(Snippet of original music below. The following carbuncle has formed on what I intended to be a nearly empty entry.)
I made up some silly titles for this particular skitch (one notch less than a sketch). But then I realized that if I post it under some whimsical illustrative name, you’d all try to picture the ostensible subject-matter while you’re listening. You won’t be able to stop yourselves. The title would win, even though it was just a joke. Then I considered posting it under an impossibly inappropriate title (“The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance“), but after a moment’s reflection it seemed to me that you’d all still try to apply the inapplicable title to your listening. How could you not?
Titles are just too powerful. No matter how big your work is and how small its title, the title will somehow become a big enough umbrella to cover it all. Y’all might claim that you’re just using “Beethoven’s Ninth” as a tag of convenience to help refer to an essentially title-less piece, but that wouldn’t be honest. Fact is, every note of that piece sounds to you like “Beethoven’s Ninth,” which is about the dumbest possible title imaginable, a really worthless little clot of text to have strutting through your brain while you listen to that particular music.
For the record, “Ode to Joy” is a pretty inane title too (it always sounds to me a little like “Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence”). But so is “The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance,” which is perhaps the kind of title that Beethoven’s Ninth might have coming to it, if it had one coming to it, which thankfully it doesn’t.
Even good titles aren’t actually good enough to justify their overarching status. Doesn’t it feel like that play suddenly opens up wide and needs to be completely reconsidered when you imagine that it isn’t essentially called “Hamlet,” but only circumstantially? Believe it or not, if it were called “The Dark Secret of Elsinore,” it would be the same play! Or should be, anyway, but it probably wouldn’t be because we can’t help ourselves. Is watching “Hamlet” an identical experience to watching the Borgesian untitled play that has the same script?
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, is I think what I’m getting at here.
But she’s talking about things and people – naming them is fundamental to our system of communication. Artworks on the other hand are experiences. We don’t give titles to dinner every night, or to trips to the bathroom. (In a pinch, a good trick is to put “The Dark Secret of” before the ordinary name of the thing.) Wouldn’t knowing that you weren’t just eating potatoes but were experiencing “The Dark Secret of Eating Potatoes” somehow distance you from the essential truth of the experience? Would you like me to repeat the question?
Or am I wrong in saying that in titling artworks we are titling the experiences? Is “The Mona Lisa” really just our fancy and dramatic way of referring to a certain framed rectangle of wood, the way we have fancy and dramatic names for famous jewels, or mountains, or other glamorized physical things? (A: No. It’s a title.)
… Okay, artworks can have titles, fine, if you insist, but then I don’t know how to make my experiences of them untitled, and that’s important to me. I think I generally find music more moving when I don’t know what it is, or at least when I’m not actively aware, in the moment, of what it is. One more form of zen to work on, I guess. Or to not-work on. (“To poop on,” as the borrowed punchline goes.)
And calling things “Untitled” doesn’t get us anywhere, because the next thing you know someone’s making a placard for the museum that says “Untitled” in the same bold black font as any other title. Or worse, “Untitled 3,” which is syntactically meaningless unless it’s a title. It can’t be anything but a title.
I feel strongly that museums should never print “Untitled” as a title; they should instead leave that part of the placard blank, and then at the bottom in small print say “This work is untitled.” STRONGLY.
Has anyone written a history of artwork-titling? I would read that. (Okay, I see this, but it doesn’t look that appealing. Is there anything better out there?)
That said… click on this hypertext “link” to hear a recording of some music I made up. Clearly the music must be, like, about titles, right? I dare you not to be thinking about titles while you listen.
No, it’s really not.
Maybe this woman will write a book.
On reading this next day I see that “Mona Lisa” is actually a uniquely bad example since it is sort of an inherited nickname for the piece of wood and not a true title.
How about “American Gothic,” then? Hm, but even there, really iconic artworks are in fact the least troubled by the title problem because the image as icon becomes its own kind of title.
I guess I should have just stuck with “The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance.” No, that’s not quite right either, because as an allegorical title it has an essential identifying function.
Guys, I am sorry. Either you know what I’m saying or you don’t.
I really enjoyed this. A very interesting topic.
Unstructured thoughts in response:
I posit that when the art work is made of words (novel, essay, story, poem, song lyric, blog post), that the author’s choice of a title is as much his decision/craft as any other artistic decision. (Unless the title is chosen by the marketing department, in which case the motives are clear.) And if the title helps the reader know what character to focus on or offers some hint of irony, etc., that is the author’s choice. Though Hamlet being called Hamlet may have been a function of convention of the time–I don’t know. A lot of the titles of Shakespeare’s plays are the name of the primary character(s).
But for visual art or music, I agree that any title can be seen as imposing words onto something that is essentially a nonverbal expression/experience.
For practical purposes, a work has to be called something to distinguish it from another work: Composition in Black and Gray, Symphony in F (?), etc.
And some visual artists WANT to use words to add a fillip of something or other to their visual expression: Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe. The Persistence of Memory. Assuming these titles were assigned by the artists themselves and not by a exhibit curator or the like.
A listener might be moved to give a piece of music a title, based on his or her unique experience of hearing it. “Spiders in the Toilet,” for example. My instantaneous title for the attached skitch is “[broomlet] at the piano, playing something haunting and wistful, while I am in the kitchen on a rainy afternoon.”
I would enjoy thinking of my daily activities as having evocative titles as you suggest. “The Case of the Tuna Casserole”– imagine the excitement! If this afternoon were titled, “The Thing in the Garage,” I would think twice before going out. This reminds me of my fantasy as a child that my regular activities were scenes in a show about me–obviously way before “reality show” was a concept. It made all of it–and therefore me–seem more important and meaningful, in the way that art DOES give meaning to life. It’s possible that just thinking of your life–or your day, or your shower, or your poop–as having a title, would imbue it with meaning that could actually be positive or even inspiring. This could be a new form of self-help. “Title Your Life for Success”