The Interpretation of Possibilities

The first stage of the interpretation involves the personal and intui-tive. It corresponds to the interpretation of the artwork, in Peirce’s semiotic context, as an icon. The purpose is to reveal how an artwork represents the unconscious. A sign designated an icon is considered in relation to the sign’s character elements, which are qualisign, sinsign, and legisign. The first stage of interpretation is a combination of:

subjectivity and feeling firstness

sense experience rheme

feeling / sensation / intuition

This stage is based on Peirce’s firstness, and as such it is related to the concept of a rheme, the category of Peirce’s third trichotomy for which a sign can be interpreted with regard to its qualitative possi-bilities. The first stage of an interpretation has to do with the senses:

it involves the qualities of feeling and perception. Interpreters must trust their intuitions and allow their feelings to be used as data for interpreting an artwork. The artwork is interpreted as it is; ideas and possibilities are comprehended without reference to anything external to it. The first stage is subjective, and as such, it is a personal way to interpret artworks. Interpreters reveal their own intuitions during this stage. If her mind is hobbled with too much information about an art-work, the interpreter cannot allow her own ideas or feelings to appear naturally. When her imagination is free, it can provide an additional source of information for the study.

Additionally, the first stage includes Jung’s (1968, 11–17) ecto-psychic behavior functions of feeling, sensation, and intuition. Feel-ing informs you about the value of thFeel-ings. You have a feelFeel-ing about the thing, and it tells you what a thing is worth to you and tells you whether it is agreeable or not. Feeling is like thinking—it is a rational function. And while feeling is genuine and real, it is an incomplete thought. Through sensation, information is received from the world of external objects. Sensation tells us that a thing is something, but it does not tell us what it is. Intuition is a certain feeling that arises in the present about things and events, which can have connection from the past and the future. Jung (1989, 69–70) proposed that sensation helps intuition to exist.

Peirce believed that sensations and feelings are experiences, but they are not properly thoughts. They fall under the term “phenomena of the soul,” because people recognize them as immediate products of an activity within themselves. Sensations and feelings are always part of the activity of thought and feelings cannot be separated from thought (Peirce 1986, 11). No present actual thought, which is merely feeling, has any meaning or any intellectual value. Feeling as a thought may be connected to other forthcoming thoughts (Peirce 1960, 173).

A good example of Peirce’s firstness arose when Alice Miller (1989, 87) was asked to discuss an exhibition of the work of Käthe Kollwitz.

Miller did not know the artist or her work, and before collecting back-ground information on Kollwitz, she wanted to see the exhibit. She wanted to experience the artworks purely as they were, in and of them-selves, and while doing so, she became naturally curious about them.

She wondered what kinds of artworks Kollwitz was exposed to in her youth, and wondered about the identity of the old woman who was depicted in almost every work. Miller (1989, 68) proposed that when a viewer is not afraid to research artists’ connections to their childhood, he is able to receive more of the content of the subject matter.

A natural curiosity is valuable for interpreting an artwork. For exam-ple, questions like those that Miller had about Kollwitz can be of

assis-tance in the interpretations. “What makes an artwork work? To find out, ask yourself a few questions: Do I like it? Now go further. What do I see? How is the work composed? What is the feeling expressed in the artwork? How does it make me feel? And of course, the way each artist sees rain and images rain is different too. What does the artwork mean? What does it make you think of? What is the feeling expressed in the artwork?” (Greenberg and Jordan 1991, 16, 39).

Jung (1966, 104–5) thought that to understand the nature of an artist’s primordial experience, viewers must allow a work of art to act upon them as it acted upon the artist. To grasp its meaning, one must permit it to shape oneself as it shaped the artist. Jung believed that immersion in the state of participation is the secret of artistic cre-ation and of the effect that great art has upon us. Freud (1995, 193–4) agreed that an artwork arouses the same sensation in a viewer that the artist experienced while creating the artwork. It is usually not known why someone likes a particular artwork. In an interpretation, the art-ist’s intentions and emotions can be clarified. An artwork’s content and meaning must be discovered, up to the point where the effect of the artwork is understood. Even after that knowledge is gained, Freud maintained that the sensation of the artwork would not disappear.

Kimmo Pasanen (2004, 177–8) wrote that the strength of intuition that an artist’s creative process incorporates can be discerned in the completed artwork. A viewer can have the same degree of intuition or artistic sensitivity, and he or she as an observer is able to understand the intuitive signs in the artist’s work. Corresponding with this attention to the viewer, the primary focus of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is the researcher rather than the artwork. In the current study, the experiences and reflections of the researcher while engaged in interpretations are emphasized (Anttila 2006, 329).