Me:
I try to get out and they pull me back in: :-)
…art is a subjective communication between the artist, the artwork and the observer…
You can restrict yourself to this threesome. But why do that when the issue, subjectivity’s trump outside of school grading, reaches beyond that triad, as I’ve argued?
In theory, and I stress in theory, the author’s intention is just another opinion about his work. Once it’s released, his creation has an autonomous existence and belongs to the world. Another may understand the work better than its creator, see elements and relations among the parts, see more deeply into the characters and their conflicts, see the poetry of the language, the imagery, symbolism, and mythic patterns and resonances and so on, better than the author. As a practical matter what the author says he intended of course counts, but it’s not determinative.
A friend once sent me a poem he’d written and I made a point about it that arose concretely from the poem, ie, it wasn’t fanciful, and he said that that simply hadn’t occurred to him.
A nice analogy here is the legal theory of originalism. In its early modern conception, it held that constitutional and statutory language had to be understood in light of what the drafters intended. Most of this involved getting into dead peoples’ heads. The potent refinement involved replacing that surmising exercise with the communicative content or the language in question, the exploration of which has roots deep in historical usage and linguistic analysis. There’s a lot more to be said about originalism but for the point I’m making about literary works and authorial intention, this will suffice.
In the innovation in academic literary criticism in mid twentieth century called the New Criticism, which was the critical doctrine I studied literature under, the argument at its extreme was precisely that you don’t need historical context to get the work. In its autonomous existence, you need to attend to its aesthetic properties to get it, needing scholarship only to explain language and historical archaisms where necessary, like the explanatory footnotes in an edition of a Shakespeare play. There’s a lot to this idea but taken too far it becomes reductive because it crowds out contexts that facilitate and enrich understanding. But it’s my position that they’re usually secondary, however helpful, to the analysis of the work by means of its own aesthetic properties. I’ll agree that exceptions exist. Guernica may well be one. I don’t think For Whom the Bell Tolls is. Portraits that are now part of the visual art canon aren’t either, I’d argue.
So, I’m of two minds about your saying without context we can’t fully access the work and what the artist was trying to communicate. Appreciating the Mona Lisa is helped I agree by knowing the circumstances of its creation and how da Vinci’s life may form part of those circumstances. But, on my view of intention, all those circumstances bow to looking hard and knowingly at the work and thereby seeing what’s in it and how and what it projects. So while history and biography help, the truly indispensable context is the larger aesthetic tradition, its principles and techniques, within which da Vinci worked.
T.S. Eliot in his famous seminal essay Tradition and the Individual Talent argues for and explores the tradition in which the literary artist works and the reciprocal relation between it and his individual work both, if you will, dialectically affecting each other and finding synthesis in what the new work brings to the tradition. Harold Bloom overdoes and romanticizes this point in his argument that great literary artists create under an anxiety of influence.
So I disagree that one can’t understand the examples you cite without knowing the history that gives them particular moment. If great art is universal, as I think it is, then one without the historical understanding of your examples, may understand the works better than someone who has it but has a lesser aesthetic appreciation of what’s comprising the work. And one without the historical understanding and without the refined critical eye may yet still feel the emotional power of the works more fully than the former two. Ideally, that’s how artistic criticism of a kind ought go, the engaged experience compelling the individual and then the individual, if he wants to, thinking about and analyzing the work to get at its meaning and its means.
So all this said, I’ll just restate my point, a work will be best understood by the best understanding and apprehension of its content, in or out of school. School translates engaging art into a discipline. And in or out of school, a work’s content demands to be respected, demands to be adhered to, and in its particularity, ie, its parts adding up to its coherent fullness, it provides the ground for judging what is right and what is wrong in the engaged’s articulation of his subjective response.
