Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context—as art—they provide no information what-so-ever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art. Thus, that it is art is true a priori.

The construction of the work of art purely around the notion of intention points directly inward: to the privacy of mental space. “This is a portrait of Iris Clert,” Rauschenberg telegraphed, “if I say it is.” And this idea of the art act as circumscribed and defined by intention generally claims its paternity in a particular reading of Duchamp—of The Fountain for example, the urinal he placed on a pedestal and signed “R. Mutt/1917.” This reading, addressing itself to the question of intention, goes roughly like this.

The finished work of art is the result of a process of forming, or making, or creating. It is in a sense the proof that such a process has gone on, just as the footprint in soft ground is proof that someone has passed by. The work of art is thus the index of an act of creation which has at its roots the intention to make the work. Intention here is understood as some kind of prior mental event which we cannot but for which the work now serves as testimony that it occurred. It is a common enough reading of the Readymades that they represent of hypostatize pure intention: that since the objects in question were not fabricated by the artist but merely chosen by him, the arthood of the object is seen as residing solely in its capacity to register that decision, to render it up as it were into the physical world. Through this reading, the Fountain operates as an expression of Duchamp’s intention to make a work.

It seems very logical to say “Art is an expression of something,” and if asked, “An expression of what?” to answer, “An expression of the artist, of what he had in mind––or an expression of the way he saw something.” In the case of Abstract Expressionism this answer seemed particularly compelling; and it largely constituted the initial interpretations of Pollock’s painting as well as de Kooning’s, although it was subsequently withdrawn from formulations about Pollock’s art. The early views of their work proceeded from the very logic of ‘expression,’ seeing every mark on their canvases as asking to be read in the context of a private self from which the intention to make that mark has been directed. In that sense, the public surface of the work seemed to demand that one sees it as a map from which could be read the privately held crosscurrents of personality—of the artist’s inviolable Self.

And this is where that sense of traditionalism which I imputed to certain forms of Conceptual art begins to appear. For a connection might begin to be made at this point between the way in which intention/expression functions as a model in time for the same kind of things for which illusionism in painting serves as a spatial model.

We can think of various kinds of illusionistic spaces: the orthogonal grid of classical perspective; the more nebulous continuum of atmospheric landscape; the undesignated, infinite depth of geometric abstraction. And in each of these pictures of the world, space itself operates as a precondition for the visibility of the pictorial events—the figures, the depicted objects—which appear within it. We consider that the ground (or background) in a painting exists somehow before the figures, and even after the figures are placed on the ground, we understand that the ground “continues” behind them, serving as their support. In illusionistic painting, ‘space’ functions as a category which exists prior to the knowledge of things within it. It is in that sense a model of a consciousness which is the ground against which objects are constituted. On its most abstract level, traditional picture-making is an argument about the nature of appearance—suggesting that its very possibility depends on a consciousness that is the ground for all relatedness, for all differentiation, for the constitution of perceptual wholes—and that that consciousness operates within the priorness of a mental space. The ground of Western illusionism is an entrenched Cartesianism.

Thus, just as intention can be understood as a necessarily private, internal mental event, which externalizes itself through the selection of objects, the objects which appear within pictorial space can be seen as issuing from an internalized, prearranged set of coordinates. As one moves within the history of painting to postwar American art—that is, to Abstract Expressionism—these two aspects of priorness fuse and become more nakedly the subject of the pictures themselves.