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This essay re-examines several examples of non-performance based artworks from the perspective and history of performance art. For instance, the photomontages I produced as an undergrad art student were based on repeated acts of stealing posters from their public sites on the street between my house and the college. Later, while working collaboratively with Mark Hutchinson in Manchester and London, we made photograms and paintings of scenes that we enacted on the street (striking a match, taking a flag for a walk). Years later, as a solo artist again, I produced a body of work in the form of slide presentations that consisted of photographs of me dressed in homemade costumes that cast me as a monster. In my work with the Freee art collective, we used slogans, our own bodies, costumes and props to give material reality to slogans that we treated as scripts. We wrote manifestos and staged events in which participants read. So, while the forms of my work are image based, the rationale is typically tied to the techniques and values of performance.

Wilfrid Sellars’ presented two parallel conceptions of language: functional role semantics and theory of picturing. The aim of my paper is to consider how these two views fit together and what roles they play in his overall philosophical project. First I show philosophical motivations for adopting these conceptions. Functional role semantics contributes to explanation of mental phenomena, it is consistent with Sellar’s critique of the given, it provides a nominalistic account of abstract terms. The picturing theory explains how language can be about the world. The question I also address in this paper is to what extent both of these conceptions are marked by what is the key problem for Sellars - the indispensability of both naturalistic and normative perspective for an adequate account of cognition, intentionality and language. I try to trace the limits of naturalistic explanation in both of his conceptions.