What Does It Mean?

What Does It Mean?
Ashley Brown


Consider once again the age-old question which has plagued for centuries art theorists, art critics, artists themselves, and even the chance college student enrolled in an Art Theory course: What is art? Countless theorists have devised countless explanations of what makes a doodle or sculpture a piece of art, and not one of those theories has been adopted by the art world as a universal truth about their trade.

I kept this fact in mind while browsing the WSU Art Museum’s Master of Fine Arts Theses. Each of the five artists on display approached art from a different viewpoint. Walther’s carefully crafted video clip was choppy, well-made, and rather confusing. Price’s Hindu tree caught the eye almost immediately upon entering the museum. McGeachy’s digital drawings were appealing yet vague. McCleary’s installation was creative and quite simply baffling. But the works which caught and held my attention the longest were those of Brad Dinsmore.

“The General Dance” series (2009) on display at the museum included two ceramic figures. A bright orange cat, one paw outstretched, the other offering the viewer a vase with a single flower, rested atop a white platform. The “Cat Bringing You Flowers” was not particularly well-made, nor did it seem to offer a deep meaning, until the viewer peered at the second ceramic figure on the ground behind the cat. “Nervous Rabbit” clutched the platform, half-hiding behind it, hiding an array of colorful flowers behind its back. Alone, either statue could mean any number of things. Together, they called to my mind an image of young love—the bold, brave cat confidently proffering a single flower while the quiet, shy rabbit hangs back in the shadows, afraid to offer his beautiful bouquet.

The cat and the rabbit both look like something a first-time sculptor could put together and paint; neither required a high level of skill from the artist. However, this may have been precisely Dinsmore’s intention—meaning over beauty, as Hickey might put it. What the viewer interprets the artwork to mean may in fact be more important to Dinsmore than how well the art was put together or how much time and skill it took him to create each statue.

Each artwork in Dinsmore’s “Epistemological Pursuits” series (2009) seems to combine skill and meaning. “Problems of Knowing” (2009) depicts a pair of well-drawn hands with a few squiggly lines. The contrast between the aesthetically pleasing hands and the crayon lines, in addition to the rather deep name Dinsmore gave it, give the viewer something to mull over and find their own meaning for. Problems of knowing what?, I asked myself. Problems of knowing what in the world the artist intended for me to take away from this piece.

“Tools for Unlocking the Abstract” (2009) is hands down the art work that I found the most interesting and compelling out of all the Master of Fine Arts Thesis works. In this piece, a skillfully sketched head peers down through some squiggles, colorful dots, and a bit of graph paper toward a skillfully sketched hand. As per my interpretation, this work played nicely off of Hickey’s dilemma in The Invisible Dragon. Is meaning more important than beauty in the art world? Abstract work sometimes sacrifices aesthetic appeal in order to achieve a higher meaning. Hickey postulated that perhaps that is the wrong approach to art. Dinsmore seems to suggest a similar idea in “Tools for Unlocking the Abstract”—his piece combines beauty, in the skillfully drawn head and hand, and meaning, in the abstract lines, circles, and graph paper.

Art is a complicated concept, as I’ve learned throughout the course of this semester. It can be beautiful, it can be ugly, it can be meaningful, and it can make absolutely no sense at all. Yet, somehow, it is still art. Hickey asked whether meaning was more important than beauty; Dinsmore answered that it is possible to have both. What is art? The Master of Fine Arts Theses held no answer to this question—or rather, each artists portrayed their own answer. Each artist, with their random installations and confusing portraits, seemed to imply that the most important part of what defines art as art is the viewer’s quest for one simple answer: What does it mean?