2 Representation, imitation, and resemblance
Representation and aboutness
Art products and performances seem in some rough sense to beaboutsome-
thing. Even when they do not carry any explicitly statable single message,
they nonetheless invite and focus thought. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades,
Sol Le Witt’s constructions, Vito Acconci’s performance pieces, and Louise
Lawler’s conceptual art are all put forward, in Duchamp’s phrase,“at the
service of the mind,”^1 in that they are intended to set up in an audience a line
of thinking about a subject matter. Most literary works clearly undertake to
describe an action, situation, or event. Works of dance typically have a
narrative-developmental structure, and even works of architecture seem
both to proceed from and to invite thoughts about how space is and ought
to be experienced and used. Works of textless pure or absolute music have
beginnings, middles, and ends that have seemed to many listeners to model
or share shapes with broad patterns of human action.^2 The abstract painter
Hans Hoffmann in teaching used to have his students begin by putting a blue
brush stroke on a bare canvas and then asking them to think about its
relations to the space“behind,”“in front of,”and around it, as though the
(^1) Marcel Duchamp,“Interview with James Johnson Sweeney,”in“Eleven Europeans in
America,”Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art(New York) 12, 4–5 (1946), pp. 19–21;
reprinted inTheories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1968), p. 394.
(^2) See for example Fred Everett Maus,“Music as Drama,”inMusic and Meaning, ed. Jenefer
Robinson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 105–30, and Anthony Newcomb,
“Action and Agency in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Second Movement,”inMusic and
Meaning, ed. J. Robinson, pp. 131–53. The fullest treatment of how music came historically
to be understood as being“about”something, but indefinitely, is in Carl Dahlhaus,The
Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (University of Chicago Press, 1989).
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