The Concept of Conceptual Art:
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art require performance. This is most easily seen in a play or a piece of music, of
course, but it is true for all aesthetic objects. When a poet reads a poem aloud,
he or she performs the work for us. And even when one reads a poem silently,
there is never true silence: the words sound in the reader’s mind, ringing and
echoing as words always do. A painting, too, is performed. There is both the
performance of its original construction and the performance of the audience
that sees it. Jackson Pollock became famous for making the narrative of the
construction of the painting central to the meaning of the painting, with drips of
paint taking the viewer by the hand and walking him or her, Hansel-and-Gretelbread-crumb-style, backwards through the path that Pollock himself had taken
through the forest of the canvas. We see the performance that created a Pollock
painting quite easily, and as our eyes try to trace that path, we repeat the
performance a second time (though like all repetitions, it is never exactly the
same). This is an obvious case of performance, but the same is true for all
painting. When we look at a Cezanne still life, there is a performance that
necessarily created the work, but the artist doesn’t wish us merely to repeat or
reconstruct that narrative. Rather, Cezanne lets the viewer perform the painting
him-or herseif, uncovering a new story in the process. The performance begins
thus: the viewer Stands a certain distance from the canvas and is instantly thrown
in space into the spatiality of the painting.7 If, for instance, the painting is
several feet away on a museum wall, but the painting is a painting of a table set
with apples and oranges, the viewer instantly enters the spatiality (i.e., the
world) of the painting and sees the table from Cezanne’s perspective rather than
his or her own. For example, if Cezanne painted the table as being about six feet
away from him, and if the finished canvas is now on a museum wall ten feet
away from the viewer, the viewer does not experience the table as being sixteen
feet away. Instead, the viewer sees the table as six feet away, instantly
collapsing the (apparent) distance between him-or herseif and the wall.8 This is
what it means to inhabit the painting. This is what it means to have our
consciousness always already “out” in the world. We think from a place inside
the canvas because our consciousness is in the work of art. Once we begin to
perform the painting from within, our eyes move around the canvas, focusing
here and there. This takes time, and as time unfolds a performance takes shape.
We move from left to right, or we dart back and forth, or we scan up and down,
or we focus for a long time on one apple while ignoring the apple nearby, etc.
What makes Cezanne one of the greatest artists of all time is his understanding
of how such performances unfold and his ability to orchestrate an experience for
the viewer that is rieh, informative, beautiful, and rewarding. By painting the
table and its contents from different perspectives, Cezanne makes it such that
while our eyes move across the canvas it seems as if we are physically moving
around the table. We walk around inside a Cezanne painting all while Standing
still in front of it, seeing this apple from the far right, this ginger pot from above
and to the left, this orange from behind, etc. In the amazing Madame Cezanne in
a Yellow Chair (1893-1895), if we move into the painting and then let our eyes