When An Artwork Isn't Enough

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.” - Susan Sontag

Before I go headlong into this piece, I need to pre-empt the reader with a caveat. A big caveat. This is my website and this blog really is just a collection of opinion pieces, but this is an OPINION piece, one I am sure some folk might disagree with. If you do, please share your views, as I really need to be convinced that I’m not existing in some alternate reality that no one else lives in. So, with that preamble over, I shall begin.

I have never really understood the purpose of an artistic statement. I kinda get the artist statement, something brief to give the viewer an understanding of the artist. Maybe a longer one for those who are interested, but it serves a purpose. An artistic statement, however, about a body of work seems to live in a totally different arena. I say this because art is a visual language. The colours, the compositions, the scenes and settings are all created to give the viewer a visual and emotional response. The work the artist has created is the very thing that informs the viewer. If the viewer is confused or doesn’t understand the work, then, if this wasn’t the intention, surely the work has in some way failed. Further, if text is required to qualify what is on display, then again, the work has failed. No? Yes? There have been times where I have been at a loss as to what I am looking at, and the statement leaves me equally confused. To fail on both levels seems monumental, or maybe what is being presented just operates on a far higher level that I.

There is, of course, also the consideration that words are art, and this cannot be ignored. Words are indeed a crucial part of communicating ideas, telling stories and providing explanations where needed. When I read a book, I don’t need pictures. The writing, if telling a story, lifts me from the present and shifts me into another plane where I am part of the unfolding narrative. Similarly, when I look at art, powerful work does a very similar thing. I’m suddenly absorbed into the image and there I sit, making peace with the art. These two forms can come together in symbiosis from an editorial perspective or a graphic novel, but the art on both fronts is a very separate entity. The collaboration in an editorial piece uses both mediums to provide clarity to the reader, or indeed the viewer. The words and the images work together, but neither needs to explain the other for them to exist.

So what is your point, I hear you say? Well, the deeper I dive into finding space for my work, the more I am aware that there needs to be a narrative for the viewer to be part of. They, the viewing public, want, so I am told, to be part of the artist’s journey, and text supporting the work needs to run in tandem in order to give the artwork validity. It seems galleries demand this, artists accept this and colleges will have us believe we need to provide this, yet I am yet to meet anyone that actually goes to see any artwork where they are led so intently by ‘words about’. I’m sure they exist, but in all the exhibitions I have visited, I can’t say I have ever stood in front of a piece of work and thought, Thank God for that statement, now all is clear. In fact, if that were the case, I would argue that, for me at least, the artwork could even be ruined. I like a bit of ambiguity. It adds a certain uncertainty to the experience. The statement is somewhat like taking a trip to some far flung land with a Lonely Planet guidebook. Sure, you won't miss the obvious, but you will miss those low footfall paths to stunning vistas few others see, or that lovely little bar on a tiny beach with friendly staff and really interesting punters. Somehow, being guided so fervently along the way, a little bit of the magic has been lost.

It feels very much that photography has been hit by this process more than most forms of art. Since Nicéphore Niépce’s first heliographic images in the early 1820s, photography has lived in something of a nebulous artistic acceptance. It sits somewhere between reality and art, neither entirely one nor the other, yet its effect on the latter has been profound. As soon as photography disrupted the idea that painting no longer needed to reproduce reality, abstraction in all its forms began to find greater freedom. Yet photography itself has continued to occupy an occasionally awkward position within the art world. Of course, you’ll see photographic work in galleries, but it still doesn’t seem to have quite the same presence as painting, sculpture and other more traditionally accepted forms of fine art. Perhaps some of that comes down to the physicality of those mediums. A painting or sculpture has contours. The light changes as one moves around a piece of work, and that change in light can affect tone, colour and even interpretation. There are the physical textures, the brush marks, the imperfections, even the smell of oil and turpentine. The work occupies the same physical space as the viewer, and there is something about that physical encounter that photography, by its very nature, cannot quite replicate. Photography sits on a two-dimensional plane like a painting, but it doesn’t have the added depth that a painting offers. It doesn’t have the unique nooks and crannies that oil on canvas has, nor the physical presence of sculpture, and because of this it can sometimes lack a certain gravitas that more traditional art forms seem to possess. Could this be why a photograph needs so much more of a contextual bump? Perhaps.

A photograph also comes with a strange burden attached to it. We know that what we are looking at once existed in front of a camera. There was a thing, a person, a place, a moment, and the camera recorded it. Even when the resulting photograph is abstract, constructed or heavily manipulated, there remains this lingering relationship with reality. Painting has no such obligation. We understand instinctively that a painting has been made. Photography, on the other hand, has to convince us that it is more than simply a record of something that was there. Perhaps this is one of the reasons photographers have become so invested in explaining their work. If the photograph can be dismissed as merely a picture, perhaps the words around it are what elevate it into art.

This I feel it what led me to write this piece. At what point did the photograph stop being enough? When did we decide that an image needed an accompanying explanation in order to demonstrate that it was more than an image? And why does the artist’s intention seem to have become so important to the way we experience the work? Surely the viewer’s response has some value too. If I stand in front of a photograph and see something entirely different from what the artist intended, have I failed to understand the work, or has the work succeeded in producing a response that belongs to me? As an artist, this is the very response I look for in my audience. That ambiguity allowed my image to not only live but to grow and develop in someone else's mind.

Apologies if this may have come across as a rant. Sometimes I need to put these thoughts down to allow my mind to make sense of something I feel I should - at this stage in the game - understand.

Tunnelled - Charlie Ribeiro 2026 ©