Hail! yon viewer.

'The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in
every way'*

Images hail viewers as individuals, even when each viewer knows that many people are looking at the same image- that the image was not intended 'just for me' but reaches a wider audience. (Sturken and Cartwright Practices of Looking, Page 50)
Several things come to mind as I revisit this. What if the viewer is Hesse's Steppenwolf, sitting before the image of the neon sign, that ruins the once perfectly good wall?
What is written in pages 49 (para.1) and 50 (para.2) of the text is of particular interest in relation to class critiques. It points to the value of being present and available to observe and interact with other's reactions to your work. Does it say what you intended it to say? Does it really matter if they do 'get it'? Is the artist responsible to be understood? On the latter question I am inclined to answer 'no'. An example is Auden, and poetry in general as I have experienced it (and come to like it). As Edward Mendelson writes in his into. to W. H. Auden Selected Poems Vintage, New York 1989 (pg. xii, para.1): These first poems often have the air of gnomic fragments; they seem to be elements of some hidden private myth whose individual details never quite resolve themselves into a unified narrative. And later in the same paragraph, Auden's early readers missed the point when they inferred from the poems' elusive privacy the existence of a coterie who shared the meanings and got the jokes; Auden's friends were as much in the dark as everyone else. The elusiveness and indecipherability of the early poems are part of the isolation they describe. This doesn't strike me as a failing but a strength of sorts, and part of a progression or development. I didn't like poetry, though I wanted to, until I gave up the need to understand it. Once I did that I quickly grew to enjoy it. And since this has happened I have also grown to like and appreciate a greater range of art in general; though I don't completely understand it (indeed, is anyone capable of completely understanding anything!). Too often my own artwork has been 'misread'; it is enough to hear someone say, 'I can tell there is an idea behind it, it has a meaning'. Isn't it an advantage of art and poetry, and dance, to express oneself in a way not readily understood? I have felt at times that I had something to express and could do so only in a way that was ambiguous.
We talk about making meaning. Could it be that our own age is so overtly vacant of real meaning, that we feel the need to create it somehow? We know we are unable to create something out of nothing, so we make up little sciences in hopes that explanation and so called understanding will solve our problem. I have no doubt that we are in or entering a time of great transition and, I am perhaps frustrated by the liquidness of this.
Lastly, my thoughts are on an example of a strong reaction to a work of once controversial art: Christ Taken Down from the Cross, by Hans Holbien the Younger. From the diary of Anna Dostoevsky, after visiting it with her husband in Basel:
The painting overwhelmed Fyodor Mikhailovich, and he stopped in front of it as if stricken...On his agitated face was a sort of frightened expression I often noted during the first moments of an epileptic seizure. I quietly took my husband's arm, led him to another room and made him sit down on a bench, expecting him to have a seizure any minute. fortunately, it didn't come. Little by little Fyodor Mikhailovich calmed down, and when we were leaving he insisted on going to take another look at the painting that had made such an impression on him.
Apparently Anna's reaction to Holbein's painting was one more of revulsion than religious experience. (Malcolm Muggeridge, A Third Testament Plough Publishing House, 2002, by arrangement with Little, Brown and Company, Inc., New York, NY) I do also find it interesting, as a side note, that Fritz Eichenberg uses the image of Holbein's Christ... in his illustrations for Dostoevsky's The Idiot.
This is all I have to say for now.


'Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.'*

*W.H. Auden, from The Unknown Citizen