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ambiguous systems of meaning II
MetaFilter post griping about the the Mayday Mystery texts.
"If I had money I would offer a reward to anyone who can demonstrate that the ads refer to anything other than themselves. Anyone can go to a library and clip passages from books and periodicals to make a collage of disparate meanings. The reader will then bring his own context to the work and will find meanings in it ... I actually think that the ads are shallow and that the whole thing ... is either a somewhat mean-spirited prank or a symptom of insanity."
I'd quibble with the wording here: it's obvious that the ads "refer to [things] other than themselves"—being (at least in part) a collage of images and texts the ads (at the very minimum) refer back to the source texts. But I think what the author here is expressing is doubt that the ads can be "solved" in such a way that yields a coherent statement about the world. This complaint raises a good question: does an amibiguous system of meaning need to have a decodable worldview behind it in order to be worthy of attention?
Frankly, I lean towards "no." Even if the Mayday Mystery system is ultimately undecodable, there are undeniable aesthetic pleasures to be gleaned from it. I enjoy being immersed into the welter of a thickly-referential text, just on the level of the individual reference: even if the references don't "add up" into a statement they still point me towards areas of knowledge that I'm not proficient in; they remind me of the immensity, complexity, and, ultimately, the unknowability of the world as a whole, which, for me, is a pleasing reminder. (I'd rather live in a world that was infinitely, richly unknowable rather than one that could be rather easily "solved.")
It also seems undeniable that the Mayday texts aren't wholly random: on at least some level there is a human consciousness selecting and arranging this material (regardless of whether it is in accord with an internally consistent "plan" or not), and thus it allows me a glimpse into the subjective consciousness of another human being, which is one of the things that art is able to do. As for dismissing the work on the grounds that it might be a "product of insanity," I'd have to admit that whether an artistic subjectivity is generally considered "sane" or "insane" is not particularly important to me: we all know that the line between the two is more akin to a large, diffuse grey area. Furthermore, if we accept that one of the things that makes art valuable is its ability to expose us different points of view, then certainly artworks that help us gain access to "insane" points of view—those most different from our own—are more valuable, not less.
For instance: artist Paul Laffoley, whose diagrammatic artworks are a kind of cousin to the Mayday texts, is rumored to have struggled with mental illness, but this does not make his pieces any less beautiful or compelling, nor does the fact that I can't figure them out, nor does the fact that I'm not even certain that there's anything "there" to "figure out" at all.
(I'd also say, by the way, that just because a piece of art is "a symptom of insanity" doesn't automatically mean that it hasn't also been built according to a discernible plan. Schizophrenics often seem able to maintain worldviews that adhere to a kind of consistent internal logic: the problem comes when they find out that that worldview is incongruent with that of the culture that surrounds them.) Labels: art, knowledge |
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
3:46 PM
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