Where would we be without names? How would we refer to
places or people or objects? Life would be a lot harder and disconnected if we
didn’t have names, however this is a reoccurring trend within the art world.
Modern and contemporary art is littered with ‘Untitled’s, some artists even
have Untitled 2, 4, 46 in
their collections. This disconnection to their paintings is an unsettling show
of the mass productivity of art, leading us to question whether or not art
still carries the same passion and meaning as before.
When my parents named me, they put a lot of thought into it.
Baby books where poured over, relative names were debated, and when they
finally chose my name is seemed right. My mum had just spent 9 months making me
and it seemed right that she gave me a name she loved. If this was not the case
however, and my parents didn’t give me a name, they’d surely at least refer to
me through some sort of characteristic – girl? Baby? Noisy? When you think of artists,
you have a stereotypical image of someone who is undeniably passionate about
their art work, puts their life and soul into everything they create, yet how
can they call their work…nothing. Untitled. Every time I see an ‘Untitled’ in a
gallery my heart sinks. Poor painting.
For artists now there are a few problems that bring around
the need for a nameless artwork. The first of these problems is the mass
production of artworks by famous artists, so much so that the paintings are
repetitive and almost identical to one another. Think Mark Rothko,
unquestionably a very talented artist who had his own distinct style, and since
his fame everyone wanted a Rothko hanging in their house. But there are only so
many Rothko’s in circulation, and when people are paying an average of $41,000
for a piece of the action, Untitled seems to be the fall back for art that has
an infinite amount of brothers and sisters and is being produced to demand. The
art market has reached an ever increasing peak, with fine art sales reaching $7
billion in 2012, so its unsurprising that artists would like to create as much
art pieces as they can. Whilst his art is worth lots of money, we can’t purely
pin point the reason for his untitled works on this. Rothko’s extensive use of
vibrant colours were symbolic of religious and political experiences and
through the colour he wanted the viewers themselves to feel emotions and take
away their own experiences without being told what to feel. Rothko used his own
opinions and emotions as his inspiration for colour, but left us to feel
something of our own.
Another problem facing new art’s possibility of a name is,
widely speaking, the sheer randomness of what we today can count as art. You
only have to stumble into the minimalist section of the Tate Modern to come
face to face with a room full of ambiguously unnamed art works. Robert Morris,
Larry Bell and Donald Judd (among many others) give their work the ever so
uncreative name of ‘Untitled’ – where has modern creativity gone? These artists
are creating piece of art that sit in world class galleries like the Tate and
the MoMa but they are so unidentifiable by name, making the viewer question if
these objects had any inspiration behind them, or what the ‘meaning’ of art
actually is. There are so many people in this world who look at art and say
‘that’s not art’, and for people like this a name would help them identify with
a piece of art and be able to take away an intended message. Minimalism however
has always had a trend of naming (or not naming) works Untitled. The lack of
defining word given to the art work is to open up the experience of viewing
this work to the public and let them understand how they feel best. By giving a
piece of art a name in reference to a political, religious or social group or
movement, the artists closes the piece of art off to other members of society.
Whilst a name of a painting offers a kind of completion to a
piece of work and is indisputably a powerful tool of influence on the viewer,
nameless work opens itself up to the audience and makes art broader and
accessible to people of all races, religions and languages.
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