When Form Speaks In Riddles: Art As Phenomena

Have you ever stood in front of an ancient carving or a grave marker where you had no idea what it was about — and fallen completely silent? I have also watched this happen with people when they encountered my sculpture. Sometimes a person stands before it and something begins to happen that has little to do with explanation. The experience seems to address something inside them that cannot be touched in words.

I recall when my kids were small and would sometimes be chasing each other in my studio. I would have to yell, “Behave yourself!” One time in particular, after one of these moments, I turned to my sculpture that I was struggling with and repeated, “Behave yourself!”

Catching myself, I thought — how does a work of art behave? What does it do exactly? Does it cooperate or antagonize? Is it the sculpture, or is the viewer that’s causing this response?

The art world so often gets hung up on the question of what art is and what art means, and usually drops the ball somewhere in between. It is far more interesting to talk about how art behaves in the world. So many ancient objects already seem to do this: they engage the viewer in something like an enigmatic puzzle that cannot be solved.

In this sense, art is not only an object — it is a phenomenon. It occurs when a human encounters a form that behaves like a riddle and awakens perception beyond language. These riddles have been carried through time, and every culture seems to develop its own way of encountering them.

Unlike language, where words are assigned relatively stable meanings, art creates meaning through arrangement — and that meaning shifts with each viewer. If this is so, where does continuity live? Where do recognition and cultural memory persist? They do not disappear; they persist in the riddle itself. The form’s behavior is not fixed in meaning. It carries itself forward as openness, allowing each generation to enter and complete it again.

Like a Zen koan, many works of art behave like paradoxical riddles that cannot be solved through direct thinking. Robert Bly describes this as a leap between the known and unknown parts of the mind — an associative movement that bypasses linear logic and links images in a dreamlike way that reconnects thought with the unconscious.

Phenomenology helps approach this differently. It is a way of seeing things as they actually appear, rather than as they have been explained to us. By using phenomenology as a bridge, you trust your own perception and your own memory. This matters because you encounter the artwork not through someone else’s perspective, but through your own lived experience.

When a work of art is “speaking in riddles,” it can appear incomprehensible. But rather than dismissing this as failure, it can be experienced as openness — something that draws you into a deeper kind of attention. It becomes a private encounter that still belongs to a shared world.

Back in October 1985, Hans-Georg Gadamer came to SUNY-Binghamton and gave a public lecture. Afterwards, as people were leaving, he stepped off the stage using his cane and slowly made his way up the aisle, his eyes cast downward.

I stepped into the aisle and walked beside him for a few moments. I told him I was a sculptor, and that I appreciated what he had written about the importance of “play” — that it verified something I had felt in my own work. Before he could respond, a philosophy student moved in and pushed past me to speak with him. I stepped aside. As they continued toward the foyer, he briefly turned his head and lifted his eyes toward me. With a half-smile, he gave a slight nod. The exchange lasted only a second, but it stayed with me.

What I understood later is that this moment itself reflected what Gadamer described as “play.” Not play as something trivial, but as something that belongs to the movement of understanding itself. This lens of understanding reads the moment, so the experience came first — before interpretation. It felt like something unfolding in the space of encounter — unplanned and not fully controlled, yet deeply private and unexpected. It was closer to recognition than conversation.

In this sense, meaning did not arrive as a fixed message. It emerged in the exchange itself — in the brief turning of attention, the interruption, the glance returned — something that moved back and forth without settling.

The Greeks referred to this experience as Ainissesthai — a way of speaking in riddles that cannot be fully resolved in words. It points to meaning that is not directly stated, but disclosed indirectly through form, arrangement, and encounter.

Art functions in a similar way, creating meaning through the arrangement of its forms. Sometimes metaphors are used not to fully explain a work, but to approach what cannot be directly said. What remains partially concealed is not a flaw, but part of its structure. This unresolved quality keeps an openness that continues to be explored today.

It does not matter if the sculpture is made of stone, clay, or bronze. It does not explain. It resists language. It carries time. It asks for presence. It does not rush interpretation. Art asks for a kind of attention that has become rare.

In much of today’s western culture, this type of observation is often missed — not always out of disregard, but because many people have really short attention spans. Many people want to be entertained or told what something means, rather than participating in a sustained engagement through their own curiosity.

But there are always surprises. I remember working in my studio on a recent sculpture, The Fencer. A teenager visiting the studio was intrigued by the piece. He had studied karate, and when he looked at it, he felt it resembled a karate pose. He could not see the invisible sword of the fencer, but that did not matter. What mattered was his engagement. It was a joy watching him imitate the pose of the sculpture. I could see his mind fully engaged with the work.

Art can be baffling. When it behaves as a riddle, it shifts — it no longer behaves as an object. Art becomes phenomenon. When a human encounters a form in this way, it awakens perception beyond language, creating a paradox.

Long before written language, humans were already marking stone — carving symbols, shaping forms, leaving traces of thought, belief, and presence. We no longer know exactly what many of these marks meant. Their original context has faded. And yet they remain — hands pressed into rock, spirals turning, lines moving across surfaces — still capable of stirring something in us.

These forms carried meaning without explanation then, just as they do now. They allowed early humans to communicate, remember terrain, and express complex experience. They continue to speak, not by telling us what they meant, but by inviting us into the same act of interpretation.

A work of art does not remain fixed in the moment it is made. It continues to change in time — not physically alone, but in how it is encountered, understood, and lived with. Art is profoundly personal. It behaves differently for each viewer.

Art moves through the world not by showing us what is visible, but by allowing us to see what is otherwise unseen. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology rejects the classical view of vision as a mental representation. Perception emerges as a living relationship between organism and environment. He describes the visible and the invisible as intertwined — what sees and what can be seen existing in relationship, not separation.

A work of art is not representation. It is not explanation. It activates imagination in the viewer, and completes itself in the encounter. As a sculptor, I have watched this happen for decades.

A friend once described it as being like a dream — where images rearrange the rules of the world, and hand you something wiser than logic. Dreams are where symbol speaks freely, without explanation.

Art does not sit quietly as an object. It waits. It grows time — not as something that settles on its surface, but as something that unfolds through its encounters. Over time, cultures change, meanings fall away, and histories fade. Yet the work remains. Not fixed, not fully knowable, but alive in each new encounter.

The phenomenon of art does not belong to the past or the present. It exists only in the moment it is experienced — where form speaks and we, in our own way, answer.

by Sherburn LaBelle

Published in Medium,  04/01/2026

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