Some Explaining To Do

One thing I wasn't able to do at yesterday evening's Gallery Night was to stand and look intently at a work for a long time. It was just too crowded to do so. That felt like something lost, but not irretrievably so. The artists' work will remain on display for quite some time to come. And being able to hear the artists' own commentaries on their work in some ways made up for the lack of concentrated gazing possible - hearing someone talk about what they've done always seems to intensify the piece for me. The same is true of poetry, and other literary forms, and music.

That begs the question as to whether the commentary, if available, becomes part of the work. I think it does - another blow against the idea of some kind of artistic purity. Even if the audience for an art-work chooses to finally ignore a given commentary it still, in some way, mediates response. I don't think you can read Pound's In a Station of the Metro in the same way once you've read his comments upon writing it, strange and oddly unrevealing as those comments are.

An artist's silence has the virtue of engendering some degree of the enigmatic, assuming a work is not entirely transparent, but I think the enigmatic is in danger of being severely over-rated. The wilfully enigmatic inevitably suggests a desire for something more akin to self-promotion than communication, and that spells death to art.

I suppose we get the best of all worlds when the artist and the critics have done their best to explain it all and it remains gloriously inexplicable.