viewer’s perception of the floor.”^67 In forming his sculptures, Caro is himself
working through visual experiences of surprise, order, coherence, and wit; in
viewing them we follow him and participate in the emotions that attend
these visual experiences. Or in music we can follow and imaginatively par-
ticipate in the working of motivic material as dramatic tension is developed
and resolved.
The reason why identifications with artists and imaginative participation
in experiences and emotions are available to us is that works of art are made
things, products or instances of human action. To understand an action,
including actions of artistic making, is to understand its suitable motivation
by reasons in contexts. (If there are no reasons available to us that motivate
an action, our sense that what is in question is anactionlapses, and we tend
to see what occurs as mere reaction or happenstance.) Actions of artistic
making, including the making of both narrative art and nonnarrative art, are
concerned with the shaping of materials to hold attention on a presented
subject matter. (In abstract work, the presented subject matters are often
centrally the perception and gestural action of the artist and the possibility of
the audience’s imaginative participation in that perception and gestural
action.) Whatever emotions figure in attention to this subject matter are
emotions that members of the audience are solicited to experience and
explore, as they participate in the attention that is embodied in the work.^68
As Frank Palmer notes,“understanding human action”–including actions
of artistic making and presentation–“is saturated with moral concepts.”^69
When someone does something, either in the plot of a narrative work or in
the making and presenting of art in general, wherein a subject matter is
presented as a focus for thought and emotion, then we see that doing as
variously attentive, lazy, guilty, kind, cruel, affectionate, melancholic,(^67) William Rubin,Anthony Caro(Boston, MA: New York Graphic Society, 1975), citedibid.,
p. 204.
(^68) Here I am close to Richard Shusterman’s suggestion that all works of art, as products of
action, have an implicit dramatic structure, in“working through”an emotion related to
a subject matter. See Richard Shusterman,“Art as Dramatization,”Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism59, 4 (fall 2001), pp, 363–72, especially p. 370A inf., where Shusterman
describes the“knot of productive tension that binds art’s heightened experience to its
formal staging.”See also my own earlier suggestion that fiction makes possible the
comparatively free exploration of the dramatic structure of emotions in relation to their
proper objects in Eldridge,On Moral Personhood, pp. 11–12.
(^69) Frank Palmer,Literature and Moral Understanding(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 2.
222 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art