Meaning, intention, and expression in art... Reflections from group tutorial

 JK got us doing into threes to do a "group tutorial" - essentially a group coaching session, where you take it in turns to present a problem and have the other two people ask open-ended questions.

I was lucky enough to be in a group with Ben and Bethany! I presented (perhaps foolishly) on my current conundrum of meaning and intention in art. Broadly:

• I asserted that art requires intention, and that the artist needs to make meaning and intention clear, or at least encode it knowingly in their work
• I pushed against process art and somewhat against abstract art as needing to meet a high bar not to be happy accidents
• I conceded that meaning is in the eye of the beholder

It was a bit of a daze, so I can't remember exactly who said what, but some of my 'take away' question/statements were:

• Meaning and intention are slippery ideas! Intention is a lower bar than meaning... Meaning could imply a message, whereas intention just implies the urge to communicate something
• But what does 'meaning' mean anyhow? I think I just mean that there's something to consider beyond the object itself - that it is a proxy for something greater (huh!) - in the language of my previous post, it is a proxy for an intangible thing that is the art
• Nature makes amazing art, so why do people have to have intention but nature doesn't? Actually, maybe the need for intention is related to saying something is 'art' - that implies intention and meaning - this is exactly why nature does NOT make art, nature makes stuff, people interpret it and add meaning, and make it INTO art. The same argument could be made of ready-mades
• Art is therefore (for me) a social construct and a social contract - it's the art of noticing and pointing things out to others to notice - by asserting something as art, I think we are saying there's layers of meaning to be gained
• All forms of recording involve choices and so are subjective and expressive - you can't NOT make art when you share something - the things you decide NOT to do are a reflection of your subjective experience/values and encode some meaning into the output
• Bethany expressed the opinion that she wants to make art that is bigger than her own subjective experience - I think that's a noble goal - good art expresses something for the artist, great art expresses something for humanity
• Art is non-verbal expression, so is my being 'concept-driven' actually a short-coming - am I actually creating VERBAL ideas and then turning them into non-verbal idea RETROSPECTIVELY? What am I loosing as a result? Wouldn't a non-verbal medium have non-verbal mechanisms for encoding meaning?

I think I come again to the point of art is NOT objects, art is an intangible thing to be communicated, the objects are the medium for that 'message' - when I write a love poem, the art is the feeling of love, the poem is just a bunch of sounds that carry that art. Nature doesn't make art, because nature doesn't have the intention to convey a message. Craft is not art, nor is technique, because they are (in my opinion) physical acts, not acts of communication.

I  woke up thinking this not so sure now how useful it is - personal experience to human experience, passive to immersive:

I'm not sure what this means, nor how useful it is, but crudely I think I want to push my art up and to the right ;) I think the bottom right quadrant is a bad place of self-indulgence.