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Populär Culture Review
experienced that we have not yet enacted and fulfilled. The object races away
from us even as we come to know it better. It is never exhausted, used up,
known, and done with. If I experience an apple, there is always another vantage
point from which I could see it, another profile it has to offer, another context in
which it can appear with new meaning. I might study the apple from Here and
There, sniff it, bite into it, or toss it back and forth from hand to hand. But even
with a lifetime spent getting to know the apple there will always be more left to
uncover, another experience I could have had but didn’t. The apple is never
exhausted by my being conscious of it: it is outside of and beyond me, even if it
finds its being in the infinite number of ways it can be given to consciousness.
All of this is true for every object of consciousness, but for aesthetic
objects there is something additional going on. The aesthetic object finds part of
its being in the performative expression of the viewer.5 What Cezanne’s painted
apples can mean is more than what they make present. In order to see this we
must first accept a less-than-obvious truth: art does not represent.
To say that art is not representational is to say that art does not replace,
echo, or shadow something real as Plato might have feared. Abstract and
conceptual art are typically understood to be non-representational, but the truth
is that no art represents something other than what it is. A painting of an apple is
not a sign of an apple. It does not denote or refer to an apple. Rather, it is an
apple. A picture or image of something is one way in which that thing can be
present to consciousness. If I look at an apple directly, taste an apple, remember
an apple, imagine an apple, see a photograph of an apple, view a painting of an
apple, or even think the word “apple,” the object of consciousness in each case
is exactly the same: an apple. Each way of presencing merely carries v