Aboutness—Further Thoughts
Today, I share with you more thoughts on the topic of “aboutness,” which I discuss in a couple of my books. As always, I offer these essays free of the annoyances of advertising and paywalls. Still, if it is within your means to contribute as little as a couple of dollars to support this blog—the work and costs that go into publishing and maintaining it—please consider making a small financial contribution. It makes a difference for me.
The artist … knows that none of these other men will ever love and understand his work as he loves and understands it.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
In my book, More Than a Rock, I mentioned aboutness as the quality I strive for in my photographic work—making my images not just pictures of things but pictures about things. In my latest book, Be Extraordinary, I mentioned using the term concept in my teachings to refer to the thing that an image is about (distinct from content, referring to the things an image is of).
[Should you be interested, my books are available for purchase on my website, as well as from Amazon and other booksellers.]
I always make sure to qualify that a concept is not necessarily something that can be expressed in words. The important thing about a concept is that you—the artist—know what it is, even if you can’t communicate or explain it clearly and unambiguously to others. A concept may be a named emotion or a relatable context, but it may just as well be a vague and/or complex feeling that informs your creative choices as you work and that may be impossible to express—fully or even at all—to others.
It’s not uncommon, when I mention the distinction between images of things and images about things, that someone will point to one of my images and ask what it is about. It’s rare that I can offer an answer other than saying the image is about a meaningful feeling I’ve had, and encourage the person asking to embrace whatever meaning, or aboutness, they find in the image, rather than attempt to understand mine. I’d like to believe that a beholder’s impressions of my work overlaps with mind to some significant degree (it is, after all, something I attempted to express), but I never concern myself with the extent of the overlap, accepting that it may be greater for some, with whom I share some similarities, than for others, who, as far as I am concerned, are entirely welcome to assert or infer their own meanings and hopefully find some value in seeing my creations.
Aboutness is only relevant to me in the sense that it guides my own choices and helps me distill in my own mind what I wish to express, which I often can’t state clearly in words: I know it in my mind, in my heart, in my gut, in the feelings and memories I wish to commemorate and re-experience when seeing my work in some future times.
Conversely, my own aboutness is never something I wish to impose on others, nor something I expect anyone to go to any effort to decipher. If anything, aboutness—regardless of whether it overlaps with my on—is a sense I hope viewers will experience intuitively when seeing my work, not attempt to arrive at by conscious analysis or guesswork. This is part of the reason I also admonish those who wish to gain the most benefit from beholding an artwork to avoid the “critic’s mindset,” or at least defer it to a time beyond their first encounter with an artwork. Critical analysis—whether of content or form, technique or classification, correctness or faults—may be helpful to artists in an educational sense, and to viewers in the sense of improving and broadening their understanding of art or of specific artists, but it may defeat its purpose of experiencing art if, by defaulting to critical analysis, one unwittingly robs oneself of the power of first impressions.
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When someone asks me what one of my images is about, I’m sometimes reminded of a story about the poet Robert Frost, who was known for his sharp humor. When asked about the meaning of one of his poems, Frost responded: “you want me to say it worse?” Wittiness aside, both the question and the answer belie misunderstandings about meaning in art.
The person asking for an explanation of meaning errs in believing that meaning—aboutness—in one medium can always be expressed or explained in another. This is sometimes the case but often—especially when it comes to great art—it is not. Sometimes, there may be words to describe some of the effects of music, visual art, poetry, dance, or other forms of artistic expressions, but sometimes there are not. Sometimes, words for certain effects may exist in one language but not in another. But, regardless of whether the meaning of an artwork has a verbal correlate, it is almost always the case that the experience of encountering meaningful art in the raw, without explanation, is more powerful and nuanced when it arises intuitively in response to sensory stimulation and is greatly diminished or oversimplified by any attempt to encapsulate it in words. This is what Frost meant by “saying it worse.”
On the other hand, Frost’s answer, for all its humorous cleverness, also rests on a common error: the false belief that a sufficiently skilled beholder must understand and experience a work of art as intended by the artist, and that failing to do so suggests some deficit or fault in the beholder. This is utter nonsense. Art is by nature ambiguous and people coming from different backgrounds, possessing different personalities and sensibilities, different levels of experience, knowledge, maturity, etc., are all too likely to bring their own “beholder’s share” to any encounter with art, which may differ from the artist’s. Ironically, one of the best-known examples for this effect is Frost’s own poem, “The Road Not Taken,” containing the famous lines:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Many readers consider the poem as an admonition or permission to follow risky, less-traveled paths. In fact, Frost’s poem was intended to poke fun at his friend, Edward Thomas, whom Frost believed was wasting too much time and energy lamenting and questioning his past choices. Frost’s own intended meaning—that taking a less-traveled path makes no difference at all and is not worth dwelling upon—is in this case the opposite of the common interpretation.
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As artists, we may take one of two approaches to the ambiguity of aboutness: we may choose to limit ourselves to the narrow range of artistic expressions whose meanings are easily and readily shared and understood by most, or we may consider aboutness as our own inner guide and accept that our work may elicit different “aboutnesses” in different people. I am decidedly in the latter camp. One reason is that my primary motivation in making art is to elevate my own living experiences. Another is that I see no value in imposing my own aboutness on others, especially if they may find greater value and meaning in my work by aligning it with their own values and beliefs.
Making my work’s aboutness a personal matter rather than something I wish to impose on my viewers allows me the freedom to delve deeper into my own psyche when creating, without concern for who may understand it or to what degree. At times, I even know from the outset that what I wish to express is not something any other person is ever likely to understand—certainly not without a much deeper insight into my personality, thoughts, and emotions than I would be comfortable sharing.
These thoughts came to me after a recent re-reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot, in which he wrote, “There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever.”
Besides the obvious relevance of Dostoevsky’s observation about each of us possessing memories, ideas, and feelings we can never fully convey to another no matter how much we may try to, there is another—much less obvious—reason his words inspired me to write this essay. I am writing these words on what happens to be the thirty-fifth anniversary of a meaningful day in my life: the day I was discharged from military conscription—an experience that has shaped the course of my life, the person I am, and consequently what my work is about in ways more complex and pervasive than I can begin to explain or would even know how to.
It occurred to me that no other person is likely to know this from seeing my work. It also occurred to me that even I am not always conscious of the effects of this history when I work or when I look back at my own images. And yet, as soon as I acknowledge it I can trace exactly how my mode of work, my choices, my subjects, my personality all tie into this history. Aboutness, it seems, is not only inexpressible to others, but at least in part may not even be entirely obvious to the artist.
