Thoughts on Vilhauer’s chapter ‘Understanding Art: The Play of Work and Spectator’ (2010).

The notion that every piece of sculptural art / literature / performative art needs the reflection of the spectator to be fully recognised and fulfil its purpose resonated with me. I am generally vey playful and open and recognised myself in the description of a playful fully engaged ‘player’ that plays with art in all its forms to encounter its meaning. I also know that I have to be in a certain mindset to really appreciate something I see (appreciate not necessarily mean ‘like’), otherwise I’m not open to engage with anything but the superficial reproduction of the subject.

Within this context I started to wonder though how much the curation of how a piece of art is shown, especially static pieces like sculptural or painting, plays into that back and forth with the spectator. And how much is an artist owed that we curate a piece of art in the way that the artist intended it to be viewed? By accepting Gadamer’s model we have to accept that every viewer might see a different truth anyway, determined by the element of randomness invited through the definition of ‘play’.

I also wondered based on the definitions used in the chapter when a ‘copy’ becomes a picture or a piece of art. How much did paintings and portraits over the centuries ‘just’ strive to represent the truth of what is seen?
The example used is a passport photo that doesn’t want to be anything but representative of the subject without adding any other meaning to it, that is about the truth of the subject and not about the medium of the picture.
But isn’t it carefully curated to try to represent the truth and nothing but the unsmiling truth of a person? Is a passport photo in a lovely picture frame a piece of art to be played with? Don’t we enjoy infusing a passport photo with potential emotions, often grumpiness or ‘criminal’ notions because they are so devoid of how we usually see or curate our “true” selves?