imaginative exploration of material, is available and valuable within a
variety of artistic practices and traditions. Part of the value of this achieve-
ment comes from its being original, from its evidencing of powers of free
meaning-making in the working through of subject matter and attitude
within the materials of a medium of art. Artists of all kinds are the first
audiences of their own works in process, and they monitor their ongoing
work to establish whether, to what extent, and how they are managing to
achieve original sense, with thought and attitudedistinctivelyfused to the
exploration of material. This is as true of appropriation art, found art,
conceptual art, performance art, and other avant-gardisms as it is of work
in more traditional media.
In modern art, artists in shaping and monitoring their work are often
quite aware of the contingences of artistic achievement that are afforded by
their particular artistic tradition and practice. Frequently they call attention
to the work itself as a more or less coherent, but still incomplete, construc-
tion or assemblage, in order to highlight the open-ended, explorative,
satisfaction-seekingquality of their work (and of the participation in that
work that they invite from their audiences). Cézanne, for example, in his
Mont Sainte-Victoire series increasingly leaves patches of canvas unpainted.
In“Tintern Abbey”Wordsworth repeatedly qualifies his own thought with
phrases such as“If this / Be but a vain belief”^64 and“I would believe,”^65 and
inThe Preludehe describes his courses of“lapse and hesitating choice, / And
backwards wanderings along thorny ways,”^66 thus highlighting the explora-
tive character of artistic making and its continuing uncertainties. Asides to
readers or viewers are staples of modern literature and drama. Movies occur
within movies. Composers introduce increasingly innovative dissonances in
the history of composition. Either density, difficulty, and ambiguity of
language (Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Pound, Hölderlin, Rilke)orunexpected dir-
ectness and clarity (Carver, Kafka) may be highlighted. Process and explor-
ation are foregrounded over any preformed message or effort to tyrannize a
culture.(^64) Wordsworth,“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,”in Wordsworth,
Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Stillinger, pp. 108–11 at p. 109, lines 49–50.
(^65) Ibid., p. 110, line 87.
(^66) Wordsworth,The Prelude, in Wordsworth,Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Stillinger, p. 359,
Book XIV, lines 136–37.
134 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art