Confronting “Aesthetic Solipsism”

In Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory Gary Hagberg presents an analogy between the artist and the speaker with thoughts but NO language or vocabulary. I am interested in this because my work as an artist is not to bound to the mandate of “meaning” or language.

Brooke Lundquist, in her paper “Wittgenstein and Aesthetics: What is the Language of Art?” writes of the artist and her thoughts:

She (the artist) “names” these thoughts through her art. This presumes that there is something in the work of art which is separable from the physical object itself. It is a “dualistic” schema [that] demands the separability of the ’cause’ of the work of art, the inner object, from the physical work itself.” (Hagberg,124) Not only does the analogy have this demand, but it requires that the “cause” precede the outward work. If we rely on such a notion that art and language always reflect definable entities, we run the risk of “construct[ing] our idea of the inner on the model of the outer, or construe[ing] the mental on the model of the physical.” (Hagberg, 130).

If I am not attentive to the need for clarity in where I stand in regard to my painting I can fall into the violence of dualism which negates the experience of the painting before me, burdening it with MY need and agenda of “meaning”.