Composition, coherence, and attachment: The critical role of context in reception

Abstract

This research demonstrates how context, the location of reception, an often-overlooked component of interpretation, is central to understanding evaluations of cultural objects, specifically art. Two cases of mildly debated sculptures in San Francisco – Mark di Suvero's “Pax Jerusalem” and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's “Cupid's Span” – are analyzed in order to ascertain the role context has in reception and debates over art. Reactions to the sculptures found in newspaper articles ( n = 37) and in interviews ( n = 82) conducted at the sites of the sculptures reveal that receivers evaluate art using a “contextual eye.” The contextual eye is a filter of interpretation similar to social characteristics such as gender or education. Individuals who share experiences with place form understandings of them shaping their expectations of future encounters in the same types of places. These sets of expectations are called place expectations. Place expectations inform three types of evaluations: composition (expected arrangement or relationship between things in a place), coherence (art's relationship to the identity of place), and attachment (valued activities in place). All evaluations of art found in the newspapers and interviews were coded into evaluative types based on the criteria used by the receiver. Evidence of context's significance in reception is demonstrated by the frequency of context evaluations (the most mentioned type of evaluation for both sculptures in the newspaper and interview data), how often contextual criteria informed aesthetic evaluations and comprehension of the sculptures, and the socio-economic variety of receivers who used contextual criteria in their responses. Aesthetic style affects the role of context in reception most significantly in coherence evaluations where individuals work to understand how Oldenburg/van Bruggen's bow and arrow relates to the symbolic landscape.