Let us now look at the entire process in action. Imagine Paul C zanne in the field with his easel, painting again and again the elusive shapes of Mont Sainte Victoire. Nature remained impregnable though and, for the longest time, the face-to-face encounter continued. But eventually C zanne managed to understand something of it and curious forms began to appear on his canvas. What emerged in the end was not a mimetic reproduction of the rugged landscape but a questioning of the thing itself. What is that mountain after all? What attracts me to it? Why am I unable to paint it? Why is it that it continually escapes every one of my efforts? C zanne's paintings then function as reminders that the thing in itself cannot ever really be captured, that there always remains something in reserve despite one's best efforts. One measure of this artist's worth in fact can be located in his acknowledgment that the world, after all, is not for us to seize. But that alone would not bring us very far. So we must go back to the idea that Henri Bergson's words convey so well: "the art of the painter gets modified under the very influence of the works he produces." 34 "Work" here also connotes the labor of creation, not just the finished painting. In other words, the greater the resistance of the world, the more extensive the artist's mutation. Indeed if Werner Heisenberg is correct when saying that a physicist always alters the object of his/her experimentation, the reverse argument must be true as well: the person doing the experimenting cannot escape being affected by it. To come to terms with the world then is a strenuous operation and the artist is reshaped as a result. He/she ends up a different person.
Once the work is complete though, the art separates itself from the environment and the period of time that gave it birth. Indeed when we look at a C zanne exhibit today, neither Mont Sainte Victoire nor the painter stands beside it. Yet, as long as the meaning of the great changes in painting at the end of the last century still resonates within us, the work itself will somehow manage to recall something of the artist's original struggle.35 It is as if the painting itself the new forms on the canvas is able to make manifest something of that tension. These forms (poetry/language) call up a world that is not unlike other sights familiar to us, yet the picture itself remains disturbing, for what we see eventually trips us up: it makes us realize our tenuous hold on things.
To draw out this aspect of the work of art (its other "work") and its impact on those who witness it, it may be best to shift to Heidegger's own
