Wow, I’ve had some really interesting questions as a result of this blog.
When it comes to titling, if I title, I tend to do it after the work is finished, trying to find in the title something that relates to the outside world or that takes the work beyond my-self. Sometimes I’ve thought of finding a title that relates to some everyday incident but more often than not this would reduce the work to biography, so I agree with Tamarin’s caution regarding closing the work down and like her idea of asking different people to think of a title. Rob’s idea of giving each work two titles is also interesting – perhaps a work could have multiple titles. Or, as Tamarin suggests, maybe having no titles would leave the viewer freer to constitute their own subjectivity through their experience of an artwork; on the other hand, untitled work might also leave the viewer with no way in.
I remember a newspaper article I read about Gillian Ayres, which refers to her practice of asking her friends to do the titling. I think this is definitely a path worth following.
