Data and Meaning

One of the first X Ray images by Willhelm Röntgen, 1896.

I read a very interesting article by Henry H. Bauer recently that proposes a distinction between two forms of knowledge: “map-like” and “story-like”. Bauer states that: “Failure to distinguish between the meaningfulness and the reliability of knowledge helps to make arguments intractable.” This conflict between information and significance is one that arises in art a great deal. Many artists find themselves caught between a desire to tell what they see as important truths and a counter desire to discover significances, between a use of art as a medium and the use of art as a tool for exploration.

The following is from a recent email to a student intended to clarify some similar issues that came up in a critique:

“The "basic failure to communicate" that you mention is, I suspect, based upon an assumption that there is a message that the work needs to convey. That's where the conflict lies because art isn't particularly great as a purveyor of facts since the language it uses is so fluid. In order to tell the facts it's likely that you'll need to resort to a more stable form of communication (ie: text) - that is, if you feel the facts are necessary. Better, I would suggest, is if the facts inform your thinking and image making by osmosis but instead of trying to wrestle the materials and processes to tell 'the' story, you work with the poetry of materials and processes to discover how they might reflect and reveal the underlying themes - some of which hopefully haven't even occurred to you yet. It's the difference between seeing art as a message (data) and a search (meaning).
”