Remodelling Interpretation after the "Encounter-Event"

"Crystal of Resistance", Thomas Hirschhorn, Biennale 2011

Writing as both an artist and an analyst-theorist, Bracha L. Ettinger declares that it is the destiny of artworks to be interpreted. She formulates the inevitable connection between subjectivity, initially the artist’s, and the Symbolic, the field of meaning, in ways which at first echo Julia Kristeva’s notion of art as the semiotic transgression of the Symbolic order. But Ettinger goes further.

Artists continually introduce into culture all sorts of Trojan horses from the margins of their consciousness; in that way, the limits of the Symbolic are transgressed all the time by art. It is quite possible that many work-products carry subjective traces of their creators, but the specificity of works of art is that their materiality cannot be detached from ideas, perceptions, emotions, consciousness cultural meanings, etc, and that being interpreted and reinterpreted is their cultural destiny. This is one of the reasons why works of art are symbologenic.5

Ettinger presents art as a kind of gift, packaged in its own materialities that are at once spurs to perceptions, feelings and thoughts as well as connections with existing cultural meanings. This gift is also an event, inviting and inciting the receptive culture to work with it. The concept of the event is central to Ettinger’s theoretical shifting of psychoanalysis from a focus on the object to the significance of a shared trans-subjective occurrence. The event initiates the foreseen that has resonance beyond the individual subject. Event in general parlance involves both a gathering and an occasion and the word, used of art, reminds us of both the interaction between different sites and moments of subjectivity and the shared experience, of the gathering of reciprocal responses. Interpretation, then, is not the exhaustive definition of what art is and where it comes from but is instead an engagement to work with it as a gift-event, that in doing something, brings about change in the culture itself: it generates new meaning.

The point of interpretation, therefore, is not a fixing of meanings to artists, forms, iconographies or practices as occurs in the dreadful recurrent phrase ‘this work is about…’. It is a work of analysis that aims to enlarge the text of culture through the co-creation with the working of art of otherness which sustains plurality, and preserves some hope that there are domains yet to be known.

-Griselda Pollock, Tate Papers

Lovely.