(Un)titled. A Conceptual Issue

“(...) one thing is denied even to the best contemporary artist: he can never manage to make a wooden horse mean as much to us as it did for its original creator. This path is closed off by an angel wielding a flaming sword” (italics are mine). I begin with this quote by Gombrich, to talk about a subject which for many might be linked to the elitism of contemporary artists when producing their work, but which has more to do with the meaning (and therefore the aesthetic experience) that is accessible to all viewers, and it was with regards to this that the German historian masterfully outlined the limits of the pretensions inherent to avant-garde art creation. 

There were some who defined people from every nation on the basis of a common defect they believed was shared by all: pirates, for example, thought the French were proud and the Spanish indolent, as Ortega tells us. In this sense, it could be argued that the aim of this article is to point out the theoretical despotism of the artist of our time; however, I would argue that, in fact, the aim of these lines is to reflect on certain proposals in the art scene from the last 100 years. I am referring to the phenomenon which I describe as the untitled–and which also serves as title to this article, if you will forgive the mischief...

By christening a work as untitled, the artist generally reveals a new position, adopted after the avant garde trends dating back to the early 20th century. In fact, the idea that the medium is the message was first suggested by Marshall McLuhan when he realised the historical significance of Cubism: the move from a reflection on the object shown (the referent) to a reflection on the form of representation itself (the medium, also according to McLuhan) gave rise to an emancipation of creation with regard to the universe of reality, or that group of objects which make it up. However, beyond this position, which Paul Klee exemplified so masterfully, whereby a creative nature is linked to the contemporary artist, the untitled represents that almost hysterical attempt to separate the artwork from any kind of reality.

Let us make a brief aside before continuing. For classic linguistic theory all linguistic signs are made up of a material substance (the signifier) and a sensory substance (the meaning) or concept (Saussure). Therefore, all speakers of a language reach the concept thanks to the material substance of the sign, on the basis of a referent which allows them to recreate a “mental” image of meaning (for example, in the case of “tree”, the signifier points at an image of what is understood as “tree”, i.e. the meaning). Semiotic theory poses a huge obstacle when applying this principle to other languages, and, in this sense, the untitled is perfectly suited to represent this problem. The obstacle is the following: there are times when there is no way of pointing at a real referent, even on those occasions when we take its existence for granted. A frequently-examined case is that of the historical discourse, where, on most occasions, the historian tells us about facts which must have taken place but of which either there is no proof, or where the meaning of a group of discourses becomes the referent (Barthes). For me to accept, for example, that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon is only possible because I interpret the referent to be the meaning of all of the discourses which have dealt with this fact. Here, like in abstract or conceptual art, we find a break in the triadic scheme of the sign, in the sense that the signifier/meaning is not carried out on the basis of a referent, but directly.

What is the aim of the contemporary artist when he conducts this exercise? Even keeping in mind that the artist might not want to provide the viewer with a unique aesthetic experience, with no need to refer to the experiences with which he or she might be familiar, we must accept that the artist wishes to convey not only that their work is unique, but that it shares no connection with reality on the basis of “expressive tricks”, such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, etc. By naming it untitled, the artist emphasises the indescribable nature of the object and of the feelings it may provoke. However, there exists a cruel paradox in this particular christening: by entitling the work untitled, the artist is still giving it a title, and this title, this linguistic act, is as creative as the work itself. The contemporary artist is, above all, an explorer of aesthetic concepts, a direct descendant of Kant, Hegel and their aesthetics of life and pragmatism. Here lies perhaps one of the greatest obstacles faced by the artist: by proposing an art of immediate experience, he forgets that behind all of this lies a complex theoretical fabric. The frenzied search by the artist begins with the use of certain theories. Perhaps at this point it is worth mentioning William Turner, who was wrongly seen as the first abstract artist, and who used the title of his works as a way to describe the theoretical concept which served as a reference point for each of his pieces (as is the case of Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory), for example).

Today’s artists are not so different from William Turner in their work as “titlers”. By “untitling” their work, they do not succeed in escaping the curse of the referent: the referent is transformed, transfigured, but it does not disappear. Just like the writer who uses proper nouns for his stories (The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Madame Bovary...), the artist makes use of a concept with great theoretical significance, which, by extension, becomes a proper noun. It was Bertrand Russell who warned us against the logical problem inherent to proper nouns, which cannot be assigned any attribute shared by all elements of the same name, in order to be able to see them as a logical class (the Johns in the world, for example, have nothing in common except their name; they share no “Johnness”). In the case we are examining here, the untitled has gradually become connected to a kind of art we recognise even before we have seen the works themselves, and it is here that it differs from proper nouns: we immediately identify this title with a kind of work. The artist thus carries out a sort of self-denunciation: the untitled could emerge as a new theme, based not on the real but on the conceptual. And perhaps the artist has adopted this position because, after Kant and Hegel, reality, more than ever before, is being defended by the angel with the flaming sword...

For my grandmother, in memoriam 1923-2010

Rayco González