Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method

183 Pages·2010·22.499 MB·English

by  Dana Arnold (ed.)

ART HISTORY
Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method Edited by Dana Arnold
© 2010 Association of Art Historians. ISBN: 978-1-444-33359-6
Art History Special Issue Book Series
Inthisdistinctiveseries,developedfromtheannualspecialissueofArtHistory,leading
scholarsareinvitedtopublishnewresearchonkeyissuesandtoreflectoncontemporary
concernsinthediscipline.Eachcollectionofessaystakesaparticularthemeandthescopeis
wide:frompaintingandsculpturetophotographyandvideo,urbanhistoryandarchitecture,
institutions,collecting,andhistoriography.
Titlesintheseriesinclude:
ArtandArchitectureinNaples,1266–1713:NewApproaches
EditedbyCordeliaWarrandJanisElliott
AboutMiekeBal
EditedbyDeborahCherry
SpectacleandDisplay
EditedbyDeborahCherryandFintanCullen
Location
EditedbyDeborahCherryandFintanCullen
AboutStephenBann
EditedbyDeborahCherry
BetweenLuxuryandtheEveryday:DecorativeArtsinEighteenth-CenturyFrance
EditedbyKatieScottandDeborahCherry
Art:History:Visual:Culture
EditedbyDeborahCherry
DifferenceandExcessinContemporaryArt:TheVisibilityofWomen’sPractice
EditedbyGillPerry
TracingArchitecture:TheAestheticsofAntiquarianism
EditedbyDanaArnoldandStephenBending
OtherObjectsofDesire:CollectorsandCollectingQueerly
EditedbyMichaelCamilleandAdrianRifkin
FingeringIngres
EditedbySusanSiegfriedandAdrianRifkin
TheMetropolisanditsImage:ConstructingIdentitiesforLondon,c.1750–1950
EditedbyDanaArnold
AboutMichaelBaxandall
EditedbyAdrianRifkin
Image:Music:Text
EditedbyMarciaPointon,SimonMillerandPaulBinski
ART HISTORY
CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON METHOD
EDITED BY
DANA ARNOLD
Thiseditionfirstpublished2010
OriginallypublishedasVolume32,Issue4ofArtHistory
r2010AssociationofArtHistorians
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CONTENTS
Notes on contributors vi
1 Art history: Contemporary perspectives on method 1
Dana Arnold
2 Sexing the canvas 8
Nicholas Chare
3 Phenomenology and interpretation beyond the flesh 34
Amanda Boetzkes
4 Surveying contemporary art: Post-war, postmodern, 56
and then what?
Dan Karlholm
5 Michel Foucault and the point of painting 78
Catherine M. Soussloff
6 Karl Mannheim and Alois Riegl: From art history to the 99
sociology of culture
Jeremy Tanner
7 Art fiction 129
H. Perry Chapman
8 Dancing years, or writing as a wayout 150
Adrian Rifkin
Index 165
v
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Dana Arnold is Professor of Architectural History at the University of South-
ampton UK. She was editor of Art History 1997–2002 and now edits the book
seriesNewInterventionsinArtHistory;CompanionstoArtHistoryandAnthologiesinArt
History, all published by Wiley-Blackwell. She is the author of the bestselling Art
History: AVery Short Introduction (2004) together with Rural Urbanism: London Land-
scapes in the Early Nineteenth Century (2006); Reading Architectural History (2002); Re-
presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London 1800–
1840(2000).Herrecenteditedandco-editedvolumesinclude:BiographiesandSpace
(2007);RethinkingArchitecturalHistoriography(2006);ArchitectureasExperience(2004);
Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness (2004); Art and Thought (2003). She
hasheldresearchfellowshipsatYaleUniversity;theUniversityofCambridgeand
the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles and numerous visiting Professorships.
Amanda Boetzkes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Design at
the University of Alberta, Canada. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellow-
ship in the Departmentof Historyof Art and Architecture at Harvard University.
Her upcoming book The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010)
discussestheaestheticsandethicsofecologyasthesearecarriedoutinartfrom
the late 1960s to the present. She has published in the journal Reconstruction:
Studies in Contemporary Culture and RACAR (Revue d’art canadien/Canadian Art
Review). Her current research focuses on the topic of waste, consumption and
contemporary art.
H. Perry Chapman, Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware, was
editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin from 2000 to 2004. She is the author of
Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity and co-author of
the exhibition catalogue Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, as well as articles on
Dutch painting, art theory and artistic identity. She is co-editor (with Joanna
Woodall) of The Artist in the Early Modern Netherlands (forthcoming). Her work has
been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, Center for Advanced Study in
the Visual Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities.
Nicholas Chare is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Departmentof
HistoryofArtandArchitecture,UniversityofReading.Heisaformereditorofthe
journal Parallax. His recent publications include articles in Angelaki, Convergence,
Cultural Critique, Southern Review: Communication, Politics and Culture, and The Year’s
Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.
vi
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Dan Karlholm is Professor of Art History at So¨derto¨rn University, Stockholm,
Sweden. He is the author of Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History in
Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond (Bern, 2004). His current research project
investigates the establishment and gradual dissolution of Internet art as a
subversive tactic and aspectof contemporary art in general since the mid-1990s.
Thepresentchapterispartofafutureprojectonthegenealogyofcontemporary
art.
AdrianRifkinisaprofessorofArtWritingatGoldsmithsCollege,London,andis
author of Ingres Then, and Now (Routledge, 2000) as well as a former editor of Art
History. His article ‘Apart from sex’, on the seeing of sex in Andres Serrano, gay
internetphotographyandVictorBurgin’searlyconceptualwork,appearedinthe
JournalofVisualCulturein2009,andhehasbeenwritinganumberofshortpieces
onartistsincludingVivienneKoorland,fortheFreudMuseum,andSusanPuiSan
Lok for Film and Video Umbrella.
Catherine M. Soussloff is Professor and Head of the Department of Art History,
VisualArts,andTheoryattheUniversityofBritishColumbia,Vancouver,Canada.
Her books include: The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern (Duke,
2006);TheAbsoluteArtist:TheHistoriographyofaConcept(Minnesota,1997);Editingthe
Image: Strategies in the Production and Reception of the Visual (with Mark Cheetham
and Elizabeth Legge, Toronto, 2008) and Jewish Identity in Modern Art History
(California, 1999). She is the author of essays and articles that address the
historiography of art history and visual culture, performance studies, and early
modern European art and theory.
Jeremy Tanner is Reader in Classical and Comparative Art at the Institute of
Archaeology, University College London. His publications include: The Sociology of
Art:AReader(Routledge,2003);TheInventionofArtHistoryinAncientGreece:Religion,
Society and Artistic Rationalisation (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Art’s
Agency and Art History, co-edited with Robin Osborne (Blackwell, 2007).
vii
INTRODUCTION
1Unknownphotographer,MariaBueno,c.1962.
Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method Edited by Dana Arnold
© 2010 Association of Art Historians. ISBN: 978-1-444-33359-6
1
ART HISTORY: CONTEMPORARY
PERSPECTIVES ON METHOD
D A N A A R N O L D
Thehistoriographyofarthistoryhasbeenapotentthemeinthediscoursesofthe
disciplineofthelastthirtyyears.Andtheapproachesandmethodsinthestudyof
the visual are probably more varied, and more vigorously debated, than in any
otherareaofhistoricalenquiry.Thisissomuchsothattheinterestinthepractice
and history of the history of art history has at times appeared to be equal to
object-basedstudyanditisarguablethatthisnowformspartofthearchiveofthe
discipline.Thereisofcoursenodoubtthatsincetheinceptionofarthistoryasa
field of academic study, works of art have been ‘read’ in avariety of ways. These
differentmodesofdescriptionandinterpretationinscribemeaningintoartand
it is here that art and its history are perhaps most intricately linked.
Theinterestinhistoriographyandmethodismanifestinabroadspectrumof
theliteratureofarthistoryfromthegeneralintroductionorsurveytothehighly
focusedacademicmonograph.Atpointsarthistoryandthehistoryofarthistory
become so closely intertwined as to be almost indistinguishable. This is evident
forinstanceinsurveysofarthistorythatareatoncegeneralintroductionswhich
aim to explain what art is and how it has been written about.1 These studies
present overviews of the different ways art histories have been written, covering
such large topics as Hegelianism, Marxism and post-colonialism as well as the
influence of the work of individual historians. But a common theme in these
analysesandexplanationsofartanditshistoryistheeffectthatachosenmethod
of enquiry has on the objects themselves and on the subjects of art history. In
otherwordsthewaysinwhichthemethodsuseddefinetheartwork.Thestudyof
the historiography of art history has also occasioned several anthologies of key
writings taken from a broad historical sweep.2 Here the authentic voices of art
historywhetheritbeGiorgioVasari’sbiographicalnarratives,JacobBurckhardt’s
historical observations, or Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s reflections on the
cultural context of art speak for themselves, albeit annotated and truncated by
thedefthandofthevolumeeditor.Needlesstosay,arthistorianshavealsoadded
to this bodyof literature in the form of both collections of newlycommissioned
setsofessaysandmonographs.3 AtleastfromVasari,ifnotbefore,theconceptof
the artist as genius continuesto be a mainstayof art historical enquiry. And the
debates around authorship, authenticity and how biographies determine our
understandingofthemythoftheartistremainlive.Anequallyimportanttheme
is the organization of symbolic form and the processes through which the visual
1
ART HISTORY: CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON METHOD
worldhasbeen,andcontinuestobe,systematizedandhomogenizedintoaunified
field of enquiry – art history – and the ways in which art can in fact resist these
pressures. This line of enquiry follows the development of art history as an
academic discipline in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuriesintheworkofhistorianssuchasPanofsky,Warburg,RieglandBenjamin
through to the engagement with structuralist and post-structuralist thought.
Thechaptersinthisvolumeaimtorespondinarangeofwaystothesevarious
patterns in and approaches to the discipline of art history as they are manifest
acrossthescholarshipofallperiodsoverthelastthirtyyears.Therearepointsof
contactandcommonthemesacrossthechaptersastheyexaminetheimpactand
influenceofagivenapproachontheformulationofhistoriesofartalongsideits
intellectualconsequences.Acentralconcerninthevolumeishowtheseissuesin
turn raise questionsto dowithour preoccupation withauthorship,authenticity
and chronologically defined linear progression, all of which have informed the
canonofarthistorybutwhichmaybeonlyonewayof lookingat,analysingand
historicizing art. Of particular interest is what is lost or left out through these
methods of historical enquiry and the points of contact and convergence with
other methodologies. In addition, the porosity between art history and other
related disciplines is brought to the fore and in turn how the archive of the
discipline has changed over time. We now see the link between cognate fields
such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology and art history as a given, and a
significant number of recently published studies of these trans-disciplinary
trendsconfirmthis.4 Togetherthechapterscombinetopresentacross-sectionof
art history and offer timely new perspectives on method.
A central concern is the emergence of how other kinds of histories – social
histories of art, feminist art history, queer art history – differ from and interact
with the writing on art history at the moment when it emerged as a discipline
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specific attention is
paid to the bias towards a male interpretation of the subject, which it is
argued leaves its trace in feminist art history through the binary categories of
gender. Our bodily experience of artworks and the effect this has on art
historyisalsore-evaluated,andthistakesusbacktooneofthefundamentalart-
historical problems, the complex business of turning visual phenomena into
verbalhistory.Theresultofthisprocessistheestablishmentofcanonicalsubjects
for art history and the notion of linear progression as these are placed in
chronologicalorder toprovidesteppingstonesacrossthe temporalspread of the
discipline.Herethelimitsofchronologyandwithitourexpectationsofprogress
are reviewed.
The role of Germany as a locus for the beginnings of art history is also
revisited, and the effects and reception of the intellectual diaspora that spread
from there in the middle years of the twentieth century. The idea of the trans-
disciplinary nature of art history is again a common theme across the chapters
andthisextendsbeyondarthistory’srelationshiptophilosophyandsociologyto
investigatethewaysthenarrativesofartists’livesbecomesubjectsoffiction,both
literary and filmic, and finally how the intertwining of the biography of the
historian and his/her subjectobject produces discourse.
Intheopeningchapter,NickChareworkstodestabilizethewaysinwhichour
categories and taxonomies of art are tacitly based on heterosexual discourse.
2