Third Level of Meaning: Context
This text highlights the importance of understanding the context in which art is made. Pay close attention to the context, which is an important theme in this course. The context describes an artwork's interconnections with other pieces of art and other aspects of society.
The decorative arts have meaning, too, primarily in the functionality
of the artworks themselves and the style and decorations
afforded them. A goblet
from
the 16th century has an aesthetic meaning in its organic form, in
its function as a means to hold and dispense liquid. A particular
historical meaning is in the way it is embellished with diamond point
engravings that depict the flow of the river
Rhine.
The goblet's detailed map of the Rhine gives it specific context:
the historical, religious, or social issues surrounding a work of art.
These issues influence not only the way the viewer finds meaning in
particular works of art but also
how the artists themselves create them.
For instance, the hammered gold mask with cinnabar and copper inlay from Peru's Sican
culture is simple and symmetrical in form and striking in its visage.
For the Sican people,
the mask represented either the Sican deity from the spiritual world
or the lord of Sican, a man who represented the deity in the natural
world. Masks were stacked at the feet of the dead lord in his tomb. In
this cultural context, the masks had significance
in the life, death, and spiritual worlds of the Sican people.
Gold Mask
To view James Rosenquist's painting, F-111 is to confront a huge image of a fighter jet overlaid with images from popular culture, all in bright colors and seemingly without connection. But when we see the work in the context of the American experience during the 1960s, we realize the two-pronged visual comment Rosenquist is making about war and consumerism, what he termed "a lack of ethical responsibility." In the artist's hands, the two ideas overlap: the salon hair dryer and the diver's bubbles mimic the mushroom cloud rising behind the opened umbrella (another formal link to the nuclear bomb blast behind it). The painting is at such a large scale that viewers are dwarfed by its overpowering presence.
Saylor Academy Knowledge Check
Source: Christopher Gildow, http://opencourselibrary.org/art-100-art-appreciation/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.