly gone through your air plane series so far because I am still only in internet cafes. From my first impression, I do find the planes flying at me somewhat frightening. However, I do love watching acrobatics made by air shows where I know that it is just for fun.