half-articulated class and gender issues is to see it as giving usentréeto the deep,
unspoken preoccupations of a people, but it can miss how a work might itself
revise such preoccupations. Close formal reading attends aptly to interrelations
of elements in the work, but it can devolve into repetitive and predictable
dwelling on“balanced paradox”and into the overvaluing of some favored mode
of decorum, without sufficient feel for history or meaning. Constructivist
appropriations and refigurations of precursor works or elements of precursor
works can both issue in valuable new art and cast light on the appropriated
precursor, but they run the risk of not in the end really being about the
precursor work at all. Text editors in music and literature and restorers of
paintings, sculptures, buildings, movies, and architecture can do invaluable
work, but there are often controversies about where restoration ends and
creative interpretation begins. Publishing all variants of a text, say, will not
establish an authentic original work, and the ravages of time cannot be unam-
biguously reversed in restoration. Moreover, it is unclear that textual and
restorative labors capture for us what a work may mean.
Is any of these six strategies for understanding a work of art uniquely apt to
its objects? Are the claims that are arrived at by pursuing these strategies
consistent, or do they contradict one another? For example, does a Freudian
reading ofHamletcontradict a reading that focuses on its patterns of images?
Are these readings even about the same thing? Just what should we do–which
strategy or strategies should we centrally practice–in order to understand a
work?
The natures of thought and action: Hegel, Baxandall, and others
A remark by Hegel provides a useful clue for addressing these questions.
“It must not be imagined,”Hegel writes,
that a human being thinks on the one hand and wills on the other, and that he
has thought in one pocket and volition in the other...[Thought and will] are not
two separate faculties; on the contrary, the will is a particular way of thinking–
thinking as translating itself into existence, thinking as the drive to give itself
existence.^3(^3) Hegel,Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge
University Press, 1991), §4 addition, p. 35.
Understanding art 145