While You’re On Your Way addresses questions around possible roles for the title that is given for an artwork — whether that title be indicative, descriptive, allusive, expansive, essential, essentialising, controlling, complicating, playful, distractive, elusive, unreliable, or otherwise more than simply a label. The title may play various simultaneous roles depending on the work and the spectator, and their context of encounter. Absence of a title may in itself speak volumes: of omission, refusal, or asserted silence. While a title is not separate from the work of art, questions arise not only about the distinct significance of any title, but also about titling as a category of literature that serves to provoke thought, feeling, imagination. A title inevitably establishes filters and seeds trajectories for feeling and thinking in response to a work of art—for how ‘meaning’ may emerge. Yet such meanings are never determining; a title might be a provocateur but should not become the comptroller. Sensory experience is not directly translatable, even if a title appears to signify summarily. Titles develop between language’s conventions and excesses, where different registers of meaning intersect and interact, and where perception unfolds between emerging, changing and proliferating possibilities: this being the work that the spectator brings to the work of art.
While You’re On Your Way addresses questions around possible roles for the title that is given for an artwork — whether that title be indicative, descriptive, allusive, expansive, essential, essentialising, controlling, complicating, playful, distractive, elusive, unreliable, or otherwise more than simply a label. The title may play various simultaneous roles depending on the work and the spectator, and their context of encounter. Absence of a title may in itself speak volumes: of omission, refusal, or asserted silence. While a title is not separate from the work of art, questions arise not only about the distinct significance of any title, but also about titling as a category of literature that serves to provoke thought, feeling, imagination. A title inevitably establishes filters and seeds trajectories for feeling and thinking in response to a work of art—for how ‘meaning’ may emerge. Yet such meanings are never determining; a title might be a provocateur but should not become the comptroller. Sensory experience is not directly translatable, even if a title appears to signify summarily. Titles develop between language’s conventions and excesses, where different registers of meaning intersect and interact, and where perception unfolds between emerging, changing and proliferating possibilities: this being the work that the spectator brings to the work of art.