Interpretive Bias

Interpretation and description
Interpretations are inferred from the artifact

Descriptions are of perceptions of the artifact that “elicit universal agreement from audiences familiar with the medium” [Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

It seems clear that interpretation adds value to the experience of a work of art. Description without interpretation cannot allow us to ascribe meaning to symbolic dispositions or narrative constructions- at least in the visual arts: without interpretation the use of historical context and genre in our understanding of a work of art cannot allow us insight into the work’s meaning. And any investigation into the work’s genesis and the intention of the artist in producing it requires an effort of interpretation that involves processing the collected descriptive qualities through a set of cultural values. If we would give a work a meaning within the context of human existence, we must attempt to perform actions on the work that redeem it to our own consciousness as if we were experiencing the work. This is an act of interpretation, and an act only possible in cultural terms: that is to say, immaterial terms. Interpretation is what is done to the materials collectable in descriptions.

Intention and interpretation
One amongst several strands
of interpretive meaning (which also includes historical context, genre
context, iconology, narrative interpretation), ascriptions of artistic
intention by the viewer can greatly add value to a work. Sometimes this
is undertaken as a project by a viewer who has already enjoyed a piece
and wants to know more about how the artwork came to be how it is,
sometimes it is undertaken as a project in trying to recover the
passage of meaning through a complex work where interpretation is
useful. [ A metaphor of tracking comes to mind: it is easier to
track someone who has an objective we can readily ascribe to them than
it is to track someone who is arbitrarily wandering. We try to achieve
such an advantage by “getting inside the mind” of the quarry: a
strategy that has been very successful in tracking the world over. It
is also a sort of creative empathy that I think has some cultural
significance. I digress… ]

“Tracking” the mind of the artist will often lead us to red herrings
(I mis-typed “read herrings”, there, which would probably stand, too).
And there are powerful reasons not to rely upon the recovery of
artistic intention as a means of guiding interpretation. We’re too
easily misled, and the successful implementation of intention shows up
in the work anyway.

But artists are not naïve about this. Artists have been creating
personae and laying false trails for a long time. There has long been a
culture of intention that has empowered some artists and frustrated
others, and I think has been one of the ways in which fine art has
tried to distinguish itself from craft and design: a distinction which
has always been reacted with by practitioners in the fields with strong
senses of artistic or political direction.

“Direction”…”False trails”…the tracking metaphor continues…

And artists have been quite savvy about bracketing intention in the media they choose too…
Intention and Book Art
My
(admittedly undeveloped) thought is that artists have developed
practices whereby they try to reinforce the milieu of the individual
work of art by creating systemic forces within their oeuvre. Sometimes
this takes the form of belonging to a school or movement. Sometimes an
elaborate formalism, sometimes a dogged banging on the same drum for
years and years and years. Sometimes the medium itself can act as a
pocketing device that can act as a temporary structure that allows the
rules and devices of the individual work to exist in a space
temporarily set aside from its context in some ways: film can do this-
framing itself does this- and so do books. I think that artists want
their track to be read- that they will go to some lengths to produce
artefacts that formalise their boundaries, the better to be seen as the
work of an individual and powerful point of view.

To be continued…and possibly revised beyond recognition…