Recently I have seen any number of artists, particularly abstract artists, asking what titles they should put on their works. The original function of a title in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to identify the work for sale purposes and was more often than not applied by a gallery or middleman rather than the artist. Titles were essentially descriptive and served the same function as do NFT designations in the blockchain today regarding ownership and the collectible investment. The rise of a wealthy middle class a century later did little to alter the need to catalogue art but modern art created a shift in thinking. The title took on a poetic or mystical identity or suggested subconscious or ironic links as much a descriptive function. Duchamp’s large glass The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors falls into this category and has been described as a riddle without an answer while Monet’s Impression Sunrise encompasses a sense of poetry in that it is not descriptive so much of place, as time. While titles steeped in mysticism still function as identifiers, the title is designed to obfuscate and question not just what is considered to be art but to challenge the tolerance and understanding of the audience. It’s almost as though calling oneself an artist comes with an inbuilt entitlement to assume superiority over mere mortals through deliberate ambiguity.

Depending upon titles to anchor meaning can mean sorting through a tangled web of associations and references when in essence the title is superfluous and arbitrary. Louise Nevelson is guilty of this approach when not only is the link of title and construction vague but the actual title changes over time. In contemporary times though artists have often disavowed titles entirely and simply numbered works in the belief that words and phrases condemn a work to one specific interpretation.

Since the 1980s when the philosopher Derrida wrote extensively on the rupture between text and meaning and recognised an ‘anormal referential function’ in titling, academic interest has passed from deconstruction of the work of art to deconstructing the implications in the choice of words in a title or explanation. The title assumes the power to rule meaning and to exist as a separate entity, particularly when it is attached to an artist or gallery-director statement on the wall adjacent to the work it purports to support. It ceases to be marginal and becomes not just external to the thing it names but a separate entity. When the title and statement become wall-sized, as in recent blockbuster travelling exhibitions, it does a lot more than just indemnify the work but condemns the work itself to compete for attention.

Using numbers to identify art does alleviate the necessity of deriving meaning from the title but a number sequence has other implications. Numbering paintings in particular suggests a linear development where each work builds into a sequence and that later work becomes automatically mature work and anything prior to that immature work. It may help a biographer to think of a lifetime’s output in that way, but the reality is quite different. Artistic output moves in waves of explored ideas and mediums. In some respects, the reverse of a linear development can be true in that the explosive work of the artist in their 20s becomes merely repetitious thereafter.
And what of ‘untitled’? Far from denying specific interpretation it frames not only how we look at a work of art but how we see it. It could mean that the artist sees the artefact as so multilayered that any one meaning associated with the choice of words in a title is detrimental to understanding. Framing a work in this way suggests that what an audience brings to the table is of more importance than whatever the artist intended. The audience is asked to filter the painting, sculpture or installtaion via their own experiences rather than what the artist has to say. To an extent this is always true but without a title to guide interpretation it becomes a case of a work of art that is not only open to interpretation but becomes no more than a stimulus to audience memory. When it was said in the early days of modernism that a painting is no more than colours arranged on a surface there was a recognition that ideas are superfluous. On the other hand, a Judd removes the hand of the artist completely so there is no idea beyond the geometric form. Untitled in this case describes a reductive process.

Perhaps though Untitled is also a sign of the times. We assume from a reading of history that the lives of former people were defined by occupation, family and circumstance and were lived in ignorance of written language. The church or the government commanded the message and a religious painting devoted to the life of a saint or a piece of social realist propaganda spoke though a universal visual language.  The 20^th century raised education levels but the increased level of awareness questioned everything to the extent that the confusion of identity and message became endemic. Untitled becomes in this scenario a recognition of that confusion where nothing is fixed.

As Welchman contends in his book Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles, there is a national-cultural issue of textuality in contemporary artists applying titles to art in that originality has become a byword for significance and collectability. The more obscure the title, the more the work assumes significance or special qualities that separate it from the pack. It becomes both extrinsic and intrinsic to the actual art in that its lack of transparency as an identifier suggests an intellectual depth that may not be evident or stands as what Derrida described as titling as an act of aggression. If the title ‘scares’ you into questioning your own understanding of art and consequently your own intelligence, then it really has divided the worlds into two camps of the Artist and the Public.