Philosophy of the Performing Arts

142 performance as art
assessed. Here, I think, we should remind ourselves of our discussion, in
Chapter 1, of the features that distinguish artworks in general from objects
of reflective attention outside the arts. The suggestion, it will be recalled,
is that artworks call for a distinctive kind of regard, and that they do so
in virtue of the ways in which they articulate their contents. To determine
the artistic contents of an artwork requires close attention to the details of
its artistic vehicle which often exemplifies properties ascribable to the work.
Artworks tends to articulate their contents by means of many different prop-
erties of their vehicles, and to do so in a “ hierarchical ” manner, where higher
level content is articulated through lower level content. Artworks therefore
call for a distinctive kind of regard if we are to ascertain not only what their
vehicles represent, express, or exemplify at the most immediate level, but
also, at the more thematic level, the point of the vehicles having the manifest
features that they do. This inflects the interrogative interest that we take in
the manifold in trying to make sense of it in terms of reasons for its being
ordered in the way that it is.^6
If an improvisatory performance like Jarrett’s Köln Concert is to be viewed
as an artwork, Jarrett’s actions on stage on January 24, 1975 must be the
work’s artistic vehicle, and these actions must have been executed with the
intention of articulating an artistic content accessible only to receivers who
accord that vehicle the distinctive kind of regard for which artworks call.
Alperson’s general characterization of our interest in improvisatory per-
formance, together with da Fonseca-Wollheim’s description of the kind of
attention for which Jarrett’s performance calls, certainly suggest that these
requirements are met. The performance, as artistic vehicle, articulates its
content through the timbral richness of the sequence of sounds produced.
The expressive qualities of the latter, and the ways in which they draw upon
the different musical traditions to which Jarrett refers in his playing, also
serve to communicate higher order content. Furthermore, those features of
musical constructions to which Alperson refers reinforce our interrogative
interest in the manner in which the musical manifold is ordered, even if that
ordering is the result of irreversible decisions made in real time rather than
of an extended process of reflective construction.
What space remains, then, for Thom’s distinction between artworks and
objects of aesthetic contemplation? Our interest in Jarrett’s performance is
an interest in something intentionally done, just as our interest in an endur-
ing artistic artifact is an interest in something intentionally made. In both
cases, however, there is a process–product ambiguity in talk of something
done or made. There is the intentional act of doing or making something,
and there is the product or result of that doing or making. In Jarrett’s case,
the result is the performed musical composition that articulates a particular
artistic content. The Köln Concert , as the result of Jarrett’s activity, is in this