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.Before the rise of the avant-garde style, some artists wrote about art.Painterssuch as Leonardo, Reynolds and Constable, and authors such as Horace, Tasso,Sydney, Pope, Shelley and Henry James all produced important writings on theirart.Generally, however, they wrote about artistic technique.Their writings are, ineffect, manuals on how to produce artworks.As a rule, the works of these artistsare independent of their writings.Audiences can be ignorant of the writings ofthese artists and still understand their works.Even if I have never read a word of,say, Shelley s Defence of Poetry, I can read, appreciate, enjoy and learn from hispoetry.Avant-garde artworks, in contrast, cannot be understood and do notrepresent except in conjunction with what is said about them.Without an associated discourse audiences would not even be able to recognisethat many avant-garde works are works of art.This is particularly true of certainimportant instances of performance art.Consider, for example, the influentialearly works of Chris Burden.One early work consisted of him shooting at anairliner as it took off.(He missed.) In another performance he had himself shot(not mortally).Oldenburg s Placid City Monument is also worth considering inthis context.In this work, grave diggers were hired to dig and then fill in a holebehind the Metropolitan Museum in New York.Someone who saw theseperformances might not know what to make of them.Nothing about their contexts(they are not found in galleries or theatres) indicates that they are artworks.Someof Burden s works might be mistaken for acts of terrorism.Fortunately, a greatdeal has been said and written about these works, and audiences can know thatthey are being asked to consider works of art.Here I am most concerned with artworks whose capacity to represent dependson an associated discourse.Discourses on a variety of subjects are conjoined withdiscourse-dependent artworks.Often, however, the subject of these discourses is146 AVANT-GARDE ART AND KNOWLEDGEthe nature of art.Most famously, this sort of discourse is associated with two ofthe most important of all avant-garde works: Duchamp s Fountain and Warhol sBrillo Boxes.A great many other instances of such works could be given.Discourses about art are associated, for example, with Bruce Nauman s videos,Black Balls (which portrays the artist applying black make-up to his testicles) andthe self-explanatory Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter ofa Square.By themselves, these artworks would not be about the nature of art.Still, in conjunction with a discourse, discourse-dependent artworks succeed inbeing about (or representing) matters such as the definition of art.We need to askhow a discourse transforms these objects into representations.We also need to askwhether such works are semantic or illustrative representations.We will then bein a better position to evaluate the cognitive values of avant-garde artworks ofthis sort.Discourse-dependent artworks are typically not illustrative representations.Frequently, the matters they are about do not admit of illustrative representation.For example, Fountain represents something about the nature of art.It isobviously not an illustration of something general about the nature of art.Generalfacts about the nature of art can only be given a semantic representation.Werequire, that is, a theory about the nature of art.In any case, it is clear that workssuch as Fountain do not represent because experience of the sculpture hassomething in common with experience of what it represents.That is, Fountain isnot an illustration.It (and other discourse-dependent artworks) are semanticrepresentations.The suggestion that an artwork can be used to make a statement may seem tobe an odd suggestion from me.After all, in the section Visual art and semanticrepresentation in Chapter 2 (pp.38 44) I noted that only in rather specialcircumstances can pictures be used to make statements and I reject thepropositional theory of art.I might be expected to have a similar view aboutsculptures and other works of art.In fact, however, the circumstances are quitespecial.When a discourse is associated with an avant-garde artwork, it can beused to make a statement.A discourse can transform an artwork into a statementin one of two ways.The first of these ways I call semantic enfranchisement
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