ART 105 / Types of Meaning Master List

Image + Form (including medium) + Context = Meaning

Image: “Narrative Content” (Buster), “Subject Matter” (Barrett), “Representation” (McEvilley)

Denotative Meaning also called Depicted (Lisa) or Representational: (McEvilley) The literal meaning of an image or item without any interpretation or inference.

Connotative Meaning: Meaning that is suggested or implied going beyond simply what is depicted. While connotation can also arise from context and form qualities (see below) in terms of image type meaning that goes beyond the literal taking a number of forms including:

· Associative Meaning: All the things an image makes us think about (from cultural and or personal sources)

· Metaphoric Meaning: Meaning gained thru analogy (likening one thing to another)

· Affective Meaning: Meaning that arises from an evident attitude of the speaker (intonation) (McEvilley’s Attitudinal Gestures)

· Symbolic Meaning: Something that comes to stand for something else by association, resemblance, or convention (i.e. can more or less coded)

o Iconography: A shared, coded, visual language (McEvilley calls it Iconographic Traditions)

o Archetype: A universal symbolic language (inherited unconscious supposedly transcending cultural contexts)

o Allegory: A narrative where an entire cast of characters or events represent or symbolize ideas and concepts.

Form: The physical structure of the work (Barrett), Formal Choices (Buster), Formal Properties (McEvilley)

· Design Elements: categories of basic form types. The most compete list comes from Kendall Buster (PDF #5) but others repeat many of the same items.

o Edge (both physical edge and internal edges)

o Line

o Color (Buster sub categorizes into emotion, symbol, indexed, palette)

o Composition (placement in sculpture) (configuration types such as pattern, field)

o Objectness: the artwork as physical object

o Scale: (absolute and relative) (Buster and McEvilley)

o Format: the overall shape of the support
also mentioned by others…

o Time, mass, texture ,shape

· Medium (Barrett)/ Materials (McEvilley) What it’s made of

o Temporal Duration: the durability of materials (if they last or not) (McEvilley)

o Genre: Type or category of artistic endeavor defined by medium, style, usage etc. and the associations that each of these types make us think about. (McEvilley)

· Process: How it came into being (Buster)

Context: An artwork’s circumstance

§ Viewing Context (Barrett) The artworks immediate surrounding including:

o Where it is seen / Where the work exists

o When the work exists

o How it is displayed

o Title (McEvilley’s Verbal Supplement)

o What is carried to it by the viewer (McEvilley’s bio physical responses)

§ Historical Context (Barrett) The artwork’s place in the culture thru time including:

o Artist’s Context: Who made it. Information about the artist including statement of intentions, other bodies of artworks, process, and personal habits.

o Social Context: The time and place of the artwork’s origin

o Art Historical context: (also McEvilley’s Relationship with Art History)
Seeing the work in relationship to other artworks including belonging to or rejecting a tradition, or quoting of other artworks.

o Destiny Through Time (McEvilley) Stuff that happens as the work ages, such as political controversy (Buster)

1. Representation: The presence of an image (marks on a page?) that we recognize as resembling something we know in nature.

2. Verbal Supplements: When text brings additional information to the work. Titles, artist statements, etc.

3. Genre/medium: The type of art form brings with it certain associations and attitudes.

4. Materials: The material with which a work is made brings with it associations and statements of "affiliation or alienation" from certain cultural traditions.

5. Scale: The size of something tells us about the value of a thing or about how it exists in relationship to other things in the world.

6. Temporal duration: How long something endures. Art that is made in extremely durable materials and ones of transient materials speak to issues of duration and timelessness or change and transience.

7. Context: The place in which the artwork is viewed effects its meaning

8. Relationship with Art History: A common way this is engaged is by quotes and allusions to other past works within a new work.

9. Destiny thru time/Accruing meaning: What happens to a work after it is made joins its meanings.

10. Iconographic Tradition: A symbolic language which is not based on resemblance.

11. Formal Properties:. Formal configurations (modes of organization and compositions) are understood as "ontological propositions" (forms of being).

12. Attitudinal gestures: The sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious presence of an attitude taken by the work.

13. Biological /physiological responses: artworks that arouse sensate reactions (sexual desire, physical excitement etc)