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For a while now I’ve been mulling over the idea of context. And how it can shift meaning and change perception.
So that’s the theme of this month’s newsletter.
Let’s dive in.
Artists craft their work to provoke a reaction. Layering it with messages and metaphors — creating the context to paint a picture in people’s minds. But a lot of the time the context in which it is seen is out of the artist’s control. The words it’s paired it with, whether it’s seen it in one gallery or another, alone or with others, in a book, online or in real life.
Every day art, like brand communication, undergoes contextual shifts which affect how the original idea is perceived.
Now this is interesting. Because in many ways, looking at art, and how it is displayed — how context shifts meaning — for me, is not just a lesson in how to frame an idea (i.e. set the context) but how to reframe it.
In marketing, reframing is taking known ideas about a product or category and shifting the emphasis to change the way people see it. For example, positioning a weakness as a strength, a problem as an opportunity etc.
Reframing relies on context.
Artists and curators, like great narrators (and marketers) know that context is critical.
John Berger makes a point of this in “Ways of Seeing”, the classic TV series and book of the same name.
“This is a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it. Look at it for a moment in silence.” He says.
“Now supposing I say to you as you look at it — this is the last picture Van Gogh painted before he killed himself”
“It is hard to define exactly how the words have changed the image but undoubtedly they have. The image now illustrates the sentence.”
Suddenly the context reframes the way you see it. It is no longer a painting about life, it’s a painting about death. The words bring a whole new meaning to it.
The exploration of the way context shifts meaning is central to the artist Haim Steinbach’s work. He takes everyday objects, groups them together and displays them on wedge-shaped shelves and in modular displays. He talks of these as “framing devices” to re-position familiar objects in the minds of the people that look at them.
Steinbach’s aim is to make us ‘resee’. In every day life, Steinbach says, “we neutralize (objects)” . We make unconscious associations and assumptions about them based on what we know.
As anyone who’s repositioned a brand knows, the longer assumptions are held, the harder they are to break. That’s why the reframe is such a powerful device.
Until next time 👋,
Harriet