idealism against Sancho Panza’s common sense, when Van Gogh paints
walking shoes strewn on the floor, when Anthony Caro presents an array
of beams and girders, or when Balanchine choreographs for the music of
Stravinsky, we are in each case invited to partake in and so to come to
understand a feeling about what is presented or arranged for us. We are to
see and to feel the comparative virtues (and the complementarity and tension
between them) of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; we are to see and to feel
what these shoes (and the countryside in which he walks and paints) mean to
Van Gogh and may mean to us; we are to feel the experience of space and
point of view, both as they are invited by Caro’s arrangement and as Caro’s
arrangement makes us aware of point of view in life; and we are to see how
Stravinsky’s musical form can be responded to in felt motion that we, in
turn, follow with feeling. Even Sol LeWitt, in his abstract, geometric con-
structions is inviting us to follow and partake in the work of construction,
and in doing so to feel the values of order and constructive proceduralism
that are embodied in the work, in the face of but hence in relation to the rest
of life. Artists seem typically to attend to and seek to embody their own
feelings about a subject matter or experience in their forms and representa-
tions, therein inviting us to share in both those feelings and their expressive
clarification in the work. Expressiveness is a criterion of art.
Significantly, the expression in question in a work of art isnotachieved
through an immediate gush of feeling into the work. It is different from the
immediacy of horror one might feel in witnessing a terrible traffic accident
or from the immediacy of empathy one might feel for those stuck in grinding
poverty. Instead, when artistic expression is aimed at, then the emotion is, as
Wordsworth puts it,“recollected in tranquility.”^5 There is a sense ofworking
throughthe subject matter and how it is appropriate to feel about it, a
working through undertaken by the artist and subsequently followed and
recapitulated by the audience. Feeling is here mediated and developed by
thought and by artistic activity. The poet must, Wordsworth observes, think
“long and deeply”about the subject,“for our continued influxes of feeling
are modified and directed by our thoughts.”^6 One must“look steadily at
[one’s] subject,”^7 attending to both the specificity of this situation, object,
experience, or action and its place in human life in general: how this
(^5) Ibid., p. 460. (^6) Ibid., p. 448. (^7) Ibid., p. 450.
Expression 77