Catherine David and Irit Rogoff, “In Conversation”, in Claire Doherty ed., From Studio to Situation, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004, pp.82-89
Catherine David has worked since 2002 as director of the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. She’s also worked as a curator at the National Museum of Modern Art, Paris. Her exhibitions since the nineties have examined art-practice in relation to contemporary socio-political issues.
Irit Rogoff is a theorist and curator who writes on the critical, the political, and contemporary arts practices. Rogoff is a professor at Goldsmiths College, London University, in the department of Visual Cultures, which she founded in 2002.
There’s a notion of cultural specificity that runs through the text, the idea that knowledge of a culture’s history and customs is necessary to understand an artwork from that culture, or that the artwork needs to be viewed in its place of creation to successfully communicate the intensions driving the work.
An individual’s understanding of a representation will differ depending on the individual’s cultural understanding of that being represented. Irit Rogoff states that some elements of cultural experience or “rapport” effect an individual’s perception and interpretation of an artwork, “In rapport we have all kinds of conceits, we have all kinds of illusions. We have a notion of understanding. We have a notion of insight. There is a kind of empathy that is fore-grounded, there’s a notion of investigation.”[1]
Reuben Paterson‘s 2004 exhibition ‘Open for Interpretation’, deals with an understanding of interpretation. Paterson is influenced by “visual, lived and philosophical traditions of his Maori ancestors”, “‘Open to Interpretation’ is a conduit to ask where do such foundations of knowing come from?”[2] His work explores an understanding of Maori culture through the use of appropriated traditional Maori design, translated through the medium of glitter, which “suggest the assured defiance of Maori culture in the face of loss. But they also emit an air of melancholy”.[3]
Although it may be necessary to understand the cultural context of an artwork before completely understanding the intended concept projected by the work, I believe the interpretation of an artwork is always in the eye of the viewer, as argued in Roland Barthes’s ‘Death of the Author’. Thus the interpretation of an artwork’s concept is a result of any individual’s personal interpretation, culturally aware or not.
[1] Catherine David and Irit Rogoff. “In Conversation”, in Claire Doherty
ed., From Studio to Situation, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004, pp.86
[2] http://www.reubenpaterson.com/press/R_PATERSON_Narcissus_Press.pdf pp.1 accessed 06/05/2010
[3] http://the-artists.org/artist/paterson-reuben accessed 06/05/2010
