{"id":101534,"date":"2026-02-05T15:40:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T22:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=101534"},"modified":"2026-02-05T17:02:31","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T00:02:31","slug":"against-decoding-greggory-wood-and-the-autonomy-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/against-decoding-greggory-wood-and-the-autonomy-of-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Against Decoding: Greggory Wood and the Autonomy of Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Greggory Wood, “Charlotte III”<\/p><\/div>\n

In the statement accompanying his cut-up and reassembled images, which he collectively titles Offense of Legacy<\/em>, Greggory Wood<\/a> tells us that by \u201clegacy\u201d he means to invoke something that parents, for example, might bequeath to their children. Or rather, that which they mean to leave, attempt to bestow, hope to pass on, which he argues is a futile desire\u2014\u201c… some of our things may haunt them or bring joy. But they are not ours. They are their own.\u201d<\/h4>\n

What he does not say, may not even be thinking, yet strongly suggests, is that this is equally true for the content of art. By \u201ccontent,\u201d of course, we don\u2019t mean that which is literally in the work: its subject matter, for instance. We mean that which is conveyed by an unconscious process: something that cannot be precisely expressed in words or any other language than that of art. We make a categorical error, an offense to use Wood\u2019s term, when we assume that the artist means to relate something that we are to decode, in which task we fail should our interpretation lack accuracy. In fact, it is in the nature of art that what the artist intends and the viewer understands are as independent as the mind of a parent and that of a child.<\/h4>\n

Before he left Yorkshire to live in Los Angeles, David Hockney\u2019s photography was widely influential. Particularly so were his Cubist Polaroids, which he made by spontaneously shooting numerous angles on a subject and then variously mounting them to produce a multi-faceted portrait. While Wood\u2019s \u201cCharlotte II\u201d and \u201cIII\u201d show clear signs of having been influenced by Hockney, Wood has also evolved his version by adding no less than three framing devices: the white borders, black mottling, and the setting the whole on a textured, white impasto field. In essence, he has announced that while it began with Hockney, he\u2019s given his approach specific identifiers and thereby made it his own.<\/h4>\n