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As is evident in some of my most recently posted essays, such as Polysemy, my overall art philosophy includes the dimension of semiotics. I firmly believe it is proper to consider semiotics in contemporary artistic practice, in ways I will make specific in a moment. Here, then, this dimension of my work is "aesthetic semiotics", in that I suggest that a study of artwork as "signs" is vital to an inclusive understanding of the nature of making artwork. Semiotics is a wide field, with a blitzkrieg of terms, models, mini-models, mathematical formulae, diagrams, body odors, unwashed armpits, greazy hair follicles, and zits. ZITS. everywhere.

I break towards originality. It'll take artists (specially, artist/scholars) to make semiotics relevant again, to save it from its absurd state of chaos. I'm one of those and I'm on the mission. If you don't believe me, pick up Winfried Noth's seminal The Handbook of Semiotics, and see how fast you are tempted to return it to the shelf. It is a masterpiece, but it also shows quicker than anything I could imagine that semiotics, as a field, is effin mad, in a bad way. Yet one of my favorite quotes is from David Sless: "semiotics is far too important an enterprise to be left to semioticians". Semiotics gets to the very raw ingredients of communication, of knowing, of relating, of processing the world. It gets to the very nature of one's worldview. And it gets to the very nature of art.

Again, I break towards my own original directions in this "semiotics for artists". Whereas virtually all schools of semiotics of the present and past use aesthetic semiotics in order to interpret artwork (as one of the many "formal schools" of art interpretation), I do not apply semiotics in this way. Instead, I transfer it to the realm of the creative artist, with a framework of artwork semiotics aimed to be considered by working artists who intend to create at the known edges of fullness, and of course beyond.

Quick Key

signifieds
interior phenomena that artist experiences intuitively
(i.e. consciously and semiconsciously)

signifiers
metaphors, gestures, smaller forms, materials, signs used within an artwork

syntax
overall form/architecture of the "whole", systematically
(in part determined by relation with other works)

semantics
meanings, reactions, and responses stirred in audiences

Humans are "sign creatures". We are symbolic animals. We extend our interior, intuitive perceptions into symbolic form. Also, everything around us we process as some kind of sign. Everything we process through our senses we take to stand for something else. When we learn to drive a car, we learn the "signs" of the road; we learn the "signs" involved with operating a car; we learn the "signs" of weather, traffic, the open road, and late-night A & W's, all in the context of driving a car, to get from A to B. Every color, every utterance, every gesture by other drivers and cars, every stop and go light, every speed sign, every flashing blue and red of the police car behind us—the mind can go crazy if you attempt to process each and every sign you encounter while driving a car.

This is part of why the human brain has the capacity to filter out what is nonessential. But everything is a sign, nonetheless. In fact, perception of this fact is part, I believe, of the reason so many artists are driven to madness. Knowing that every sign in an artwork ought be there for a reason is a serious cause of existential angst and analysis paralysis.

A piece of art is a resonator, generator, and receptacle of signs. Artwork, as the intuitive play and arrangement of signs of various kind, and on several planes of perception, includes signs of "beauty" in the premodern sense, but that of course is a term with far more ambiguous meanings in today's age, as well as frankly in the past, where "decadent", "ugly", "minimalist", and "ironic" can be held by lovers of art as "beauty" according to their perception. Art contains signs that evoke deep remembrance and deep recognition. Some get very spiritual about this, saying that artwork contains a "higher calling" and this, too, has to do with the signs embedded in the artwork, perceived by that person. Others are fine just to experience awe, excitement, and fresh energy from artwork. Signs are at the heart of these kinds of perception, as well.

No matter what you get out of the artwork experience—in any and all cases, it'll happen because of the signs involved, in the artwork, in the occasion of presentation, in the moment-to-moment flux of perception by viewers, and because of the artist's own background, reputation, and interior makeup. These signs create resonances (or don't) with one's worldview, which itself is a semiotic dynamic, though far deeper and wider than anything particular to a single piece of art. Worldviews—the generalized undergirding that supports meaning, perception, and intersubjectivity—are shared, and determined, culturally, through the operations of human collectives. This is not to be confused with "point of view", which is entirely particular to each person.

"Aesthetics" is a Greek term that originally meant "perception by the senses", in order to make distinct from logic as the science of rational knowledge. It was coined in 18th century through the work of Alexander Baumgarten. The study of aesthetics was, for Baumgarten, a theoretical endeavor, having to do with the conception and arrangement of beauty, via both nature and art. Yet as soon as "beauty" came to be a more problematic and ambiguous term, as I mention above, then a split arose between "nature aesthetics" and "artwork aesthetics". Today, nature and artwork continue to be distinct, but the field of semiotics at least serves to lightly thread these two together.

In fact, if you consider human life in broad brush strokes, semiotics is what binds most all aspects of human life together. Every aspect of life is deeply effected by communication, and thus by signs. Signs themselves gain and lose relevance, meaning, and freshness over time depending on the culture. Sometimes, signs are recycled and used again, if slightly altered given new circumstances. But the point is to understand how profound "signs" are to, basically, everything. Even in the case of art, the entirety of art interpretation and creation rests upon its implications, which change over time as worldviews change—quite slowly at the fundamental levels, but on the surface, all is in flux.

I predict that "semiotics" will become a popular topic in the coming years. This is for good reason. It is a natural consequence of realizing that meaning exists in the world, on several planes. If handled delicately, and through careful research and non-hyperbolic display, it can really deepen one's consideration of how to communicate with others. The temptation to get "literalist" about this field is also a danger, much in the same way that some in the integral community insisted upon labelling people according to worldviews which, true or not, undoubtedly is a self-serving habit, even if unconsciously.

This is a problem with regard to art semiotics, because much in art is timeless, and a situation not for material evolution but for renewal in what is here-and-now but also ancient. The formal complexity of an artwork, as well as its raw materials, sometimes evolve with the times, and that bears important consideration in integral art semiotics, as I have already written about. The open secret, however, is that one learns the avant-garde techniques of their own discipline of art (meaning, one learns the techniques, rules, and structural possibilities of their disciplines' own world of signs) in order to drop all of it and just play. In order to truly burn something new, you must learn something old.

Since the responsibility of my integral artwork philosophy is geared towards the subtle inspiration of artists, I use a lot of restraint and I hold quite a bit back, because of my own shit detector, informed through conversations with other artists. These folks tell me what really matters to their artistic practice, and their reports give me ample reason to conclude that, in truth, less is way, way more, especially when one gives as much consideration to the meaning of particular words, phrases, and ideas as I do. Words mean something. Ideas have consequences.

Meaning. It exists. On many planes. That is "polysemy". And that is a prime lesson of artwork semiotics. I think that sentence alone is enough "semiotics" for some artists. And that is perfectly fine with me. By all means, run with that and make art like no one but yourself thought possible.