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A wide thread about the idea of 'Ideology' in works of art

All Acting Regiment

14:05 / 06.02.08

Basically, I've got a number of thoughts about this topic at the moment which I'll introduce in different posts. Feel free to add anything relevant or take the discussion off in new directions as long as it's to do with the basic themes.

Basically I was wondering whether this - which I've lost the source for now, but it's been pestering me - stands as an argument:

'All works of art have ideological potential, but because context determines what this is, it is impossible to accurately say that a piece has any one ideology without mentioning in which context the work is being produced, read or reproduced.'

21:08 / 06.02.08

I'm having difficulty thinking about it because I automatically want to exchange the word "ideology" with "meaning"; art has the potential for meaning according to context- the death of the author, bricolage rather than true encoded meaning, differAnce etc. (but I don't want to get bogged down too soon)

but I think, probably erroneously, ideology connotes a more deliberately constructed complex of meanings and brings about a tension between the concept of an intentionally encoded authorial ideology and the idea of ambient cultural ideologies that may be acting upon the artist, the reader and the methods which might be used to display or reproduce the work.

Another concern is that the term "all works of art" seems to contain a suggestion that art takes the form of objects, not that art objects signify art in some way. That seems strange to me because on the one hand the statement references the production of meaning according to context but also contains this (deliberate or not) bias toward object based art and the intrinsic potential for meaning in the object. I think what I mean is that there is another tension between the idea of intrinsic potential and contextual emergence. Also; why is it only all works of art that have this potential, what about art which is yet to be framed? i.e. do objects which are not art not contain the same potential for ideology that art does?

02:39 / 07.02.08

do objects which are not art not contain the same potential for ideology that art does?

good question. my bed is at home and not made. tracey emin is famous (among other reasons!) for saying to curators who wanted to construct her piece, something along the lines of'when anyone else does it, it's just an unmade bed, but when i do it, its fucking art'. but why then isn't my bed not art?

now, one wonders just what is it about the bed, the 'object', as you posit it, sideweyes, that inherently contains this ideology - or is it something in the act of creating the art (and then the context in which that art was created, or later any aspect of the object's history) which contains the ideology potential of all acting regiment's question.

i dunno, btw, i just rekkun its a good question. is this the sort of direction, AAR, you were headed?

by the by, i have been involved in a discussion on a local issues site where i live about graffiti - tag or art, more or less, has been the debate. it has raised the hackles of a number of citizens in my community who view this as vandalism and suggest all manner of retribution be visited upon the perpetrators and i have been surpirsed at the vitriol. (for the record, the piece that initiated the thread was for mine a 'tag', pretty but a tag, and was an example of some great craft, but i guess this is not the kind of aspect this thread is about) just thought to point out that discussions on art seem to bring with them a lot of emotion and often little agreement on just what is at discussion - not that this thread is such an example, but something to clarify and keep in mind, mebbe, if we discuss contentious examples.

19:14 / 09.02.08

well it's also a great example of how context is critical, not just in the interpretation of art but also in the very act of its creation.

In today's art climate the artist has the power to take a mundane item, and through the magic quality of hir art education, make it art by recontextualising it into a different space, both physically and conceptually (just like Emin above).

Jeff Koons is a big one for doing that. His art sometimes takes the form of unaltered artefacts from the advertising industry. By taking these items away from their usual habitat and placing them in a gallery he forces us to reconsider them and the ideologies ( i would rather say mythologies to keep it real to my buddy Barthes...) that are evident through examining them. In my opinion this is done unironically. Koons isn't sniping at mainstream culture, he's asking us to look again, using that common duchampian context trick to puncture our casual acceptance of the mundane.

04:34 / 18.03.08

Perhaps it is the conceit of 'space'. A Gallery is an 'art space', in the same way that a stage-with-audience is a 'theatre space'. When an everyday object (read: 'bed', or 'tank', or 'naked humans' = object) is placed in a Gallery space, we-as-observer must reflect on said object in a new way. So, my 'bed' also becomes a symbol/subject to be viewed and contemplated by said observer.

I suppose that any object placed in a new such 'space' becomes an 'art object', be it a play or a sculpture or a piece of furniture; it becomes a thing that is meant to be viewed and interpolated, instead of simply existing.

13:39 / 16.04.08

Interesting - we can make the mundane into art by recontextualizing it physically or conceptually (i have a small, empty, unlabelled, globular, glass mustard jar on my mantle which i am particularly fond of), and (not exactly inverse, but a fun juxtaposition nonetheless) we can gallery-ize the mundane by adorning it artistically (with "tags" and "writing", for instance).

Art is always ideological in some sense, whether concious, sub_, or un_. Hell, the ACT of creating art is itself ideological: reflective of all sorts and degrees of concepts of selfhood and expression, anthropocentricity, attempts to shape or offend aesthetic ideals, and so on, ad nauseum. We can declare the "end of ideology" until we're pink in the face, but, in practice, there's no escaping it . . .