Wayne Schoenfeld: Content

Los Angeles artist, Wayne Schoenfeld, continues my recent project by writing about "content." Schoenfeld is represented locally by The Fraser Gallery. As usual, I extend an invitation to all local artists who would like to participate in this effort. Just email me!

Color Photograph

Wayne Schoenfeld: Content

Moby Dick is a great boy’s action novel. Maybe. But thoughtful readers have found a book rich with symbolism, metaphor, double entendre, intended and unintended images that tell the various other stories, the stories that scholars still debate. Artists, through their medium tell their stories and make their statements, literal and figurative, but the reader, or viewer brings their own life experience to the process of interpretation which is a rich interactive collaboration between the artist and interpreter. The idiosyncratic life experience, attitudes, individual biology, culture and… take the viewer down a personal path. The artist may employ his tools and present his images in such a way that the viewer is started off in a particular direction or, with Rorschach ambiguity permit the interpretation to be entirely a reflection of the viewer. Such is content. It is a mixture of intended and unintended interpretations of the story, the meaning, the intensity, the sensuality and the emotion that a viewer feels or thinks when he experiences a work of art.

Good art can be judged by it’s content. How deeply the viewer is affected, how many questions the art asks or answers, how interactive is the experience of the art, fine artists recognize the viewer as a part of their art.

The visual image, documentary and reportage are the photographer’s medium. The creation of the image, the editing of the image, the point of view, the cropping, the angle the lighting, all of the factors that create and the eye that selects which images an audience views determine the content.

In my own work I am very aware of the influence that I’d like to have as well as my ultimate impotence to determine the content of my work. In my own work I use literal forms and assemble them in novel and figurative ways to startle and jar the viewer down the path that I’ve traveled, but I know that each viewer may find his own way to his own destination. The subjectivity of content in all media, the personal way in which each individual experiences that which is around him is why we have disagreements, elections, courts and a rich fabric of life woven with the threads of many points of view.

Vanity - The Grand Inquisitor
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Previous Posts:

Charles Neenan: Tradition
Kelly Towles: Color
Ryan Mulligan: Originality
Matt Hollis: Confinement
Dean Fueroghne: Originality
James W. Bailey: Obligation
J. Coleman: Depiction
Andy Moon Wilson: Decision
Molly Springfield: Language
Bryan Whitson: Scene
Elyse Harrison: Motivation
Jiha Moon Wilson: Influence
Alexandra Silverthorne: Derivative
Jose Ruiz: Contemporary
Kathleen Shafer: Focus
Jennifer McMackon: Connection
Gregg Chadwick: Responsibility
Warren Craghead: Material
Angela Kleis: Purpose
Peter Reginato: Order
Anna L. Conti: Community