Here's a little side project: I love to paint! And I don't want to interfere with people interpreting my works, so I thought about marking them as painted with no artistic intent. I'd love to hear your opinions on that!
What a wonderful concept. Feels like the sort of thing Yves Klein would have done. The stamp in particular is a wonderful guesture.
I wonder to what extent do you think that the viewers appreciation of, or interpretation of the work is based on them coming to it with no particular conception in mind either, or do you take a more constructivist view that there has to be a frame or context brought to it from the observer by their experiences and life?
I guess the latter – the piece could remind them of a feeling, or stimulate them to think something new. I just don't want to interfere with that. They shouldn't waste their resources on trying to figure out what I was thinking.
I thought its more about really feeling as a viewer what the painting stirs in your own soul and not what the painters feeling/intention/state of mind was when he created the painting.
Like dont read the art critic interpretation (or not only) but rather really feel what the art invokes in you - a unique feeling.
To my surprise, some are astonishingly attractive, some look like AI generated (so much of GPT off late), and some just vague! But it's just about "nothing in my mind" play.
True art could get lost amidst all the AI stuffs! Long live true artists. Long live those who follow their passion amidst all the chaos! Hail hemmert!
I swear I painted them by myself :-) It is a side project which I simply enjoy (painting the paintings) – but our walls were getting too full, so I thought I could also start selling them.
(In a sense, then it is also about me having a feeling - fun - while painting, which differentiates it from AI-generated 'works'.)
this reminds me, there is a principle from the book - the courage to be disliked. its about task seperation. basically you do your task and let others do their task. you dont let others meddle in your tasks and you dont meddle in tasks of others. For a singer for example, the singer's task is to sing well, focus on improving their voice, style, learn voice related skills and improve them. The critic has the task to love/hate the singing, comment, praise, do marketing (good or bad). The singer shouldnt manipulate what the critic does, its the critic's task.
i think this applies to all art/expression. this manupulation pandemic and image management of today's world is making artists slaves of critics.
As a former poet (haven't written in 15 years) I strongly disagree.
Figurative art might be about what you feel when you look at an art piece (still debatable), but art per se is not.
Every single poem or song I wrote had a very precise meaning and a message in it and my choice of words, rhyme, and rhythm was deliberate and meant to be aiding me in conveying that message.
Yes, perhaps the statement about 'Art is ...' and 'Art is not ...' is too big. It's what I try to achieve here, but this is, of course, not true for all art. Thank you!
Thank you – it's formulated too bold indeed. It's one approach to art, and I get the feeling that exploring this might be really interesting. It's also funny to see how the stamp on the backside gets all the attention. I thought I was a painter, but I'm chasing meaninglessness.
But if the artist, when painting, thinks that he wants no message to be imparted in the work but rather created in the mind of the viewer, then it can be both?
Very much in line with what the Dadaists had to say about this topic. Remove the artist and their intentions from the equation and let the viewers experience art in itself. A particular group of them, in Zurich I believe, went to the extant of signing each other's pieces or with pseudonyms to distance themselves from the art they created.
> What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding. Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and
centers. Its chains kill, it is an enormous centipede stifling independence. Married to logic, art would live in incest, swallowing, engulfing its own tail, still part of its own body, fornicating within itself, and passion would become a nightmare tarred with protestantism, a monument, a heap of ponderous gray entrails.
Interesting comparison. The Dadaists looked at a similar idea but at a social scale - what is art in society? Or what does society consider art, and how do we value it? There's a mockery of the social conceptions of art in their work, which this feels like a different take on. This feels like a personalisation of that - not "we should attack the idea that the socially constructed narrative of art is the correct one", but "the individually constructed narrative of this art is always a valid one".
I agree, this is more of a personal take on how art should be produced and perceived without calling for a societal upheaval or annihilation or art as we know.
I can absolutely get behind this sentiment and the custom stamp is the icing on top.
It seems that for both study of English language/literature and art at schools is 80%-90% analysis of "what the author/artist was thinking or meaning when creating this" and then expecting the students to either agree with this ideology and pass the assignment/exam or disagree and fail the assignment/exam.
This is an incredibly narrow angle of study and allows little room for creativity or even the idea that the author literally meant nothing or left it up to interpretation and seems to be teaching rote thought only.
I know little about this subject, but let me take the devil's advocate position. In that last example, how are teachers of English expected to teach writing styles, choice of words and phrases, language features and techniques or sentence forms if they can't analyse such choices in examples from literature?
I know there's a movement in artistic circles that denies intent in the artist, but some artists do actually have an intent. Art is used as a medium for communication and therefore can have meaningful content. It's important to their artistic expression. It seems to me that not all art is semiotically vacant. Is that therefore bad art? Should it not be studied in those terms?
I'm an outsider, I have zero artistic training or background so the chances I have any idea what I'm talking about are extremely low. The only reason I even know what semiotics means is because a flat mate of mine studied contemporary dance and I helped her with an essay on it once a long time ago, as English wasn't her first language.
I agree, not all art is semiotically vacant. At the same time, we'll never get (as the viewers of a piece) get to fully understand what the artist wanted to express – and that's the situation I wanted to evade as the artist here.
There's an excellent song by the band 22 about this subject called "You Are Creating", which puts the creation of the art in the subjective experience of the listener, rather than in the artist.
Everybody's feeling like
"Oh my, that's my song"
And it is because
You're hearing yourself
By means of us
There's no quote unquote
You're creating this note
The thing I was wondering: When I put the stamp on the back of the painting, THAT is something that communicates an intent, actually. It's almost a Hofstaedter (Gödel/Escher/Bach) loop, or a prisoner's dilemma. Or Watzlawick's 'We cannot not communicate.'
I think that "You intended to create a painting, gotcha!" is a lazy dismissal on a technicality.
Yes, there are obvious limits to not having anything in mind while doing anything but we can be more charitable when interpreting this. Like "nothing besides the obvious stuff but this disclaimer would make it too long to fit on the stamp" :-)
Aiming for not producing a particular feeling is in itself, still an intention. The artist purposefully painted in a particular way, hoping to evoke feelings in the viewer, albeit particular unspecified and viewer dependent feelings. But that's the intent! To produce whatever feelings are yours.
I think TFA conflates two things a bit: "While painting this picture, I had nothing in mind." — let's grant that as true. "All my works [… have] been painted with no intention at all." — that's different: my point (and I think the parent comment's) is that painting with nothing in mind is an intentional decision.
While I granted the statement about painting with an empty mind, I also wonder if that's true: if the point of art is, as TFA states, "be about the feelings it creates in you. The viewer." then did the artist not have feelings about the art as the art was being produced? Can you separate yourself from the process? Can one have an empty mind, especially while trying to do a focused task such as painting, and for long enough to complete the work? It seems close to trying to not think about a thing, which becomes all the more impossible to do the more you try to do it.
I also think there's a leap from "Art is about the feelings it creates" and "I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong." The artist might be able to say, "there is no interpretation of this art that is right or wrong", as that's their intent … but there is definitely art out there the intent of which is to produce a particular reaction within its viewership, so I think the statement is a bit too broad.
Firstly, I like this project and the art itself. As others have said this is not a new thing in art but I think the presentation, the stamp and everything are quite nice.
Now secondly, obviously the premise is also completely untrue and almost impossible to achieve: The artist did have something in mind when painting these pictures: to paint pictures where only the viewer is meant to decipher the meaning while the artist themself has nothing in mind. He or she also did paint something aesthetically pleasing so there seems to be a lot of intention on that part as well. Painting something without any intention at all seems almost completely impossible to me. (Maybe you could trick somebody else into painting something without them knowing about it – but even then you are still the artist with an intention).
Finally I wanted to address the criticism by some other comments that art critique and galleries are always looking for an artistic intention even if there is none. I don't think that's completely true – I have seen plenty of exhibitions where it is explained that the artist "was just experimenting with form/colors".
Actually, the longest part of building this was finding the right wording. Here are some previous attempts:
- When painting this, I had no artistic intent
- When painting this, there was nothing I wanted to express with the picture
- When painting this, I wanted to express nothing
In German, there's a nice ambiguity: "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is somewhere between 'I was not thinking' and 'I wanted to express nothing.'. It's also the reason why I went with a German stamp (which is my mother tongue) and not an English one.
It is SO complicated to say that I wasn't up to anything with these pictures.
Thanks for the added explanation! German is my mother tongue as well and I also think "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is very elegant and basically not translatable.
I’ve grown to greatly appreciate those phrases that don’t translate. Admittedly, as someone who got competent in formal programming languages before I was ever competent in a second human one- it took me a while to appreciate the “syntax error”… lol.
There's a piece of graffiti from the May 1968 Paris riots that goes "I have something to say but I don't know what." Reminds me of this. I can't find the original French but I think it's something like "J'ai quelque chose a dire mais je ne sais quoi."
Ah, nice! I'll compile a page of related projects on the website (with all the interesting links from this discussion), and that will go on it, too, of course! Thanks!
Very Zen. Not being sarcastic and don’t mean in the corny way it’s often used here in the States implying peaceful gardens of tranquility… blah… blah… blah.
But, if I may be so bold, what you describe there is the essence of Zen. And also why zenmasters are famously reluctant to find words for it. :)
Then especially, thank you! (If you haven't, check out the links to related artworks in this discussion – many of them I hadn't come across yet, but they have a similar vibe!)
It sounds like you are very concerned with making sure people know this. Were you concerned with that before you painted them? Before you decided to share them, and how to share them? Then clearly there is an artistic intent behind them.
That's an interesting point that got me thinking already:
No, I wasn't aware of that when painting most of the pictures. I just enjoyed the process of painting. But, as you can imagine, wall space gets limited after painting number 25, and at some point they were hanging in the staircase, all the way down to our basement. So I thought about selling them.
That was the point when I thought that I'd love to mark them as painted without any intent. That was before picture 25, I'd say.
Now, number 26 was painted KNOWING that I'd be marking it as painted without anything in mind, which somehow (same for all upcoming pictures) increases the 'pressure' of not adding any meaning.
Until now, I'm comfortable with that (the painting process is so much fun), and it's probably a thing worth exploring further. Perhaps I could write something contradictory on the front?
I guess the autor deliberately intended to have no deliberate intention in mind while painting.
Also, the author somehow "allows" the pictures to cause feelings in the viewer, but says that he/she removes him/herself from the equation. But I think he/she is a viewer of his/her own pictures while drawing it. There is definitely some feedback going on.
So one improvement could be to draw without looking at the output.
But maybe the best way to go here is to computer-generate some pictures. And one is also not allowed to hand-pick a generated picture. And one should have nothing in mind while writing that computer program.
That's an interesting idea! I'm also trying to paint something nice, so when painting, I do look at the picture and say: "Ahh, this doesn't look right.", and then I go about and change something. I do enjoy painting, and I guess I wouldn't if I, say, blindfolded my eyes. But I probably should try that ;-)
Train a GAN with images with intent, then have the computer produce an image that lacks intent of an artist but imitates the visual amenity of the input works? Art-in-the-shell??
Even if you aren't able to see the art while creating it you would still know a little of what's happening on the canvas. It would be farther removed for sure, but even the physicality of the scraping here would start to tell you what is happening.
I like the idea though, and it does take the artist a little further away.
- "The artist did have something in mind when painting these pictures: to paint pictures where only the viewer is meant to decipher the meaning."
- "He or she also did paint something aesthetically pleasing so there seems to be a lot of intention on that part as well."
Sorry, you're probably wrong on both assumptions. Playing with viewers is not common and is a genre thing. Aesthetic pleasantness is also not a required requisite of an art piece and as an intention may stand in conflict with honest self-expression.
There's always going to be something of the person in anything created by a person (at bare minimum reflective of the physical properties of the person, such as large or small hands). This is obviously true. Just as any interpretation of art is indicative of mental elements of the person interpreting the art.
The artworks on the linked page are similar enough in style that it's obvious something within the artist dictated them.
The question is whether there is conscious intent, and what that intent is. Lots of people create art just to create something they find beautiful, with no other meaning intended.
> The ideomotor phenomenon is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously.
> The phrase is most commonly used in reference to the process whereby a thought or mental image brings about a seemingly "reflexive" or automatic muscular reaction, often of minuscule degree, and potentially outside of the awareness of the subject. As in responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively with an ideomotor effect to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action.
> Even humans draw many things that they don't understand. If we draw something that we completely don't understand (such as through random scribbling) we don't even call it a representation. It's a fluke. I used to scribble and then trace images in my scribbling (if possible). Often I ended up tracing things that looked like a child's bad drawing of Donald Duck, but once, without having to trace particular lines at all, my scribbling was a perfect seeming of a rose flower (with some minor additional flourishes). I recognized the rose flower, but I certainly didn't set out to draw it.
Personally I think an artist without intention would not interest me, though I agree that his intent is not necessarily of greater significance than the viewer's reaction.
Interesting concept. I particularly appreciate how much it allows to untangle in the trio artist <-> art piece <-> viewer.
It has to be noted though that it is very difficult to "just like" a piece of art for good reasons. Art historically had a function: religious, mystic, political... and we're still stuck with this legacy. The function of art has only recently been deemed to be a raw trigger of raw emotions. For better or for worse, I can't say. Probably both.
It also seems to me that "having nothing in mind" is polysemic and I'd be interested in knowing which prevails or how they coexist for the artist. "I had no intention", "I had no goal" and "My mind was blank" (is it even possible?) draw 3 very different intentions.
Again, it's a very interesting approach. One might argue that it is too formalized, elaborate and sophisticated of an approach only to claim that the creation process is "with nothing in mind", but I don't think that the intensity of the concept and the outcome have to align in all points. The only certainty. here is that it cannot be categorized as naive.
Which brings us to the audience. The audience for this project clearly is an educated one, one that met the struggles of having to comment and understand a piece of art and the ridiculous situations and discussions that often ensue to battle over who has the biggest one (brains, I mean).
And look at my own comment... full of gibberish and not a single word on the art pieces themselves. I quite like them though. Shapes, colors, textures, they're beautiful.
I'm indeed not an English native speaker, so I wasn't fully aware of the different possible meanings of 'nothing in mind', but you're right. The German stamp has exactly the same ambiguity, which I thankfully took as a way out of the impossible situation of 'thinking nothing.
It's also very notable that the back of the paintings receives way more attention than the paintings themselves – but I guess that's what HN is all about (and what I like about it!), pondering the intellectual and philosophical problems of not thinking ;-)
I want the artist to use the art to try to connect to me in some way. I don't want it to be a still piece of abstract nothingness that is supposed to only reflect my perception.
May as well be randomly generated noise, or AI art.
Though, it doesn't really matter, because what this artist is claiming is impossible anyway, but I'm glad it is. Their idea is nauseating and gross. My only reaction to this is disgust and revulsion. Maybe that's the point? But I doubt it
When I was in high school, we had an (excellent!) teacher of Italian literature who always interpreted texts according to a specific key, which she tried to explain through the historical and philosophical background of the era. At some point she gave an interpretation of a novel and, rumour has it, because it was the time of the rise of social media, one of her students contacted the author on Facebook and asked if the interpretation was correct. And, rumour has it, he said no. We were all outraged at the teacher!
However, it's difficult to talk about any artwork without ever discussing an interpretation. By saying "I had nothing in particular in mind", we risk having the opposite effect, that of forbidding any kind of interpretation or discussion. It should be made clear that this means "you are free to interpret", not "there is no interpretation whatsoever".
Finally, a remark: the author is saying they had nothing in particular in mind, but this is not true. Not that they're lying - they are fooling themselves.
Hello, and thank you for the excellent comment! I love the conclusion that I successfully fooled myself into thinking I wasn't thinking anything. That would also make a nice stamp ;-)
Nothing in mind? Go read Marvin Minsky's excellent "The Society of Mind" and reconsider this statement ...
According to Minsky the mind is composed of tiny "components" (which form the "subsconscious" one might say) and only some reach "consciousness" levels of attention.
This school that espouses that art is what viewer feels, not the artist conceives - this was the mainstay of Marcel Duchamp and his ilk.
"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”
> "Art is not what I think when I'm painting. It's what you feel when you're looking."
I love this definition of art and it's why some of the recent knee-jerk rejection of AI-generated artwork (sometimes citing its inhumanity or lack of human backstory) is premature IMO.
More importantly, that's beautiful art. Thank you for sharing, OP.
To me, it seems like the artist at least has this particular sentiment in mind - if not while doing the physical act of painting, at least at some time before or after, or while sharing the works of art themselves.
To me, I often sense I don't "get" art, because I don't feel anything looking at it, and I am wholly preoccupied with wondering why the artist created what they did, and what they had in mind at the time. To me... that's what art is. Wholly contradicting what this particular artist defines it as.
Thank you for your comment and the appreciation of that definition - and the paintings!
I also don't know what to think about AI-generated art yet, either. All of my paintings, I just keep painting until I have the feeling that they're finished. But: in my head, don't I simply remix previous things I saw and found beautiful, pigment and scratch movements that worked well, and all these things? Where's the difference? :-)
(I enjoy the act of smearing paint on canvasses, which makes a lot of difference for me – and there is no prompt.)
Very nice output but I bet the experience you go through beats anything. From my experience, when you enter flow state you can let it take over intent and then anything goes as long as it’s at the same tempo as the flow. I paint too and similary just take whatever direction the work wants to go while clearing my mind. There is a slight adjustments to the flow here and there but the decisions largely come into being by chance. I get a bonus dopamine hit when work is completed. I work on 10 to 20 works at a time so as not to linger for too long on decisions or interrupt the flow.
I do this first as a form of therapy and don’t care to display or show the world my works as I feel knowing there was an audience would interfere with my process, would make me more self conscious perhaps wanting to please a perceived audience. I applied the same philosophy to music making.
Refreshingly honest of you, and a nice exploration of colour and texture. The CIA would be pleased.[0] My favourite abstract art is that which conveys something of an idea or commentary on our society. It deconstructs reality and reassembles it in strange and unique ways that hopefully reveal something of the invisible ideas and processes that shape us all. Like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2, inspired by the first moving picture.[1] Or The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, inspired by J.J. Thomson's discovery of the electron.[2]
Thank you for the appreciation, and the interesting links! I heard about the CIA story, and how they sought to quantify creativity as a person's 'ability'.
I'm in the camp that holds that the artists needs to be trying to communicate something for the work to be art in the first place. There are other words for when you're making things and not trying to communicate: illustration, decoration, design, etc. These words aren't insults (I'm an illustrator and a designer), they are just different things and it's useful have different terms for different things, and use the most apt one.
> “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”
That's Tolstoy's definition, and it's basically the one I stick with because it filters out the most things that don't seem to be art, and leaves the most things in which seem to be. It's an ad hoc, imperfect definition, but to me it's better than the one that says "anything is art, and art means whatever I want it to".
In terms of interpretation, I believe most art is open to a pretty wide range of interpretations, and you can make a strong case for the meaning to be something other than the most literal reading. Artists have subconscious minds too. But, in my opinion there are wrong interpretations, and the easiest ones to identify are ones that have no textual evidence ("Macbeth is actually about radio astronomy") so I don't agree with statements like:
> I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong.
Because where does that leave us? A world where art has a lot less value because it can just be anything to anybody. If it can mean anything, it effectively means nothing. Hard to find common ground or have a shared cultural language when you operate like that.
Intention to not provide a reason for creation of a work _is_ having something in mind.
To recapitulate, they had in mind creation of a work with no intrinsic meaning.
Accidental art, if it is possible, has been of interest to me for a decade or so; my conclusion (limited as it is) is that it is not art.
However, finding an object and imbuing it with meaning is an artistic endeavour, so if the painter were able to produce work devoid of intrinsic meaning then it would become art if a person finds the work and imprints a meaning on it. Quintessential postmodernity, I guess.
It's an interesting area. It reminds me of reading a poet's reaction to reading an analysis an educational organisation had applied to that poet's work: you know the sort of thing 'the poet used the darkness of the sky to highlight the sense of foreboding of the hero'. The poet did not recognise any of their motivations in the analysis that was (IIRC) being taught to schoolchildren. Consciously they had been very plain in their approach of recording a (fictional) event ... of course they might have subconsciously made choices in language that would follow the analysis given ...
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadI wonder to what extent do you think that the viewers appreciation of, or interpretation of the work is based on them coming to it with no particular conception in mind either, or do you take a more constructivist view that there has to be a frame or context brought to it from the observer by their experiences and life?
True art could get lost amidst all the AI stuffs! Long live true artists. Long live those who follow their passion amidst all the chaos! Hail hemmert!
(In a sense, then it is also about me having a feeling - fun - while painting, which differentiates it from AI-generated 'works'.)
Thank you!
i think this applies to all art/expression. this manupulation pandemic and image management of today's world is making artists slaves of critics.
great paintings!
Figurative art might be about what you feel when you look at an art piece (still debatable), but art per se is not.
Every single poem or song I wrote had a very precise meaning and a message in it and my choice of words, rhyme, and rhythm was deliberate and meant to be aiding me in conveying that message.
I'm glad to see other ideas and points of view, and I do think you should keep exploring the statement. You could probably go pretty far with it.
It's a fascinating topic in general. I really like how you have incorporated the debate/concept into your art.
Here's a playful and provocative Dadaist manifesto by Tristan Tzara
https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918....
> What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding. Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centers. Its chains kill, it is an enormous centipede stifling independence. Married to logic, art would live in incest, swallowing, engulfing its own tail, still part of its own body, fornicating within itself, and passion would become a nightmare tarred with protestantism, a monument, a heap of ponderous gray entrails.
It seems that for both study of English language/literature and art at schools is 80%-90% analysis of "what the author/artist was thinking or meaning when creating this" and then expecting the students to either agree with this ideology and pass the assignment/exam or disagree and fail the assignment/exam.
This is an incredibly narrow angle of study and allows little room for creativity or even the idea that the author literally meant nothing or left it up to interpretation and seems to be teaching rote thought only.
See also:
http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2013/03/5-reasons-i-absolutely-...
https://www.tumblr.com/austinsirkin/180007505784/the-blue-do...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/dghmrf/im_in_eng...
I'm in the UK and this is the type of crap they were and still are teaching: https://madameanglaise.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/aqa-gcse-eng...
(It's also often that people ask me 'What did you want to express while painting this?')
I know there's a movement in artistic circles that denies intent in the artist, but some artists do actually have an intent. Art is used as a medium for communication and therefore can have meaningful content. It's important to their artistic expression. It seems to me that not all art is semiotically vacant. Is that therefore bad art? Should it not be studied in those terms?
I'm an outsider, I have zero artistic training or background so the chances I have any idea what I'm talking about are extremely low. The only reason I even know what semiotics means is because a flat mate of mine studied contemporary dance and I helped her with an essay on it once a long time ago, as English wasn't her first language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eXQjgcGOWc
Yes, there are obvious limits to not having anything in mind while doing anything but we can be more charitable when interpreting this. Like "nothing besides the obvious stuff but this disclaimer would make it too long to fit on the stamp" :-)
I think TFA conflates two things a bit: "While painting this picture, I had nothing in mind." — let's grant that as true. "All my works [… have] been painted with no intention at all." — that's different: my point (and I think the parent comment's) is that painting with nothing in mind is an intentional decision.
While I granted the statement about painting with an empty mind, I also wonder if that's true: if the point of art is, as TFA states, "be about the feelings it creates in you. The viewer." then did the artist not have feelings about the art as the art was being produced? Can you separate yourself from the process? Can one have an empty mind, especially while trying to do a focused task such as painting, and for long enough to complete the work? It seems close to trying to not think about a thing, which becomes all the more impossible to do the more you try to do it.
I also think there's a leap from "Art is about the feelings it creates" and "I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong." The artist might be able to say, "there is no interpretation of this art that is right or wrong", as that's their intent … but there is definitely art out there the intent of which is to produce a particular reaction within its viewership, so I think the statement is a bit too broad.
But what do I know, I'm a software engineer.
Now secondly, obviously the premise is also completely untrue and almost impossible to achieve: The artist did have something in mind when painting these pictures: to paint pictures where only the viewer is meant to decipher the meaning while the artist themself has nothing in mind. He or she also did paint something aesthetically pleasing so there seems to be a lot of intention on that part as well. Painting something without any intention at all seems almost completely impossible to me. (Maybe you could trick somebody else into painting something without them knowing about it – but even then you are still the artist with an intention).
Finally I wanted to address the criticism by some other comments that art critique and galleries are always looking for an artistic intention even if there is none. I don't think that's completely true – I have seen plenty of exhibitions where it is explained that the artist "was just experimenting with form/colors".
Actually, the longest part of building this was finding the right wording. Here are some previous attempts:
- When painting this, I had no artistic intent
- When painting this, there was nothing I wanted to express with the picture
- When painting this, I wanted to express nothing
In German, there's a nice ambiguity: "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is somewhere between 'I was not thinking' and 'I wanted to express nothing.'. It's also the reason why I went with a German stamp (which is my mother tongue) and not an English one.
It is SO complicated to say that I wasn't up to anything with these pictures.
Aber für Deutsch, brauche iche mehr ubung! :)
Found it: https://www.dicocitations.com/citations/citation-67489.php
They use the pas
There is a big difference between "... je ne sais quoi" and "... je ne sais pas quoi".
"... je ne sais pas quoi" means "I don't know what". The slogan is indeed "I have something to say but I don't know what".
"je ne sais quoi" is a weird French construction which is actually a name. It takes a masculin determinant and means "a little something".
Il manque à ce plat un petit je ne sais quoi = this meal is missing a little something
But, if I may be so bold, what you describe there is the essence of Zen. And also why zenmasters are famously reluctant to find words for it. :)
No, I wasn't aware of that when painting most of the pictures. I just enjoyed the process of painting. But, as you can imagine, wall space gets limited after painting number 25, and at some point they were hanging in the staircase, all the way down to our basement. So I thought about selling them.
That was the point when I thought that I'd love to mark them as painted without any intent. That was before picture 25, I'd say.
Now, number 26 was painted KNOWING that I'd be marking it as painted without anything in mind, which somehow (same for all upcoming pictures) increases the 'pressure' of not adding any meaning.
Until now, I'm comfortable with that (the painting process is so much fun), and it's probably a thing worth exploring further. Perhaps I could write something contradictory on the front?
as opposed to commercialism/marketing/etc
I guess the autor deliberately intended to have no deliberate intention in mind while painting.
Also, the author somehow "allows" the pictures to cause feelings in the viewer, but says that he/she removes him/herself from the equation. But I think he/she is a viewer of his/her own pictures while drawing it. There is definitely some feedback going on.
So one improvement could be to draw without looking at the output.
But maybe the best way to go here is to computer-generate some pictures. And one is also not allowed to hand-pick a generated picture. And one should have nothing in mind while writing that computer program.
https://www.pinterest.de/pin/brobot-desktop-robot-arm-is-pra...
I like the idea though, and it does take the artist a little further away.
- "He or she also did paint something aesthetically pleasing so there seems to be a lot of intention on that part as well."
Sorry, you're probably wrong on both assumptions. Playing with viewers is not common and is a genre thing. Aesthetic pleasantness is also not a required requisite of an art piece and as an intention may stand in conflict with honest self-expression.
The artworks on the linked page are similar enough in style that it's obvious something within the artist dictated them.
The question is whether there is conscious intent, and what that intent is. Lots of people create art just to create something they find beautiful, with no other meaning intended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_phenomenon
> The ideomotor phenomenon is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously.
> The phrase is most commonly used in reference to the process whereby a thought or mental image brings about a seemingly "reflexive" or automatic muscular reaction, often of minuscule degree, and potentially outside of the awareness of the subject. As in responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively with an ideomotor effect to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34507844
> Even humans draw many things that they don't understand. If we draw something that we completely don't understand (such as through random scribbling) we don't even call it a representation. It's a fluke. I used to scribble and then trace images in my scribbling (if possible). Often I ended up tracing things that looked like a child's bad drawing of Donald Duck, but once, without having to trace particular lines at all, my scribbling was a perfect seeming of a rose flower (with some minor additional flourishes). I recognized the rose flower, but I certainly didn't set out to draw it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
Personally I think an artist without intention would not interest me, though I agree that his intent is not necessarily of greater significance than the viewer's reaction.
It has to be noted though that it is very difficult to "just like" a piece of art for good reasons. Art historically had a function: religious, mystic, political... and we're still stuck with this legacy. The function of art has only recently been deemed to be a raw trigger of raw emotions. For better or for worse, I can't say. Probably both.
It also seems to me that "having nothing in mind" is polysemic and I'd be interested in knowing which prevails or how they coexist for the artist. "I had no intention", "I had no goal" and "My mind was blank" (is it even possible?) draw 3 very different intentions.
Again, it's a very interesting approach. One might argue that it is too formalized, elaborate and sophisticated of an approach only to claim that the creation process is "with nothing in mind", but I don't think that the intensity of the concept and the outcome have to align in all points. The only certainty. here is that it cannot be categorized as naive.
Which brings us to the audience. The audience for this project clearly is an educated one, one that met the struggles of having to comment and understand a piece of art and the ridiculous situations and discussions that often ensue to battle over who has the biggest one (brains, I mean).
And look at my own comment... full of gibberish and not a single word on the art pieces themselves. I quite like them though. Shapes, colors, textures, they're beautiful.
I'm indeed not an English native speaker, so I wasn't fully aware of the different possible meanings of 'nothing in mind', but you're right. The German stamp has exactly the same ambiguity, which I thankfully took as a way out of the impossible situation of 'thinking nothing.
It's also very notable that the back of the paintings receives way more attention than the paintings themselves – but I guess that's what HN is all about (and what I like about it!), pondering the intellectual and philosophical problems of not thinking ;-)
I want the artist to use the art to try to connect to me in some way. I don't want it to be a still piece of abstract nothingness that is supposed to only reflect my perception.
May as well be randomly generated noise, or AI art.
Though, it doesn't really matter, because what this artist is claiming is impossible anyway, but I'm glad it is. Their idea is nauseating and gross. My only reaction to this is disgust and revulsion. Maybe that's the point? But I doubt it
However, it's difficult to talk about any artwork without ever discussing an interpretation. By saying "I had nothing in particular in mind", we risk having the opposite effect, that of forbidding any kind of interpretation or discussion. It should be made clear that this means "you are free to interpret", not "there is no interpretation whatsoever".
Finally, a remark: the author is saying they had nothing in particular in mind, but this is not true. Not that they're lying - they are fooling themselves.
Does anyone have a reference price point?
According to Minsky the mind is composed of tiny "components" (which form the "subsconscious" one might say) and only some reach "consciousness" levels of attention.
(Even if I'll have to cross off the stamp on the back after reading it ...)
Gruss aus dem Rheinland ...
"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”
Ref: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp.
I love this definition of art and it's why some of the recent knee-jerk rejection of AI-generated artwork (sometimes citing its inhumanity or lack of human backstory) is premature IMO.
More importantly, that's beautiful art. Thank you for sharing, OP.
To me, it seems like the artist at least has this particular sentiment in mind - if not while doing the physical act of painting, at least at some time before or after, or while sharing the works of art themselves.
To me, I often sense I don't "get" art, because I don't feel anything looking at it, and I am wholly preoccupied with wondering why the artist created what they did, and what they had in mind at the time. To me... that's what art is. Wholly contradicting what this particular artist defines it as.
Who is right?
When you say "that" you appear to disagree with the quote.
I also don't know what to think about AI-generated art yet, either. All of my paintings, I just keep painting until I have the feeling that they're finished. But: in my head, don't I simply remix previous things I saw and found beautiful, pigment and scratch movements that worked well, and all these things? Where's the difference? :-)
(I enjoy the act of smearing paint on canvasses, which makes a lot of difference for me – and there is no prompt.)
I do this first as a form of therapy and don’t care to display or show the world my works as I feel knowing there was an audience would interfere with my process, would make me more self conscious perhaps wanting to please a perceived audience. I applied the same philosophy to music making.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_N... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marcel_Duchamp,_1912,_Le_...
> “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”
That's Tolstoy's definition, and it's basically the one I stick with because it filters out the most things that don't seem to be art, and leaves the most things in which seem to be. It's an ad hoc, imperfect definition, but to me it's better than the one that says "anything is art, and art means whatever I want it to".
In terms of interpretation, I believe most art is open to a pretty wide range of interpretations, and you can make a strong case for the meaning to be something other than the most literal reading. Artists have subconscious minds too. But, in my opinion there are wrong interpretations, and the easiest ones to identify are ones that have no textual evidence ("Macbeth is actually about radio astronomy") so I don't agree with statements like:
> I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong.
Because where does that leave us? A world where art has a lot less value because it can just be anything to anybody. If it can mean anything, it effectively means nothing. Hard to find common ground or have a shared cultural language when you operate like that.
To recapitulate, they had in mind creation of a work with no intrinsic meaning.
Accidental art, if it is possible, has been of interest to me for a decade or so; my conclusion (limited as it is) is that it is not art.
However, finding an object and imbuing it with meaning is an artistic endeavour, so if the painter were able to produce work devoid of intrinsic meaning then it would become art if a person finds the work and imprints a meaning on it. Quintessential postmodernity, I guess.
It's an interesting area. It reminds me of reading a poet's reaction to reading an analysis an educational organisation had applied to that poet's work: you know the sort of thing 'the poet used the darkness of the sky to highlight the sense of foreboding of the hero'. The poet did not recognise any of their motivations in the analysis that was (IIRC) being taught to schoolchildren. Consciously they had been very plain in their approach of recording a (fictional) event ... of course they might have subconsciously made choices in language that would follow the analysis given ...