EMBODIED VISIONS

What Does It Mean to Look at a Work of Art?

HUMAN BEINGS ARE THE ONLY animals who make art. I have heard stories of painting elephants, drawing monkeys, and typing dogs, but despite the complexities of pachyderm, simian, and canine cultures, visual art is not central to any of them. We are the image-makers. At some moment in the narrative of evolution, human societies began to draw and paint things, and it is safe to say that the act of picture-making is only possible because we have the faculty of reflective self-consciousness; that is, we are able to represent ourselves to ourselves and muse about our own beings by becoming objects in our own eyes. This ability is distinct from what has been called prereflective self-consciousness, that immersion in everyday experience that we do not have to reflect upon to perceive, the smell of the basil on the kitchen counter, the warmth of sunlight through a window, the feel of my body in a chair. I am not unconscious of myself as I sit in that chair, surely, but I can sit comfortably for a long period without meditating on what it means for me to be sitting there, and I can stay quietly in place without having a mental picture of myself as Siri the Sitter. This form of subjectivity is a given of our experience. William James called it “the outward looking point of view” as opposed to what happens when we “think ourselves as thinkers.”1 Edmund Husserl understood that even when we don’t think ourselves as thinkers, there remains a form of self-knowing, “To be a subject is to be in the mode of being aware of oneself.”2 Although I can’t be sure, I suppose that my old dog, Jack, had a prereflective sense of himself, a feeling of Jack-ness, a bodily me-ness that allowed him to know that he was too warm or cold or hungry and needed to do something about it. But let us say that while I am in the same chair I get it into my head to do a self-portrait of myself in the chair, and I fetch a pencil, paper, and a mirror so I can see myself and begin to draw. The idea expressed in the words—I’ll draw me—entails a splitting of myself into both subject and object, and this self-reflective distance is an essentially human adventure.

But what lies beneath this reflective faculty—mirroring and recognition—is not unique to people. Elephants, dolphins, some of our fellow primates, and certain birds recognize themselves in the mirror. Dogs do not. At around eighteen months, it happens to children. Long before Jacques Lacan wrote his lecture on the mirror stage in 1949,3 the researcher William Preyer, who worked in Germany, published a book called Die Seele des Kindes (1882), in which he argued that before a child is able to use the pronouns I or me, she has a sense of self and that mirror self-recognition is a crucial aspect of her development.4 But prior to mirror self-recognition is mirroring behavior in infants, which appears to be innate. Babies as young as an hour old have been photographed imitating the facial expressions of adults.5 Their reflecting behavior seems to be an automatic response to the face of a fellow human being. Newborns do not have reflective self-consciousness. Hegel was surely right when he argued in The Phenomenology of Mind, “While the embryo is certainly, in itself, implicitly a human being, it is not so explicitly, it is not by itself a human being (für sich)…”6 This being there “for itself” arrives later in life, but it is preceded by earlier forms of intersubjectivity. Winnicott reconfigured Lacan’s mirror stage to include the mirroring looks between mother and child that are crucial to the baby’s growth.7 More recently, neuroscience has shown that these exchanges affect the way the infant’s brain develops.8 We find ourselves first in the eyes of our mothers, and we continue to have strong reflective responses to the expressions on the faces of other people long after we have grown up and ceased to imitate their facial gestures. The faces of others affect our moods, something that has been seen over and over again in what cognitive psychologists call “masking” studies. People are presented with images of faces frowning and angry, or friendly smiling, for example, but so briefly they cannot consciously register the images. Nevertheless, the subliminal pictures influence their responses to the questions that follow. Even though the face is not consciously perceived, it can affect a person’s thoughts, memories, and feelings.

The discovery of human mirror systems in neuroscience underscores what many psychologists and philosophers have long postulated about the dialectical relation between self and other, and this unconscious neuronal firing is at work in human beings whether we are looking at a real person, at a photograph of a person, or at a painting of a person.9 Furthermore, these shared systems that match an action and the perception of the same action are also involved in prediction, in what the movement is for. All of this takes place un- or subconsciously. The mutuality that happens between people is indisputably real, and it cannot develop in isolation. What becomes an I is embedded in a you. We are inherently social beings and our brains and bodies grow through others in the early dynamics between a child and his parents, but also within a given language and culture as a whole.

My argument here is that the experience of looking at visual art always involves a form of mirroring, which may be but is not necessarily conscious. This is fairly obvious to us when we look at a portrait or at any human figure—we see something like ourselves there—but it is also present when we look at a representation of a thing or at an abstraction. The reflective quality is there because we are witnessing what remains of another person’s creative act, and through the artistic object we find ourselves embroiled in the drama of self and other. This back-and-forth dialectic between spectator and artwork occurs despite the fact that a painting, sculpture, or drawing is also just a thing, an object like any other in the material world. It may be a canvas with oil or acrylic paint on it or wood or stone or a paper with some charcoal markings or fiberglass or rubber or any other material. It can last for centuries or burn up in a fire, but it is fundamentally different from the chair I mentioned sitting in earlier. It has no purpose other than to be looked at and thought about. It is not a tool. We can’t eat with it. Art is useless. I am well aware that with architecture, for example, this becomes murky. I also know that Picasso decorated some plates I’d be afraid to eat off of and that some designers of furniture have made objects I personally find more beautiful and even more interesting than certain works of art, but I am bracketing my discussion here to objects without utility. A famous example of a fundamental transformation from practical thing to art object is Duchamp’s urinal. Once it became Fountain, nobody, to my knowledge at least, ever took a pee in it. Ripped from its context in the ordinary world as a repository for human waste, turned upside down, and signed “R. Mutt,” it metamorphosed into a mysterious art object thickly wrapped in layers of cultural irony.

Although works of art are things, they are also strangely alive, animated by a mysterious power, and this thought brings me round to Friedrich Schelling and to his thinking about art. He too recognized that works of art are particular, finite things, subject to the laws of all objects. Nevertheless, art cannot be finally determined or pinned down, because for Schelling works of art were the result of a fusion between the unconscious creative energy or “drive” in nature and the free conscious efforts of the artist, and therefore something in the artwork always remained hidden: its unconscious roots. Unlike other philosophers, Schelling did not oppose Nature and Spirit. He was a monist, not a dualist, who believed that the world was made of a single dynamic stuff—nature and intellect are one and the same, but they represent different stages in the development of that force—intellect and self-consciousness become possible in the human being when he is able to reflect upon himself.10 It is not necessary to embrace the whole of Schelling’s philosophy or his Romantic idea of “genius” to acknowledge that he identified something essential about art. Although I’m convinced he would have been appalled by Duchamp’s urinal, not even that scandalous ready-made can be said to have been created from purely self-conscious cognitive activity. Where do thoughts come from, after all? There is an underground to thought, a place of incubation we have little access to. And just as no artist brings only an idea to his art, no viewer perceives art only through his intellect, not even if he is staring at the urinal or at Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs. I can articulate several sentences about Kosuth’s three kinds of chairs, which I believe would be true, but there is more to my experience than those sentences. I also have a physical relation to the three chairs, one that is immediate and felt, and I have a keen sense of the artist’s dogmatic presence and his desire to overturn old notions of the aesthetic. I may sympathize with this, but the man standing next to me might find himself irritated. He might say, “That’s not art. I could have done that.” But there is always an emotional component that is part of a viewer’s response to the work, and what generates that emotion is not easy to understand, describe, or quantify.

Art requires an artist, and that artist is, or was, a living, breathing human being with an embodied self that functions both consciously and unconsciously within a larger world of meanings. For some reason that person is driven to make art. This urge, one I have, is not explicable to me. I am aware of an urgent need to write, to make something, to push forward, but where it comes from or why I have it is unknown to me. Most of what I am at any given moment is hidden. We have explicit memories—the ones we can pull forth at a moment’s notice—but also implicit ones that may return as an association to something else or remain forever buried. For Freud, making art was a sublimation, a kind of translation of fundamental human drives, for him sexual, that were then turned into something else. It is not hard to see the influence of earlier philosophers on his thought—Schelling certainly, but also Schopenhauer, with his will to power, the blind force that drives human beings. I think the German word Trieb, or drive, rather than instinct, as it has been translated into English, describes this push best. All animals have drives, most notably to survive, but making art is not about survival, despite the fact that many artists feel that if they couldn’t do their work, their lives would lose meaning.

Art, it seems to me, must be distinguished by a kind of intentionality. Franz Brentano, his student Husserl, and the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty all used this word, and it is now essential to the vocabularies of people working in phenomenology, as well as to Anglo-American analytic philosophers. For Brentano intentionality was a characteristic of all mental acts. He described it as “reference to a content” or “direction toward an object.”11 Although Husserl disputed aspects of Brentano’s definition, he also mostly employed the idea of intentionality as a conscious directedness. Merleau-Ponty, influenced by Gestalt psychology and neurology, had a far more embodied notion of intentionality, one that included a prereflective intentionality, a motivational force toward something that is not necessarily self-conscious in that thinking-ourselves-as-thinkers way. For Merleau-Ponty the sphere of lived intentions was much larger than conscious thought.12 Long before research unveiled a subliminal neurobiology of intentionality, Merleau-Ponty included it in his theory. Works of art exhibit traces of this embodied intentionality. In drawings, the feeling of the hand that once moved on the page is present. When looking at a painting I am often deeply affected by the remains of the artist’s gesture or the sense of his motion now stilled—in a Jackson Pollock action painting, for example, or in a work from Gerhard Richter’s series Sinbad. Not only do I feel the movement of the lacquer on the glass, I want to start dancing. This sight, with its colors and the now stopped motion, affects my limbs as if I were listening to a rock-and-roll song. But even when there is no trace of the artist’s hand, brush, or movement, intentionality is present, albeit in a more cognitive form, in an upside-down urinal or a simple chair. It is this quality that turns an “it” into a form of a “you.”

Producing art includes a drive to make something, an embodied intentionality. But art is not possible without intersubjective human experience because art is always a gift made for another, not a specific other, but a generalized other person who is asked to read or listen or look. Art necessarily establishes a relation between the artist and an imaginary reader, viewer, or listener; it is inherently dialogical. Therefore, all visual art implies a spectator, even when that other is part of the self, the viewing self, as was the case with Henry Darger, one of the so-called outsider artists. When he died in Chicago in 1973, he left behind him the immense illustrated saga of the Vivian girls, over fifteen thousand pages of narrative and several hundred watercolors that include hermaphroditic girl armies and their often violent adventures. He was his own voyeur.

The artist presses something of himself out into the world—the fantasies of a man bruised forever by his childhood. Darger’s mother died when he was four. Then he lost his crippled father, and the boy, deemed defective, was sent to a mental institution, from which he escaped when he was sixteen. In his art, he created an epic of children enslaved by sadistic adults, a narrative of suffering and insurrection that finally ends in triumph. And the story and the pictures are at once of him and not of him. Darger was an urban hermit. It is doubtful that he spent much time in art museums, but his pictures draw from visual representations he knew well: advertisements, comics, and illustrations from children’s books. I am using Darger as an example, but what I am going to say is true of every artist, for this is where inside and outside collapse. No artist lives in a vacuum, not even Henry Darger. The perceived world becomes part of us in memory, but we are also immersed in that world. Much of what we take in becomes part of our vast implicit understanding of things once it is learned, becomes the body’s knowledge, and this knowledge can’t be separated from our engagement with people and things in our particular environment.

When I am drawing my self-portrait I do not think about where my hand is on the paper; it moves because I know how to move it. My hand responds automatically to what I am seeing in the mirror. I don’t rehearse drawing any more than I relearn how to ride a bike every time I jump on one. I might mourn my skills and wish I were Leonardo da Vinci, but what I am able to do is present in my hand’s motion. Living is movement. Thoughts are in motion, and when I think, my body thinks too. While writing I find the words not only in my mind but in the feeling of my fingers on the keyboard. When I’m stuck, I stand up and walk around the room, and walking often jogs the sentence loose. There is a powerful connection between vision and motor-sensory circuits in the brain, and visual perception cannot be separated from our knowledge of the world gained through our movements in it.

We are proprioceptive beings. Broadly, proprioception, which comes from the Latin word proprius, meaning one’s own, is our ability to sense the position, orientation, and movement of our bodies and its parts in space. Much of the time we simply don’t have to think about this; it is unconscious. As with so many things we take for granted, it is only when this sixth sense doesn’t develop or is lost to injury that its absolute necessity is made clear. Children with a defective proprioceptive sense may fall down or intentionally bump into walls and doors to get a better idea of where they are. People who suffer a brain injury and damage this faculty cannot feel where their bodies are in relation to a chair, for example, and will have to actively evaluate their spatial relation to it in order to sit down.

If you are throwing up your hands and saying, “But what does this have to do with art?” my answer is that every encounter with a work of art is an embodied, subjective one. Our phenomenal experiences of Duchamp, Kosuth, Richter, or Darger are not objective, third-person experiences. I don’t fly out of my body and my personal story when I stand in front of Duccio’s Madonna and Child at the Metropolitan Museum. What happens happens between me and the image. Even in science there is no such thing as perceptual neutrality.13 This doesn’t mean that looking at art is a solipsistic experience either or that any response is as good as another. I can imagine flying out of my body and examining the picture from another perspective, say as an old childless man, but I know that my excursion is not real. I can also use my learning about painting in Siena at the turn of the fourteenth century to inform my vision. We cannot help but be part of our language and culture, which shape our beliefs about how things are. And we all engage to one degree or another in consensus-making, and intersubjective consensus precedes us. Nevertheless, we all have a genetic makeup—some scientists call it temperament—that will be expressed through our environments. The temperamentally sensitive will be more vulnerable to shocks and blows than the temperamentally robust. This applies to art as well. Our temperaments in tandem with our personal stories as we grow as human beings will affect our responses to a painting and become part of the dialogue.

We are born into meanings and ideas that will shape how our embodied minds encounter the world. The moment I walk through the doors of the Prado or the Louvre, for example, I enter a culturally sanctified space. Unless I am an alien visitor from another galaxy, I will be permeated by the hush of greatness, by a sense that what I am going to see has the imprimatur of those in the know, the experts, the curators, the culture-makers. This idea of grandeur made physical by big rooms, rows of paintings and sculptures, affects my perception of what I am going to see. An expectation of greatness is apt to be part of my perception, even if I consider myself unprejudiced and am not aware that my view of a work of art has been subtly altered by where it is.

Art’s meaning is created at every level of our experience. Sensing color, for example, appears to be prereflective. Red, green, or blue will affect us—we will feel their impact—before we are even able to name the color. As the Gestalt theorists argued, we will also distinguish foreground from ground prior to a recognition of the objects on that ground. This has been called “preattentive” vision.14 A large work of art will immediately strike us, as will a very small one, before we can articulate largeness or smallness because, if our proprioceptive sense is working, we will engage with its size instantly, before we can meditate on it. And, I think what we see has emotional or affective value, not after we have contemplated the object and named it, but in the earlier subliminal stages of vision. In an article “See It with Feeling: Affective Predictions during Object Perception,” L. F. Barrett and Moshe Bar argue that before an object has even been identified, we respond bodily to its perceived salience or meaning through past experience. Depending on the prediction about the thing’s value, our breathing, muscle tension, heart rate, stomach motility, as well as vague or potent sensations of pleasure, anxiety, or distress will be present. Merleau-Ponty referred to this kind of expectation as a stereotype.15 Barrett and Bar write, “When the brain receives a new sensory input from the world in the present, it generates a hypothesis based on what it knows from the past to guide recognition and action in the immediate future.”16 Aside from the fact that the authors turn the brain into a subject, which is rather silly, their point is well taken.

A vivid and conveniently prolonged example of stereotypic ways of seeing can be seen in something that happened to my husband, Paul Auster, and which he included in his novel The Book of Illusions. He was walking our now-deceased dog Jack down a street in Brooklyn one misty night, and in the blurred light of the streetlamps saw a small blue object glowing on the sidewalk. Pleased and curious, he leaned over to investigate. It was a stone, he guessed, or a piece of cut glass, or perhaps a moonstone or sapphire fallen out of a ring or necklace. Part of the passage from the book reads: “And so I started to pick it up, but the moment my fingers came into contact with the stone, I discovered that it wasn’t what I’d thought it was. It was soft, and it broke apart when I touched it, disintegrating into a wet, slithery ooze. The thing I had taken for a stone was a gob of human spit.”17 Needless to say, disgust quickly replaced pleasure. Our earlier motor-sensory experiences order our vision and become predictors of what we are going to see when we pay close attention to the object. This is why when blind people recover their sight physiologically—their primary visual cortex is functioning normally—they nevertheless cannot “see.” Years of perceptual learning that create expectation and orientation are missing and their vision is chaotic, blurred, and incoherent.

Looking at a work of art engages this prereflective expectation of its value—of pleasure or disgust or boredom and their bodily concomitants. But this is usually instantaneous, and once one has stopped to look properly at a work of art, forms of reflective consciousness are also brought to bear. Indeed, almost all writing about art takes place at this level of the experience. We read about the historical period of the painting or sculpture or about the artist’s biography or about what x-rays reveal about its creation or perhaps a complex theoretical argument about the avant-garde or capitalism and the art market. If I know, for example, that Kosuth was interested in Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this information will affect how I “read” his chairs, just as knowing about Darger’s childhood changes his work. The Tractatus and years of boyhood spent in a mental institution are part of the intersubjective and linguistic fabric that clothes my perception as I think about what it is that I am actually seeing.

Despite significant advances in research on the visual areas of the brain, there is a lot of disagreement about how we actually see. It is known, for example, that there are as many as thirty areas in the brain dedicated to vision, that some of these areas or rather neuronal networks appear to be for specific functions: color, motion, depth perception, etc. Interestingly, there is also a part of the brain in the temporal lobe crucial to face recognition, the fusiform gyrus. Face recognition is a particular neurological event, and it too can be lost. But none of these discoveries constitutes a theory of vision. There are still many scientists and philosophers who cling to a computational model of perception. We are like computers with serial inputs and outputs, and our brains operate according to logical rules. In this view, seeing is largely passive. All we do is receive images from the world that are then represented like reflections in our brains. Another view, one I find far more compelling, is a phenomenological one. We are not computers, and we are not just brains. We have bodies that move in space and we have emotions and a vast unconscious, and our perceptions of people and things are active and creative. It has become increasingly clear that a large part of the dynamic patterns of neural connectivity in our brains is not predetermined genetically. They are not static but are shaped by our behavior and our motor-sensory and cognitive experiences. Learning changes the brain, and its plasticity continues throughout our lives.

Despite the scientific zeal to atomize experience, to break it down into comprehensible bits and pieces, this approach often results in a frozen view of reality. In recent years, parts of the scientific community have been influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl, and, more important, by Merleau-Ponty, to challenge a paralyzed, purely third-person view of perception. Neurobiologists such as Humberto Maturana and the late Francisco Varela,18 the cognitive scientists Shaun Gallagher19 and Claire Petitmengin,20 as well as philosophers such as Alva Noë21 and J. J. Gibson22 argue for an enactive theory of perception founded on our motor-sensory abilities and have embraced a whole-body-in-relation-to-its-environment understanding of vision. Although there is no unified front and there are many disagreements among them, my reading of these thinkers has led me to the position that viewers are not merely passive reflectors of the out-there, but embodied creative seers. Two researchers at the Max Planck Institute, Andreas Engel and Peter König, articulated the position well in a paper called “Paradigm Shifts in Neurobiology: Toward a New Theory of Perception”: “What neuroscience has to explain,” they write, “is not how brains act as world-mirroring devices, but how they serve as ‘vehicles of world-making.’”23

Let us take a very simple example of active visual perception. One day last spring, I was walking down the street with my daughter, Sophie, in lower Manhattan. She had just moved into a new apartment a few blocks away, and we were shopping for household objects to put in her new place. The sun was shining. The sky was blue, and we walked along arm in arm. I felt like singing. I looked up, saw a sign and read: HAPPY ORTHODONTICS. I turned to Sophie and said, “Look, isn’t that the craziest name for an orthodontist’s office?” I pointed to the sign, but when I looked again, it said: KARPOV ORTHODONTICS. This simple error is illuminating. My misreading was subliminal, active, and creative. I projected my emotional state onto the text and proceeded to garble the letters. Similarly, it has been shown that clinically depressed people respond to pictures of neutral, unemotional faces in a far more negative way than people who are not depressed. Mood acts creatively on our perceptions.

The first time I saw Zurbarán’s Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose, which is in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, I had a very strong reaction to the picture, and I stood in front of it for some time. It’s neither tiny nor huge: 60 by 107 cm. Its size did not overwhelm me, but I had no feeling of its being diminutive either. Its colors are vivid but muted against a dark background. I cannot track the initial unconscious milliseconds of my response to the picture, but I know the image hit me instantly and bodily, and had some person been there to measure the activation of my sympathetic nervous system that had sped up my heart rate and increased the sweat levels in my skin, he would have pronounced me in a state of heightened emotion and attention.

Why? How can four lemons on a silver saucer, oranges in a basket, a rose, and a teacup filled with water sitting on another silver saucer create such a physical charge? Naming the contents of the painting gets us nowhere; it is simply a banal recitation of ordinary things. And if I arranged these objects for you on a table, I could make a lovely still life. There would be a pleasant contrast of colors for the eye, but the visual experience would be very different. First of all, the real fruits, china cup, and flower would exist in three-dimensional space and have a backside that could be explored. Part of your perception would be that you could, if you dared ruin my construction, pick up a lemon or an orange and eat it. I could declare it my artwork, and it would be one. But you would never see the objects in my piece as this work by Zurbarán sees them. They appear to be in hyperfocus, to be more defined, more perfectly clear than things in the world, despite the shadows. It is as if we have improved our normal vision with specially made glasses, and the objects are illuminated by a light that represents no time of day or light source we could ever name. We do not imagine a window or candle somewhere in the room lighting these objects. The initial “pop” of this picture is not because we are experiencing realism or naturalism, but precisely the opposite. They are fictions in a fictitious world, an imaginary elsewhere that has opened up before our eyes. We recognize every thing in the painting, but each of these objects is forbiddingly removed from any idea of use or consumption, not because they are painted but because of the way they are painted. They are enchanted by the artist’s intentionality—a force that is prereflective and reflective, one that I engage with as a distinct presence of another human being, albeit the ghost of that other, that absent you.

The longer I looked at it, the stranger and more mysterious the image became. The words lemons, saucer, oranges, basket, teacup, and rose detached themselves from my experience as I tried to pin down what was happening and discovered that I couldn’t, or rather, that whatever I said to myself seemed inexact. After that initial startle response, my nervous system quieted down and the stillness and silence of both the things represented (lemons and oranges are not animate) and of the medium itself (painting does not move in a literal sense) acted on me like a balm, and I fell into a kind of reverie typical of art viewers, an active, ongoing, shifting, physical, mental response to what I was seeing, one that included emotion—but which one? A form of awe, I would say, a sense that the world we live in with its fruits and cups and tables and chairs and animals and people becomes increasingly alien the more closely it is examined. It is a feeling I often had as a child and still have from time to time, and on occasion it is accompanied by a strong lifting sensation inside me, as if I am rising up and out of myself. This Zurbarán brings me back to that emotional state, and so a part of my response to the picture is an active projection or, to use the psychoanalytic term, a form of transference of my memories and my lived past onto the painting. This transference is subtler than my misreading of KARPOV ORTHODONTICS but is nevertheless a related phenomenon. Subject and object, I and you, begin to collapse in my viewing. What part is the Zurbarán picture, and what part is the spectator?

When I saw the painting for the first time, I did not know that the objects in the work are symbolic offerings to the Virgin Mary, that lemons are an Easter fruit, that the rose signifies love, purity, and chastity, and the table an altar. I read that later. It did not fundamentally change my feelings about the picture but rather added to what I had already felt in an undogmatic way—that there is something unworldly about the things I see here, that they are objects suffused with transcendent feeling. Much scholarship about art is in the business of explaining these sorts of meanings: the oranges and their blossoms signify the renewal of life. Other academics write long discourses about technique to explain how a work was made, and there is high theory about art as well, the philosophy of art. In my reading of these philosophers I ran across this:

O is a work of art-e = df O is an artifact and O functions to provide for aesthetic appreciation.24

This is part of a much longer analytical argument, in which James C. Anderson gives the reader a definition of art. Every definition is under siege, and there is little agreement. I have no problem with logical formulas as a way to get at meanings and, in the course of his essay, Anderson modifies this definition to include a second qualifier as a subcategory of appreciation: “art self-conscious art,”25 but what interests me here is the way “aesthetic appreciation” appears in the formula. The words imply an abstract viewer, a general appreciator, and that something happens in that “appreciation,” but the particular embodied dynamics of appreciating are missing, although Anderson suggests that even disgust can be subsumed by the word appreciation. I am not saying that Anderson is necessarily wrong. I am offering here an addendum to theories that have left the drama of creative perception and embodied feeling out of the discussion about art, theories that have largely forgotten that art lives in a viewing subject, in the person who stands in front of whatever the thing is and looks at it, sometimes appreciatively, sometimes not. We might ask how much appreciation does it take to make a work of art. Why do we appreciate art at all? Why do I love the Zurbarán picture? Why am I not alone in loving it? Where and how and when does that love I feel take place? There is no art without the imaginary, and the imaginary is not a given; it arrives at a moment in human development, and it begins in play.

All mammals play, especially young ones, but imaginative play—taking on other roles, being the mother or the father or the baby, building sand castles, making mud pies, drawing a house with a big sun shining over it—belongs to human children and the ability develops over time. Vygotsky argues that in early childhood “there is a union of motives and perception. At this age perception is generally not an independent but rather an integrated feature of a motor action. Every perception is a stimulus to activity.”26 This comment resonates well with my earlier discussion about our proprioceptive, motor-sensory abilities that underlie our visual perceptions of things. Children learn through their active exploration of space, which in time develops into a sixth sense. Around the age of three pretending begins. In imaginative play, the child detaches the usual meaning of a thing, stick, for example, and gives it another significance, horse. The new meaning horse determines the child’s action—galloping across the floor with the stick between his legs. That gallop has been severed from the ordinary meanings of what he sees around him. Dogs romp and play with each other, but they do not indulge in the fantasy of another world. And where does pretending happen? It occurs in an imaginary space that exists side by side with actual or real space. This human flexibility to be two places at once is a function of understanding time and symbolic representation. Because at some moment in my childhood, through my acquisition of reflection—in mirroring and then in language—I developed the ability to remember myself in the past and project myself into the future. I can leave my immediate circumstances and pretend that I am elsewhere or that I am someone else: the old man looking at Duccio, for example. I can imagine myself in the third person and as someone who is not me. Without this there is no art.

Merleau-Ponty writes, “In the case of the normal subject, the body is available not only in real situations into which it is drawn. It can turn aside from the world … lend itself to experimentation, and generally speaking take its place in the realm of the potential.”27 Art happens in this potential space—I would say fictional space of human life, the world of play and its transformations, which Vygotsky refers to as a “realm of spontaneity and freedom.”28 And it always involves some form of intentional motion outward into the other and otherness, not necessarily a specific place or person but an active seeking toward them. In Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through (1914), Freud uses the word playground in connection to the transference, that mysterious fluctuating space between patient and analyst, which he also calls “an intermediate region” where “almost complete freedom” is possible.29 Winnicott elaborated on Freud’s playground as the essential space of creativity: “This area of playing,” he writes, “is not inner psychic reality. It is outside the individual, but it is not the external world.”30 Its origins are deep and bodily. They begin in the first relations between child and mother, in mirroring, in our physical explorations of space and our ability to posit an imaginary zone of experience, which Winnicott also refers to as “potential space.”31 This is the ground on which art lives. It is also where appreciation happens and where love can happen.

When we come to a work of art, we are not only witness to the results of another person’s intentional play in his or her fictive space, we are free to play ourselves, to muse and dream and question and theorize. As spectators, we too find ourselves in a potential space between us and what we see because perception is active and creative, and artworks engage us, not just intellectually but emotionally, physically, consciously, and unconsciously, and that relation, that dialogue may be, as Schelling believed, finally indeterminable. But when we love a work of art, there is always a form of recognition that occurs. The object reflects us, not in the way a mirror gives our faces and bodies back to us. It reflects the vision of the other, of the artist, that we have made our own because it answers something within us that we understand is true. This truth may be only a feeling, only a humming resonance we cannot put into words, or it may become a vast discursive statement, but it must be there for the enchantment to happen—that excursion into you that is also I.

2010