The Artist's Sanction in Contemporary Art

Contemporary artworks raise a variety of ontological, epistemological, and interpretative questions that have not yet been adequately dealt with in aesthetics. Whereas traditional visual artworks have typically had a set of privileged and (ideally) unchanging properties fixed at a particular moment early in their histories, a contemporary installation artwork may be installed differently each time it is taken out of storage, or even constituted out of different objects at each exhibition site. The resulting variation in its configuration and visual properties may simply be a function of the changing features of galleries or available materials, or it may be essential to the work's meaning. Or both: many contemporary works are site specific, essentially responsive to their environments in such a way that context is incorporated into the work's meaning. Some contemporary works are made from materials that gradually degrade or decay over time. Sometimes, as with Jana Sterbak's Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987), a dress made from raw meat that decomposes over the course of the exhibition, such degradation is intended by the artist and seems to contribute to the work's meaning. In other cases, it is the unintended result of experimentation with new techniques or substances, in which case it often appears regrettable and is subject to conservators' attempts to control the damage.' The question of whether and how the degradation is relevant to our interpretation of the work can be quite difficult to answer. In such cases, it may be difficult to get a handle on the nature of the artwork. Is the work an essentially decaying entity, such that its decay is an interpretable feature of it? Or is its material degradation something we should politely ignore, as we ignore (and, when we have the resourc s, may attempt to correct) the yellowing of varnish, the flaking of paint, and the breaking off of noses in traditional Western artworks? Is the installation work simply a collection of objects that may be assembled in whatever way? Well, typically not: usually there are heuristics and gestalts that seem to guide acceptable configurations so that not just anything goes. But algorithms that will allow us to determine with exactitude which arrangements are acceptable and which are not are exceedingly rare. Thus the work may seem to have a deeply indeterminate nature. We may wonder, is this indeterminacy central to the work's meaning? Or is it simply part of the framework, a function of the medium within which the artist is working, and thus to be ignored in interpretation? In this paper, I argue for a view that provides reasoned answers to such questions about the nature of the artwork and the considerations relevant to interpreting it. Through an extended example, I will show that if we wish to be true to the nature of many contemporary artworks, we must appeal to information related to the artist's intention at relevant points during the works' production. My view, however, is not an intentionalist one: it does not require that we make inferences about the artist's intentions, whether actual or hypothesized, construed as mental states or as behavioral dispositions.2 It requires, instead, that we examine the artist's publicly accessible actions and communications, the contexts in which they were delivered, and the conventions operative in those contexts to determine what the artist has sanctioned. The artist's sanction may serve to fix the boundaries of his or her work, to determine whether a particular feature is relevant to the work's interpretation,