Human consciousness is paltry and parasitic, a voice so almost silent that you can hear it only in your own head. In a massive, uncontrollable universe, consciousness is a mosquito.

Ever since I started saying that sort of thing, people have been telling me that, on the contrary, consciousness is nature's most astounding creation. They've been offering me ennobling tributes to the protean creativity of imagination, the astounding power and endless fascination of emotion, the miracles of knowledge that derive from human perception. As the tribute gets applied in the aesthetic realm, we might call it the Barney view of art. There's nothing we can't do if we use our imaginations, boys and girls! Then the big purple dinosaur, himself a typical product of the human imagination, reaches into the Barney bag and pulls out animated stars and all the kids are firefighters.

When it's time to write the art history of the twentieth century, we will separate it into two strands. One is the extension and the end of nineteenth-century romanticism: the human consciousness exploring itself, singing its own Whitmaniac song, as in Picasso and Pollock. The other is a kind of play with the external world that moves outward rather than inward and attacks romanticism through irony: Marcel Duchamp's urinal, Piero Manzoni's "living sculptures," Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, Damien Hirst's pickled sharks.

As we came to the century's end, it was certainly the latter strand which had won the day, and for good reasons. The romantic project collapsed because, in its self-involvement, it ran out of material.

However, the best painting being made right falls outside this dichotomy entirely and seems to reach back beyond the romantics. I'm talking about a quietly beautiful, painstaking realism, the kind made by artists such as Utah's Chris Terry, D.C.'s Manon Cleary, and New York's Bill Richards. I'm going to try to show you that that sort of work is a key to understanding art now and in the future, but in order to do that, I need to defend my first sentence. So let's talk about imagination, emotion, memory and perception in relation to the world outside the human head.

As John Locke pointed out, echoing the Greeks, imagination simply re-orders the real. You can paint a melting clock, but only because you've seen clocks and things melting. And the expressions of imagination in art and media are doubly parasitic. When Chagall paints the visions of his imagination, he's not only painting upside-down ponies in a purple tornado, he's using paint and canvas, which are out here and not in there. And when he imagines his own exploration of his imagination, he imagines paint and canvas. Barney's paeans to the imagination have to be made with costumes, kids, cameras, broadcasting equipment and so on, and being a fireman is not something which arises *ex nihilo* in the skull either of Barney or your child. Furthermore, when it comes time for you to imagine, using the supposedly God-like powers of your mind, you yourself are probably in turn (God bless you) using work by people like Dali or Chagall or Barney.

One might say the same of the supposedly vast wellspring of human emotion. Emotion no doubt involves something in your head, but it has external causes and external expressions. It comes from and returns to the world. Pollock sucks down external-world vodka, emotes about external-world situations, spatters external-world paint, impresses external-world Clement Greenbergs and gets peddled by external-world art galleries. Try to write two pages about your emotional states without referring to external objects. Emotions in themselves are neither terribly elaborate nor terribly interesting: they're interesting in relation to situations

Or memory: it derives from experience, but it also *uses* the external world. I'm looking for a passage in a book. I don't remember the page number, but I remember that it was in the center of a right-hand page near the beginning. Then I leaf through the book, looking at the middle of the right-hand pages and I find the passage. Remembering in that case is not something that happened exclusively in my head; it happened in the situation that included my head and the physical book itself. And think here in particular of the use of pictures as elements of remembering, for example the role of snapshots in your memories of childhood.

There are two basic philosophical accounts of perception. The first, internalism, was popularized by Locke and Descartes and runs something like this. You aim your eyes at something and an image is formed in your mind. It's that image or "perception," rather than "the thing itself" that you see. So as it were you're locked in your own head viewing images as on a television. Such a view immediately raises the specter of external-world skepticism. How do you know that the images in your head "match up" to the real world? Perhaps nothing actually exists except the mind. Here's a problem with internalism: Let's say there *are* little images in your head. What is it that's seeing them? Maybe an eye in your head: a humunculus or miniature person. Then what's watching the little images in the humuncular head, and so on? Internalism finally explains nothing.

Externalism or direct realism removes the image and postulates an organism in direct contact with its environment. The brain is involved with perception, but not so as to re-create an image-world in your head which is what you're actually experiencing. Perception is a sheer physical interaction with the world in which the world literally enters into you. Seeing is more like being impaled on a huge spike than like watching television.

The images that internalism locates in your head were called "impressions" by the empiricists, and the art movement called "Impressionism" sought to paint such things. So the impressionists were still devoted to showing the external world, but they retreated to the external world as depicted in their heads. That there were no pictures in their heads vitiated the theory behind their paintings, though of course not the paintings themselves.

The Impressionists, then, took the first step in making a strange mythology: that art was located or "created" inside people's heads. Philosophers such as Collingwood even argued that, strictly speaking, the actual work of art was a mental object in the head of the artist. Soon we had expressionists who were exploring their emotions through distortion of the real and finally through abstraction. Soon we had magnificent knights of the imagination, aesthetic heroes like De Kooning and Kandinsky whose bulging heads whipped up worlds of human experience from scratch. Soon after that, we had Barney.

What I like about realist art is that it's a real exploration of real things, and *hence* a real engagement of human perception, imagination, and emotion. See? If you're exploring the imagination itself, you're not really engaging the imagination, because the imagination is only engaged by the external world. An exploration of the real world is exactly, logically equivalent to an investigation of human perception because you can't actually see what's not there.

No world, no imagination. To imagine, you need an external social situation and physical stuffs. In particular, art always comes from, uses, and returns to the real world, though of course something, some slight deflection or animation is contained in the skull of the artist. Realist art celebrates its own origin and return to the world. Solipsistic art, art dedicated to exploring human consciousness, has an impoverished topic, and one contradicted by its own source and destination. It also operates within a sort of delusory framework: it can't ultimately be or be about what it says it is. So if Pollock and Picasso are great artists, they are great in spite of their theories, or in spite of the theories that grew up around them.

Realist art is often condemned as slavish imitation and kitsch. It apparently lacks the imagination, the commentary on human perception, the intense expression that people wanted in art or even defined as art during the last century. And it also lacks the layers of self-involvement that feed postmodern irony. But to recapitulate, it is the external world itself which sets all this apparently huge machinery of the artistic head into motion and to which it returns. If you want to explore your imagination in art, find its material in the external world and provide external-world material over which we can in turn use our own imaginations. Engage us with the external world in an interesting way, because that's where our imagination comes from and is of some use, what our emotion is *about.* Paint people and the objects around people and then interesting shit will happen in our heads.

That's why the move toward a recognition of realist painting seems truly subversive to me, because if I want to explore the contents of my skull I want also to explore the external world. Those are *the same thing.* Realist art not only celebrates the world; it embodies an externalist theory of perception, imagination, and emotion. And to celebrate the world is always also to celebrate and engage those faculties.

Recently I was at an exhibition drawn from the permanent collection of the Brandywine Museum in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania. In its nineteenth-century grist mill, the Brandywine houses a definitive collection of American still-life painting from the early nineteenth century to the present. As I gazed at "Oranges" by George Cope, I could see both Cope's rigorous self-effacement before the real and the fully engaged imagination that went into the making of the painting. What we see is just fruit hanging from branches, gathered against a board. The appearance is simplicity itself, though the craft is admirable. But it also sent me into a flight of imagination. I was at the museum on a snowy day, and I felt warm looking at the oranges. I got hungrier, maybe some kind vitamin C craving. I thought about the oranges in the toe of my Christmas stocking when I was kid. And I could traverse Cope's own act of selecting, isolating, composing the materials of the painting. I was no less engaged by the facture than I would have been by a Pollock. But I was having a layered experience of meanings and memories in which I was using and transforming the oranges, the painting, the process of making the painting, and the experience of seeing the painting in self-reflection simultaneously.

That experience is richer than the experience of seeing a Mondrian; it engages your whole body in an incredibly complex but almost instantaneous appropriation of the painting into one's life. "Oranges" engages the eye and can be fully absorbed (unlike an impressionist treatment of the same subject with its attempt to capture the instantaneous glance) only by an active scanning of detail. It engages the parts of yourself that are in play in the experience of a picture crafted by human beings in a skilled process of making, but it also engages all of you that might go into an experience of oranges, with the exception of actually chowing down. That, I think, is the purpose of still-life: engagement of all the faculties of the head *through* an engagement with the world, which is the only way such a thing is possible. I had that sort of sense over and over as I looked at paintings in the Brandywine by artists such as William Harnett, John Peto, Greg Mort, and Walter Murch.

Harnett was the great master of late nineteenth century still-life. His shockingly precise rendering, apparently true to the last grace note on a sheet of music (a favorite subject), bespeaks an almost religious devotion to the quotidian. His picture in the Brandywine is "A Man's Table Reversed," and it raises the puzzle of realism in an exemplary way. First of all, if you wanted to look with rapt aesthetic attention at a beer mug, biscuits, and pipe, you could just go get some and set them on the table. But it's difficult to conceive anyone doing that. Things are sitting on your table already and you're using them rather than contemplating them. But I for one could stare at this painting for 20 minutes, and have.

Aristotle asked a version of the same question in the *Poetics* about tragedy. You don't want to see people stabbing each other or plucking out their eyes (I guess) so why are you paying your hard earned whatevers to go see *Oedipus*? The same question might be posed of the last Bruce Willis movie. The representation is pleasurable, but meteors hitting NYC flat suck. Now Aristotle's answer was that you were getting a "catharsis of pity and fear" out of tragedy and that you felt "cleansed" when you were done. But there's no catharsis of pity and fear when you look at "A Man's Table Reversed."

We are aware of our act of looking at Harnett in the museum situation; we are aware of Harnett's act of looking as he painted; we are speculating about the process by which Harnett passed his memories and his perception into an act of his hands, and the act of his hands into his memory and perception; we are gazing through layers at the object itself as it appears in Harnett, in the world, in ourselves. (The act of the hands is missing in some sense in mechanical reproduction, or anyway we conceive it to be missing; it's important that the Harnett is a dazzling display of hand skill and not the push of a shutter-button.) We are engaged in a social act of shared seeing with Harnett and the people around us in the museum. We are studying perception, memory, imagination, which is to say that we are studying the real world and ourselves as part of the real world.

That experience is what keeps us coming back to realist art again and again: in it, we look at ourselves from the outside and from within, we see ourselves and one another seeing. But we also look back at ourselves out of the world, learn to gaze back at people out of pictures and the things pictures represent. We mirror ourselves as if we were outside of ourselves, as if we were hanging on a wall, a self-portrait gazing back at its sitter. Of course, Miro and Soutine raise many of the same issues, but not as thoroughly or in such a complex way, which explains why almost the entire history of the arts is representational, and why, I think, its future is representational as well.

My argument at the beginning was that when we think back on twentieth-century art we will remember the acts of appropriation, the practice beginning with Duchamp of simply grabbing things and sticking them in the gallery.

That in a way is the apotheosis of realism: cut out the representation, the middle man, and go straight to the heart of the real and hence of human perception. It made us focus on things *as if they were* representations, and so reverberated into our experience: anything was a potential work of art. And really the ready-made has hardly begun: there is a lot of stuff that we haven't put in the museum yet, though Piero Manzoni once built a huge upside-down stone pedestal and declared that he had converted the whole world into a work of art. The ready-made adds a layer in one sense because it engages the layered response to representation in the perception of real things: the thing as it were represents itself.

But the ready-made also forecloses part of the experience of the representation, because though there is a process by which the object comes to be displayed, there is no act of crafting an interpretation of perception as a perceptible object. So we don't retrace the artist's hand though we enter into her vision. We don't pass ourselves through the process by which the artist deflected the object in imagination and memory. We learn just as much or more about things, but not as much about ourselves as things.

Because people *are* things: we're physical objects and maybe nothing more, which is the metaphysics behind my doctrine of the paltriness of consciousness. The ready-made simplifies our ontology: it collapses the distinction between representation and object of representation. But it leaves the widest ontological gulf intact: the gulf between persons and sheer objects. Where we go next is reconceiving ourselves as brute senseless objects in a brute senseless world of objects. The things we use as ready-mades and depict in realist art are, as it were, our relatives, they're the same kind of things that we are. What realism and the ready-made explore equally is our place in the world of things: but that is something we are always exploring insofar as we live, and insofar as we remember, perceive, imagine, emote. What we find in realist art that we don't find elsewhere is an exploration of that very exploration: a way of seeing our own seeing as emerging from the world and not from ourselves. Realist art is *humble before the real,* whereas it's hard to miss the fact that Pollock and Picasso were megalomaniacs who in a way thought it was their job to invent the world. It's obvious that by *that* standard they were miserable failures.

Realist art endures because it engages human consciousness and because it changes with a changing world. Chris Terry's simple and skilled still life is no less contemporary than Chris Ofili's dung-stung Madonna. Realism changes with a changing world and hence with the changes in ourselves which emerge from the changes in the world and eventuate in such changes. That is why the mission of realism is a permanent mission of art. The realist tradition has endured through and has been the foundation of the art of the last two centuries, whether it's Picasso or Duchamp, self-involvement or irony.

So as I was looking at Terry's "Dulcimer Case" in recent exhibition at Utah State, I was aware of the artist's humility; I was aware of the simplicity of pleasure and the pleasure of simplicity, but in a very complex process. I was in love with the painting and the world and I was affirming my own worldliness, my own life as a thing among things. No one, not even Barney, gets to invent the world. If we're lucky, we get to keep existing within it .