Meaning as Event

There's a familiar kind of praise we give to open works of art: that they leave us free to see what we want. A song whose words let each listener build a private story. An abstract painting left untitled, so you can find in it whatever feels closest. Freedom of interpretation, treated as an unqualified good.

But is it always?

Think of anyone who has sat down to a board game with a rulebook — maybe translated awkwardly from another language. By the first move, a second game has already begun: not on the board, but between the players, each bending the rules in their own favor. The words that were meant to instruct instead open a space of unwanted ambiguity.

So openness has a shadow side. But the problem isn't freedom itself — it's the unawareness of whoever is exercising it. Read it and see what you understand can be a genuine invitation to build meaning together. It can also be intellectual laziness dressed up as openness — a way of dodging the responsibility of saying something precise. The line between the two isn't always visible from the outside. It comes down to one honest question: does the author know what they're doing? Do they know they're leaving it open, and want to? Or do they think they were clear, and weren't? In the first case, we're looking at a deliberate aesthetic choice. In the second, we're back at the game table.

And here's the uncomfortable part: even when we believe we have everything under control, how much of what we make is actually chosen? The medium we use is never neutral. It shapes thought while thought is still forming. The words we pick carry histories we don't govern. The culture we work inside encodes our choices without asking permission. What surfaces when we create is often more than we intended to put there — as any psychoanalyst, or any honest maker, will tell you. And the material itself has its own resistance and its own logic: the canvas answers the brush in ways the painter never fully commands.

In painting this reaches its peak — and its greatest potential. Thought doesn't pass through the filter of words, which is already a shared, rule-bound code. It goes straight into form, colour, gesture, matter, and so it slips past rational control far more easily. A painter begins with an intention, perhaps a vague one, and the moment the brush touches the canvas something shifts. A colour behaves unexpectedly, a gesture comes out different from the one planned, and suddenly the work is heading somewhere the artist never decided. Many painters describe this as the most alive moment of the whole process — when the work takes on a will of its own. Paul Klee called drawing taking a line for a walk. You don't know where it will go.

Then a second thing happens: reception. A painting without words reaches the viewer with no instructions — not even the syntax of a sentence to guide the reading. Pure form meets pure perception. And what is born in that space, between the work and the one looking at it, belongs to neither the artist nor the viewer. It is a third thing.

Which is why commenting on your own work is a paradox. The moment an artist explains a piece, they don't explain it — they change it. The words become part of the viewer's experience, and that free third space narrows, orients, sometimes closes. Titles do this most sharply. An untitled abstract canvas is one thing; the same canvas called My Mother on Her Deathbed is something else entirely. Not a millimetre of paint has moved, but you can never see it the same way again. Words colonize perception. Duchamp knew this perfectly, and used absurd titles to sabotage interpretation rather than steer it.

And when the artist does comment, who is actually speaking? The one who made the work, or the one looking at it afterward, from the outside, building a rational story on top of it? The author's account isn't necessarily truer than the viewer's. It's only more authoritative — and that authority may be an illusion.

Because if the author has no privileged access to the meaning of their own work, even after making it, what was really guiding the process while they made it? Much of it happens below awareness, at a level that comes before thought becomes words or images. This isn't the Freudian unconscious of repression and conflict; it's something more basic — the mind processing, connecting, generating patterns before consciousness even notices. The same level that lets you drive a familiar route without thinking, or find exactly the right word in the middle of a sentence without having searched for it. When a painter moves the brush, or a musician improvises, they are drawing on this. Consciousness arrives afterward, almost as a spectator, and says yes, that's right — without knowing why. Michael Polanyi called it tacit knowledge: we know more than we can tell. Art may be one of the few ways that knowledge can surface without being translated into words — and so without being distorted by the translation.

Many artists describe creation not as production but as passage: the work moved through them, it didn't come out of them. Perhaps consciousness isn't the centre of the creative process at all, only the point where the process becomes visible to itself.

So where does meaning live? Not in the author, who doesn't fully control what they made. Not in the work, mute without someone to look at it. Not in the viewer, who brings themselves but not the original intention. Meaning has no fixed address.

It isn't a static thing you find. It's an event that happens — in the movement between author, work, and viewer. It belongs to none of the three, and exists only in the relation among them.The same is true of a real conversation: what gets built in a genuine exchange was in neither person beforehand. It emerges in the dialogue, the way a work emerges in the making. This piece is no exception — it grew out of a dialogue between myself and an artificial intelligence, and something surfaced that neither of us fully controlled, and that perhaps neither of us would have found alone.

Marco Raimondo & Claude Anthropic

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