Motion is brought to the object by the subject.  It is one more thing that the viewer brings to the work of art.  At least in the case of the pictorial art.  Even in the picture, we see first one thing, then another.  Our perception of the piece is “mediated by succession”.  So, the perceiver brings his attention to bear on the pictorial work, and in the nature of that attention, motion is provided to the work.  “It is by the movement of the look that the movement of the object appears."(278) So much is given by the spectator to the world at large, I suppose.  In everything I perceive my gave moves and so the object is endowed with motion, however static is might be.  In the work of art we are given something more.

Painting, say, can represent movement, but we want more than that.  We want the painting to be moving.  “representing movement and being movement are two quite different things for painting."(280) The painter can put movement into the work.  The lines on the canvass become something more than trajectories.  The artist embeds a meaning in the work to which the spectator may react.  The painter is moving the paint, and that is more or less obvious in the finished work.  There is, then motion left over from the creation that is meaningful in the finished piece.  As the brush strokes are often not carefully hidden or eliminated, but left to reveal what the artist was doing.  At the same time they reveal a motion present in the creation, the strokes also express the meaning (at least partly) of the work of art.

It is expressive, this movement in the work.  Yes, perhaps we need to admit, as Dufrenne does, that our speech here is metaphorical.  We might consider how musical expression works, and whether that is also metaphorical (reference here to Nelson Goodman, maybe).  In any case we may need to return to this consideration of the motion of the work of art, and how that plays to its expressive nature.  There may be a connection between the expressive in art and the intrinsic motion that exists in the work.

Dufrenne provides a rather cryptic discussion of the mainfestation of time in space (on pages 276-277).  The conclusion seems to be that although the work has a temporal existence, this is not the crucial temporal nature that we need to understand.  The time in the work as a work of art must meet the condition stated above.  Of course the painting is aging in the ordinary way.  The colors are fading, the canvas is decaying in various ways, or whatever the materials do.  We can just preserve the canvass, but that is not (just so) a work of art.  If there is a work of art, it may have time as part of its structure.  The pictorial space does something analogous to what space does for time. 

I don’t quite remember it, but I think Hawking says something about entropy as giving a direction to time.  Maybe thinking of time as having a direction is already using a spacial metaphor, and Dufrenne wants to make use of something similar here.  He does not talk about entropy, but he does mention motion.  Time “. . . has to entry by proxy, under the guise of movement. . . . But we must distinguish movement from the trajectory of movement."(277) Even in real space, the movement of the rock across the water leaves the ripples, which are not the movement of the rock, but leave a trail, a trajectory, that while not the movement, it is evidence of motion.  So motion gives us time, and the trajectory implies motion.  We can have neither time nor motion directly in the pictorial object (qua work of art), but we can have the trajectories.

“In other words, pictorial space becomes temporalized when it is given to us as a structured and oriented space in which certain privileged lines constitute trajectories that, instead of appearing to us as the inert residue of some movement, appear as filled with a movement realized in immobility."(277-278)

We have, then, found something that can reside in the pictorial work (the painting let’s say) and has some connection to time.  Further, the trajectories in the work can be both representational and actual.  There can be brush strokes that are themselves intrinsic to the work, and are themselves trajectories.  They imply the motion of the brush.  At the same time (not necessarily in the same work or the same part of the work) there can be representations of the ripples in the water that are trajectories because they are the lines left by the motion of the rock.  Every permutation on these considerations is also possible.  There can be representations of motions that within the painting, have no motion.  There can be representations of immobile objects that themselves have motion.  Dufrenne mentions Van Gogh’s olive trees in contrast to Gericault’s horses.

As we might expect, Dufrenne next invokes Kant.

We notice space in the picture in so far as it is itself represented by the picture.  So, perspective or foreshortening, or other ways that the artist has of representing 3-dimensions in the space of 2-dimensions (sorry I originally had 3-d here, but that does not make sense).  The pictorial work tries to represent, in a way that music does not.  I wonder why that is.  Sometimes music tries to represent.  Think here about St. Saens birds and other things.  But the origin of music is not at all representational.  There are artificial things that sound like other things, for example, bird calls, or other sort of animal noises for hunters for example.  No one would confuse these with music.  So music is not representational, but in the pictorial arts, and maybe we can say the visual arts entirely, representation is, at least in the beginning, very much in the forefront.

Dufrenne’s point is that this representational nature of pictorial work deprives it of the possibility of temporality.  It is not entirely clear to me why he says this, but part of it is the conceptual nature of the representation.  So, the picture is a picture of something, and we are left with thinking of the thing represented.  We are struck by what is represented, and we are left, in a way, wondering or thinking of what it is.  What is represented takes us to the conceptual realm.  “Our attention is involved in the domain of concepts, i.e., in the nontemporal."(274)

The temporal nature of art.

Yet there is a temporal aspect of the visual arts.  It is not in the manner of music.  In drama we may experience the temporal in the passage of time through the play.  But in painting or sculpture?  Again considering space.  For the representational painting, space is almost given to the artist.  Dufrenne appeals to Sartre’s idea of the “perceiving more and other than I see”.  Let me appeal to another musical analogy.  Sometimes in the harmony to a melody, we can drop the tonic, or the fifth, note of the chord, and if the melody is strong enough, the listener will fill it in.  The listener can make up for what the music lacks, if there is enough hinting in the right direction.  Dufrenne thinks that pictorial art can do the same.  If we think there is a person in the painting, we will fill it in.  We do not need much from the artist.  Dufrenne even suggests that the work on perspective in the Renaissance was not really necessary in order to get the viewer to perceive or at least experience depth in the painting. 

Of course an artist can work on representation.  The artist can be better at representing.  But in doing so he is moving the viewer in a direction that he is going anyway.  To get someone to look at the painting, we need to move in the direction of non-representational.  Even worse if the painting is of something that is intrisically interesting in its own right. 

So, spaciality is something more or less given in the representational work.  What about temporality?  There is something interesting here in considering how the work is presented.  Not just that the static picture can represent something in motion.  We are already beyond pictures (which has more to do with drawing than painting), but even if we are considering pictures, there is more to motion than a simple attempt to represent. 

Dufrenne makes this point in his discussion of the formation of an audience.  We go to the theater, or the symphony, or the jazz club, and we sit by ourself, but we recognize that we are part of the audience.  There is something that binds us together.  It is not our recognition of everyone as fellow participants.  We really, insofar as we are attentive, do not notice the others as such. 

This is why it is so rude to interrupt the performance.  Keith Jarrett is a performer who is well known for being very demanding of his audience.  You have to at least be quiet.  Insofar as you are not, you are not giving the work what it needs, and you are equally not receiving from the work what it can give.  Don’t make us think that you are there planning dinner, or doing anything that any one of us is not also doing right now.  The concert hall, or the club is there to allow the performance to take place.  Would it be better if we could all sit in our own private space?  I don’t think so.  Part of going to the public place to see the performance is to engage ourselves in the humanity of it.  We cannot escape. 

There are people who stay home because they cannot stand the crowds, or they can’t sit still, or they are afraid of crime or traffic.  It may well be that for most of us, most of our aesthetic experiences are private.  I have heard Tristan and Isolde more often sitting in my home.  But I know that I am not getting the whole thing, and in some sense, I tell myself, I am really preparing myself for a true aesthetic experience.  We can be ready, if ever we get a chance to be in the audience.  It would be different still, if I had never been to any public performance.  “. . . aesthetic perception calls on the spectator to realize the human within him at the same time that he recognizes the human as surrounding him in the public.”(69)

There are times when performers are trying to fool an audience (a con game for example), but a true artistic performance is not that.  No one on either side is fooled by anything.  The performers are trying to present what the artist produced, the audience is trying to appreciate both the work and the performance.  This is not done by giving up and being fooled.  No one needs to think that the woman on stage singing the role of Violetta really has tuberculosis.  Apparently some of the early audiences for La Traviata had trouble appreciating the suffering of Violetta, and the singing of the soprano.  Tuberculosis being rather incongruous with such singing.  But there is something silly here, what?

There are many ways of being an audience, or performer, and all of these are ways of providing the public that the work of art needs if it is to become an aesthetic object.  There are ways of engaging a painting or sculpture, or play, novel, or poem.  For any of these we can be an audience, or a performer.  We do our part, and are rewarded with a work of art, or better to say, rewarded with whatever a work of art can bring to us.  After all, we are discussing the work and its public.  The public provides performers and audiences (witnesses both).  The work of art ought to provide something as well.

Attract us in such a way that we perceive it appropriately as a work of art, and then give rise to an aesthetic object.  It is interesting, because usually when we think of performance, we think of a performer.  Someone instantiating a piece of music, or acting a part in a play. Dufrenne also recognizes this as a kind of performance.  There are, for him, arts in which “the performer is not the creator"(20).  In such cases we have a set of instructions given by the creator to guide the actions of the performer.  Where exactly is the work of art in all this?  We want to let that go.  We assumed at the beginning that we have a work of art.  We have a score to the symphony.  We are asking for an honest performance so that the score can produce a work of art.  But of course the performance must be honest, in a way.  It must faithfully produce the work of art as intended.  Musicians have their scores (or at least their lead sheets).  The theater actor has his script (provided by the “artist"), but also his director, and stage manager, etc.  The screen actor even more, has so much in addition to the script, it is difficult to know where the work of art ends and the performance begins.  Somewhere we have the performance that presents the work of art.  Something interesting here with respect to dance, and choreography.  There is often enough no written text to guide the dance.  There is instruction, something like “do it this way” and a demonstration.  Yet we separate the choreographer from the dancer.  In the world of musical performance we have the performance of a scored piece, Verdi’s La
Traviata has its score that must be respected.  The performers are performing that piece.  It can be instantiated in many different ways.  There is some sense in which Bernstein/Sondheim is really just Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare gives rise to many different honest and aesthetically respectable performances.  There is also music that does not live in the score.  There is some techno style music that seems to live in the performance.  There is no chance that anyone else later will “play that piece” because there is no piece to play. 

In the world of jazz there is often improvisation.  Such improvisations can live just in the performance, but it often happens that transcribers come along later and, on the basis of recordings, make a score out of what originally was a performed piece of art.  In such cases the performer is the creator, and the scribe is the helper.  It can be not so obvious a line.  Many themes in Duke Ellington’s compositions began as improvised lines by his musicians.  Many musicians improvise the same lines each time they play a particular work.I want to return to this idea of the performance of the work. 

Dufrenne considers the “arts in which the performer is the creator”, and he places painting and sculpture in this category.  “The painter executes or “performs” a portrait, the sculptor a bust"(30).  I’m not sure I like this idea of where the performance lies in these arts.  It seems to me more in line with what Dufrenne is suggesting to say that every experience of a work of art requires a contemporary performance in order to give rise to an aesthetic experience.  That is what I want to say, anyway.  I am going to leave it here, though, and return to this theme throughout this commentary. 

Kandinsky’s wife said that her habit was to rush through museums until something caught her eye and made her stop.  What makes her, or anyone, stop is an appropriate aesthetic performance.  A painting can perform as well as an actor on a stage, or a violinist in a concert hall.  Let’s try to work that out.