Making Meaning

 Have you seen that confusion confounded in mystery covered up in a puzzle? Oh, yea, I am referring to illusion art.

Very intricate is this version of art. The artist has to create a painting operational at multiple levels. It essentially has to be multidimensional. It houses very many realities in it, and the wonder of wonders is that all the aspects are present and yet absent at the same time. Obviously an absolutely virtuoso performance!

This form of art is still more special because it is the best example of the spectator finally completing the meaning in/of the frame. Indeed, finally, the meaning of art lies in the audience perspective. Whatever might be the intention of the artist while creating it, it is the viewers who finally decide the meaning of the art, whatever might be the form of the art. 

Let me give you an example. Coleridge's great poem "Christabel" can be seen as a narrative poem, as dramatic verse, as a gothic text, et al. Personally, I feel it is about the corruption of gullible innocence that thinks the whole world is as good as self. Hence I find in it a great variation on/of the Christian myth of the pre-lapsarian and the post-lapsarian realities.

In fact, since readers/audience can thus find new meanings to/in them, the ancient texts appeal to us. Otherwise, why read the works by  Sophocles or Shakespeare or Kalidas?

True,  in brief, that art allows fluidity of interpretations. The illusion art excels in this aspect of art though. In the same innocent frame would be innocuously hidden multiple perspectives which are both present and absent at the same time.  The viewer is challenged to locate all these.

Art and its interpretation thus become a 'heady' job indeed. This intellectual challenge is often supposed to be full of psychological meanings. If you see the hare first, you are left-brained, while if you see the duck, you are right-brained apparently. Most often such a painting proves most viewers to be harebrained though.

My problem with such interpretations is that not only do I see the duck and the hare simultaneously, I can also spot the squirrel the psycho interpreters never assign any value to!

Which proves perfectly my point  about making meaning. Art and the meaning lie in the eye of the beholder!

Pratima @ art is great because it eternally challenges us and our fixed paradigms in to newer moulds.