Yuning "Anona" Yang

2019/12/03

Walking through the corridor set up in an art installation “Hub” by the artist Do Ho Suh according to the rooms in his childhood home in Korea, the transition between the orange room to the blue room reminded me of my transition from China to USA as an international student. I felt like I went back to my home, standing inside the old house in my hometown, the place that I had lived in until the age of 10. In a trance, dim yellow light struggled to permeate into the room through the closed curtains. Nervously, I was looking at the ceiling when a trace of noisy sounds of people talking coming from the street entered my ear. The noise grew louder and louder, as if they might break into my room in the next second—I was too young to know about the existence of auditory hallucination that came together with my fever. My grandmother entered the room in response to my anxious calling and lay beside to comfort me.

As the mist of memory floated away, the reticulated shape of diaphanous polyester that comprised “Hub” created a delicate distance between the reality and me. Through the dreamlike “transparent” walls, my eyes saw the outside world in an ambiguous way. My brain was no longer able to distinguish between the reality and my own memory. Thus, in my brain, a distortion occurred; by the form of installation, the passages of “Hub” invited me to turn into an insider of the artist’s mind and use my sensory feedback to understand his way of presenting and record my own experiences forming my personal interpretation. At this moment, the artist’s and my identities blended into one. Although I am not the artist, the artwork he presented triggered a shared experience of changing dwelling places as a form of migration that belonged to both him and me. As both an internal (moved to another city within a country) and an international “immigrant” (student abroad), I seemed to be able to “correctly” receive the message sent out by the artwork, to feel and think about the step-by-step motion of crossing the threshold between the two rooms, which symbolized the shifts in living environment and the process of changing identities. As we grow older from the past “version” of ourselves to the future ones, we are enhancing the new culture in the new environment and becoming more mature (Suh 2017). If lots of people had experienced a change in their living environment, so as a commonality in personal experiences that they shared with the artist, it would open the gate of understanding the artwork; the artist’s expression could be conveyed more smoothly. But is a commonality between the artist and the audience necessary for the artist’s expression in the artwork to be conveyed correctly? Or to say, is that expression necessary to be conveyed correctly and is the audience’s interpretation necessary to be in the “right way”?

In Dianne Arbus’s photographs, marginalized groups including freaks, mad people, suburban couples, and nudists, are photographed within a familiar daily settings in black and white pictures, suggesting “a world in which everybody is an alien—hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships;” by that, she was trying to highlight the importance of proper presentation of all human beings (Sontag 1973). As discussed by Susan Sontag in her essay “Freak Show”, she claimed Arbus was trying to express “a desire to violate her own innocence, her sense of being privileged” and to reveal the “adversity” in “crippled identities” that she had never felt in her childhood (1973). Arbus, as an outsider of adversity who didn’t share commonality with her subjects—the freak people in the world of adversity—interpreted the adversity by the queasiness in freak people and hoped the audience to see the equivalency she was making among her subjects (Sontag 1973). However, opposite from her expectation, her audience—outsiders of adversity as well—perceived her subjects as something disgusting. More cruelly, Arbus’s way of approaching photographya towards “unknown ahistorical secret lives” of marginal groups, deviating from the society’s mainstream values of beauty, was seen as voyeuristic by the public; she was criticized as unethical to photograph other people’s incurable pain. In Arbus’s experiment of exploring the world of adversity as an insider, the public’s missing commonality of experiences in the world of adversity seemed to create an abyss that puts Arbus’s expression unreachable at the other side. In Sontag’s opinion, Arbus’s work had been misunderstood and the public was using a wrong strategy to approach those photographs; the public is focusing too much on content rather than perceiving the content and form as a whole (1964). But how can the public know what the “right strategy” is? What is the real problem, this “bad habit” of interpretation or the missing commonality in personal experiences, that is resulting the abyss between artist’s intention and audiences’ interpretation? In fact, is there a “right strategy” existing for interpreting art?

In Sontag’s theory, what really happened here was people judging disgusting freaks. People are “expressing their lack of response” due to “dissatisfaction with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.” (Sontag 1964). Sontag, as an existentialist, believes art is mainly about personal sensory experiences and when people are looking at arts, they should“show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than show what it means.” (1964). In Sontag’s critique, the public was exactly trying to show what Arbus’s photographs means by judging their content of freak people. Instead, through the same form of coloring in black and white, including freaks, mad people, suburban couples, and nudists at the same time, and positioning the subject to face the camera directly with dignity, Arbus’s expression of making equivalences between all her subjects can be seen (Sontag 1973).

My way of interpreting “Hub”is consistent with the method of “sensory experience” that Sontag was recommending. “Hub”’s content of living places and form of installation as passageways are both included in my process of sensory interaction. Arbus’s photographs were actually like “Hub”, inviting audiences to “step” inside and briefly experience the freak’s world, except the photographs were not in the form of installation that people could physically walk through as an insider. For an artwork, there’s always a delicate distance created by the subject of the artwork that the artist is presenting, since the world enclosed by the artwork about the subject won’t always be the reality that the audience are living in. For Arbus’s photographs, this delicate distance provides an opportunity for the audience to get a taste of the freak world as an insider and then come out as an outsider to think about the relationships between both worlds. However, problems may occur during this process. The delicate distance between the two worlds may be mis-controlled by the artist; standing in the inside world of the artwork, the audience may find the ambiguity in the outside world as something they are not able to understand. The artwork is ineffable to them, but if people still try to interpret the ineffable meaning by clear language as if the artwork indeed has an intention that is necessary to be conveyed to the audience, they are doing exactly in the way that Sontag was criticizing on—they are only focusing on the content. But why does that method of only focusing on content “wrong”?

When people are interpreting the artwork only based on the content, they may easily get the artist’s ideas wrong. And that is dangerous. If an artwork expressing the idea of peace is misunderstood to be aggressive, the political influence this misunderstanding will spread may be hard to resolve. By “Freak Show”, Sontag was making a point of misinterpretation had become a common bad habit of modern people when they were dealing with arts. Sontag further explained the problem of misinterpretation in regards to art in another essay “Against Interpretation” that “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.” (Sontag 1964). Art used to be high and scarce, when few people would like to challenge the interpretation of art because the move of interpretation was seen as revolutionary and creative (Sontag 1964). As the society develops, people become more knowledgeable and more intelligent. They assume they know a lot, which in fact they don’t; they overlook their ignorance and become conceited in dealing with arts. “Whether artists intend, or don’t intend, for their works to be interpreted” is not important anymore since people will interpret anyway to enjoy the process of taming an artwork and showing off their intelligence. (Sontag 1964). “In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone…By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.” (Sontag 1964). Sontag also states in the same article that “to understand is to interpret.” (1964). Since human perceive new things upon the basis of the previous knowledge they have, in the process of understanding, we are actually taking in our values shaped by the cultural backgrounds we have and our personal experiences. To understand the transitions of identities presented by “Hub”, I revisited my experience of migration and the values I had towards home. The process of recalling my childhood memory and then coming back to reality helped me to think about my growth and changes from a child to a young adult. But if I leave the artwork alone without the personal experience, it is only two small houses connected together that I can walk through as a passageway; I can’t even accomplish the process of sensory experience that Sontag is saying. I am not the artist, so I can never truly understand what this artwork means in his life, so I need my personal experiences to work as an association that helps me understand the artwork. My interpretation might not be what the artist is trying to convey, but it is the only way that I can use to understand it. Meanwhile, based on Suh’s artistic statement explaining his themes of home and identities, my own way of interpretation combining my personal experiences offers me unique insights and new experiences that will be different from any others: I felt how the cultures in the three cities that I had lived in influenced me, I thought about how I should interact with the cultures that I was going to encounter, and I could tell how I missed the people and places existed in my memories; it’s all inspirations about the relationship between the reality and myself. Artwork becomes manageable when I take in my personal experiences; and with my insights, the original value of the artwork extents under my interpretation.

Sontag assumes that art may not be manageable in structural interpretation and artists may not intend their works to be interpreted. In other words, some art is not necessarily to be interpreted and it may even can’t be interpreted. Why is that? Like the high arts in the past, Sontag assumes that interpreting arts requires great intelligence. But art is not meant only for people with greater intelligence; everyone deserves the right to enjoy arts. When people are looking at arts, they have the natural desire to understand what they are looking at, so they start the process of interpretation. We can’t devalue people’s rights to look at artworks only because they can’t interpret in “appropriate” ways. Art, in Sontag’s eyes, changes “morals—that body of psychic custom and public sanctions that sets a vague boundary between what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not.” (1973). Since art has its social meaning on changing morals, no matter the artists want it to be interpreted or not and no matter the art has a meaning or not, arts would always be somehow conveying values. Therefore, although Arbus said “I would never choose a subject for what it meant to me when I think of it” that she presumed “the viewers are not supposed to judge the people she photographs”, Sontag still said “of course, we do; and the very range of Arbus’s subjects itself constitutes a judgment,” admitting art always has an arena of arguments (Sontag 1973).

When people are looking at art, they want a sense of involvement with the argument that art is conveying. Through the process of interpretation, they are using their personal experiences and values to assign a meaningful value to the artwork. If the commonality of personal experiences is essential for expression, the dissatisfaction people may have is caused by the missing commonality. Without a resonance with the artwork, people can hardly connect themselves to the expression. As Sontag stated in “Freak Show” that art is a “self-willed test of hardness,” art is a test of how well the audience’s values can bear the artist’s values (1973). The extent of the consistency determines the understanding the audience can have towards the artist’s intention and how enjoyable the artwork is to the audience.

Unlike Arbus, Steve McCurry’s photographs are quite welcomed among his audience. In Teju Cole in his essay “A Too-Perfect Picture”, he comments that McCurry’s photographs are too idealized. McCurry’s Taj Mahal And Train In Arga was used as an example. The photo was taken in 1983, presenting an ideal image of India in foreigners’ eyes: “the Taj Mahal is in the background, a stream train is in the foreground and two men ride in front of the engine, one of them crouched, white-bearded and wearing a white cap, the other in a loose fitting brown uniform and a red turban.” (Cole). McCurry photographed a series of photos under the theme of India to “evoke an earlier time in Indian history, as well as old ideas of what photographs of Indians should look like, what the account rents of their lives should be”—the “vanishing cultures” in India. In Cole’s eyes, McCurry  intended to present the “most authentic form” of India culture and all McCurry’s subjects “have been chosen for how well they work as types.” (Cole). By comparison with Rughubir Singh, whose photographs are about the “messiness” in daily life, this “too perfect” picture of McCurry is presented in an inappropriate way.

Cole seems to be criticizing McCurry’s way of presentation as too perfect to be true, but what Cole is actually criticizing is his interpretation of McCurry’s intention of photographs, which is the commonality Cole finds in McCurry’s photographs, instead of McCurry’s interpretation of McCurry’s own intention—the commonality McCurry finds in India that he wants to present to the audience. Cole, as an outsider of McCurry’s mind, is criticizing McCurry as an outsider. When he is invited into McCurry’s world of “India,” by what he had known of India, he sees stereotypical perfection. But he said that “the uniqueness of any given country is a mixture not only of its indigenous practices and borrowed customs but also of its past and its present” and “any given photograph encloses only a section of the world within its borders.” (Cole). In fact, art creation is itself a process of interpretation. The “section” of the world presented by the artists is where they find the associations between their artworks and themselves. McCurry set the distance between India and the foreigners to be more distant to interpret the perfection that he saw in India, while Singh set the distance to be more closer to interpret the her associations with the daily life in India; their approaches towards presenting India are different in perspectives, but are all valid presentations. Since artists have the freedom of choosing subjects, they also have the freedom in the process of creating art through their own ways of interpretation. So do the audience. People interpret the different associations they find in the artwork; since different people see different associations in arts, that “abyss” of understanding artworks discussed in Sontag’s critique is actually caused by the “abyss” among different associations that people choose.

Similar to Cole, Sontag is criticizing the public as an outsider of their minds. The visual experience that public got out of Arbus’s photographs can all be considered as sensory experiences under Sontag’s definition. Sontag has no point of limiting people’s freedom to only look at the content; and how does she know the public hadn’t include the form into consideration? I don’t know either, but how to interpret is their freedom. Arbus, similar to McCurry in Cole’s eyes, is telling the story of a typical section of adversity in the world as an outsider. If Arbus changed her subject from freak people to people under the common cognition of beauty, the audience wouldn’t feel so disgusted and might not criticize the possible voyeurism she was presenting.  But only this subject is the section of the world she wanted to see and the world she wanted to be an insider of. She wanted her audience to not judge the freak people in her photographs but feel them as one of them. Although we still judge those people, but since she has her freedom to choose the “section” of the world that she wants to present, we also have the freedom to see her subjects from the “section “of the artwork that we find associations to understand.

Cole states in his essay that we don’t cry “appropriation” “whenever a Westerner approaches a non-Western subject”, or to say whenever an outsider of the artwork (audience) approaches an insider (artist’s presentation of chosen subject in the artwork) (Cole). However, Sontag is saying about not allowing the viewer “any distance from the subject” and the artwork is “entirely based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other”. She is denying the existence of distance between artwork and audience, assuming that audiences should all interpret the artwork exactly as what the artist wants the artwork to be presented. But that’s the process of “appropriation” that Cole is disagreeing with. It is quite impossible the appropriation can really happen because we as the audience don’t necessary have the commonality with the artwork that the artist is associating with her subjects. In Arbus’s photographs, we are strangers; without the commonality, the adversity will never become a part of ourselves. If Sontag forces the audience to see the equivalency, it’s possible that we still can’t see it. In the delicate distance that Arbus’s photographs creates, what Arbus actually did was only make us have the ability to perceive the reality of adversity with a closer view: we now know about their existence. As interpreted by Sontag, Arbus’s method of creating the delicate distance was opposite from the general approach of modern art, which was to “lowering the threshold of what is terrible.” (Sontag 1973). Although those photographs may seen emotionally intolerable, the queasiness in them fills up the abyss between the reality of adversity and us as if we are no longer strangers in the freak people’s world.

Nowadays in museums and galleries, it becomes a custom that we put the artwork’s title, author and artistic statement beside the artwork. Audiences have different approaches to use them. Some read the artistic statement, follow artist’s ideas and recall the commonality by it so that the audience can have connections with their personal experiences to better understand it. Some ignore the artistic statement and interpret the artwork completely on the audience themselves. The others interpret the artwork completely based on the artistic statement. Surprisingly, people’s unique ways of interpretation involving personal experiences sometimes inspire the artist. As Cole said, “some of the most insightful stories about any place can be told by outsiders,” both insiders and outsiders can interpret same subject. So there is no right strategy nor necessity to interpret correctly. Artists may even use those different interpretations as feedback to refine their artworks. In this modern time, as people become more intelligent, not only everyone becomes a critic, but they also become artist as well. After repeating the process of interpretation again and again, people are generating new insights based on existing opinions, extending the legacy of art and creating new values for artworks.

I will never forget the experience that I had in “Hub”. The overwhelming immersion in memory and emotions was so “pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy.” (Sontag 1964). The artist of “Hub”says in his artistic statement that “I see life as a passageway, with no fixed beginning or destination…We tend to focus on the destination all the time and forget about the in-between spaces. But without these mundane spaces…these grey areas, one cannot get from point a to point b.” (2017). The interpretation of art is the same, we don’t need to focus too much on a definite outcome that we “need” to get out of an artwork as the “destination” of our experiences in one specific artwork. What we might do is to pay more attention on the “mundane grey areas” in the “delicate distance” between the world of the artworks and ourselves (the reality) and find inspirations in the transition between the identities of insiders and outsiders. Art isn’t about “correct” interpretations; since everyone has the freedom to generate their own interpretations, the art has different values for different people. When we are standing in front of an artwork come from a distant world, the only thing we can do is to interpret for understanding. Though, as the freedom of opinions is encouraged, interpretations of art can have too much variety and sometimes it can contradict with the artist’s intention, the new hybrid come out of the interpretations is actually the thing that makes art meaningful, which extends the legacy of art in human’s spiritual world as the moral essence.

WORKS CITED

Cole, Teju. “A Too-Perfect Picture.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 Mar. 2016,https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/a-too-perfect-picture.html.

“Do Ho Suh: Passage/s.” Victoria Miro, https://www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/501/.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” 1964.

Sontag, Susan. “Freak Show.” The New York Review of Books, 1973,

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/11/15/freak-show/.
Suh, Do Ho. “Breakfast Corner.” The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. 2018.

Suh, Do Ho. “Entrance.” The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. 2018.