The work of art as a metasemiotic experiment
Abstract
What is artistic experimentation? How are artistic experiments indeed experiments? This is a paper about the ontology of the artwork. Here, art is defined as a metasemiotic experiment, a process of signs investigating a process of signs. We define this metalevel as a semiotic phenomenon of self-inspection. Artists, like spectators, are situated within self-organized processes. They are not the tutors of semiotic processes but their participants. To structure this argument, based on C.S. Peirce's model of semiosis (action of the sign), we propose a typology - artistic experiments focus on the sign, the object, or the interpretative effects (interpreters) of semiosis, which are the variables they isolate. We illustrate this typology with historical cases from the Rupture Group, artists Cildo Meireles, and Lygia Clark.
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References
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