When the American painter Jackson Pollock turned away from figurative art in 1938, especially as a result of the development of his "dripping" technique in 1947 and the presentation of his concept of action painting, which culminated in his work "Convergence" in 1952, he was the object of fierce criticism in which some experts labeled his work as "anti-art". However, he is considered one of the most important authors of American plastic art today.

 

The rupture with figurative art and with the classical concepts of the academy on behalf of many artists of his generation led some critics to consider seriously the possibility of the "death of art". Moreover, even some artists such as Andy Warhol came to think that the "artistic work" was a concept "of the past".

 

Rational Kantian thought held the thesis that, in painting, the true bearer of beauty is the form. On the contrary, colors are a mere charm, that is, a sensitive emotionality that is subjective and therefore has nothing to do with artistic or aesthetic creation.

 

However, this way of thinking, fruit of its time, did not reach the intuition of art as a mean of communication between the artist and the immense emotional and unconscious baggage of each one of the spectators of the work, who reconfigure it from the intuition of their own unique and unrepeatable emotional experience.

 

Paul Ricoeur, one of the great thinkers of the literary criticism known as Hermeneutics, explains in his Writings and Lectures that the literary work (although in this case the concept can be extended to the artistic work in general) has three different stages. The prefiguration, where the artist devises the work he intends to make; the configuration, which is the final result of the artist's work (with all the conscious or unconscious variations that differentiate it from his "ideal" work) and finally the reconfiguration of the work, in which the artist no longer participates, because it is the spectator who receives it and makes it pass through the sieve of his sensibility, experience, and imagination to recreate it.

Brecht with Helene Weigel on the roof of the Berliner Ensemble during the International Workers' Day demonstrations in 1954. (Berlin, Germany). [web image]

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Thus, the concept of the artwork is in no way linked to the classical concepts of harmony (beauty, truth, goodness). However, by what means, does a "work" possess its identity as a work? Ricoeur, Gadamer, and Brecht would agree that its identity would depend greatly on what each spectator actively produces through his or her active emotional and spiritual participation, for as we have seen, the co-player is also part of the game.

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Then, is the artistic work whatever the viewer wants to interpret? The answer is "no." Every game, as well as every artistic work,  has a framework or structure and rules that we will label "convention". When Dostoyevsky describes a dark staircase twisting to the left, he means exactly that. No one can interpret the staircase as "straight" or "luminous". However, the image of that staircase that each reader visualizes in his mind may vary in form and meaning, so that each reader is convinced that he sees the "right" staircase.

 

This issue, which would delight Wittgenstein, was nicely identified by Roman Ingarden, who speaks about "points of indeterminacy". Every poetic trope leaves a free space that the creative imagination of the reader fills, following the linguistic evocation of the narrator, giving rise to polysemy in art.

 

When studying Todorov and the Russian formalist school one faces the dilemma: how does a vacuum cleaner manual differ from a literary text? The answer has to do with the "estrangement factor" (Ostrasnanie) of language. The vacuum cleaner manual should be univocal, with only one possible meaning, e.g. "do not plug in underwater" should be understood as such and in no other way. Nevertheless, when confronted with the symbolic language of art, the possibilities of the symbol are full of different interpretations. This is the challenge that the consumer of the artistic work assumes. That is why one cannot go to a museum or gallery and leave unscathed. The spiritual enjoyment of art appreciation is directly proportional to our creative rapport with the work of each artist.

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Even when watching the work of a figurative author such as Velázquez; for example, if when we observe the equestrian portrait of Charles V we only see the imitation of nature (the "photograph" of a man on a horse), in reality, we have seen nothing. It is necessary to observe the background, the gaze, the attitude of the emperor ("in my kingdom the sun never sets"), the folds of the bridle. In short, we must detect the symbols, the poetic tropes that elevate art beyond the representation of nature. Because the difference between an oil portrait and a photograph is that the latter reproduces what the naked eye sees, while a painting records precisely what the eye cannot capture.