Lesson 32

There is no such thing as the ‘purely visual’. All art comes with a text and a context. The viewer is more often than not told what to think, in all those books, magazines, reviews, labels and titles. All art is transformed by text and a change of context.

Most of this writing is by critics, journalists, reviewers, art historians, curators or gallery education departments and very little by the artists themselves.

In all this noise, titles are a way the artist has of giving the viewer a cue as to how they would like their work to be read or a clue as to their intentions.

Even ‘Untitled‘ used as a title is a cue. ‘Untitled‘ says that this is an autonomous, self referential work, to be viewed as a object in its own right. A genuinely untitled work would only be referred to as ‘untitled’ for archival needs. Of course titles are important for archival and cataloging purposes and here numbers are useful. Dating work is a good idea and would serve this cataloging need.

Even though the artist titles the work this does not prevent others changing the title, or the work being better known by another title. The painting colloquially known as ‘Whistler’s Mother‘ was in originally titled by Whistler as ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1‘, which requests a very different reading from the conversational title commonly used of his pious Victorian mother.

For me titles have always been important; even the use of text in the image. Some students over the years have been reluctant to title their work, not wishing to pin the work down or be too specific as to what the work was about, which is understandable. But like images, language can be ambiguous and is often open to interpretation; if it wasn’t we would not have poetry or Shakespeare. Simply, these students needed to put more thought into their use of words.

There is the ‘non’ title, title, like a still life being titled ‘Still Life‘ or a landscape titled ‘Landscape‘ or, say, ‘Study‘. The viewer thinks that the title informs them of something but in reality this is an obsolete, redundant, anti-title that does not inform them of anything they don’t already know.  This form of ‘innocent’ titling can be useful: for instance, imagine a painting of a murder scene titled ‘Interior‘, in which the understatement becomes poignant. Or the same scene contradictorily titled ‘Picnic‘, which would emphasise the macabre nature of such a painting. Titling work in a contradictory manner can be interesting.

Or take the honest descriptive and slightly shocking use of ‘street’ language in the titles of George Shaw’s work, such as the painting ‘Landscape with Dog Shit Bin‘, which refers to the intrusion of the urban and the managed into the rural. George Shaw’s titles are significant. Titling a banal fence of a feral scene ‘Ash Wednesday‘ not only gives the work a time of year but also a religious resonance, as does the series his ‘Scenes from The Passion‘. These melancholic paintings of unregarded, mundane, suburban hinterland are somehow contradicted and the viewer is challenged by these titles. The work should not fit the titles but they do. The viewer makes the fit.