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Saturday, October 02, 2010

The banality of 'misinterpretation'


We read in the first page of the brochure of the  Martin's Creed show in Fruitmarket Gallery,Edinburgh:

Martin Creed uses ordinary and extraordinary materials to make deceptively simple, direct and compelling work.His paintings, drawings, sculptures,installations,films and music have been described as minimalist, conceptualist and by the artist himself as 'decorative'.Germaine Greer praises his work for its resistance to 'being explained',or being confined to particular meanings: 'He strives for utterances that will not yield an ulterior meaning to even the most dogged (mis)interpreter.'When asked to define what he does, Creed simply states 'I make things'.His primary concern is for the work to be interesting to look at, rather than for it to have a predetermined or fixed meaning.Any verbal interpretation of the artist's work,including this Exhibition Guide,risks misinterpreting it.

What the author of this text essentially claims is that Creed's work is in fact resisting verbal explanation and that any interpretation of it risks misinterpreting it. Following logically this scheme, her interpretation of Creed's work that can be summarized in the phrase,"every verbal interpretation risks misinterpreting it", so it will be either a failed one or a right one (as in any situation which is not predetermined there is also a chance to be right). Two scenarios come out of this:

First, that her interpretation is indeed failing to be the correct one, and thus if we invert her failed statement, the correct statement will go like: "all verbal interpretations do not run the risk of misinterpreting the work" and thus all are correct. But this of course is already forming a paradox since we took for granted the possibility that her interpretation was wrong.

The second scenario is that her interpretation is the correct one and then indeed "any interpretation risks misinterpreting the works". Again here we meet a similar contradiction, as there are possibilities open for the following interpretation to be correct: "interpretations do not run the risks of misinterpreting the works". If both these interpretations are correct then we have a vicious circularity paradox that again renders illogical the author's initial claim.

This indefinability of the art object is indeed an argument that goes back art criticism to the 50's. Of course the whole story lies on the fact that the author is not fully realizing that she is making a meta-commentary on interpretation, which is indeed an active interpretation of the works on the show.

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