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PARTISAN REVIEW
the power of a framework imposed through sheer force of will,
through sheer accumulation of fact.
It
[the Grand Canyon] can be seen only in parts from hour to
hour and from day to day and from week to week and from
month to month. A year scarcely suffices to see it all. It has in–
finite variety . .. .
- John Wesley Powell
The urge to exhaust knowledge of the given, to encompass as
fully as possible that which inarguably
is)
seems to have arisen in
response to the daunting immensities of the American landscape.
The very scale of experience on the new continent confounded Old
World conceptions of measure, proportion, and possibility. It took
three hundred years, as historian Henry Savage has noted, simply to
take stock of what the country contained - its flora, fauna, soils,
topography, geography - and this constituted not intimate know–
ledge but cursory acquaintance. As though in response to the very
enormity of this task, and in defiance of its difficulties , American
ambitions have always been somewhat outsized. In the 1800s the
painter and ornithologist James Audubon set out not simply to
depict a representative sampling of bird life but to render every
single species on the continent; he found four hundred eighty-nine.
In our day, Jennifer Bartlett's
In the Garden
series depicts over two
hundred views of that bit of French backyard, seen from a multitude
of vantage points and perspectives. In these works, and others, it is
as though tenacity of vision itself can lead to or constitute know–
ledge; as though such knowledge is to be earned through the very ex–
penditure of attention and effort. Gertrude Stein, referring to her
novel
The Making
oj
Americans)
remarked: "I began to be sure that if I
could only go on long enough and talk and hear and look and see
and feel enough and long enough I could finally describe really
describe every kind of human being that ever was or is or would be
living."
It
is an archetypal American admission. One need only per–
sist; at some point, should understanding remain out of reach, the
encyclopedic impulse will itself suffice, cloaked in the conviction and
authority that confound further questioning.
Experience in its vital form is experimental .
-John Dewey
