A possible structure of art interpretations (ostensive visual cues + common context info)

There is plenty of other notes and possible prefaces and explanations I could write out to supplement this, but for now I am posting the result plain and simple to avoid getting caught up in paragraphs.

I also have lost the reason as to why I created this structure (what to call it?), but it has become a sort of basic organizational flow/chart for practical purposes. It really isn't a concept or anything new.

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On the topic of image creation, interpretation, and results of art (by that I mean when an art is "successful" or a "failure", in context of viewer involvement and presentation).

A general example: Someone wants to express their childhood traumas in relation to their family, and paints a family portrait. They wish for the viewer to spot something "off" about it and feel an emotional or intellectual sensation of horror.

The operation is made of two parts: (1) ostensive visual cues (2) common contextual information; and by way of a combination of the two, results in a conclusion that shall be "put through" or "taken from" the art.

Ostensive visual cues are the literal things inside of the artwork's image, or are part of the artwork's material or construction, or some other location that deals with the artwork as a work. 

In this case, the visual cues could be, for instance, that the family is painted in a pose where they are simultaneously distant and awkward, but touching in a strange manner. It can also be a general tone of strangeness, coldness, awkwardness, stiffness, and so on and so forth (the "vibe").

Common contextual information (or 'common context info') are pieces of information or frameworks of knowledge held by the current viewers and artist. Most likely this does not really include information known about the artist, but instead "common sense", at least the common sense of an art-knowing individual. This can include the current cultural sentiments, current mainstream opinions, historical backgrounds; both in regards to art as well as general topics.

In this case, the common context info could be current-day knowledges of trauma, or the effects of trauma studies in the intellectual viewer, and the general consensus on childhood experiences, family expectations, and photo etiquette, trends, and norms. It would also include the canon of art history, specifically in regards to portraiture.

The result of this combination is that, for instance, the viewer looks at the work and picks up on the visual cues, they spot the stiffness, the touching, the dark vibe... The viewer, aware that they are likely looking at a family portrait, combines this observation with the fact that family portraits should look a certain way, and that families should be a certain way, and realize their observation does not align with this. A sense of horror creeps in, or they at least assume it should, and so on and so forth...

In a present-tense, active scenario: The combination of ostensive visual clues and common context info is what the artist is self-aware of, means for, and hopes the viewer to get (in any manner that can occur). It is then what the viewer picks up (or can pick up, if successful).

(It should be noted that the expectation isn't for someone to read the entire operation and "get" all of it, but that at least some part of it should result in the general viewing population, and a part should certainly result in the intellectual-interpreting critical population.)

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The following sections are speculative and I'm not confident in terms of how much sense they make, as I typed it in a daze:

Using this structure, 'less interesting' art that often gets criticized for being too straightforward or too 'easy' fail for the lack of differences, conflicts, or meaningful associations in the combination of items (1) and (2).

An example can immediately be assumed to be, for instance, of a beautiful landscape. However, with this example I argue it isn't as easy to become uninteresting as one would think. E.g.:

An artist wants to represent a beautiful mountain view he saw, so he paints a realistic depiction of it.

The ostensive visual clues of this artwork is the realistic style, the fact that its an evident landscape, the beautiful method of painting, the skill of the painting, and etc. The common context info includes the entire history of landscapes, especially their status (at times or places) of being a highly accepted art form but varying in perceived complexity (at times portraiture was valued more, at times it wasn't, etc.). It would also include, due to the history of art, the highly accepted nature of realistic painting styles.

Therefore, is the landscape not boring? There is no tension in the combination of its cues and context. But I have purposefully left out another piece of context: In the year of 2025, you could depict a landscape with a photograph.

There is tension now, as the artist is going against the idea of a practical solution 'why don't you just take a photo if you want to realistically depict it?'

But this tension is actually not so deep. It is present in many more works of art, or could even be present as a topic of 'why make art at all?', which is so general it may as well apply itself to every little corner of art.

The real tension is in the past mentioned facts, as well as another point: in the year of 2025 art takes on many different forms (by this I mean the same sense that causes people to say 'anything goes nowadays!') and there is always an obsession with pushing boundaries and for 'newness' in various fields, art included. So now, you could ask the artist 'why don't you just make a conceptual work if you want to make something significant?'

But if this attitude is now part of the present-day common context info, and the artist is directly going against it, is this not another source of tension?

And while this tension is still might less dramatic than other examples we could think of, the multiple instances of it, albeit mild, layer onto each other and create an interesting sandwich-style combination.

It is not to say that something needs to be more interesting than the next object (although can we assume across the board, a proper 'interesting' thing has merit?), and it especially doesn't need to by way of this structure. It is not meant to be a formula.

The more examples I plug in, and the more I think on them (I have lost my words so I ceased my typing), the result is very accommodating yet anticlimactic. Essentially, putting aside how the revolutionaries and avant-gardes and rebellious and boundary-pushing people do truly cause innovation, perhaps art lives on in some trudging manner by constantly creating little conclusion sandwiches of various interesting tensions.

In a less dramatic manner, this trudging effect is seen in the interpretation and understanding of artists in history, with the large focus on biographical facts and environmental contexts necessary to 'fully understand' the work. One paints a landscape, and we do not see the visual cues of the artist's internal troubles until we know of them years later (which is the cue and which is the context? Is the context that no one knew at the time, or is the context the troubles themselves? This hints that the structure is either less strict than is thought, or that things just get muddy quite quickly). And then more and more context builds from the progression of time and fields of art history, theory, and just about everything else. It doesn't build and build on top of each other, as if an additive process or necessarily improving/upwards(/any direction), but keeps rotating and shifting and trudging along... perhaps...

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Can this order of operation be seen elsewhere? How about understanding and 'realizations' themselves, e.g. if we take the artist from earlier, how did they understand their family to be "off"?

(1) The ostensive visual cues could be the actual experiences had by the individual, without any interpretation.

(2) The common context info could be the same facts about how a family should be, which the individual might have only learned in full later on.

Thus the combination of the two results in a conclusion that something about their experience was deeply wrong. If they look at old family photos (which seems to want to exist in the same form as ostensive visual cues), and combine it with the common context info, the full understanding, conclusion, or realization had dramatically changes the photos, and we would not say that viewing the photos naively as 'normal' would be correct, we would say they were mistaken or misled, and that the new horrible understanding is the correct one.

Quote from 'The Hidden Order of Art'

"Gombrich's great achievement to have finally broken the 'externality' illusion that had invested the conventional schemata of Western realism with objective reality. (One wonders whether Wittgenstein would have tried to give objective validity to the logical structure of language had he not-- somewhat naïvely-- accepted that the elements of a picture had the desired objective structure, which, of course, they had not.) According to Gombrich the coherence of a picture rests on entirely conventional schemata which the artist has learned to read as though they were as objective and real (realistic) as reality itself. The rules of realistic picture making were the rules of a game played according to certain conventions that were constantly modified like the rules of a game. Had Wittgenstein known Gombrich's ideas he would have been able to synthesize his older 'picture theory' of logical language with his final 'game theory' of language. Understanding the flexible rules of learning to play the game accordingly is all there is to the objectivity of images both in the visual arts and in language."

-- The Hidden Order of Art; Ehrenzweig; pg. 111

Sometimes I think about exactly what a book will eventually say or reference, at least vaguely, and when I see it all connected out of nowhere in a manner far better than any inkling I had prior, and I throw my hands up in the air. Or, which is the same thing I am describing actually, I hope to find something relevant in an unplanned location (e.g. a random book) and it ends up being far too relevant. Same reaction. Thank you Burren College library.

On immersion vs. belief

From last post:

"I have been recently thinking about what having a strong conviction about something means, or questioning why that is so significant, which more or less is the same thing as having a belief."

"I'm not sure what made me focus on 'belief' first rather than immersion"

So belief and conviction is what is similar. But I also alluded to immersion being similar, which is actually wrong. I think they have similarities and might even appear the same at first glance/surface-level (though the latter doesn't matter), maybe a similarity in its style of operation or the location of something or another, etc. etc. etc.

What I mean is that immersion is the suspension of self-awareness or self-consciousness; it lacks the third-person, stepping-back motion of "let me think about what I'm doing for a second here", it is tunnel-vision, it enters a smooth and fast propelling motion... Immersion is also what occurs when someone believes the sun will set tonight and rise again tomorrow morning, and so it is a suspension of doubt, of being skeptical; it is going along with things, hence the propelling motion. Examples would range from going along with the laws of physics, to going along with the man-made conventions of the business world. All are possible to doubt and go against, all are possible to go along with. None are possible to not doubt. This isn't to say that all are "fake" and there is some higher truth out there we can reach regarding sunsets and suit-and-tie handshakes, it is how everyday life occurs and continues on. But this isn't to say that one example of immersion cannot be "better" or "worse" than another. It is not stupid to assume the sun will set, it might be stupid to think LinkedIn is a necessary force for history of the universe.

But at the end of the day, LinkedIn is used. If someone were to sigh a "well, you just have to use it, don't you?" this would not be immersion, he is self-aware. The same man can, however, lose this awareness and operate as if he believes LinkedIn is as necessary as the sun, perhaps with enough time, or with enough usages of the site, etc. This is him becoming immersed. It is why I have always used the word "delusion" to stand for the things people believe in when immersed.

A clearer example is the capitalistic belief in the supply-demand model. I have seen many times an internet user state with full conviction: if we just stopped making our demands seen on affordable apartments, then rent would stop going up; or, 'the reason rent goes up is because you people buy at this price'. We see people and governments (or more so figures in governments) claim that the best way to run a non-business service is to run it like a business, and we can see when it fails (a $2 train ticket cannot fund a transit system, but we lose our business sensibilities when we realize you cannot just raise the price of a train ticket any higher-- or I suppose NYC can, but it still is cheap compared to what that city will make you fork over for a sandwich). 

So now belief pops up. But I don't mean that belief is just part of immersion, it is not like how 'delusion' is the object of focus within the immersion system/model and doesn't really appear or exist elsewhere.

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What matters in discussion of belief is not the object being believed in, but the fact that one believes, belief itself. Does this work across the board for all sorts of beliefs? A belief in God is difficult to wrap one's head around not because of God's nature, not because God is an unbelievable being (I am not saying a god is nor isn't believable, because I do not have an answer, and any answer isn't relevant here) but because someone is seriously believing in a god. It sounds the same, so perhaps it should be worded as: (1) God is a type of object that, due to its qualities and characteristics, is/isn't realistic, (2) The act in certainly believing God, particularly because this object sparks no universal conclusions (not everyone agrees God exists, many types of gods, etc.), is/isn't strange. The topic of this is the same: believing in something. Within it are the things of the topic: the object of belief, the act of believing itself, and the characteristics of both the object of belief and the believers' acts in regards to how "believable" something is. Number 1 focuses on the object of belief, God, and Number 2 focuses on the act of believing in its specific context.

So in an art context, belief is found in someone believing in their own practice, believing in what they are doing, believing in its importance, for instance. "Belief" is actually a poor word in certain contexts because it has a habit of constantly pointing at its object, so much so that if we call back attention to it ("the act of believing"), it sounds as if we are criticizing all acts of believing overall. It is belief itself in the specific situation/context outlined, because of its object. We should imagine the grammar to be switched around in order to express where our attention should lie: the object is not certainly believable, therefore the belief is strange-- No! Do not look back, you must stop looking at the object! The sentence should be verbalized out loud, a clear "belief in the specific situation we outlined" followed by a pause, a glance to the side, lean back, sigh, and in an overtly lazy and unserious tone, "well... because of [the object] obviously..."

The phrasing is doomed to fail.

A specific case: a painting student paints, and when asked why he paints the specific things he does, he answers "Well, I enjoy where I grew up, which is by the ocean, so the marine themes and sensibilities are from that". But why does he paint the ocean, why choose to paint it, why not write about it, why not become a scientist and study the ocean, a sociologist of ocean-side locations? "I think art brings out a different part of the ocean, or any topic really; it expresses more. And, I don't know, I like that. I want to both overtly depict things visually, and sneak in sensibilities underneath, like the memories and feelings I have," and he can run on and on about why painting as an art, due to whatever theory here and there, is able to complete this and that. But that is all practical. No, why does he paint and make art in general, and specifically why does he feel the need to put his memories and feelings into art and express this and that, etc. etc. And now the painting student stands quietly, he cannot think. You must guide him to a clearer question and a clearer topic. If one questions, critically or not (it usually comes off roughly the same, a passive critical or back-handed tone), why he chooses to do any of this, why he presents the work, why he studies it, why he feels the need to show people and attempt to sell this art for real money, and so on... Now he will answer, now he will light up in passion and defend himself. Of course, one can fall back to practical, externally-held statements, of the importance of art in the world and so on. But his true answer is that he just feels/thinks/believes that he must.

That is what I am talking about, that is the object of our focus here. Seriously, what is up with that sort of believing? In this case, it is better worded as conviction (and I will just keep belief and conviction interchangeable, even though they aren't the most similar words otherwise).

And it is moments like these, the existence of someone holding a strong conviction in what they do, that makes everything seem special, better, higher quality, more gripping, more striking, more stable, and so on and so forth. It is the power of belief, and this can be compared to confidence.

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So why did belief pop up previously, or more so, what is similar in immersion and belief/conviction that merged the two worlds? It is the suspension of disbelief and doubt, it is confidence and certainty. It's what holds it all together.

I read a book and believe the author to be a real person (if the case is made that they are a real person), I believe the name on the cover to be theirs, I believe the name to be consistent in identity with the other books that adorn it, etc. I do not pause and doubt this and think 'what if it is multiple people?' 'what if this is a pseudonym of the last author I just read the other day?' Some questions are easier to think about than others (very well someone could be a pseudonym). So to specify: this author has a personal biography, a description of them and their work in the back cover, a photo of their face, and international recognition as being the author, they go to book signing events, everyone who knows them in their personal life saw them study to be a writer and eventually publish the book. It is still possible to doubt that whichever human we are watching is the author, but it is a level of absurdity that becomes mental.

Because it is still possible to doubt, all it means is that one will just choose to believe to continue on, and if everything is possible to doubt (ignoring the topic of the self because I do not want to get Cartesian here), then one just chooses to believe in everything to continue on.

Within immersion, this is what holds the tunnel-vision together, the glue of the tunnel. Something like capitalistic theories are easier to critique and doubt in a serious manner, and those same theories are ones where the belief in them seems significantly less necessary. Who says this results in that and all of these actions must be upheld in societies, the government? Bah! Easy to doubt, isn't it? Something like the sunset is harder to doubt, because it one of the examples that becomes mental to doubt due to its absurdity (I should also say that how long or how many people uphold a belief also affects its supposed validity). When we do not doubt, it is an act of moving on, whether consciously (not very immersed) or unconsciously (highly immersed). What allows this continuing-on is belief. We believe the sun will set, so we time our evening around it. If we did not believe the sun would set, any amount of doubt, little or large, would linger on, and it would both become difficult to time our evening (we now don't really know when it'll get dark, because perhaps it will never) and pointless (if the sun won't set, why plan our evening arounds things at all). So the belief is necessary. This is why I do not ever wish to indicate that believing in something means the thing is bollocks; similarly, I do not think we should stop using numbers just because someone made up their vocabulary and system, it isn't like there necessarily is some greater truth out there behind made-up believed-in lies.

In our examples of belief in general, like the art student, one's conviction is what powers on further action, it is again for the sake of allowing things to continue on. This then brings up an interesting note, whether or not it is possible to do something without a belief in it. I think it is, because in this operation, belief is the mental process, similar to a reasoning, while the act of doing is the physical/external/real/produced thing, similar to a result or the thing at hand. This is not to say one is before the other, it is to say that they are two different kinds of things, located elsewhere yet within the same context/situation. The difference (a difference in kind?) is what allows this example: an artist doesn't believe in his own art and therefore feels like he is creating pointless work, or becomes confused, feels lost, or shuts off all of his feeling and thinking. He is still making artworks and having an art practice, just without belief in it. Now, is it possible to do such a thing with confidence, seeming as confident as our special artist with his high convictions? Perhaps, I do not know.

I once again haven't really reached any conclusion or real question in this post.

Thought on immersion in art

A thought I wrote earlier that I never finished:

I wonder if the most typical "real" appearing artists, those who are so immersed in their own art-making, who seem to have such a high level of love for the game, are this way because of (or partially) a belief in what they do. They 'feel" strongly about it, in a "there is something to this" sort of way. They do not need to be conscious or unconscious of any of this (I always assume most I observe are unconscious, but who knows).

It would be entirely possible to be assigned to make an artwork and provide it with a highly complex and substantial conceptual existence, one that elevates that artwork to a truly respectable and "real" level. Repeating an artwork, or a manner of art-making, without any real thoughts behind it may operate in a similar way.

But isn't there something different, something special in those who believe in their art so strongly? Not that they need to have a sense of importance or find their art to be special, or find their art to be art at all... It may be similar to when you meet someone overflowing with genuine confidence. There just is something different about them, not that they have a certain personality or behavior, but they just do things that are genuine, feel so attached to themselves; when you know that someone has a strong sense of self, for instance.

I wanted to expand on how I observe others to be more immersed in their art, which then speaks to a more general concept of immersion. I'm not sure what made me focus on 'belief' first rather than immersion; I have been recently thinking about what having a strong conviction about something means, or questioning why that is so significant, which more or less is the same thing as having a belief.