More or less information

Unlike food, money, or energy, when we use information we are still left with it. Using it does not destroy it or make it go away. As a remarkable corollary, the more we use information, the more we are likely to acquire.

On the other hand, while - especially in trivial instances - losing or destroying information is easy, deliberately making it partially unavailable is not always straightforward. One technique for doing so is that employed in the most secure forms of encryption, when data is mathematically manipulated in a unidirectional process, so that the original message cannot be rediscovered unless one is in possession of an appropriate key. Another instance when an aspect of information gets lost is one we sometimes encounter when using  Photoshop or similar. When we wish to convert a colour image to greyscale the software prompts us, before proceeding, to check that we are happy to discard colour information. Once in black and white we cannot go back to full colour. We may not realise intuitively that this is a one-way process. Some, but not all, information gets lost, and becomes  irretrievable. Which brings us to our main topic.

“Classic Murder”  © R. Abbott, 2018

This is a recent painting of mine. As presented here, it is an instance of “less information”, since I’ve converted it, along with its blood-red sky, into monochrome, purely for the purposes of this article. From what you see you can’t re-create the original in full colour. However, what I really want to go on to talk about is the idea of the “more information” which can subjectively be read into the painting – into any painting - but which objectively is simply not there. Not the missing colours, but the meaning, the significance.

This conundrum is informed by the iconographic theories of the German-American art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968). Appropriately (or ironically) enough, various perspectives on this problem can be taken, not all of them artistic. I’m going to remove my amateur painter’s beret and replace it with my information scientist’s hat, which at least I have some formal authority to wear. From an information science or taxonomic perspective there are implications for how one would classify an image such as the above. Without going into too much detail or into Panofsky’s terminology  this mode of analysis asks, in effect, (a) what is this? (b) what is it of ? and (c) what is it about?

The answers in the present instance are:

(a) a monochrome digital photograph of a small painting (and one may choose to elaborate by noting that the subject matter appears to be an urban settling, with houses, pavements, bare trees, and sky);

(b) it is a picture, evidently, of a winter’s day (perhaps dawn or sunset) in a setting which, architecturally, must be inner London, and which appropriate familiarity will pinpoint as a location which is either Tolmers Square in NW1, or an imaginary scene inspired thus. The title suggests something to do with a murder, though there is nothing in the image that supports that interpretation directly. The copyright declaration fixes the name of the image’s owner, and the year of its creation. And, er, that’s it;

(c) is much more interesting. What you think the picture is about is up to you. What I think it’s about is up to me. What someone else thinks is up to him or her. But what would an indexer in a picture gallery – someone responsible for being able subsequently to retrieve it -  classify it as?

My understanding of it, as the artist, is this. Yes, it’s Tolmers Square near Euston Station, sort of, impressionistic, not quite accurate, moved around a bit, and it’s a winter’s dawn in a claustrophobic (or as I would say, claustrophilic) environment, a setting that is seedy, decaying, physically and perhaps morally filthy (I tried to go for soot-covered, but couldn’t do it at that scale).  

In a word, juicy. I don’t know if any murders have ever happened in precisely this location, but they should have. The era depicted is meant to be the immediate aftermath of World War Two, a time of “classic murders” by the likes of Hume, Haigh, Heath, and Christie (in other parts of London), but also a time of rebirth and recovery after the cessation of hostilities. Hence perhaps the red dawn (though I don’t do symbolism of that sort, and anyway the future’s orange, allegedly). Artistically the location has a rich history – one thinks of the Camden Town and Euston Road “schools”, and of Walter Sickert, Spencer Gore and William Ratcliffe as just three among many painters who worked in the surrounding architecturally and sociologically complex districts that stretch between and around Fitzrovia, Somers Town, Mornington Crescent, and the mainline railway termini. “Classic Murder”, then, is intended to convey a mood of time and place, it’s an attempt at a fusion of feelings and associations, expressed in oil paint, photographed, and then, for present purposes, deliberately impoverished chromatically with the aid of commonplace software.

In the 1970s Tolmers Square achieved notoriety when it was taken over by political activists and squatters, who tried to preserve it as an “urban village”. By that time it had the appearance of the “classic slum”, while still possessing some sense of coherence and community. Ultimately the powers-that-be won, and while Tolmers Square can still be found on the map, today it is a bleak and lifeless lacuna amid an   unlovely eruption of highrise steel and glass. Yet another victim of the usual disease, the one that has been eating away at London (and cities everywhere) for the last half a century or so, destroying the body of the city with patches of ischaemia, disfiguring warts, and priapisms out of control. Tolmers Square exists in a salient in the battle of the architectural bulge to the north of Euston Road. Symbolically it is/was a skirmish in the apparently unstoppable encroachment by the up-and-coming money-motivated CBD into the former residential heartlands of the down-at-heel but atmospherically-rich, people-centred inner suburbs.

Pause for breath. Did you get all that from looking at the picture? I thought not. It’s not entirely my fault, though.  There’s an argument that maintains that a work of art should stand on its own, as a message adequate and sufficient in its own medium, not having to depend on other efforts to rescue its meaning. The example that often gets quoted is how, when someone didn’t “get” a particular Schumann étude, the composer’s response was to play it again, and then a third time. The great man  wasn’t even going to try and explain it in words. You simply can’t do that with a piece of music (unless programmatic), nor with a painting. Either it “works” as is, or it doesn’t.

But to repeat an earlier question. How would an indexer in a picture gallery classify “Classic Murder”? How would they do it in such a way so as to be able to find it again when someone came wandering in with an enquiry? Would they, for instance, list it under paintings of London, paintings produced in the early twenty-first century, paintings showing a deserted inner city square, paintings with a red sky, paintings with a monochrome grey sky, paintings with iron railings, paintings cited in a blog in April 2018, not very good paintings? Ones with a daft title? Ones with wintry trees? Ones by an English artist? Ones devoid of people or aircraft contrails? Ones where there might be a dog unseen just round the corner?

OK, this is becoming slightly Borgesian, but if you didn’t “get” all of the “more information” offered above,  just by looking at the accompanying image, then (a) you will appreciate the point about image indexing and (b) in one sense the painting has failed. But then, many paintings will fail similarly, even figurative, realist ones. There will always be other interpretations, additional readings, abstruse associations one can make, extra richnesses of significance imported - all relying on one’s background knowledge, interests, the luridness of one’s imagination, and on one’s awareness of the wayward thought processes of the artist concerned. The “meaning” is subjective and open-ended and influenced by what you already know. In this way, coming from a scientific background as I do, and with a childhood that involved visits to Merseyside, I would have to say that - as a painting of an Isle of Man ferryboat - the “Mona Lisa” falls down considerably. Oh, isn’t it meant to be about that?

You may believe that a work of art should stand on its own, self-explanatory. Everything you need to know should be contained within it, with only limited additional legitimate help from the accompanying metadata of title, creator, medium, time and place. But it isn’t like that. It never is. Hence the dilemma of the indexer, fun for the imaginative taxonomist, and freedom for the artist. Actually, thinking about it, “Classic Murder” really is a daft title. I’m going to rename it: From now on it’s “Angst #97”.