THE PREGNANT CRITIC.

Behind the brief passage on Ellsworth Kelly in our collaborative work Arts of Impoverishment, there had been a nearly epiphanic experience of what critical activity has meant for us. We had, during one of our museum visits while in the process of thinking about the book, confronted Kelly's work with an intense blankness, not unlike the characteristic Proustian posture of an anxiously strained attention to the world--in particular, to those objects in nature and in art whose hidden, precious depths, once revealed to Proust's Marcel, would, he believes, deliver "the secret of truth and beauty." In Proust, this extreme receptiveness is somewhat deceptive. Its passivity both exacerbates the distinction between subject and object and positions the subject for a more or less secretly wished-for relation of mastery to the object. The subject's illusion of contributing nothing to the encounter promotes the further illusion of his being able to "know" the world, to penetrate and to appropriate otherness. It could be said that A la Recherche du temps perdu is a monumental tribute to such projects of mastery--although there are moments when the Proustian narrator discovers that penetration, so to speak, can never be a one way street.

Poised in front of the innumerable buttercups growing along the Guermantes Way, the young Marcel finds that, unable literally to devour the flowers in order "to consummate with my palate the plea sure which the sight of them never failed to give me," his pleasure "accumulates" on the flowers' golden surfaces "until it became potent enough to produce an effect of absolute, purposeless beauty." It is, then, the visibility of the boy's pleasure on the flowers that caused the pleasure that transforms the buttercups into something like an object of art. Beauty turns out to be not a hidden attribute in the object but, instead, a mode of relationality, a manifestation of the subject's implication in the world. The flowers "shine" with their own effect on Marcel's enraptured body.