I was watching a piece the other night about Georgia O’Keefe, and was struck by the fact that apparently she got rather upset when people suggested that there might be a psychoanalytic interpretation of her painting. First of all, the fact that people looked at her work in this way should hardly be surprising in view of the centrality of psychoanalysis in the consciousness of educated Americans at that time. More important in my view, however, is the problematic idea that the artist is the sole custodian of the meaning of the work. Surely the response of the viewer is an essential part of the process of art.
For a long time I’ve been impressed by the utility of the notion developed by the French anthropologist Dan Sperber, that we are all custodians of “encyclopaedias” of possible reference. Some of these associations are purely private: some are common to our group: and some are the property of our cultural milieu more widely. Any intelligent artist is going to be aware of a part of the potential range of associations likely to be conjured up by images we produce: but we cannot anticipate all of them, and we certainly have no possible opportunity to either know or censor them.
There might well be idiosyncratic (or even downright silly or outrageous) associations which our images evoke in their viewers, but we have no control over these. They are a part of the risks we run in communicating. O’Keefe has to be believed when she tells us that potential Freudian implications of her work are not among her intentions …. but hard luck.