Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician. This has to be acknowledged in order to avoid asking of it more logic than it can give, thereby condemning oneself either to wring incoherence out of it or to thrust a forced coherence upon it. (Bourdieu 1990:80) The impetus for this book emerged in the heat of practice. It was in the experience of painting two works Reading Fiction (1995) (Illus. 1) and Reading Theory (1995) (Illus. 2) that I came to question the representationalist logic that underpins contemporary understandings of the work of art. Reading Fiction and Reading Theory were painted within weeks of each other at a.
