do you believe art needs intention or do you fear the audience grappling with the disunity? do you fear that ambiguous art has a chance to hurt someone, and if only every aspect had an explanation you could be sure you did it right?
- she/her
Recently appeared on this plane. Last seen: Posting (in a serif font) and/or casting spells. my icon and header image are turned around on purpose actually its not like i dont know how to fix it or anything. my age is private information but if you feel the need to know it presume i'm somewhere between 18 and the age you are and treat me accordingly
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in reply to @bigstuffedcat's post:
intention may be overrated but also i am not fully separable from my art any more than i am anything else i do in this world
yeah absolutely! honestly i wish the Art Thinky Culture around me talked about less about intention as kind of the be-all end-all and more about voice, specifically the kind of voice you're talking about that's an unavoidable product of the circumstances of creation
i've been meaning to write a big complaint about the intentist manifesto for about a decade now, voice is a good way to explore alternatives
do i fear any of that? no.
all those things will happen. someone will read something and get the wrong idea, no matter what idea i present.
ambiguous art, by its name, will have many interpretations and you can't clamp down on every single niche thing you might accidentally invoke.
but there's ways to clamp down the big, easy to trigger harmful stuff. tiny optimizations in wording and such to make things cleaner, and clearer.
I've thought about this and adjacent topics on my blog before. The two posts that come to mind especially are this post examining art made with clear intention and this post examining art made without clear intention.
My immediate response, though, when the question is phrased in this particular way, is that I was unable to write the book I always wanted to write until I stopped worrying about whether it would make sense to everyone, i.e., even to its worst critics and most cynical interpreters. I decided to write for people who wanted to listen, regardless of whether I understood my own emotions and intentions clearly or not, and I feel a lot better for doing so.
I still do my best to communicate as clearly as I can, because I still see communication (and therefore art) as a two-way street, but I no longer view myself as needing to be perfect before I have permission to express the things I wish to express.