I was reading through comments yesterday, and the last few sentences of my aunt Dinah’s comment (or my uncles translation thereof – btw thanks uncle Aki)  in response to this entry caught my eye ” But in any case, every work (book, painting, ballet, play or film) is only half completed until it has been “consumed”. It is the reader, the spectator, or the user of a media that truly completes the artistic production. The way a work is received is very important and changes at each playing or performance. Even identical copies of a film are seen differently at each playing. The same goes for reading books and plays.” While in no way do I mean to imply that I do not agree with the rest of what my aunt wrote, this point in particular interests me, for it cuts to the core of all art.

What, exactly, is art without eyes to witness it? After all, a painting is just pigment on canvas, and a novel is just lines on a page until someone sees it. Art needs human cognition to make it real, more than the sum of it’s parts. Similarly, all things need eyes to gaze upon them, as well as words to speak of them, to be made real. If I write the word tree, an image of a tree pops into your mind, which was not there before; thus, for all intents and purposes, the word called that tree into being. However, as de Sasseur notes, the relationship between sign and signified is arbitrary, so the tree in my mind may be different to the one in yours; moreover, if you say ‘tree’ to the same person at different times, different trees come to mind.

Similar things happen in art. It is most obvious, I suppose, with writing. My image of the places and characters in a book will be different to someone else’s. give two children the same piece of prose, and then ask them to draw a picture of a character, and their pictures will be different. While this may not be so obvious in other art forms, where the relationship between sign and signified may be closer, the same broad principals apply. Thus, texts themselves can be said to be constantly changing, even though the words on the page remain the same, since any text needs human cognition to exist.

If I can now go back to my short essay on whether film is a text or a performance, we now see the line between the two is blurred, since both are in an equal state of flux. This, as Chris says, is postmodern, as postmodernism seems to question the very existence of truth. Thus, if all texts are in flux, why cannot it be valid to remake films. (putting aside the fact that nearly all such films are dire, that is.)