Against Surface Interpretation

Against Surface InterpretationAuthor(s): Tom LeddySource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 459-463Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/432152 .

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Discussion

Against Surface Interpretation

The concept of surface interpretation, and its distinction from deep interpretation, has been put forward by Arthur Danto, and elaborated by Peg and Myles Brand.1 On Danto's view, there is one correct interpretation of an artwork: the one that comes closest to the artist's own interpretation. Danto distinguishes this "surface interpretation" of the work from the "deep interpretation" provided by such theoretical perspec- tives as psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism. Deep interpretation attempts to determine or explain what the artist is "really" doing. By contrast, surface interpretation does not explain anything beyond the agent's surface reasons. Rather, it constitutes an object as an artwork (by way of the "is" of artistic identification). Interpretation transforms material objects into works of art: a material object is an artwork only in relation to an interpretation. Works are misconstituted when surface interpretation is wrong. Surface interpretation, therefore, is inseparable from the work. Deep interpretation depends on surface interpretation: good deep interpretation is constrained by correct surface interpretation. Surface interpretation is that which deep interpretation interprets.

Myles and Peg Brand also distinguish between surface and deep interpretation, holding that something is transfigured into a work of art if it has an accurate surface interpretation. They believe that the surface interpretation consists of a set of artist's intentions, or a set of sentences describing those intentions. How- ever, contra Danto, they insist that an accurate surface interpretation can contradict a correct deep interpretation so that deep interpretation need not depend on surface interpretations

This discussion note will address points that the Brands share with Danto, and will focus on their way of stating this view. I reject the theory that there is such a thing as the correct artist's or surface interpretation for any one work. I also oppose the view that there are such things as artists' surface interpretations that can be clearly distinguished from deep interpretations. So-called surface interpretations explain as much as they constitute. So-called deep interpretations constitute as much as they explain. Deep inter-

pretations do not interpret surface interpretations: they just interpret the work itself. There is a rough distinction between surface and deep interpretation. It is simply the distinction between interpretations that look to authors' intentions, and ones that bring in larger theoretical concepts.

Serious and well-known epistemological problems give rise to legitimate skepticism concerning the existence of surface interpretations. Many of these have been mentioned elsewhere.3 I will simply raise a couple here. If surface interpretation consists of a complete set of statements describing the author's intentions, should these statements be ordered in some sequence, for example in a narrative? If so, the surface interpretation begins to look like an interpretive essay about the work, which is somehow lodged in the mind of the artist. Although some artists may construct such internal essays as they create their works, this is no support for the general claim that there is such a thing as the surface or artist's interpretation.

Joseph Brodsky recently published an article in The New Yorker in which he gave extensive interpretations of poems by Robert Frost. Imagine someone says that Brodsky's essay was an accurate rendering of Frost's surface interpretation of these poems. Does this mean that Frost already had something very much like these sentences, in this order, in his mind even before Brod- sky formulated them? This seems unlikely.

Perhaps the sentences do not have to actually be in the artist's mind during the creative process in order to count as the surface interpretation. Danto and the Brands believe that surface interpretation may be a matter of the artist confirming what she would have meant upon reflection. Perhaps the set of intentions the surface interpretation describes is simply a dispo- sition to assent to certain sentences generated by critics and other close readers.

However, "what the artist will assent to on reflection" will vary according to circumstances. Artists might even give assent to competing interpretations produced by different critics. As Dewey put it, "It is absurd to ask what an artist 'really' meant by his prod- uct; he himself would find different meanings in it at

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57:4 Fall 1999



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different days and hours and in different stages of his own development."4

Presumably the surface interpretation of the work is the interpretation that the artist has at some one point in the creative process. The Brands speak of it as being determined by the initial intentions of the artist. If, by this, they mean the artist's intentions at the very beginning of the creative process, surely this is too soon. At the beginning, the artist might simply be intending to make a poem or a sculpture. More- over, whatever thoughts the artist might have at the beginning usually change considerably as the work emerges.

Perhaps we should tie the surface interpretation of the work to the point at which the work is finished. On this view it would be the set of true statements that describes the artist's intentions when the work is completed. Even assuming that there are such things as artists' intentions, it is doubtful that there is such a thing as a specific set of such intentions in the artist's mind at the very moment that the piece is completed.

When is the work actually completed? When the artist intends it to be? Yet, an artist can think the work completed at different times. Sometimes the artist changes his or her mind about the point of completion. Whistler actually took a painting off the wall of the house of someone who had purchased it so that he could retouch it.

The Brands imagine an artist who creates a work that depicts a large, bright, red-orange sphere with a yellow background, says at first that he intended to provide an exercise in color and composition, but later interprets his work as a symbol for an impending holocaust. They think that the first is a surface interpretation and the second a deep interpretation of the work, and that the second is no more plausible than any observer's deep interpretation.

Imagine, however, that the artist not only pro- pounded this new interpretation but also retitled the work "Holocaust" and exhibited it under that name. Must the artist be limited by his own initial intentions, as the Brands believe? There are no rules of language or other social conventions that require this. Contra the Brands, the artist's second set of intentions is not significantly different from his first.

The distinction Danto and the Brands make between surface and deep interpretation requires that the artist have privileged access to surface interpretation but not to deep interpretation. This would imply that we should not pay special attention to an artist's later interpretations of her earlier works. Surely this is wrong. After all, she created the works. She knows them "from the inside." These are not just works she might encounter as she does works by others. They are parts of her on- going creative process, a process that does not com- monly just stop at the completion of individual works, but continues throughout a career. Individual works

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may be attempted solutions to a problem the artist has been struggling with for years. Moreover, the artist's interpretation of a work may deepen when she thinks through, and revises, earlier thoughts. She may legit- imately say, "I thought at the time that this was what I meant in this work, but now I realize that I was try- ing to say something else."

True, the artist's access to her own deep meanings is not incorrigible, complete, or exclusive. Others may have insights into the meanings of her work that she failed to have or at least to fully articulate. Still, her access is worth special consideration. In short, although artists do not have absolute authority over a sort of interpretation called surface interpretation, their non- superficial self-understandings should be given special weight because of the role that self-interpretation plays in the artist's lifetime creative process.

The Brands hold that if we cannot rely on artists' reports for accurate surface interpretation of works of art then we cannot establish any genuine surface interpretations. I agree with this statement, affirm the antecedent, and also the consequent. This is not, however, to reject the more traditional distinction between superficial and deep interpretation, where "deep" simply means the opposite of superficial. An interpretation is superficial if it fails to give insight into the meaning of a work, or to address important relations between the work and fundamental human is- sues. It is deep if it does give such insight and address such relations. Theoretical frameworks such as Freudi- anism and Marxism sometimes help us to achieve this kind of depth, although they are not necessary for it.

I am not denying that artists have mental representations concerning their work, that they sometimes give spoken or written interpretations of their works, or that these might well be called "artist's interpretations." I am denying that artists' mental representations are fixed unities of which it makes sense to speak of "accurate" description, and that there is such a thing as the artist's interpretation.

One source for belief in surface interpretation is projection from things that happen in everyday discourse, and in discourse about art. Often in everyday discourse, someone says something, we ask what she means, we get a reply, and we accept it. Similarly, we often ask an artist what a particular element in a work is meant to represent, the artist replies, and we accept what she has said. This happens especially when we are talking to child artists.

Imagine talking to a child about a drawing she has made. We may ask her "What is this?" pointing to something that looks like a house. She then says, "It is a house." So then we might think that she has a map within her mind which is her internal representation of the work. This map includes labels for each of the elements in the drawing. Each label translates to a sentence using Danto's artistic "is." While we look at



Discussion

the drawing we do not have such a map (or series of sentences), but she does, and she can refer to it.

Recently I asked a seven-year-old what she meant by an image that looked like a baby cradled on the edge of a new moon. She said that it was "The Child of the Universe," and then she wrote "The Child of the Universe" next to the image.

So the image meant "The Child of the Universe." Or did it? I have no idea whether she had this label in her mind before I asked her that question, or whether she made up the answer when I asked her about the image. Perhaps the meaning of the image evolved as I spoke with her. Someone might say, "Why don't we just ask her whether the image was of the child of the universe before the question was asked?" But doing this would only raise the problem to another level.

In short, we cannot be sure that there was some one unchanging mental representation to which the child referred when I asked, "What is that?" Also, even if some artists persistently have internal labels for certain aspects of their works, this is not enough to posit such a thing as "the surface interpretation" of such works. At most it explains why some people believe there are such things as surface interpretations.

It might be argued that we need not have a complete or even an elaborate interpretation to have an accurate surface interpretation. The title of a work might be seen as an accurate surface interpretation of the work. For example, Picasso's title "Guernica" identi- fies what the painting is about, and it guides further interpretations. The painting "is" Guernica in Danto's artistic sense of "is." In calling his painting "Guer- nica," Picasso meant to tell us that the painting ex- presses his outrage at the fascist bombing of the vil- lage of Guernica. We accept this interpretation because we know that Picasso is the one who did the painting, and we have no reason to believe he was lying when he spoke about the painting.5

Titles are often guides to how artists would like a work to be seen or interpreted. Picasso probably did intend to have us see his painting in terms of the events at Guernica. But most titles are only one or a few words long, and not usually sentence-like. These seem too short and nonpropositional to be interpretations, lit- erally speaking. We think of interpretations as con- sisting of at least one sentence, and usually a series of them arranged coherently. I do not mean, however, to exclude the possibility of an entire interpretation being implied in a single-word quip.

Another source of the idea that there are such things as surface interpretations is that we often give authority to the artist in the interpretation of her works. For instance, we often ask the artist whether a particular interpretation of her work is accurate, and accept her views on this. Something similar happens in our interpretation of everyday statements. However, such authority, as Danto (unlike the Brands) recognizes, is

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a function of social convention. Danto mentions that Faulkner could determine what was included in his novels and what not. Faulkner had special authority, and could do things that lesser-known writers could not, because of his social position. This seems to show that surface interpretation, if there is such a thing, is not determinate, but malleable.

A third source for belief in surface interpretation is the view that it is needed to establish identity of something as a work of art. The Brands believe that we can know that what appears to be merely stains on a wall is really a work of art because we know that these marks were originally created with that intention. Fine. However, it is another thing to say, as they do, that this constitutes establishing a surface interpretation. Knowing that something is a work of art is quite different from understanding what the artist meant by it.

Also, even if the artistic "is" is needed for artistic identity, there is no reason why the interpretation needed for this has to be completely and uniquely determined by the artist. Why cannot the constituting interpretation be emergent within, and from, a larger and constantly changing context in which the artist merely plays an important role?

The Brands hold that creating a work of art is an action, that interpreting a work of art is a special case of understanding an action, and that a behavior is an action if caused by certain mental representations, especially intentions. Stravinsky's lowering his arm while conducting a concert is an action in that it is caused primarily by an intention. An observer may infer this from context and from analogy to his or her own experience.

The Brands compare a description of an art object to an observer's understanding of the behavior asso- ciated with an action, surface interpretation to an agent's understanding of her own action, and deep interpretation to an observer's understanding of the con- sequences of the agent's action. For them, the description of a work of art is simply of the work's physical characteristics: for example, a description of the size of a canvas, the kinds of objects depicted, or the main characters in a novel. It does not include the artist's or author's intentions. They conclude that the artist's intended interpretation makes an object into an artwork, just as Stravinsky's intention to lower his arm makes his bodily behavior into an action.

It is true that if we are only told about the rate and direction of the descent of Stravinsky's arm we have no way to determine whether he acted. But it would be rare for us to be told just this. More likely, we are told something like: "Stravinsky, in conducting The Firebird, lowered his baton in the direction of X." We do not need information about Stravinsky's private inner life or its connection to his arm's motion to have good reason to believe he acted. We have good reason if we see his arm move as he is conducting, or if we



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are told that he moved his arm in a certain way in a certain context.

Moreover, although artists' intentions may be necessary for the constitution of works of art, they are not sufficient. Although Stravinsky's intention to lower his arm contributes to his bodily behavior being an action, it only constitutes such an action within a context that includes certain social conventions. Gener- ally speaking, acts and works of art are both constituted and reconstituted through evolving intentions in constantly evolving social contexts. It is also doubtful that a description of a work may be fully isolated from interpretation. For instance, it is often a matter of interpretation whether a particular canvas is large, and what kinds of things a painting depicts.

Although the artist's interpretations contribute, at various stages, to the production of a work of art, and although we are reluctant to say something is a work of art when we have reason to believe that it was never intended to be a work of art, neither of these facts imply that there is such a thing as an artist's intended interpretation, frozen in time, which causes something to be a work of art.

The Brands think that if a critic questions whether Stravinsky was signaling the cellos at a particular moment in The Firebird it is obvious that Stravinsky himself is in the best position to know the answer, and that if Stravinsky occupies a privileged position in this instance then he does so in general when it comes to interpretations of his actions. For the Brands, if the artist's memory is "veridical," and he is not lying, then he is the ultimate authority on his intentions.

Yet little sense can be made of the concept of "veridical" if there is nothing that the artist's self- report could be publicly checked against. In addition, Stravinsky, like Faulkner, is in a position of authority with respect to his artistic intentions. So, if he says that he intended to signal the cellos, then his intention, I would argue, is retroactively constituted in that way. This reshapes the meaning of whatever thoughts may have been dominant in his mind when he actually made the movement. Stravinsky occupies a privileged position, but only in relation to the institutional context that gives him that position, and never as ultimate arbiter of meaning.

In sum: The meaning of Stravinsky's baton movement is constituted not simply by Stravinsky at the time of the movement but in an elaborate context that includes thoughts that were going through his mind at the time, the requirements of the score, previous thoughts he had while creating the score, the situational context within the theater, social institutions connected with music and the roles of composers and conduc- tors, and later thoughts about what his intentions should have been. It even includes the context of the demand that he answer our question concerning his intentions.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

In order to explain deep interpretation, the Brands ask us to consider a case in which a group of rebels has decided that a certain downward motion of Stravin- sky's arm will start a revolution quite without his knowledge. Here, a work of art is interpreted in a way the artist never intended or imagined.

But the rebels are not interpreting Stravinsky's actions. Their response is not even about Stravinsky. In- deed, on the very causal theory of action that the Brands accept, Stravinsky does not even act in this instance, since an action must be caused by an intention, and Stravinsky did not intend to start the revolution. And even if he unconsciously intended to start a revolution, that has nothing to do with the rebels! In short, there is nothing in common between what Stravinsky's act means to the rebels and what it might mean deeply, for example, in terms of his unconscious desires.

For the concept of surface interpretation to hold, the distinction between surface and deep interpretation must remain clear. However, the Brands' view of surface and deep interpretation is confused and ultimately fails. In conclusion: There is no one surface interpretation of a work. There are no surface interpretations at all, unless by that is simply meant the artist's stated interpretations, or that plus whatever the artist is disposed to say in honest reply to questions like "What did you mean by that?"

TOM LEDDY Department of Philosophy San Jose State University San Jose, California 95192

INTERNET: [email protected]

1. Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University Press, 1986), chaps. 2 and 3. Peg Brand and Myles Brand, "Surface and Deep Interpreta- tion," in Danto and his Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993).

2. The Brands give a bewildering variety of subtly conflicting descriptions of surface interpretation. It is (1) "a statement of the artist's prior representational mental state" (p. 57), (2) "the interpretation the artist gives to the work in virtue of his [initial] intentions in creating it" (pp. 59, 60), (3) "the understanding of the work given the artist's intentions, background beliefs, and other representational mental states that played a role in creating it" (p. 59); (4) it must "coincide with the artist's own description or mental representation of the work" (p. 66), (5) it must be one "with which the artist does (or would) agree" (p. 66), and (6) it is a set of "statements that accurately reflect, or fail to accurately reflect, the artist's intentions in creating the work" (p. 67).

3. See Michael Krausz, "Intention and Interpretation: Hirsch and Margolis," in Intention and Interpretation, ed. Gary Iseminger (Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 152- 166, esp. 152-153.

4. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Milton, Balch, and Co., 1934).



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5. 1 owe this example to Richard Keshen. I would also like to thank the anonymous referees of the JAAC for useful comments.

Surface Interpretation: Reply to Leddy In our paper "Surface and Deep Interpretation," we sought to provide detail and texture to Arthur Danto's views on interpretation, thereby explicating and de- fending them.1 In his response to our paper, Tom Leddy criticizes several key aspects of this approach to interpretation, as well as offering a (negative) thesis about the relationship between interpretation and the artist's intentions. Leddy's observations about our views can be summarized in three main points, all of which critique our views and ultimately Danto's: (1) Leddy rejects the notion of a correct artist's (surface) interpretation for any work of art; (2) he rejects any distinction between surface and deep interpretations; and (3) he rejects the view that artists' intentions, although necessary, can be sufficient for constituting a work of art. However, Leddy's response contains both mistakes and misunderstandings. While we will not try to unravel all that he says, a few points are worthy of mention. In the end, Danto' s view, given our expli- cation of it, remains tenable.

Danto distinguishes between a surface interpretation of a work of art, which is the artist's intended interpretation, and a deep interpretation, which is an interpretation other than the artist's intended interpretation, that is grounded in some theoretical or conceptual framework. The surface interpretation captures the artist's intention in creating the work and is constitutive of a work of art in that an object or an event is a work of art in virtue of the existence of a surface interpretation: "My theory of interpretation is ... constitutive, for an object is an artwork at all only in relation to a [surface] interpretation."2 Using Danto's mode of expression, interpretations are transfigura- tive, in that they are "functions which transform material objects into works of art."3 In a later essay, written in response to our comments and other critiques, he adds:

Constitutive interpretations just are what I had in mind by surface interpretations: it is what the audience grasps when it understands the work, and, so far as this interpretation an- swers to the artist's intention, to understand the work is to know what the intention was.4

Deep interpretations, by contrast, "generally relate works to ulterior causes rather than physical objects to works" and are the more common, ordinary interpretations made by critics and others in which the work of art-previously considered a mere physical

object or event-is understood in terms of some background theory or conceptual framework, for instance, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, or even textbook art history. Also, as distinguished from surface interpretations, deep interpretations are "not in any way constitutive of the work."s

In our paper, we specifically discuss Danto' s claims about the relationship between surface and deep interpretations. One relationship, noted above, we called the "Constitutive Dependency Thesis." The second, which we called the "Content Dependency Thesis," captured Danto' s argument that a deep interpretation must be consistent with the surface interpretation; that is, for instance, a critic's interpretation must respect the artist's intention. We pointed out that in his art criticism, Danto does not follow this stricture and offers convincing critical (deep) interpretations that are inconsistent with the artist's intention. Our per- spective is that Danto' s practice as an art critic is fun- damentally correct, and he should give up the thesis that a deep interpretation must be consistent with a surface interpretation. In his reply to our criticisms, he absorbed the apparent inconsistencies into a broader notion of "surface interpretation," claiming that what we perceived as deep interpretations were really part of surface interpretations, and thereby retained his content dependency thesis. This broader notion of surface interpretation seems to permit inclusion of background and commonsense beliefs held in common between the artist and the critic (or viewer). If so, then Danto's broader notion-though not the one articu- lated in his earlier book, which was the target of our critique-is consistent with Leddy's claim (3) that the artist's intentions are not sufficient for constituting a work of art. Nonetheless, as the above quotation makes clear, Danto continues to maintain that the artist's intentions are necessary for something being a work of art, in that they are constitutive of artworks.

Let us proceed now to consider Leddy's criticisms. Note the intimate connections between them. Leddy's claim that there can be no correct surface interpretation (1) is tied to (2): his claim that there is no such thing as a surface interpretation. Also, since (1) no such (correct) surface interpretation exists, then (3) it cannot be sufficient for turning a physical object or event into a work of art.

Leddy rejects the notion of a correct artist's (surface) interpretation for any work of art based on a re- jection of any distinction between surface and deep interpretations. In citing a litany of problems in knowing an artist's intention, he claims that in our essay we are less than helpful by providing "a bewildering variety of subtly conflicting descriptions of surface interpretation." He expands our characterizations of surface interpretations-taken directly from Danto's writing-into unrecognizable assertions we never proposed. For instance, we did not suggest that a sur-



Against Surface Interpretation

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