Homage to—
December 15, 2025 | by Arnold Klein
Peter Fuller somewhere recounts how his unconversion from what may be called the Acrid School of Marxist Art Criticism was effected by his encounter with an ancient sculpted head, whose power to move him he found wholly unrelated to the class struggle, means of production, false consciousness, late capitalism and all the rest.
Well, I had a similar experience—though not of unconversion from an ideology but of confirmation to what I take to be a cardinal artistic value—up at the MOMA a few years ago when I turned the corner of a room containing the perfectly awful portrait of Condeleezza Rice by Luc Tuymans (and I name it, her and him for a reason) and came across—
But before getting to exactly what I came across, let me say of the experience itself that it was characterized by the absence of what I usually find present in my visits to the art world and by the presence of what I usually find woefully absent there.
What was absent in that experience that was usually present? Discourse: discourse contextual, biographical, art-historical, critical even, overt or implied; and all the cants respectively accompanying them—the whole logo-noetical sea into which, as Gilson says, everything disappears. (The Talmud is not wrong when it reminds us that the tongue is the only muscle that never gets tired.)
What was present, that was usually absent—that obviated discourse, and rendered it impertinent in both senses—malapert in both senses?
Imaginative expression.
Expression has gotten a bad rap; it has been taken to mean something like unclarified and uncontrolled emotion. But I mean it as referring, in art, to any significant record of a sensory-motor-affective-intellectual experience, including, of course, the (sensory-motor-affective-intellectual) experience of coming to clarify that experience in a material form, that is, in a work; and I call it “imaginative” because it is only in some power that is neither sense, motor, feeling nor intellect only that those (and everything else coming into it) can form a unity and result simultaneously in a record of that unity, that is, in a work. I don’t mean to commit myself to a facultative theory of mind here, only to emphasize that, in expression, the whole person is at once the impetus and the site of a process, whose termination, in art, is a work.
As must the whole person be engaged, in the reception of a work.
Not the “effect:” effect implies passivity on the part of what is usually called the reader, the viewer, the audience, and so on; the-eye-goes-here-the-eye-goes-there sort of thing; the we-laughed-we-cried sort of thing; the what-did-the-poem-make-you-feel sort of thing. But reception is not passive—you make yourself receptive, you engage (in Captain Picard’s sense) what Pater called “the power of being deeply moved,” as paradoxical, even as oxymoronic as these formulations sound. Not every work put out as art, or putting itself out as such, calls for reception in this sense, the discourse-laden portrait of Rice certainly does not;—or answers your call, though more works than you might think will gladly do so, if asked (but not until then). As Lamb said of certain old books, and as we might say of certain cold people, some art works have to be loved before they will prove themselves worthy of love.
So imaginative expression covers both sides, maker and recipient, as the recipient is remaking the expression of which the made thing is the significant record, from that record alone. You can call it communication if you want to, if you emphasize the commune part, the verbal stem, not the petrifying -ation, the noun, and even abstract noun, part, as two whole persons are indeed meeting; but not if you regard communication on the usual verbal model of one-party-telling-something-to-the-other, simply, and disregard the plain fact that the other in even the simplest case must take the words in, which is another way of saying make herself receptive, if communication is to take place at all. And not if you assume, again on the usual verbal model, that communication is always about something (the what-is-she-trying-to-tell-us sort of thing; the what-is-this-movie-really-about sort of thing), as there is no about in communion.
So what was the work that confirmed my commitment to imaginative expression as a cardinal artistic value?
You see my dilemma: no discourse allowed! But before I name it, and the name attached to it on the museum plaque, let me say something about this sad business of associating art works with the empirical persons usually taken to be their makers—the people who are born, live and die, eventually becoming fodder for biographers—instead of with I will call, following Croce, the aesthetic personage, knowable to us only through, and as, the physiognomy of the works themselves.
As to the empirical person: it is not merely that most of the world’s greatest works are anonymous, actually anonymous; it is not merely that the materials for anybody’s life are fragmentary and variously interpretable, when in fact there are any such materials left (as there are not in Shakespeare’s case, among others); it is not merely that most of anybody’s life, and probably the most important part—the moment-to-moment contents of her consciousness—leaves no record, variously interpretable or otherwise; it is not merely that biography is a literary genre and no more to be credited as true than any other subclass of fiction, including history, nor that it follows pseudo-absolute interpretative fads (who swallows “psychobiography” anymore?); it is not merely, in sum, that people are unknowable, even to journalists. It is that the empirical person and the aesthetic personage are of completely different interests.
A Nietzsche scholar quoted by Rorty (I don’t have the book to hand) says he is not interested in “the miserable little man who wrote Nietzsche’s books,” but in the character created in them; and here too, I am not interested in the by-all-accounts wonderful empirical person named on the plaque, but in the aesthetic physiognomy projected in the individually characteristic works that go about in the world under her name. Let’s get the order straight: the empirical person, even if we knew anything more than a few promiscuous superficialities about him or her, which we cannot (see above), would be of no interest whatsoever but for its misleading association with the artistic personage and its physiognomy, which we can know so profoundly.1
And I might add, know directly. The empirical artist may be sheltering in Rossinière or drinking in Soho or moldering in Vauvenagues Castle or currently dust, but the works are right here, silently calling to us or silently waiting for our call to answer.But here’s the thing: not every work going by an artist’s name will originate in the aesthetic personage and manifest its characteristic physiognomy. The empirical person can still use a paintbrush, and other interests than purely artistic, i.e., imaginatively expressive, ones (rhetorical ones, for example) may direct her hand. Such works will go by the same name as the artistic ones, of course, and sell out of the same dealership and take up space in the same museum, though one would hope an expert institution like the MOMA could discriminate between the two, between what Croce called poesia e non poesia, between painting and not-painting, and not devote wall space to canvasses that have nothing expressive going for them beyond their nominal association with an artist, Luc Tuymans, and his subject, Condeleezza Rice, say.
Once upon a time, at Fanelli’s, around one p.m., it was not uncommon for the conversation around not a few tables to turn to the question of “who was the greatest living painter,” and the debate (to date it somewhat) usually devolved into a contest between Balthus and Bacon and sometimes Mitchell, although one of the participants (initials R.L.) always and quite sincerely named himself. Well, convinced as I was that afternoon that whoever made Elephant with White Tusks was our greatest living artist (and no, I haven’t seen everything by everybody—but neither had the Fanelli’s painters, and that didn’t stop them), I set about trying to find other works by the same maker, and here knowing her name was very useful in hunting up a few images and a catalogue; but the one at the MOMA remains the only sculpture that I have seen in person.
But at the risk of saying something, not so much about that sculpture as about why you should be interested in it: its chief expressive qualities are compassion and fragility; not compassion for fragility, for the fragility in question includes the compassionator no less than it does the piteous animal embodied in its burnt clay, and, indeed, through that, includes us all, human and animal—since all of us are, like clay, a little earth and a little water, fused for a little while by the fire of vital heat.
I have a feeling that this, or something not far from this, is the physiognomic truth of the works that are going about in the world under the name of Daisy Youngblood.
1 And ditto for such curatorial concerns as “The Roots of Fauvism,” “Pioneers of Abstraction” and so on—we would have no interest whatsoever in the inchoate but for the perfections alleged to have developed from it. Matthew Arnold got it right when he warned that the “historical estimate of art” would divert attention to origins and away from the consummations that alone would give them such interest as they might possess. (For a lark, try searching "pioneers" in the MOMA database.)
About the Author:
Arnold Klein’s work appears regularly in The Revenant Quarterly.