ART HISTORY

AESTHETICS
VISUAL STUDIES
 BOOK NO:

ART HISTORY
AESTHETICS
VISUAL STUDIES
A RT HISTORY
A ESTHETICS
VISUAL STUDIES
This publication is based on the proceedings of the Clark Conference
“Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies,” held 4-5 May 2001 at the
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
For information on programs and publications at the Clark,
visit www.clarkart.edu.

© 2002 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without
the written permission of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute,
225 South Street, Williamstown, MA 01267

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Printed by the Studley Press, Dalton, Massachusetts

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WO) 1) ty af (he Tae She oy al

Title page and divider page illustration: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Trees (detail),
1643. Etching and drypoint on paper. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Massachusetts

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Art history, aesthetics, visual studies / edited by Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey.
p. cm. — (Clark studies in the visual arts)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-300-09789-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Aesthetics—Congresses. 2. Art—History—Congresses. I. Holly, Michael Ann.
II. Moxey, Keith P. F, 1943— III. Series.

BHig .A73 2002

7o1.17—dc21
2002021787
Contents

Introduction Vii
Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey

Part One: In Time

Defining “Aesthetics” for Non-Western Studies:

The Case of Ancient Mesopotamia
Irene J. Winter

Romare Bearden: African American Modernism 29

at Mid-Century
Kobena Mercer

Chaos and Cosmos: Points of View in 47

Art History and Aesthetics
Karen Lang

National Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments 7\

in the Historiography of Art
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

Part Two: Out of Time

Darkness and the Demand for Time in Art 87

Philip Fisher

Censorship, Autonomy, and Artistic Form 105

Jonathan Gilmore

Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman [22

Michael Kelly

The Aesthetics of Difference le

Griselda Pollock
Recollections of Rembrandt’s Jeremiah 175
lvan Gaskell

Part Three: With Time

Ghostwriting: Working Out Visual Culture 189

Nicholas Mirzoeff

“Theory,” Discipline,
and Institution 203
Stephen Melville

Dialectics of Seeing 215

Hal Foster

Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture 231

W. J. T.Mitchell

Current Issues in Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies 25|

David Carrier

Mixing Metaphors and Talking about Art 260

Janet Wolff

Contributors 269
Introduction

Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey

Talking about visual matters has never been so complicated as it is today, nor has
it been fraught with so many competing voices. The Clark Conference of May
2001 reduced these perspectives to three: Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies. Each
of these three areas sometimes supplements, but often contradicts, some of the
most fundamental intellectual principles of the others. Of course, this isn’t neces-
sarily a bad thing. Out of the fracas comes not agreement, but insight. The conference
posed a number of questions: To what extent has the history of art been indebted
to aesthetic theory, from its foundations through its twentieth-century practice?
What are the dominant aesthetic foundations underlying art historical investiga-
tion? How have these assumptions been challenged by visual studies? Are questions
of quality, form, content, meaning, or spectatorship to be considered culturally
specific or universally resonant? Where do ideas about the aesthetic begin and end,
both in the academy and in the museum? Can we still define the parameters of
what should properly constitute the objects of the history of art? To what extent
can the history of art enrich its subject matter and justify its disciplinary protocols
if it resorts to the kind of cultural inquiry that animates visual studies? Has the
field of visual studies expanded its range to the point of incoherence? Such ques-
tions, of course, proliferate in the thoughtful essays collected here.
There was always the risk that this forum—in which these fields might
meet so as to confront, evaluate, and/or cooperate with one another—would
allow them to slide past each other, avoiding significant interaction. While one
specialized discourse can indeed become opaque to the next, one of the most grati-
fying rewards in re-reading the final papers is recognizing the extent to which
practitioners of these three fields took heed of each other’s views. Of course, this
is the best possible outcome to an intellectual event of this kind.
Choosing the etching of Rembrandt’s Three Trees from the Clark collec-
tion to emblematize our topical trio of “Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies” on
our publicity brochure led to a number of amusing speculations, not the least of
which was to call the proceedings the “Conference of the Three Trees.” We might
have chosen, for instance, Titian’s Three Ages ofMan, because an intellectual his-
torian could claim that the field of aesthetics preceded the formation of art history
viii Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey

as a discipline, which, in turn, was a father of the rebellious challenges of visual

studies. But chronology is often tedious. Given the fractious nature of much
recent discussion about the relations among the three generations, in which each
one views the other with caricatured suspicion, an apt choice for a group portrait
might have been Fuseli’s Three Witches. Yet it was spring in the Berkshires, so per-
haps a sunnier fantasy might have been the embodiment of harmonious beauty
intertwined in Botticelli’s Three Graces. But, peace and tranquility, while admirable
and coveted states of mind, do not often translate into exciting intellectual events.
A good fight for the maiden, such as that in Uccello’s Saint George, where only the
snarling green dragon is slain, might have offered a richer visual metaphor. It would
be inappropriate to identify the best player for that role: Aesthetics, Art History,
or Visual Studies—at least until our essayists (a bit less soberly than Daumier’s
Lawyers) adjudicate the struggle. Tree Philosophers (Giorgione’s in this case) could
have helped set us right, although we shouldn't presume who that is staring off into
space, in a world of his own.
Maybe trees are the safest allegories after all—at least if we don’t twist them
around. There's a claim that turning this print upside down reveals a portrait of
Rembrandt himself! Is there a moral to this story? Only if we concede that turn-
ing questions inside out and upside down and looking at them from unaccustomed
angles can yield surprises that transcend the banal. Or maybe we find that what-
ever we attempt to say about objects from either traditional or novel angles is
actually a self-portrait in disguise.
The organizers initially grouped the talks in three categories, “In Time,”
“Out of Time,” and “With Time,” rubrics glibly invoked to plot the relationship
of art history “in time,” aesthetics as being “out of time,” and visual studies as “with
time,” yet it was immediately apparent that these tidy appellations would not serve
us very well. Before we convened, we had imagined that we might be talking about
what was at stake in the debate of institutional power: in other words, who could
say what about which objects and with what authority. To some extent, disciplin-
ary protocols continued to buttress modes of argumentation. Yet the reference to
critical theory in most of our talks is symptomatic of changes that have been cours-
ing through the humanities for two or three decades. Scholars in different fields
can now turn to a common set of interpretive strategies and to the work of the
theorists who defined them.
The terms of the conference's organization, which identified the relation-
ship of art history, aesthetics, and visual studies, as temporal modes, are thus to be
 Introduction ix

regarded as porous rather than absolute. “In time” bleeds into “out of time” as art
history recognizes its debt to philosophy. “Out of time” bleeds into “in time” as
universalism feels the pressures of contextualization, and both bleed into “with
time” as they negotiate their interaction with the emergent field of visual studies.
To be fair, some of our participants were originally slotted into the “wrong”
category, but as it turned out, it was this kind of blurring of both person and iden-
tification that led to the most suggestive possibilities. Consequently, we have felt
the freedom to reshuffle the order of papers discussed in this introduction. Most
speakers, in any case, would refuse to be identified exclusively as aestheticians, art
historians, or practitioners of cultural studies. Our scholars were selected on the
basis of their intellectual breadth and flexibility of mind, and these qualities
certainly contributed to the caliber of discussion.

Any mention of threesomes reminds some of us of the semiotic work of Charles

Saunders Peirce—the greatest trinitarian of them all. The relevance of Peirce’s
concept of the sign to these proceedings lies in its allegorical status as a protean
engine of meaning. According to Peirce, the linguistic sign is incapable of stable
definition. Language never grasps reality, never fixes meaning, rather it forever
attempts to interpret what it cannot determine or define. The linguistic sign is
something that is always transformed in the process of transmission or communi-
cation, its value varying according to the context in which it is articulated. We
might use this notion of the sign as an allegory of the way the disciplines of
aesthetics, art history, and visual studies remain resistant to definition. The signifi-
cance attached to each of these enterprises not only depends on the ways each
discipline is conceptualized by those who practice it, but also by the interactions
of the three through time. It is unclear today whether aesthetics can remain reso-
lutely philosophical and universalist in the face of the challenges of historical
specificity, unclear whether art history can continue to act as if its interests are
purely empirical and positivistic so that its studies owe no real debt or allegiance
to broader philosophical systems, unclear whether visual studies can dare to ignore
the transcendent nature of the claims made for the concept of “art” in its engage-
ment with the heterogeneous world of images. Is it really the case, as W. J. T.
Mitchell suggested, that aesthetics is an eighteenth-century discipline, art history
a nineteenth-century one, and visual studies that of the twenty-first, or is it not
x Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey

possible that each field can belong to very different periods simultaneously? Instead
of conceiving of disciplinary time in terms of a teleological view of history, it might
be rewarding to conceive of it as incorporating the qualities of a variety of histori-
cal moments.
This issue was addressed by Irene Winter, for example, who discusses
whether or not the classical aesthetic concepts proposed by Kant can be usefully
applied to the understanding of the visual culture of faraway times and places, in
her case, ancient Mesopotamia. Acknowledging that the world she studies had no
concept of aesthetics or art, she nevertheless argues that “sensory response and
affective experience,” the fundamental categories of aesthetics, are still relevant to
understanding the visual culture of this part of the world. Yearning to find a way
of distinguishing “core aspects of aesthetic experience from the historically con-
tingent,” she sees no contradiction in insisting on a fundamental basis for aesthetic
experience while recognizing the enormous cultural and historical distance that
separates ancient Mesopotamia from Western Europe. Winter advocates an inclu-
siveness, a broadening of the standards of taste and an expansion of the idea of art
theory so as to incorporate material that the concepts of aesthetics and art were
never intended to valorize. The power of this argument is widely acknowledged in
the collection and organization of visual culture in the museum. While this process
intends to empower alterity, that empowerment is always contained within the
allegedly universal system that called it into being.
Griselda Pollock makes a different attempt to bridge the gap between the
universalist claims of philosophical aesthetics and the particular claims of specific
identities—in this case the feminist assertion of gendered difference. Pollock turns
to the work of the feminist psychoanalyst Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger to argue
that the values of traditional aesthetics need no longer be associated with
masculinist bias. She asserts that the notion of “sensory response and affective ex-
perience” on which it is founded is the property of all human beings. “Aesthetics,”
she writes, might be the “co-responsibility of subjects who share a fundamental,
pre-linguistic sense of the humanity of the other as a result of being born.” The
accent here is on a shared masculine and feminine subjectivity, not on one that is
defined in terms of gendered difference. Transubjectivity becomes the key by which
the traditional claims of aesthetics can be imbued with new life and fresh relevance.
Rather than condemn the practice of aesthetics as Eurocentric and masculinist,
Pollock seeks a way to make its notion of human subjectivity more inclusive: “In
the matrixial supplementation of our theories of the subject, subjectivity functions
 Introduction xi

as an encounter and not only as in phallic logic, as an effect of the cut, of separa-
tion.” A more fluid relationship among historical, theoretical, and cultural dimensions
yields “new possibilities for a combinatory methodology.” And it is in the venera-
ble domain of aesthetics where the site for transformation lies.
In Michael Kelly’s essay, the encounter between aesthetics and art history
is explicitly foregrounded. In focusing on a particular artist, he exposes the limi-
tations of philosophy to the advantages of art history, although he does remind us
that “art historians have again become more involved in some of the theoretical
tasks formerly performed primarily by the philosophy of art.” Kelly criticizes Arthur
Danto, who in his account of the art of Cindy Sherman, adopts an essentialist
definition of art, in which “philosophical interests are given priority over the his-
torical conditions of art.” Kelly compares how Rosalind Kraus, on the other hand,
in arguing as a deconstructionist for the instability of meaning in Sherman's works,
indicates how Sherman's self-portraits are, in the terms of the linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure, signifiers without signifieds. Only those who project their own need
for meaning onto her work insist on attaching to it particular significance. Pitting
the historical specificity of historical circumstance against philosophical univer-
salism, both Krauss and Kelly work to expose the ideological dimension of all forms
of historical interpretation.
Jonathan Gilmore offers a reflection on the successful history of the con-
cept of form within philosophical aesthetics by suggesting that this revered paradigm
has offered philosophers a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the idea of form
offered art theorists a means by which they could deride political censors for
believing that the content of works of art was more important than their form,
while on the other the invocation of form could be used to defend high art from
the encroachments of popular culture by fetishizing its importance for the
educated classes. On this view, the universal value of one of the most important
categories in aesthetics is not to be justified philosophically, but according to the
political fortunes of historical circumstance. “Form was exploited to save art from
its political content in the cases of censorship, and to save art from the assimila-
tion via that content into mass-produced and popular representations as well.”
Philip Fisher deliberately avoids the confrontation of the disciplines in
order to sanction an aspect of our appreciation of canonical works of art. He pleads,
most eloquently, for a recognition of the power of silence and the value of shadow
in our enjoyment of works of art. Like Keats, he yearns for a “museum with one
work inside” that would be more than capable of sustaining prolonged “bafllement
xii Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey

and fascination.” He dismisses Impressionism as a movement that sought to make

the work immediately accessible to the observer, and as alternatives, he shows us
Poussin and Jasper Johns, who instead sought to complicate our relationship to
the canvas and to protect it from accessibility by means of shadow. Shadow
becomes a metaphor for time—the time it takes for a spectator to come to terms
with what is before him or her. In terms of Gilmore’s scheme, we could understand
Fisher’s plea for shadow as a formalist defense against popular culture.
Impressionism—so sunny, open, and accessible—is perhaps to be removed from
the canon because it fails to include mystery as part of its appeal. But there is much
more poetic power to Fisher’s parable than that. Keats’s “problem is not how to
answer the questions his historical ignorance places before him in the first few sec-
onds, but how to get different questions rising within the experience itself to which
he has, not answers, but satisfaction—what he calls in the end—all you know and
all you need to know.”
For Hal Foster, on the other hand, the interest of the issues raised by the
conference lies in the way in which notions of universality and contingency de-
termine what you need to know about art. The question of the identification and
definition of art has become especially relevant in the context of the rise of visual
studies and its challenge to some of the history of art’s cherished assumptions.
“Today the canon is less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through.” Plainly
unhappy at the prospect that the discourse of art should become just one more of
the varied forms of visual production analyzed by visual studies, Foster sketches a
genealogy of paired thinkers, such as Walter Benjamin and Erwin Panofsky or
Michel Foucault and André Malraux, whose past writing makes us think anew
about the concept of art today. It is Benjamin, an author who both lamented the
end of art in an age of mechanical reproduction and assigned it a redemptive force
in the life of culture, with whom Foster most closely identifies. He argues for a
consideration not of what is art but rather when is art. Sensitive to the failure of
all definitions, yet passionately committed to art’s cultural significance, Foster’s
position is one of “strategic essentialism.” There are moments, he believes, when
it is necessary to insist that art rises above objecthood, but those occasions never
ultimately settle the issue of how those moments might be characterized.
Perhaps the most direct challenge to the assumptions of traditional aes-
thetics is Kobena Mercer's essay on Romare Bearden. “Bringing a cultural studies
approach to art historical and aesthetic concerns,” Mercer argues for what he calls
a “diaspora aesthetics,” for aesthetic value that has nothing to do with the “disin-
 Introduction xiii

terest” of the idealist tradition and everything to do with the politics of a particu-
lar raced identity. How can race be reconciled with the dominant and apparently
universal values of modernism? Far from being incompatible or contradictory,
Mercer suggests that Bearden found a way of braiding the two together in a way
that enabled them to resonate with one another. Bearden’s collages combine cub-
ist techniques with photographic materials in such a way that artistic modernism
is inflected with race, and vice versa. His “‘both/and’ logic of hybrid inventiveness”
in his montages reveals “a mode of double voicing which would loosen and undo
the double binds of race and representation that had created an impasse in the
‘Negro artist’s dilemma.”
Tom Kaufmann’s paper offers us another perspective on the claims of
traditional aesthetics. Far from being the product of dispassionate reason, ideal-
ist philosophy was profoundly steeped in the cultural values of the historical
moment in which it was conceived: “the discipline was formed and grew during
an age of nationalism.” Kaufmann shows that the founding fathers of art
history—such as Alois Riegl and the members of the Vienna School—shared the
racist assumptions that had been a feature of Enlightenment philosophy. They
may have looked at a wider spectrum of the world’s art, but they argued that the
art of different peoples was different because of their races. “Even where aesthetic
prejudice of one sort may seem to be absent, thinking in terms of stereotypes, and
thus having recourse to other sorts of prejudice, not just of a neutral hermeneu-
tic kind, may determine the share of arguments about history and aesthetics.”
The art of the world was varied, but for the Viennese scholars that variety could
be judged and ordered according to criteria that quite unself-consciously mani-
fested a Eurocentric, and even Germanic, bias.
Karen Lang’s talk dramatizes the tension between the abstraction of philo-
sophical aesthetics and the texture of the historical moment in the writing of Erwin
Panofsky. Lang suggests that Panofsky’s concern with aesthetics characterized his
early theoretical writings more profoundly than his later work, which tended to be
of a more historical nature. She puts her underlying question, however, to the dis-
cipline as a whole. “How does an ultimately unknowable aesthetic object become
an object of disciplinary knowledge?” Panofsky seems to have sacrificed aesthetics
with its concern for “sensory experience and affective experience” for a safer dis-
tance between subject and object, an “Archimedean point” from which the historian
could feel secure that his or her work constituted a contribution to something fixed
and permanent called “knowledge.” According to Lang, the device Panofsky found
xiv Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey

to subordinate aesthetics to history was the concept of style. The idea of style, she
argues, encompasses the quality of response but relativizes it by means of the idea
of history.
It is in the concept of memory that Ivan Gaskell finds a way of blurring
the boundary between aesthetic and non-aesthetic valuation of works of art. Many
members of his chosen sample reported that in their memories of their first
encounters with Rembrandt’ Jeremiah in the Rijksmuseum, aesthetic response was
inextricably meshed with circumstantial information. There was enough of the
texture of everyday life in those recollections to suggest that aesthetic considera-
tions could not be distinguished as a separate response. “In all cases memory
coalescing as knowledge affected successive encounters with both reproductions
and the original in an ever-developing progressive relationship between object and
viewer.” While his paper suggests that aesthetic value is a necessary aspect of our
experience of a painting—as with this Rembrandt—we might ask, to what extent
is this attributable to naive response and to what extent is it because we recognize
the work as belonging to the canon of great art? Gaskell asserts that the location
of his argument in personal memories refuses to “give credence to the false choice
between aesthetic evaluation and its renunciation in visual studies.”
It was W. J. T. Mitchell who most directly addressed the issues raised by
the study of visual culture for the more established disciplines of aesthetics and
art history. On Mitchell’s view, visual studies supplements the work of the other
two fields by investigating the experience of seeing. While much of the new field’s
analytical energy is currently devoted to the study of systems of representation,
he believes that its primary mission lies in enhancing our understanding of
vision—not just visuality, but the biological and cultural processes that render
our visual experience comprehensible. “The questions to ask about images are not
just ‘what do they mean?’ or ‘what do they do?’ but ‘what is the secret of their
vitality?’ and ‘what do they want?” Visual studies is not just about “the social con-
struction of the visual field,” but also about “the visual construction of the social
field.” Beyond the realm of discourse there is something else, and it is our duty
as interpreters to peer around the edges of convention and ideology. Mitchell thus
appears to break ranks with post-structuralist thinkers who would insist that there
is no way out of the web of representation—not even our own—so that our
access to the real is effectively occluded.
Secondly, Mitchell wants to dispel some of the misunderstandings that
have arisen regarding the emergent field. Far from eroding the distinction between
 Introduction xv

art and non-art, for example, visual culture considers “both sides of this ever-
shifting border and traces the transactions and translations between them.” What
visual culture denies, then, is not a discourse of art but rather a definition of art.
It affirms the social function of the category while denying that it can be ascribed
fixed and universal meaning. Similarly, he wants to disassociate the introduction
of visual studies from any triumphalist implications that its location within a teleo-
logical view of history might imply. Visual studies should not depend upon claims
that we live in an “age of the visible” or that modernity represents a “hegemony”
of the visible. Visual studies should not depend upon its belatedness—some sense
that it has arrived at the end of time and is consequently the fruition of history.
Rather it is a form of analysis that supplements those institutionalized practices
dedicated to the study of the visual that are already in place, and its investigations
are not restricted to the visual production of “modernity.”
Some idea of the heterogeneity of the images to which visual studies turns
its attention is suggested by Nicholas Mirzoeff’s paper. In summoning the “ghost”
as a metaphor of the imagery that has usually been located on the periphery of aca-
demic attention, he predicts that the future of visual studies will be bound up with
a consideration of the visual conventions responsible for the construction and
manipulation of social subjects. “For visual culture, the objects of study come into
being at points of intersection of visibility and social power.” Delighted by an
empowerment to study all the forms of visual production, rather than just those
included in the purview of art history and aesthetics, Mirzoeff ranges widely across
the spectrum of this production, from photographs of spiritualist séances to
images of Anne Frank. Mirzoeff, like many other converts to the field, is excited
by the liberty of not knowing how to find all the answers: “[v]Jisual culture is
defined more by the questions it asks than the objects it studies.”
The other side of this freedom, however, is not addressed. If, following
the example of cultural studies, visual studies is to attain disciplinary status, how
is it going to order the vast world of images it has discovered? Does it harbor too
many “ghosts” to be usefully contained within any one discipline? If a discipline
cannot be organized around its objects, then is it possible to organize it around
the theories and methods by which it proposes to study these objects? If the
latter proves indispensable to any future definition of visual studies, then how are
these protocols to be framed? While there is clearly much to be gained from the
protean energy released by freeing visual studies from the restrictions imposed by
considerations of aesthetic value and by the concept of art, if it does not aspire to
xvi Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey

some form of identity, its activities threaten to dissipate into formlessness.

Appropriate for the last paper discussed in this context is Stephen Melville’s
rumination on methodology. “The liberty of reading”—a liberty that entails obliga-
tions and “as I will tend to put it, objectivity’—should at least strive to keep subjects
and objects separate as method would have us do. Melville wants to
rediscover the merits of formalism but there are obstacles in the way. He argues
that our grammar of seeing and reading has of necessity failed us. Wélfflin is more
suggestive when he gestures toward what he is vot talking about; Greenberg in his
elision between art and culture; and Fried in his reluctance to admit “the various
interlacings or dispersions of objectivity.” Yet even earlier formalists share the post-
modern intuition that no “field of knowledge” exists except as a “writing on objects.”
Particularly suggestive are Melville's endnotes that directly and indirectly address
the major questions of the conference with which we began.
For help in drawing more conclusions from the conference and its papers,
Michael Holly asked David Carrier and Janet Wolff to contribute some brief
remarks about their reactions to the event and the texts it occasioned. We invite
the reader to turn to their lively reflections for assistance in finding access and
insight into what transpired. From our own perspective, we would like to conclude
with the following three points:
First of all, the conference sought to initiate a dialogue between three
major disciplines dedicated to the study of visual representation. Our aim was
to see whether it was possible to transcend disciplinary boundaries in such a way
that aestheticians, art historians, and students of visual culture might be able to
see beyond the confines of disciplinary activity and the conventions of their own
academic discourse. We wanted to know what, if anything, they had to say to
each other.
Secondly, in one way or another, virtually all the contributors, as well as
those participating in the discussion afterward, suggested that the principles with
which the disciplines had once established their raison d’étre could no longer with-
stand the scrutiny of current theory. The essentialist truths on which the disciplines
had been founded are now in question. The commitment of aesthetics to the
articulation of the nature of human responses to art, regardless of the historical
and cultural circumstances in which those responses took place, seemed no longer
defensible. The commitment of art history to the study of historical circumstance,
unimpeded and unhampered by philosophical and ideological assumptions,
appeared naive. And the commitment of visual studies to the study of all forms of
 Introduction xvii

visual production, without reference to a criterion of selection or judgment, seemed

potentially unproductive.
Third, it is obvious that we are left with many more questions than we
opened with. How does one combine the level of critical thought evidenced here
with respect for the image? How can aesthetics be reconceived in this new situa-
tion? After thirty years of ideological critique, what kind of object is now at the
heart of art history? Is it fair to say, in the wake of theory, that all disciplines seek
not knowledge but insight? Whether aesthetics, art history, and visual studies will
continue the kind of dialogue initiated at the Clark Conference remains to be
seen. What we come away with, however, is that the conference encouraged
practitioners of these three different forms of visual study to appreciate the
implications of their own work by considering those of their academic neighbors.
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Defining “Aesthetics” for Non-Western Studies:
The Case of Ancient Mesopotamia

Irene J.Winter

In the analytical exercise of exploring Mesopotamian “aesthetics,” I have not used

the word lightly. Cognizant that the languages of Mesopotamia—Sumerian and
Akkadian—contained no word for “aesthetics,” or indeed for “art,” while the cul-
ture(s) of Mesopotamia over their three-thousand-year history incorporated no
tradition of exegetical texts devoted to artistic theory, I have come nevertheless to
be comfortable that the general sense of the term as an analytical tool for probing
the affective properties of works we call “art” can be made to bridge the distances
of culture, time, and space that separate us from the ancient Mesopotamians.
However, before we can assume the validity of the study of Mesopotamian
“aesthetics” as a path toward Mesopotamian cognition, it is necessary to confront
the usage and utility of aesthetics within the history of art, as distinct from phi-
losophy. If we are to use the term and the concepts it carries at all, it is essential, I
believe, to become conversant with the European intellectual tradition of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, within which the word was first coined and
subsequently came to be used.
Despite the Greek root and an etymology that can take us back at least to
Aristotle,! the term “aesthetics” was in fact constructed by A. G. Baumgarten in
1735 and presented in the first volume of his Aesthetica in 1750 as a way of study-
ing perception—that knowledge derived from the senses, as distinct from knowledge
derived by processes of mentation.’ Earlier eighteenth-century thinkers, most no-
tably in Scotland and Germany, had inquired into the linked natures of beauty
and art.> As the streams came together, particularly following Kant, aesthetics came
to refer to a more limited set of responses to the designated fine arts—painting,
sculpture, architecture, poetry, music—as distinct from those arts called technical
or decorative.’ By the early nineteenth century, aesthetic responses were asked to
meet certain conditions: they had to include the exercise of judgment with respect
to beauty; and they had to be effected in a state of “disinterested contemplation,”
in which the work itself was experienced divorced from any context, utility, or prior
concept.’ Aesthetics, in this way, insisted upon a category of works designated as
“fine” art, that could be considered as such, distinct from works called artifacts, the
utility of which form a significant part of its identity.
4 Irene J.Winter

At issue for the application of a general theory of aesthetics to any

non-Western, or indeed any pre—early modern Western, artistic production is whether
and to what degree one may distinguish the ideal conditions of a pure aesthetic judg-
ment from the historically contingent conditions by which one makes such judgments.
That one cannot pare away sensory perception and affective response from aesthetic
judgment seems evident. Other parts of the package, however—such as the neces-
sary elevation of particular classes of artistic production to the status of fine art, as
well as the insistence upon contemplation and disinterest—were themselves grounded,
I would suggest, both in debate with prior concepts of the unity of the beautiful and
the good in theology and in developing notions of property, ownership, value, and
identity current in contemporary economic and social theory.
This perspective is important in situating the very construct of “disinter-
est” and the “non-utility” of the work in the discourses of early modernism—an
idealist position on the one hand, and one that serves to obscure the enormous
social, and even political, utility of ownership and display, on the other.°
Several recent studies—for example, by Martha Woodmansee, The Author,
Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, and essays included in the
volume edited by Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, The Consumption of Culture,
1600-1800, have helped to sustain this formulation,’ as has further reading in non-
canonical texts of the nineteenth century. The one individual who seems to have
recognized that “disinterestedness” had a “political underside” was William Hogarth,
whose Analysis of Beauty was published in 1753. Hogarth read Shaftesbury’s
formulation of aesthetic disinterest, articulated in his Characteristicks of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), as serving the interests of an elite who could
“afford to appreciate . . . beauty,” and for whom “the subtext of ownership and
control” lay beneath the supposed disinterest of the popular, if self-serving, con-
struct of the “man of taste.”® Hogarth’s Analysis, however, never entered the
mainstream of philosophical aesthetics; his text was labeled a “misguided detour
into theory” by his contemporaries.’
For the student of other cultural/aesthetic systems, this is indeed unfor-
tunate, not least because Hogarth was also a rare individual of his age, who further
anticipated cultural (or racial?) difference in aesthetic criteria and response. His
formulation of “the Nigro [sic] who finds great beauty in the . . . females of his
country,” yet who “may find as much deformity in the european Beauty as we see
in theirs,” led to a summary statement of the “Power of habit and custom” that
anticipates later anthropological studies of cultural diversity.!°
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies 5

While there is no question but that eighteenth-century thinkers were aware

of other cultural traditions—Africa, Austronesia, the Americas, certainly Asia—
virtually no attention was paid to testing for cross-cultural validity in the development
of aesthetic theory. David Hume’s essay “Of National Characters” speaks of na-
tional difference, but is filled with general stereotypes and includes nothing empirical
in the analysis of associated characteristics.!' More relevant for our purposes is “Of
the Standard of Taste,” originally published in his Four Dissertations of 1757.'* There
Hume acknowledges the “great variety” of taste in the world. He suggests a supra-
cultural constancy in value terms (e.g., “elegant,” “beautiful”), but very different
applications affixed to particular instances or expressions.'* He then argues that in
the face of works of a different age or nation, the individual possessed of a refined
eye and mind must (therefore must be able to) “place himself in the same situation
as the audience” in order to form a true judgment of the work."
Although Hume asserts that properties of the object under scrutiny do not
inhere iv the object, but rather exist in the intersection between object and mind,
he also contends that “the same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome 2000
years ago is still admired at Paris and at London.”’? Hume exploits this ambiguity
to the end. He argues for cultural relativity in values, with emphasis upon the ideal
individual of refined sensibility who can shed the prejudices of his own time and
enter into the values of another; and he simultaneously insists that there are
“certain general principles of approbation . . . some particular forms or qualities”
possessed by the “nobler productions of genius” that can be recognized as tran-
scendent (by which I understand him to mean transhistorical or transcultural).!°
Hume is, alternately, optimistic about and despairs of establishing a proper
“standard of taste’—the former because quality can and will be recognized; the
latter because it is impossible to bring all men to the same level of unprejudiced
discernment, since the “different humors of particular men” and the “particular
manners” of ages and nations often result in irreconcilable apprehensions.'7 In the
end, although he concludes that “a certain degree of diversity in judgment is
unavoidable, and we seek in vain for a standard, by which we can reconcile . . .
contrary sentiments,”!® one is left with the sense that the voice of Homer, able to
speak across the ages, in London as in Athens, will provide the yardstick for any
measure of good taste.
Kant was clearly not unfamiliar with Hume’s position on diversities of
taste, hence judgment, raising similar issues of subjectivity in his argument that
“the . . . principle for judging the beautiful” is universal, “but unknowable from
 6 Irene J.Winter

Fig. |. Relief of Tiglath Pileser Ill (745-727 B.C.E.), Central Palace, Nimrud, Assyrian Period. Photograph courtesy TheTrustees,
The British Museum, WAA 118908

any (single) universal concept.”!? Yet in neither do we perceive a sense that “the
cultural” might intervene between the individual subject and the work as a deter-
mining factor in the formation of taste or the establishment of criteria of judgment;
nor do we find a drive to empirically test the proposition that “the beautiful” is the
paramount category of judgment.”°
What this contextualization of the genesis
of Western aesthetic theory does for the study of
other cultural traditions is to allow us to challenge
some of the normative aspects of philosophical
discourse on aesthetics, freeing us from the need to
measure Mesopotamian—or any other—artistic
production by an exclusively Western yardstick.
By the European classification system for
the fine visual arts, for example, we do have major
Fig. 2. Drawing of wall painting from Governor's
Palace,Til Barsib, Assyrian Period, c. eighth century
works of sculpture (such as the well-known Assyrian
B.C.E. (after Thureau-Dangin, Til Barsib, pl. XLVIII) reliefs, e.g. fig. 1); painting, however, while attested,
is so fugitive as to be rarely well preserved (fig. 2).?!
A class of construction identifiable as monumental architecture clearly existéed—
for example, temples and palaces; however, since buildings tend to be recovered
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies 7

archaeologically only as largely incom-

plete walls and ground plans, the
possibilities for translating structural
remains into aesthetic experience are ex-
tremely limited. In addition, many works
of Mesopotamia—such as intricately
Fig. 3. Modern impression of cylinder seal, Akkadian Period, carved cylinder seals (fig. 3) or vessels of
c, 2200 B.C.E., provenance unknown. Photograph courtesy ee é 5 :
TheTrustees,
The British Museum, WAA 113871 pregiens materials intended for cultic
purposes (fig. 4)—do not fall into these
three classes, so are invariably relegated
to the “minor” or “applied” arts within
a Western framework, although they
represent a major artistic investment in
the Mesopotamian repertoire.?? Most
important, zo work in Mesopotamian
texts is ever valued by criteria divorced
from the work’s functional context. Thus,
if one had to study Mesopotamian
aesthetics by application only to Western
categories of the fine arts and non-utility,
one would be hard-pressed indeed.
It has also been necessary to
challenge the centrality of the quality of
beauty in generating aesthetic response.
First, because a number of cultural
traditions in fact have no word that
corresponds to the single term “beauty,”
Fig. 4. Silver cult vessel of Entemena of Lagash, c, 2350 B.C.E, making it imperative to look at the in-
Telloh, Early Dynastic Period. Photograph courtesy Département : : 3
des Antiquités Orientales, Musée du Louvre, Paris, AO 2674 digenous lexicon of value, and second,
because it is important to resist the temp-
tation then to find or reject ascriptions of beauty based upon ethnocentrically reified
properties—as, for example, the case of archaeologists calling an eighth-century B.C.E.
carved ivory head the “Mona Lisa” of Nimrud upon discovery, then disparaging an
accompanying head as “The Ugly Sister’—without any investigation into the
features and qualities Mesopotamians (or their descendants in the modern Middle
East) may have deemed positive.”4
8 Irene J.Winter

Behind many of our value judgments lie the inevitable comparisons be-
tween “their” manifestations and “ours,” particularly with reference to our self-selected
ancestors—the Greeks of a neoclassical and romantic imagination, bleached by
time and occasionally by a purposeful acid bath from the gaudy colors of antiquity
to whited marble, and sold to us by Winckelmann and others in the very same era
that produced aesthetic theory.”? As a consequence, it is necessary to construct the
argument that zfwe are to look at Mesopotamian aesthetics, we cannot permit what
is essentially a folk terminology of the European West to determine both the cate-
gories and the standards of measure. For, if we do—even when the bias is not as
blatant as Kenneth Clark’s judgment of the Hellenistic tradition that produced the
Apollo Belvedere as representing a “higher state of civilization” seeking after light,
when compared with African masking traditions that seek after darkness”°—still,
the ancient Near East, or indeed any other culture, is inevitably the loser.
Instead, I believe it is possible to maintain relative, not absolute, categories
and criteria of value—seeing at least some of the conditions for aesthetic judgment
as presented in early Western aesthetic theory to be not only historically specific,
but historically contingent, while at the same time retaining the core aspects of
sensory response and affective experience. With this maneuver, the scholar of the
ancient Near East need not reject the term “aesthetics,” or the analysis of it,
because the components of art for art’s sake, beauty, and disinterest have no place
in the culture of Mesopotamia. Instead, one can retain the term/analytical tool/ex-
periential category, and reconfigure its definition.
The validity of such an intellectual move was discussed as part of a 1993
debate at Manchester University, “Aesthetics is a Cross-Cultural Category”.”” The
participants, all anthropologists working on aspects of visual culture, included on
the pro-side, Howard Morphy (whose important article, “From Dull to Brilliant:
The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power among the Yolngu” had been published in 198978)
and Jeremy Coote; on the con-side, Joanna Overing and Peter Gow. In his intro-
duction to the debate, James Weiner declared himself to have been more persuaded
by the negative argument, but I believe that Overing and Gow were forced to
determine that one cannot accept the concept/category because they did not first
question the Western requisite of disinterest and non-utility in their operative
definition of aesthetics. Morphy and Coote, by contrast, insisted upon the fact that
(aesthetic) experience cannot—indeed, must not—be divorced from culture, and
consequently concluded that the relationship between sensual experience arid the
value placed thereon has to be established in indigenous terms, using local stan-
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies 9

dards of judgment as well as criteria for value! They thereby left room for the
omission of some Western attachments, such as non-utility, while retaining the
possibility of examining an “indigenous aesthetics.”
Scholars of a number of other cultural and artistic traditions have faced
this dilemma. In the Sanskritic tradition of India, for example, where there is a
developed aesthetic theory easily as complex as that of the West, the criteria for
beauty are not only physically distinct from ours, they are also invested with dif-
ferent signification: the voluptuous body, both male and female, and its ornamentation
are considered signs of auspiciousness.”? In addition, while in this case there zs a de-
veloped vocabulary for “beauty,” the primary focus is upon the range of emotional
expressiveness in and responses to the work. This is known as the theory of rasa, on
which there is an enormous literature.*° The dominant metaphor is culinary, in
which the well-prepared viewer receives the “juice” of the artwork—whether a poem
or painting representing the amorous Krishna or a sculpture of the heroic Shiva. So,
too, devotees at a ritual performance receive the “essence” of the divine—literally,
via the distributed juices of sacred substances, and spiritually, by imbibing through
the other senses. Where Indian aesthetic theory departs significantly from Western
theory is in the insistence that judgment and openness to experience is
itself based upon prior experience and learned discernment, hence that one cannot
hope for a raw sensory response unmediated by preparation and a priori concepts.*!
Most scholars working on Indian art have simply ignored those aspects of
aesthetics that are not in conformity with Western usage, and proceed from an in-
ternal definition of the aesthetic condition without confronting areas of difference.
Remarkably rare have been any attempts to engage in comparative studies, looking
at Western and Hindu and/or other well-developed Asian conceptions of the nature
of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience in terms of similarity and/or difference.”
More recent work on the arts of Africa, undertaken by both art historians
and anthropologists, has taken on issues of difference quite explicitly, largely by
emphasizing indigenous attributes and criteria of value.** Kris Harden, for example,
in her work on Kono dance, expanded the definition of the term “aesthetics” well
beyond the domain of the Western work of art, to include human interaction in
public debate. She also insisted upon judgment being applied to performance as a
whole, as a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, rather than to isolated components. As James
Clifford pointed out in The Predicament of Culture, it is we who have promoted
the hard substance of the mask to the status of “art object” and put it in our
museums, whereas their object includes the organic, rafha costume as well;34 and
10 Irene J.Winter

it is the power of the mask as it is danced that is subject to local aesthetic judg-
ment, not the carving of the mask alone.
Both of these scholarly traditions—the Indian, which theorizes a holistic
relationship from divine inspiration through the artist and his product to the
informed viewer (who then receives both the flavor of the work and the divine
spirit that infused it), and the African, which has its own lexicon and criteria for
value (including coding positively the dark and lustrous, pace Kenneth Clark)—
have helped significantly to shape my approach to Mesopotamian aesthetics.
One more excursion is required, however, to set the stage for a discussion
of Mesopotamian aesthetics, and that is the initial reception of those works we
have promoted to the category of art, since their discovery coincides with the era
of the mid-nineteenth century so powerfully marked by developing Western aes-
thetic theory. The early explorations of sites like Nimrud and Nineveh, for example,
produced amazing works, particularly the great orthostat relief slabs and gateway
colossi from Assyrian royal palaces, many of which were then transported back to
the great museums of Europe and ultimately, America (figs. 1 and 5). These works
caused no little controversy when they were first introduced into the British Museum,
that monument to classical nostalgia, on the grounds that they would pollute the
purity of the Greek sculptures already contained within.*° General opinion seems
to have been that whatever the interest of the Assyrian stones, it was not as works
of art they were to be valued. Even a distinguished assyriologist of the time, Sir
Henry Rawlinson, an early decipherer of cuneiform, opined in letters to their
excavator and champion, Sir Austin Henry Layard, that works like the Assyrian
reliefs were: “Not valuable as works of art” when compared to “the highest stan-
dard available . . . the Elgin Marbles.” He declared that such works could be
“invaluable” for the unfolding of history and theology, simply “valueless” as works
of art because they could “neither instruct nor enrapture!”*° Indeed, attempts were
often made to civilize the barbarian Assyrian works through surgical interventions
that made “art” out of the reliefs by cutting semi-human figures down to what
would correspond to good Western portrait bust formats—as seen in the collec-
tions of the Kimbell Art Museum and the Sackler Museum of Harvard University,
where full-bodied winged genii carved on relief slabs from the Northwest Palace
at Nimrud have been reduced to head and shoulders!
These asides into the formative period of Western aesthetics and the early
history of the reception of Mesopotamian works help to establish the ground for
an investigation into Mesopotamian aesthetics on its own terms. For, once it is
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies | |

accepted as unjustifiable to impose inappropriate or limiting concepts upon another

place/time (if one wants to be able to say something more about them), one is freed
from absolute definitions of art and aesthetics, and able to pursue the concepts that
underlie aesthetic experience in the tradition under scrutiny. In particular, one can
allow for traditions such as the Mesopotamian, that do not abstract works—such as the
silver cult vessel of Entemena of Lagash (see fig. 4) or the great Assyrian colossi (fig. 5)—
from a matrix of cultural function.
Thus, in my own working defi-
nition of both the visual arts and the
aesthetic, I have sought to avoid forc-
ing the works of ancient Mesopotamia
into categories or judgments generated
according to the historically contingent
values of another time. Specifically, I
would eschew requirements of beauty
and disinterest, and yet keep what |
believe to be the fundamental aspects
of sensory experience and judgment.
This has resulted in the following
operative definitions: of “art” as “works
of human agency, for which skill is
required and to which standards of cor-
rectness have been applied, a portion
of the function of which is to be visu-

Fig. 5. Colossus from the Northwest Palace of Assurnasirpal II

ally and emotionally affective”; and of
(883-856 B.C.E,), Nimrud, Assyrian Period. The Metropolitan “aesthetics,” as concerned with “the
Museum of Art, New York. Gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr, 32.143.2
properties of, investment in, and ap-
preciative response to works of human
agency, for which skill is required and to which standards of correctness have been
applied, a portion (but not all) of the function of which is to be visually affective
and emotionally affecting.”
These definitions permit one to select for consideration works that meet
criteria within a Mesopotamian context—jettisoning the word “beauty” for
specific attributes deemed positive in Sumerian and Akkadian texts, such as “well-
ornamented,” possessed of “good form,” “grace,” “vitality,” and “luminosity,” and
wielding “awesome power.” Indeed, it is possible to produce a lexicon of terms and
 12 Irene J.Winter

textual sources related to various aspects of

creation, representation, appearance, and re-
sponse, such that the properties claimed for
important works of human agency emerge
from an indigenous vocabulary. I have se-
lected six such properties for discussion
below—two related to response, two to de-
sirable attributes, and two the result of
positive value judgment.
First is the capacity to elicit a
powerful emotional response—what in psy-
choanalytic literature is referred to as
cathexion: deep attachment to a love object
or its substitute. Thus, in an early dream
sequence in the Gilgamesh epic, preserved
on tablets from Assurbanipal’s Library
at Nineveh and elsewhere, the hero’s
Fig. 6. Detail, Victory Stele of Naram-Sin of Agade, c. 2250 companion-to-be, Enkidu, is prefigured by
B.C.E, found at Susa. Photograph courtesy Département des , F
Antiquités Orientales, Musée du Louvre, Paris, Sb 4 an ax Gilgamesh Sees lying at the entrance
to his chamber.*” He tells his divine mother,
to whom he comes for interpretation of the dream, that he saw it, “loved it, and
embraced it as [one would] a woman.” The many bronze ax-heads found in the
archaeological record and depicted being carried by both royal and divine heros
in sculptural relief (for example, fig. 6, detail of ruler, Naram-Sin of Agade,
c. 2250 B.C.E., from his victory stele) permit us to imagine Gilgamesh’s literary ax.
Clear from the text is an implication of delight in and passionate connectedness
to objects and works—a vocabulary, I should add, that is identical to that de-
scribing lovers, positive aspects of the human body (as that of Naram-Sin himself,
discussed below), or the fertile landscape.*®
A second response, the highest praise that can be given to an object or a
work of architecture, is that it has elicited “joy” and/or “wonder” on the part of its
spectators—the emotional result of what Jas Elsner has described as “spiritual view-
ing.”*? The textual descriptions of temples such as those that would have been set
atop the ziggurats of Babylon and Ur (fig. 7) attest to an anticipated experience of
wonder on the part of the spectator before the sacred—the very word for
“wonder” being a compound comprised of a verb signifying intense visual en-
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies 13

Fig. 7. Ruins of the ziggurat at Ur, Third Dynasty of Ur, c. 2100 B.C.E. Photograph courtesy the University Museum,
University of Pennsylvania

gagement. I have argued elsewhere that this intense visual expereience is actually
referenced directly on early sculpture in the exaggerated eyes so characteristic of
Mesopotamian statues of the third millennium B.c.z. (fig. 8).*°
Third, texts record special value accorded the attribute of light and/or
radiance. Temples are described as being endowed with interiors of silver and gold—
not merely as signs of material wealth, but as indications of divine presence—the
logic being that if radiance is an attribute of the divine, then that which shines has
been touched by the divine.*! Indeed, this use of light in a symbolic way to indi-
cate the sacred unites Mesopotamian temples and liturgical objects with early
Christian churches and objects, and provides links as well across the divide
between the pre-Islamic and Islamic Near East, as well as with the rest of Asia.*
To the extent that anything that has been touched by the divine will be invested
with light, radiance is also attested textually as a property of rulers, who claim to
have been chosen by the gods and, in the process, infused with awesome powers—
although the Christian, Buddhist, and Islamic device of a manifest visual aura has
not yet been developed as an artifact of representation.
What és well developed visually is, fourth, the value accorded “ornament”—
terms for which occur in both Sumerian and Akkadian.“ The contextual meaning
of this attribute is very far from the modern conflation of ornament with mere deco-
 14 Irene J.Winter

ration, the latter understood as

embellishing, but not intrinsic
to the work in question.
Instead, again with close par-
allels to the religious art of the
medieval West and Hindu and
Muslim India, adornment, or
“ornament,” is a mark of grace
and divine favor, fertility and
abundance—that ornatus that
marks the cosmos as a place of
created order—and so adds
the component of the fullness
Fig. 8. Votive sculptures of the Early Dynastic Period from the Square Temple,
Tell Asmar, c. 2750-2500 B.C.E. Photograph courtesy The Oriental Institute of of life and auspicious blessing
the University of Chicago to aesthetic expression and
experience.** Thus, sculptural
figures wearing elaborate jewelery (such as the water-bearing protective goddess
from Mari, fig. 9, or even Naram-Sin, fig. 6) represent not merely secular displays
of wealth or adornment, but rather, “auspiciousness” and “elaborate endowment.”
Similarly, works of wall painting and glazed brick show-
ing elaborate schemes of ornamental bands go beyond
mere decoration to embody vital principles within the
Mesopotamian cosmos.
An example of the latter is a glazed brick panel
from the major reception suite of Fort Shalmaneser at
Nimrud (fig. 10), where the central panel is surrounded
by concentric bands of guilloche, rosettes, lotus and pome-
granate garlands, palmettes, and goats.4° The order of
these bands corresponds literally to the ideal Mesopotamian
garden, known from Mesopotamian textual sources, in
which flowers grow at the feet of fruit trees which them-
selves grow in the shade of tall palms.4” When seen not
Fig. 9. Detail of statue of water-bearing in Western terms as an enclosing frame, but in
female deity from the Palace of Zimri-Lim,
Mari, Old Babylonian Period (c. eighteenth Mesopotamian terms as signifying that fertility emanat-
century B.C.E.), Aleppo Museum, 1659.
ing out as a consequence of the right relationship between
Photograph courtesy Département des
Antiquités Orientales, Musée du Louvre the king and the gods depicted at the center, then these
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies 15

ornamental bands take on meaning related to divine abun-

dance well beyond the relatively small, or even negative,
Western cultural value accorded to frame and decoration.
In addition, when the same array of empaneled and
repeating motifs ornaments the king’s garments on Assyrian
reliefs (fig. 11),** the ruler, too, is woven into the cultural
matrix as provider of abundance—aesthetic taste in cloth-
ing inextricably merged with cultural meaning.
A fifth property, more evaluative than descriptive,
is that of “fitness” for the intended task or role to be played
by a work. Works so described are most often located in the
Fig. 10. Glazed brick panel from Fort
religious sphere, as with temples or accoutrements of cult;
Shalmaneser, Nimrud, Assyrian Period, however, judgment is also sometimes applied to the politi-
c. 850 B.C.E. (afterJ.E. Reade, ‘A Glazed
Brick Panel from Nimrud,” Iraq, 25 cal domain, as with the palaces constructed by Assyrian kings.
[1963] pl. IX) The Banquet Stele of Assurnasirpal II of the ninth century
B.C.E., for example, describes the king’s Northwest Palace at
Nimrud and its inaugural ceremonies.” In the text, the assertion of being splendid
and “fit” for the intended purpose follows immediately upon formulaic pro-
nouncements of perfection in construction (the ultimate impact left to us to visualize
only through nineteenth-century reconstruction drawings).”° These declarations of
fitness reflect a reliance upon measured judgment of aesthetic properties in order
to be confirmed; and so “fitness”—like perfection—becomes an aesthetic category,
perhaps not unrelated to Kant’s later elaboration upon the lesser “adherent” or “de-
pendent” beauty, which allows for a prior concept of the object and the perception
of “an answering perfection” in the object as joined in aesthetic response.”!
Such a bond between aesthetic judgment and sense of purpose/function
had been considered for Western aesthetic theory in the earlier eighteenth century.
Hume, for example, insisted that “Every work of art has also a certain end or pur-
pose for which it is calculated, and is to be deemed more or less perfect, as it is
more or less fitted to attain this end;”°? while Hogarth devotes a chapter to “Fitness”
as one of his six aesthetic principles.°* Although Hogarth’s concept is related first
to the fit of parts to a whole, the whole itself is then subject to judgments related
to purpose, the “beauty of fitness” being in the end a measure of “propriety,” in-
cluding therefore aspects of moral utility as well as functionality.° Despite such
perspectives, however, the pursuit of aesthetics in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries has tended to stress the unmediated, disinterested aspects of aesthetic
 16 Irene J.Winter

response, independent of utility, and to insist upon direct sensory response to an

object, as distinct from responses that require cognitive evaluation.” For the
Mesopotamian case, however, there is no doubt that the assessment of fitness is
part of overall aesthetic judgment, and it therefore opens the door to questioning
assumptions of any immediate and unmediated sensory response, since an assess-
ment of mastery in making, an appreciation of requisite properties, and a cognitive
match between intention and realization are required.
I would suggest that this entailment of the work in an evaluative context
approaches closely both Hindu and early Christian attitudes toward the construc-
tion of temples and churches and the production of liturgical objects—thereby
making works like the silver cult vase
from Telloh destined for the god Ningirsu
(see fig. 4) close analogues for such
medieval vessels as patens and chalices.
What the traditions have in common
is a theological ground that admits of a
“religious aesthetics,” as put forward by
Frank Burch Brown and others, which
is to be found reflected in medieval
European writing on visual affective-
ness,°© and in Hindu tradition, as
discussed by Bahm, in which “aesthetic
theories imply, and are implied by, meta-
Fig. 11. Drawing of detail of king with garment decoration, relief physical theories.”>”
of Assurnasirpal || from Northwest Palace, Nimrud. Photograph Rinall sth tclecelas
courtesy The Trustees,
The British Museum, WAA 124565 (after Inally, sixth, disclaimers con-
A.H. Layard, The Monuments of Nineveh, 1848) cerning culturally specific vocabularies
notwithstanding, Mesopotamian aes-
thetics cannot be considered without some discussion of the Western attribute
generalized as “beauty.” The well-modeled figure of the Akkadian ruler Naram-Sin
depicted on his victory stele found at Susa (see fig. 6) may well be the image that best
conforms to our notions of “beauty,” but throughout the Mesopotamian
sequence, the attributes ascribed to the positively valued human figure are never
subsumed under a single, all-embracing term. Instead, texts often use couplets or
strings of attributes to describe the positive. For example, applicable to Naram-Sin
are qualities of “good form” (implying good breeding) and “grace” (as the visible sign
of “auspiciousness”), “vitality” (through his upright stance and posture), and “allure”
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies |7

(a term applied both to individuals exhibiting sexual appeal and to highly charged
works, like buildings!).°* These visual qualities provide Naram-Sin with all of those
positive aspects required to signal that he has been favored by the gods, and so is fit
to rule. As such, they could in sum add up to the necessary and sufficient conditions
for our “beauty’—where the perfectly formed hero is also the perfectly enspirited hero,
manifesting divinely sanctioned grace, vitality, and allure. But to gloss him as merely
beautiful does not do justice either to the culturally specific set of attributes that con-
stitutes the ideal ruler or to the fusion of the pleasures of aesthetic sensation with
sexual attraction, found throughout the Mesopotamian literature.
What has been of particular interest in the attempt to probe a Mesopotamian
lexicon of value and to capture Mesopotamian aesthetic experience is that many
of the terms I have been using, from the “affective” to “fit” and “wonder,” are very
much in the larger vocabulary of current neurobiological studies of brain and per-
ception, and psychological studies of emotion and cognition. The questions being
pursued—from bower birds’ drive to ornament their nests to hard-wired responses
across cultures and species to qualities of light and shine—all speak to the issue of
the transcultural: at what level do shared responses represent universals, not simply
cultural clusters?® It is highly possible that I have sought and then “found” the
concepts corresponding to terms in current usage because I myself am a part of a
contemporary intellectual and experiential universe. It is equally possible that a fu-
ture scholarly generation looking at ancient Mesopotamia will see the contingent
and historically specific aspects of my interpretive structure, just as I have tried to
observe and distance myself from constraining eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century interpretive structures.
Yet it is also the case that these terms—“fit” and “wonder” and the
description of “affect”—are attested in the Mesopotamian lexicon, they are not
merely a projection onto Mesopotamia. In addition, the Mesopotamian associa-
tion of affective experience with the experience of the divine (hence, the “good”)
is just beginning to be examined by the scholarly community of aestheticians and
cognitive scientists, a number of whom have recently explored the relationship be-
tween representation, stimuli leading to sensory response, and that profound reaction
often characterized as religious experience.°!
Much of this recent neurophysiological work, in concert with some of the
eighteenth-century aesthetic theory cited above, demonstrates the need for, at the
very least, a two-tiered analysis of human aesthetic experience: distinguishing clearly
those conditions that may obtain at the general level of the species—i.e., the
18 Irene J.Winter

positive valuation of a sensory response to certain physical properties such as light—

from those specific qualities that are deemed desirable at a cultural, sub-cultural,
group, or individual level—for example, the possibility of preferring dark luster to
bright. The need for this split-level analysis has been advanced by Van Damme,
who, in pursuing the distinction between innate responses and enculturation, at-
tempts to distinguish those properties or qualities that seem to appeal to humans,
regardless of cultural background, from those principles operative in evaluating such
properties or qualities. In the latter case, he argues that visual stimuli must first be
interpreted by the socialized subject “in a culturally . . . conditioned manner
before they can trigger a mechanism or sensitivity that in itself may be ‘hard wired’.”®
Van Damme’s conclusion, in interesting concert with the observations of Hume
and Kant, cited above, is that while there may not necessarily be transcultural agree-
ment on the evaluation of a given stimulus, there can be pancultural agreement on
the positive appraisal of what is signified, thereby providing a bridge between lo-
cal cultural values and innate responses.
The implications for the scholar attempting to study aesthetic experience
is that one cannot understand either polarity—subjectivity or species behavior—
without incorporating an analysis of both socio-cultural parameters and the social
formation of the individual. Hence, the cultural and the social must be engaged as
necessary variables between the subject and the species.
What the Mesopotamian case offers the current discourse on aesthetics in
general, and cross-cultural aesthetics in particular, is sufficient textual support to
establish a local vocabulary of properties and responses within the domain of the
aesthetic, such that the cultural norms, at least as presented rhetorically, can be ar-
ticulated. It needs to be emphasized for the non-specialist reader that the preserved
texts generally represent either royal—hence ideological—pronouncements, or
scholastic—largely priestly—compositions, and may not reflect vernacular vocabu-
laries or attribures. Still, they are consistent in explicitly acknowledging the
necessary role of judgment in aesthetic experience, implying thereby an awareness
of the inseparability of cognition from sensation. Indeed, the textual representa-
tion of Mesopotamian aesthetic experience as never divorced from either context
or cognition (hence never purely perceptual), actually accords better with current
brain imaging and cognitive studies than the prior model of separate responses.®
Moreover, in the insistence upon judgments of “fit,” the Mesopotamian case
offers support for the challenge to requirements of disinterest, under examination
in recent philosophical discourse and indeed already challenged by Hogarth.
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies 19

An additional salient aspect of the Mesopotamian case, apparent from

literary, economic, and historical texts alike, is that no sources separate aesthetic
experience from experience of the wondrous and/or of the sacred. In retrospect,
a close reading of Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art will show that the German philoso-
pher had also insisted upon the linkage of art, religion, and philosophy, all three
of which only fulfilled their “supreme task” when bringing to mind and express-
ing “the Divine” (emphasis his).© This relationship between representation, affective
response, and transcendent experience is well illustrated in Mesopotamian texts.
If, with Philip Fisher, we understand an “aesthetics of wonder” to be located on
“the border between sensation and thought,”® then the Mesopotamian case adds
further weight to arguments concerning not only the inapplicability of art for art’s
sake, but also once again the inseparability of perception and cognition.
Throughout the present study, it has decidedly not been my goal to pur-
sue the history of philosophical aesthetics for its own sake. Nevertheless, it has been
necessary to explore those aspects of the legacy of European aesthetics that have
stood in the way of reconstructing ancient Mesopotamian aesthetic experience.
Clearly, there is not one single Western aesthetic theory; issues have been debated
in each era, often with conflicting positions emerging. It has proven useful to chart
those attitudes and propositions that entered the mainstream of the next genera-
tion’s perspectives and those that were occluded, if only to underscore the fact that
paradigms that still structure the way we think today are not givens, but are them-
selves the product of selection and exclusion. Had Hogarth, who saw clearly
(1) other cultural habits, (2) the interestedness of the concept of “disinterest,” and
(3) the erotic/sensory bond that unites aesthetic response with sexual response, not
ultimately been marginalized,°’ for example, or had Hegel’s association of art and
the divine been emphasized rather than notions that led to the autonomy of “sig-
nificant form,” the way might well have been paved far earlier for the exploration
of alternative systems of aesthetic perception and value to our own.
In attempting to probe the cognitive structures underlying ancient Near
Eastern monuments, I have argued that it zs possible to reconstruct at least the
language of Mesopotamian aesthetic experience—getting (beyond beauty) to the
visually affective, while stripping away some of the residue that has adhered to the
art of Mesopotamia when viewed through an overly modern, Western lens. But,
once again, I insist that this is only possible if one first establishes the indigenous
lexicon, its semantic range, and attendant values. Perhaps even more important, if
aesthetics is to be engaged by not only the philosopher, but also the art historian
20 Irene J.Winter

investigating visual culture, it is also essential to construct a working definition of

aesthetics and the aesthetic experience that permits application in cross-cultural
contexts, and does not leap to assumptions of normative, transcultural, or trans-
historical experience before doing justice to the culturally specific.

In pursuit of issues and materials in the present study for which I am decidedly not trained, I am grate-
ful for the comments, nudges, restraints, and encouragement of a number of individuals: particularly
Noél Carroll, Lydia Goehr, Robert C. Hunt, Michael Kelly, Wilfried van Damme, Judith Wechsler,
and the various students who have participated in my seminar on cross-cultural aesthetics at Harvard
University. Being so far out of my element, I must emphasize the disclaimer of the responsibility of any
of the above for errors of reading or interpretation.
1. Gr. aisthésthai, “to sense.” On the history of Greek attitudes toward the beautiful, see John T. Kirby,
“Classical Greek Origins of Western Aesthetic Theory” in Beate Allert, ed., Languages of Visuality:
Crossings between Science, Art, Politics and Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 29-45.
2. M. H. Abrams, “Art-as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics,” Bulletin ofthe American Academy
ofArts and Sciences 38 (1985): 8—33.
3. See, for example, Peter Kivy, “The ‘Sense’ of Beauty and the Sense of ‘Art’: Hutcheson’s Place in the
History and Practice of Aesthetics,” Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 349-57; Jorge V.
Arregui and Pablo Arnau, “Shaftesbury: Father or Critic of Modern Aesthetics,” British Journal of
Aesthetics 34 (1994): 350-62; Jeffrey Barnouw, “The Beginnings of ‘Aesthetics’ and the Leibnizian
Conception of Sensation,” in Paul Mattick, Jr., ed., Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction
of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 52-95.
4. Immanuel Kant, Critique ofthe Power ofJudgment, Paul Guyer, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 197-212. See also Denis Dutton, “Kant and the Conditions of Artistic Beauty,” British
Journal ofAesthetics 34 (1994), 226-41; G. W. E. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), esp. Introduction, 1-25.
5. Kant, Critique ofJudgment, 90, 96, 104, 111 and passim for discussion of judgments free of prejudice,
interest, utility or prior concept. On the development of the attitude of “disinterest” as a feature of
Hutcheson’s theory, pursued by Kant, see P. J. E. Kail, “Function and Normativity in Hutcheson’s
Aesthetic Epistemology,” British Journal ofAesthetics 40 (2000): 443. A seminal paper on the topic was
written by Stolnitz in 1961, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,” Journal ofAesthetics and
Art Criticism 20 (1961), which was subsequently discussed in Richard Woodfield, “On the Emergence
of Aesthetics,” British Journal ofAesthetics 18 (1978): 217-27, with a view toward understanding the cul-
tural conditions that led to the emergence of aesthetics in general.
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies 2

6. As an aside, I have also wondered whether “disinterest” did not serve other—teligious and hege-
monic—ends as well, justifying the removal of objects from tainted or idolatrous practices, free to be
responded to without the negative associations of their originating contexts. This sentiment would seem
to underlie at least one sixteenth-century source on the formation of elite collections of works in Dresden
(on which, see Barbara Gutfleisch and Joachim Menzhausen, “How a Kunstkammer Should be Formed’:
Gabriel Kaltemarckt’s Advice to Christian I of Saxony on the Formation of an Art Collection, 1587,”
Journal of the History of Collections 1 [1989]: 3-32).
7. See in particular John Brewer, ““The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious.’ Attitudes Towards
Culture as a Commodity, 1660-1800,” in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption
of Culture 1600-1800. Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995), 341-61; Ann Bermingham, “Elegant
Females and Gentlemen Connoisseurs. The Commerce in Culture and Self-image in Eighteenth-Century
England,” in ibid., 489-513.
8. Discussed by Ronald Paulson, in his introduction to William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), xxiii—xxiv.
9. Ibid., xi. Paulson notes that Sir Joshua Reynolds may well have been behind a campaign of 1753-54
to discredit Hogarth’s Analysis; his own attack was published in 1759 (ibid., xlviii).
10. Ibid., 115: supplementary passage from an additional manuscript version of the Analysis that was ap-
parently to have been part of an intended introduction.
u. David Hume, Selected Essays, ed: Stephan Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 113-26.
12. Ibid., 133-54.
13. Ibid., 134. This issue is further discussed by Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” Journal ofAesthetics
and Art Criticism 43 (1984): 181-94.
14. Hume, Selected Essays, 133, 145. In positing this necessary shift of perspective and ability to perceive
as the original audience, Hume clearly does not share the postmodern angst related to “transparency”
and rejects the absolute “relativist” position (ibid., 136).
15. And when those qualities are not perceived, the problem lies with the lack of practice or inherent
imperfection in the perceiver, not in the work (ibid., 139, 140, 149).
16. Thereby accounting for the fact that some authors, for example (Homer, Terence, Virgil), can ex-
ercise a “universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men” (ibid., 146, 147, 149). Hume's statement
(p. 146) that “In all the nobler productions of genius, there is a mutual relation and correspondence of
parts” seems heavily indebted to Aristotle.
17. Ibid., 148, 149. See on this, Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 181, where the issue of “cultural
relativity” in Hume’s essay is raised.
18. Hume, Selected Essays, 150.
19. Kant, Critique ofJudgment, 228 (§ 59).
22 Irene J.Winter

20. Kant’s primary “other-cultural” example, cited when speaking about accessory, or “dependent”
beauty, was with respect to “New Zealanders with their tattoos,” where he argues that the designs, how-
ever satisfying, cannot be perceived in terms of the higher category of a pure response to “free” beauty,
because they cannot be accessed without reference to a prior determinate concept: that is, the human
figure (ibid., 15 [§ 16]). That he included rhetoric and landscape gardening among his categories of the
fine arts suggests in retrospect just how time-specific and contingent such categories are; just as the in-
clusion of lacquer-work and sword-making in the comparable Japanese classification of fine arts indicates
how culture-specific categories can be (ibid., 197-200 [§ 51]; William Samonides, The Kéami Workshop
of ‘maki-e” Lacquerers, in progress).
21. For example, Henri Frankfort, Art and Architecture ofthe Ancient Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1970), passim for sculpture, figs. 142, 152-53, 181, 291 for painting; Anton Moortgat, Art ofAncient
Mesopotamia (London and New York: Phaidon, 1969), passim for sculpture, figs. 11, 12, 49, 58-60, 72,
98-101, 11, 112 for painting.
22. Ibid., pls. A—O for seals, pls. 19, 24, 113 for cultic vessels.
23. As attempted in Irene J. Winter, “Aesthetics in Ancient Mesopotamian Art,” in Jack Sasson, ed.,
Civilizations ofthe Ancient Near East (New York: Scribner's, 1995), 2569-80. A larger study, Visual Affect:
Aesthetics ofAncient Mesopotamia, is currently in preparation.
24. M. E. L. Mallowan, Nimrud and Its Remains (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1966), 1: 128-34
and figs. 71, 73. This judgment has been made largely on the basis of the first ivory’s tucked mouth,
with analogies not only to the Mona Lisa, but to the classical repertoire of archaic Greek sculpture, de-
spite the fact that the two female heads share other features, such as round faces, large eyes, and cascading
hair.
25. J. J.Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden: Waltherschen Hof, 1764). There
has been a great proliferation of work on Winckelmann (1717-1768) in recent years. See, for example,
Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), esp. 99-107; Alex D. Potts, “Winckelmann’s
Construction of History,” Art History 5 (1982): 377-407, and Flesh and the Ideal: Winkelmann and the
Origins ofArt History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994); S. Howard, “Albani,
Winckelmann, and Cavaceppi,” Journal of the History of Collecting 4 (1992): 27-38, esp. 28ff; Alice A.
Donohue, “Winckelmann’s History of Art and Polyclitus,” in Warren G. Moon, ed., Polykleitos, the
Doryphoros, and Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 327-53; Richard Brilliant,
“Winckelmann and Warburg: Contrasting Attitudes toward the Instrumental Authority of Ancient
Art,” in Alina Payne et al., eds., Antiquity and its Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 269-75. Such studies have dealt largely with the impact of Winckelmann on the study of clas-
sical antiquity and his influence on subsequent scholars, for example, Hegel (see his Aesthetics: Lectures
on Fine Art, 2, chap. 2: “The Ideal of Sculpture,” in particular pp. 723-24). However little analysis has
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies 23

been undertaken of the degree to which such perspectives have also established a hierarchy of values,
and thereby constrained the study of other (non-classical) traditions. Although on this, see Haskell and
Penny, Taste and the Antique, 107, and also Mary Beard, “Reflections on ‘Reflections on the Greek
Revolution,” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 4 (1985): 207-13, in which the author takes on Ernst
Gombrich’s elevation of “classical naturalism” in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology ofPictorial
Representation (London: Phaidon, 1977).
26. Kenneth Clark, Civilization (London: John Murray, 1969), 2.
27. Tim Ingold, ed., “1993 Debate: Aesthetics is a Cross-Cultural Category,” in Key Debates in Anthropology
(London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 249-94. See also discussion by Denis Dutton, “But They
Dont Have Our Concept of Art,” in Noél Carroll, ed., Theories ofArt Today (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2000), 217-38, who takes on and rebuts the argument of the impossibility of investi-
gating aesthetics cross-culturally.
28. Howard Morphy, “From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power among the Yolngu,”
Man new ser. 24 (1989): 21-40.
29. Discussed by A. K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation ofNature in Art (New York: Dover, 1956).
Also see, for example, Biswanarayan Shastri, Kalikapurane Murtivinirdesah (Kalamiulsastra, Series 9]
(New Delhi: IGNCA, 1994), e.g., pp. 31-33, on a puranic text attested from the thirteenth century, in
which the auspicious signs for deities, including jewelry, are enumerated. When students visiting the
Harvard University Art Museum's Asian art galleries are asked to comment upon a medieval South
Indian bronze image of the god Rama, they almost invariably identify the god as a female figure, be-
cause of his curving left hip.
30. Bharata, Natyasastra, M. Sastri (ed.), (Benares: KHV, 1971); G. Ranieri, The Aesthetic Experience
According to Abhinavagupta (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1956); Stella
Kramrisch, trans., Vishnudharmottara, part 3 (Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1928); J. M. Masson
and M. V. Patwardhan, Aesthetic Rapture, 2 vols. (Poona: Deccan College, 1970). See also B. N. Goswamy,
“Rasa: Delight of the Reason,” in Essence ofIndian Art (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 1986), 17-303
Kapila Vatsyayan, “Some Terms of Indian Arts, an Analysis,” in J. P. Sinha, ed., Ludwig Sternbach
Felicitation Volume, (Lucknow: Akhila Bharatiya Sanskrit Parishad, 1979), 2: 783-801; and Vatsyayan,
Bharata: The Natyasastra (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996); and Donna M. Wulff, “Religion in a
New Mode: The Convergence of the Aesthetic and the Religious in Medieval India,” Journal of the
American Academy of Religion 54 (1986): 673-88.
31. In this tradition, the preparedness of the viewer to receive the work is a necessary condition for proper
reception of the artist’s conception (articulated at length in Kramrisch, Vishnudharmottara, and see also
Vatsyayan, Bharata, p. 138)—a precept far more theoretically developed in India than in the literature
of the West. It may well be exemplified by a work of the great mid-eighteenth-century painter, Nainsukh
of Guler, where the artist depicts himself directly behind a princely viewer of a painting of Lord Krishna—
24 Irene J.Winter

thereby setting both pairs of eyes on the same perceptual sight lines. The painting is published in B. N.
Goswamy, Nainsukh of Guler: A Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill-State {Artibus Asiae, supp. 41]
(Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 1997), cat. no. 39.
32. Notable exceptions are Archie J. Bahm, “Comparative Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 24 (1965): 109-19, although I would not, in the light of recent understanding of the combined
role of cognition and perception, agree with his working definition that “aesthetic experience consists
in intuition of intrinsic value” (emphasis mine); and Richard L. Anderson, Calliope’ Sisters: AComparative
Study ofPhilosophies of Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990), although note review by Kris
Hardin in Journal ofAnthropological Research 47 (1991): 116-21, in which Anderson is criticized for still
replicating Euro-American categories of experience, form and behavior with respect to “art.” See also
Wilfried van Damme, “Studying Aesthetics from a Global Perspective: Three Contemporary Approaches,”
in Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’ Art, ed. John Onians (Williamstown,
Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, forthcoming), who speaks of the scarcity of consider-
ation of not only the cross-cultural but the global perspective in aesthetics.
33. Roland Abiodun “Identity and the Artistic Process in Yoruba Aesthetic Concept of IWA,” Journal
of the Courtauld Institute 1 (1983), 133-30; Sylvia Boone, Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine
Beauty in Mende Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Kris Hardin, “Aesthetics and the Cultural
Whole: A Study of Kono Dance Occasions,” Empirical Studies of the Arts 6 (1988): 35-57 and The
Aesthetics ofAction (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Press, 1993); Babatunde Lawal, “Some
Aspects of Yoruba Aesthetics,” British Journal ofAesthetics 15 (1974): 239-49; Roy Sieber, “The Aesthetics
of Traditional African Art,” in Carol E Jopling, ed., Art and Aesthetics in Primitive Societies (New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1971), 127-31; Wilfried van Damme, A Comparative Analysis Concerning Beauty and Ugliness
in Sub-Saharan Africa, Africana Gandensia 4 (Ghent: Rijksuniversiteit, 1987); Kariamu Welsh-Asante,
ed., The African Aesthetic: Keeper ofthe Traditions (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993).
34. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), esp. chaps. 9 and 10; see also Eberhard Fischer and
Hans Himmelheber,” The Arts ofthe Dan (Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 1984).
35. An illustration of such a colossus being brought into the British Museum was published in the
Illustrated London News of 28 February 1852 (reproduced in John M. Russell, From Nineveh to New York
[New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997], fig. 43).
36. Rawlinson letters to Austin Henry Layard, dated 5 August and 19 August 1846, cited in Mogens
Trolle Larsen, The Conquest ofAssyria: Excavations in an Antique Land, 1840-1860 (London and New
York: Routledge, 1986), 102-3. The Assyrian reliefs’ beauty and worth was, of course, defended by their
excavator, Layard, as of “exquisite taste” and “remarkable” in their knowledge of anatomy (Larsen, pas-
sim and Frederick Bohrer, “Orientalism” and Visual Culture: Exoticizing Assyria in Nineteenth-Century
Europe, chap. 4 {in press]).
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies 25

37. See discussion in Benjamin Foster, “Gilgamesh: Sex, Love and the Ascent of Knowledge,” in John
H. Marks and Robert M. Good, eds., Love and Death in the Ancient Near East (Guilford, Conn.: Four
Quarters Publishing, 1987), 27.
38. Wilfred G. Lambert, “Devotion: The Languages of Religion and Love,” in Figurative Language in
the Ancient Near East, ed. M. Mindlin et al. (London: SOAS, 1987), esp. 30-31.
39. Jas Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation ofArt from the Pagan World to Christianity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. 184, 242-43, 286-87.
40. Irene J. Winter, “The Eyes Have It: Votive Statuary, Gilgamesh’s Axe and Cathected Viewing in the
Ancient Near East,” in Robert S. Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: SeeingAs
Others Saw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 22-44, especially 36-37. The power of the
eyes is also conveyed by those instances when, as in a copper/bronze head from Nineveh of c. 2300
B.C.E., the eyes have been gouged out in order to “kill” the image—an iconoclastic practice known from
later periods as well (on which, see Carl Nylander, “Earless in Nineveh,” American Journal ofArchaeology
84 (1989): 329-33, pursued also by Zainab Bahrani, “Assault and Abduction: The Fate of the Royal Image
in the Ancient Near East,” Art History 18 [1995]: 363-82).
41. Discussed in Irene J. Winter, “Radiance as an Aesthetic Value in the Art of Mesopotamia (with some
Indian parallels),” in B. N. Saraswati et al., eds., Art: The Integral Vision (Essays in Felicitation of Kapila

Vatsyayan), (New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 1994), 123-32, and developed further in “Images of Gods
and Kings: What Cannot be Represented Visually,” in Ingolf Thuesen, ed., Proceedings of the 2nd
International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Copenhagen; in press).
42. See, for example, Sarah-Grace Heller, “Light as Glamour: The Luminescent Ideal of Beauty in the
Roman de la Rose,” Speculum 76 (2001): 934-59; Avinoam Shalem, “Fountains of Light: The Meaning
of Medieval Islamic Rock Crystal Lamps,” Muqarnas 11 (1994): I-11.
43. It is important to note, therefore, that not all properties ascribed to figures, or to works, in Mesopotamian
texts have their counterpart in visual representation.
44. Irene J. Winter, “Ornament in Assyrian Art and the ‘Rhetoric of Abundance’ in Assyrian Text,”
Eretz Israel 27 (in press).
45. See Coomaraswamy, Tiansformation ofNature, 85; Walter Andrae, Die ionische Sdule: Bauform oder
Symbol? (Berlin: Verlag fiir Kunstwissenschaft, 1933). Nor is charged ornament an artifact only of the
European Middle Ages. For discussion of architectural ornament in the Italian Renaissance, see Alina
S. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), for example, and reviews by Caroline Van Eck in Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 3, 5, 6, and Christine
Smith in Journal of the Society ofArchitectural Historians 59 (2000): 110-12.
46. Published by J. E. Reade, “A Glazed-Brick Panel from Nimrud,” /raq 25 (1963): 37-47.
47. Jean-Jacques Glassner, “A propos des jardins Mésopotamiens,” in Rika Gyselen, ed., Jardins d'‘Orient
(Res Orientalis 3) (Leuven: E. Peeters, 1991), 10.
26 Irene J.Winter

48. Jeanny Vorhys Canby, “Decorated Garments in Assurnasirpal’s Sculpture,” /raq 33 (1971): 31-53.
49. A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers ofthe Early First Millennium BC, I (Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia:
Assyria, 2), (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1991), no. 30, 288—93.
50. Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and its Remains, (London, 1849), 1: frontis. For the text: Grayson,
Assyrian Rulers, no. 30, lines 27 and 60-61:
arsip usaklil I built, I perfected
usim usarrih I made fitting, I made splendid
st. Critique ofJudgment, esp. 114-17 §16—-17; and discussion in Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims ofTaste,
2d edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 113. For Kant, adherent, or dependent,
beauty (pulchritudo adnaerens) is introduced as representing a lesser quality than pure, or free, beauty
(pulchritude vaga). However, for Mesopotamian tradition, the notion of beauty “for which an idea is
to be sought,” and which is “fixed by a concept of . . . purposiveness” (Critique ofJudgment, 114, §16)
is exactly what the aesthetic experience is about.
52. Hume, “A Standard of Taste,” 146—47.
53. Hogarth, Analysis, 25-27.
54. Ibid., 27, and Introduction, xli. This becomes the basis for Hogarth’s later discussion of proportion,
which for him can only be understood as a case of fitness (60-61).
55. See discussion in Kirby, “Classical Greek Origins,” 31, 37, and 41 n. 18, for Plato’s concept of “right-
ness,” as analogous to “fitness,” which suggests that, despite later exclusion, there was an early philosophical
stream that argued such judgments (hence cognitive processes) were not to be divorced from percep-
tual experience.
56. Frank Burch Brown, Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study ofMaking and Meaning (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989). See also the work of Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God
in Imagination, Beauty, and Art (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
57. Bahm, “Comparative Aesthetics,” 111.
58. Irene J. Winter, “Sex, Rhetoric and the Public Monument: The Alluring Body of the Male Ruler in
Mesopotamia,” in Natalie B. Kampen, ed., Sexuality in Ancient Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 11-26.
59. Naram-Sin here joins a long historical array of heros, from the Greek kouroi to Jacques-Louis David’s
Romulus (on which, see ibid., 20). The dilemma of how to not reduce aesthetic theory to “beauty the-
ory” is pursued by Carroll, “Hume's Standard of Taste,” and by James C. Anderson, “Aesthetic Concepts
of Art,” in Noél Carroll, ed., Theories of Art Today (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 73.
Interesting for our purpose is that, once again, the association between aesthetic response and sexual
response was anticipated by Hogarth in his Analysis. See discussion by Mark Hallett, Hogarth (London:
Phaidon, 2000), 250. ,
60. For example, Semir Zeki, “Art and the Brain,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and
 Defining "Aesthetics" for Non-Western Studies 27

Sciences 127 (1998): 71-104; V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein, “The Science of Art: A Neurological
Theory of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 6—7 (Art and the Brain),
June-July (1999): 15-1; C. W. Tyler, “Is Art Lawful?” Science 285 (30 July 1999): 673-74.
61. Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg, “The Neuropsychology of Aesthetic, Spiritual and Mystical
States,” Zygon 35 (2000): 39-52; Newberg and d’Aquili, Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the
Biology ofBelief (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001).
62. Wilfried van Damme, “Universality and Cultural Particularity in Visual Aesthetics,” in Nigel
Roughley, ed., Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives
(Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2000), 258-83, citation p. 271. See also Noél Carroll, “Art and the
Domain of the Aesthetic,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 40 (2000): 191-208, who also insists upon
the contextual in his emphasis on “norms of response shared reciprocally by artists and audiences” (192).
63. Newberg and d’Aquili, Why God Wont Go Away, 26; Roman Bonzon, “Aesthetic Objectivity and
the Ideal Observer Theory,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 39 (1999): 230-40; Carroll, “Art and the
Domain of the Aesthetic,” esp. 208, n. 25. In fact, Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method (New
York: Continuum, 1975), 81-82, argues, with roots in Aristotle, that “perception a/ways includes mean-
ing” (emphasis mine). This conjunction had not escaped Hume, either, who had observed that an
individual must have a sense of the range of a quality (for example, beauty) before pronouncing upon
the degree of the quality attributable to a particular example (discussed in Carroll, “Hume's Standard
of Taste,” 184 and n. 34). For this reason, I would disagree with Carroll’s classification of Hume among
those philosophers who preclude the operation of reason in aesthetics, although Carroll is surely cor-
rect that it is Burke, not Hume, who explicitly insists upon a combination of reason and sensory response
in the aesthetic experience (ibid., 186)—see Edmund Burke, “Introduction on Taste,” in APhilosophical
Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas ofthe Sublime and the Beautiful, James Boulton, ed. (South Bend,
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), 23. The proposition that perception is inextricable from
a priori concepts, hence cognition, warrants further attention.
64. See Carroll, “Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic,” 196, where the author notes (with reference to
the work of Monroe Beardsley, as in “Aesthetic Experience,” in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected
Essays (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982], cited 195, n. 7) that the “problem is that the re-
quirement of disinterestedness and the requirement of sympathetic attention may, and indeed often
do, stand in conflict.”
65. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, 7-8. The problem for aesthetic studies to date has been how Hegel's pri-
mary model for a “true expression of this union,” that of classical Greece (ibid., 10), was used both by
him and subsequently. This is only now coming under scrutiny from a broad critical perspective. In
fact, Hegel does not accord the laurels of the golden age of art exclusively to the Greeks, but also in-
cludes the “later Middle Ages” (probably meaning the artists known as “primitives” of the early Renaissance),
although he does not develop his analysis of late medieval art in any way comparable to that of the
28 Irene J.Winter

Greeks. As a consequence, the narrower Neoclassical and Romantic construction of value with
respect to the classical ideal has led to a hierarchical view of the classical legacy which has itself served
as a constraint on any plurality of models or values.
66. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics ofRare Experiences (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1998) and review thereof by Ronald W. Hepburn, The British Journal of Aesthetics
40 (2000): 282-84.
67. Hallett, Hogarth, 292, 315, quoting Hogarth in the 1760s: “the torrent was against me.”
 Romare Bearden: African American Modernism at Mid-Century

Kobena Mercer

Romare Bearden’s participation in the Spiral group was the catalyst for the
Photomontage Projections he began in 1964. While individual works such as
Pittsburgh Memories are widely appreciated as part of a distinctive contribution
to postwar American art, it may be said that the significance of Bearden’s collage
practice has eluded deep interpretive understanding (fig. 1). Bringing a cultural
studies approach to art historical and aesthetic concerns, this study sets out to
examine the underlying montage principle of Bearden’s work as a key turning
point in African American modernism.
First identified by Ralph Ellison in his 1968 catalogue essay, “The Art
of Romare Bearden,” the montage principle of dialectical cut-and-mix has a
broader significance in African American art history as it resonates with the
ee Zl ll assemblage art practiced by Betye
“ : Saar, David Hammons, and Noah
Purifoy in the late 1960s. Drawing
on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the
dialogic imagination to examine the
importance of collage in dias-
pora aesthetics, my aim is to elabo-
rate upon Ellison’s insight that
“what is special about Bearden’s
achievement is . . . the way in
which his technique has been used
to discover and transfigure its ob-
Fig. |. Romare Bearden (American 19!|—1988), Pittsburgh Memories, : 1 : ;
1964. Photomontage, 27/2 x 35%: in. (68.6 x 88.9 cm). Estate ject.”' Bearden and Ellison enjoyed
of Romare Bearden. © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by a close rapport throughout their life-
VAGA, New York, N.Y.
long conversation on the interplay
of literary and visual strands in African American modernism. As well as
stylistic affinities, they shared a similar generational background—Bearden
was born in 1912 in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and Ellison was
born in 1914 in Oklahoma City. After graduating in the mid-1930s, each
moved to New York City, and both participated in the passionate debates on
30 Kobena Mercer

art and politics in the 1940s that formed the historical backdrop to Ellison’s
classic novel, Jnvisible Man (1952).
Where Ellison got close to the “inner dialectical quality”? that animates
Bearden’s collage, his insights shed light on the artist’s struggle with the double-
binds of “race” and representation that underpinned what Bearden had called
the “Negro artist’s dilemma.” Working through aspects of this dilemma in the
vernacular realism of his early gouaches and then with his deepening interest in
post-Cubist pictorial space, Bearden found a synthesis in collage and photomon-
tage that reconciled his commitments to the high modern ethos of individuality
and complexity, on the one hand, and to the call-and-response ethos in black
American “folk” culture, on the other.
Sharing a mutual interest in what happens in the hyphen that articu-
lates African and American to form a distinctively composite identity, Bearden’s
and Ellison’s rapport was based on an implicit critique of realism in favor of a
dialogical approach that sought to enter the inner world of black subjectivity so
as to reveal its emotional, as well as social, realities. Hence, when Ellison states
that “the true artist destroys the accepted world by way of revealing the
unseen,’ I suggest that Bearden’s dynamic fragmentation of pictorial space
inscribes the creative presence of the “cut,” which James Snead identified as a
distinctive feature of diaspora aesthetics.‘ In contrast to the “folksy” humanism
that characterizes prevalent interpretations of Bearden’s work,° this reading seeks
to restore the controlled negativity of the dialectical “cut” to the Photomontage
Projections. Observing the Rabelaisean presence of the carnivalesque and the
grotesque in Bearden’s figurative vocabulary, in which the iconography of the
“African” mask plays a presiding role, I suggest that a closer reading of his indi-
vidual trajectory, from the 1940s to the 1960s, reopens a range of unresolved
issues in the historiography of African American art.
Where successive generations encountered the “Negro artist’s dilemma”
in the form of an institutional double-bind that arose when ideologies of “race”
were in conflict with the freedom of expression that was taken as axiomatic for
modernism as a whole, criticism and scholarship repeatedly comes up against
what Michele Wallace calls “the problem of the visual in Afro-American cul-
ture."° The problem was not simply that cultural difference was regarded,
throughout most of the twentieth century, as something that had to be subordi-
nated to modernism’s core values of originality, individuality, and complexity, as
immediate particularity is said to be subordinated to abstract universality, but
 African American Modernism at Mid-Century 31

that the visual index of “race” was itself based, as Frantz Fanon revealed,’ on a
symbolic code that made the optical realm of the gaze central to the politics of
social recognition.
Looking at the Spiral moment in the context of the broad ruptures of
the 1960s as a whole, this study identifies two issues that cast the “problem of
the visual” into an altered light. One concerns the out-of-joint quality that arises
in the uneven relationship between minority art histories and the big story of
twentieth-century modernism, which I touch on by showing how Bearden’s
individual story personifies a wider, generational, story about the mid-century
shifts that resulted in the passage from late modern to postmodern. The other
concerns an equally discrepant quality in the surrounding discourse whereby a
rift often arises between what black artists are doing in the work and what intel-
lectuals, advocates, and patrons seem to want them to be doing in society at
large. These issues demand a critical revision of the modern art story that is
able to enter into the dialogic spaces of the diaspora imagination. Understood
as a place of “discrepant engagement,”® whose iconology remains unwritten,
Bearden’s art and Ellison’s ekphrasis illuminate these hitherto unseen dimen-
sions of hybrid modernity.

Uptown Looking Downtown

Bearden’s journey began at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance in the late
1930s. Having graduated from New York University in 1936, while also enrolled
at the Art Students League, he contributed editorial cartoons to such newspapers
as the Baltimore Afro-American, and worked as a city welfare department
caseworker from 1938 onward. His first studio was on West 125th Street, where
Claude McKay was a neighbor, and his second was in the basement of the
Apollo Building, shared with the photographers Morgan and Marvin Smith.
Drawn toward the circle of artists who met at the 306 West 141st Street studio
run by sculptor Henry Bannarn and painter Charles Alston, where his first
exhibition was held in May 1940, Bearden had found a supportive environment.
It was among the 306 group that he first met fellow painters Norman Lewis
and Jacob Lawrence, and where he also crossed paths with Ralph Ellison,
who had initially contemplated becoming a sculptor, having briefly studied with
Richmond Barthe after leaving Tuskegee Institute.’
As the Pan-African imagery of the Harlem Renaissance gave way to
scenes of rural Americana in the Depression era, Bearden was outspoken on
32 Kobena Mercer

issues of “race” among American art-world institutions. His viewpoint was

informed by a strong interest in the wide-ranging debates on the “social respon-
sibility of the artist” that arose against the background of the the Popular Front
platform announced at the 1935 Communist International, on the one hand,
and the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, from 1939 to
1941, on the other. In dialogue with the views of Stuart Davis, who led the
American Artists Congress (1935-36), as well as those of Augusta Savage, who
formed the Harlem Artists Guild (1935-41) along similar lines, Bearden’s
approach was shaped by a dual commitment to the political imperatives of black
representation and the expressive possibilities of modernist painting. Early paint-
ings, such as Cotton Workers (1942), sought to reconcile artistic freedom and
social responsibility by turning to the working-class “folk” cultures of the South,
and such choices aligned Bearden with the vernacular realism embraced by
Elizabeth Catlett (b. 1915), Charles White (b. 1918) and John Biggers (b. 1924).
Where White depicted a sharecropper’s eviction in Hear This (1942), Bearden’s
Rite of Spring (1941-42) adopted a similar theme in its portrayal of a factory boss
handing a termination notice to a despondent mother. The stylized distortion
that characterizes the factory owner’s exaggerated hands and massive face high-
lights an anti-naturalistic emphasis that was influenced by George Grosz, who
was Bearden’s tutor at the Art Students League. The influence of Diego Rivera
and José Orozco further accentuated an internationalist outlook, which Bearden
shared with Catlett, who had relocated to Mexico City in 1940, designing litho
prints and posters at the Taller de Grafica Popular.
In two important articles of this period—“The Negro Artist and Mod-
ern Art” (1934), published in Opportunity, the journal of the Urban League, and
“The Negro Artist’s Dilemma” (1946), published in the short-lived avant-garde
journal, Critique—Bearden took a sharply critical view on the politics of “race”
and representation.'? Acknowledging the achievement of the 1920s, which lay in
the recognition of black American expressive culture as an artistic subject and as
a source of stylistic inspiration, he nonetheless rejected Alain Locke's ancestralist
paradigm on the grounds that “to try and carry on in America where African
sculpture left off would be to start on a false basis—the gap of the years, the
environment, and ideology is too great.”!!
Where the 1934 article was critical of the “timidity of the Negro artist”
and the distorted self-perception whereby minorities felt they had to erhulate
outmoded models of academic competence, it expressed Bearden’s view that
 African American Modernism at Mid-Century 33

modernism and the African American vernacular were not mutually incompati-
ble. From his opening premise that, “the post-Impressionists, the Cubists, the
Futurists, and hosts of other movements . . . are commendable in the fact that
they substituted for mere photographic realism, a search for inner truths”!? to
his conclusion that the “Negro artist . . . must not be content with merely
recording a scene as a machine. He must enter wholeheartedly into the situation
he wishes to convey,”!? the argument highlighted Bearden’s immersive commit-
ment to a vernacular realism in which expressive standpoint took precedence
over the duty of depiction that was implicitly assigned to black artists on
account of “race.”
Indeed, the 1946 essay pinpointed insiduous pressures created by three
prevalent assumptions, namely: “1. The Negro should continue, or at least simu-
late, the traditions of African art. 2. The Negro artist should attempt a unique,
nationalistic, social expression, closely akin in feeling to jazz music and the
sprituals .. . . 3. The Negro’s art should be a trenchant reflection of his political
and social aspirations.”!4 The burden of critique was directed toward what Bear-
den saw as an implicit double standard in the reception of black artists. Between
1926 and 1933 the Harmon Foundation’s annual awards, Distinguished Achieve-
ment among Negroes, had played a major role in providing exhibition opportu-
nities for the 1920s generation, but its philanthropic agenda compounded the
perception of “Negro art” as “peculiarly backward”! in its relationship to mod-
ern art as a whole. Highly critical of such double standards, Bearden’s view was
that “the attitude of the Foundation towards Negro artists was patronizing; it
firmly established the pattern of segregated exhibits [and] it fostered artificial
and arbitrary artistic standards, stemming from a sociological rather than aes-
thetic interest in the exhibitor’s works.'° To the extent that Bearden’s position
was framed by a broad historical understanding of the political character of the
relations of “race” and representation, his awareness of a struggle for access into
art-world institutions aligned him with the hard-won insights of earlier genera-
tions. After reviewing nineteenth-century stereotypes in American art, his asser-
tion that “it is the privilege of the oppressor to depict the oppressed”'” echoed
with the analysis put forward by W. E. B. DuBois in “Criteria of Negro Art.”!8
From his starting point that, “the Negro, aside from his folk expressions, is a
latecomer into the visual arts,”! his account overlapped with the historical sur-
vey that Alain Locke had curated in The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the
Negro Artist and the Negro Theme in Art? Although Bearden had questioned
34 Kobena Mercer

Locke’s initial embrace of modernist primitivism, both shared the view that
“culture is not a biologically inherited phenomenon.””! Hence, Bearden’s view
that “the Negro is part of the amalgam of American life,””* actually confirmed
Locke’s later position, which re-accentuated the nineteenth-century term “amal-
gamation’ so as to stress the hyphenated character of American Negro identity.
Concluding his 1942 review entitled Who or What is Negro?, Locke declared:
“There is, in brief, no ‘The Negro,’” for where “we stress the dominant flavor of
the blend [it] is only in this same limited sense that anything is legitimately
styled “Negro;’ actually it is Afro- or Negro-American, a hybrid product of
Negro reaction to American cultural forms and patterns.”’* Hence, as he put it
in his motto for black Atlantic modernity: “To be Negro . . . is to be distinc-
tively composite.””4
It was precisely this multi-accentual approach to the composite realities
of African American life that Ellison picked up on and pinpointed as the locus
of Bearden’s distinctive stylistic signature when he wrote:

During the late thirties when | first became aware of Bearden’s

work, he was painting scenes of the Depression in a style strongly
influenced by the Mexican muralists. This work was powerful, the
scenes grim and brooding, and through his depiction of unemployed
workingmen in Harlem he was able, while evoking the Southern
past, to move beyond the usual protest painting of the period to
reveal something of the universal elements of an abiding human
condition. By striving to depict the times, by reducing scene,
character, and atmosphere to a style, he caught something of both the
universality of Harlem life and the “harlemness” of the national human
predicament.”

Before we open up Ellison’s trope of chiasmus, or doubling, which has impor-

tant implications for grasping the “double root” of Bearden’s style, as it were, it
is crucial to take account of Bearden’s passage through the mid- to late-1940s
and to understand the double-binds he was obliged to negotiate with the advent
of Abstract Expressionism.
During the period between 1944 and 1947, when he was represented by
the Samuel Kootz Gallery on East 57th Street, following solo exhibitions such as
The Passion of Christ (1945) at Caresse Crosby's G Place Gallery in Washington
 African American Modernism at Mid-Century 35

D.C., Bearden sought to resolve the dilemmas he had previously identified by

turning to literary sources. Taking inspiration from Garcia Lorca’s Lament for a
Bullfighter for a 1946 solo exhibition of watercolors and oils, he followed it with
another series, including Poor Thirsty Souls and Some Drink! Some Drink! (1946),
inspired by Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, which was in turn followed by
a series based on The Iliad. Some individual pieces from each of these series fea-
tured in the Whitney Annual exhibitions of 1945 to 1947 and He Is Arisen (1945)
was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.
Bearden’s narrative choices may be read as an effort to reconcile the
perceived particularity of the black vernacular with the universalist values
arrogated by modernism. Rabelais and Lorca, who evoked the Old World
“folk” cultures of the European peasantry and popular classes, were aligned
with Bearden’s passion for Goya’s Disasters of War, which he viewed in the 1946
essay, against the propagandistic or sentimental pitfalls of mere protest, as an
exemplary articulation of art and politics. His interest in tragedy would also
account for the selection of those moments of biblical narrative, namely the
Crucifixion and Resurrection, central to the black Protestant church. Finally,
such works as Blues Has Got Me (1946), contributed to a group show at Kootz
entitled Homage to Jazz, indicated both the dialogue that Bearden was striving
for as well as the fresh dilemmas that arose with the shift from figurative to
abstract expressionism.
Placed at the Kootz gallery alongside Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Mother-
well, William Baziotes, Carl Holty, and Byron Brown, Bearden’s uptown-to-
downtown journey had much in common with other African American artists of
his generation. Between 1941 and 1953 Jacob Lawrence had six solo exhibitions at
Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, which also held exhibitions by Horace
Pippin; William Henry Johnson had shows at the Wakefield Galleries in 1943
and 1944 during Betty Parson’s tenure; and Norman Lewis was represented by
Marian Willard from 1946 to 1964.7° What happened next, however, serves to
reveal the inadequacy of the exclusion/inclusion couplet in accounting for the
historical interaction between African American artists and the institutions of
metropolitan modernism. In 1946 Samuel Kootz organized a touring exhibition
with sponsorship form the United States Information Service entitled Advancing
American Art. Although intended to demonstrate modern art’s migration to
postwar New York, when the show arrived in Paris and was derided as retar-
dataire rather than avant-garde, the response precipitated the closure of Kootz’s
36 Kobena Mercer

gallery in July 1948. When Kootz reopened in September 1949, with a new roster
of artists that included Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock,
Bearden found that, like Byron Brown and Carl Holty, he had been dropped.
Responding to the displacement by withdrawing from painting, Bearden took a
nine-month study leave in Paris, but even after his return to New York in 1952
he experienced a crisis of confidence that persisted until the early 1960s.
Looking back on that period, Bearden recalled: “I had two worlds, two
different polarities: the blues up here, the downtown scene there with Kootz. At
some point this had to coalesce.”?” But it didn’t. Or rather, it was not until the
popular ruptures of the 1960s that the cultural and political conditions were
created for such a coalescence. Hence, although Ellison was keenly aware of the
double-binds that black artists were placed in as a result of opting for representa-
tional realism, he overlooked the twist to the “Negro artist’s dilemma” that arose
during the heyday of American abstraction. Observing that the black artist “feels
an irremediable conflict between his identity as a member of an embattled social
minority and his freedom as an artist,””8 Ellison was excoriating in his view of
the 1940s generation, for he argued that: “while many are convinced that simply
to recognize social imbalance is enough to put it to riot, few achieve anything
like artistic mastery, and most fail miserably through a single-minded effort to
‘tell it like it is.””? Adding that the “highest praise and admiration” was won by
“those who have offered an answer to the question—ever crucial in the lives of a
repressed minority—of who and what they are in the most simplified and
graphic terms,” which may be understood as an allusion to Jacob Lawrence,
Ellison’s voluntarist emphasis nonetheless underplays the structural conditions
of monocultural consensus that conditioned individual choices during the still-
segregated era of the 1950s.
Ann Gibson points out that the inclusion at the center of such artists as
Charles Alston, Hale Woodruff, and Norman Lewis—who participated in the
Artist’s Sessions at Studio 35—did not preempt the perception of their work as
marginal.’! Where action painting exalted bebop improvisation as a generative
analogue for the spontaneous gestural stroke, musical antiphony was understood
as a call-and-response pattern in which “no single instrumentalist established
absolute dominance”*? over the composition: yet in the drive toward painterly
purity that led, say, from Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942) to
Franz Kline’s Dahlia (1959), for example, such works as Norman Lewis's Jazz
Musicians (1948) or Charles Alston’s Blues Singer I (1952) were seen as manifesta-
 African American Modernism at Mid-Century 37

tions of stylistic centrism. Forms of directed abstraction that retained referential

signification were seen to stop short of high modernist values which held
that “expressionistic brushwork was an authentic index of an artist’s emotional
honesty.”°> Hence African American artists who also practiced stylistic variation
within their work were seen to betray “a lack of sincerity or conviction.”*
On the other hand, as Bearden himself put it in a 1980 interview: “For me, the
trouble is the word ‘abstract.’ . . . A lot of these painters painted with jazz sounds
filling their studios . . . Now I was lost in this . . At my studio in the Apollo I
found the music more interesting, and although I couldn’t see any painterly
equivalent at the time, I did try some experiments with Holty in the use of
color—that it sometimes broke open the picture for me—that it seemed to run
away and not stay on the canvas. So | just began to work in bigger chords of
color. . . .Then just as the color was getting away from me, so did painting as a
whole. Like the surveyor in Kafka’s Castle, it always seemed to elude me.” To
the extent that visual studies might seek to explain the conflicted inclusion of
black artists in the 1950s by examining the discursive valence of “folk art” in the
nascent hegemony of American art-world institutions as formations of both a
national and international culture of modern art, it would do well to take
account of Gibson’s insights into the prevailing sublation of cultural difference
during this period. Gibson relays a telling anecdote in which “Sculptor Phillip
Pavia recalls Hale Woodruff as being a friend of Ad Reinhardt’s, a paying
member of the Club, and a good painter. . . “One night we had a minstrel
show,’ said Pavia, ‘[Woodruff] didn’t like it, and he complained to me about it.
He didn’t like the idea of jazz as folk art, either,’ adding, “We didn’t have any
color prejudice. . . . | don’t think he liked us very much, but we liked him.”*°
During his final days at Kootz, Bearden contributed to a limited edition publi-
cation entitled Women: A Collaboration of Artists and Writers (1948), and in it, as
Gibson reveals, the author of the text, William Carlos Williams, wrote: “because
Bearden was a Negro, he could understand Woman, because he ‘alone among
men resembles her.’”?”? Such underlying equivalences confound the view that
anti-mimetic or non-representational practices somehow transcended the social
inscription of difference in the optical realm.
Turning now to Spiral’s 1960s moment, I shall echo Ralph Ellison's
question—“How then does an artist passionately concerned with solving the
more advanced problems of painting as painting address himself to the task
(never so urgent as now) of defining Negro American identity, of its pressing
38 Kobena Mercer

claims for recognition and for justice?”3°—to suggest that the answer Bearden
discovered in the montage principle was a dialogic mode of double voicing
which would loosen and undo the double-binds of “race” and representation
that had created the impasse of the “Negro artist’s dilemma.”

Spiral and the Cut

Following the 1963 March on Washington, union leader A. Phillip Randolph
called for a meeting with Bearden and Woodruff, asking how artists might
respond to the Civil Rights movement.*? The Spiral group held its first meeting
on 5 July 1963 at Bearden’s Canal Street loft. “As a symbol for the group, we
chose spiral,” said Woodruff, “a particular kind of spiral, the Archimedean one:
because, from a starting point, it moves outwards embracing all directions, yet
constantly upward.”4°
With Alston and Lewis from the Studio 306 era alongside younger artists
such as Reginald Gammon (b. 1921), William Majors (b. 1930), Richard Mayhew
(b. 1934), and Emma Amos (b. 1938), Spiral’s cross-generational composition
underlined its ambition to combine artistic freedom and political commitment.
Having leased a gallery at 147 Christopher Street with a view to a group homage
to slain Civil Rights activists in the South, which was to have been entitled
Mississippi 1964, members were wary of the potential misperception of the
initiative as mere documentary or protest. In the ensuing debate, an alternative
idea was adopted in which it was proposed that works would be produced
within the stricture of a monochrome palette. Hence, during its brief existence
from 1963 to 1965, Spiral staged its first and only exhibition, Black and White.
Emma Amos recalled that Bearden arrived one evening with “an enormous
picture file, all cut out in shapes and stuffed in a bag. He brought it to the Spiral
meeting place on Christopher Street and spread it out on the floor, suggesting
that we make a collaborative piece.”4! Although Amos and Mayhew joined in,
with a view to making a mural along the lines of Picasso’s Guernica, Bearden’s
idea for a collective collage proved unworkable and was subsequently dropped.
Black and White featured paintings directly inspired by the March on
Washington, such as Reginald Gammon’s Freedom Now (1965), based on a press
photo by Moneta Sleet, Jr., and Norman Lewis's Processional (1965), an abstract
work whose diagonal thrust vividly evoked the era’s optimism in a coalitional
politics of progressive movement, a theme previously portrayed in Charles
Alston’s Walking (1958). As the setting in which the Photomontage Projections
 African American Modernism at Mid-Century 39

were first exhibited, Black and White not only provided the catalytic context for
Bearden’s individual breakthrough, but marked the turn to collage aesthetics as
a decisive shift among African American artists of the 1960s as a whole. Forming
the basis of Bearden’s first museum retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of
Art in 1965, the twenty-one Projections also featured in the 1968 Paintings and
Projections exhibition, which was the occasion for Ellison’s insightful ekphrasis.
Illuminating the dialectics of negation and affirmation at play in the work, he
reveals how montage creates a hyphenated interval between painting and
photography. Ellison recognized that what Bearden broke through was the
impasse whereby the black artist's burden of representing the “race” was at odds
with the modernist ideal of expressive freedom, which had liberated modern art
from the duty of depiction. His trope of chiasmus thus offers a guiding thread
into the work’s labyrinthine mise-en-scéne, for to catch “something of the
universality of Harlem life and the ‘arlemness’ of the national human predica-
ment,” is to subvert the absolute “either/or” dichotomy that Fanon identified in
the “manichean delirium” installed into the visual by the optical polarities of the
gaze.*? Such doubling breaks open the closed or saturated codes of “race” as a
representational problem that once equated the universal and the particular with
the arbitrary signs of skin, blood, and bone and brings a “both/and” logic of
hybrid inventiveness into the mix.
Bearden spoke of “arriving at the space” when asked about the subject
matter of the Projections: “A lot of the life that I knew in certain rural Negro
communities is passing, and I set down some of my impressions of that life,” he
said.** Beyond the biographical enclosure that has often limited previous inter-
pretation, once we observe how Bearden’s iconography roams and shuttles across
urban and rural spaces, often enjoined by the motif of the train, we get closer to
the dynamic relationship between his “cubist techniques’ and the photo-
graphic material he took as found. Cutting and pasting images that were literally
torn out of such magazines as Life, Ebony, and Ladies’ Home Journal onto small
8-by-11-inch masonite boards, Bearden employed dechirage and papier collé,
which he had been quietly experimenting with since the late 1950s, to underline
the cut or the paper tear as both a stylistic signature and a mark of critical
discrepancy between different regimes of representation.
“Suggesting some of the possibilities through which commonplace
materials could be forced to undergo a creative metamorphosis when manipu-
lated by . . . non-representational techniques,” writes Ellison, “he has sought to
 40 Kobena Mercer

reveal a world long hidden by the clichés of sociology and rendered cloudy by
the distortions of newsprint and the false continuity imposed on our conception
of Negro life by television and much documentary photography.” The Street
(fig. 2) and The Dove imply a highly motivated choice of scene, for where Aaron
Siskind’s candid reportage of the 1930s, for example, had indeed become a cliché
of postwar photojournalism, the problem-oriented depiction of the “ghetto”
had saturated the genre with connotations of poverty, injustice, and despair.
Whereas Archibald Motley’s Black Belt (1934) had performed an unstable inver-
sion of Edward Burra’s Harlem (1934) by substituting values of community and
conviviality into the contested space of the street, Bearden’s dis-articulation of
photographic realism was all the more subversive in its implication that social
reality is itself composite and contradictory. “A harsh beauty . . . asserts itself out
of the horrible fragmentation which Bearden’s subjects and their environment
have undergone,” 46 says Ellison, who
adds: “Where any number of painters
have tried to project the ‘prose’ of
Harlem—a task performed more suc-
cessfully by photographers—Bearden
has concentrated on releasing its
poetry, its abiding rituals and cere-
monies of affirmation, creating a
surreal poetry componded of vitality
and powerlessness, destructive im-
pulse and enduring faith.”4”7 The
Fig. 2. Romare Bearden, The Street, 1964. Photomontage, 31 x 40 in. mural-like scale of the works further
(78.7 x 101.6 cm). Estate of Romare Bearden. © Romare Bearden ; : ‘ ;
Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. highlights Bearden’s oblique, rather
than oppositional, relationship to pho-
tography. Taking up Gammons’s suggestion to enlarge the original paper collages
to a scale of 3 by 4 or 6 by 8 feet by means of the photostat process, which
rendered a continuous monochrome surface in keeping with Spiral’s black-and-
white proposal, such photo-mechanical translation elevated the small, box-like
“masters” into the realm of history painting, while also lending them to mass
reproduction where they continue to circulate in the form of posters and prints.
Secondly, with regards to the figurative vocabulary of “mask-faced
Harlemites and tenant farmers” we find across Mysteries or Conjur Woman (fig.
3), for example, Ellison’s emphasis is on the synthetic moment of re-assemblage,
 African American Modernism at Mid-Century 4!

whereby the photographic fragments that

Bearden pulled out of his sources are can-
celled out and yet legibly preserved in their
rearticulation “as signs and symbols of a
humanity that has struggled to survive the
fragmentizing effects of American social
processes.”# As he continues: “Through his
creative assemblage . . . his Harlem becomes a
place inhabited by people who have in fact
been resurrected, re-created by art, a place...
where the sacred and profane, reality and
dream are ambiguously mingled. And resur-
rected with them in the guise of fragmented
ancestral figures and forgotten gods (really
masks of the instincts, hopes, emotions,
Fig. 3. Romare Bearden, Conjur Woman, 1964.
aspirations and dreams) are those powers that
Photomontage,
367/sx283/s in. (91.4 x 71.1 cm). now surge in our land with a potentially
Estate of Romare Bearden. © Romare Bearden s f hich é f a
Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. estructive force which springs trom the very
fact of their having for so long gone unrecog-
nized, unseen.”*? Where social relations of “race” and representation overdeter-
mined portraiture as one of the most saturated genre in which depictions of the
ex-African face and body were remorselessly subjected to the iron mask of the
stereotype, Ellison’s insights are to be offset against a reception context in which
Dore Ashton found Bearden’s figures to be “accusing,” and in which Robert
Hughes merely perceived “crowded figures, shouting. . . Here I am! Notice me!”*!
On the contrary, Ellison’s repeated evocation of the Fanonian trope of the mask
draws attention to the inner realities whereby “faces which draw on the abstract
character of African sculpture for their composition are made to focus our
attention on the far from abstract reality of a people. Here abstract interiors are
presented in which concrete life is acted out under repressive conditions.””
Although Ellison overlooks the stylistic exaggeration Bearden gives to human
hands—itself a legacy from the 1930s, where it was appropriated from socialist
realism’s concern with the dignity of manual labor—he insightfully observes that
“these works give plastic expression to a vision in which the socially grotesque
conceals a tragic beauty.”®? Adumbrating his conclusion that the Projections “em-
body Bearden’s interrogation of the empirical values of a society that mocks its
42 Kobena Mercer

own ideals through a blindness induced by the myth of race,”*4 I must end
with some remarks about the dialogic role of the cut in Bearden’s dialectical
photomontage.
Far removed from Alain Locke’s idiom of “amalgamation,” and much
closer to the dicey pluralism that characterised Albert Murray's sociological
overview in The Omni-Americans,” Ellison nonetheless points to an interactive
space of antiphony as the very setting in which Bearden’s collage principle acti-
vated a restlessly interrogative dialogue with the cornerstones of the European
canon. “He has used the discoveries of Giotto and de Hooch no less than those
of Juan Gris, Picasso, Schwitters and Mondrian . . . and has discovered his own
uses for the metaphysical richness of African sculptural forms,” wrote Ellison in
yet another chiastic fold of double-consciousness; “In brief, Bearden has used
(and most playfully) all of his artistic knowledge and skill to create a curve of
plastic vision which reveals to us something of the mysterious complexity of
those who dwell in our urban slums.”% It is exactly this “curve of plastic vision”
that slices through Bearden’s storytelling picture space, as curator Lowery Stokes
Sims observes.°’ When Ellison ends by saying, “Bearden’s meaning is identical
with his method. His combination of technique is in itself eloquent of the sharp
breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of
time, and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize
much of Negro American history,”’® such insight calls out to the aleatory con-
ception of “the cut” that James Snead briefly sketched in “Repetition as a Figure
of Black Culture.” Engaging with Hegel’s view of history as developmental
rather than cylical, Snead argued that, where “European culture does not allow
‘a succession of accidents and surprises’ but instead maintains the illusions of
progression and control at all costs . . . Black culture, in the ‘cut,’ builds ‘acci-
dents’ into its coverage, almost as if to control their unpredictablity. . . . [T]his
magic of the ‘cut’ attempts to confront accident and rupture not by covering
them over but by making room for them inside the system itself.”°? Moving
through music, dance, and language to describe what the “cut” does in folk
song, in sermon, and in jazz improvisation, Snead saw a strange affinity between
Freud’s notion of repetition compulsion and the way in which “in black culture,
the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick it up when you
come back to get it.’ If there is a goal in such a culture, it is always deferred.”
If it is by virtue of such cultural deferral or differance that blackness
falls behind the beat, into the place of the “syncope” where punctual meter goes
 African American Modernism at Mid-Century 43

missing in the rhythm, then I suggest that what Bearden’s Photomontage Projec-
tions did, in their double-voiced dialogue between the compositional elements of
line, plane and color in post-Cubist pictorial space and the heterogenous cuts
and folds of diaspora subjectivity, was to issue a “coupre” or break to the bound-
ary that once separated African and American as if they were mutually exclusive
identities. “It’s the spacing of what you leave out that makes what is in there,”
said Bearden. “A good illustration is the Greek vase . . . The spaces between
these Attic figures counted even more than the figures themselves. It was one of
the few art forms in which not just the figures, but I want to say the compo-
nents, seem to be torn apart. What holds it all together is that the spacing
between the various elements seems to be more important than the figures or
objects themselves.”°! Interspersed with his memories of conversations with
Stuart Davis about the role of the interval in the music of Earl Hines, these
remarks confirm the point that the thing is there for you to pick it up when you
come back to get it, for we should also know that the photostat apparatus was
already there during the 1940s, when Bearden enlarged textbook reproductions
to conduct his own compositional analyses of ancient ceramics, European paint-
ings, Chinese landscapes, and much else besides.® Continuing the conversation
on the analysis of picture-making space via correspondence with Carl Holty,
what resulted was The Painter’ Mind, a coauthored book published in 1969.
By way of a coda: Bearing in mind the highly volatile climate of the
times, Spiral’s outlook was rapidly overshadowed by the Black Arts movement,
which saw the emergence of such artists’ groups as Africobra, formed in 1968 in
Chicago by Jeff Donaldson and others, and the Black Emergency Cultural
Coalition, formed by Benny Andrews in New York in 1969. From his apparently
conservative-liberal late-modern standpoint, Ellison was implicitly writing
against the grain of such voices as those of Amiri Baraka, Ron Karenga, and
Larry Neal, who espoused what Addison Gayle called “the black aesthetic.”™
The paradox was not merely that, in its populist demand for identifiably black
content, the Black Arts movement was merely repeating the Popular Front
demand for social realism, but that, more broadly, in its highly didactic tone, the
essentialist discourse of the black cultural nationalists was compulsively repeat-
ing the three prescriptive pressures Bearden had pinpointed in 1946, namely that
black artists “should continue the traditions of African art . . . should attempt a
unique, nationalistic, social expression . . . should [provide] a trenchant reflec-
tion of [his] political aspirations.” As Bakhtin had put it, and as Bearden worked
44 Kobena Mercer

it through, substituting “image” for “word,” as it were, when he realized that the
inner dialectical quality of the sign comes out fully into the open in times of
social upheaval, as it did in the 1960s: “The word is language is half someone
else’s. It becomes one’s own . . . only when the speaker appropriates the word,
adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment
of appropriation the word does not exist in a neutral or impersonal language . . .
rather it exists in other people’s mouths, serving other people’s intentions: it is
from there that one must take the word and make it one’s own.”©

1. Ralph Ellison, “Introduction,” Romare Bearden: Paintings and Projections, exh. cat. (Albany: The Art
Gallery, State University of New York, 1968), reprinted as “The Art of Romare Bearden,” in Going to
the Territory (New York: Vintage, 1987), 221. On Bearden’s and Ellison's dialogue, see also Paul Rogers,
“Ralph Ellison, the Collages of Romare Bearden and Race: Some Speculations,” /nternational Review
ofAfrican American Art to, no. 3 (1994): 7-10.
2. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy ofLanguage (1929; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1973), 23.
3. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 234.
4. James Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1984), 59-79.
5. Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Mary Schmidt Campbell, and Sharon F. Patton, eds., Memory and
Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987 (New York: Oxford University Press and Studio
Museum in Harlem, 1991).
6. Michele Wallace, “Modernism, Post-Modernism, and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American
Culture,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever,
Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 39-50.
7. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1967).
8. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
9. Mark Busby, Ralph Ellison (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 11.
10. Romare Bearden, “The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” Opportunity (December 1934), 371-72.
Romare Bearden, “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” Critique (November 1946), 16-22.
11, Romare Bearden, letter to Walter Quirt (20 January 1942), quoted in Myron Schwartzman, Romare
Bearden: His Life and Art (New York: Abrams, 1990), 121. ,
12. Bearden, “The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” 371.
 African American Modernism at Mid-Century 45

13. Ibid.
14. Bearden, “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” 20.
15. Malcolm Vaughn, New York American (1927), quoted in Bearden, “The Negro Artist and Modern
Art,” 372. See also Gary Reynolds and Beryl Wright, eds., Against the Odds: African American Artists
and the Harmon Foundation (Newark, N.J.: Newark Museum, 1989).
16. Bearden, “The Negro Artist's Dilemma,” 19.
17. Ibid., 17.
18. W. E. B. DuBois, “The Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis (October 1926); 290-97.
19. Bearden, “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” 16.
20. Alain Locke, The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and ofthe Negro Theme in Art
(Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1940).
21. Bearden, “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” 19.
22. Ibid.
23. Alain Locke, “Who or What Is “Negro?” Opportunity (February and March, 1942), reprinted in
Jeffrey C. Stewart, ed., The Critical Temper ofAlain Locke: A Selection ofHis Essays on Art and Culture
(New York: Garland Publishing 1983), 311.
24. Ibid.
25. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 231-32.
26. Ann Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 120.
27. Romare Bearden, in Schwartzman, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, 146.
28. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 230.
29. Ibid., 229.
30. Ibid., 230.
31. See Chapter 6, “Painting Through Primitivism” in Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics,
114-32.
32. Matthew Rohn, Visual Dynamics in Jackson Pollocks Abstractions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987),
quoted in ibid., 32.
33. Ibid., ror.
34. Ibid.
35. Romare Bearden, in Schwartzman, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, 173.
36. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, 122.
37. Ibid., 76.
38. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 230-31.
39. Gail Gelburd, “Romare Bearden in Black and White: The Photomontage Projections of 1964,” in
Gail Gelburd and Thelma Golden, eds., Romare Bearden in Black and White: Photomontage Projections
1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Abrams, 1997), 18.
46 Kobena Mercer

40. Hale Woodruff, “Foreword” to Spiral, exh. cat. (Long Island University, 1965), quoted in Floyd
Coleman, “The Changing Same: Spiral, the Sixties, and African-American Art,” in William E. Taylor
and Harriet G. Warkel, eds., A Shared Heritage: Art by Four African Americans (Indianapolis: Indianapolis
Museum of Art, 1996), 148-49.
41. Emma Amos, in Schwartzman, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, 210.
42. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 183.
43. Romare Bearden, in Schwartzman, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, 179.
44. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 234.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 236.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 234.
49. Ibid., 234-35.
50. Ibid., 235.
st. Dore Ashton, Romare Bearden: Projections, exh. cat. (Washington D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art,
1965) and Robert Hughes, in Time (June 1991), quoted in Gelbrund and Golden, Romare Bearden in
Black and White, 21.
52. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 235.
53. Ibid., 237.
54. Ibid.
55. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture
(New York: Dutton, 1970).
56. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 236 (emphasis added).
57. Lowery Stokes Sims, Romare Bearden (New York: Rizzoli Art Series, 1988).
58. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 237.
59. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” 67.
60. Ibid.
61. Romare Bearden, in Schwartzman, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, u10.
62. “When I started to paint in oil, I simply wanted to extend what I had done in watercolor. To do so
I had the initial sketch enlarged as a photostat . . . Later on I read Delacroix’s journal and felt that I too
could profit by systematically copying the masters . . . I again used photostats.” Romare Bearden,
“Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings,” Leonardo 2 (January 1969): 12.
63. Romare Bearden and Carl Holty, The Painter's Mind: A Study ofthe Relations ofStructure and Space
in Painting (New York: Crown Press, 1969).
64. Addison Gayle, Jr., The Black Aesthetic (New York: Doubleday, 1971).
65. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press 1981), 293-94.
Chaos and Cosmos:
Points of View in Art History and Aesthetics

Karen Lang

In a speech delivered in 1945 to the Institute for Advanced Study, Erwin Panofsky
commented on intersections between the humanist and the scientist:

There are, after all, problems so general that they affect all human
efforts to transform chaos into cosmos, however much these efforts
may differ in subject matter The humanist, too, finds himself faced—
once he attempts to think about what he is doing—with such questions
as: the changing significance of spatial and temporal data within
different frames of reference; the delicate relationship between the
phenomenon and the “instrument” (which, in the case of the human-
ist, is represented by the “document’’); the continuous and/or
discontinuous structure of the processes which we lightheartedly call
“historical evolution.”!

The stations of Panofsky’s art historical methodology demonstrate his thinking

about what he was doing: “the changing significance of spatio-temporal data within
different frames of reference” is studied in his 1927 Perspective as Symbolic Form;
“the delicate relationship between the phenomenon and... the ‘document’ finds
its fullest articulation in the iconographic method; finally, “the structure of the
processes” which enable “historical evolution” might be found in the underlying
laws of the discipline of art history itself. The search for such intrinsic principles
animates Panofsky’s early theoretical essays.
Turning from the strict observation of nature or culture toward specula-
tion on their objects of study, the scientist and the humanist transcend their separate
scholarly domains and join on a common plane of thought. This shift from the
empirical to the objective point of view also marks the arrival of theory—what
Panofsky describes as the thinking about what one is doing. Enabling the scientist
and the humanist to consider the object within a more speculative frame of refer-
ence, theory facilitates the creation and activation of fields of inquiry. Art history
is theoretical in a double sense: first, after close observation and thoughtful study
the art historian must interpret aesthetic objects which do not subscribe to natural
48 Karen Lang

laws; second, transforming an aggregate of aesthetic objects into a scholarly disci-

pline requires a theoretical point of view onto the field of the visual arts.
Indeed, art history is a curious discipline. Consisting of a domain of
aesthetic objects, art history requires the close observation and study of images which
by their very nature can never be “known” in the objective sense to which science
strives, as well as the classification of these objects into categories and contexts
which—structurally speaking—resemble those of the natural sciences.? If the goal
of the sciences is knowledge, then that of the humanities must be wisdom.* Conceding
knowledge to science does not leave art history in the lurch of relativism, however.
The methods employed by the art historian guide research toward reasonable ends.
In this way art history can be built up “as a respectable scholarly discipline” though
“its very objects come into being by an irrational, subjective process.”
In what follows I would like to reflect on points of view in art history and
aesthetics, on what enables the turn from chaos to cosmos, which is to say from
the perception of a single object to the transcendental vantage onto a unified field
of inquiry. To this end I will consider seeing, representation, and knowledge. Each
term of this triad can be correlated with a point of view: by “seeing” is meant the
perception of an object, or the empirical point of view; “representation,” on the
other hand, implies the shift from the perception of an object to the mental rep-
resentation of it, which entails an objective viewpoint;° lastly, “knowledge” refers
to the epistemological or transcendental vantage point, wherein one moves beyond
the mental representation of an object toward speculation on that object within a
broad field of inquiry. Examples of the latter point of view include the search for
the fundamental laws of perceptual phenomena or the initial classification of these
phenomena into schemes and systems.
Pace Panofsky, we might want to consider wisdom rather than knowl-
edge as the more appropriate term for “the history of art as a humanistic discipline,”
since art history trades in aesthetic objects. Yet art history is predicated on the
transformation of aesthetic phenomena into “knowable” objects, if not objects
of knowledge. In this sense Panofsky’s early theoretical essays demonstrate the
search for the fundamental principles necessary for a scientific art history
(Kunstwissenschaft). Encompassing internal and external vantage points within
its purview, theory enables the movement from seeing to representation to knowl-
edge. As theory ushers our perceptions into thoughts, and finally into knowledge,
so does it lead us from sight to insight, from the particular instanceto the
general category.’ In this way, the transition from seeing to representation to
 Points of View in Art History and Aesthetics 49

knowledge describes the movement of disciplinarity in the visual arts.

Art history, aesthetics, and visual studies—art history's satellites old and
new—require concepts, methods, and theoretical vantage points with which to turn
chaos into cosmos. Panofsky commences his 1920 essay “The Concept of Artistic
%
Volition” (“Der Begriff des Kunstwollens”) by addressing the particularity of art his-
tory, as well as the need for a theoretical point of view onto the field of investigation.

It is the curse and the blessing of the academic study of art that its ob-
jects necessarily demand consideration from other than a purely historical
point of view. A purely historical study, where it proceeds from the
history of form or the history of content, never explains the work of
art as a phenomenon except in terms of other phenomena. Historical
study does not draw on a higher source of perception: to explain the
artistic production of a particular artist within the frame of his time
(or in light of his individual artistic character), it traces a particular rep-
resentation iconographically, or a particular formal complex according
to a history of types, or even tries to determine if such a complex Is
derived from any particular influence at all. This means that each real
phenomenon to be investigated is referred to all the others within the
whole complex: their absolute locus and significance is not determined
by a fixed Archimedian point outside their essential nature. ...Artistic
activity, however, distinguishes itself from general historical activity (and
in this sense is like perception) in that tts productions represent not
the expressions of subjects but the informing of materials, not the given
events but the results. Thus in considering art we are faced with the
demand (which in the field of philosophy is satisfied by epistemology)
for a principle of explanation by which the artistic phenomenon can
be recognized not only by ever further references to other phenom-
ena within its historical sphere but also by a consciousness which
penetrates the sphere of its empirical existence.

Creating a unified history from an aggregate of aesthetic objects requires

an Archimedian point. Without it we remain in the vicious circle, for example, of
knowing style via the work of art and the work of art via its style. A viewpoint out-
side the circle might be given in the form of a principle, one which would not only
suggest the relation of art objects to each other but also tell us about the nature of
50 Karen Lang

art itself. Correlating aesthetic phenomena with a notion of causality and a system
of historical sequence is one thing, adequately describing the nature of art is an-
other. The aesthetic, in other words, offers special challenges for art history, something
Panofsky discovered as he sought to provide the “inherent laws” and to preserve
the “unique
q value” of “the academic study y of art.”?

Stargazing
Seeing, representation, knowledge: each involves the engagement with an object
as well as an empirical, objective, or transcendental point of view. In this sense each
term might be related to theory or the theoretical vantage point. Theory, whose
Greek stem is thea—“to look,” “to view,” “to contemplate’—customarily applies
to speculation, to schemes or systems of ideas which serve to explain, or account
for, a group of facts or phenomena. Interestingly, an archaic use of the word im-
plies a sight or spectacle. This entire cluster of meanings can be found in Theaetetus,
Plato's dialogue on epistemology. Socrates and Theaetetus’s attempt to answer the
question “what is knowledge?” concludes in undecidability: at the end of the dia-
logue we do not know what knowledge is, though we have a better idea of what it
is not. The insufficiencies of Socrates’ models of the soul as a wax block or an aviary
suggest the necessity for knowledge of a separation between sight and insight, a
point of view outside the scene of perception.!°
Midway along the journey of the dialogue, following a mention of winged
thoughts, Socrates tells Theaetetus about Thales, the founder of Greek natural phi-
losophy. As the anecdote goes, Thales, “studying the stars . . . and gazing aloft,”
fell into a well. A “witty and amusing Thracian servant-girl made fun of him be-
cause, she said, he was wild to know what was up in the sky but failed to see what
was in front of him and under his feet.” “The same joke,” Socrates concludes, “ap-
plies to all those who spend their lives in philosophy.”!! What intrigues me in this
anecdote—aside from its classical Schadenfreude—is the looks, for here we have
the empirical, the objective, and the transcendental points of view. Gazing up into
the (transcendental) heavens, which is to say into what he cannot know, Thales
fails to see what he could have seen; the servant girl, on the other hand, provides
the so-called objective perspective and with it her judgment of Thales, which takes
the form of laughter. If, according to Aristotle, all philosophy begins in wonder,
then without proper coordinates it can surely lead astray.!?
This scene of failed representation might be followed by another of more
positive outcome. In a well-known passage Kant equates the moral law in the sub-
 Points of View in Art History and Aesthetics 51

ject to the starry heavens above him.!> Arguably Kant’s most famous utterance aside
from the categorical imperative, “the starry heavens above me and the moral law
within me” concludes the second volume of his critical philosophy, the Critique
ofPractical Reason of 1788. It is useful to follow the philosopher at length on this
point, for in this conclusion he offers us the essential contours of the idealized
Kantian subject:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and
awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry
heavens above me and the moral law within me.| do not merely con-
jecture them and seek them as though in darkness or in the transcendent
region beyond my horizon:| see them before me, and | associate them
directly with the consciousness of my own existence.
The former be-
gins at the place | occupy in the external world of sense, and it broadens
the connection in which | stand into an unbounded magnitude of worlds
beyond worlds and systems of systems and into the limitless times of
their periodic motion, their beginning and their continuance.
The latter
begins at my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world
which has true infinity but which is comprehensible only to the un-
derstanding—a world which | recognize myself as existing in a universal
and necessary (and not only, as in the first case, contingent) connec-
tion, and thereby also in connection with all those visible worlds. The
former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were,
my importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the
planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came,
the matter which is for a little time provided with vital force, we know
not how. The latter, on the contrary, raises my worth as that of an in-
telligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals a life
independent of all animality and even of the whole world of sense—
at least in so far as it may be inferred from the purposive destination
assigned my existence by this law, a destination which Is not restricted
to the conditions and limits ofthis life but reaches into the infinite.!4

Consider how Kant’s scene involves a single subject. This individual has incorpo-
rated, as it were, the points of view we find in Plato’s dialogue: seeing, representation,
and knowledge come together under the auspices of the starry heavens and the
52 Karen Lang

moral law. Whereas the experience of the starry heavens “annihilates” the “impor-
tance” of the subject by reminding him of his inevitable mortality, or to use the
words of Kant, the fact that he “must give back to the planet . . . the matter from
which it came,” the moral law elevates the subject out of his station as “a mere
speck in the universe” and into the possibility of infinity. The subject in his infin-
ity is thereby rendered akin to the cosmos in its vastness, while he is also endowed
with the capacity to grasp a seemingly infinite totality. Guided by the moral law
as a regulative principle, the idealized Kantian subject discovers his superiority and
his “universal and necessary connection” to the universe in the contemplation of
the starry skies.
Having the choice to follow the moral law or not, the subject is consti-
tuted in its freedom at the same time as it is given the coordinates with which to
make the connection between near and far, subjective and objective, empirical and
transcendental. Here the transition from vita contemplativa to vita activa is a scene
of representation: theory, seeing the world, becomes the use of theory to form the
world as representation; finally, through the discovery of the moral law, theory pro-
vides a transcendental point of view onto both perception and understanding.
While the Kantian subject partakes of the desire, or, as Hannah Arendt would put
it, the human condition,’ to exceed the bounds of his own space and time, his
wonder does not go awry. Viewed historically, this idealized Kantian subject is both
powerful and poignant: following as it does the Copernican revolution, and more
recently the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which served as a turning point
in Enlightenment debates on the cosmos, Kant provides the subject with analytic
security at the same time as the laws of nature—and natural force—appeared to
be taking the ground from under his feet.
Kantian stargazing theory begins with a view directed into the night sky
which, along the way, becomes a re-creation of the world through representation.
If we now add the use of theory as an instrument, we will have our sign of three:
seeing, representation, and knowledge. Thinking “about what he [or she] is do-
ing,” the scientist and the humanist use theory as an instrument with which to
speculate on their respective fields of inquiry. If the Thales anecdote tells of the
yearning for the transcendental and the failure of the empirical point of view, then
the use of the theory as an instrument implies the vantage point of the Kantian
stargazer. In this sense Kantian stargazing is analogous to Hegel’s famous descrip-
tion of the owl of Minerva: like the owl of Minerva, the scientist and the humanist
embark upon the objective and arrive at the transcendental point of view when
 Points of View in Art History and Aesthetics 53

they separate themselves from both the object and context of study, taking flight
into a realm of pure speculation.
Entering the space between object and analyst, theory thus effects the sepa-
ration necessary for “objective” knowledge; employed as an instrument, theory
completes the move from seeing to representation to knowledge, which is also to
say from individual object to field of inquiry. Taking the metaphorical viewpoint
of furthest remove thus promotes the deepest understanding of the object of analy-
sis. Only the transcendental viewpoint onto a field of study—the “thinking about”
what one is doing rather than the analysis of the object per se—leads to the dis-
covery of the underlying principles binding objects to each other and into a scholarly
discipline. Panofsky adopts the transcendental vantage point in his early theoreti-
cal essays in order to discover the underlying principles of the history of art.
Since art history comprises a set of images and their history, unitary prin-
ciples not only define the objects in the field, they must also turn images into
objects of disciplinary knowledge. How does an ultimately unknowable aesthetic
object become an object of disciplinary knowledge? How does art history account
for the empirical, the objective, and the transcendental points of view within a uni-
fied field of inquiry? Panofsky’s early essays demonstrate how seeing, representation,
and knowledge might be reconciled in the history of art, and how a theory of style
might account for perception, representation in the form of a work of art, and his-
torical knowledge in the guise of a history of style. In so doing Panofsky’s theory
of style accounts for the empirical, the objective, and the transcendental points of
view just as it reveals something of the underlying principles comprising and cor-
relating the history of art.

Chaos, Cosmos, and Correlation

In 1915 Panofsky published a short essay, “The Problem of Style in the Visual Arts”
(“Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst”), in response to Heinrich Wolfflin’s
December 1911 lecture to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.!° Under the guise of
taking Wolfflin to task for his double root of style, Panofsky charts a relation be-
tween seeing and meaning, on the one hand, and form and content, on the other.
For Panofsky the cluster of terms that denote seeing—Sehen, Auge, Optische—te-
main mechanistic and empty of connotation (Sinn and Deutung) when these are
understood only literally. Is the eye merely an organic, unpsychological instrument,
as Wolfflin implies: can we fundamentally separate the relation of the eye and the
world from the relation of the soul (Seele) and the world?!” If Wolfflin’s five
54 Karen Lang

conceptual pairs describe how Renaissance and baroque paintings are composed,
and provide us with a formal vocabulary with which to describe these images,
Panofsky’s 1915 essay seeks to explain why representation is expressive.'®
Endeavoring to provide seeing, the eye, and the optical with figurative
meaning—which is to say with the capacity for expression—Panofsky stresses the
role of the soul or mind (Seele). Understood variously as the site of feeling, tem-
perament, and turn of mind, the Seele lends expressive content to what the eye
sees, as it organizes what is seen into meaningful content. Consequently style does
not have a double root—“a psychologically meaningless form of seeing,” on the
one hand, and “an expressive, interpretive capacity for meaningful content,” on
the other.!? Stressing the inner dimension that provides the “empty container” of
the eye with the capacity for content and individual expression, Panofsky thus
demonstrates the combined role of representation and expression in perceptual
experience. Whether considered individually or in relation to other images, the
artwork is the result of a dialectical interaction between general categories of
representation and individual See/e, and can only achieve individual expression as
the outcome of this interaction. Artists, Panofsky contends, work within and shape
general stylistic categories: the artist chooses between linear and painterly just as
he or she paints in a style that might be characterized as linear or painterly. In short,
perception, expression, and representation must be joined in the concept of style
just as they are joined in the creation of a work of art. Unlike W6lfflin, then, for
Panofsky a single work of art and the art of period are allied as manifestations of
an a priori will to form and expression.”°
Notwithstanding his criticisms, Panofsky praises Wélfflin for providing
art history with general categories such as linear, painterly, and so forth. The “first
task of art history must be the discovery, elaboration, and refinement of these cate-
gories,” he argues, for only in this way can art history achieve systematicity and
disciplinary coherence.*! If one considers these categories literally, then they
remain colorless concepts—analogous in Panofsky’s essay to the “empty container
of the eye.” Like the dialectical relation between the eye and the soul, WélfHlin’s
general categories obtain their full value only when they are set in a dynamic rela-
tion with particular, actual forms. For Panofsky, then, the dialectical relation both
explains and creates the problem of style: if an understanding of the interaction of
the eye and Seele is essential to activate the category of style and to provide it with
analytical and heuristic value, then this very interaction is responsible for the mul-
tiplicity and heterogeneity of individual forms.
 Points of View in Art History and Aesthetics 55

As far as he succeeds in offering an accounting of Wélfflin’s five concep-

tual pairs, Panofsky concludes by saying that a complete explanation is not possible
because, in this case, causality cannot be determined. Yet even if “it is not possible
for scientific knowledge to delineate the historical and psychological causes of the
general artistic forms of representation, then all the more must it be its task to in-
vestigate the metahistorical and metapyschological sense [Sinn] of these forms.
What does it mean—from the point of view of the metaphysical, fundamental
conditions of artistic creation—that the representations of an epoch are linear or
painterly, planar or recessional? The possibilites of posing this infinitely fruitful
question would deprive the consideration of art itself if in great images it would
glimpse, instead of the expressive realization of the soul or mind /Geistes], modali-
ties of seeing explicable by nothing other than the determination of natural laws.”
Operating “like an epistemologist,” Panofsky is here “not concerned with
the empirical subject,” understood as either the artist or the viewing subject, but
with “art itself,” and more precisely, with “what is harbored within the work of
art.” *3 Like Wolfflin, Panofsky trains his sights on the work rather than on the
maker. Unlike W6lfflin, however, whom he criticizes for defining Sehen, Auge, and
Optische too literally, Panofsky finds the traces of the maker in the work—soul or
mind, after all, lends individual temperament and feeling to the organ of the eye.
And yet, in the 1915 essay soul or mind is considered more as an a priori principle
than as an individual expressive element per se. Though Panofsky binds style to a
single, a priori principle, he is, in other words, not as interested in the composi-
tion of Seele so much as in how it operates. In this way he neatly avoids the thorny
task of defining messy terms like temperament or feeling. Instead, he focuses on
the more important task of delineating the analytical and heuristic value of a uni-
tary principle of style.
Operating “like an epistemologist,” moreover, allows Panofsky to assume
the role of interpreter, discovering meaning otherwise lost on those whose gaze lies
too near—spatially or temporally—to the object of study. From this vantage point
he is able to regard what lies within the object: “an involuntary gesture, without a
trace of expressive intention, can be eminently expressive,” he suggests in a foot-
note.?4 What remains in germ, expressed as it is in a footnote in the 1915 essay, is a
prolepsis—the trace of a future, iconographic method. Forms, traces, clues: Panofsky’s
search for meaning in an image might be likened to the practice of the medical
doctor and the sleuth.” Yet it is precisely in validating the role of the present-day
interpreter over the artist’s own interpretations of his or her work, or the aesthetic
56 Karen Lang

reactions to this work by the artist’s contemporaries, that Panofsky hopes to

determine the substance and function of the first principles of art history.*®
According to Panofsky, “it is Riegl who has come furthest in the creation
and use of such fundamental concepts.”?” Encompassing both a will to form and
the expressive features of the artwork itself, Riegl’s concept of artistic volition, the
Kunstwollen, might account for intrinsic meaning and the history of that meaning
as this is expressed in works of art. Acknowledging in his 1920 essay how the
Kunstwollen can easily slide into “psychological volition,” and the “equally com-
mon and parallel concept of ‘artistic intention,” Panofsky is keen to secure artistic
volition as a first principle.?8 To this end he avoids the use of artistic volition in
“modern aesthetics,” which tells us more about the “psychology of the beholder
making the judgment” than it does about the work of art itself.2? Moving away
from the psychological volition of both viewer and artist, as well as from the “his-
torically genetic” volition of the artist's time, Panofsky focuses instead on a “conceptual
or phenomenal” investigation of volition, since only the latter understanding of
Riegl’s Kunstwollen will permit a history “of immanent meaning.”°°
Using the concept of artistic volition as a means with which to unlock the
“ultimate meaning” of the “artistic phenomenon,” Panofsky assumes the possibil-
ity of comprehending “that phenomenon as a unity.”*! As in the 1915 essay, where
he had sought to correlate form and content, perception and expression, in an un-
derstanding of style, Panofsky here understands “formal and imitative elements as
different manifestations of a common fundamental tendency.”** Considering the
Kunstwollen as a first principle is a matter of perspective: to illustrate this point
Panofsky takes Kant’s proposition from the Prolegomena, “the air is elastic,” which,
he writes, can be considered from “many points of view”—historically, psycho-
logically, grammatically, logically. However, if we ask the transcendental-philosophical
question of it, namely “whether it contains a judgment which is linked by the pure
cognitive concept of causality” (which is to say “by consciousness in general”) some-
thing of the “epistemological essence of the proposition” is revealed: “that which
is in it as purely cognitive content apart from its formal logical structure and its
psychological prehistory, indeed apart from what the person making the judgment
‘meant’ himself.”*? Taking a transcendental view of artistic volition therefore re-
quires us to consider artistic phenomena “not in relationship to something outside
themselves (historical circumstances, psychological prehistory, stylistic analogies)
but exclusively in relation to their own being.”*4
Asking the “philosophical-transcendental question” of Riegl’s Kunstwollen
 Points of View in Art History and Aesthetics 57

is to consider the concept in a way not possible for Riegl himself on account of his
own historical position.*» Employing the concept of the Kunstwollen as a theoreti-
cal instrument, Panofsky thus demonstates how a transcendental point of view
might open up the deepest level of meaning in the work of art. Panofsky’s consid-
eration of Kunstwollen against the grain is nevertheless in keeping with the earlier
art historian’s own definition: for Riegl, too, the concept of artistic volition en-
compasses the sphere of the metaphysical and the historical particular. Taking the
Kunstwollen as an a priori principle, Panofsky correlates Riegl’s metaphysical and
historical senses of the concept into one unitary sense or “immanent meaning.” In
this way he shows us how we might arrive at a principle of style which precedes
the particular “stylistic qualities” or “modes of representation” in works of art them-
selves. In keeping with his earlier essay on Wolfflin, Panofsky does not define the
substance of the Kunstwollen. Rather, he “secures the concept of artistic volition in
a purely critical manner”** by offering a critically undefined concept of artistic vo-
lition to art history as its own first principle.
Style serves as a fundamental principle and means of correlation in Panofsky’s
1925 essay, “On the Relation of Art History to Art Theory. A Contribution to the
Discussion of the Possibility of ‘First Principles in Art History” (“Uber das Verhiiltnis
der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie. Ein Beitrag zu der Erérterung iiber die
Moglichkeit ‘kunstwissenschaftliche Grundbegriffe’”). Here a more detailed ac-
»»

counting of how a principle of style operates in art theory, art history, and the
science of art (Kunstwissenschaft) is provided. While “modern aesthetics” remains
the foil for the operations of the art historian, Panofsky demonstrates how “mod-
ern aesthetics” can be overcome through a proper point of view. Finally, in making
a careful distinction for the first time between the activities of the art historian and
the science of art, the author ventures a critical articulation of the deepest level of
meaning in artistic phenomena. Not surprisingly, this fundamental level is corre-
lated in his schema with “a unitary principle of style,” and so with the register of
disciplinary coherence.
In the 1925 essay Riegl’s concept of artistic volition has been translated
into a will to form (Formwillen), which is likewise referred to as a principle of style
(Stilprinzip). Thus characterizing artistic volition as a will to form, Panofsky pro-
vides a motor for the “great ur-problem of art:”*” if art fulfills its specific task in
the creation of sensuous form (Gestaltung der Sinnlichkeit), then a resolution of the
perpetual antithesis of “fullness and form” is the impetus for aesthetic phenom-
ena.°® As in his essay on Wolfflin, Panofsky here defines artistic phenomena, and
 58 Karen Lang

so a principle of style, as the necessary interaction and “balance of two opposing

principles.”
Shortly into the essay one encounters a table (fig. 1), which Panofsky be-
lieves “might clear up matters a bi 1.39

Universal Specific oppositions within the phenomenal, that is, visual sphere Universal
antithesis within antithesis
i As ithin th
eva cee 1. Opposition 2. Opposition 3. Opposition en :
sphere methodological
of the of the values of compositional
sphere
elementary values of figuration values

“fullness” “optical”
p values “values of depth” values of “in one “time”
is opposed to (open space) are are opposed to another” (merging) is opposed to
“form” opposed to “surface values” are opposed to “space”
“haptic” values values of “next
(bodies) to one another”
(division)

Fig. 1: From Erwin Panofsky, “Uber das Verhaltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: Ein Beitrag zu der Erérterung Uber die
Moglichkeit ‘kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe;” Zeitschrift ftir allgemeine Asthetik und Kunstwissenschaft 18 (1925): 132

What the author terms the “universal antithesis within the ontological sphere,”
namely the “living exchange” between fullness and form, offers the substrate, or
grounding principle, of the aesthetic. On the far left of the table we thus find the
presentation of the problem of form and style Panofsky claimed W6lfflin did not
provide. In the “universal antithesis within the methodological sphere,” at the far
right, we find “time opposed to space” (or, literally, time standing in oppostion to
space), categories Panofsky borrows from Kant’s Critique ofPure Reason. Moving
to the “specific oppositions within the phenomenal or visual sphere” in the middle
columns, we see how this “living exchange’ is then given characteristic form through
the various oppositions described. In column one we find Riegl’s optical and hap-
tic values, the opposition of which produces figure and ground relations. Column
two offers Wélfflin’s binaries of plane and recession, which serve to connect visual
elements. Finally, column three registers the opposing compositional values of
merging and division in which the “highest region of the visual gathers the work
into a high level of unity.” If the greatest unity in the visual sphere is provided
through the compositional values of merging and division in the third column,
 Points of View in Art History and Aesthetics 59

then time opposed to space, which creates causality, enables the possibility of his-
tory. In the ontological, the visual, and the methodological spheres we therefore
find the common forming principle of this cosmos—namely, a unitary principle
of style. Greater unity is achieved as we move from left to right, which is to say
that style is the most analytically powerful when it is considered methodologically,
by which Panofsky means historically.
Panofsky thus grounds art history on first principles by discovering a tran-
scendental category—a will to form, a principle of style—that is also perceptible
in the work of art. Indeed, the three fundamental artistic problems of isolation,
connection, and unity indicated in the middle columns of the table are the repre-
sentational results of the originary opposition of fullness and form registered in
the ontological sphere. Whereas Wolfflin offers the visual ways and means by which
the artistic problem is solved, Panofsky provides the Problemstellung, the originary
impetus for the problem of form and style.*! In so doing Panofsky relates art the-
ory, the task of which is to “establish and develop the absolute antithesis of basic
principles,” to art history, one aim of which is to study these principles as they are
represented in artistic phenomena. Again, this is a matter of perspective: “Regarded
ontologically, the work of art is an opposition of ‘form’ and ‘fullness’; viewed
methodologically, the work of art is an opposition of ‘time’ and ‘space.”” When
these two points of view are correlated with one another, then the fundamental
principle of fullness and form “can also be spoken of as the principle of a science
of art?
If Panofsky’s table correlates the orientations of art theory and art history,
then it also presupposes distinctions between aesthetics, art history, and
Kunstwissenschaft. One practice is initially separated from another by point of view.
Aesthetics, analogous in the essay with a science of the thing (Dingwissenschaft), is
an orientation toward the particular “sensuous characteristics,” otherwise termed
“the superficial style characteristics” or “stylistic symptoms,” of the work of art. Art
history, on the contrary, attends to formal or “artistic problems” in aesthetic phe-
nomena in order to illuminate the style concepts and criteria we find in the middle
columns of Panofsky’s table. Kunstwissenschaft, Panofsky suggests, addresses itself
to the “essence” of these stylistic criteria, namely to the opposition of fullness and
form, that first principle of art history or “unitary principle of style.”*? As the aes-
thetic object becomes an historical object, the work of art is connected to an
expanded field of inquiry until, finally, as the theoretical object of Kunstwissenschaft,
the question of the conditions of the possibility of the artistic phenomenon is
60 Karen Lang

decoded. The movement Panofsky traces from the aesthetic contemplation of a

single object to the engagement with artistic problems, toward the ultimate goal
of the discovery of first principles is likewise a trajectory from seeing to represen-
tation to knowledge. While aesthetics is criticized by Panofsky for both isolating
the object and considering it from an overly individual point of view, art history
activates the object as the representation of art historical problems. In the move
from aesthetics to art history, which is to say from seeing to representation, the
work of art becomes a historical object queried and analyzed through various
methodologies of the history of art. Although, as Panofsky maintains, knowledge
in the strict sense cannot be achieved in art history, the historical object operates
as if it were an object of possible knowledge when first principles are pursued
through the orientation of Kunstwissenschaft.

The “Ideal World” of Style

The art of art history we find in the central columns of Panofsky’s table is balanced
on either side by the transcendental category of art and its methodology. The simi-
larity of these categories and the manner in which they bracket the “phenomenal
or visual sphere” of art indicate, to my mind, why style is such a powerful concept
in the history of art and why it often seems like a hall of mirrors. Indeed, for
Panofsky, “style determines the structure of the ideal world of objects.”“* Yet style
per se is defined only in relation to itself—the opposing categories of space and
time are analogous in Panofsky’s table with the “living exchange” of fullness and
form. As the ontological and the methodological spheres fold into one another,
style is caught within its own hermeneutic circuit.
Panofsky’s early theoretical essays, including the table of 1925, demonstrate
how style serves as a kind of truth content for art history and aesthetics. If truth
might be equated—rather simply—with coherence, and coherence defined as a
matter of avoiding contradiction, then style allows us to follow the advice of Saint
Thomas: “When you meet a contradiction, make a distinction.” Style, the most
capacious concept in the history of art, is predicated on distinction and similarity.
Style, in other words, preserves coherence while offering difference. What contra-
dicts one style might just be another style whose definition awaits the future, when
one will have more evidence at hand or the historical distance necessary for retro-
spective analysis. Genealogical and proleptic, capacious, flexible, and analytically
powerful, style, it seems, can never be wholly controverted. And so style remains
an animating principle—a truth content, if you will—for art history and aesthetics.
 Points of View in Art History andAesthetics 6|

The 1925 table is Panofsky’s first and last outlining how a history of art
might be constructed on first principles. In an essay first delivered in 1931 to the
Kiel chapter of the Kant Society, “On the Problem of Description and Meaning
in the Visual Arts” (“Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von
Werken der bildenden Kunst”), this table would be replaced by the stages and ma-
terials of iconographical and iconological interpretation. Panofsky would later
indicate the impossibility of finding the first principles of art history.“ As his table
suggests, however, this is not really necessary. When style operates as an a priori
principle, as a mode of description and analysis, and as a means by which to co-
ordinate objects into historical sequences, then the drive to articulate the conditions
of the possibility of “style” become unnecessary. On this account I would argue
that Panofsky’s much-lamented adandonment of theory has less to do with his im-
migration to the United States in 1934 than with the discovery of a method that made
this particular theoretical pursuit unnecessary.*” Turning from a critical definition
of first principles to a focus on how these might operate in art history, which is to
say from the pursuit of the transcendental-philosophical question of style to the
ways and means of its historical appearances, Panofsky leaves behind art theory for
art history. One might argue that the aims of a science of art are still registered in
the pursuit of iconology. If iconology is understood as “the search for intrinsic
’“® however, then art history—as a branch of the humani-
meanings or content,
ties—sets itself in search of a knowledge that can never be fully grasped. The pursuit
of intrinsic meaning is, nevertheless, fundamental to the discipline since this pur-
suit presupposes the use of the theory and interpretation necessary to transform
the aesthetic object into an object in and for the history of art. Since style might
be the concept with which to describe and enact these various operations, a criti-
cal definition of style becomes less necessary than the deployment of a concept of
style within the unified space of art history.
If style reverberates down the ontological, visual, and methodological alleys
of art history, then style, or style considered transcendentally, can be coordinated
with any variety of historical styles. In this way theoretical meditations on art, close
looking at artistic objects, and the historical view of a period would all find their
place within a unified field of study. Moreover, if most coherence lies in the his-
torical or methodological sphere of space and time—and certainly, we might say,
in those epochs of siber-coherence such as the Italian Renaissance—then aesthet-
ics per se would not be of much value. If for Panofsky “a work of art is an object
which demands to be viewed aesthetically,” the aesthetic point of view is not an
62 Karen Lang

end unto itself. #” Attentive looking should usher forth an engagement with art his-
torical problems. Formulating his art history alongside advocates of empathy theory
and psychological aesthetics, Panofsky was keen to ward off the incursions of “mod-
ern aesthetics” into the history and science of art.
Panofsky’s “The Concept of Artistic Volition” concludes as follows: “There
is a contemporary point of view which stresses too strongly the argument against
the theory of imitation, but art is not a subjective expression of feelings or the con-
firmation of the existence of certain individuals; it is a discussion, aimed at the
achievement of valid results, that objectifies and realizes a formative force, using
material which has to be mastered.”°° It is well known how this material was mas-
tered through Panofsky’s own iconographic method. As in the 1925 table, where
greater unity and disciplinary coherence are achieved in the movement from the
visual sphere of the work of art to an understanding of the history of art, so the
use of documents carries us away from the work it seeks to explain. The tables from
Panofsky’s famous essay of 1939, “Iconography and Iconology,” demonstrate how
interpretation moves further away from the work in the search for deeper mean-
ing of it. In a similar way, the greatest unity of a period brings the most objects
together under one umbrella of style: “Gothic” man and Gothic cathedral are, so
to speak, rendered on a single, unified plane, one which is, at the same time, sepa-
rated from us by the space of centuries of historical distance.

Representation and Historicity

In the essay he read to the Kiel chapter of the Kant Society in 1931, Panofsky cites
from Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem ofMetaphysics, a book published two years
earlier. Concluding his study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger describes
the inherent violence in interpretation: “Certainly, in order to wring from what
the words say, what it is they want to say, every interpretation /Jnterpretation] must
necessarily use violence. Such violence, however, cannot be roving arbitrariness.
The power of an idea which shines forth must drive and guide the laying-out
[Auslegung]” of interpretation.*! After citing Heidegger Panofsky goes on to ex-
plain to the Kant Society how his own method, including his use of documents,
mitigates the violence in interpretation by a careful search for the intrinsic mean-
ing in historical works of art.
Panofsky’s quotation of Heidegger omits a crucial final sentence from the
paragraph cited: “Only in the power of this idea [which shines forth],” Heidegger
. a“ . . . . .

continues, can an interpretation risk what is always audacious, namely, entrust-

 Points of View in Art History and Aesthetics 63

ing itself to the concealed inner passion of a work in order to be able, through this,
to place itself within the unsaid and force it into speech. This is one way, however,
by which the guiding idea, in its power to illuminate, comes to light.”5? For
Heidegger, Kant’s first Critique was not simply an historical treatise, it was a liv-
ing text in history. Consequently the meaning of the Critique could be read anew,
as he did when, focusing on the philosopher's first version of his magnum opus, he
opened it up to an interpretation toward Being rather than one within epistemol-
ogy. Likewise, it was the manner in which the Florentine Renaissance work of art
was alive in its historicity that enabled Warburg to study it in a deep historical sense
while, at the same time, perceiving its emotive and thematic ties to a present hu-
man condition.*? Finally, while Panofsky himself might be criticized for sometimes
becoming too constrained within the cosmos of his own method, and so for sug-
gesting too close a link between the artwork and the personality of Michelangelo,
for example, or of Gothic architecture and scholasticism,» it was his reading of
Riegl against the grain which made possible the use and modification of the
Kunstwollen as an a priori principle in his early theoretical essays.
If there are to be points of contact between art history, aesthetics, and vi-
sual studies, these might lie in a thoughtful engagement with history which would
likewise permit images to remain potent in their historicity.°° I conclude with a
plea for history because in our contemporary condition—aptly described in German
as a “Bilderflut,” or flood-tide of images—the history of images is effaced along
with, perhaps, their power to do more than distract attention or to illustrate a
point.*” Panofsky’s early theoretical essays chart the movement from seeing to rep-
resentation to knowledge as the points of view of aesthetics, art history, and a
scientific art history. While the intrinsic laws of aesthetic phenomena might be
adumbrated through a transcendental vantage point, only an active engagement
with the work of art leads us from description, to understanding, to meaning. The
aesthetic point of view is crucial, in other words. Panofsky, in keeping with his own
fear of the “arbitrariness” of “modern aesthetics” and his desire for a unified
history of art, advises us not to rest there but to move on toward more theoretical
points of view.
Acknowledging how “very comfortable” it would be for us “if art theory
and art history had nothing to do with one another,” in reality, as Panofsky points
out, art theory and art history are “reciprocally related.”°* Indeed; a balance be-
tween art history and art theory leads to the solution of art historical problems.
Theorizing “seeing” in his 1911 essay, Panofsky brings together perception, expression,
64 Karen Lang

and representation into a single root of style. Wrestling further with what might
constitute a unitary principle of style, he charts a more nuanced understanding of
Riegl’s Kunstwollen. Abandoning the search for a critical definition of artistic
volition for the operations of a “principle of style,” he then sets out to refine the
method by which he would become famous. If theory arrives through an engage-
ment with artistic objects, this investigation should encompass a wide-ranging
sense of theory and method. Panofsky implies as much in July 1927, when, com-
menting on the “future tasks and directions for research” of art history for the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, he sets an expanding field of artistic objects and the
development of art historical method in a dialectical relation.” A spirited search
for meaning in artistic phenomena, and the negotiation of empirical, objective,
and transcendental points of view, animates Panofsky’s early theoretical essays.
Rather than consider art history, aesthetics, and visual studies according to the dif-
fering sets of objects and methodologies that define them, following in the spirit
of Panofsky we might set these fields in relation to each other and into a force-field
of theoretical inquiry.© This, then, might be called a “motivated history,” to use
Keith Moxey’s term in another sense,°! which ventures the laughter of the Thracian
maid in its contemplation of visual and theoretical points of view—both distant
and near.

An expanded version of this essay will appear as a chapter of my book in progress, Cool Idols: Aesthetics,
Subjectivity, and the Making of Art History. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
1. Richard M. Ludwig, ed., Dr. Panofiky & Mr. Tarkington: An Exchange of Letters, 1938-1946 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1974), 114. In his 1940 essay, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline”
(Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972], 24; originally published in
The Meaning in the Humanities, ed. T. M. Greene [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940],
89-118), Panofsky suggests: “To grasp reality we have to detach ourselves from the present. Philosophy
and mathematics do this by building systems in a medium which is by definition not subject to time.
Natural science and the humanities do it by creating those spatio-temporal structures which I have
called the ‘cosmos of nature’ and the ‘cosmos of culture.” The “cosmos of culture” is a leitmotif of
the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, Panofsky’s colleague at the University of Hamburg. In future I will
investigate the influence of Cassirer on Panofsky’s early theoretical essays, especially the latter’s
Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Untersuchungen tiber die Grundfragen der Panne (1910),
and Zur Einsteinschen Relativitétstheorie. Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen (1920), which appear
 Points of View inArt History and Aesthetics 65

together in translation as Substance and Function & Einstein's Theory of Relativity (trans. William
Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (Chicago: Dover, 1953); Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschafien: Funf
Studien (1942), newly trans. by S. G. Lofts as The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); as well as the early writings of Edgar Wind, who
was a student of both Cassirer and Panofsky at the University of Hamburg.
2. Originally published as “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form,” Vortrige der Bibliothek Warburg,
1924/25 (Leipzig/Berlin, 1927), 258-330; Trans. Christopher S. Wood as Perspective as Symbolic Form
(New York: Zone Books, 1991).
3. See Martin Warnke’s brief remarks on this curious state of affairs in “Panofsky: Die Hamburger
Vorlesungen,” in Bruno Reudenbach, ed., Erwin Panofsky. Beitrage des Symposions Hamburg 1992
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 58; and Panofsky (“The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,”
r9ff.) on the necessity of “aesthetic re-creation.”
4. “Scientia and knowledge, denoting a mental possession rather than a mental process, can be iden-
tified with the natural sciences; eruditio and learning, denoting a process rather than a possession,
with the humanities. The ideal aim of science would seem to be something like mastery, that of the
humanities something like wisdom.” Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” 25.
5. Ibid., 15. See also Martin Kemp, “Relativity not Relativism: Some Thoughts on the Histories of
Science and Art, Having Reread Panofsky,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside. A
Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) (Princeton: Institute for Advanced Study,

1995), 225-36.
6. An objective viewpoint should not be confused with “objectivity” per se. By an objective view-
point I intend a distinction between an object existing in the world and the mental representation
of an object. This distinction is nicely articulated in the German language: whereas das Objekt, lit-
erally speaking, denotes an object in the world, das Gegenstand, philosophically speaking, implies the
taking up of an object by the mind in such a way that it stands out as a re-representation, or object
for analysis.
7. On the formation and activation of objects, categories, and systems of knowledge, see Michel
Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses (Paris: Edition Gallimard, 1966); Eng. trans.: The Order of Things. An
Archaeology ofthe Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); and Harriett Ritvo, The Platypus
and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1997).
8. Erwin Panofsky, “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens,” Zeitschrift fiir Asthetik und Allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920): 321-39; trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Synder as “The Concept
of Artistic Volition,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 18. I will cite the English translation of
this essay.
9. Panofsky, “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” 19.
66 Karen Lang

10. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. M. J. Levett (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1992), 67-78. For a commen-
tary on Plato’s dialogue see Myles Burnyeat, The Theaetetus of Plato (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett,
1990).
ul. Plato, Theaetetus, 43-44. For an alternative anecdote of Thales, see Aristotle, Politics I 4, 1259a,
6-19. On the history of the reception of the Thales anecdote and its transformation into metaphor,
see the fascinating study by Hans Blumenberg, Das Lachen der Thrakerin. Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987), and more generally his earlier study Der Prozess der
theoretischen Neugierde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), a reworking of the third sec-
tion of The Legitimacy ofthe Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).
Also of interest is Hans Blumenberg, Die Vollzdhligkeit der Sterne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997).
12. Aristotle, Metaphysics (983a) in ed. R. McKeon, The Basic Works ofAristotle (New York, 1941), 14ff;
Plato, Theaetatus (154d), 19. See also David Summers, The Judgment ofSense. Renaissance Naturalism
and the Rise ofAesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 37; 182-97; and Philip
Fischer, “The Poetics of Wonder,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside, 175-93.
13. Though I find it highly unsatisfactory to refer to a male Kantian subject, this is how Kant char-
acterizes the subject. For historical consistency, I will follow Kant’s designation.
14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett,
1956), 161-62. See also Rudolf Unger, “Der bestirnte Himmel iiber mir.... Zur geistesgeschichtlichen
Deutung eines Kant-Wortes,” in Immanuel Kant: Festschrift zur zweiten Jahrhundertfeier seines
Geburtstages, ed. Albertus University, Kénigsberg in Prussia (Leipzig, 1924), 340-70.
15. Hannah Arendt, 7e Human Condition (1958; reprint, Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1973).
16. Panofsky asks the reader to note that his text was in the hands of the editors at the beginning of
July 1915, which is to say before Wolfflin’s book was published. Panofsky’s essay originally appeared
in the Zeitschrift fiir Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 10 (1915): 460-67. It is reprinted in
Erwin Panofsky, Aufsdtze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen
(Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessling, 1964), 23-31; and more recently in Karen Michels and Martin Warnke,
eds., Erwin Panofsky. Deutschsprachige Aufsiétze (Berlin: Akademie Verlag), 2: 1009-18. I will cite the
1964 reprint. See also Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations ofArt History (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984), 57—68.
17. Panofsky, “Das Problem des Stils,” 25.
18. Consequently Panofsky does not provide an “empirical-historical accounting” of the validity of
Wolfflin’s five conceptual pairs but discusses only their “methodological-philosophical meaning.” He
continues (24): “We will not ask whether it is justified to conceive of the development from the
Cinquecento to the Seicento as a development from the linear to the painterly, from planar to re-
cession, etc. Instead, we will ask whether it is justified to characterize the development from linear
 Points of View in Art History and Aesthetics 67

to painterly, from planar to recession as merely formal.”

19. Panofsky, “Das Problem des Stils,” 23.
20. Panofsky uses the terms Ausdruckswille and Gestaltungs-Wille.
21. Panofsky, “Das Problem des Stils,” 29.
22. Ibid., 30.
23. Ibid., 31 n. 5.
24. Ibid.
25. See Carlo Ginzburg, “From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method,” Myths,
Emblems, Clues, trans. John and Anne C. Tadeschi (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1986), 17-59,
170-94; and “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” in Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok,
eds., The Sign of Three. Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 81-118.
26. In future I will examine Panofsky’s search for, and articulation of, first principles alongside Cassirer’s
demonstration of the interaction of the “substance and function” of conceptual categories.
27. “He has not only created the concept of artistic volition, he has also discovered categories suited
to the understanding of the concept” such as his “concepts of ‘optical’ and . . . “haptic” which “aim
at revealing a meaning immanent in artistic phenomena.” Panofsky, “The Concept of Artistic Volition,”
28. See also Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations ofArt History, 79-96.
28. Panofsky, “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” 20.
29. Ibid., 24. Panofsky cites Theodor Lipps, Asthetik: Psychologie des Schénen und der Kunst, 2 vols.
(1903-6), as an example of “modern aesthetics.” A useful compendium in English of German psy-
chological aesthetics is Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, intro. and trans., Empathy,
Form, and Space. Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica, Calif:: The Getty Center
for the History of Art and the Humanties, 1994). On “hedonistic aesthetics” and “art historical an-
hedonia,” see Randolf Starn, “Pleasure in the Visual Arts,” in Irving Lavin, ed., Meaning in the Visual
Arts: Views from the Outside, 151-62; and Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement ofArt
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
30. “Far from displacing purely historical work, the method which adopts the history of meaning
[sinngeschichtlich] is the only one competent to complement it, more competent, in any case, than
pscychologizing, which appears to deepen the historical picture but which in fact only confuses art
and artist, subject and object, reality and idea.” Panofsky, “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” 30-31.
31. Ibid., 26. Five years later, Panofsky defines the “artistic phenomenon” as follows: “Here . . . the
characterization ‘artistic phenomenon or ‘artistic appearance’ is understood as every art-historical
[kunstwissenschaftliche| object that, from the point of view of style criticism, can be seen as a unity—
whether this unity is restricted to the merely regional (Volksstil), epochal (Zeitstil), or personal
(Individualstil), or whether it is represented in a single work of art.” (Panofsky, “Uber das Verhaltnis
der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie. Ein Beitrag zu der Erérterung iiber die Méglichkeit ‘kunst-
68 Karen Lang

wissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe,” Zeitschrift fir Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschafi, 18 [192s]:

129.) Panofsky’s essay is reprinted in Erwin Panofsky, Deutschsprachige Aufsdtze, 2: 1035-63. Here I
cite the 1925 essay.
32. Panofsky, “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” 26.
33. Ibid., 27.
34. Ibid., 28. Asking the “transcendental-philosophical question” of the Kunstwollen is further refined
in the 1925 essay (Panofsky, “Uber das Verhaltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie,” 129), where
the artistic phenomenon is considered as a “meta-empirical” object [Gegenstand], or “Denkgegenstand,
. .. which is not encountered in the sphere of reality (or in the sphere of historical reality), but, to
use the words of Husserl, is the bearer of eidetic character.”
35. “Riegl could still not completely recognize that he had justified a transcendental philosophy of
art which left behind the purely genetic method which prevailed at that time.” Panofsky, “The Concept
ofArtistic Volition,” 30 n. 18.
36. Ibid., 28
37. Panofsky, “Uber das Verhaltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie,” 130.
38. Ibid., 130-31.
39. Ibid., 132.
40. Ibid., 133.
41. Ibid., 139 n. 1.
42. Ibid., 131, 142.
43. A “unitary principle of style” is further characterized (ibid., 154) as style in the innermost sense
(“Stil im inneren Sinn”).
44. Panofsky, “Probleme der Kunstgeschichte,” dea. Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 7 (1988): 9.
In this sense, Panofsky writes, “style” is for Kunstwissenschafi as “natural law” is for physics, with this
exception: “the world of natural ‘perceptual contents is, so to speak, still an Adiaphoron: ‘the light-
ning storm is, in and for itself, something entirely neutral . . The world of artworks, on the contrary,
appears to us with absolutely specific demands.” When “the art-historian observes a work of art sub
specie ‘style,’ .. . he should not give a new meaning to the work but translate the given meaning from
the realm of the irrational into a rational sphere” (9). In future I will consider Panofsky’s notion of
“aesthetic re-creation,” his later writings on style, as well as the central art historical texts on this ab-
solutely useful but critically illusive concept.
45. Erwin Panofsky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsbedeutung von Werken der bilden-
den Kunst,” Logos 21 (1932): 103-19; reprinted in Erwin Panofsky. Deutschsprachige Aufsitze, ed. Karen
Michels and Martin Warnke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 2: 1064-77. I will cite the 1998 reprint
of this essay. i
46. “From the end of the eighteenth century, there has arisen a dichotomy—inevitable, to be sure,
 Points of View in Art History and Aesthetics 69

but nevertheless a little saddening—between a scientific interpretation of the world that looks for
laws and principles regardless of meanings, and a humanistic interpretation of the world that gropes
for meanings while no longer being able to believe in daws and principles. This was not so when both
the sciences and the humanities came into being and walked hand in hand for a few glorious cen-
turies. . . . Needless to say, we cannot go back. We cannot revert to the acceptance of either classical
tradition or Christian dogma, however much revered, as something that guarantees meaning to the
law of nature, and, at the same time, guarantees the force of a law to the meaning of history.” Ludwig,
ed., Dr. Panofsky & Mr. Tarkington, 114-16.
47. On the fate German art history, and of German art historians “transplated” into the United States
after 1933, see two important recent studies: Ulrike Wendland, Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger
Kunsthistoriker im Exil. Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebe-
nen Wissenschafiler, 2 volumes (Munich: Saur, 1998), and Karen Michels, Tansplantierte Kunstwissenschaft.
Deutschsprachige Kunstgeschichte im amerikanischen Exile, Studien der Warburg Haus, vol. 2 (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 1999).
48. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” Meaning
in the Visual Arts, 39. This essay was first published in 1939.
49. “A work of art is not always created exclusively for the purpose of being enjoyed, or, to use a more
scholarly expression, of being experienced aesthetically. . . But a work of art always has aesthetic sig-
nificance (not to be confused with aesthetic value): whether or not it serves some practical purpose,
and whether it is good or bad, it demands to be experienced aesthetically. . . . Only he who simply
and wholly abandons himself to the object of his perception will experience it aesthetically. ....A
man-made object, however, either demands or does not demand to be so experienced, for it has what
the scholastics call an “intention.” Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” 10-11.
50. Panofsky, “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” 33.
st. Panofsky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsbedeutung,” 1072; Martin Heidegger, Kant
and the Problem ofMetaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1990), 138. On Panofsky’s quotation of Heidegger and its relation to “the scheme of art his-
torical interpretation that persisted through the later versions of his essay,” see David Summers,
“Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Lavin, ed., Meaning in the Visual Arts:
Views from the Outside, 9-24. I agree with Summers that Panofsky “did not think it desirable to elim-
inate ‘violence’ since we must always—or should always—approach the past on our own personal
and historical ground.” (11).
52. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 138.
53. See the following essays by Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli” (1898), “Francesco Sassetti’s Last
Injunction to his Sons” (1907), “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia,
Ferrara” (1912) in Aby Warburg. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, intro. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David
70 Karen Lang

Britt (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities,
1999).
54. Erwin Panofsky, “The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo,” Studies in Iconology. Humanistic
Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 171-230ff.
55. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian Books, 1968). Originally
delivered as the Wimmer lecture for 1948.
56. To use the rather eloquent words of David Summers (“Meaning in the Visual Arts,” 20), “it is
through history that we understand our own historicity and thus confront so many human possi-
bilities. This is the historicist version of the ideal of the examined life. If it is because of our histories
that we think and act as we do in the present, it is also partly because of our knowledge of history
that we may act differently in the present.”
57. See “Bilderflut oder Interpretationsebbe?,” a special issue of Kritische Berichte 26, no. 2 (1998).
58. Panofsky, “Uber das Verhaltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie,” 156-57. In this regard see
also Stephen Melville, “Positionality, Objectivity, Judgment,” in Seams. Artasa Philosophical Context,
ed. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1996), 68—88; 219-20.
59. Panofsky, “Probleme der Kunstgeschichte,” 7.
60. A fundamental inquiry might begin with the definition of the visual image in our contemporary
context. In this regard see Gottfried Boehm, ed., Was ist ein Bild? (Munich: Fink, 1994); Dieter
Kamper and Hans Belting, eds., Der Zweite Blick. Bildgeschichte und Bildreflexion (Munich: Fink,
1998); and Horst Bredekamp, “Einbildungen,” Kritische Berichte 28, no. 1 (2000): 31-37.
61. Keith Moxey, “Motivating History,” Art Bulletin 77, no. 3 (September 1995): 392-401.
National Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments
in the Historiography of Art

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

When I was a graduate student, an important professor, who later became the chief
curator of a major museum where I|was once also a fellow, used to dismiss art from
Austria and surrounding regions as “schnitzel” and art from Germany as “kraut.”
Soon afterward, when I began teaching, a senior professor and chair of the de-
partment where I teach spoke in a similar vein about my interest in art from these
regions. He said that I would not have written on a major artist by the time I was
forty, because, as he obviously implied, there was no major art in Central Europe.
No doubt many art historians who have studied previously neglected areas
may have had similar experiences. As many recent critiques of art history and of
other fields have argued, canons are established, parameters or paradigms chosen
for discussion of a time period or place that may depend on assumptions or
determinations that ignore or dismiss the art and culture of other places or
peoples as unworthy of attention, second-rate, or derivative. The terms “schnitzel”
and “kraut” moreover indicate that standards of taste may link aesthetic and
historical judgments with national stereotypes and prejudices. This definition of
national stereotypes follows recent research in describing stereotypes as more or
less general representations of social phenomena, which are always connected with
value judgments. Stereotypes are judgments connected with convictions that are
independent of actual experience; they are transmitted and mediated from
traditions, in this instance intellectual ones, and historiography.'
In any instance, epithets for peoples of nations other than one’s own have
long associated cultural difference with eating habits. One speaks disparagingly in
French of the English as “les rosbeef,” in English of the French as “frogs,” and of
the Germans as “krauts.” But one may well recall Voltaire’s comments about the
“common saying, that there is no disputing about tastes: . . . if by taste here be un-
derstood the palate, which loathes certain aliments and relishes others, the maxim
is just; [because it is needless to dispute about what cannot be corrected, or to
attempt reforming the constitution of organs merely corporeal]. But the maxim is
false and pernicious, when applied to that intellectual taste, which has for its
objects the arts and sciences.”? Or as David Hume put it in his essay “Of the Standard
of Taste,” “we are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own taste
72 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

and apprehension: But soon find the epithet of reproach retorted on us.”
Personal anecdotes can thus serve to introduce a more general and long-
standing problem in the literature of art. This brief paper takes up this theme and
considers, first, one important tradition of art history that tried to be free of
aesthetic prejudices. Second, it suggests how this tradition may have been initiated
as a response to the employment of canons in art history, but that art historians
associated with this school also failed to escape from the snares of regional and
national prejudices, and that the tenacity of these prejudices results only in part
from the circumstance that the discipline was formed and grew during an age of
nationalism. Finally, an argument is made that a more fundamental problem is in-
volved, one that has persisted from the time that aesthetics first became entangled
with art history and a kind of proto-anthropology, when the modern forms of these
discourses in fact originated in the eighteenth century.
A remark attributed to the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl provides a
good entry into this Problemkreis. Riegl is reputed to have said that the best art
historian was the one without personal taste. By this he meant that one had to shed
one’s aesthetic prejudices and try to discover the historical raison d’étre of every
work of the past.‘ In this effort Rieg] was responding to a kind of art history rep-
resented by his only slightly younger contemporary, Julius von Schlosser.’ Schlosser
distinguished between a history of art and a history of great artists, which stood
outside of it, since he believed in an independent canon of great artists. Schlosser
also believed in national stereotypes. In his book on the Kunst- and Wunderkammern
of the Renaissance, Schlosser speaks of national peculiarities and prejudices, and
contrasts the collections of the Italians, who are so rational that mathematics might
almost be considered their dialect, with the adventurous irrational collections of
the Germans, who still breathed the air of the superstitions of the Middle Ages in
their Kunst- and Wunderkammern.° For Schlosser, and similarly either implicitly
or explicitly for many art historians since the eighteenth century, the canon and
the norm were furnished not only by classical antiquity, but by the Italian national
creation, Renaissance art.
What Riegl was reacting to was however assuredly not just an attitude
expressed by his contemporaries. In a familiar critique first delivered as a lecture
forty years ago, E. H. Gombrich, who was also a student of Schlosser, demon-
strated that from at least Giorgio Vasari, art history has utilized processes of stylistic
classification and critical characterization that depend upon the establishment of
norms that in turn exclude forms that do not conform to the canon they
 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments 73

establish.’ To exemplify his argument, Gombrich—who, it may also be noted,

believed in transhistorical standards and norms—adduced Vasari’s remarks on what
is now called Gothic architecture.
But Vasari did not use the word “Gothic.” In the well-known passage
Gombrich cited, Vasari spoke of “another kind of work, called German . . . which
could well be called Confusion or Disorder instead.”* Vasari’s negative remarks are
in keeping with the kinds of categories that he established and employed through-
out the Vite. As is well known, Vasari deployed distinctions among the types of art
made in various cities, between art in Florence and art in Venice, between Tuscan
disegno and Venetian colorito. He also implied that artists could be treated accord-
ing to national differences. Vasari’s position not only clearly resulted from a prejudice
in favor of the Tuscan (and its related appearances in Rome), but it led to the
neglect or disparagement of other centers, and clearly of the art of other nations.?
This is for instance also evident in his vita of Jacopo Pontormo, where one point
for criticism is Pontormo’s use of German engravings: northerners, Germans
included, are to come to Italy to learn from Italian art, not the reverse.!°
Similar expressions of aesthetic judgment have informed much of the sub-
sequent literature of art. Depending on one’s point of view, the Venetian, Dutch,
German, French, or whatever place one might like to promote, supplied the norm
for writers who responded to Vasari in creating their own regional or national
historiographies. Even the sort of art history which, like the work of Johann Joachim
Winckelmann, treated national or local schools as constituting a sequence, and
which in the writings of later historians regarded this sequence as the result of a
process of evolution of styles, managed to combine this idea of progress with the
assumption that some norm had been expressed in the history of art. For
Winckelmann, and for many others, it was of course the art of ancient Greece, and
subsequently that of the Italian Renaissance.!' To be sure, other norms could also
be posited: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe thus turned Vasari on his head by
giving a positive value to Gothic architecture and deeming the Gothic a positive
expression of Germanness.!* Subsequently, many art historians from the time of the
institutionalization of the discipline in the nineteenth century have sung the praises
of German art; mutatis mutandis art of other nations has also been celebrated when
the forms of their art were established as normative.
Normative assumptions and in particular the classical canon were espe-
cially what Riegl had in his sights. As Otto Pacht suggested in his acute analysis of
Riegl, the implications of Riegl’s writings were that the classical canon, and
74 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

absolute aesthetic norms in general, had become obsolete by the late nineteenth
century.!3 They had to be dropped. Instead, it was necessary to understand that
each phase in history had its own aesthetic ideals. For this, as is well known, Riegl
developed the idea of Kunstwollen: each period and place had its own Kunstwollen.
Nevertheless, while eschewing judgments and an approach to history that
seemed to be based on aesthetic prejudices, Rieg! employed concepts of regional
or national constants that also rely on stereotypes, and may insinuate such preju-
dices into the writing of history. In Das Holléndische Gruppenportrat Riegl called
the Dutch group portrait “the genre most representative of Holland’s national
style.”!4 Whatever the term may mean elsewhere, Riegl’s protean Kunstwollen is the
force which drives stylistic change in Das Hollindische Gruppenportrat. It takes on
national, and within the national, regional forms in the genre of portraiture.
Although it might be argued that Kunstwollen is a heuristic and not nec-
essarily a psychological term, Riegl’s use of the concept of Kunstwollen in this
particular case is directly used to explain national and local styles in relation to
group psychology. What Wolfgang Kemp has called an “ethnopsychological
constant,”!? namely the character of Holland or of the north, as opposed to Italy,
is used to account for the development of a phenomenon in the history of art. In
this way Riegl’s thinking in terms of stereotypes was not so far removed from that
of Schlosser. Material which does not quite fit Riegl’s definitions—one could
adduce counterexamples—is simply not considered.
Furthermore, Riegl’s notions of national differences and of historical
evolution were clearly based on certain racial assumptions, common to his time,
in which the nations of Europe embody racial differences. These ideas were
explicitly expressed in Riegl’s manuscript of 1897/98 for a book on the Historische
Grammatik der bildenden Kiinste, especially in passages where Riegl deals with the
“germanische Volker.” Rieg| means here not only the peoples of the time of the great
migrations, but even later Germans, French, and Netherlanders, who are consid-
ered to be “Vélkern der germanischer Rasse.” Riegl accounts, for example, for the
difference between French and German art in the twelfth century by reference to
differences in blood, meaning, in the language of this discourse, race. Race for
Riegl remains the constant in the history of art: Germanen are the group that Riegl
refers to in the even later periods of the Renaissance and baroque, in which it might
have been expected, even according to Riegl’s own trend of thinking, that the
volkisch or racial character would have been effectively diluted.'%
Thinking in terms of racial or national constants was common to many
 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments 75

writers of Riegl’s time (he died in 1905), as it had been in the nineteenth century,
and his assumptions about the psychology of peoples were certainly not restricted
to his time and place. Riegl is, however, important for several reasons. For Riegl’s
ideas have continued to provide the basis for arguments for the existence of na-
tional and racial constants in art. Notions of national or racial constants remained
important during the twentieth century for many Viennese professors through all
the Vienna “schools” of art history, from the “first school,” to which Riegl belonged;
to Otto Pacht, Hans Sedlmayr, and Karl Maria von Swoboda in the second school;
to Konrad Oberhuber in most recent times.!7
Recently Riegl and other scholars associated with the Vienna School like
Pacht have been translated into English; they have begun to receive an increasing
amount of attention, in part perhaps because they may seem to offer a way of do-
ing art history which appears to escape from some traditional aesthetic prejudices,
and thus to give license to an expansion of the canon.'!* While it has also become
fashionable to stress other aspects of thinking about psychology and style in rela-
tion to art to be found in the work of Riegl and Pacht, and to overlook or downplay
the importance of their assumptions about the nature and effect of national propen-
sities, assumptions about national constants nevertheless constitute the foundation
of Riegl’s (and following him, of Pacht’s and Swoboda’s) arguments about what is
intrinsic to “the instinctual and supra-individual nature of the evolution of art.”?
Pacht’s (and other Viennese scholars’) precognition of styles, that is their use of
what more neutrally, indeed positively, has been described by Hans-Georg Gadamer
as the employment of hermeneutic prejudice,”° in accounting for the origin and
character of different forms of art relies explicitly on the idea of national constants,
as was already criticized in a trenchant review of 1936 by Meyer Schapiro. Most
notoriously, these assumptions are hard to distinguish from other sorts of nation-
alist and even racial prejudices, and they had consequences for the opinions of
some of those trained in Vienna including art historians who became Nazis, such
as Dagobert Frey and Hans Sedlmayr.’!
The point is neither to castigate scholars of the Vienna School nor to
malign them all for the association of some art historians with unsavory political
movements. Thinking in terms of national stereotypes pervaded so much nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century thinking about art that it would require much more
than one paper to address it adequately. Nevertheless the case of Riegl and his
Viennese successors is instructive, because it suggests that even where aesthetic
prejudice of one sort may seem to be absent, thinking in terms of stereotypes, and
76 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

thus having recourse to other sorts of prejudice, not just of a neutral hermeneutic
kind, may determine the shape of arguments about history and aesthetics.
Furthermore, although discussion of the “instinctual nature of artistic evo-
lution” is a post-Enlightenment phenomenon, questions raised in relation to the
writings of Riegl and the Vienna School lead to consideration of an issue that is
already present in the eighteenth century, when the modern discourses of art his-
tory and aesthetics were founded. Some of the first works of the eighteenth century,
like that of the Abbé du Bos, which marked out a space for the aesthetic in
relation to works of what came to be called the visual arts, by defining a separate
realm of fine arts, relied on the relation of taste and its expression in artistic prod-
ucts to nation, conceived as an underlying constant. Like the better-known work
of Montesquieu, Abbé du Bos elaborated older climatological notions of the
origins of national character. Du Bos related art to national character, and charac-
ter in turn to air and climate. In his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture,
du Bos asserted, for example, that the warmth of the English climate was sufficient
to produce great exemplars of most of the sciences and professions, except for paint-
ing and the related visual arts. English painting could be represented by three
obscure portraitists; most of the visual artists active in England were foreign born.”
In his essay on national characters, David Hume subjected to a stringent
critique the arguments of du Bos and others who would assign the origins of
national character to physical causes. However, Hume not only retained du Bos’s
sorts of distinctions of national character, but also his distinctive terminology of
moral and physical causes. Hume rejected physical causes in favor of “moral” causes
for national characters, by physical meaning “those qualities of the air and climate,”
just those things that du Bos and Montesquieu had discussed. In stressing the moral
he meant “all circumstances which are fitted to work on the mind as motives or
reasons the nature of the government, the revolutions of pubic affairs, the plenty
or penury in which the people live, the situation of the nation with regard to its
neighbours, and such like circumstances.””3
Although Hume thus seemed to favor what might be called historical, em-
pirical grounds for the existence of national character, he undercut his arguments
by making assumptions about the natural aptitude and quality of men, which can
only be thought of as physical, as constant, and indeed as racially determined. In
his essay on national character, as in that on taste, Hume might have seemed to al-
low for suprahistorical standards, and for cultural creations that were independent
of peoples. Yet Hume specifically excluded Africans from the categories of culture
 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments 77

and taste, and for reasons that can be said to be derived from physical causes. Hume
states: “I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There
scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual
eminent either in action or speculation. Such a uniform and constant difference
could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an origi-
nal distinction between these breeds of men.”*4 Because Hume suggests that these
debilities of what he calls “negroes” are revealed no matter what society or land they
inhabit, they must be regarded as innate qualities, what can be called the results of
racial differences. Consequently there has been much discussion of Hume’s racism.”
These ideas, and in effect a range of similar stereotyped notions haunt the
aesthetic and, perhaps more surprisingly, the epistemological ideas of Immanuel
Kant. It is well known that Kant responded to Hume’s aesthetic theories. Through
them he likewise became ensnared in the problems of national and racial stereo-
typing that were present in Hume.
Kant’s aesthetics were intertwined with his anthropology, which while an
older discourse was newly defined as a separate subject or “science” (Wissenschaft)
in the eighteenth century.”° For Kant anthropology also formed together with
geography the whole of our empirical knowledge of the world.?” When in his
Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht of the late 1790s, Kant turns from reflec-
tions on man in general to consider in its discussion of Der Charakter des Volkes,
that is groupings of men taken in particular, he makes differentiations according
to national distinctions. The Volk is treated synonymously with Nation, and
derived, especially as seen in his account of the English, from its origins in the
Stamm or tribe. Kant’s account of national character proceeds by describing
national stereotypes of the European countries, which echo those of Hume, and
of earlier eighteenth-century thinkers such as du Bos.
Although Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht may be called one
of his “post-critical” works because it appeared subsequent to his three critiques of
critical reason, of practical reason, and of judgment, his opinions seem to have
remained fairly constant; Kant lectured on anthropology from the 1770s, and the
content of his lectures probably constituted the source from which he later drew
when he put his thoughts down in print. In any event it has been correctly
observed that Kant’s judgments about national character and its relation to art did
not shift from his pre-critical to his post-critical publications.”®
In a footnote to his remarks on the feeling of the beautiful and the sub-
lime, Kant states that he is not investigating whether or not national differences
78 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

appear by chance, or are bound with a certain necessity to climate (“ob diese
Nationalunterschiede zufillig . . . oder mit einer gewissen Notwendigkeit an das
Clima gebunden seyn”).”? Reading these remarks, which were published in the
1760s, in the light of his antecedent comments of 1757 on physical geography, how-
ever, allows for the hypothesis that he believed, like many other thinkers including
du Bos, that these differences may have depended on climate. Kant also made state-
ments demeaning Negroes in his Beobachtungen iiber das Gefiihl des Schonen und
Erhabenen of the 1760s that follow those of Hume, whom he cites, and press for
the idea of racial constants.*°
The Kritik der reinen Vernunft also briefly brings up the issue of
Volkscharakter. In his discussion of the regulative use of ideas Kant mentions
Volkscharakter as a possible reason for the differences of opinion that insightful
men may have. Either people see differences as deriving from Volkscharakter,
decisive and inherited distinctions of families and races, or all differences are merely
the result of chance.
In Kant’s opinion both sides in the argument overlook the deeper causes,
and views of the unity or multiplicity of nature may be reconciled by reason.?!
Kant may thus with equanimity merely be representing the unresolved opinions
of others, and trying to explain differences in a manner which would not be con-
tingent or historical, much in the manner of his anthropology. On the other hand,
Dagobert Frey, who was, as mentioned, a twentieth-century proponent of a racist
geography and history of art, made reference to this passage and read part of it to
bolster his own arguments that Volkscharakter had a racial basis.**
Whether it therefore is the case that racist ideas about the nature of
national character are also already anticipated in this passage by Kant—even though
Kant characteristically calls for reason to adjudicate and reconcile differences of
opinion—Kant’s anthropology did rely on generalizations about national charac-
ter, and Kant did make assumptions about racial difference. Race was a subject
that engaged Kant in other writings: he devoted a work specifically to the topic of
racial differences.*? He seems to have believed, in contrast with his pupil Johann
Gottfried Herder, that there were different races, signified by color and other
features, and that race was a determinant of character and culture.*4 Although his
views on race changed in the course of time, Kant’s statement in his Anthropologie
that despite Philanthropismus, or philanthropic views of man, the mixing of tribes
(Stamme) would not be beneficial for mankind, does seem to suggest that racialist
assumptions do underlie his discussion of nations and tribes.
 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments 79

These ideas have a pertinence for art history, as well as for aesthetics. Kant’s
thinking about national character directly involves art. In his tract on anthropol-
ogy Kant says that the Italian character is revealed in its taste for art. Kant’s national
stereotyping was in fact long dependent on and implicated in his considerations
of art and beauty. In the fourth section of his Beobachtungen of the 1760s Kant had
already distinguished between national characteristics in as much as they depended
on distinct feelings of the sublime and beautiful.°° Consistent with the remarks he
was to make in his Anthropologie, Kant for example stated that Italian genius had
displayed itself chiefly in music, painting, sculpture, and architecture.*” In the
conclusion of his Beobachtungen Kant even adduces examples from the history of
art. Casting a look at history, he notes that taste can take constantly changing forms,
and that the Greeks and Romans showed clear signs of a pure feeling for the
beautiful and for the sublime in poetry, sculpture, and architecture.*®
Theories of national differences, of schools of art related to them, of
cultural development related to climate, and perhaps even of race, were further
conjoined in the great eighteenth-century landmark of the historiography of art,
Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums of 1764.
Winckelmann cited many ancient sources of his ideas, including Polybius on the
effect of climate. Winckelmann believed that art was dependent on the inborn and
developed nature (Eigenart und Gemiithsart) of peoples who made it, among other
factors.°? Art was consequently dependent upon national character (Winckelmann
explicity uses the word Nation), and national character was influenced by heaven,
by which Winckelmann meant the effect of climate.
Winckelmann also seems to have seen effects of climate or place not only
as causative, but as constant. Harald Keller has noted that he compared qualities
of Etruscan art with that made by Tuscan-born artists of the Renaissance in more
recent times.*° This is because Winckelmann evidently believed that national
differences were constant, and could be related to the effects of temperature and
the air: these could be observed in present-day peoples.4! Winckelmann also may
have believed that these distinctions were inborn, since he compared the differ-
ences of peoples found in differing countries to the differences found among species
of animals, although it is not completely clear if these assumptions also involved
racial as well as national distinctions, as they seem to do in Hume and Kant.
It is more usual to trace the origins of national stereotypes, and related
questions of racial prejudice as they are expressed in art history and in other fields,
to the nineteenth or early twentieth century. These problems are supposed to have
80 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

arisen in the generations that followed Hume, Kant, and Winckelmann. This
paper has however suggested that even those thinkers who stressed “disinterested
interest” as characteristic of the beautiful, like Immanuel Kant, or sought for a
standard of taste independent of times and peoples, like Hume, were caught up in
a categorization of peoples and nations which informed their notions of taste and
its expression in the arts.
It is open to debate if the entanglement of these beliefs in stereotypical and
racialist thinking discounts the validity of philosophical arguments about
aesthetic theories. But it certainly qualifies the universal claims of these theories, and
in the least makes their applicability problematic.* This is particularly the case for
arguments about history that would be founded upon their premises. This problem
is evident in large stretches of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought that derive
from or use such notions, which may allow for prejudice, not just of a hermeneutic
kind, and for personal taste, as it were, to come in through the back door.
This paper has attempted to suggest that the problem of disentangling art
history from aesthetic prejudices adumbrated by Riegl and his followers opens up on
to a larger and older issue: whether aesthetic values and beliefs can be disentangled
from other notions that also rely on stereotypes. There are ways that they can be.
But it would be necessary to employ different anthropological and geographical
premises and methods than those that have often been in operation in the histori-
ography of art. To put it another way: instead of an anthropo-geography of art, in
the sense of Friedrich Ratzel, a géographie humaine of art, following in a tradition
established by Paul Vidal de la Blache, remains to be elaborated.*4

I. See the summary in Jan Berting and Christiane Villan-Gandossi, “National Stereotypes—An
Introduction. The Role and Signficance of National Stereotypes in International Relations: An
Interdisciplinary Approach,” in Teresa Walas, ed., Stereotypes and Nations (Cracow: International
Cultural Centre, 1995), 11-27.
2. Voltaire, “Essay on Taste,” in Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory
1648-1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 531.
3. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Eugene F. Miller, David Hume. Essays Moral, Political
and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 227.
4. There has been an increasing literature on Riegl. This account follows the perceptive remarks by
Otto Pacht, “Alois Riegl,” republished in Jorg Oberhaidacher, Artur Rosenauer, Gertraut Schikola,
 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments 81

Methodisches zu Kunsthistorischen Praxis. Ausgewahlte Schriften (Munich: Prestel, 1977), 141-52 (origi-
nally published as “Art Historians and Art Critics—VI: Alois Riegl,” Burlington Magazine ios [1963]:
188-93).
5. For introductions to Schlosser and his thought see Eduard Lachnit, “Julius von Schlosser (1866-1938),”
in Heinrich Dilly, ed., Altmeister Modener Kunstgeschichte (Berlin: Dietrich Riemer, 1990), 150-62;
Artur Rosenauer, “Julius von Schlosser,” in The Dictionary ofArt; and the articles contained in the
number of Kritische Berichte 16, no. 4 (Winter 1988) devoted to Schlosser on the fiftieth anniversary
of his death. Pacht, “Riegl,” tsof., also points to the contrast between Riegl and Schlosser.
6. Julius von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spatrenaissance. Ein beirag zur Gschichte
des Sammelwesens (1908; 2nd ed., Braunschweig: Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1978).
7. E. H. Gombrich, “Norm and Form. The Stylistic Categories of Art History and their Origins in
Renaissance Ideals,” reprinted in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art ofthe Renaissance (1966; London:
Phaidon, 1971), 81-98.
8. As translated in ibid., 84.
9. For Vasari’s treatment of foreign artists, see Giorgio Bonsanti, “Gli artisti stranieri nelle Vite del
Vasari,” in I! Vasari Storiografo e Artista (Atti del Congresso Internazionale nel IV Centenario della Morte)
(Florence: Instituto nazionale di studi sul rinasimento, 1976), 717-34.
10. For the most recent treatment of Vasari’s critique of Pontormo, see Elizabeth Pilliod, Pontormo,
Bronzino, and Allori. A Genealogy ofFlorentine Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).
11. See Ernst H. Gombrich, Kunst und Fortschritt. Wirkung und Wandlung einer Idee (Cologne: Dumont,
1978). Originally published as Ideas of Progress and their Impact on Art (New York: Cooper Union
School of Art and Architecture, 1971).
12. For this point, see Hans Belting, Die Deutschen und ihre Kunst, Ein Schwieriges Erbe (Munich:
Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1992), 15.
13. Pacht, “Riegl,” 144f.
14. Alois Riegl, “Das hollandische Gruppenportrat,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des
allerhochtsten Kaiserhauses 23, nos. 3-4 (1902), 71-278.
15. Wolfgang Kemp, “Introduction” (trans. David Britt), in Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of
Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1999), 14.
16. See Alois Riegl, Historische Grammatik der bildenden Kiinste, ed. Karl M. Swoboda and Otto Pacht
(Graz and Cologne, 1966), 45-60. Specific reference is here made to a passage on p.5o: “An den
Franzosen erwies sich im 12. Jh. Der Vorteil der Beimischung eines Tropfens antikens Blutes . . . .”
Even though these remarks are taken from the manuscript of an unpublished book project, and Riegl’s
ideas often changed, there is no reason to doubt that these comments represent Riegl’s thought at
the time they were written.
82 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

17. These ideas of these scholars are treated in chap. 3 of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Place of
Art. Toward a Geography ofArt (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming
[2002]).
18. Recent translations of Riegl include Problems of Style. Foundations for a History of Ornament, trans.
Evelyn Kain, annotations and intro. David Castriota, preface Henri Zerner (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992); The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. cit.; Pacht, The Practice ofArt History.
Reflections on Method, trans. David Britt, intro. Christopher $. Wood (London: Harvey Miller
Publishers, 1999); for other authors of the Vienna School, see The Vienna School Reader: Politics and
Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 2000).
19. Cf. Kemp, “Introduction,” 14-15. Wood, in his “Introduction” to Pacht, The Practice of ArtHistory,
15, raises the problem of national constants, and Pacht’s response to Meyer Schapiro’s critique (see
below), but passes over this central issue in favor of other considerations.
20. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1982) 235fF.
21. Pacht himself was already aware of the problem of the use of the idea of national constants in the
1930s, see Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis, 139, and more explicitly, subsequently in 1971,
ibid., 299; Pacht’s own cursory defense of the concept on empirical bases against its “rationalist” crit-
ics begs the question, and does not answer issues of historical definition of the national and ethnic
rubrics which he continued to use.
22. Abbé Jean-Baptiste du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, preface Dominique
Désirat, (1719; reprint, Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1993), 252ff.
23. David Hume, “Of National Characters,” in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, 197 ff.; the quo-
tation is from 198.
24. Ibid., 208 n. 10.
25. See (with reference to previous literature) John Immerwahr, “Hume's Revised Racism,” Journal
of the History of Ideas 53, no. 3 (July-September 1992): 481-86.
26. For its antecedents see however Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 196.
27. See J. A. May, Kant’s Concept of Geography and its Relation to Recent Geographical Thought (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1970), 104.
28. Gerd Wolandt, “Kants Vélkeranthropologie als Programm,” in Hugo Dyserinck and Karl Ulrich
Syndram, eds., Europa und das nationale Selbstverstndnis. Imagologische Problem in Literatur, Kunst
und Kultur des 19. und 20. Jahrunderts. Aachener Beitrage zur Komparatistik, 8 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988),
39-70, especially 47ff.
29. Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen tiber das Gefiihl des Schinen und Erhabenen (1764; reprint, Riga,
1771), 81n.
30. See further, Sander Gilman, “The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory,” Eighteenth-
 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments 83

Century Studies 8, no. 4, 373-91; I am grateful to Michelle Foa for this and other references. This
point has also already been observed, without much further discussion or Kant’s relation here to
Hume or much comment however, by Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory ofAfrican-
American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 141.
31. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Ingeborg Heidemann, (1781; reprint Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966),
694~-95: “Wenn ich einsehende Manner mit einander wegen der Charakteristik der Menschen, der
Tiere oder Pflanzen, ja selbst der Kérper des Mineralreichs im Streite sehe, da die einen z. B. beson-
dere und in der Abstammung gegriindete Volkscharaktere, oder auch entschiedene und erbliche
Unterschiede der Familien, Rassen usw. Annehmen, andere dagegen ihren Sinn darauf setzen, daf
die Natur in diesem Stiicke ganz und gar einerlei Anlagen gemacht habe, und aller Unterschied nur
auf dusseren Zufalligkeiten beruhe, so darf ich nur die Beschaffenheit des Gegenstandes in Betrachtung
ziehen, um zu begreifen, daf er fiir beide viel zu tief verborgen liege, als da sie aus Einsicht in die
Natur des Objekts sprechen kénnten. Es ist nicht anderes, als das zwiefache Interesse der Vernunft,
davon dieser Teil das eine, jener das andere zu Herzen nimmt, oder auch affektiert, mithin die Ver-
schiedenheit der Maximen der Naturmannigfaltigkeit, oder der Natureinheit, welche sich gar wohl
vereinigen lassen, aber so lange sie fiir objektive Einsichten gehalten werden, nicht allein Streit, son-

dern auch Hindernisse veranlassen, welche die Wahrheit lange aufhalten, bis ein Mittel gefunden
wird, das stetige Interesse zu vereinigen, und die Vernunft hieriiber zufrieden zu stellen.”
32. Dagobert Frey, “Die Entwicklung nationaler Stile in der mittelalterlichen Kunst des Abendlandes,”
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 16 (1938): 3-4, and further,
Dagobert Frey, Kunstwissenschaftliche Grundfragen. Prolegomena zu einer Kunstphilosophie (Vienna:
Rudolf M. Rohrer, 1946), 66.
33. See, for example, Von der verschiedenen Racen der Menschen, first published 1775.
34. For this point see Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History ofIdeas, (New York:
Vintage, 1976), 163, who notes that Herder said “a nation is made what it is by ‘climate,’ education,
relations with its neighbours, and other changeable and empirical factors, and not by an impalpable
inner essence or an unalterable factor such as race or colour . . . Herder protests . . . that the great
liberal Kant in his Anthropologie emphasized race and colour too much.”
35. Wolfgang Becker, ed., Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983).
36. Kant, Beobachtungen tiber das Gefiihl des Schinen und Erhabenen, 81.
37. Ibid., 83.
38. Kant, Beobachtungen iiber das Gefiihl des Schinen und Erhabenen, 107. Cf. Gilman, “The Figure
of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory,” which traces changes in Kant’s thinking about race in the
course of his writing.
39. See Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden, 1764), 22ff.
40. Ibid., 11.
84 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

4t. Ibid., 22, e.g., where qualities of Neapolitans and Sicilians are mentioned.
42. Cf. Frey, “Die Entwicklung nationaler Stile,” 3, but whether or not this may be related to the
new (in the eighteenth century) anthropological conceptualization of race, as Frey characteristically
claims in his efforts to ground his own racialist thinking, is not so clear.
43. One way that the universal claims might have been saved is by the questionable claim that those
who were denigrated were in fact of a different species than the human. This is an argument that has
been repeatedly used by various forms of racist discourse; see, for example, the discussion in Immerwahr,
“Hume's Revised Racism.”
44. The heritage of Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache in art history, and many other issues adumbrated
here, as well as other suggestions for approaches, are discussed further in The Place ofArt: Toward a
Geography of Art.
Darkness and the Demand for Time in Art

Philip Fisher

Almost two hundred years ago in London, the poet John Keats sat down to write
a poem about a single work of art. His “Ode on a Grecian Urn” records both his
excited inspection of the urn and the fact that he faced a work of art with just that
puzzled and half-defeated mood that spells the onset of a troubled relation between
audience and art in modern culture.
What Keats's poem records for us is an experience of a museum with one
work inside. Alone, faced with and recording his response to one remote, half-
understood, field of details through which he moves in spurts of energy, finds himself
baffled, regroups, pulls back, returns to the attack, he reaches, in spite of ignorance
and blankness, profound relation. No other contrasting work or roomful of
Grecian urns, no conversation with a friend or expert, no juxtaposition to a work
of his own time, no information, no general or categorical knowledge about urns
or Grecian history or mythology or dates or the artist who made or might have
made the urn is allowed to enter into his experience.
Keats's museum with one work inside is one extraordinary example of the
central aesthetic experience of a culture of engulfment. This experience is now the
norm for our encounter with music, poetry, and novels. The term “engulfment”
defines a wide spectrum of aesthetic energies. Ever since the rise of the novel and
its solitary, silent reading, technologies like those of print culture have offered us
an experience in which a handheld, inexpensive copy of the work is read alone, at
a place and time chosen by the reader. Later variations of this experience would in-
clude, for music, a compact disc listened to at home, alone, or even through
headphones, and again at a time when the desire to hear just this work strikes one
and can be satisfied. Unscheduled, solitary experiences of works of art met under
the circumstances of personal choice often at night and often in darkness and si-
lence: it was this that the novel brought into modernity and by this new experience
electrified cultural life. The novel was the first work of art commonly experienced
in the most intimate domestic space of all, a bed, and in that border of undressed
vulnerability, just before sleep.
Our museum experience of works of art is a surprising exception to the
culture of engulfment, because as an indoor boulevard the museum creates a sub-
88 Philip Fisher

divided rapid form of attention that ultimately records its greatest successes with
movements, persons, assemblies, and pageants in which the single work played its
part as a detail. The thriving, modern museum—one of the absolute success sto-
ries within modern culture—creates its energy and pleasure by discouraging
engulfment and standing as far as possible from the idea of a museum with one
work inside.
By juxtaposing works, hanging them in series, clustering them within a
room, organizing a path through a suite of rooms that encourages us to walk past
fifty or sixty works, or simply in creating an array of works hung side by side on
one wall, the museum favored or, once in place, elicited what we might call works
that would thrive within the ecology of museums. Works organized through mood,
and offering subtle pleasure to the first moment or two of attention; and then works
forming their own natural society, usually in the form of an art movement like
Impressionism, Cubism, or Surrealism; and, finally, works seen through the lens
of a few presiding artistic personalities but where the larger story subsumed the
individual work by Monet, Vermeer, Matisse, or Pollock—works of art of these
three kinds were the natural citizens for this museum world of clustered, sequenced
art presented in a suite of rooms where we find, arranged for our attention, a set
of juxtaposed works designed to suggest lively, multiplied connections between
works even at the expense of any possible single-minded encounter with one
extraordinary work. Such single encounters are the norm in listening to a piece of
music, reading a poem, or looking at a new architectural masterpiece. Architec-
ture creates only works of art that can literally surround and engulf us. We could
speak of novel reading as a kind of spiritual architecture.
Prolonged attention to one work of art, as Keats recorded it in his expe-
rience of the Grecian urn, has a natural relation to works where parts, local episodes,
and details have to be weighed and examined one after another before any
relation to the whole can exist. Equally, prolonged attention has a clear relation to
baflement and fascination, to a set of not easily resolved questions that never find
answers, but lead instead to more interesting questions not obviously posed within
the work itself.
For each of the scenes on the urn that Keats describes he knows this but
not that, and he never knows the whole intended artistic fact. “What men or gods
are these?” He can recognize that he is in a world that has men and gods—poly-
theism—but he cannot tell whether these are men or gods—he has lost iconic
confidence, and even if he could say that much with certainty, he still does not
 Darkness and the Demand for Time inArt 89

know their names, their stories, or their purposes here on this urn. “What men or
gods are these?” Such a question—and it is only one of dozens in the poem—comes
out of a pathos of intelligibility in culture, one that slowly undoes the difference
between “our culture” and all else, between an actual tradition humming under-
neath the present and a set of mere facts with which we might or might not happen
to be acquainted.
Many acts in the face of a work of art can be termed recognitions. John
Keats recognizes that the object in front of him is an urn and he recognizes that it
is from ancient Greece. Looking at a painting we recognize that this is a woman
and we recognize what those people are doing as what we call “dancing” or that in
a Renoir work what we see is a “picnic.” Whether or not something like what we
know as a “picnic” is happening in a certain work by Manet we can’t be sure be-
cause some of the picnickers are dressed and others not, and the food might be
more like what we call or recognize as a “still life” than “food”—a very different
category of recognition which might make the overall situation something else
than a picnic.
Keats's half-unanswerable questions are not simply caused by the fact that
the urn is an ancient object from a culture not his own. One strength of modern
art has been to level the playing field between “our own culture” or “our own time”
and the widest possible field of objects and experiences by opening up the exact
kind of iconic bafflement we used to associate or ascribe—as Keats does—to the
fact that he has sat down in front of something remote in time and culture from
himself. With Picasso, a lifetime experiment with suggestion, recognition, pun,
and half-defeated recognition turned by Picasso’s artistry to play and wit stands for
one side of a modernity in which the central pleasure of recognition itself is de-
moted from being what we are invited to do with a work of art—that is, pass along
a chain of recognitions to a certain kind of knowing pleasure—but is still retained
as what we do. We recognize, but under troubled conditions, or find ourselves ex-
posed to the final refinements of recognitions that had become stale and too easy.
One problem of recognition lies in the fact that every work of art is what
Keats called the urn, a “foster child of silence and slow time.” Ever growing patches
of silence open up in the slow cultural time that preserves things longer than na-
ture does while not preserving the culture that created the work and acted as an
unseen partner in all of its undertones and suggestions. In the long run preserva-
tion only slows down rather than outwits the decay of meaning and intelligibility.
Every artifact’s final condition is silence or what we could call “object death.”
90 Philip Fisher

Keats, halfway through the slow time of the urn, asks again and again:
What? Who? Where? He cannot say: There! That is Pan piping or over there are
Pyramus and Thisbe united at last, or there, that is a Dionysian priest officiating
at a rite to clear a village from infection. As a man who finds himself midway in
the ongoing, ever-increasing silence of the urn, he knows this, but not that. He
still has the concept “sacrifice” that makes certain visual scenes involving a man, a
garlanded heifer, and a crowd recognizable, even though sacrifices no longer exist
in his world and heifers are not seen being led garlanded through London and the
urn itself does not picture the sacrifice itself or even the place of sacrifice, but a
crowd of this kind on their way to a place we have to imagine. Only those who
know quite a lot can invent in the mind the later act and place of the sacrifice.
Natural and spontaneous access to this imagined scene is one of the things that we
mean by having a culture. In a little more “slow time,” a few thousand or million
years, even the idea of sacrifice may not be remembered or recognizable in an
image of a “person” (seen by Keats as a priest) leading a “heifer” by the average
viewer of this kind of urn, if any remain and if the urn does.
Keats questions because, in slow time, he can experience only in part what
is in front of him in the images on the surface of the urn. He still knows the word
“sacrifice,” but he has no historical memory that reaches back to include these
scenes, as his memory would reach back to decipher scenes like one of the guillo-
tining of the French king during the revolution or a spring boat race on the Thames.
That the poem builds and releases clusters of questions suspends its form at the
midpoint of this silencing where what is known and recognizable is progressively
being eclipsed by what is no longer familiar.
To know that what he sees in one area of the urn is a “wild ecstasy,” that
is, to have the cultural concept of ecstasy, sharing it, he thinks, with the maker of
the urn and being able to assign that word (as we would the word “picnic” or
“Thanksgiving dinner” to certain kinds of representations) to know all this confi-
dently, but not to know exactly “what wild ecstasy” is the exact midpoint of
recognition (cultural memory) and blankness (cultural forgetting).
Slow time is the already half-accomplished silencing of things, the sub-
traction that goes on continuously in the number of possible recognitions within
an image. Keats's unanswered questions announce how many recognitions are al-
ready impossible and predict a time when fewer and fewer will be, reaching, finally,
none at all. Keats still knows that the odd thing in that bit we see as a mouth is a
musical instrument—a pipe—but a few more years of slow time and that, too, will
 Darkness and the Demand for Time inArt 91

be unknown. He cannot identify the man, but he can the thing. Twenty centuries
ago both would have been instantly known; a few millennia from now, neither.
He writes and forms part of an audience at a certain moment of half-accomplished
oblivion: half-finished silence. And everyone stands at such a moment. The still
unkissed woman, the crowd halfway to the sacrifice, the legends that haunt ghost-
like because we see they must be legends, but don’t know what the content is: these
many “between” moments of life in time are amplified in slow time as the half-
accomplished silence of the object of culture, the urn itself.
Instead of finding answers to his many questions about what he cannot
now know, Keats makes of those unanswered questions new questions of his own.
He asks, for example, the following questions. Why would the maker of the urn
represent someone playing music? An act that must make us conscious—in what
we see as we look at the urn—not of sight but of hearing and of the thing we can-
not hear—the unheard melody? Or why in representing sexual pursuit would an
artist choose the instant before any kiss—the unkissed maiden—and not the cul-
mination of the action? Or why would a town occur “emptied of its folk” rather
than alive and bustling? Keats does not find answers to the questions he first had—
what men or gods are these, what ecstasy, what wild pursuit—but finds different
questions: unheard melodies, midpoints of action, the representation of the felt
experience of emptiness—and these questions point to open lines of curiosity within
which he will discover the brightness of his own experience. His problem is not
how to answer the questions his historical ignorance places before him in the first
few seconds, but how to get different questions rising within the experience itself
to which he has, not answers, but satisfaction—what he calls in the end—all you
know and all you need to know.
Each of Keats’s many questioning observations involves attention to a
small part of his visual field. Without following any narrative order he jumps
from place to place. It is one local event or detail and never the object as a whole
that draws him into questioning. He takes in the leaves of the trees, and the
musician beneath the leaves, but also the relation of our word for foliage (leaves)
to our word for departure (leaves). Leaving or abandoning someone or leaving
off playing a flute are not relations proposed within the content of the work
itself because they involve questions thinkable only within the English language
of Keats’s day by someone looking at an urn made by someone in a culture where
that pun on the word “leaves” could not have existed or been foreseen. His
attention turns to the fact of marble leaves, the most transient detail of seasonal
92 Philip Fisher

nature represented by the most enduring material known to civilization.

Keats presents us with questioning that begins from parts and details, at-
tention not to the urn, but to a scene on this part of the urn, not to the total scene
but to the trees, not to the trees but to the leaves. Finally, those leaves enter unex-
pected relations; to leaving by means of the English pun, and to marble by means
of the formal paradox of substance and the artistic material through which each
and every substance has to reach visibility on the plane of representation of an urn.
Questions are invariably local. How then do we move from these smallest intriguing
parts to the order of a larger reality?
It is syntax that lets us put these parts together. For that reason, the ques-
tions that bring us to think about syntax have a natural relation to prolonged
attention, to engulfment by a single work, to works that strike us first as a set of
local episodes rather than an overall single impact, and to whatever reasons we
might have for asking why with works of art we have preferred the experience of
“walking past works of art”—usually fifty or sixty works in a ninety-minute visit
to a museum—to encountering single, rich, slowly delivered aesthetic objects.

Syntax
To think about these questions and to make clear just what I mean by syntax, I
want first to consider the ordinary case in language of syntax and the complexity
that it builds within a reality no longer easily felt to be made up simply of persons
and things. Consider this sentence describing an easily understood everyday event.
“If I had not slammed on the brakes, I would have hit the child who ran
out between two parked cars chasing his soccer ball.” This little universe is made
up of two persons (I and the child), several things (a soccer ball, two parked cars,
the brakes), and two key acts in a neat balance: “slammed on the brakes” and “ran
out” joined to an action suspended “would have hit” rather than “hit”—or, to be
perfectly accurate “would have hit” standing in for and clarifying the actual fact—
“did not hit.”
If we think about these persons (I, the child) and things (soccer ball, brakes,
two parked cars), sense does not yet appear. Nor does it appear at the level of in-
dividual words, “the” or “brakes” or even “the brakes” because “slammed on the
brakes” gives us our first complete unit of sense. Not quite. What we find is the
word “not” (“not slammed on the brakes”) and this would seem, as syntax, to lead
us to think the brakes were not slammed on, except that the presiding word “if”
(“If I had not slammed on the brakes”) overrides the word “not” and tells us, at
 Darkness and the Demand for Time inArt 93

long distance, that I did slam on the brakes even though the word “not” appears
right next to the word “slammed.”
“If I had not slammed on the brakes” is the intricate local unity that binds
a person, thing, and action together (I, the brakes, slammed) and it takes the strange
interaction of “if,” “had” and “not” to lock the right picture in place to give us
what we call a fact. In a more complex way this is true if we look at the other core
phrase, “hit the child.” This is the heart of the matter, but here again, although the
words seem to state a positive thing that happened, the word “not” is nowhere to
be found in front of “hit.” Looking closer we see that the opposite is the case be-
cause we bind together just enough words—“would have hit the child”—so that
we see that the intended meaning is that I did not hit the child even though
(reversing what happened earlier with the brakes) there is no negation here but a
complex imaginative condition in which my mind is fascinated more by what might
have happened (hit the child) than by what did (that I did not hit the child) and
we have in the syntax (would have hit the child) exactly the way to carve out this
fuller reality for what might have been (but wasn’t) over what did happen, because
what did happen lacks the imaginative hold of what was possible, but averted.
If we need these large combinatory, subtle situations to have the first whole
units of meaning, we might ask the opposite question: At what levels is there no
meaning? First, we have no meaning at the mere level of letters or parts of letters.
Questions and answers driven by any curiosity we might have about letters lead us
nowhere. If someone noticed how many letter “i’s” there were, or that there were
four “c’s” in the phrase “a child chasing a soccer ball,” no meaning results. We would
be accumulating information, but not meaning. If we noticed in the phrase “hit
the child” that the two-letter pair “hi” occurs in “hit” and in “child,” seeming to
bind the words together, there is no syntax to this fact; it is simply more infor-
mation, an accidental fact. It is worse than meaningless because it ask us to notice
distracting information, like the fact that the sentence has twenty-five words or re-
quires 123 characters or is in English.
Meaning or syntax begins higher up the organization of matter, even in a
sentence. When we look at the words “hit the child” or even “I would have hit the
child,” standing free of the larger syntax, we have to notice that the word “hit”
might mean strike or hit with my fist or hand, except that, from a great distance
we govern this word by the formula “hit by a car” even though my “car” is never
directly named in the sentence. But on hearing the phrase “slammed on the brakes”
we insert the picture these words call up into the familiar actions of driving a car,
94 Philip Fisher

so thanks to the brakes the word “car” already exists indirectly and in our pictorial
imagination. Without being named it is able to give its particular control to the
phrase “hit the child,” ruling out the picture of a man hitting a child with his fists.
Naturally, it is the whole sentence that, in this case, is one complete syn-
tactic whole because it gives us a complete action with all its primary and secondary
details, including what might have taken place, but didn't, and including the over-
precise fact that the child was chasing a soccer ball. But such a whole only works
because of our skill at creating what I think of as “sub-canvases” or nested small-
and middle-sized wholes locked into larger wholes.
“T would have hit” is such a whole because the person, the action, and the
suspension of the action in this special way are all required to make the word “hit”
have its clear sense. We also remember that we have to have the implied car whose
brakes have been mentioned, far off in the distance to make exact what “hit” means
in this case. Seen alone the word “hit” might have an even wider range of possi-
bilities: a “hit” in a baseball game or in poker, not to mention a “hit” in a Mafia
film or a “hit” Broadway musical or simply a brutal adult “hitting” a child, usu-
ally his own. The word “hit” has no meaning whatsoever until we know whether
it is a situation involving a car, a baseball game, record sales, or domestic violence.
Only in dictionaries do all of these ideas swarm around the same three letters (h,
i, t). We cannot look up the meaning brought to life by syntax in a dictionary, and
for that reason we cannot in the end look up the live meaning of a word in any
dictionary now in existence. The dictionary stores possible meanings without the
rules for activating any one of those meanings.
Any reading of our sentence is not made richer, but poorer, by any side-
glances of attention to these other words that have the same sound. We could speak
of the freestanding letters h-i-t, as asleep and only wakened into sense, that is into
real existence as a word by the syntax and context that lets us experience any
actual meaning (baseball, Mafia, car accident, blow of the fist) for these letters. The
situation is not really different from the fact that faced with the letters p-a-i-n, and
not knowing whether the language is English or French, we cannot say whether
bread or physical suffering is in question. Only knowing which language these
letters are meant to be a part of can make a word out of them at all.
The little unit “I would have hit” slips into place against no simple word
like “child” but “the child” or “the child chasing his soccer ball” or in the mind’s
eye, “the child who ran out between two parked cars chasing his soccer ball.”
And this whole sub-canvas, made up like a small clock of many wheels
 Darkness and the Demand for Time inArt 95

and gears, is ultimately locked into the larger whole whose real subject is not the
child at all but “I” and “would have hit” because these two master parts give us the
presiding psychological subject, or rather the relation between the two uses of “I”—
“I slammed on the brakes” balanced against “I would have hit.” Through the word
“T’ and its link to these two actions (the one done, the other possible, but averted)
we find the ordering that reaches out through every letter, word, phrase, and de-
tail to bind the whole.
The words “if,” “had not” and “would have” are the overlooked heart of
the matter because it is their nuance that actually structures together “I,” the brakes,
the child, the parked cars, the soccer ball (the things of the sentence) along with
slammed, hit, chasing (the actions of the sentence).
To sum up:
First: Where do we first find a local complete part? Is it at the level of
letter, word, phrase? The answer is, none of these. We have to go a certain distance
up the pyramid of nested units to reach syntactic parts that are complete: “his
soccer ball,” “slammed on the brakes,” “would have hit.”
” «

Second: How do we avoid pointless questions? Why in “hit the child” do

the letters “hi” occur in both hit and child? Why are there twenty-five words? Or
123 characters? This is mere information. How do we sort out mere information
from significant detail?
Third: How does action occur at a distance? We saw this in the power of
“if” over everything that follows or in the way the never-named car lets us know
which one of the many possible meanings of word “hit” is active here. Or how the
word “not” is not negative when it follows “if.” “IfI had not slammed on the brakes
.. means I did slam on them.
Fourth: How do we make a single picture in the mind by moving from
small sub-canvases (the child) to mid-level (the child who ran out between two
parked cars chasing his soccer ball) to very large (I would have hit the child who
ran out between two parked cars chasing his soccer ball).
Let me call these issues: first, “the smallest real whole” or for painting, “the
smallest sub-canvas’; second, “action at a distance”; third, “rising along the pyra-
mid of wholeness,” especially attending to all the middle positions and middle levels
of order between the smallest sub-canvas and the work as a whole.
The complete work is not made up by adding together the twenty small-
est parts. Instead, it is changed at every level by each of the next higher, more
inclusive levels of syntax.
96 Philip Fisher

Visual Syntax
When we cross over from sentences, even from a pictorial sentence like the one I
have been examining, to paintings, we start out skeptical that the visual world would
have anything like the syntax that mediates between mere piles of words or letters
and the complex states of affairs that slip into view once those words or letters find
themselves set free as thought within the discipline of syntax.
I do not want to suggest that there is any such thing as a highly logical
visual syntax with equivalents to the nuanced actions and suspensions we are
familiar with in words like “if,” “not,” “would have” or that action at a distance that
” «

is set in motion when we hear a subject pronoun like “I” and hold it in the side of
our attention until, many words later, the verb turns up which completes the
expectation raised by the long delayed impact of “I.” Instead, the general ad-
vantages of syntax are my goal. I would list them in this way:

First, ordering a discrete, segmented attention.

Second, defining a smallest real whole.
Third, ruling out mere information.
Fourth, shaping smallest and middle-sized units into a hierarchy.
Fifth, setting up paths for action at a distance.

Did the museum experience as we now commonly enjoy it rule out ob-
jects about which these questions needed to be asked? The alternative to syntax is
a satisfaction with the immediate, complete response to the work as a whole. One
question that must be asked before describing what a visual syntax might involve
concerns our twentieth-century preference for composed, unified works. Did
certain kinds of new art first make acceptable the quick take so typical of museum
experience, doing so by means of a relaxed freedom of details? Were there works
that profited from small variations of mood, but overall continuity of subject, works
that exploited our habit of walking past works of art, pausing here and there, some-
times finding a favorite to prolong our stay beside, but with the motive of extending
an atmosphere or state of feeling rather than trying to make available a set of
pleasures not available to us in the first glance? With such works extra time would
be taken to prolong the first glance rather than reject it in favor of what I like to
call “prolonged attention.”
I think that this is one side—not the whole story—of the extraordinary
international success to this day of Impressionism. We could say this is the twentieth-
 Darkness and the Demand for Time inArt 97

century rather than the nineteenth-century importance of Impressionism.

Impressionism is one part of the rising importance since Romanticism of
the moment as a harmonized self-contained aesthetic whole. By means of a mood,
or atmosphere diffused through every part (and therefore making parts less
important, if not negligible in importance), Impressionism lives off a small range
of middle-intensity emotional states that can be delivered at first glance by an every-
where harmonized, unified presence.
After Cézanne, a wide range of tactics can be described as techniques to
demand time from the viewer by refusing the kind of satisfactory first sight deliv-
ered by Impressionism. These tactics—the mysterious faceting of Cubism, the
assembled canvas of Jasper Johns that has no single wholeness—protect the work
from three things: from quickness, from meaning, and from mood.
Meyer Schapiro, in “Recent Abstract Painting” (1957), made the claim that
abstract art needed to be seen as refusing rapid understanding because it existed in
a culture where visual images were ubiquitous while being more and more skill-
fully deployed as communication. Images carried a message, acted by surprise,
pleasure, speed, and unification to achieve the effect that—in language—we call
the effect of a slogan. The best slogans are catching, memorable, fresh, simple, and
appealing. Schapiro wrote as though what we could call the problem of quickness
and unity and charm came from the growth of advertising—whether commercial,
political, or even revolutionary and subversive (one tiny part of the larger
machinery of the political).
In fact, for art the visual habits that new works of art had to overcome
came only in part from how the visual image was used in the popular, commercial,
entertainment, or political culture of the period from 1910 to 1950. Inside art itself
(through the agency of the museum and the Impressionist solution to the museum
experience), the overall, harmonized, quick-release, charming work, presenting it-
self as a mood, had, for the twentieth century, become established as the benchmark
museum experience. Please note that the aggressive, visceral, visually violent work
with its one strong effect is identical to the thing it claims to be against—the charm-
ing, ingratiating work, the work of one idea, one point. Both aggression and charm
are unified, easily recognized, quick-release experiences.
What makes possible the quickness of response and therefore our com-
fortable passage from work to work—in effect, our license to walk past works of
art—is an overall harmonized surface and, at the emotional level, the modern
replacement of passions by moods. Paintings that reach out to a viewer by means
98 Philip Fisher

of moods—or in political works by means of opinions, slogans, easily recognized

positions, and group affiliations—do so in a reduced emotional vocabulary. Mood
is pervasive, immediate, and delivers itself fully. The mood of a room or a person's
mood pervades every detail. Mood can either invite or dispense with lingering. We
choose to linger if we like the mood and its suggestion. Moods, like gaiety, agita-
tion, wistfulness, relaxed pleasure in sunlight, or melancholy found in Monet, van
Gogh or Whistler, are the internal complement to the technical fact of an overall
harmonized surface. But beyond these two facts of mood and harmonized surface
lies the single most important, but least often noticed part of the technology of
quickness. It could be called the loss of darkness in painting since Monet.
The high-pitched, light-centered paintings of Impressionism cast a spell
over the work that followed. By helping along that high-pitched brightness by means
of its own “modern” white walls, the museum joined what we might think of as a
conspiracy of light, a conspiracy of brightness, of clear, full visibility. The com-
plexity of the surface after Monet or Cézanne comes from the way it is
broken by strokes, facets, arbitrary shapes, or gestures of paint, not from the work-
ings of darkness and light.
Darkness slows down seeing. If we think of a Poussin or Courbet, not to
mention a Chinese landscape of ink on silk, we realize that first of all the eye has
to adjust down to the level of overall darkness, a level that differs from work to
work. Only then can we begin to search out details in spite of darkness. We could
think of darkness as one important precondition for searching. Its presence signals
the pace of prolonged attention. Little or nothing is delivered to our first glance.
The brightly lit and relatively detail-free content of many Monet paint-
ings, along with the preset, overall harmonization, is the clue to a world seen at a
fixed middle distance, one where atmosphere builds up between us and the objects
and persons of the painting, and maroons the world in a dissolving liquid harmony.
At just these kinds of distances in real life we are used to taking things in in a gen-
eral way. We are not close enough to examine detail after detail. Nor is this the
distance at which we act on the world or the world on us. We find ourselves in the
middle distance of restful, observation of a world where light is the only event.
Nor can we get closer. To vary Gertrude Stein’s remark: there’s no closer
there. If we walk right up to the canvas to inspect it, we find paint, blobs, strokes,
marks, and spots instead of a detailed world. What we can inspect is the paint, not
the world, because the world only exists at one set distance.
The generosity of darkness, and of locally staged, partially lit places within
 Darkness and the Demand for Time inArt 99

darkness, is one guarantee of how time can be demanded by the work of art. The
reverse is also true. Fully illuminated brightness makes possible a satisfying brief
glance. The bright, overall, high-pitched image is a quick image, a quick-release
image, we might say, because it delivers a world completely naked and frontal to
our first glance, then releases us from it. A room of such images takes us from mood
to mood, immersing us in those we enjoy, letting us take in or pass by those we are
not in the mood for.
The invention of this quick, bright, and (in the case of Impressionism)
mood-based system retroactively disabled our capacity or our willingness to engage
a broad territory of earlier art that did not offer fast enough results when measured
against the full disclosure at first glance that had been invented about 1870.
Darkness we should think of as supporting something in the visual world
like a syntax because darkness creates a nested set of distinct places that have to be
taken in one at a time and then explored by later back and forth glances that mul-
tiply relations, pairings, sequences, echoes. Only attention prolonged through time
discovers the actual center or the actual paths from place to place within the work.
There are three separate prolongations of attention sponsored by darkness,
but lost when darkness is banished, replaced by either a feeling of overall light, or
by color rather than light, as the example of Matisse makes clear. First, an
adjusting of the eyes down to the level of light, an act that we could call “accept-
ing the work,” agreeing to its conditions, not passing it by. Second, a visit of the
eyes to eight or a dozen patches and areas, each lit like a room in a house. Third,
the cross glances that begin to show how these cell-like illuminated exceptions to
the darkness form an organized array made up of pairs, evocations, sets, runs, and
melodies generated by each viewer’s path of back and forth glances.
Our normal experience now as citizens of the new visual world founded
by Impressionist quickness and ratified by film experience is to turn away from this
slowly revealed, time-demanding ballet of attention. If satisfaction, surprise, and
pleasure can really be delivered in the short courtship of mood and pre-
harmonized effect, why play the old game of darkness?
If we consider for the next few pages two works, one by Poussin, the other
by Jasper Johns, we can see that this “old game of darkness” is still alive, and that
a contemporary artist like Johns has the same reasons to solicit the work of time as
artists had in the past. I would go further and say that a wide range of modern
“difficulty” on the surface of the work—from Cézanne to Cubism to Pollock to
Johns—has to be seen as the attempt to find something that works as well as dark-
100 Philip Fisher

ness (now that it has been lost), wherever the artist wants to call for the time of the
passerby and for prolonged attention. Darkness is one sign of the artist's demand
for all or nothing, for patient disclosure or none at all.

Poussin
To begin to look at Poussin’s seventeenth-century painting The Infant Bacchus
Entrusted to the Nymphs ofNysa at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum (fig. 1), we need at
first to quiet down our own demand for more light to meet the work in its offered
obscurity, an obscurity punctuated by various levels of light. This means leaving
the comfortable air of the bright top section at the upper right and the central top
to the left, where we are already at home with the brightness, to adjust to the bot-
tom half of the work where most of its events take place. This done, the episodes
are found one by one, pairs or groups of figures with intervals of foliage and land-
scape. Each group of individual bodies or interlaced bodies draws us into experiential
states, passions, and circumstances of distinct kinds and levels of intensity, much
like the levels of light and darkness. We find sleep and waking, moods of joy and
sensual luxury, delight in a newborn child first held up in the air, or the reflective
solitude of a musician, sitting comfortably playing his pipes. There is no one over-
all mood or condition. After a while we find, even in the upper half, one obscure
single figure, or across the top we return to the episode luminous within the clouds.
No one act of focus can take in more than roughly one tenth of the area. Only the
choice to spend time here and then there can unlock the pleasures of this great
work. And in each sector time is required to grasp the details and enter the exis-
tential state of quietly playing music, holding up a newborn child, or arriving as
messenger and pointing to the sky.
We can speak here of a “defeated first glance” because the work gives noth-
ing to a viewer who has time for only a first look. It would, if tried, return next to
nothing. Only after taking in the cellular parts can we begin the later pleasures of
looking back and forth to put, for example, what occurs on the lower right (the male
world of sleep) together with the female unclothed world of luxury and sensuality
opposite at the bottom left. We see the isolated artist on high in his nest of trees, on
the same plane as Jupiter but in darkness rather than light. What could be meant
by this upper painting pairing of the artist in darkness across from the deity in light,
but both above the three less elevated, more human events and groups below?
These are only the first stirrings of interest in a work that datkness’ pro-
tects from short investments of interest but discloses to prolonged attention. It
 Darkness and the Demand for Time inArt 1|0!

Fig. |. Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594—1665), The Infant Bacchus Entrusted to the Nymphs of Nysa;The Death of Echo and
Narcissus, 1675, Oil on canvas, 48 3/4 x 70 '/2 in. (122.9 x 179 cm). The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums,
Gift of Mrs. Samuel Sachs in memory of her husband, Samuel Sachs

might seem easy with conservative works of the past to say that it is the human
body, alone or grouped, set within narrative storytelling, that lets us mark out the
smaller locations within the canvas. Can art that has given up the face, the posi-
tion and expression of the body, the self-contained groups of two to five figures and
the linking armature of the natural landscape with its openings and spatial map—
sky and ground, trees and water, high and low, front and back—solicit the kind of
curiosity and time built into the aesthetics of these older works? Without stories
can there be narrative effects in abstract works? And can some equivalent of dark-
ness be found within twentieth-century works that do without the real world where
both light and darkness have their one home?

Jasper Johns
In Jasper Johns’s painting Land’ End of 1963, now in the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art (fig. 2), we have a compelling, sensuous, eventful space in which
obscured events, small in scale, make a demand like that of Poussin’s seventeenth-
century painting. Words and letters, we might say, do for Johns what faces did in
 102 Philip Fisher

traditional art. Any face pulls the eye to itself and defines within any size work a
small, local place, complete in itself, yet composed of parts. One twentieth-century
problem is to invent alternatives to the face with its features—its syntax—to give
scale and a first clue to the syntax of the work as a whole—a job done in the past
by the scale and syntax of the human face.
Words have letters, just as faces have eyes, nose, mouth, chin, and fore-
head. The letters we find in Land’ End lock our interest onto one kind of local
action, and because the large word “red” is painted over with a small second, red-
painted “red” and reflected as though a mirror existed in the work onto the surface
as a mirror image with the end of the
letters touching. Johns creates some-
thing equivalent to what in earlier
painting, including Poussin, would
occur as a figural group. A color word
like “red” uniquely sets off a narrative
field of action taking the eye down
below for example in the red letters
“b” and “u” of “blue” (the “u,” we no-
tice has a second, smaller, black “u”
on top of or in front of it). Or, still
set off by the word “red,” we see just
below the word itself, an area where
blue-gray colors seem painted over a
red that appears behind and through
the blue, an underpainting red that
extends down beneath the second,
central third where we see the word
“yellow” (painted in blues, violets, and
grays). Like all canvases, Johns’s has a
center, an eye-level, mid-painting core:
Fig. 2. Jasper Johns (American, b. 1930), Land's End, 1963. Oil on canvas h hed Ll ith
with stick, 67 x 48 '/4 in. (170.2 x 122.6 cm). San Francisco Museum of Che ESO STECES Year ae,
Modern Art. Gift of HarryW.and Mary Margaret Anderson whiter ghost of the right part of the

letter “y” just beneath it. Free of the

color itself, this word sets up a quest or hunger for yellow and sends us to the up-
per right corner where a dramatic bright yellow, nearly covered with dark blue-gray,
appears behind and then dripping down in two places over the effaced semicircle
 Darkness and the Demand for Time inArt |03

of paint that is one large-scale episode within the work—including the trace of red
along the upper edge of the device that indicates the scraping, by circular motion
of the semicircle. Gradually, we see that only traces and remnants of these two
primary colors, red and yellow, remain. They seem behind, or nearly covered by
afterthoughts and second choices, giving way to a somber world of blue, blue-gray,
and red-enriched blue-gray that is in its turn partly overcome by black, especially
at the bottom left corner, in the prominent hand and arm and in the downward
pointing arrow on the miniature canvas at the right.
In Land’ End the nuanced delivery of each letter and letter-scaled sector
is as though thought out in paint for the first time. The area our eyes take in around
the word “blue” is of exceptional complexity and beauty like the richly clothed fig-
ures in earlier work, Poussin’s Mercury, for example. Although the painting is about
blue, the word itself is disordered, troubled, and produces in the fallen orange “u”
tumbling off the bottom edge of the canvas (with its gray overpainting) an emo-
tionally moving narrative moment, like the fall of a person in earlier art. The orange
“u’ is safely attached at its center as though paint alone is holding it from sinking
off the canvas entirely. This orange-gray “u’” and the light blue narrow rectangle be-
side it at the lower right edge of the painting complete the three-part narrative
episode of the right side of the work. First, and at the top, we see the equilibrium
of the scraped semicircle with its moving clock-like thin rectangular radius scraper—
a clock hand really except that a real hand and arm exist elsewhere, as though
reaching up out of the painting, raised above water by a drowning man. Below the
equilibrium of the semicircle is the small canvas with a downward pointing arrow,
the partner to the upward raised hand across the work. Finally, the fallen “u” just
barely held—like a buoy onto the surface of the work—adds a third step to one
larger narrative-like passage (top to bottom) of the canvas.
Because we began with the smallest attention-grabbing local episode within
this work—a letter—we might have hoped to find a direct passage from letter to
word to sentence to the work’s statement—a paragraph, let’s say. Instead a black hand
and arm rises and calls for its own attention—the kind of anxious attention we might
pay to such a hand rising out of water in front of us as we stand on a pier—or at least
with the memory or undertone of that real life experience with this, the most
human object in the work. An arrow on its “signboard” solicits its distinct kind of
attention, above all the direction it supplies to everything, by pointing down.
Over the surface dozens of tiny dramatic episodes ask for—by means of
beauty and complexity—a certain prolonged moment of time: the yellow that we
104 Philip Fisher

see behind the gray at the top by means of its brightness and in its push to the front
undoing the scraped area by the downward gravity of its drip. The canvas has three
parts from top to bottom. We see the line from left to right. The words “red,” “yel-
low,” “blue” are centered in their separate but equal chambers, but on the right
these break down, superseded by the semicircle, the little sign, the tiny blue rec-
tangle stabilizing the lower edge and the fallen “u” that implies in its incompleteness
an unseen fourth chamber below.
Like Poussin’s The Infant Bacchus, Johns’s painting Land’s End refuses any
first glance, and invents its own means of generating cells of attention just as, in
earlier painting, darkness, local light, faces, and figural groups had done. In this
painting Johns uses our habits of creating a locally complete space wherever in life
we find a word or letter to tip us off about the scale and number of events to be in-
vestigated or experienced as distinct pleasures here. Because certain acts of reading
and seeing create narration—by reaching out somewhere beyond themselves to the
thing they mention—as the word “yellow” does to any and all yellow in the work,
or as a pointing arrow does to what we find below it—means have been invented
to make the action at a distance of narrative and storytelling occur without persons
and events that once seemed to argue that without history painting—Poussin—no
narration remained.
I have used Land’ End to open up the question of how a work might de-
mand prolonged attention or none at all—demand, we could say, to be the only
work in the room, the only one we have time enough for in the way that one string
quartet or one poem is only read or heard if given time, released from juxtaposi-
tion, from history, from questioning the premises of this work across the room or
from the kind of half-life that many second-level objects have as contented mem-
bers of a well-organized group—Surrealism, Cubism—that prefers never to travel
alone or be seen without allies nearby.
By looking at how darkness was used and how a painter like Johns might
locate a way of painting that preserves—or reinvents—in a modern form the rich
effects of darkness without darkness itself, I have tried to start into the question of
why we might want works that begin as stubbornly different parts, turning away
from completeness, harmony, composition, and mood. The wealth of places for at-
tention, local event, narration, and time opened up by darkness is only one of a
variety of means by which an object living within a museum can itself become a
museum with one work inside.
Censorship, Autonomy, and Artistic Form

Jonathan Gilmore

Hitherto people had been accustomed to spend their time either in

fighting or in agriculture ... Now they idled away the greater part of
the day in clever and trivial chatter about aesthetics.
—Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, 21

In an 1852 letter to Louise Colet, Gustave Flaubert describes his dream of writing
“a book about nothing, a book with no external attachment, which would hold
together by the internal strength of its style, as the earth, without being supported,
floats in the air, a book that would have no subject at all or at least one in which
the subject would be almost invisible.” For form, which he describes as emerging
from a progressive development akin to political emancipation, “is free.”!
I begin with these remarks because they express a conception of art—as
ideally independent of external reference and outside determinations and gaining
that freedom through an extrusion, or invisibility, of content—that shapes, I will
suggest, certain responses to political and popular threats to the arts in the modern
period. I want to discuss not so much the philosophical origins of this artistic con-
ception, as certain rhetorical and strategic ends, within art history and criticism,
that such a philosophical aesthetic has served. The ends I address here pertain to
how the fine arts at the end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth
centuries responded to threats posed by official censorship from “above” and popu-
lar and mass culture “below.” The rise of a conception of art implied by those spatial
locators—an art that would see itself as existing autonomously were it not for the
stifling pressures of bureaucratic repression or the eruption into its proper sphere
of popular taste—is, of course, part of what ultimately needs to be explained.
I will begin by describing a structure of response that I think character-
izes certain struggles over the first kind of pressure on the arts—official censorship.
None of the following incidents in the history of artistic censorship will be
unfamiliar, but what I hope to show is that a putative consistency in artistic
censorship, assumed to consist of a prosecution bent on suppressing subversive
religious, political, or erotic expression pitted against the forces of progressive art
seeking expressive liberation, is belied by certain changes within modernism in the
106 Jonathan Gilmore

arguments that are used, by both prosecution and defense, and the ends that those
arguments are meant to serve.
The structure of censorship I want to describe is constituted on one side
by an approach to art as what we might call transparent. Here, a work of art is
treated as primarily a representational, rather than expressive or material, entity,
where there is little acknowledgment of how the form or context of a work trans-
figures its represented content from what it might be outside of that context or
independent of that form. For a censor operating with this mode of response, an
artwork is construed as a sort of container in which is held an offensive represen-
tation, where the container has little constitutive role in its contents. The censor
does not respond principally to the content given form, in a work of art, just, to
exaggerate a bit, the content itself.
In, for example, the 1857 trial of Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal for
obscenity, the prosecutor complained of the effects of the poet’s “coarse realism,”
treating that realism as if it belonged to only a stylistic technique external to the
work itself: verse which did not merely refer to or represent sexual activity, but
stood as its textual instantiation. Charging that the work courted a response from
the body before the intellect, the prosecutor declared that the poetry would return
“their senses to those who can no longer feel.”? The same approach—one that
threatens to elide the work itself and its external referent—was adopted by those
critics of Courbet who, though they were well acquainted with the realist style,
still posited a direct circuit between the vulgarity or ignobility of the individuals
represented in his Stonebreakers and Burial at Ornans and what they charged to be
the “deliberate ugliness” of the paintings themselves.* And when, more recently,
conservative critics condemned as pornographic certain photographs by Robert
Mapplethorpe, they acknowledged the status of the works as art, but not the ways
in which the imagery had been transfigured—if not in appearance then in mean-
ing—in forming the pictorial basis of those works of art. This transfiguration—which
Mapplethorpe described as creating “smut that is also art” or having “all the
elements of pornography and yet . . . a structure oflighting that makes it go
beyond what it is” —made the images as much about the visual representation of
the sexual practices as the practices themselves.* Yet, when hostile commentators
examined the work, many could not discriminate the form at all—even though
that form, in its potential association with kitsch, would have allowed a ae
on aesthetic rather than moral grounds.
But if the attacks of the censor treat art as transparent, the defense in the
 Censorship, Autonomy, and Artistic Form 107

modern period often construes the art as opaque, where the tendency is to stress
that there is no relevant content except that content transfigured into form; or to
say that the art resides in its form. So the celebrated defense in the trial of Ulysses
did not deny the work’s obvious scatological and sexual words and phrases, but
argued that such words and phrases were only represented or quoted, in the
service of artistic effect, to give the reader an impression of the style and texture of
how characters of the novel would speak. This meant that such words and phrases
were evacuated of the meaning and force they would have in an ordinary context,
such as one inhabited by those characters, in which they are used—perhaps
obscenely—to swear, assault, or sexually arouse.
An analogous operation characterized the defense of Baudelaire. Nearly a
hundred years after the original trial, a French court dismissed the 1857 judgment,
insisting that the offense of the poet’s work was not, as had been claimed, to pub-
lic morals but merely to art, that is, to the conventions of composition inscribed
in the genre of lyric poetry. This essentially confirmed Baudelaire’s own retreat to
the defensive posture of self-reflexive form in remarking in an essay on Théophile
Gautier written not long after his trial, that “poetry . . . has no other object than
itself.”> And, finally, when the director of the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati
was charged with pandering obscenity for exhibiting certain of those photographs
by Mapplethorpe, the legal defense succeeded through portraying even the artist’s
ritualized sadomasochistic images as merely what it called “figure studies” and one
of the most provocative of those—displaying a finger inserted into a penis—as “a
central image, very symmetrical, a very ordered classical composition.”° Here, with
an obvious strategic motivation, the concept of art—and the formalization and
aestheticization that concept allowed—was posed as a kind of membrane that
would protect audiences from whatever offense or harm might ensue from
exposure to what, on the other side of the membrane, the image disclosed.
There is thus an order of incommensurability in the structure of these
controversies: attacks on art’s content are met by defenses based on art’s form.
I want to propose that this is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. And I want to ask
why, with the advent of modernism, this structure of debate over the arts emerges.
For prior to the early nineteenth century these sorts of conflicts over the arts
appear to have had a different structure: attacks on content were met by defenses
of content, even if it meant that such content had to be construed in novel terms.
So, for example, papal reproval of the teeming multitude of nudes in
Michelangelo's Last Judgment (1541) was deflected by rationales, such as Vasari’s,
108 Jonathan Gilmore

that the artist showed, “with appropriate judgement and consideration,” only how
souls would appear when once again given bones and flesh in resurrection from
the dead.’
Paolo Veronese was questioned by the Venetian branch of the Inquisition
in 1573 over his Last Supper for its inclusion of such unusual details as an atten-
dant with a bloody nose, seven liveried black pages, five turbaned Muslims, a dwarf
holding a parrot, and other assorted “scurrilities” that the Inquisition may have
understood to betray a kind of crypto-Protestantism. Ordered to “correct and
amend the painting,” Veronese did nothing but retitle the work, that is, attribute
to it a different content, as Feast in the House of Levi.
And, while Renaissance and post-Renaissance nudes in some cases
represented courtesans or the features of a patron’s mistress (as in Titian’s 1553-54
Danaé), they enjoyed a kind of artistic elevation and moral indemnification, un-
available to contemporary erotic prints, in mythological and NeoPlatonist
redescriptions. This was just as, in an earlier time, classical art from Greece and
Rome featuring genuinely mythological characters was preserved from Christian
iconoclasm by being reinterpreted as symbolizing or presaging Christian themes:
Apollo stands for Christ, putti become seraphim, and the Minotaur’s labyrinth
(which survived in the medieval cathedral) an emblem of the imprisoned and blink-
ered state of the soul in earthly time.
Finally, while Goya’s Clothed Maja (c. 1805) may have exposed him to
censure for its representation of a coarse, sexually brazen, stereotypical character
of the lower classes, his Nude Maja (c. 1797) enjoyed a somewhat protected status
through its unclothed subject, allowing an innocent identification with just those—
now safely venerable—depictions of Venus.?
By contrast, the modern structure of debates over the arts—where the threat
of art’s content is met by the prophylactic power of art’s form—reaches its most
perspicuous expression in Zola’s (1867) formalist defense of Edouard Manet against
the charge that his Déjeuner sur ’herbe is obscene: “the nude woman . . . is un-
doubtedly there only to give the artist an opportunity of painting the color of flesh,”
Zola writes. For Manet constructed this scene only “to obtain an effect of strong
contrasts and bold masses”; and, those who find themselves offended by such work
should recognize, Zola remarks, that “a head posed against a wall is nothing more
than a brush stroke, more or less white, on a surface, more or less grey.”!
How have we arrived here? The idea of form, and thus the potential for
formalization has existed as long as art has. Why then is it not until the first half
 Censorship, Autonomy, and Artistic Form 109

of the nineteenth century that there emerges this idea that form could indemnify
content, a notion familiar enough that it could be employed, without explanation
or apology, by the time Zola defends Manet?
A natural response, of course, would be to suggest that this notion of form
and associated ideas of artistic autonomy arose out of developments in eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century aesthetics and philosophy of art. For pre-modern
commentators, from Plato to Rousseau, would have granted artistic representa-
tion, by virtue of belonging to art, no such power to protect its audience from what
it proposed to display. Such theorists did not identify artistic value as compensa-
tion for, or in tension with, other measures of value. Rather, they understood the
notion of artistic value to be already suffused with all sorts of values—moral,
political, practical, scientific, and pedagogic—that the modern autonomy of art
renders distinct. This, of course, meant that the identification of an artifact or
activity as artistic conferred no special form of protection. If, for Plato, paintings
and narratives represent reality at a third-remove and thus falsely, and theater causes
those who play base characters, or imagine themselves in those roles, to become
base themselves, then there is no sense in which distinctively artistic values could
be held up as the antidote to the moral poison the artwork proffered.
It is only in the eighteenth century, in the kind of account developed in
Immanuel Kant’s Critique ofJudgment that we find a form of artistic evaluation
that suspends other evaluative standpoints—say, of utility, politics or sensory
pleasure—from which the content of a work of art may be judged. Kant does think
that aesthetic values, like all values, ultimately are in some way subordinate to moral
values but his characterization of the “disinterested” nature of the judgment of taste
captures that response to art which is presumably left over when all other evalua-
tive criteria are withdrawn. The connection between this form of judgment and a
formalist interpretation of art arises from Kant’s understanding of disinterested-
ness as requiring no concern for the real existence of the thing which causes what
one sees (for that would be a kind of interested desire), or the identity of the thing
perceived (for that would attribute to it a function or purpose, in its fulfillment of
which it might be judged) but only a pleasure arising from the object’s universally
apprehended form (which as a Gestalt requires a constructive judgment, unlike the
immediate “private” sensation of color).'! Although Kant accords priority to
natural beauty in his analysis of the judgment of taste, he does not in principle
exclude any objects from its application. Indeed, in one passage he explicitly ex-
tends the concept of a painting to include the appearance created by such things
110 Jonathan Gilmore

as interior decoration, personal costume (including rings and snuff-boxes), and

elegant parties, suggesting that insofar as they provoke an aesthetic judgment
independently of any definite end, that judgment “is determined in one and the
same way: namely, as... only upon the forms . . . as they present themselves to the
eye.”!?It is not incidental, from the perspective of an art historian, that such a judg-
ment excludes any historicizing consideration of how a work of visual art compares
with others within a development, tradition, or style to which it might belong.
But if Kant’s theory was taken up by later commentators as having secured
a notion of artistic autonomy in an evaluative sense (if not quite in Kant’s own
terms), Hegel provided philosophical expression to the idea of artistic autonomy
as an explanatory notion—casting art as an internally developing form that, for
part of its history, serves as the vehicle for the broader, but still internal, evolution
of Geist. This developmental and historical notion of autonomy lived an afterlife
of sorts in the foundations of the academic study of art history, not so much in
terms identical to what Hegel laid out, but through influencing how early art his-
torians conceived of the relationship between art’s internal historical unfolding and
the social or political history by which that development may have been shaped.'°
Heinrich Wolfflin’s final account of how to explain changes in art history was based
on what he called the “two roots of artistic style,” which he identified as the
culture or society of the artist and the visual tradition the artist belonged to. But
rather than seeing the explanatory roles played by these two factors as identifiable
only on a case-by-case basis, as Jacob Burckhardt, his teacher, proposed, Wolfflin
asserted it was the visual tradition the artist belonged to that uniquely explains the
way in which the artist’s work developed from his or her predecessors. Art devel-
Ops in a sense autonomously, as a “form working itself out inwardly,” where the
artist's social context does not enter into the explanation of the form of his work,
except as the initial conditions that encourage or frustrate the visual tradition’s de-
velopment along its own trajectory.!4 Such a stress on the immanent causes of art’s
development was similarly adopted by Alois Riegl, who, although recognizing the
historically contextual factors of a work’s function, technique, and material, spoke
of these not as explanations of the character of a work of art, but as negative
factors influencing the ways in which the Kunstwollen, or the work’s “inner deter-
mination’ is realized.!° And, finally, Henri Focillon stressed that while one should
not isolate works of art from human life and contingency, it is nonetheless central
to understanding how artistic expression evolves to recognize that “form liberates
other forms according to its own laws.”'6
 Censorship, Autonomy, and Artistic Form || |

Were we to stay just within the art criticism of the nineteenth century and
focus on the influence of Kantian and Hegelian conceptions of autonomy and
commensurate versions of formalism in France, we could trace out there the some-
what corrupted versions of those ideas in the writings of Victor Cousin (who as
early as 1817, traveled to Germany where he met Hegel), Benjamin Constant (who
had visited Weimar in 1803—4 and met Goethe, Schiller, and Schelling), and later
adherents to a doctrine of “art for art’s sake.”
I want, however, to resist that form of explanation, that sort of causal
model that treats philosophical aesthetics as if it were an intellectual wave that,
once generated, washed over everything in sight. What I think must be asked is
not how were the history and criticism of art influenced by such philosophical
theories of autonomy and form, but, rather, why did the history and criticism of
art draw on such aesthetic theories at all? These theories may have been developed
as part of the ahistorical conversation in which professional philosophers, past and
present, have seen themselves joined. But we ought to ask, once given its philo-
sophical foundation, what sorts of cultural needs, ends, or anxieties did the notion
of formal autonomy answer to? What functions was it employed to serve?
I want to focus on the functions served by form in not only, as I’ve illus-
trated, preserving art from the threat of official censorship, but in saving art from
a perceived threat of popular and mass culture, as well. The threat of censorship
was, of course suppression, seizure, or imprisonment for offending political or
religious authority. The threat of popular and mass culture appeared to be assimi-
lation into that culture and a consequent loss of whatever exclusive privileges and
protections were accorded those once occupying the provinces of high art. But, I
hasten to add, these two threats—the popular and the political—should not be
understood, in origin or execution, as entirely distinct.
For if art had always been subject to censorship for offending the church,
monarch, or state, it is when imagery and text become widely disseminated, and
where there is a perceived emergence of a public for art that is neither drawn from
the elite, nor takes its cues from those who are, that official censorship sees itself
as most urgent.
Thus if censorship at one time was aimed at stamping out subversive ex-
pression for the symbolic threat it posed to political or religious forms of authority,
now censorship would justify itself in suppressing such expression because of the
threat it posed to the public—the good morals of society, the public’s moral health.
Only with a mass production of those vehicles of expression, and a perceived
112 Jonathan Gilmore

emergence of a textually and visually literate public, would authorities worry that the
population could come to be contaminated by such supposedly dangerous works.”
The emergence of this public, in discourse, in imagination, and in fact,
occurred in at least two significant ways.'® One was, in France, through an
increasing physical presence, and acknowledgment of the presence, of ordinary,
non-elite audiences for art at the Salon exhibitions mounted by the Académie
Royale (later the Académie des Beaux-Arts). Whereas such audiences could see art
in certain churches, private studios, some royal collections, dealers’ shops, and pub-
lic festivals and street fairs, it was particularly in the institutional space of the late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Salon—with an architectural design that
did not preserve, as in the church or theater, a hierarchical social order—that com-
mentators remarked upon and satirized this public, especially in its mix of members
of different classes. In his foundational text on the emergence of a self-aware pub-
lic for art in France, Thomas Crow cites a description of a Salon that refers to the

mixing, men and women together, of all the orders and all the ranks of
the state ... Here the Savoyard odd-job man rubs shoulders with the
great noble in his cordon bleu; the fishwife trades her perfume with
those of a lady of quality, making the latter resort to holding her nose
to combat the strong odor of cheap brandy drifting her way; the rough
artisan, guided only by natural feeling, comes out with a just observa-
tion, at which an inept wit nearby bursts out laughing only because of
the comical accent in which it was expressed; while an artist hiding in
the crowd unravels the meaning of it all and turns it to his profit (Pidansat
de Mairobert, ‘The English Spy,’ a clandestine news-sheet).!?

What is remarkable about this relatively liberal description from 1777 is that only
thirty years earlier, when the critic La Font de Saint-Yenne had circulated a pam-
phlet that rather mildly suggested that artworks should not be completely immune
to public scrutiny any more than were theater and books, he was pilloried in the
press and by members of the Academy. Indeed, quite contrary to its founding prin-
ciples, members of the Academy doubted, when the proposal was raised, that the
general public’s opinion could have had any legitimate jurisdiction over the arts
on display. The engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Secretary to the Academy,
insisted, “I hold the principle that a painting, a statue, do not belong to the
public in the same way that a book does.”?° Just what way the fine arts do belong
 Censorship, Autonomy, and Artistic Form | 13

to the public—and what sort of public that is—was thus being asked, if not
answered, well before the French Revolution and, with current debates over just
what constituencies governmental support of the arts serves, continues to be
unresolved today.
In England, Joshua Reynolds explained in his “Advertisement” to the first
exhibition at the Royal Academy that an admission fee would be charged to
prevent “the room from being fill’d by improper Persons, to the entire exclusion
of those for whom the exhibition is apparently intended.”?! The danger, as Reynolds
expressed in his Discourses on Art (delivered 1769-90), was that painters would
endeavor to please such “improper Persons,” reducing painting to the mechanical
recording of nature for those “ignorant of the principles of art” who “will always
be pleased with what is natural, in the confined and misunderstood sense of the
word.””? Reynolds's disparagement of the “natural” is part of his effort to secure
the status of painting as a liberal art, one that in execution and appreciation re-
quires free and abstract thought, not merely manual proficiency. But his dismissive
reference to the aim of mimetic fidelity also serves to distinguish between two types
of spectators: those who have the “character, taste, experience, and observation” to
properly appreciate a work’s style and embodiment of abstract principles of art,
and those of “narrow, vulgar, untaught or rather ill-taught reason” who judge a
work by what it represents, or “whether the production is a true copy of nature.”?°
Indeed, in remarks that presage objections to the mechanical nature of photog-
raphy as an art, Reynolds asks that we recognize that in “a view of nature represented
with all the truth of the camera obscura, and the same scene represented by a great
Artist, how little and mean will one appear in comparison with the other, where
no superiority is supposed from the choice of subject.”*4
If such a neoclassical theory of taste served to preserve the autonomy of
the elite segment of the social order, its modernist incarnation in formalism served
to preserve high art in an autonomous aesthetic order. High art could be
understood in terms suiting its form, while the encroaching imagery of popular
and mass culture would continue to be read for what it represented—for its
pictorial content or motif.
However much artists and elite audiences objected to a newly self-aware
public asserting its rights as aesthetic arbiters, critical, journalistic, and official
opinion began at the end of the eighteenth century to concern itself with this pub-
lic—to describe, dissect, mock, praise, or lament its presence to a degree commentary
on the arts had never done before. Reviews of the Salon appeared in not only the
114 Jonathan Gilmore

established daily press of the Journal des débats and Le Siecle, and art magazines
such as L’Artiste, but also popular publications such as Vert-vert, papers subscribed
to by professional groups such as Garde nationale, women’s magazines such as La
Mere de famille, and even a number of children’s magazines such as Journal des
enfants and Le Petit poucet.
A second way this public emerged was through its association with the
burgeoning market of mass reproductions of works of fine art and commensurate
growth in production of items of low visual culture: ordinary prints, playing cards,
shop signs, theater advertisements, pictorial wallpaper, transfer-ware china, and
later, of course, various forms of entertainment photography.
Writers had already experienced the rise of an analogous public for books
at the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in Germany, where elite authors
were more dependent on the public market than in France (where they largely had
patrons).”° Here is Friedrich Schiller frustrated by the limited commercial demand
for his work in the immense expansion of the market in popular reading material:

The need to read, which is becoming more and more generally felt,
even in those classes of society where the state is wont to contribute
so little in the field of education, instead of being used by good
writers for more noble purposes, is being misused by mediocre pen-
pushers and avaricious publishers to peddle their poor merchandise
without regard for the cost in public taste and morality... . Mindless,
tasteless, and pernicious novels, dramatized stories, so-called journals
for the ladies ... are completely destroying the few healthy principles
that our playwrights had left intact [1792].

And, in a letter to Goethe: “Since one cannot hope to build and to plant it is at least
something to inundate and destroy. The only possible relationship to the public is
war” (1799).
In France the visible constitution of a reading public came a bit later. It is
manifested in the “railway” or “travelers’ libraries,” names of leading series of cheap
paperbacks, stimulated by mass transportation. And this public was suggested by
the prevalence of cabinets de lecture (a sort of bookstore that rented books and
journals for periods ranging from one visit to a year), which soared in number from
32 to 226 between 1820 and 1850, and increasingly suffered from official surveil-
lance, not just for the possibility that they would sell subversive literature, but
 Censorship, Autonomy, and Artistic Form 115

because they allowed a place for devotees of that literature to convene.?’

In the visual arts, such a public was constituted, again perhaps more in
official discourse and imagination than in fact, through mass-produced prints.
Engravings had, of course, been one form of mass production. Indeed, although
in his Discourses Reynolds considers engraved reproductions of fine art only as
vehicles for academic instruction, and he displays an antipathy to any mechanical
production of images, his professional success and that of other members of the
Royal Academy was indebted to the flourishing English print trade.*® And there
had already been an association, despite their not inconsequential cost, between
prints and popular audiences and censorship. It was when prints of Michelangelo's
Last Judgment began to circulate widely that the fresco suffered the most aggres-
sive verbal assaults (by Aretino in particular).”
Yet what allowed an extraordinary rise in the circulation of images and a
commensurate lowering of their cost was the development of specifically litho-
graphic techniques of printing in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.*°
Lithographic depictions were used not only in the widely published reports on the
Salon exhibitions, but, more importantly, in more than seventy journals,
magazines, and albums in the nineteenth-century popular press which referred to
themselves with the term musée, offering their own printed exhibitions, via repro-
ductions of the masterpieces which hung in the national museums and the Salon.*!
Lithographic technology also played, of course, an important role in cari-
cature, through the some 350 caricature journals established in the nineteenth
century. These were particularly significant manifestations of the new public for
art. For it is in association with caricature journals—easily and cheaply produced,
circulated widely, read and discussed in public cafés and cabinets de lecture, and
(unlike subversive text) open to the illiterate—that both those forms in which the
public was constituted—their physical presence and the mass-reproduced items
signifying their existence—came together. There were laws in Paris in the 1830s
against public discussion among factory coworkers, who would, authorities feared,
compare injustices, scheme and conspire in revolutionary actions. (A system of
spies enforced one such 1838 law by infiltrating cafes to report on laborers’ social-
izing.)** The threat of caricature was in part that it appeared to allow the emergence
of virtual communities, groups united by a purportedly consistent reaction to the
images—images which, authorities complained, contained no ambiguity and hence
no hope of a fractured or heterogeneous response. For fifty of the sixty years
between 1820 (when censorship laws were firmly established) and 1881 (when
116 Jonathan Gilmore

they were abolished) the French government censored drawings in advance of

publication, but not the printed word.
In 1835 the French minister of justice declared that Frenchmen have the
right to circulate their opinions in published form, but insisted that “when opin-
ions are converted into acts by the . . . exhibit of a drawing, one addresses people
brought together, one speaks to their eyes. That is more than the expression of an
opinion; that is a deed, an action, a behavior.” This position was widely held. In
1852 a police minister called drawings one of the most dangerous of means used
“to shake up and destroy the sentiments of reserve and morality so essential to
conserve in the bosom of a well-ordered society,” because while even the “worst
page of a bad book requires some time to read and a certain degree of intelligence
to understand,” caricature represents “in a translation which everyone can under-
stand, the most dangerous of all seductions, that of example.”*4
Here it is precisely the legibility of caricature, the transparency of its
content to any untutored spectator’s eye, in which its danger inheres. High art, by
contrast, could be construed as opaque, with its content sublimated, so to speak,
into its form.*°
The response to popular and mass culture I describe here would be
exacerbated with the invention of photography, particularly after 1851 with the
breakthrough of the collodion-on-glass negative, which made it possible to
produce multiple photographs, with the tonal range to be commercially viable,
from a single source.*° But what I want to emphasize is such a response was already
operative before photography was invented, that photography was only the night-
mare that answered to this cultural discourse’s fears. This is to say, somewhat against
technologically determinist models of art history, that the importance of photog-
raphy to anxieties over mass culture was not of cause to effect, but a situation in
which the technology was seized upon as an emblem of that anxiety, its sign and
guarantee. Even just after the invention of the daguerreotype, well before multi-
ple and cheap photographic prints were possible, commentators spoke as if this
slow, awkward, and expensive form of photography had the explosive penetration
into the public sphere ordinary photography has today. Baudelaire, in his Salon of
1859, speaks of how photography has helped “only to confirm fools in their faith,
and ruin what vestige of the divine might still have remained in the French mind.”37
Let me stress the verb “confirm” there, as if it were only hammering the last coffin
nail in place. Just as philosophical aesthetics did not cause the move towards
formalism, but stood, after the fact, as a strategic answer to the combined politi-
 Censorship, Autonomy, and Artistic Form | !7

cal and popular threats to high art, so photography was invested with the cultural
concerns by which it was predated.
Formalism, with whatever soundness as an aesthetic theory, allowed the
high arts a way of keeping the threat of popular and mass culture, and the public
it putatively served, at bay. For if access to an image was available to both the elite
audiences and those drawn from society’s lower orders, formalism (in an incarna-
tion quite contrary to Kant’s conception of the aesthetic judgment as presuming
an inter-subjective validity) postulated that one type of spectator could see what
the other could not. If today a putatively formalist approach to an image, as con-
cerned only with a visual array, not its symbolic or historical import, suggests an
experience requiring no special knowledge or training, and thus open to all, later
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators spoke as if the appreciation of
form was an achievement available only to those whose taste and sensibility were
sufficiently refined. It is one the ironies of high art’s relationship to popular
culture that when artists began to explicitly respond to and absorb popular forms
of illustration—such as in Seurat’s adoption of the composition and motif of the
circus poster—and to exploit the perhaps inevitable breakdown of the barriers
between high art and its popular and mass-produced varieties, a powerful mod-
ernist response was to treat these elements of popular culture, even if they were the
ostensible subject of a painting, as ultimately still extraneous to its art, there only
to be transcended to the work’s real source of meaning, its technique.*®
So, to close, my aim in this essay was to investigate whether there might
be an alternative to aesthetic, critical, and art historical discussions that treat form
in purely negative or, so to speak, “formal” terms, as posing a withdrawal from a
work’s content or meaning. I’ve tried, that is, to consider some ways in which the
concept of form is deeply imbricated with notions, often intertwined, of the
political and popular. Form was exploited to save art from its political content in
the cases of censorship, and to save art from the assimilation via that content into
mass-produced and popular representations as well. When Flaubert dreams of writ-
ing a book about nothing, we should remember he was an artist who felt threatened
by popular art, particularly photography and the sort of novels read by Emma
Bovary: “full of love and lovers, persecuted damsels swooning in deserted pavil-
ions, postillions slaughtered at every turn, horses ridden to death on every page,
gloomy forests, romantic intrigue, vows, sobs, embraces and tears, moonlit cross-
ings, nightingales in woodland groves, noblemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs,
impossibly virtuous, always well dressed.”*? That Flaubert suffered, as well, from
118 Jonathan Gilmore

censorship of his Madame Bovary might suggest that his desire for a work of art
that is without content is a desire for a work indemnified against content’s
hazards, that is, a work composed only of form.”

1. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1998), 156-57.

2. Cited in E. S. Burt, “An Immoderate Taste for Truth’: Censoring History in Baudelaire’s ‘Les
Bijoux,” in Robert C. Post, ed., Censorship and Silencing: Practices ofCultural Regulation (Los Angeles:
The Getty Research Institute, 1998), 113.
3. See, for example, those responses surveyed in T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and
the 1848 Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 138.
4. Arthur Danto, Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement ofRobert Mapplethorpe (Berkeley:
University of California Press), 76, 89-90.
5. Charles Baudelaire, “Théophile Gautier” in Oeuvres completes, ed. C. Pichois (Paris: Gallimard,
1976), 2:112—13.
6. Danto, Playing with the Edge, 88; “Censorship and Subsidy in the Arts,” in Beyond the Brillo Box:
The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1992), 174.
7. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, 2nd ed. 1568; trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1996), 2: 693.
8. See Philipp Fehl, “Veronese and the Inquisition: A Study of the Subject Matter of the So-Called
‘Feast in the House of Levi,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., 58 (1961): 325-54.
9. See Janis A. Tomlinson, “Goya and the Censors,” in Elizabeth C. Childs, ed., Suspended License:
Censorship and the Visual Arts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 125-47.
10. Emile Zola, “Edouard Manet, étude biographique et critique” in Ecrits sur l'art (Paris: Gallimard,
1991), 159, 159, I5I.
u. That Kant conceives of a pure judgment of taste as apprehending an object without considering
its purpose or end leads him to accord priority to natural beauty over artistic beauty, as the experi-
ence of the latter enjoins awareness of what the object should be: “The beauty of aman .. . , the
beauty of a horse, or ofabuilding . . . , presupposes a concept ofthe end that defines what the thing
has to be, and consequently a concept of its perfection.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique ofJudgement,
trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 1: 72-73, §16.
12. Kant, 1:188, $51.
13. For a theory of style, stylistic limits, and internal narratively structured developments within art
history, see my The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2000).
 Censorship, Autonomy, and Artistic Form 119

14. Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles ofArt History: The Problem ofthe Development of Style in Later Art,
trans. M. D. Hottinger, 7th ed. (New York: Dover, 1950), 14.
15. Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985), 17.
16. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 97.
17. It is a corollary of this that the regulation of pornography, as well as its classification and seques-
tering in specially restricted zones of libraries and “secret museums,” occurred only in the early decades
of the nineteenth century. (The Collection de l'enfer of the Bibliotheque nationale, a name playing
with the dual meanings of “closed” and “hell,” was set up in 1836 although the idea had been pro-
posed much earlier.) With the rise of literacy and spread of education in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, expurgation of the classics was also felt to be required.
18. Some the many recent treatments of the development in the eighteenth century of a unified and
self-aware “public” in political and cultural contexts, and the role of the press, social gatherings, and
artistic practice in constituting, in fact and discourse, that public, are: Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas
Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Roger Chartier, The Cultural
Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1991); Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1985); Keith Michael Baker, “Public Opinion as Political Invention,” in Jnventing the French
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 167-99.
19. Crow, Painters and Public Life, 4.
20. Ibid., ro.
21. F, W. Hilles, The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1936), 38; cited in John Barrell, The Political Theory ofPainting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1986), 77. This attitude survived well into the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury in debates among museum and political officials over whether to open museums on holidays
and Sundays, and thus allow laborers to visit. Asked in 1851 by a parliamentary committee on the
British Museum why he did not open the museum during Easter holidays, Principal Librarian Sir
Henry Ellis responded, “I think the more vulgar class would crowd into the Museum.” When it was
proposed that a purpose of the museum might be to improve the vulgar class, he replied, “people of
a higher grade would hardly wish to come to the Museum at the same time with sailors from the
dock-yards and girls whom they might bring with them,” and that those drawn from society's lower
orders would hardly gain from “the mere gazing at our curiosities.” Anne Goldgar, “The British
Museum and the Virtual Representation of Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” A/bion 32 (Summer
2000): 195-231.
22. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975),
89, 96.
120 Jonathan Gilmore

23. Ibid., 233, 237, and 241. In his eighth Discourse he refers to the story recounted by Pliny the Elder
of the shoemaker who after competently criticizing the representation of a sandal presumes to criti-
cize the rendering of a leg. The mistake, Reynolds suggests, was to assume a link between having
knowledge of the object an image represents and knowledge of the principles of art by which that
representation in its highest form is achieved.
24. Ibid., 237.
25. For an original and subtle account of the commercial context within which pivotal texts in aes-
thetics were born, see Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History
ofAesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
26. Quoted in Woodmansee, 29.
27. Richard Terdimann, “The Paradoxes of Distinction,” in Discourse/Counter-Discourse : The Theory
and Practice ofSymbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
28. See David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 274. For an account of the tensions between the
ascendant “visual culture” of engravings in fine art and the theory of art espoused in Reynolds's
Discourses, see Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860
(New York: Palgrave, 2001), 67-97.
29. See Bernadine Barnes, “Aretino, the Public, and the Censorship of Michelangelo's Last Judgement,”
in Childs, ed., Suspended License, 59-84.
30. First used in France around 1803, the technique had been invented a few years earlier in Germany
by J. N. F Alois Senefelder, a dramatist hoping to circulate his plays cheaply. Within the first decade
of the nineteenth century, the process was used to reproduce images of works of art, such as, by 1803,
those of the Louvre by the music publisher Johann Anton André. By 1820 color (9 stone) was em-
ployed (A. Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques [London,
1980]; V. I. Carlson and J. W. Ittman, Regency to Empire: French Printmaking, 1715-1814, exh. cat.
(Baltimore: Baltimore Museum ofArt, 1984]).
31. For a useful survey and discussion of these journals, which in many cases targeted different groups
(such as the Musée des dames and des demoiselles for women, the Musée chrétien, which collected only
Christian art, and the Musée des tailleurs devoted to the art of tailoring) see Chantal Georgel, “The
Museum as Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds.,
Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994),
113-22.
32. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 214. Restrictions on
the right of workers to congregate were not formalized in England to the same extent as in France,
but were enforced informally.
33. Le Moniteur universel, 5August 1835 (emphasis in the original). Cited in David S. Kerr, Caricature
 Censorship, Autonomy, and Artistic Form |2!

and French Political Culture 1830-1848: Charles Philipon and the Illustrated Press (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 122.
34. Cited in Robert Justin Goldstein, Censorship ofPolitical Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989), 4.
35. One can see, by the way, an anticipation in those remarks of the argument Catherine A. MacKinnon
has recently used against pornography—that in part through its immediacy it amounts to an action,
that it is not, as in the title essay of her work, Only Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1993).
36. During the 1840s the daguerrotype, a unique, fragile image created on a polished, silver-plated
surface, was the commercially dominant form of photography. Although Talbot had invented a process
for generating paper positives from a paper negative and had set up a commercial printing estab-
lishment in Reading, England, in 1843, the grainy paper prints, without the tonal range of a daguerrotype,
did not satisfy the public’s taste for detail. Few practitioners in France used the paper negative until
1847, when it was patented there.
37. Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1859,” in Critique dart (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 276.
38. See Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Modern Art in the
Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 3-37; and the essays collected in Andreas
Huyssen, Afier the Great Divide. Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986).
39. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Merloyd Lawrence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 29.
Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 16 Jan. 1852, cited in n. 1.
40. See “Mass Culture as Woman” in Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 44-62.
Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman

Michael Kelly

The relationship between aesthetics and art history has undergone a major trans-
formation over the last twenty years as art historians have again become more
involved in some of the theoretical tasks formerly performed primarily by philoso-
phers of art. Art historians have, for example, developed their own theories of
art, a task which, more than any other, was once regarded as the province of
philosophy. One might expect this development to result in more cooperation
and understanding between aestheticians and art historians, at least in cases when
they both discuss the same or similar art. For in former times there seemed to be
a theory/history split between the two disciplines, but now they seem to have at
least the possibility of a shared theoretical-historical discourse about art. The very
existence of this Clark Conference on “Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies” is
evidence of such a possibility.!
While I cannot speak for art historians (or visual studies theorists), I have
such expectations as a philosopher and welcome the introduction of art theory, es-
pecially in connection with contemporary art. I even hope that it might be a good
way to transform aesthetics by inspiring, if not compelling, a reconsideration of
some of philosophy’s dominant interests in art, particularly those at odds with the
historicity of art. Unfortunately, my expectations have not yet been met. Unlike
contemporary philosophers of science, who are quite aware of what is happening
in both the sciences and historical studies of them, contemporary philosophers of
art for the most part ignore both contemporary art and their histories and thus fail
to appreciate, let alone to engage critically, the contributions that art historians
(and critics) have already made to the philosophical understanding of such art.
This is not to say that aestheticians do not know anything about contemporary art
or its histories, for many of them do. The point is rather that, even when they have
such knowledge, it does not play a significant role in their philosophical concep-
tions of art. It is as if philosophers of art have built an imaginary wall around
themselves to keep art historians out, especially as the latter have developed their
own philosophical reflections on art.
I would like to take this wall down by finding a way for aesthetics to get
a better grasp of the philosophical significance of history for the conception of art
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman |23

(especially but not exclusively contemporary art). I think we can begin to do so by

clarifying some of the kinds of philosophical interests that I believe must be re-
considered if this wall is ever going to fall. I will try to clarify these interests, the
problems they cause (particularly iconoclasm, which I will explain only at the end),
and thus the reasons why these interests need to be reconsidered. I hope to do all
this while contrasting a philosopher’s and an art historian’s interpretations of a sin-
gle contemporary artist. The philosopher is Arthur C. Danto, the art historian
Rosalind E. Krauss, and the artist Cindy Sherman. The choices here are obvious,
since Danto and Krauss are leading members of their respective fields, as is Sherman
of hers, plus Danto and Krauss, as critics as well as theorists, have both written ex-
tensively on Sherman’s photography.

Danto’s Philosophy of Art

Danto has developed a distinct philosophy of art, the centerpiece of which is an
essentialist definition of art: something is a work of art only if it has meaning and
only if the work embodies the meaning that it has.* So meaning and embodiment
are the two necessary, though not quite sufficient, conditions of a work of art.
Armed with this definition, Danto interprets any individual work of art by iden-
tifying its meaning and by showing how the meaning is embodied in the work.*
This all seems straightforward enough. But what exactly is “embodied” meaning?
To say that embodied meaning is im the artistic image, while “unembodied” mean-
ing is something external to which the nonartistic image can only refer, begs the
question, for whatever embodied meaning is, we can safely assume that it is
supposed to be im the work. Since Danto does not offer any clear theoretical
criteria enabling us to discern when meaning is embodied, the only way to under-
stand what he has in mind is to look at the examples of embodied meaning he
provides, particularly in his art criticism. As we will see, however, when he
actually interprets individual works of art, he looks elsewhere than in the works as
he tries to explain their embodied meanings.
The reason Danto looks elsewhere is, I think, that the embodied mean-
ings he has in mind are universal and, as such, they are actually artifacts of his
philosophical interests rather than anything we should expect to find in artworks
insofar as they are understood to be deeply historical. In other words, to Danto’s
seemingly straightforward approach of interpreting art in terms of its embodied
meaning, he adds an unstated and problematic condition, namely, that the em-
bodied meanings of artworks be universal. I say “unstated” because, to my knowledge,
124 Michael Kelly

he does not defend, identify, or even acknowledge this condition in his philoso-
phy of art. Since this condition is unstated, it is never defined by Danto, but it is
clarified when it is put into practice in his art criticism, where the meanings he
identifies in connection with the works he interprets are almost always universal
and where (as in the example of his interpretation of Sherman below) he suggests
that “universal” signifies, when applied to artworks, that meaning must speak to/for
all of us. The lack of definition of universality may not be surprising, since Danto
is a philosopher and may therefore take the claim of universality to be self-evident.
But even if—or, especially because—his penchant for universal meanings is an
artifact of his profession, it requires justification.
What particularly requires justification, I think, are the interpretive steps
of abstraction Danto takes to render meanings of historical works of art universal.
For on his own account, the embodied meanings of artworks are historically in-
dexed, since embodiment is possible only under concrete historical conditions and
only through artistic means that are also historically specific. He argues, for
example, that Andy Warhol’s 1964 Brillo Boxes could be a work of art only in a
particular historical period, namely, one in which it is possible for a Brillo box
carton to have an embodied meaning. Yet Danto also argues that the meaning of
Warhol’s work—which is none other than the essence of art—is universal and, as
such, not confined to the historical period that first made it possible.° In effect,
works—or at least their meanings—have to be abstracted from their own history
in order to be rendered universal; otherwise, the works remain historically particu-
lar or contingent, which for Danto would mean that they would be of no
philosophical interest and, worse, may no longer be works of art in his terms. So
it is the philosophical interest in universal meaning that leads Danto to abstract
art from the very history in which he himself first situates it by virtue of the
definitional condition of embodiment. There is thus a philosophical tension in
Danto’s philosophy of art (in particular, with respect to his essentialist definition
of art) between embodiment (the second condition of the definition) and univer-
sality (the unstated, third condition), for the former is historical and the latter is
not. Danto resolves this tension, in effect, by siding with universality and against
history.© But this resolution, such as it is, has serious implications for his concep-
tion of art and, more immediately and immanently, for his definition of art.

Danto’s Interpretation of Sherman

Let me clarify what I have in mind when I speak of the conceptual tension within
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman 125

Danto’s philosophy of art by discussing his interpretation of Sherman’s work, par-

ticularly her Untitled Film Stills.’ \ think there is a revealing and troubling discrepancy
between the starting point and conclusion of his interpretation which is manifested
on four interpretive levels at once: regarding (1) the art historical background of
Sherman’s work; (2) her role as the model for her photographs; (3) her gender; and
(4) her specific medium, namely, photography. For after giving historically indexed
accounts of Sherman’s work on all four levels, all of which would seem to add
historical substance to Danto’s notion of embodiment (and thus to his definition
of art), he then abstracts the work from history in order to realize his interest, qua
philosopher, in universal meaning.
(1) On the first level, Danto offers a sketch of the historical background
of 1960s art, which he says was infatuated with commonplace or “subartistic”
images (used in, say, the celebration of touchpoints in life) because they were
recognized as carrying “a more powerful charge of human meaning” than high-art
photography could ever hope to carry.’ Enter Sherman in the late 1970s to early
1980s, when in her Untitled Film Stills she, too, seized upon “a genre of working
or subartistic photograph,” namely, the film still of mostly B movies, and appro-
priated its “seductive, enticing, and meretricious” aesthetic qualities.” But immediately
after introducing her work in these art historical terms, Danto argues that her
appropriation of the film still “carries us only a certain distance in the understanding
and appreciation” of her work, for appropriation provides only “a framework
through which her deep artistic impulses found expression.”!° He then focuses on
these impulses, claiming that they are driving Sherman’s work. Thereafter, he seems
more interested in the universal nature of what he thinks is driving her to appro-
priate subartistic images than in the mechanics of how she artistically and historically
embodies meaning in these images to make them into art. While these two inter-
ests—universality and embodiment—need not be incompatible, they happen to
be in Danto’s case, as the former has philosophical priority over the latter once
tension between them arises because of what I call the “history factor’—namely,
the historical conditions of art needed for meaning to be embodied seem to
preclude meaning from being universal.
(2) Danto identifies the universal impulses driving Sherman’s work only
on the second level of his interpretation, namely, when he discusses the signifi-
cance of the fact that Sherman is the model for her own photographs. With continued
reference to the Untitled Film Stills, he says they are not self-portraits, even though
all of them are of Sherman in the sense that she is her own model. But he then
126 Michael Kelly

adds that, while it may not matter in each particular photograph that Sherman is
the model, it does matter when we take the photographs as an aggregate. The
difference at the level of the aggregate is that she is the means or medium by which
she expresses something about the human condition. In other words, the stills are
not about her, but it is important to what they are about that she is the model,
that she is the one who expresses what they are about. More specifically, the Untitled
Film Stills are about what Danto calls “The Girl” “in her myriad embodiments’:
“The Girl” in trouble, “The Girl” as detective, “The Girl” as the one we left
behind, “The Girl” as the one with a golden heart, and the like.'! In short, “The
Girl” in the aggregate stills touches “the myth we carry out of childhood, of
danger, love, and security that defines the human condition.”!” So it turns out that
the impulses driving Sherman’s work and thus determining the meaning of her
images are danger, love, security, and the like, all of which are universal since they
are part of what “defines the human condition.” Moreover, it is by virtue of this
universality that, according to Danto, Sherman’s work is able to “rise to the
demand on great art, that it embody the transformative metaphors for the mean-
ing of human reality.”! That is, what makes Sherman's work art as distinct from
the commonplace, nonartistic images she appropriates is not that her images have
embodied meanings, but that their meanings are universal: Sherman's images “tran-
scend” their antecedents because of the “oneness” she achieves through her genius,
whose universality can be traced back to the impulses driving her to create these
images.!4 This is where Danto’s notion of universality is strikingly and immanently
at odds with his notion of embodiment, because the transcendence that is required
for universality is also a transcendence of the historical conditions in which “The
Girl” was first embodied in myriad ways in Sherman's photographs.
(3) The historical/universal discrepancy in Danto’s interpretation is even
more evident on the third level with regard to the gender question. He first says
that Sherman’s portraits are “of an identity she shares with every woman who
conceives the narrative of her life in the idiom of the cheap [B] movie.”!> But
after offering this gender-specific and historically indexed identification, Danto
immediately shifts his interest to the issue of universality. Any particular girl who
identifies with the cheap movie becomes “Every” girl or simply “The Girl.” But
a girlbecomes The Girl only by first transcending her gender specificity; in Danto’s
words, “The Girl is an allegory for something deeper and darker, in the mythic
unconscious of everyone, regardless of sex.”!° So, although “The Girl” clearly is a
woman, her gender has been universalized (as The rather than a girl) to the point
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman |27

that it loses specificity. It is not that you could substitute “The Boy” for “The Girl,”
but that whatever distinguishes the girl from the boy or one girl from
another is not relevant philosophically. For “The Girl” speaks for all humans, not
just for all women, at least once the interpretive emphasis is on the universality of
the impulses being expressed through her. But—and here is where Danto very
explicitly transcends the very history with which he begins—she can become a
spokesperson for universal human impulses only once she is conceived as being
“beyond sexual difference.”!7
(4) The fourth and final level of Danto’s interpretation concerns Sherman's
medium. Although he begins by clearly recognizing that her images are photo-
graphs, he says (in the very first paragraph of the essay which is specifically about
Sherman) that she uses the camera just as a means; that is, her images are works of
art that just happen to be photographs rather than photographs asserting them-
selves as art.'® As far as Danto is concerned, therefore, Sherman is an artist first
and a photographer only in order to realize what he calls her “extra-photographic
artistic ends,” namely, the expression of universal impulses. Citing the point that
she is “not required” to trip the shutter or develop the plates herself because, in
Danto’s words, such activities are “inessential to her way of being an artist,”!? he
claims that Sherman is interested in the images only qua means, not in the tech-
niques of the medium by which the images are realized. By making such claims,
Danto is thereby abstracting Sherman’s work from its artistic as well as historical
conditions, and again his motivation for doing so is to render the meanings of her
images universal.
Now, the explanation for the discrepancy on all four levels between the
starting point and conclusion of Danto’s interpretation of Sherman is his claim
that she not only appropriates commonplace, historically specific imagery but that,
in doing so, she transfigures it into something that captures the universal “human
condition.””° Sherman is said to achieve transfiguration by taking on the role of
the performance artist qua priestess for whom “art is the practice of a form of magic”
and the “‘work’ is a means toward transformative ends.”?! That is, she subsumes
photography under performance art, discovering that “one can attain the ends of
performance art through pre-empting photographs that already connect with the
consciousness of her audience.””* As a result of this transfigurative magic, Sherman
achieves four types or modes of “oneness,” that is, an overcoming of the bound-
aries between the viewer and The Girl**: (1) a “oneness with her means” because
the camera is collusive with the stills, making it internal to her work rather than
128 Michael Kelly

the subject itself; (2) a oneness with her culture, since she has found a way to tap
into its “mythic unconscious’; (3) a “oneness with a set of narrative structures in-
stantly legible to everyone who lives this culture”; and, finally, (4) a “oneness with
her presumed audience” because she is “The Girl” and “The Girl” is everybody.”
It is also through such transfiguration that Sherman achieves the transcendence of
personal identity, gender, and artistic medium discussed above. Moreover, it is only
through transcendence of some of the very conditions that determine the mean-
ings of the images before they are appropriated by Sherman that the meanings of
her images can become universal as they become works of art. What is transfig-
ured here is thus not the images per se but their meanings,” which are taken out
of history as they are taken up into art. So transfiguration qua transcendence
requires the abstraction of meanings from the historical world and their elevation
to an ideal world of artworks—Danto’s “artworld”—interpreted in terms of their
universality.7°

Krauss’s Interpretation of Sherman

There are at least three ways to criticize Danto’s interpretation of Sherman's work.
(1) We could argue that another interpretation of its embodied meaning better suits
it. This strategy would still be consistent with Danto’s position, however, as it would
satisfy the conditions of his definition, namely, that works have embodied mean-
ing. (2) We could argue that an entirely different type of interpretation better suits
the work, namely, one that, say, takes historical considerations into the account of
what makes her photographs works of art. This strategy would be a serious chal-
lenge to Danto because his definition of art excludes such considerations, since he
argues that his essentialist definition of art is external to (and thus indemnified
against) history.” Or (3) we could argue that Sherman’s photographs have no mean-
ing at all, which would be a more radical critique of Danto, since it would challenge
his essentialist definition of art. Although I am interested in the first two strategies,
I will focus here only on the third strategy, which is where the contrast between
Danto’s and Krauss’s respective interpretations of Sherman is most relevant. While
the idea that her work has no meaning might seem like a thought experiment
unlikely to have any counterpart in any intelligible discourse about art, Krauss’s
interpretation demonstrates that this experiment is not so remote after all.?® As
formidable as her task may be, since the onus is now on her to demonstrate that
art does not have any meaning, Danto makes things easier than they might be. For
it is enough for her to come up with just one case of something which is not “about”
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman |29

anything and thus has no meaning but which is still a work ofart in order to estab-
lish a single counterexample to—and thereby undermine—his essentialist definition
(and philosophy) of art.
With this counterexample in mind, and with the more immediate philo-
sophical aim of clarifying the problems I see with the conception of art underlying
Danto’s interpretation of Sherman, I now want to contrast it with Krauss’s inter-
pretation of the very same work.” She claims that to emphasize meaning in the
way Danto does in the case of the Untitled Film Stills is to be “in the grip of myth,”
to consume the myths that the film stills are allegedly about. According to Krauss,
this is rather naive and uncritical, rather like believing a salesman’s pitch: “The
salesman’s pitch [the still] names it [a myth], and the buyer [Danto qua critic] . . .
accepts the name, is satisfied (or suckered) by the pitch.”3? Expressed in her more
technical language, Danto has taken the signifier at face value and followed its lead
to the signified or myth. According to Krauss, by contrast, we need to demystify
or demythify the myths (meanings) uncritically associated with Sherman’s work and
to focus on the works as effects rather than as means. To do so, we need to “look
under the hood,” that is, to examine “the signifier, the material whose very articu-
lation conditions the signified.”*!
Krauss first explains her notion of “under the hood” by clarifying what we
cannot expect to find there, namely, myth, which she defines as follows: “Myth is
the act of draining history out of signs and reconstructing these signs instead as
‘instances’. . . of universal truths or of . . . things that have no history. ... Myth
steals into the heart of the sign to convert the historical into the ‘natural’—some-
thing that is uncontested, that is simply ‘the way things are.’”°? This general
characterization of myth turns out to be particularly applicable to Danto’s inter-
pretation of Sherman, because (a) Krauss seems (in the Sherman text at least) to
identify myth and meaning (all meaning is universal/mythic) and because, at the
same time, (b) her critique of meaning helps to sharpen the conceptual tension in
Danto’s philosophy of art between universality and embodiment/historicity. For
when he insists that Sherman’s film stills are transcendent on the level of person,
gender, and medium, such transcendence is achieved, in Krauss’s words, only by
“draining history out of signs,” thereby rendering the alleged meaning (signified)
of the photographs (signifier) universal and ahistorical rather than particular and
historical. On Krauss’s account, in other words, it is Danto the philosopher rather
than Sherman the artist who “steals into the heart of the sign” and seeks to trans-
figure the signified into something universal and “natural.” That is, while he claims
130 Michael Kelly

that Sherman performs an act of magical transfiguration on commonplace images,

elevating them out of history and into the pantheon of universal art, Krauss
argues that it is actually Danto who transfigures these images—specifically their
meanings—with the philosophical interest of rendering them capable of acquir-
ing universality.*
The dominating, interpretive presence of this philosophical interest in
universal/mythic meaning is evident in the shift from the historical to the
ahistorical in Danto’s interpretation of Sherman (the process of abstraction and
transcendence through which meaning becomes universal), and this shift is an
example of what Krauss means by the naturalization of the myths invoked by the
photographs. In order to challenge this naturalization process, Krauss tries to
restore emphasis on the signifier, on what is “under the hood.” The link between
this restoration and her critique of the universal/mythic meanings of artworks is
that, on her account, belief in such meaning is what has drawn philosophers’
interest to the signified and thus away from the signifier. So, for Krauss, to critique
myth is to critique meaning is to undermine interest in the signified. In this light,
she reads Sherman’s work as the undermining of the myth of meaning, specifically
the very universal/mythic meaning that Danto identifies as constituting Sherman's
photographs as art.
Drawing on Roland Barthes’s notion of the “death of the author,”*4 Krauss
argues that Sherman’s own persona is invisible in her work since, as Danto puts it,
she always appears in disguise as her own “other.” This is one of the few points on
which Danto and Krauss agree, but the agreement turns out to be short-lived. For
Danto, the effect of Sherman’s absence qua individual female is that she could
thereby attain a oneness with her audience and thus with the culture whose uni-
versal myths she captures. So the absence of the artist qua individual is, in his mind,
a condition for the universality of the meaning of Sherman's photographs, much
the way that the disinterestedness (in the sense of impartiality) of an individual
who judges art is a condition for the universality of any judgment he makes. For
Krauss, by contrast, the author/artist’s invisibility puts in question the relevance of
universality as well as of individuality, for they—individual/universal—are just
extremes on a continuum of the signified and it is the entire continuum that she
is questioning. Since her aim is to shift the interest back to the signifier, to “the
material whose very articulation conditions the signified,” all the personas Sherman
embodies in her photographs are not “freestanding” characters, as they must be for
Danto if they are going to transcend to the universal status of “The Girl.”3> Rather,
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman |3!

the personas Sherman embodies are “effects—outcomes, functions—of the signi-

fiers that body them forth.” So, for Krauss, embodiment is the effect of the
signifier, whereas, for Danto, embodiment is the function (if not the expression)
of the signified and involves a transcendence of the historical conditions in which
the signifier operates.
Now, while it may seem possible without undermining the signified of
Sherman's work to follow Danto and envision such signified as ideal and ahistori-
cal, it is clearly not possible to separate the signifier from its artistic and historical
conditions, for after such separation the signifier would simply cease to function.
But if the signifier ceases, there is no longer any signified either, since the signifier
is after all what leads us to the signified. Moreover, since the signified depends on
the signifier, and the signifier (along with the embodiment of the signified for
which it provides the mechanics) is historical, there is no signified without history.
Therefore, Danto’s strategy of (a)
eliding the signifier in the interest
of the signified and (b) abstracting
the embodiment of meaning from
history in the interest of universal-
ity cannot be sustained in the end.
We can get a clearer picture
of the implications of Krauss’s crit-
ical strategy for Danto’s philosophy
of art by looking at her readings
ofa few specific images from the
Untitled Film Stills. For example,
Fig. |. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978. Black-and-white Sherman appears wearing the same
photograph, 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and h i } :
Metro Pictures suit and hairstyle in three different
photographs (Untitled Film Stills
#21-23), suggesting to Danto that the same universal Girl is present in all three
cases.°” But, according to Krauss, the sameness of the images ends with the out-
ward appearance of the sole figure they all contain. For in Untitled Film Still #21
(fig. 1), the “register is close up” and the background is a diffusely lit and out-of-
focus cityscape; in Untitled Film Still #22, Sherman uses the technique of a long-shot
that “posits the character against rich architectural details” that have no identifi-
able context; and in Untitled Film Still #23, the figure is “framed in a medium-shot”
against an undefined city street.** The effect of such changes on the level of the
132 Michael Kelly

signifier is that a different persona or character appears in each of the photographs.

More precisely, each of the three characters is an effect “only of work on the signi-
fier,”3 so we have to examine this work with an eye to difference rather than identity.
In light of such difference, the examination of the signifier will start and remain
particular and historical—a move that is in sharp contrast to Danto’s abstraction
from the signifier and his (not Sherman's) transcendence of particular/historical to
universal/mythic meaning.
Krauss’s emphasis on the signifier shifts the focus from what universal
meanings the works might /ave to what the works actually do, to the mechanics
of how they operate as signifiers. One thing they do, according to Krauss, is to
construct the perspective of the viewer—whether the male gaze, or Danto’s
universal point of view—from (and for) which the works are said to acquire their
meaning, whether particular or universal. To return to the Untitled Film Stills, con-
sider #2, where a young woman is draped in a towel and standing before a bathroom
mirror just inside a door, According to Krauss, it is not the doorjamb in the picture
which places the viewer (and the gaze) outside the bathroom; such a claim would
entail reference to a reality external to the signifier and, in turn, would risk
making any interpretation of the image derivative of that same reality. It is rather
“by means of the signifier that reads as graininess” that the viewer (and the gaze)
is placed and, in fact, first constructed.“ In Untitled Film Still #39, an image of an-
other woman in a bathroom, the voyeuristic remove is established, not by appeal
to the (male) gaze operating independently of the image, but by “a kind of
nimbus that washes around the frame of the image, repeating in the register of
light the sense of barrier that the door frame constructs in the world of physical
objects.”4! At the same time, this nimbus diffuses or even washes out any gaze
because there is little for it to focus on. Also, in the case of Untitled Film Still #81,
yet another image of a woman scantily dressed in a bathroom, there is a sharp depth
of field that seems to eliminate rather than assume or construct the distance between
the viewer and viewed, thereby undercutting the gaze (at least as it is interpreted
by Laura Mulvey).4? What these examples demonstrate, according to Krauss, is
that we can understand Sherman's photographs as art only by doing justice to their
status as signifiers.

Danto and Krauss on Meaning

Krauss’s argument here, however, is not only that the signifier in Sherman’s work
is (a) a precondition of any meaning (“the material whose very articulation con-
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman = |33

ditions the signified”) that Danto or any other interpreter might identify as well
as (b) the means of the embodiment of any such meaning, but that the signifier
fragments meaning, universal or otherwise. Near the very start of the text on Sherman,
Krauss introduces her notion of the fragmentation of meaning by contrasting a
realist interpretation, whether of Sherman or of any artist, with an antirealist one.
The two types correspond to the signified/signifier distinction in the sense that a
realist is interested only in the signified and, more specifically, in identifying a sin-
gle signified for each work of art, whether it is a photograph, a painting, or a work
in any other medium (or perhaps in identifying a unifying signified for a body of
work, as Danto does for the Untitled Film Stills). By contrast, the antirealist is one
whose interest lies in the work on the signifier (in ways described above), so she is
not faced with such limitation (determination), but rather with “a multiplicity of
unstable signifieds” and a “sliding” or “blurring among them.”*? So instead of
singular and stable meaning, we now seem to have a proliferation of meaning. But
if Krauss’s account of the fragmentation of meaning culminates in just a prolifer-
ation of meaning, then the fragmentation she promises would merely be a splitting
of meaning into multiples, perhaps not unlike Danto’s idea of pluralism in art.4
This would allow Sherman’s work to bear all the interpretations—Danto’s, Mulvey’s,
Krauss’s own—that have been assigned to it. But then Krauss’s interpretation,
though different from Danto’s, would not constitute a challenge to his philosophy
of art and it certainly would not provide a counterexample to his definition of art.
So Krauss must have something else in mind here if she is to succeed, on her own
terms, in her critique of Danto’s conception of mythic/universal meaning.
Krauss’s argument might rather be understood as follows. If our interest is
in the signifier that, in turn, fragments meaning, then not only is Danto’s interpre-
tation of Sherman in doubt because his interest is only in meaning, but his definition
of art is in jeopardy because it is meaning that makes something, such as Sherman’s
photographs, into art to begin with. Even the possibility that Krauss is right about
the fragmentation of meaning introduces reasonable doubt about Danto’s defini-
tion. So let me pursue this possibility—and thereby illustrate the challenge it represents
to Danto’s essentialist philosophy of art—by asking what it means for Sherman’s
photographs, qua signifers, to undermine or fragment meaning.
To clarify how meaning is fragmented, Krauss argues that Sherman's photo-
graphs fragment any single point of view(er) or perspective because of her use of
light, which Krauss describes as a “scattering of gleams around the otherwise dark-
ened image as though refracting it through the facets of an elaborate jewel,” thereby
 134 Michael Kelly

creating/producing a “corrosive visual dispersal.”4° One example of such light is in

Untitled Film Still #110 (fig. 2), where Sherman “concentrated on creating a sense
of the completely aleatory quality” of illumination in an image of a woman seen
from the front whose body is three-fourths in darkness, resulting in a “knotted
complex of near unintelligibility.”4° Another example is Untitled Film Still #149,
where what Krauss calls “wild light” plunges the
woman's head and upper torso into darkness, de-
spite the close-up angle of the shot; in addition,
there is light beaming off of the material covering
the other parts of her body. Such “gleams and re-
flections” are what cause the fragmentation of any
single (determinate) “point” of view, which in turn
makes the gaze unlocatable, thereby preventing it
“from being the site of coherence, meaning, unity,
gestalt, eidos.”4” Thus the fragmentation by light
of any single point of view is a fragmentation of
meaning, at least so long as the point of view is
the site of meaning.
To provide a second example of the frag-
mentation of meaning, which involves another
series of Sherman photographs on which Danto
Fig. 2. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #110, 1982. and Krauss have both written, consider the History
Color photograph, 45'/s x 30 in. (114.9 x 76.2 cm). tHE ou :
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures Portraits.*® Krauss’s interpretation 1S, as always,

centered on the work on the signifier, this time

involving the use of prosthetic body parts attached to Sherman’s own body as she
posed for the portraits, most of which are loosely suggestive of real or imaginary
high-art portrait paintings of royalty and other subjects deemed worthy of this
medium. These body parts seem at first to be some kind ofveil or mask that could
be pushed or pulled aside, thereby exposing the underside of the subject being
portrayed. Such unveiling would suggest a form of deep interpretation of these
portraits, namely, an unveiling until the inner meaning is revealed. According to
Krauss, however, the prosthetic body parts “elaborate the field of desublimatory,
horizontal axis that erodes the facade of the vertical, bearing witness to the fact
that behind that facade there lies not the transparency of truth, of meaning, but
the opacity of the body’s matter, which is to say, the formless” [the informe, or
formlessness]. In other words, the physical elements modeled by the prosthesis
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman 135

have a combined weight that pulls the images down from the vertical axis to the
horizontal, from the axis of form to that of the informe. As a result, the body parts
actually conspire against meaning and interpretation, for they are self-consciously
attached to Sherman's body rather than discreetly placed over it. At the same time,
since the prosthetic parts are not blended into her body in order to function as a
disguise that would then have to be interpreted away, they do not veil or hide
(neither themselves nor anything else) and thus cannot serve as masks. In fact,
they are used in such a way to suggest that there is no veiling going on at all, which
again means that no unveiling is required. Since such unveiling is typically sup-
posed to reveal an inner or underlying meaning, the deliberate absence, even
undermining, of such a veil has the effect of suggesting that there is no inner
meaning and perhaps no meaning at all—since on the deep interpretation model
Krauss describes and critiques, meaning is veiled or it does not exist, that is, it ex-
ists only as veiled (at least until it is unveiled—and thus rendered transparent—by
the philosopher/critic). Since she argues here as if veiled, mythic/universal mean-
ing were the only type of meaning in art, the fragmentation of this type is
tantamount to a fragmentation of all meaning.
Danto might very well respond here that, on Krauss’s interpretation, the
meaning of Sherman's work is the undermining of any determinate meaning, even
the one he himself articulates. And, his response might continue, this is still an
example of meaning or “aboutness,” because indeterminate meaning is still mean-
ing and a work of art that is about the undermining of meaning is about something
and therefore has meaning. Krauss’s retort here would be, I think, that Sherman’s
work is not about the undermining of meaning; rather, it zs such undermining.
The “is” here is intended in the sense of an action or event—in this case referring
to the use of mechanics or techniques, such as gleams and reflections, that have
the effect of undermining meaning in the photographs in which they are em-
ployed. Ascription of universal meaning to these same photographs is possible
only if an interpreter, such as Danto, first takes an active disinterest in the tech-
niques of the signifier and thereby fails to see how they conspire to undermine
the very meaning he ascribes to the work in question.
Krauss’s idea of the fragmentation of meaning, which is part of a theo-
retical shift from the signified to the signifier, involves a second shift in theoretical
interest from form to formlessness, which we already witnessed in passing. She char-
acterizes the informe by saying that it both accounts for and undoes form; it is
“form-which-is-also-the-transgression-of-form.”*° That is, the informe is not a
136 Michael Kelly

force operating outside or behind or otherwise separate from the form of a work
which would then have to be unveiled; it rather operates inside form, being “what
form itself creates.”>! The transgression here, which is particularly though not ex-
clusively relevant to Krauss’s critique of Danto, is that the informe de-classifies or
“de-classes” the form of any work of art: “‘declasser,’ an action that simultane-
ously (1) lowers or debases objects by stripping them of their pretensions—in the
case of words, their pretensions to meaning—and (2) declassifies, or attacks the
very condition on which meaning depends, namely, the structural opposition be-
tween definite terms.”°? To return to Sherman, the informe is what “organizes”
her photographs.* That is, with specific reference to the Untitled Film Stills, Krauss
says (a) that the informe is most evident in the “most radical and productive re-
sources” of Sherman’s work, such as the “gleams and reflections” (and, in the
History Portraits, the emphasis on the horizontal axis), and (b) that these resources
are “running in strong countercurrent to the constellation form/meaning” and
are thus “splitting apart meaning from within.”™
But Danto might ask a question here similar to the one just raised, namely:
is the informe just a name for the opacity of meaning in art? If so, meaning would
be left intact since even opaque meaning is still meaning, and Krauss’s interpre-
tation of Sherman would therefore not represent a challenge to Danto’s essentialist
definition of art. Or is the informe rather the source or cause of the fragmenta-
tion of meaning in art and thus the invisible guarantor, in effect, that there will
never be any meaning, determinate or otherwise? If so, then (in combination with
the earlier claim that fragmentation is not about meaning even though it is the
undermining of it) the forme would indeed represent a challenge to Danto. It
seems clear that it is to be understood in terms of the second option here, since
Krauss explicitly claims that it is the destiny of the informe to liberate “our think-
ing from the semantic [meaning], the servitude to thematics, to which art seems
so thoroughly indentured.”*? Moreover, she also explicitly states that the informe
is not “just some kind of haze or vagueness in the field of definition, but the
impossibility of definition itself due to a strategy of slippage within the very logic
of categories (male/female, horizontal/vertical, inside/outside, etc.).”*° Interpreted
in the light of the informe, therefore, Sherman’s photographs are indeed a coun-
terexample to Danto’s essentialist definition of art, for they are works of art even
though they have no universal/mythic meaning and even though they are not
about not having such meaning. As art, Sherman's images defy the philosophical
interest in (universal) meaning and have the effect of undermining that interest.
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman |37

In this light, Danto’s and Krauss’s interpretations of Sherman could not

be more different: Danto argues that universal meaning can be embodied in a work
of art even while he abstracts art from the historical conditions of its embodiment,
whereas Krauss argues that such (or seemingly any other) meaning is fragmented
by the formlessness within the form of the work, the very form in which any em-
bodiment is to take place. Despite this striking difference, however, their views
have a similar consequence for the issue of embodiment in art, for embodiment is
undercut in both cases, albeit in different ways—one by abstracting from its con-
ditions (Danto) and the other by undermining its means (Krauss).*” So, on either
view, the embodiment condition of Danto’s definition is in jeopardy, which means
that the definition itself is in jeopardy as well, because meaning (universal or oth-
erwise) has already been fragmented and meaning and embodiment are the only
two (stated) conditions of Danto’s essentialist definition of art.

Danto’s Iconoclasm
My philosophical aim in contrasting Danto’s and Krauss’s interpretations of Sherman
is not simply to claim that one is wrong and the other right about her work, but
to critique the philosophical interests determining how Danto conceives art as (if
not before) he begins to interpret any.°® As I see it, the problem with his concep-
tion of art is that it leads to iconoclasm, by which I mean a combination of disinterest
and distrust in art, where disinterest is an uncanny mixture of disinterestedness
and lack of interest, and thus a mixture of a technical philosophical term and an
everyday expression.”
For Kant, whose Critique ofJudgment is the locus classicus for this notion,
disinterestedness is achieved when we abstract or distance ourselves from any
interest in the existence of the artwork being judged; for Danto, disinterestedness
is achieved when he abstracts art from the historical conditions that would
prevent its meaning from being universal.®° In Kant’s case, abstraction is a
condition for the universality of a pure aesthetic judgment of taste (there are four
“moments” of such judgments: disinterestedness is the first and universality is the
second; moreover, Kant claims that the second can be inferred from the first): In
Danto’s case, abstraction is the effect of the interest in universality, this time in the
form of universal meaning, because it is that interest which requires the abstrac-
tion. Such disinterest, whether a condition or an effect, is a disinterest 77 art (rather
than just a disinterest in interests other than universality) insofar as art is deter-
mined by the other interests from which it has been abstracted. That is, so long
138 Michael Kelly

as art is and remains tied to the conditions of its sensuous and historical particu-
larity (or existence, in Kant’s terms), to abstract from them is to abstract from art
and therefore to be disinterested in them is to be disinterested in art. Such disin-
terest in art is akin to a lack of interest, but it is a lack that is philosophically
determined and thus philosophically significant. Of course, Danto claims that
the universal meaning of art is embodied in historically particular artworks, sug-
gesting that his interest in universal meaning is compatible with art’s historical
and sensuous particularity after all. But, as we have seen, his condition of
embodiment is in conflict with his condition of universality. This is why Danto
abstracts art from the historical conditions of embodiment and thus ends up with
a disembodied universal, despite his efforts to avoid just such a result. Let me try
to explain why I call this result iconoclasm.
The specific form of iconoclasm I have in mind here is generated by Danto’s
conflation of his own philosophical interests in art—namely, universal meaning and
essentialist definition—with what constitutes art. The problem here is not just that
Danto qua philosopher has interests, which we would expect him to have, but that
he inscribes these interests into the very conception of art and thereafter interprets
it principally in terms of this inscription.®! Such inscription leads to an unusual
predicament where the effects of certain philosophical interests in art are disinter-
est and distrust in art; that is, the pursuit of the interests in universal meaning and
essentialist definition results in disinterest and distrust in the very art whose mean-
ing and definition are at issue.” For once Danto is committed to these interests,
he becomes disinterested in the historically specific conditions of art—as was the
case in his interpretation of Sherman, where he displayed a disinterest in the sig-
nifiers constituting her work—even though such conditions are necessary for his
own criterial notion of embodiment. And, again, so long as art is determined by
historical conditions, as Danto himself seems to concede when he discusses em-
bodiment, then disinterest in these conditions is tantamount to disinterest in art
itself. He also distrusts these same historical conditions—and thus art—because
they threaten to make it impossible for the meanings of the artworks he interprets
to be universal; such distrust is most clearly reflected in Danto’s insistence that
Sherman's work be abstracted from the four levels of historical interpretation in
which he himself initially recognized it as being embedded. This combination of
disinterest and distrust in art generates a philosophical form of iconoclasm, which,
like the more common religious and political forms, has the effect, intended or
not, of threatening art—in this case by manipulating the conception of it.
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman |39

Let me return, briefly, to Danto’s interpretation of Sherman to explain this

iconoclasm. When he argues, for example, that her work is not to be understood
as photography but as performance art, he is at the same time disinterested in the
details of how the photographs qua signifiers actually work to have meaning and,
even more important for Danto, to embody the meanings they have. Such disin-
terest is not simply a lack or absence of interest, for it reflects an active interest in
abstraction from such details which is required, as we saw earlier, by the philo-
sophical interest in universal meaning. But so long as Sherman’s art has to be
understood as photographs in order to be understood as having embodied mean-
ing—which was the point of contrasting Danto’s and Krauss’s interpretations—he
is disinterested in Sherman’s work qua art if he is disinterested in what is “under
the hood” of her photographs. This is how his philosophy of art unwittingly
becomes iconoclastic. Of course, Danto does discuss concrete, historical details of
Sherman's works, as he does in much of his other art criticism, and he does so
especially while trying to explain how the meaning of her work is embodied. But,
I have argued, his discussion has the purpose of demonstrating whether and how
such works have universal meaning, and such demonstration is at odds with the
stated interest in embodiment—for universality (as Danto conceives it) requires
that artworks be abstracted from these same details. This confirms that his over-
riding interest is in universal meaning rather than embodiment.
What I am calling “iconoclasm” here is the disinterest and distrust in art
generated when such philosophical interests are given priority over the historical
conditions of art. For what interest can we have in art whose historical conditions
of embodied meaning have been transcended? In fact, on Danto’s own conditions,
how can there even be any art in which we might take an interest, for something
must have embodied meaning to be art and embodiment has been undermined
by his own acts of interpretive abstraction? And how can we not distrust art once
we recognize, in the interest of embodiment, that it is inextricably tied to history
yet also believe, in the interest of universality, that art must be abstracted from that
same history? We might want to say that this would be distrust in history (or in
the history factor) rather than distrust in art itself, except that there is no art with-
out history, since there is no art without embodiment and no embodiment without
history. Iconoclasm is therefore an immanent problem for Danto’s philosophy of
art. For when art is taken out of history, it is cut off from the very conditions that
allow its meaning to be embodied and that, on his own account, therefore make
it art.
140 Michael Kelly

To clarify further what I mean by iconoclasm in Danto’s case, consider one

more time the tension internal to his definition of art between his embodiment con-
dition and his unstated condition that the meaning of art be universal. The tension
arises because the only way we can make sense of embodiment is in terms of the
mechanics of art, yet Danto has exhibited his disinterest in these mechanics by
abstracting from them while pursuing his interest in universality. So it seems that
either the second or third condition can be met, but not both: meaning is either
universal but not embodied, or embodied but not universal. But if both conditions
are not met, what becomes of the definition, since the first condition—meaning—
is not enough to make something a work of art (since Danto acknowledges in his
interpretation of Sherman that commercial photographs have meaning yet they are
not works of art)? He needs the embodiment condition in order to have the essen-
tialist definition of art he envisions, but he also needs the meaning to be universal
for the same reason. Hence the tension. To resolve it, Danto has to choose between
embodiment and universality. As we have seen, he chooses universality, thinking
that it will best allow him to obtain the essentialist definition he seeks. That is, his
philosophical interest in such a definition leads him to give priority to universality
over embodiment. But, as we have also seen, this leads him to jeopardize the very
definition in the name of which he has made his choice.
The only other way I can see of resolving this tension is to return to the
notion of embodiment and to give the history factor its due. Of course, this would
involve philosophical interests different from the ones Danto displays. But I can-
not do anything more here than I have done already to indicate what those interests
are (e.g., embodiment and historicity) and to point in the general direction in
which I expect they will lead us.

Conclusion
The contrast between Danto’s and Krauss’s interpretations of Sherman should make
it clear, Ihope, why we need to reconsider the philosophical interests underlying
Danto’s conception of art, or any other interests in contemporary aesthetics (or
even in art theory) which are just as likely to generate iconoclasm. My aim has
been to make a case for such reconsideration in order to encourage more philo-
sophical exchanges among theorists in aesthetics and art history (and visual studies).
I realize, however, that the reconsideration I am advocating may be at odds with
the discussion I want to encourage, because which philosophers or theorists
(myself included) would willingly subject their interests to such reconsideration?
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman |4!

If, however, I have made it clear that iconoclasm is an imminent danger even to
Danto’ aesthetics, despite his active involvement with the arts as a critic as well as
a philosopher, perhaps such reconsideration and exchanges will be forthcoming.

1. In this essay, I will be pushing aesthetics (critical reflection on art, culture, and nature) toward art
history as a way to push it toward history. Visual studies theorists, in turn, often push art history
away from the history of art proper to a broader, more social-political sense of history. I welcome
these “pushes,” but want to proceed slowly in order to retain the link between artworks and history
which some visual theorists may undermine insofar as they encourage us to move beyond “artworks.”
The reason I want to retain this link is that it highlights the notion of embodiment which I think is
both central to philosophical aesthetics and useful in art history and visual studies alike insofar as
they, too, need embodiment to link their interests in art with art.
2. There are, thankfully, exceptions on this score within contemporary aesthetics, namely, philoso-
phers—such as Lydia Goehr, Daniel Herwitz, Gregg Horowitz, and others—who take history seriously
as they engage in aesthetic theory. But they are in a distinct minority.
3. For a discussion of Danto’s definition of art (both a formulation and its internal history), see his
After the End ofArt: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997).
4. See the introduction to Danto’s Madonna ofthe Future (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2000),

where he describes his sense of art criticism in terms of this definition, albeit without referring to it as
such. See also my interview with Danto about this book (and specifically about the relationship
between his philosophy/definition of art and his art criticism) in Bomb 92 (June 2000): 84-89.
5. For Danto’s earliest discussion of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, see “The Artworld,” in Journal ofPhilosophy
61, no. 19 (15 October 1964): 571-84.
6. There is a related tension in Danto’s philosophy of art between essentialism and historicism, which
he explicitly discusses in his After the End of Art, chap. 11; for a critique of his handling of this ten-
sion, see my “Essentialism and Historicism in Danto’s Philosophy of Art,” in History and Theory:
Studies in the Philosophy ofHistory, Theme Issue 37 (November 1998): 30-43.
7. Danto writes about Sherman’s other works, particularly the History Portraits and her 1987 Whitney
Museum of American Art retrospective, but he prefers the Untitled Film Stills over her later work;
see Cindy Sherman: History Portraits (New York: Rizzoli, 1991); and “Cindy Sherman,” The Nation
(15/22 August 1987), reprinted in Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (New York:
Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1990), 120-26.
8. Arthur Danto, Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills (Munich: Schirmer, 1990), 6.
142 Michael Kelly

9. Ibid., 8.
10. Ibid.
u. Ibid., 10, 13.
12. Ibid., 14.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 13. For more on this “oneness,” see below. Elsewhere, Danto explicitly uses the word “tran-
scend” when speaking about how Sherman’s work is neither about herself nor tied to the medium of
photography; see Encounters and Reflections, 121.
15. Ibid., 10. There is a class angle here as well, for the images condense “the myths that define life’s
expectations in Middle American fantasy” (ibid., 13).
16. Ibid., 14.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 8, 9.
19. Ibid., 8.
20. Such transfiguration of the commonplace has, of course, been a central notion in Danto’s phi-
losophy of art since his book of that title, Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1981). But he already used the concept of transfiguration in his earliest article in the
philosophy of art, namely, “The Artworld.”
21. Untitled Film Stills, 11.
22 Didgels)
23. Ibid., 11.

24. Ibid., 13, 14.

25. In principle, the images could look exactly the same, though they do not in Sherman's case.
26. See Transfiguration ofthe Commonplace, 135 (as well “The Artworld”), where the “artworld” refers
to an ideal world of interpreted things that theory has detached from the real world.
27. After the End of
Art, chap. 11.
28. The main object of Krauss’s critique (Rosalind Krauss and Norman Bryson, Cindy Sherman:
1975-1993 [New York: Rizzoli, 1993]) is, of course, Laura Mulvey’s Lacanian, feminist reading of
Sherman. Since my focus here is Krauss’s critique of Danto, however, I will not discuss her Mulvey
critique, except insofar as it overlaps with the discussion of Danto. And it does overlap, because
Krauss criticizes Mulvey for emphasizing only the content or signified of Sherman’s work, which
serves to “put a mythic reading of the Untitled Film Stills in place, one that is not taking trouble, in-
deed, to look under the hood” (ibid., 56). In a word, Mulvey’s reading suffers from the same philosophical
problem as Danto’s.
29. While this contrast also sheds light on Krauss’s interests, this is not my main concern here, which
is to examine how art theory reveals the interests constitutive of the philosophy of art rather than
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman 143

how the philosophy of art may in turn reveal the interests constitutive of art theory.
30. Krauss and Bryson, Cindy Sherman, 20.
31. Ibid., 28. The “under the hood” metaphor is a curious one here because it may suggest some form
of deep interpretation of the type often associated with certain forms of hermeneutics and, in gen-
eral, with any type of interpretation (e.g., psychoanalysis) that seeks to identify a hidden meaning or
signified. But Krauss is using this metaphor to challenge deep interpretation—and, in fact, virtually
any kind of interpretation, Danto’s included—that focuses on the signified over the signifier. See
Krauss’s own footnote on how this metaphor might be misread (ibid., 28, n. 6). And see also an
earlier occasion where Krauss defends Roland Barthes’s and Jacques Derrida’s theories in such a way
as to make it clear that she is not advocating but criticizing the veiling/unveiling model of interpre-
tation: “These theories run exactly counter to the notion that there is a work of art, X, behind which
stands a group of meanings, a, b, or c, which the hermeneutic task of the critic unpacks, reveals, by
breaking through, peeling back the literal surface of the work.” See The Originality ofthe Avant Garde
and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 292.
32. Krauss and Bryson, Cindy Sherman, 25.
33. The universal truths mentioned in Krauss’s notion of myth fall into two groups: (a) truths about
art, in this case photography; and (b) truths about the human condition. Regarding (a), Krauss iden-
tifies two truths: “Cindy Sherman is an artist and artists imitate reality (Universal Truth No. 1), doing
so through their own sensibilities, thus adding something of themselves to it (Universal Truth No.
2)” (ibid., 28). Although Danto does not subscribe to the traditional theory of mimesis, he does de-
fine art in terms of a basic contrast between art and reality (mere things). And while he also does not
accept the traditional (i.e., premodern) expression theory of art, he does believe that art is expressive
of the embodied meanings that define it as such.
34. Ibid., 32.
35. Ibid., 28.
36. Ibid., 32.
37. Sherman's images are known to be of the same person, Sherman herself, yet they appear to be of
different people, since, with few exceptions, she looks different from one image to another. So you
have to have external knowledge about Sherman’s images—namely, about the model she uses—to
see beyond the appearance of difference. At the same time, Danto claims, there is a third, meta-
physical level here where all the images are again the same, though now in truth (rather than on the
basis of knowledge) and in contrast to appearances.
38. Krauss and Bryson, Cindy Sherman, 28.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
144 Michael Kelly

42. Ibid., 56.

43. Ibid., 28.
44. For a discussion of Danto’s pluralism (“anything goes” in post-historical art), see After the End
ofArt. And for a critique of this idea, see Tom Huhn and Gregg Horowitz's introduction to The Wake
ofArt: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998), which in-
cludes essays by Danto and his response to the Introduction.
45. Krauss and Bryson, Cindy Sherman, 106.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 109.
48. See Krauss and Bryson, Cindy Sherman, and Danto’s essay in History Portraits.
49. Krauss and Bryson, Cindy Sherman, 174. Krauss appropriates the notion of the Informe from
Georges Bataille; see his Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1039, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 31. And of course see her Formless: A Users Guide,
written with Yve-Alain Bois (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
50. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 19, 3073
Formless, 108.
51. The Optical Unconscious, 166-67.
52. Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 5.
53. Krauss and Bryson, Cindy Sherman, 109 (emphasis added).
54. Formless, 242-45.
55. Ibid., 252.
56. Bachelors, 7 (emphasis added); cf. Formless, 53, 92, 252.
57. Insofar as Krauss does undermine embodiment, she may thereby undermine the historical di-
mension of her art theory which in the discussion thus far is one of the features that has distinguished
her theory from Danto’s. But this is an issue I will have to address at another time.
58. Although I have sided with Krauss here, I want to emphasize that she may very well make the
same basic philosophical mistake for which she criticizes Danto, namely, that meaning in art must
be universal. That is, she criticizes him for assuming that the meaning of art must be universal, which
in her terms means that it must be mythic. But when she argues against Danto, she does not just
challenge universal/mythic meaning. Rather, she attacks all types of meaning, in effect, by empha-
sizing how the informe fragments any and all meaning. So if we were to agree with Krauss against
Danto that the meaning of art need not be universal, we would be left with no sense of what other
kind(s) of meaning it might have. Even if fragmented meaning were still meaning of some sort, it
would not be enough to give a clear account of Sherman's photographs. In short, I think Krauss sim-
ply goes too far in challenging Danto’s universal meaning and ends up undercutting all meaning.
But clearly, universal meaning can be challenged without abandoning all meaning, and Danto’s
 Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman 145

definition of art can be challenged without giving up any and all conceptions of art (particularly with
respect to the issue of embodiment). In fact, the purpose of such challenges is presumably to offer a
different conception of art—of what it does rather than what it is—and only then of its embodied
meaning. To provide such a conception, as Krauss seems to want to do, she will need some notion of
meaning. Cf. her_A Voyage on the North See: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1999), where she develops a new concept of “medium” (as having differential
specificity) after developing a critique of the old concept(s); perhaps she now has something similar
in mind for the (old) philosophical concept(s) of meaning in art.
59. It may seem odd to accuse Danto of being an iconoclast since (a) he is an art critic as well as a
philosopher, (b) he is one of the few philosophers to develop a theory of art in direct response to
contemporary art, (c) he argues that history is central to art, and (d) he has written critically about
the problem of the “philosophical disenfranchisement of art,” which is very similar to what I am call-
ing iconoclaam—see his The Philosophical Disenfranchisement ofArt (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986). But the charge is appropriate, both for reasons articulated here and for the following
additional reasons. First of all, iconoclasts always have some interest in art, though only of the type
(of interest as well as of art) they find acceptable, which of course it is one of the objectives of icon-
oclasts to determine. This is no less true of the philosophical form of iconoclasm than it is of the
more common religious, political, or cultural forms. So appeal to Danto’s personal or professional

interest in art does not in itself exonerate him; if anything, it makes him more suspect, given my no-
tion of iconoclasm as involving philosophical interest that actually generates disinterest. But more to
the point here is the fact that I am analyzing iconoclasm first and foremost on the level of theory,
not on the level of actual engagement with the arts, even if, as in the Danto-Sherman case, the the-
ory does not become fully evident until it engages art. That is, my focus is on how Danto conceives
art, not on whether or not he is appreciatively involved with the art he so conceives. My critique of
Danto’s iconoclasm is part of a longer manuscript on iconoclasm in the work of Martin Heidegger,
Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Derrida. So Danto is in good company.
60. The term “disinterestedness” is of course traditionally synonymous with “impartiality,” especially
in connection with judgment (in legal and moral as well as aesthetic cases), but such impartiality is
itself a means to achieve universality. My focus here is on the interest in universality that underlies
disinterestedness rather than on the impartiality that is achieved once disinterestedness has been at-
tained. In a word, I am concerned about the costs of such universality relative to the other interests
determining art.
61. Another serious problem with this inscription is that art is deemed deficient relative to these philo-
sophical interests. More specifically, art is constituted, according to Danto, by the need to define
itself in essential terms; since definition is the province of philosophy, however, art fails to achieve
this definition (the closest it comes is Warhol’s Brillo Boxes in 1964). Philosophy (Danto in particu-
146 Michael Kelly

lar) then provides art with the essentialist definition it needs but cannot attain on its own. What
should be clear here, however, is that what philosophy provides is what philosophy has determined
art needs and only philosophy can provide. I think this strategy has more to do with the legitima-
tion of the philosophy of art (in terms of the analytic criteria of what makes for good philosophy)
than with art.
62. The meaning of “disinterest” is always somehow tied to that of “interest,” but the relationship
between these terms here is not to be understood as one between two contrary terms that are taken
to be mutually exclusive. If they are seen only in that contrary way, then if somebody has an inter-
est in art, for example, she could not at the same time have a disinterest in it. But these terms are
sometimes related in a more dialectical manner, as is the case here, where interest and disinterest are
conflicting but mutually determining rather than mutually exclusive. Danto clearly has an active in-
terest in art, which is evident in his philosophy of art as well as in his art criticism. But, at the same
time, he has a disinterest in art—or, to make the same point stronger as well as in the right order, it
is because of the philosophical interest he has in art that he has a disinterest in it as well. For Danto
displays a disinterest in art in the sense that when he is actually interested in art, his primary inter-
est is directed to some philosophical problem, albeit as it is reflected in art, and away from the historical
conditions constitutive of what art is or does. This is not to say that interest and disinterest do not
conflict; on the contrary, my aim is precisely to identify and analyze their conflict, but in such a way
that it is clear that when they do conflict, they are determining rather than excluding each other.
And it is with such conflict in mind that it is clear why the term “disinterest” is more appropriate
here than “lack of interest” (and “disinterested” more than “uninterested”), since disinterest preserves
the relation to interest while “lack of interest” simply points to the absence of interest.
The Aesthetics of Difference

Griselda Pollock

Beauty that | find in contemporary art-works that interest me, whose

source Is the trauma to which it also returns and appeals, is not beauty
as private or as that upon which a consensus oftaste can be reached;
it is a kind of encounter that perhaps we are trying to avoid much
more than we are aspiring to meet because the beautiful, as Rilke says,
is but the beginning of the horrible in which—in this dawning—we
can hardly stand.

Meditation |
I was at the Getty Research Institute in the summer of 2000. Paul Barolsky invited
the assembled scholars to contemplate a story from Vasari about Leonardo da Vinci
with which I was unfamiliar.” It concerned a birdcatching fisherman from Ser Piero
da Vinci’s estate, who had roughly carved a shield from a fig tree he now wanted
painted. Ser Piero knew just the man for the job. He went to Florence and asked
his son, Leonardo. In perfectly mythic fashion, the story tells us that the Florentine
artist transformed the crude and natural object (the raw) into a work of art (the
cooked).? First, Leonardo straightened the clumsy wooden thing with fire, turned
and smoothed it, and laid on a perfect gesso ground. Upon this now blank screen,
Leonardo declared his intention to paint “something that might be able to terrify
all that came upon it.” The image was to produce “the same effect as once did the
head of the Medusa.” The beautifully cooked remakes the raw and rough in order
to frighten us to death, but only at second hand, via representation that itself calls
upon but does not reproduce a mythic prototype that links death with looking at
a once beautiful woman who now reveals the shocking horror of her sexual dif-
ference: a pubic but fetishistically phallicizing nest of snakes surrounds the voided
face/genitals from which a petrifying gaze can kill the man who looks directly.
Vasari tells us that Leonardo collected into a private room a mass of creepy-
crawlies: lizards, grasshoppers, crickets, serpents and bats, to wit, all kinds of uncanny
anatomies from whose miniscule strangenesses he fashioned “a great ugly creature,
a monstrous and horrible thing.” The text hallucinates the painted monster thus:
emitting poisoned breath that turned the air to fire, it came of out a dark and jagged
148 Griselda Pollock

rock and belched forth venom from its throat, fire from its eyes, and smoke from
its nostrils. Full of menacing openings its interior is externalized as dangerous forces
of destruction. Apparently it took so long to make this monster that all the varied
source materials rotted and began to smell—but the artist took no notice so great
was the love he bore his art: “per il grande amore il portava all’arte.”4
When finally finished, Leonardo did summon his father to a viewing. He
prepared the buckler by placing it carefully on an easel with the light adjusted just
so in a darkened room so that, on entering, Ser Piero “at first glance, taken by sur-
prise, gave a sudden start, not thinking that that was the buckler, nor merely painted
the form that he saw upon it, and falling back a step or two, where Leonardo held
him, saying, this work serves the ends for which it was made; take it then and carry
it away since this was the effect it was meant to produce.”
In all the richness of the debate to which this immensely rich fable could
give rise, a certain feminist dimension beckoned to me. This sixteenth-century text
registers in fabulous form, just like the monster, something that otherwise cannot
be said about the aesthetic moments of creation and encounter with the image. In
the presence of dead nature, the artist refashions an image of a monster. Art works,
therefore, at the threshold with death but draws from that encounter an amorously
charged process that offers, only at second looking, a deflection of the horror into
the beauty of surviving the virtual encounter. It does not produce a beautiful sight:
it incites an encounter we can properly name uncanny, that is an encounter with
the primally repressed: with the negative verso of the subject’s recto that psycho-
analysis calls “castration’—a threat of archaic non-being that also marks the cut
incised by the Symbolic into the corpo-Real that is the function of language—the
symbolic—itself when it offers the means of signification at the price, on the
condition of a secondary repression: the creation of the unconscious.
At first glance: in the brute moment of an unprepared visual encounter,
there is shock. The traumatic effect of the image transcends a cognitive awareness
of its status as an artifact. The viewing subject is undone, falls back, as he appears
to fail—utterly, psychically, and materially—in the presence of death and horror
(the uncanny return from primal repression).’ At this hinge, however, there is also
beauty as an effect that blinds us through the marvel of the created image. Thus af-
ter initial fright, further inspection yields Ser Piero pleasure at the magic of his son’s
creativity. What if that second move is the structure of art history’s coded manage-
ment of the aesthetic as encounter with the economy of sexual difference it’ seeks
always to repress by pretending never to see the obvious, and only to find beauty?
 The Aesthetics of Difference 149

Psychoanalysis, furthermore, points us to a repressed and displaced

dimension of the Vasarian fable: what is the monstrous, what is the horror that
needs to be seen to be mastered and yet endangers us and from which we need to
be shielded? What is the role of the screen that shows and veils? I shall suggest that
it concerns sexual difference and the death drive.
According to Vasari, Leonardo’s next two works after this monstrous buck-
ler were a Madonna and a Medusa: representing the opposing images of female
sexuality and its negation. The latter was in the Galleria degli Uffizi in the mid-
nineteenth century. Some suggest that Caravaggio’s painted leather shield Medusas
Head (1600-1601, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi) was the younger man’s homage
to a buckler that Vasari tells us Ser Piero sold to merchants in Milan. Can we imag-
ine Leonardo's monstrous image? If we did, would it be interesting?
Paul Barolsky flashed upon his seminar screen a painting: Saint George and
the Dragon by Paolo Uccello, now in the National Gallery, London (fig. 1).° This,
too, is a gift to the feminist thinker, freed from the art historical tasks of period, style,

Fig. |. Paolo Uccello (Italian, 1397-1475), Saint George and the Dragon, c. 1460. Oil on canvas, 22 '/4 x 29 '/s in. (56.5 x 74 cm).
National Gallery, London
150 Griselda Pollock

and iconography to offer a more structuralist reading of what it syntactically stages.

As the second venture on this subject, the first being a stagey event now
in the Musée Jacquemart, Paris, this later version is visually dramatic. The canvas
is divided into two sections. The background of the left side is dominated by the
huge cave, whose pale rocky exterior sharply marks the depth and darkness of its
menacing interior. This left side contains the sacrificial princess and her dragon-
husband, entirely defined by the yawning cave. On the right, Saint George and his
horse, hot from the rout of San Romano, drives into and thus creates the impression
of space, at a diagonal to the plane on which the woman in flat profile and the
menacing monster are planted. Behind Saint George is a forest, and above his head
is a curious vortex that some read as a supernatural whirlpool signifying God is on
his side! From that displaced eye of the psychoanalytically evocative vaginal vor-
tex, down the directional slant of Saint George and his thundering steed, the line
of sight follows the straight length of his phallic lance whose point of contact
is the creature’s left eye, blinded—castrated—by this deadly piercing. Its gaze is
mercifully deflected onto Saint George but its mouth, crusted with shark’s teeth,
gapes and blood leaks onto the ground through its wounded throat leaving a shock-
ing red puddle that is coloristically adjacent to the tiny, pointed, red-slippered foot
of the princess. Bulbous eyes, open throat, and gaping jaws are evocative images
through the mechanism of repression: displacement. The dragon’s body sinks
phallically between its two legs, its open wings displaying the ocelli, the little eyes,
of which entymologists and psychoanalysts make such play in their studies of
camouflage, mimesis, and the mirror phase.
What is, perhaps, most curious about this dramatized fantasia of the con-
quest of the vagina dentata that would popularly surface in our time in the movie
Jaws (1976) is the umbilical line that loops between the bridal princess and the
monster. Whichever way we read this, as a chain on her wrist or a lead on its head,
both the fact of this curving sign of their connection and the ambiguity of its role
structurally identify the two as recto and verso of an interrelated concept. The flat,
disembodied princess, in virginal and in fact bridal profile,’ is the closed and con-
tained, socially remodeled, and sublimated form within which femininity can be
sanctified and tolerated—only at the price of the violent destruction of the exter-
nalized and phantasmic revelation of what is hidden beneath the veil, and is
projectively embodied in the monstrous fiction of her bestial “husband.” The rubric
of a Christian legend that tells a story of a heroic rescue of a saintly lady by a knight
incites a visualization that holds before our eyes not merely an illustrated narrative
 The Aesthetics of Difference 1/51

but a mise-en-scéne, like a dream, the unconsciously overdetermined syntax of the

psychic dramas of masculine subjectivity and its dread of the feminine.
The monstrous image that Leonardo fashioned from his collection of
sundry insects registers on a visual plane the psychic terror of difference that is
driven to adorn the supposed lack of the feminine body with the sign of mascu-
line narcissism—testoring the impossible maternal phallus—while also conquering
a dread of its lack both by its imaging and by imagining the destruction of the fear-
ful sign of feminine specificity: inverted as the aggressively toothed and gaping jaws
oT that are lanced in the petrifying eye.
Reading both Vasari’s tale and its lost
image, and Uccello’s paintings of Saint
George and the dragon as allegorical,
we can propose a strange intimacy be-
tween horror, art, and sexual difference.
The masculine psyche splits
the archaic memory of the maternal
into abjected monstrosity or sublime
idealization. The latter can as easily in-
volve the closed and virginal body as
the female nude that will play a role
later in this paper (fig. 2). These strat-
egies, however, disseminated across
Western art, occur only under what I
Fig. 2. Raphael (Italian, 1483-1520), The Three Graces, 1504. Oil on
panel, 67/4 x 67/4 in. (17 x 17 cm). Musée Condé, Chantilly
shall name the “phallic” prism, where
any crossing of these boundaries
(life/death, being/nonbeing, inside/outside) is a transgression, not a reverberating
passageway, and where any encounter with such difference is uncanny and thus to
be disarmed only by the maintenance of the barrier, the blinding shield of Perseus:
the shield of art.

|. AWord of Explanation
This opening meditation from within art history enables me to pose my central
questions: What is the image and from where does it address us? What in us is
called into focus by the encounter with the image, if we place it beyond the ideal
self and its fiction of representation? Vasari’s story can be read for the elements of
sexed subjectivity it stages. Since subjectivity is not coherent and homogeneous
152 Griselda Pollock

but fractured and differentiated, this inevitably allows me to speak of the repressed
of art history: sexual difference and the inscription of a specific logic—shall we
call it phallicp—into representation and discourse.
To explore this further I shall invoke Jacques Lacan, notably in his semi-
nar of 1959-60, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where he retheorizes Kantian concepts
of beauty through identifying the figure of Antigone in Sophocles’ eponymous play
as an “image of beauty,” not a beautiful image.* Lacan names the moment of the
“beauty effect” as the blinding flash of death in life, that simultaneously shows and
veils the impossible beyond, marking the limit of language. In this Lacanian “be-
yond” cluster death, beauty and the feminine, the triad of impossible non-knowledge
as the end of desire: Woman/Other/Thing. Hence we have another route to the
phallic structure of sexual difference built upon an unspeakable negativity that ren-
ders the feminine unknowable and its effect unimaginable. It cannot enter thought
or fantasy even while it negatively forms the limit of both.
So I shall need to go beyond Lacan’s phallic model for a feminist inter-
vention that also turns upon an examination of the image of Antigone’s stance
between two deaths to formulate what post-Lacanian feminist theorist Bracha
Lichtenberg Ettinger names a “matrixial” logic that folds profoundly into think-
ing about the aesthetic.? Here the effect that stretches between the impulse to make
art and the experience of encountering the image, requires a radical expansion of
our understanding of what subjectivity itself is, as always and already a mode of
transubjectivity, a co-emergence in difference, as encounter. The border between
subjects is then not one to be phobically defended, nor will it yield images of the
fiercesome monstrosity of what appears to lie beyond/menaces the clean, closed,
masculine subject. As encounter, borderspace becomes generative of co-emergent
and co-transformative effects that are not based on subject/object relations but
materially mediated subject/subject affects. Thus they challenge the basis of Kantian
aesthetics but not by a simple displacement of beauty in favor of the sublime as a
desubjectifying unimaginable otherness.
Finally, if matrixial thinking enables me to offer a theorization of the aes-
thetics of difference, it does so within the precision of a shocking historical frame.
“After Auschwitz” is the Aistorical condition for this feminist intervention into
psychoanalysis and aesthetics because of conjunction of the paradox and anguish
of Jewish [non]being in a Christianocentric world and feminine non-being in a
phallocentric world.'° In both we find at work the phallic logic of difference and
the phobic hostility to a necessary other, the stranger, and of the association of the
 The Aesthetics of Difference 153

negated terms of difference with death. Out of the traumatic grief of the histori-
cally specific feminine Jewish subjectivity of the child of survivors, arises an art
historically specifiable painting practice in the space of oblivion of twentieth-
century death that addresses the key question of aesthetics after Auschwitz.

Il. Feminism and the Anti-Aesthetic,

or Working out a Historical Dynamic
This set of issues might be unexpected. Readers might well anticipate that a femi-
nist would propound an “anti-aesthetic” position, aesthetics standing for universalist
concepts of transcendent value anathema to a politicized project like feminism
premised on identifying both the negative and positive effects of sexual difference.!!
Yet here I want to confound that expectation. This perversity registers no turncoat
nostalgia for “the object” that needs to be rescued from the new philistines of
“visual studies/culture.” Nor does it betoken a sudden conversion on the Damascan
road to “art” after the apostasy of social history of art or feminist critique of
representation. Perhaps it is part of a sea change visible, for instance, in the recent
appearance of what might appear to many as an oxymoronic publication: Differential
Aesthetics: Art Practices, Philosophy and Feminist Understandings.’
From the left of a triangulated field, I might caricature the encounter staged
for the Clark Conference in 2001 as a fake contest: dragging the truly geriatric—
aesthetics—onto the stage with the recently deposed—art history—in order to crown
the fresh young king of the analytical roost, visual culture. Feminism, countering
art history and hostile to traditional aesthetics, might seem the natural ally of visual
culture.!? The feminist critique of art history '4 that emerged in the 1970s is deeply
indebted to the same body of theoretical resources (semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxist
ideology critique, deconstruction, and discourse theory) as that of visual culture.
Thus early feminist moves that radically erased hotly defended boundaries between
high art as the site of disinterested beautiful things and pornography, for instance,
or that insisted on continuities between the subjects of painting and themes in pop-
ular culture, made possible the formation of a new way of “reading” art as just a
particular end of a spectrum of dispersed regimes of visual representation. This, in
retrospect, turned out also to be an alliance with a feminist critique of visual repre-
sentation that was taking place in/through contemporary artistic practices.’
The gains of this focus on representation and its effects were enormous.
They must neither be gainsaid nor reified as the new way. Questions of artistic
value rooted in a suddenly dismissed formalism were shuffled off stage for a more
154 Griselda Pollock

hermeneutic project that asked what images signified, questioned the effects of rep-
resentation on their immediate viewers, and identified new transdisciplinary
themes—such as the body, sexuality, fantasy, difference, masculinity, masquerade,
and so forth—in place of questions of style, period, movement, and quality. Beauty
of form was shown to be inextricably bound up with social or ideological ugliness
in the forms of differential and often grossly prejudicial views of bodies and
persons excluded from the “club.”!° These advances were, however, inevitably
accompanied by the backstaging of other questions, practices, or issues that could
not be addressed through this emerging semiotic vocabulary.'”
We always knew, however, those of us regularly working with contempo-
rary artists, that there were criteria on which we would have to readdress, through
revised terms, the dimensions of artistic practice that had in the first place called
forth the specific discourse of the aesthetic that first found its home in eighteenth-
century philosophy in Europe. It was also clear, however, that the eighteenth-century
German and British traditions on which it was premised were not alone on the
stage of the late-twentieth-century aesthetic theorizations that would be on offer
when we once again resumed the interrupted business. There were other impor-
tant traditions of thinking about art and its effects that could be considered as
relevant and expanding resources: the enlarging tradition of Marxist aesthetics, the
aesthetic reflections in the massively complex philosophies of Theodor Adorno,
Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin made more mainstream by key transla-
tions in the 1970s onward, the expanding field of psychoanalysis built on Freud’s
own work but reconsidered by Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, Adrian Stokes, and many
others. There was a major body of writing in French that considered painting,
rather than cinema, through the prism of the new alliances of semiotics and psy-
choanalysis. This would not mean that feminists would never read Kant or Hegel,
or find other more complex critiques than our initial and often clumsy negations.
Lacanian aesthetics were just on the horizon; phenomenology would later press;
Jean-Frangois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze were waiting. Julia Kristeva’s stunning
writings on Bellini and Giotto would soon filter through artists’ work as would the
phenomenon of French feminism that promised insights into aesthetics from Héléne
Cixous and Luce Irigaray.!®
There are now possibilities for a combinatory methodology that allow
many of us to work on the basis of the semiotic move of the 1980s towards a more
fluid relationship between historical, theoretical, cultural, and what Icall aesthetic
dimensions of the study of visual art within visual culture. Framed by the trans-
 The Aesthetics of Difference 155

formative intervention of psychoanalysis in semiotics that she names “semanalyse,”

Kristeva creates a strategic role for what she defines as “aesthetic practices’: art,
music, poetry, at this postmodern moment of mass culture. Her position fertilizes
Adorno with a semiotized psychoanalysis. Once claimed by bourgeois aesthetics
for its ahistorical fantasy of individualism, the insistent singularity and position-
ality typical of aesthetic practices functions for Kristeva on a historical hinge as a
now ever more necessary antidote to the massification of both commodity culture
and the apparently radical identity cultures of the present that equally subsume
irreducible singularity.'®
Kristeva'’s difficult and much misunderstood position is useful as a moni-
tor of the uncritical embrace of commodification that lurks within the turn to
visual culture which, for its own genuine and important hemeneutic purposes,
denies itself access to the very questions Kristeva poses as a political counterforce
to uncanny convergence of formalism, totalitarianism, Marxism, transcendental-
ism, and the commodity. Equally, her profound political perspective rooted in a
humanist Marxism forecloses on any simplistic return to the aesthetic object.
“Aesthetic” conjoined to “practice” via her mediating notions of “signifying prac-
tices,” conceives of art as a dynamic, working on, renovating, and even revolutionizing
the signifying terrain of a split, desiring subjectivity in touch with its corporeally
premised drives.”° Not only what produces meaning, but what undoes it, and shifts
its viewing subjects, underpins a political valuation of aesthetic as practice.
The opening short story from Vasari about Leonardo was so striking for
me because since Freudian aesthetics originates with Freud writing on Leonardo
and depends upon the proposal of an Oedipal structure, I felt Vasari’s tale held a
series of references and displacements that would open a new chapter for feminist
psycho-aesthetics. It also confirmed in its own allegorical structure that which
Lacan would later formulate as his theory of beauty, namely, the encounter with
the uncanny/the Real that itself is coded as the feminine =death = negativity. If
nothing can be reported back from what Lacan defined as the structuring void
which entwines Woman/Other/Thing, that can only figure within culture as the
monstrously threatening void, the feminine can never be accessed even by women
artists or feminist theorists. Thus the centrality of this mythos of the origins of art
and its intended effect is utterly masculinist and presents a challenge for feminist
thinking about the psychoanalytical definition of the aesthetic. It also poses
aesthetic practices as the possible site of its transformation: a shifting of the
masculinist imaginary and symbolic.
156 Griselda Pollock

If we have shown over and over again, and my reading of Vasari/Leonardo

and Uccello is merely the exemplar of this—how this Oedipal model of subjec-
tivity organized by castration works to render femininity either the abjected other
or the sublimated ideal in the western aesthetic imaginary (an exercise typical of
visual culture while also showing how it lies at the root of Vasarian notions of
creation and the aesthetic effect as always in part a Medusa effect), the implica-
tions for thinking about art and the aesthetic effect arising from a non-Oedipal
model become necessary. Where better to seek out such a model than in his, Oedipus’
daughter/sister, Antigone?

Meditation Il

Never, | tell you, if |had been the mother of children or if my husband

had died, exposed and rotting—l'd never have taken this ordeal upon
myself, never defied the people's will. What law, you ask, do | satisfy
with what | say? A husband dead, there might have been another.A
child by another too, if|had lost the first. But mother and father both
lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to light again.
—Sophocles, Antigone

Here there is an image, but not a picture. For Jacques Lacan, Antigone is not a fig-
ure of the clash of social and natural moralities as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the
ethics of sexual difference, but the image of the aesthetic.*! This reading depends
on a formula. Lacan identifies the human with the cut that initiates the subject as
an effect of language. The cut simply makes meaning possible by marking a
differentiation that itself is the inscription of prohibition; something is negated,
refused, excluded, differentiated. Not this.
This structure is erected, however, on a ground provided by another
dimension that is radically foreclosed by the arrival of signification that allows only
certain pairings to be meaningful. Thus Lacan hypothesizes a beyond language,
which is, in Heideggerian vocabulary, pure Being. I take this to convey the notion
of life itself, being a living thing which is an undifferentiated state, that is then the
invisible but necessary support for the formal inscriptions of syntactic difference,
that are the effect of language, for instance nature/culture, that marks the
humanization of life by making us sexed speaking subjects.
In the play Antigone, Antigone blazes forth as an image that tips into a
 The Aesthetics of Difference 157

visibility encountered by the audience watching the play, the performance or the ar-
tifact, a sense of this “beyond” that is death. From the moment the play opens, Antigone
is condemned to be buried alive for daring to bury her rebel brother in defiance of
the king’s decree that his traitorous act leave him desecrated. On one level of under-
standing, there is life and death as a binary meaning-generating opposite in which
death is the theoretical negativity around which we fashion the meaning of life, for
instance, by the rituals of burial performed by the living on the dead body. These rit-
uals give meaning to life in the moment of its disappearance. We might say that we
are human because we perform this distinction and do not just toss the bones of our
relatives on the midden with the rest of our recent debris of food and excrement.
Antigone is condemned to be buried alive because she refused to leave her
brother uncovered by the rites of burial that would alone ensure the imaginary per-
sistence of his humanity after his physical death. Doing this in the knowledge that
it carries the death penality, Antigone becomes an image of what Lacan calls the
“second death.” As textually fabricated image, Antigone transgresses an impossible
boundary because normally there can be no knowledge of this death, this utterly
beyond that is both testament to her acknowledgment of her brother’s irreplaceable
being and to her own. Nothing can be reported back from this space. But in an aes-
thetic practice, there is an image of the transgression, the irresolvable oscillation
between living and death that can be refracted back through the work of art to flash
out in splendor, as Lacan puts it. One commentator writes: “The aesthetic dimen-
sions arises in The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis 1959-60 via the question: What is the surface
that allows the emergence of ‘images of passion” —namely images of suffering, im-
ages of the indelible play of subjectivity in and beyond the body and its materiality.”
Lacan invoked the Marquis de Sade as a further explanation of this func-
tion of the support.”? De Sade explained that torture does not kill us; it makes us
experience ourselves. Pain stresses the body so that its resistant materiality becomes
the support for the subjectivity that is projected by the experience of bodily pain
apart from it, experienced in an intensity beside it. The person wants to die to
escape the pain, but if the body does not succumb, it remains this material support
for a subjective dislocation that is in effect the experience of subjectivity: torture
stages the play of pain.
Lichtenberg Ettinger comments on Lacan:

The extraordinary passion which transports death into life and impels
life into death arises only, says Lacan, from some contact with the that
158 Griselda Pollock

which is, the unique and irreplaceable, with what has no substitute, and
can not be exchanged. Beauty enters the picture through ideas of
relations with the irreplaceable. A disappearance in appearance
creates the effect of beauty. The effect of beauty results from the rela-
tion of the subject with the horizon of life, and from traversing to a
second death. From Antigone’s point of view, life “can only be lived
from the place ofthat limit where her life is already lost, where she is
already on the other side. But from the place that she can see it and
live it in the form of something already lost.’ This limit, detached from
historical time, is a source of creation ex nihilo.
Ifthe surface of passion captures such a unique value to make
an image of it,this image creates a barrier that blocks us from traversing
to the other side, and, writes Lacan, the image of beauty is the effect
of blindness, blindness to the other side, blindness as the castrating
schism. The function of the beautiful, therefore, is precisely “to reveal
to us the site of man’s relationship to his own death and to reveal it
to us in only a blinding flash.'4

This text echoes something of my reading of the short story in Vasari, the definition
of the aesthetic as the encounter with an image that blinds, a shielded access to
what, without the artifact, frightens us to death.
Thus Antigone is named an outrage within Lacan’s text and Lacan pulls
out meanings from its various forms, aller outre, outrepasser, to go beyond, to trans-
gress. The Latin form “transgress” occasions not on the Kristevan sense of renovation
of meaning but introduces also the idea of criminality or prohibited passage. Beauty
glows in the place of an impossible, illicit transgression whose motor is desire: that
mark of the ultimate prohibition of the Father’s Law. “The aesthetic question
operates, therefore, at a limit materialised and represented in art by the human
body ... ‘the envelope of all possible phantasms of human desire.”*> The human
body is thus both transport and barrier from the Other beyond—a second death
and the feminine. Thus Lichtenberg Ettinger concludes: “it is in the domain of
aesthetics that the frontier that separates the human being from death converges
on the frontier that separates the human being from the feminine.”°

Ill. Feminist Retunings: Subjectivity as Encounter

Now in my third move in this paper, I want to introduce the heretical, feminist
 The Aesthetics of Difference 159

question: What if that aesthetic, glimpsed in Sophocles’ image of Antigone, the sis-
ter/daughter/aunt, is not just about the encounter with death? What if it
textually/performatively allows us a glimpse of another economy, a connectivity
between the dead and living through the transmission of trauma, through the
co-responsibility of subjects who share a fundamental, pre-linguistic sense of the
humanity of the other as a result of being born, being framed then in relation to
a non-phallically defined femininity?
To say this requires us to acknowledge that the space of the mother is a
site of meaning for defining an irreducible humanity not because the mother can
be reduced to a body (later imagined as the dark cave, the fire-belching throat, the
abjectly monstrous other) but because the late, pre-birth covenant of two is the
site of an archaic subject-subject encounter?
What if, through a feminist turn within psychoanalysis, we can imagine
a different difference, namely the feminine not just as the yawning void of a non-
subjective body (i.e., what is it within phallic logic), but as a subjectivizing structure
where two potentially human subjects co-emerge and co-transform within a space
of minimal difference, namely the fantasizing adult becoming mother and the
sense-garnering becoming child? Neither fused nor separated, yet distinct and
sharing, we can imagine a structure that delivers potential for fantasy and mean-
ing to the human subject that arise from the feminine outside of its definition by
the phallic, castration paradigm as only the lacking negative in relation to the phal-
lus. Risking what is for phallic thought the unthinkable and the heretical, we can
hypothesize psychoanalytically, hence without any risk of essentialism, for this is
not about anatomies, but psychically garnered sensations of the corpo-Real, a
before-birth moment of archaic encounter as a way to imagine a humanizing, a
subjectivizing dimension. This subjectivising dimension lacks the thetic cuts that
are necessary for full-blown symbolic structuration and language. Thus never
displacing the phallic structure, this supplementary stratum offers the potential
for experiences subjacent to language: those we encounter through the affective
channels of artistic practice and experience. Is this not related to what Kant and
other aestheticians tried to think about philosophically, when they identified as
aesthetic something that happens to us but not only at the level of cognition and
thought, when they tried to ask how do we know things through the senses that
have affect? What if the experience of art is itself precisely that encounter with
human meaning, meanings that structure our sense of being human (sex and death
and the beyond)?
160 Griselda Pollock

Then do not theories of subjectivity and theories of the aesthetic con-

verge also at the site of revised theories of sexuality and sexual difference? At its
most basic, this theory allows us to revisit key sites of Western discourse on art
and on the subject with the possibility that the feminine can be theorized beyond
the phallic concept of woman as the castrated other. We can think a different
feminine as a supplementary dimension of subjectivity not based on the cut alone
but also on combination of minimal difference (adult/becoming child) and con-
nectivity, shared borderspaces that offer new dimensions to our thinking about
what eighteenth-century European thought named “aesthetics.”

Meditation III
When Antigone speaks from the point of no return condemned to a no-life and
no-death of enclosure alive in a tomb, she utters a long lament that explains her
actions.?” What she has done—to bury her criminal brother on pain of death for
disobeying the king’s edict that he should remain dishonored—she declares she
would only do for a brother. This is the point at which Goethe and other com-
mentators have balked. Why so? Antigone’s argument is that a child or a husband
can be replaced. But once her mother and father are dead, there can be no more
brothers, no others who shared this space of generation. This speech invokes the
maternal body—the womb invoked in the Greek adelphos—as a site that can struc-
ture meaning and become the basis for an ethical position. In Lacan’s text, this
evocation of the mother’s body and her desire is, however, swiftly erased by being
folded immediately into the paternal metaphor: “born of the same womb . . . and
having been related to the same father.””8 Under this slippage, the brother func-
tions then as the sign of the One, the unique, the irreplaceable.
Painter and psychoanalytical theorist Lichtenberg Ettinger questions the
exclusive sovereignty of this logic and suggests that a shifting of this phallic per-
spective allows us to imagine dimensions of subjectivity—especially those that flash
out in our encounter with the aesthetic—beyond the phallic model of One and its
Other, life/death, nature/culture, masculine/feminine, presence/absence. She trans-
gressively dares to think of the function of the maternal sexuality and desire as
signified by “the borderspace of the several” that is the womb as a support for other
fantasies and other logics that are premised on transubjectivity from the start. She
has forged from her reflections on her own painting, arising at the open passage-
way of transmitted trauma between generations of the Holocaust, two new terms.
The matrixial dimension of subjectivity is to be imagined as a perpetual,
 The Aesthetics of Difference 16!

shared borderspace in which a minimal degree of difference exists (this is not sym-
biosis or fusion) sufficient to mark an J from an un-cognized, unknown non-I, while
through constant retunings, co-emergence and co-fading, affects traverse this
pliant threshold of the several who are intimate, co-affecting strangers. This is not
Maternity as we usually think of it that is logically phallic: mother and child are
objects of each other’s desire within the logic of loss. There is nothing cozy about
the situation of matrixial co-subjectivity. It is the pathway of transmitted trauma,
hatred, anxiety or fear as much as it can become the basis for theorizing the way in
which what is not me, nonetheless affects me, and in which I can handle effects that
are not me: these capacities seem critical to understanding the transmission of trauma
and affect that art as encounter induces at the level of subjectivities. In the matrix-
ial supplementation of our theories of the subject, subjectivity functions as an
encounter and not only, as in phallic logic, as the effect of the cut, of separation.
Using the metaphor of psychic aerials tuning in and out to transmitted signals that
acquire shape and form once registered even beyond the place of the I, Lichtenberg
Ettinger furthermore retheorizes a dimension of the gaze in the field of vision that
painting in what I have named “painting after painting after history” illuminates.”
Secondly, in lieu of the figures of metaphor and metonymy, figures of
substitution characterizing phallic signification, the artist coins the terms
“metramorphosis” as the passageway through which “affected events, materials and
modes of being infiltrate and diversify onto non-conscious margins of the Symbolic
through/by sub-symbolic webs.” Thus never rising fully to what Julia Kristeva
would name the communicative dimension of the symbolic, but hovering like her
concept of the semiotic at its transformative margins where affectivity hinges bod-
ily intensities to the sub-symbolic intimation of meaning as affect, metramorphosis
catches poetically that which we have now come to experience and accept in
radical moments of modern painting from Rothko onward. His name marks a
historical cultural moment that began the move beyond representation, but was
interrupted when painting, abruptly dismissed from center stage in the 1960s, had
just begun to reconfigure very late Cézanne and later Monet as a site for even more
radical explorations of the affectivity of the scopic field in painting. Locatable in
traditional art historical framings, the moves that Lichtenberg Ettinger’s paintings
now dare to make by looping back to reconnect with that suspended moment “af-
ter Rothko” are also to be considered under the sign of Antigone for another
historical reason. The artist/theorist writes: “What in Antigone’s argument is
waiting to be heard and com-passioned, is her suffering from the tearing away into
162 Griselda Pollock

total separateness of her principal partner-in-difference, until this moment

separated-in-jointness. If the almost impossible knowledge of the Thing-Event
concerns the originary feminine rapport, it is not death itself that inflicts the horrible
cut in the matrixial web, but the passage to a bestiality that threatens to blow up
and explode this sphere altogether into separate pieces.”>° Antigone must bury her
brother not because he is the One, but because he is a partner in her humanity.
His bestialization by lying unburied for the birds and dogs to tear his flesh is
inescapably hers. The death of the other is in part my death if we take the defini-
tion of the human to reside in part in that archaic encounter with the feminine as
the co-emergence of subjectivity in a relation of I and non-l.

Meditation IV
But for Lichtenberg Ettinger, what lurks awaiting recognition as a philosophical
and dramatic trace in the play by Sophocles has a terrible concrete resonance in
the historical moment of which she is the bearer. The wound to the matrixial web
of co-humanity invokes the bestiality of the unmarked, unburied inhuman
dying of her own family/people in ghettoes, execution sites, and concentration
camps of the Final Solution in Europe between 1941 and 1945. Found or sought
in the anonymous and ubiquitous images of atrocity that form the photographic
archive of that genocide, her recurrent painting of three haunting figures of her
unburied non-I’s stay time and hold that crime and its mourning before our eyes.
Lichtenberg Ettinger began painting in the mid-1980s with a series of large-
scale canvases titled After the Reapers. Seared onto nuclearized landscapes of disaster,
gesturally evoked traces of skeletal bodies and death’s heads marked the limits of
the western representational tradition premised on the bounty of the land and
the specular idealization of the body. The ash of cremated millions beneath the
grass of Europe, the unbearable images of corpses of those starved to an inhuman
death, potentially mark the ethical end, the possibility of that whole tradition of
figure and landscape. Turning to the ultimate anti-auratic machine, the photo-
copier, the artist began to work with the remnant of a Family Album that now
historically registered the dislocation and yawning absence of the Shoah. Passing
found images of both a personal and a collective archive*! through the machine
while interrupting it at the point it scattered its dust/ash as the residue of the burnt
image, Lichtenberg Ettinger assembled only fragments of apparitions into ghostly
assemblages of invisible bodies. The fragments on torn papers of sometimes sear-
ing violet were assembled into ghostly figures and combinations that reformed a
 The Aesthetics of Difference 163

fractured alphabet of what she named “the memory of oblivion.”* In the early
1990s, she began a series called Autistworks, returning to these intermediate specters,
that dusted the page, with her paint-loaded brush, but with colors of red and pur-
ple, the colors of blood and of grief. If something of western representational logic
was incinerated at Auschwitz, aspects of the formalist and literalist attention to
painting's defining potentialities as space and color could be once again rearticu-
lated, but on the other side of this radical postmodern disillusion.
In 1992 the artist began a third
h
{ major series, framed by the figure of
u

Eurydice, the mythic woman aban-

i
t

doned at the mouth of hell by her artist

lover, Orpheus. Eurydice is also a fig-
ure of the feminine that allows us to
ask what she, like Antigone, sees from
that place between two deaths. Like
many of her works there is a recurring
encounter that the artist repeatedly
restages through working again and
Fig. 3. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (Israeli-French), Eurydice, again from one image of a frieze of
1992-96. Installation of 13 paintings, Face a I’Histoire, Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1996-97 naked women about to be shot, from
an unidentified photograph of mass
murder by Einstatzgruppen Aktionen
in Mizroc in the Ukraine in 1940.
Isolating three figures, a woman with
her head averted, a woman appealing
to the place the viewer now stands but
that once held the photographic wit-
6
ness, and a woman with her small child
Fig. 4. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Eurydice, no. 15, 1994-96. in her arms, Lichtenberg Ettinger has
spent over a decade at this arresting
Mixed media with oil on paper mounted on canvas, 10 x 20'/2 in.
(25.2 x 52 cm), mounted on chassis: I '/2 x 21/1 in. (29 x 55.5 cm).
Private collection spot both bringing her “three graces”
back into view and fading away rep-
resentational violence by an aesthetic practice of painting on that suffering as
support (figs. 3, 4). Evoking “three graces” serves contradictory purposes: locat-
ing continuity and marking rupture. The scale and mode of Lichtenberg Ettinger’s
painting is itself a studied reworking of the often-overlooked backgrounds of
 164 Griselda Pollock

Fig. 5. Raphael, Fire in the Borgo, 1516-17. Fresco, The Vatican Museums, Rome

Raphael’s painting of that title (fig. 2). Yet Raphael’s painting emblematizes the
sublimated idealization of the feminine of which I spoke at the beginning of this
paper. Lichtenberg Ettinger’s painting deals with the historical destruction of the
body emblematized by Raphaelist tradition, an aesthetic face of what created and
is still sustained by the violence against the other that the photograph from the
Ukraine witnesses in 1940. Lichtenberg Ettinger, as any artist is entitled to do,
plays in the museum, finding in the Raphael oeuvre an uncanny precedent for
the desperate mother, the averted head, and the figure of appeal. These occur in
Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo (fig. 5) complete with threatening inferno. But from
this terrible fire of Roman history, heroic male nudes rescue the threatened women.
None came to our rescue.
Lichtenberg Ettinger’s paintings themselves seek and undo the lines of
connection between images and between their historical and epochal conditions
of emergence and erasure. She makes her work in the presence of a Raphael who
represents a lost and impossible world, before Auschwitz, including the mod-
ernism that appears now so slightly to have contested its ideal of the beautiful.
 The Aesthetics of Difference 165

Raphael and The Three Graces as the image of beauty in the body was, according
to some, destroyed with the kinds of images of the human body we saw when the
camps were opened. Now the image archive includes not just the abject and the
sublime, the beautiful girl and the aged crone, or the monster as in Uccello: the
beautiful girl, the mother, the child were all reduced to a kind of inhuman bes-
tiality. All art should register this radical shift. All of us become cultural Antigones;
bound to act against the intolerable nature of this crime. Some artists will be un-
able not to work at the point of this radical shift for reasons of personal necessity.
Lichtenberg Ettinger’s paintings blind us to the naked atrocity that the
genocidal gaze of the original photograph encodes. Her combination of machinic
drawing in ash and overpainting in searing violets or reds shields the women from
the voyeuristic or abjecting gaze, bringing the intensity of face and gesture close
enough to the viewer to establish the possibility of affecting contact across time
that then remains suspended as the gulf that marks the epoch that began here,
the epoch Adorno names “After Auschwitz.” Attentive to the physical and mate-
rial marks that conjure the illusion of the image in the same movement as it returns
to materiality, the artist works and works again with veils and webs of grief col-
ors to “erase all image while conserving its constituents: its fragility, its screen, its
blur, its abstract character, its ‘shadow space’ [Michaux].” Christine Buci-Glucksman
calls this “veil-painting” and “violet skin.” She concludes:

Perhaps this strange violet is but the trace and transposition of an in-
visible signifier which recurs in the writings of Bracha Lichtenberg
Ettinger, “‘Halala’’ While as a masculine substantive known [in Hebrew]
“halal” is common and is used to signify both dead and space (one
could say the space of the dead), the feminine “halala,’ absent in mod-
ern Hebrew, on the other hand, is gifted with a particularly strong
significance: it points back to acts of desacralization and profanation in
ancient Hebrew.
The painting in its violet, in its ‘‘halala’” would be this
act of profaning (‘‘hiloul’’) the space of the dead (‘‘halal’’), indeed it
would be the conquest of impurity as ambiguous as the colour violet.
The magic pad of the Autistwork could then be interpreted in the fol-
lowing manner: it brings into contact photo-halal—shadow space,
death-space—and a painting-halala a power of life as troubling as the
aggressive, metaphysical violet it makes from a kind of transparent light-
ing, the inner space of painting with its modulations and its resonances.°?
166 Griselda Pollock

Yet, as theorists of the transmitted trauma argue, these ghosts and their
past inhabit the artist as child of survivors, occupying her own present, constitut-
ing an expanded trans-subjective field that makes her participate in traumatic ways
with their dying which she, however, argues can be otherwise mourned through
the matrixial processing of traumatic encounter. Thus she argues against Lacan,
insisting that

life and death are constituted in the psyche as already human even
when beyond the reach of the human symbolic exchange or commu-
nication, even at the corpo-real level. Human body is not animal body.
Non-human bestiality inflicted on any of my non-ls diminishes, and can
also abolish,
the capacity of the matrixial web for the reabsorption of
loss, for transference of memory and for the processing of mourning.
Antigone's private death—she hangs herself in the womb-tomb—is
less a price to pay than living through the irremediable explosion of
the matrixial borderspace. Antigone literally acknowledges the corpo-
real source of this psychical space: the shareable maternal womb.*4

The painter, working through this structure of Antigone/Eurydice as fig-

ures of the historical moment of a Jewish feminine subjectivity, proposes the aesthetic:
the shocking encounter with the other's dying, as the site of an aesthetic poiesis
that generates an ethical dimension: the encounter with the human in the space
of the inhuman act of its desecration.
What speaks to me through this painter’s practice and her reading of the
Sophocles mediated by Lacan’s theoretical text is the anguish of the survivor's child.
Formed by a transmitted trauma from a past event she did not witness, she becomes
not only a witness without an event, which is, she then argues, the condition of
every viewer of art, the inheritor of affect without the historical cause being known
in ourselves. The artist also becomes what she calls a wit(h)ness, capable of bearing
the trauma of others, and more, incapable of mot sharing it. Yet this gives death a
means of transport to another site of living, even if that is tragic. Antigone’s stance
is not to set moral social law below family law, or the law of the gods who represent
for human thought the beyond and below of being itself. The mythic figure of
Antigone declares what the historical trauma of our times has made horrifyingly
real: that all our humanity is compromised if any of us is reduced from the human
to the bestial. That humanity arises not in the logic of phallic difference, one/other
 The Aesthetics of Difference 167

but is unqualified, originary from a feminine site of matrixial co-subjectivity. Funeral

rites are a mark of the human, but, Lichtenberg Ettinger is arguing, only because
being itself is already human through the matrixial, feminine prism and thus the
feminine enters into thought not merely as the Thing/Other/Death or negativity
and radical alterity. The feminine subjectivizes from that place of always already hu-
man being. If that is the case then sexuality as well as the aesthetic is intimately
associated with the matrixial site of feminine difference.

Iffeminine originary sexual difference is an enigma of which we can know

something through the matrixial prism, and if this prism opens to us the
contact with the spaces of non-life,
the transgression [the alleroutre the
outrage] with/in/to the feminine via the process of art has a particular
aesthetic effect because in transmitting sub-knowledge from the site of
transgression, in a borderspace that contacts by a surplus of border-
linking, the artist can bear wit(h)ness to and articulate sub-knowledge
of/from the sex of the other The fate of Tiresias—the figure who trans-
gressed from male to female and back—which is impossible in the phallic
stratum Is also a matrixial “promise of happiness” even if such beauty is
tragic [as is the work of BLE repeatedly visiting the site of Eurydice—
woman caught between two deaths at the mouth of hell].*°

Thus the “function of the beautiful” is to reveal to us instances of co-emergence

and co-fading and articulate their always not quite cognitive acknowledgment that
may flash out in the artistically evoked matrixial borderspace.
If high Lacanianism, a critique of representation and conceptual art prac-
tices/film-dominated feminist enquiry in the 1980s, a post Lacanian, “painting after
painting,” after Auschwitz retheorization has developed in response to and as an
extension of that earlier generation. Feminism is internally dynamic and shifting
and what was hegemonic—the gaze as power and representation as meaning—in
the 1980s is being challenged by those who work with that legacy but not only in
it and dare to reopen the prematurely foreclosed feminist debates on painting as a
unique site of aesthetic encounter and affectivity.

IV. Conclusion
We have come too far too quickly—so far from Leonardo’s bug-infested studio and
his Medusan image of terror/beauty and from Uccello’s gaping-mouthed dragons
168 Griselda Pollock

and rocky caverns that worked with the dichotomy of phallic imaging of the femi-
nine as either abject or sublimated. Yet we are once again with the deepest repression
of western culture: the feminine as a source of any means of structuring meaning
and subjectivity. Wending her way through the thickets of late Lacan’s brave and
arcane psychoanalytical readings, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger shows how beauty
need not function as the blinding splendor of a near encounter with death. Beauty
is the flash of intuned connectivity that is the condition for aesthetic affectivity.
This element of art, always present, often subdued in the service of representation,
has been distilled out during the long and interrrupted modernist century. During
this century, modernist challenges to the representational and figurative logic of
art determined by the Christian theology of incarnation, co-emerged with both
psychoanalysis and with feminism: the modernization of sexual difference. The
turn to linguistics and semiotics that has given us visual culture has been rich in
the harvest of ideological analysis but we have risked being unable to speak at all
of affectivity as a site too of meanings and of political significance. The inhumane
cataclysm of fascism’s murder of humanity that we mark with the word “Auschwitz”
that must be remembered and yet never can be represented sets the stage for an
extraordinary event: the unexpected play of history, art, sexual difference, and the
image toward whose complex interweavings for art history, aesthetics, and the study
of visual culture, I have merely gestured here.

1. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, “Art as the Transport-Station of Trauma” in Artworking 1985-1999,

exh. cat. (Ghent: Ludion and Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000), 91.
2. Giorgio Vasari, Lives ofthe Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architectures, trans. Mrs. Jonathan
Foster (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851), 2:372-73. I want to acknowledge my deep gratitude to Paul
Barolsky for giving me new access to Vasari’s founding and still hegemonic text, but in drawing at-
tention to the need for art historians to reflect on the stories that constitute the mythic underlay of
our historical enterprise. I hope he will not be dismayed by my unashamed feminist rampage through
one of his favorite texts.
3. This text, as Paul Barolsky wished to demonstrate, is extremely fertile at all levels. I cannot enter
into a full analysis here and this is not my purpose. Invoking Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the
Cooked (1964; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1989) is intended to signal this fundamental mytheme
in this founding text of art historical representation of the creative act. .
4. Having taken so long over this small commission, no one wanted it anymore and the reader is told
 The Aesthetics of Difference 169

that Ser Piero had meantime bought a painted buckler from a peddler to give to his trusty bird-
catcher—a buckler upon which was represented a heart pierced by an arrow! Signifying love, it is
also an atrocious image of bodily violence.
5. Lapologize to readers not familiar with the arcane systems of psychoanalytical thought which seem
to non-specialists locked into their own esoteric vocabulary. The crucial point I wish to make here
concerns those ideas and images that are primally repressed and remain fundamentally inaccessible,
although the instinct and the affects associated with them remain operative. Any recurrence of these
foundational repressions (that themselves are based in something traumatizing) occurs as uncanniness.
Secondary repression may be defeated depending on the strength of the unconscious wish
striving to return to consciousness and this is called “the return of the repressed.” This occurs through
various mechanisms: displacement, condensation, conversion, and events that call forth repressed

ideas and images: a trigger mechanism that is also related to what Freud called Nachtgraglichkeit:
deferred action. In the Lacanian model that I am also using, the subject is formed at three levels, the
Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. The Imaginary is the realm of fantasy which is not strictly
governed by the unconscious, and fantasies are operative rather than unconscious. The Symbolic,
whose instrument is language is the mechanism of repression policing the border of unconscious and
conscious as itself an unconscious structure that structures the subject inserted into its pre-existing
terms. The Imaginary is defined by /e semblable, by deceptive connections established by resemblance,
confusing signifier and signified, while the Symbolic is a break, creating an arbitrary system of mean-
ings determined by the chain of signifiers. The Real is initially for Lacan the ground of these other
orders and disappears as a result; in his later work, however, after the mid-1950s, Lacan researched
and theorized the pathways of the Real (trauma) to the Imaginary (fantasy). This move is echoed in
the work of Julia Kristeva and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, who in radically different ways, embrace
this move to re-engage the drives and the archaic traces of the corpo-Real, the bodily as motility and
sensation. These historic revisions within psychoanalysis are playing out in psychoanalytically in-
spired aesthetic theories and practices.
6. Uccello is important here, for his story in Vasari reminds us that his love of art did keep him from
his wife’s bed. What Uccello deflected his erotic drive toward was perspective: the creation of a rep-
resentational virtuality in which the structural elements of legendary stories could be narratively
located in the artificial space of reason. Uccello first painted a Saint George and the Dragon in a ver-
sion that is now in Musée Jacquemart in Paris. What it lacks precisely is that articulation of pictorial
space into narrative space, hence it remains emblematic, not dramatic. The later work has shifted
some of the elements and works better, I think. What does that mean here? All of the distracting
supplementary information of castle, agriculture, background, explanatory vignette is dispensed with,
including the dragon’s too obviously pubic beard.
7. For an analysis of the meaning of this profile see Patricia Simons, “Women in Frames: The Eye,
170 Griselda Pollock

the Gaze, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop 25 (1988): 4-30.
8. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminar ofJacques Lacan Book VII, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 243-90.
9. The founding statement of her theory of a supplementary signifier of a feminine difference be-
yond the phallus appears in “Matrix and Metramorphosis,” Differences 4, no. 3 (1992): 176-208.
“Metramorphic Borderlinks and Borderspace,” Rethinking Borders, ed. John Welchman (London:
MacMillan, 1996), 125-59 is also a good introduction, while “The With-in-Visible Screen,” in Inside
the Visible, ed. Cathérine de Zegher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 89-113, makes clear the
relations between aesthetics and sexuality. A first volume of Ecrits appeared in Regard et Espace de
Bord Matrixiels (Brussels: Editions de la lettre volée, 2000) and will soon appear from (ed. Brian
Massumi) University of Minnesota Press. The major retrospective exhibition catalogue Artworking
1985-1999 contains both essays on her paintings (by me and Brian Massumi) and a theoretical essay
by the artist/theorist, “Art as the Transport-Station of Trauma.”
10. For a fuller elaboration of this argument see my “Abandoned at the Mouth of Hell: A Second
Look that Does Not Kill or the Uncanny Coming to Matrixial Memory,” in Griselda Pollock with
Penny Florence, Looking Back to the Future: Essays on Art, Life and Death (New York: G+B Arts; and
London: Routledge, 2000), 113-74.
u. There is considerable confusion at the level of terminology these days. The debate on gender turns
in general on a critique of the political, social, or cultural effects of marking a difference between
men and women in their lived identities. The term sexual difference is more open. It addresses the
conditions for making a distinction based on sex. Thus it addresses the systems and structures that
produce masculine and feminine positions, psychically and linguistically. Since the body and sex it-
self is not taken to have innate meaning, we are dealing with processes of signification, fantasy, and
positionality. This has led in several directions: one to the sense of the possibility of thinking about
subjectivity in non-sexuated terms, the anti-Oedipal moves. The other suggests that we should not
yet foreclose the debate on the possible value of differences however structurally they are produced.
Thus the feminine, not as innate, but produced, has a potential value both in its fuller acknowledg-
ment for and by those marked by its sign, woman, and for culture as a whole when it has been so far
only monosexual, designating the feminine as a negated other, not as a structural difference. I work
with this positive interest in the as yet unexplored potential of feminine sexual difference without
subscribing in any way to some notion of essentialism, philosophical or physiological. Hence the in-
sistent use of a feminist psychoanalytical model to speak this paradox of structurally produced
difference and culturally embraced potential in that effect. Having said that, it becomes clear that
via this rigorous theorization, one can acknowledge the significance of the body, not as a cause of
meaning, but an archive of sensations that may, with appropriate signifiers, attain effects in fantasy
and thought. This is why we need more signifiers to expand the symbolic, the domain of thinking
 The Aesthetics of Difference |7|

and meaning with regard to the repressed of phallocentric culture: difference from the feminine, not
just the feminine as the voided site of difference.
12. Penny Florence and Nicola Foster, eds., Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices, Philosophy and Feminist
Understandings (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001). The book draws heavily on Isobel Armstrong
who is quoted: “The aesthetic is not the political, but it may make the political possible.” I. Armstrong,
“So what's all this about the mother’s body?” in Textualities and Sexualities: Reading Theories and
Practices, ed. Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). I
want to thank Penny Florence, for it is from her conference on “The Aesthetics of Difference” in
1996 that I borrow the title for this paper.
13. For example, see Nicola Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska, Feminist Visual Culture (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
14. My initial designation of art history as an ideologically infused discursive formation dates from
Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Pandora Books, 1981), and I have recently expanded
that analysis of canonicity through a partly psychoanalytical diagnosis drawn from Freud via the work
of Sarak Kofman in Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing ofArts Histories, (London:
Routledge, 1999).
15. This point cannot be stressed enough. My work has been undertaken in a double space of debate
against traditional art historical repressions and exclusions and in alliance with a living creative cul-
ture, with contemporary feminists working in the field of artistic practice. It is the triangulation of
History, Theory, and Practice that I now recognize as the critical structure that makes possible femi-
nist interventions and transformations.
16. Kenneth Clark’s confident use of the word “we” before a classical female nude was suddenly ex-
posed, its universalist presumption revealed as local and partisan, belonging to a white European,
heterosexual masculine in-group for whom other bodies were mere forms for often sublimated plays
of desire and power. One of the earliest feminist exercises undertaken by Rozsika Parker and myself
was a critical analysis of the ideological and linguistic structure of Kenneth Clark’s The Nude. See
also Nanette Salomon, “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission” (1991), reprinted in D. Preziosi,
ed., The Art ofArt History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 344-55, and “The Venus Pudica: Uncovering Art History's Hidden Agendas and Pernicious
Pedigrees,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London: Routledge,
1996), 69-87.
17. One site of anxiety about premature foreclosure surfaced in a feminist debate in the early 1990s
about the status of painting in contemporary practices. For some writers, the term “feminist” had
come exclusively to endorse what Mary Kelly once named “scripto-visual” art practices to the ex-
clusion of those aspects of art explored through painting in the modernist era: a performativity,
materiality, space, and mark. What had momentarily seemed so emancipatory at the end of the 1960s
172 Griselda Pollock

was now condemned as a new, if radical, orthodoxy that itself performed new exclusions. For a dis-
cussion of this debate see Griselda Pollock, “Painting, Feminism and History” (1992), in Griselda
Pollock and Penny Florence, Looking Back to the Future: Essays on Life, Art and Death (London and
New York: G+B Arts; London: Routledge, 2000), and Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance
(London: Routledge, 1996); and she continues to question why feminist analysis pays so little at-
tention to painting and issues raised by its practice beyond representation, that is at the level of the
body, effect, and hence the aesthetic. As someone who has been writing about painting and gender,
most insistently since 1992, I find her sense of lack somewhat misleading.
18. See for instance Hilary Robinson, “The Morphology of Mucous: Irigarayan Possibilities in the
Material Practice of Art,” in Florence and Foster, Differential Aesthetics, 261-76, and her unpublished
“Becoming Beauty: The Implications of Luce Irigaray’s Writings for Feminist Art Practices” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Leeds, 1999). Julia Kristeva, “The Dissident: A New Kind of Intellectual,” The
Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 292-300, is discussed in relation to paint-
ing in my “Killing Men and Dying Women: A Woman's Touch in the Cold Zone of American Painting
in the 1950s” in Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1996), 219-94, 269-73.
19. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986),
188—213: “It seems to me that the role of what is usually called ‘aesthetic practices’ must increase not
only to counterbalance the storage and uniformity of information by present-day mass media, data
bank systems, and, in particular, modern communications technology but also to demystify the iden-
tity of the symbolic bond itself, to demystify, therefore, the community of language as a universal
and unifying tool, one which totalizes and equalizes. In order to bring out—along with the singu-
larity of each person, and even more, the multiplicity of every person’s possible identifications—the
relativity of his/her symbolic as well as biological existence, according to the variation in his/her spe-
cific symbolic capacities,” 210. For a timely explanation of this difficult concept see the article
“Correcting her Idea of the Politically Correct,” New York Times, 16 July 2001, which outlines the
major misunderstandings of Julia Kristeva’s thinking and explains the political basis of her insistence
on singularity rather than the delusions of hardened notions that subjectivity and any one social or
political identity—as woman, gay, black—are synonymous.
20. “Signifying practice, where practice is taken as meaning the acceptance of a symbolic law together
with the transgression of that law for the purpose of renovating it. The moment of transgression is
the key moment in practice; we can speak of practice whereever there is transgression of systematicity,
i.e., a transgression of the unity proper to the transcendental ego. The subject of a practice cannot be
the transcendental subject, who lacks the shift, the split in logical unity brought about by language
which separates out, within the signifying body, the symbolic order from the workings of thé libido.”
Julia Kristeva, “The System and the Speaking Subject” (1973), The Kristeva Reader, 29.
 The Aesthetics of Difference |73

21. Luce Irigaray, “The Eternal Irony of Community,” Speculum of the Other: Woman, trans. Gillian
Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Geroge Steiner, Antigones (London: Athlone Press, 1993);
G.W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Oxford University Press,
1977), 266 ff. For a contemporary feminist engagement see, Judith Butler, Antigone’ Claim: Kinship
Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
22. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, “Transgressing With-In-To the Feminine,” Florence and Foster,
Differential Aesthetics, 183-209; citation 191.
23. Lacan, The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis, 26 ff.: “In the typical Sadeian scenario, suffering does not lead
the victim to the point where he is dismembered and destroyed. It seems rather that the object of all
the torture is to retain the capacity of being an indestructible support. Analysis shows clearly that the
subject separates out a double of himself who is made inaccessible to destruction, so as to make it
support, borrowing a term from the realm of aesthetics, one cannot help calling the play of pain.”
24. Lichtenberg Ettinger, “Trangressing With-In-To the Feminine,” 191. Translations are by the artist
from the French original transcripts of the seminar, published as The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis.
25. Ibid., 192, citing Lacan, The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis, 281.
26. Ibid.
27. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, ed. Bernard Knox, trans. Robert Fagles (London:
Penguin Books, 1984), 105.
28. Lacan, The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis, 279.
29. “Painting after painting after history” refers to a feminist resumption of the unfinished business
of painting prematurely foreclosed in the tactically necessary anti-modernist moves of feminist cri-
tiques of modernism. It also locates this resumption within the field of post-Auschwitz aesthetics and
philosophy. We both come after history and exist in a new epoch beyond previous historical patterns
as a result of the Holocaust. See Griselda Pollock, “Gleaning in History,” in Generations and Geographies
in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London: Routledge, 1996), 266-88, and
Griselda Pollock, “Painting as a Backward Glance that Does Not Kill,” in Fascist Aesthetics, ed. Greg
Hainge, special issue of Renaissance and Modern Studies 42 (2000): 16-44.
30. Lichtenberg Ettinger, “Trangressing With-In-To the Feminine,” 205.
31. Anyone directly involved in the Shoah necessarily scans these often unidentified photographs of
camps, massacres, and ghettoes, fearing to as much as desiring to recognize a lost family member.
Could these people be me, could they be a sister, mother, grandmother, aunt? Thus the actual rem-
nants of family photographs and the whole archive of the collective disaster resonate with personal
and immediate terror as well as longing to refind, even for a moment.
32. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Matrix Hala(a)—Lapsus: Notes on Painting, (Oxford: Museum of
Modern Art, 1992). These are the carnets in which the artist daily recorded responses to her painting
practice and from whose scattered grains she began to develop a theorization that, once transplanted
174 Griselda Pollock

to the terrain of psychoanalysis, could offer another means of thinking and articulating what arose
in and through an aesthetic practice of painting as transubjectivising encounter. These writings are
textually analysed by Carolyn Drucker, “Translating the Matrix,” Versus Occasional Paper No. 1,
Versus 3 (1994).
33. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “The Inner Space of Painting,” in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger et
al., Halala-Autistwork, exh. cat. (Aix en Provence: Cité du Livre; and Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1995),
65 and 68. Other citations from 64.
34. Lichtenberg Ettinger, “Trangressing With-In-To the Feminine,” 205.
35. Ibid., 205-6.
Recollections of Rembrandt’s Jeremiah

lvan Gaskell

These are the observations not of an art historian, nor of a philosopher, nor of a
museologist, but of a historian, relating present experience to the past. Memory is
one means of connecting the present with the past, and this paper addresses mem-
ory. In doing so, I have tried to keep before me David Hume’s observation “that
the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, and to conjoin
with them any internal impressions, which they occasion, and which always make
their appearance at the same time that these objects discover themselves to the
senses.”' Certain of those internal impressions have to do with memory.
First, I shall present a general argument about aesthetically evaluative and
ostensibly non-evaluative discussions of material objects. Then I shall present a
case study concerning the role of memory and reproductions in what I shall
describe as the dynamic or progressive apprehension of the painting that is my case
study: an object in Hume’s sense. This discussion will concern the painting
(prototype), reproductions of it, and mental knowledge of it. Although mental
knowledge can derive from various sources, such as talk or texts, here I limit con-
sideration to memory. Memory of an object and its reproductions is the principal
topic of this paper.”

It is sometimes said that the consideration of aesthetic values on the one hand, and
their apparent avoidance in what is now generally termed “visual studies” on the
other, constitute the two opposite poles of the practice of art history today. It might
seem thus from an art historian’s viewpoint. While respecting that controversy might
arise legitimately from looking at things in this way, I must admit that from my
historian’s viewpoint they look a little different. It seems to me that once one at-
tends to objects in their variety and complexity, and to human relationships with
objects—again in their variety and complexity, the question of whether or not
aesthetic evaluation should be our guiding principle simply does not arise. Such
evaluation, and elaboration of the means by which we might perform it, becomes
but one of several possible matters we can choose to address in relation to objects
176 Ivan Gaskell

and their uses. It happens to be a complex one to which a great many people have
given much careful thought over many generations. In spite of this attention, we
are not all necessarily interested in aesthetic evaluation. Yet, aesthetic evaluation is
unlikely not to arise as one element of our investigations of the uses of objects at
some point or other. If, when, and how it does will depend on its pertinence to the
questions we choose to ask of objects, and about our relationship to them, in any
given instance. Those questions will vary as circumstances and the nature of our
investigation vary. Even in respect of the same object or objects, on one occasion
those questions may be art historical, on another museological, on yet another his-
torical, and on yet another philosophical, or ethnological. To make assumptions
regarding the nature of any such object or objects a priori of the kind “this is art,”
or “this is a commodity,” or “this is the instantiation of a concept” seems impru-
dent. Objects can be all of these things, though not necessarily all the time. In any
given instance, at or near the outset, we must establish which terms of reference
will apply to our discussion. All we must insist upon is consistency of reasoning
and judgment within the terms of that discussion, which can be transdisciplinary
and innovative, or traditional and conservative. Aesthetics, commodity theory, ana-
lytical philosophy, and other demonstrably effective ways of addressing questions
can all have a part to play in our investigation of human beings’ relationships with
the objects they find or make and use, though not necessarily simultaneously. History
and aesthetics—sometimes mistakenly seen as mutually antipathetic—can have
everything to do with each other, but do not necessarily. Let us take the time and
trouble to develop a wide range of intellectual tools to enable us to investigate our
relationships with objects and their circumstances, and talk about them all the more
effectively, rather than prescribe over-selectively and proscribe censoriously.
I should like to think that a separation between aesthetically evaluative and
non-evaluative forms of enquiry could be as neat and convenient as the above would
suggest, but this is not so. Even if aesthetically non-evaluative criteria are paramount
in some enquiry, it is unlikely that aesthetic concerns are not involved, albeit “pri-
vately.” This must be so in the course of making choices, composing questions, and
sustaining chains of reasoning. It must be so even when the author’s motivation is
the questioning or subversion of normative aesthetic values. It is, as well, not to
conceal these concerns, the judgments they entail, and the criteria by which such
judgments are made. This is not only a matter of intellectual honesty, but of pro-
viding all possible grounds for sustaining an argument.?
Here I wish to illustrate but one way of trying to understand the charac-
 Recollections of Rembrandt's Jeremiah 177

ter of a particular kind of complex object. It concerns the role of memory in

apprehension as a dynamic process. It concerns an object that we might all agree
to classify as art—yet this is not in itself to give that object, and any aesthetic qual-
ities we might ascribe to it, any special privilege; for we should recall Nelson
Goodman's proposition that “a Rembrandt painting may cease to function as a
work of art when used to replace a broken window or as a blanket,” and Marcel
Duchamp’s injunction to “use a Rembrandt as an ironing board.”° These are salu-
tary reminders that we should recall when we unthinkingly assume that great art
is invariably great art to all, and that those who do not see it as such are deficient
in their appreciation. That is not necessarily the case. Furthermore, although these
observations do not imply that I regard art as a special case in respect to the claims
I make concerning the role of memory in the progressive apprehension of objects
and in cognitive processes concerning them, I think it is worth stating as much
explicitly. Art may be a special case, but I doubt it—though I am unable to explore
the issue here.
The way people use objects is rarely simple. Pictures form one category of
objects the uses of which can never be said to be straightforward. Nonetheless, what
we might recognize as our basic use of pictures seems describable enough: we look
at them. Generally speaking (there are exceptions) pictures are designed for people
to look at. Yet looking at pictures is a complex affair. We can describe and try to
explain it in several registers. The picture that concerns us here (fig. 1) is of the kind
we generally agree to categorize as art, and of the subset Old Master paintings in
oil on wood panel. It is figurative, or depictive, as opposed to abstract, and is the
kind of Old Master painting that we are most likely to find hanging on a wall in
an art museum. Furthermore, the picture in question is associated with an artist
whom no one seriously doubts was responsible for making it: Rembrandt van Rijn
(1606-1669). It is reliably monogrammed and dated 1630. Although other identi-
fications of its subject have been suggested, it is generally held to show the biblical
prophet Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem, and this description usu-
ally serves as its title. Although it has been lent to temporary exhibitions at other
institutions, we are most likely to see it in the seventeenth-century Dutch paint-
ings galleries of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
If using any object is a complex matter, looking at a painting is more com-
plex than most. We might be familiar with it from reproductions even before we
see the painting itself; or, indeed, we may have seen such reproductions and never
yet have seen what they reproduce. In this respect, as in so many others when we
Fig. |. Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669), Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction ofJerusalem, 1630. Oil on wood,
23 x 18 7/s in. (58.3 x 46.6 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
 Recollections of Rembrandt's Jeremiah |79

consider art objects, we are subject to the tyranny of the unique. Not everyone who
might be deeply, as well as casually, interested in such a painting has had or may
ever have the opportunity to see the painting itself. This does not mean that they
cannot know it, at least in some qualified sense. It would be obtuse to suggest that
knowledge derived from reproductions is of such a low grade that we must dis-
count it. Much scholarly work, as well as much casual pleasure, would be disqualified
were we to hold that reproductions preclude justifiable claims to knowledge. We
take photographically based reproductions to be consistent and reliable within cer-
tain boundaries, permitting at least some discussion of the objects they represent.
Much art historical scholarship—to say nothing of teaching—would be impossible
were this not the case. Indeed, even those fortunate enough to have seen Rembrandt's
Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction ofJerusalem itself are also likely to have seen re-
productions of it, whether beforehand, or subsequently, or between viewings. Those
for whom the painting and its image are familiar may even be unable to ascertain
in their own minds whether any particular observation they might make—of the
character of the wrinkles on the prophet’s brow, for instance—derives from a view-
ing of the painting itself or from a reproduction. Even if a particular observation
must, by its topic, depend on an encounter between observer and object—such as
the character of the impasto on the vessels and braided hem beside Jeremiah—that
observer may not be able to identify whether that observation derives from one
or another from among a series of encounters with the object itself, possibly
separated by days, months, or years, if that observer has seen the painting on more
than one occasion.
Memory, therefore, plays a considerable role in what we might call the in-
dividual’s cumulative viewing experience of such a painting. Every viewer already
familiar with this painting and its image, whether fleetingly or profoundly, whether
from the original or its reproductions, or both, brings memories of it to each new
encounter with either the painting itself, or a reproduction of it. The effect is
Heraclitan: just as we cannot set foot in the same river twice, so we cannot see the
same painting twice.° And this is so on two counts. First, the painting changes—
the very site, the wall upon which it hangs, the works beside it, the quality of light
falling upon it, even its state of conservation. Secondly, the viewer changes, owing
to what that viewer has seen since the last encounter with the painting, its repro-
ductions, and the viewer's acquisition of other forms of knowledge or surmise about
it from talk or texts. Memory therefore plays a great part in the constitution of our
progressive experience of such a thing—once there is a memory to evoke or invoke.
180 Ivan Gaskell

I wish to ascertain how memory plays its varied and often fugitive part in
the constitution of our experience of an object such as Rembrandt's Jeremiah
Lamenting the Destruction ofJerusalem, and thereafter in our talk about it. Therefore
I asked ten scholars, all specialists in seventeenth-century Dutch art, the following
question: What is your earliest memory of this painting? I asked them this ques-
tion on the same occasion, in the presence of the painting itself. The occasion was
the symposium “Rethinking Rembrandt” held on 14 and 15 October 2000 to
accompany the exhibition Rembrandt Creates “Rembrandt”: Art and Ambition in
Leiden, 1629-1631 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The ten schol-
ars were men and women from art museums and colleges or universities. They were
at various stages of their careers, ranging from a newly appointed assistant professor
to an elderly faculty member on the brink of a long-deferred retirement. All had
published on seventeenth-century Dutch art, many on Rembrandt. Although the
majority were American, four nationalities were represented.
The results are obviously not statistically significant, yet neither are they
limited to the anecdotal insofar as they reveal thematically significant aspects of
the role of memory in acts of viewing, and in the constitution of long-term
acquaintance with, and knowledge of, complex artifacts. I should stress that I do
not wish to suggest that my question confers any particular privilege such as might
imply a metaphysical value upon a viewer's first encounter with the work, as
distinct from subsequent encounters. I hope this is clear from what follows.
For some, the painting had deep associations, which came to mind as these
observers looked at it while searching their memories in response to my questions.
For others, indifference was almost palpable. The responses of five of the ten schol-
ars suggested that this painting was of no particular significance in their lives,
whether professionally or personally. Viewing it while considering my question
prompted no strong memories. Yet this reaction does not imply an indifference to
the work itself, or a lack of sophisticated engagement with it on that occasion or
on others; simply that it was one painting among many associated with the artist
that held no special place in their minds.
For three of the scholars, Jeremiah had registered on first viewing as some-
thing special that really remained with them. Two of those three revealed strong
personal associations with the painting deriving from a first encounter, while two
others, who had not initially suggested that their first encounters with it had forged
an emotive bond, also revealed that it nonetheless held very strong, long-lasting
personal associations for them. Both of those who were immediately and lastingly
 Recollections of Rembrandt's Jeremiah 18!

impressed by the work on a first encounter were then undergraduates visiting

Amsterdam—indeed Europe—for the first time. If they had seen the work repro-
duced beforehand, they had no recollection of it. The other two scholars who
revealed a particularly affective bond with the painting, but not obviously as a
result of, or immediately after, seeing the painting itself for the first time, had quite
different recollections of their first encounters. One saw the Jeremiah at the
Rijksmuseum at the age of twelve during a first family visit to Europe. Receiving
special instruction in art practice, this future Rembrandt scholar had been advised
by the teacher responsible to pay particular attention to paintings by Rembrandt,
Hals, and Vermeer. Looking back, this scholar felt that this proto-adolescent child,
then particularly interested in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, was especially recep-
tive to images of melancholy romanticism associated with artists as misunderstood
Bohemians. Rembrandt's Jeremiah appealed strongly on those counts. Yet this ap-
peal took time to develop, only consolidated by subsequent frequent perusal of
Horst Gerson’s folio volume, Rembrandt Paintings (1968) in the family’s possession.
The second scholar for whom the painting only came to mean something
special over time first saw it as a young adult between twenty-two and twenty-five
years old; yet this was not an encounter with the painting itself, but rather with a
reproduction in a book, most likely the 1935 edition of Abraham Bredius, Rembrandt
Gemiilde: 630 Abbildungen in which the richly dark reproductions on matte paper
have what this scholar recalled as a silky quality. That richness of tone in the
reproduction of the Jeremiah was especially striking to the future scholar, and this
recollection demonstrates that the particular quality of a reproduction, as well as
of a prototype, can play an important role in the perceptual process by which a
picture holds a special place in the memory. Another aspect of that first acquain-
tance remained in the future scholar’s mind, not least because it involved an
elementary mistake which at a distance seems comic, but which nonetheless is a
clue to a process of memory: this observer then noticed that the annotation on the
edge of the large book on which the prophet rests his elbow was misspelled, “Bibel.”
That this is perfectly correct Dutch was as yet beyond this viewer's knowledge, but
it stuck in the memory ever after.
The viewer who wrongly perceived a spelling mistake was not the only
one who recalled becoming familiar with the Jeremiah in the first instance through
a reproduction. For another scholar who first saw the painting in Amsterdam while
a graduate student, it was already familiar as a canonical image from books, slides
encountered as a student, and even examinations. For another, who saw it for the
182 Ivan Gaskell

first time while a teenager, it was by then already familiar from black-and-white
book illustrations and, in particular, from the color plate and black-and-white
detail encountered in what must have been a copy of Bob Haak’s Rembrandt: His
Life, His Work, His Time (1969). This observer recalled that such enlargements
of details acted as (to quote) “revelations” that led to a perception of the painting
itself in what was probably a manner quite different from what might have resulted
had those blow-ups not been encountered beforehand. As Walter Benjamin
observed, “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise
what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural
formations of the subject””—even, we might add, when the subject (actually the
object) is not itself familiar to the observer. These reproductions, therefore, work
in an anticipatory manner, preparing the viewer for an encounter that would
otherwise necessarily be different, though precisely in what way different can never
be ascertained.
If familiarity of a kind derived from reproductions—demonstrably memo-
rable for their own particular character—can be important in the formation of
memories that follow eventual encounter with the object itself, reproductions en-
countered subsequently also shape memories and the terms of later viewings of the
work itself. We have seen that the scholar who first saw the Jeremiah at the age of
twelve consolidated a growing romantic, adolescent fascination with it by means
of illustrations in a family copy of Gerson’s Rembrandt. Another future Rembrandt
scholar who was particularly struck by the painting on first seeing it when an un-
dergraduate responded in the way that many museum visitors do in similar
circumstances, by buying a reproduction from the museum store, in this case a
color print mounted on a wooden support: an elaborate object for a color repro-
duction. This investment was a measure of the impression the painting itself had
made at the time. In similar manner, innumerable mounted color prints of
Rembrandt's Jeremiah have a domestic presence worldwide. The print allows mu-
seum visitors literally to domesticate the painting. It can enter the reproduction
owner's own sphere of seclusion and meditation on matters of weighty significance
in his or her own life. Although they are copies, the place of each reproduction is
unique. Each plays a particular role in the domestic and imaginative lives of those
who live with them. That role may diminish with familiarity, once the impulse of
regard that prompted the purchase in the first place fades, but a residue remains,
even if the print is successively demoted from primary living space, to attic, to base-
ment. In the case of this particular reproduction of Rembrandt’s Jeremiah, the
 Recollections of Rembrandt’s Jeremiah 183

scholar who had bought it nearly twenty years previously admitted to vicissitudes
in its domestic fortunes through successive moves, but stated that it had recently
re-emerged to take a prominent place upon a desk used for writing on Rembrandt
and seventeenth-century Dutch art. The owner of this reproduction surmised that
the Jeremiah can have a particular resonance for Jewish viewers; that is, its appeal,
as a work of art in reproduction as well as in the original, resides for some in the
myth of Rembrandt’s sympathetic relationship with the Jews, both his Amsterdam
contemporaries and Old Testament figures. This perception can move a particu-
lar class of viewer, including this scholar, to prompt purchases of reproductions for
intimate domestic use.
The particularly emotional appeal regularly evoked by this painting is far
from confined to one ethnic or confessional group. This is demonstrated by the
reaction of another scholar, of a quite different background, who was “overwhelmed”
by two paintings by Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum also on first viewing them as
an undergraduate visiting Europe for the first time: the Nightwatch and Jeremiah
Lamenting the Destruction ofJerusalem. The same future scholar already owned a
poster of the Man in the Golden Helmet in Berlin, admiring it greatly, but on the
same visit to Europe, seeing the painting itself for the first time, was utterly
disappointed and knew—well before the attribution to Rembrandt was publicly
doubted—that it was not by that artist. Here a reproduction had led to expecta-
tions of greatness in the original which the original could not sustain.
Three others among the ten scholars I questioned had first seen the Jeremiah
as students, making five in all; two had first seen it while children, one as a twelve-
year-old, the other as a sixteen-year-old on a Scout trip to Europe. This young
future scholar had been captivated by two paintings by Rembrandt in the
Rijksmuseum in particular, Titus as a Monk and Rembrandt’s Mother, but not by
the Jeremiah. Two of the scholars first encountered the painting in maturity, one
of them admitting that this very occasion, during which I was asking these
questions, was the very first time the painting had really registered. Other works
had demanded attention during visits to the Rijksmuseum leading to this one
being passed over hitherto, even in reproduction. Even then, on this first occasion
of close engagement, seemingly unaffected by memory, the painting had appar-
ently not made a particular impression.
The chronological range of date of the first remembered encounter with
Rembrandt's Jeremiah among the members of this group of ten specialist Dutch
scholars spanned over fifty years, from 1948 to that very day. Some were as though
184 Ivan Gaskell

affectively indifferent to it—though of these several were obviously intellectually

engaged by it—while others were deeply moved by it in a personal, non-scholarly
way. Memory played a vital role in the structure of all these relationships, which
ranged from indifferent to intense. In all cases memory coalescing as knowledge
affected successive encounters with both reproductions and the original in an ever-
developing progressive relationship between object and viewer.
Here we might pause to interject a brief analytical consideration of what
I have been describing. We might appeal to Nelson Goodman's notion of kinds—
at the core of his philosophy—elaborated by Jan Hacking as interactive kinds.
Kinds are categories, classes, sorts, types. Hacking proposes child abuse as an
example of an interactive kind. “Interactive kinds interact with people and their
behavior,” he avers. In this sense I now propose each encounter with Rembrandt's
Jeremiah—events in people’s lives—as an example of an interactive kind. This radi-
cally affects our conceptualization of our understanding of art objects. Hacking
writes: “We can well understand how new kinds create new possibilities for choice
and action. But the past, of course, is fixed! Not so. As Goodman would put it, if
new kinds are selected, then the past can occur in a new world. Events in a life can
now be seen as events of a new kind, a kind that may not have been conceptual-
ized when the event was experienced or the act performed. What we experience
becomes recollected anew, and thought in terms that could not have been thought
at the time. Experiences are not only redescribed; they are refelt. This adds
remarkable depth to Goodman’s vision of world-making by kind-making.”$ Counting
experiences of art an interactive kind allows us to account precisely for the
experiences of our ten scholars with respect to Rembrandt's Jeremiah.

The canny reader may suppose that I chose this particular painting for this exer-
cise in the investigation of the role of the object, its reproductions, and memory
in relation to both in the constitution of a dynamic relationship between viewer
and object for the simple yet seemingly neat reason that the subject of the paint-
ing itself is visualization by means of memory: that of Jeremiah lamenting the
destruction of Jerusalem that he had foretold. The representational structure of the
Jeremiah is complex and equivocal, but introspection and memory are clearly in
play. That this is so could provide a convenient means of interleaving this enquiry
with the consideration of the theme of the painting by means of some post-
 Recollections of Rembrandt’s Jeremiah |85

modern conceit; yet to do so would be duplicitous. Although the theme of memory

is obviously evoked by the representation of Jeremiah and what one takes to be his
recollection of recent disaster, I might have asked the same questions of the same
respondents in respect of any other painting present.
Perhaps the fact that memory is the subject may yet have helped to lodge
the painting in the minds of those for whom its memory was vivid. Yet some among
the group had responded with indifference to the representation of introspection,
which suggests that it has no special privilege when it comes to lodging in the mind.
The simple reason for my choice is that this painting had lodged in my own mind
from the time I had first seen it, at the age seven or thereabouts, and each time
I have seen it over the years I have remembered my childhood sense of awe and
wonder in an ever-increasing elaboration of remembered memories. It seemed to
me that memory, no less than reproduction and the specifics of the physical set-
ting of any given object, provides the circumstance of encounter, and that can and
must be different each time we view a work. We cannot view the same painting
twice, and have to learn to live with the consequences of the dissolution of the sta-
bility of perception. This is no more, nor no less, than a consequence of the nature
of our relationships with those objects that interest us. I propose that we would do
well to incorporate an acknowledgment of this condition in our attempts to under-
stand those relationships. If we do not, and if we give credence to the false choice
between aesthetic evaluation and its renunciation in visual studies, we shall be left,
like Jeremiah, with no more than isolated fragments saved from the wreck, and
our own melancholy regrets.

This paper is dedicated to Egbert Haverkamp Begemann, a Rembrandt scholar with a long and capa-
cious memory.
1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 112 (bk. 1, pt. 3, § 14, 25).
2. Theories of memory are confusing. I have found Daniel L. Schachter, Searching for Memory: The
Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York: HarperCollins, 1996) to be especially helpful, and have bene-
fited from discussions with him, and other colleagues, under the auspices of Harvard University’s
Mind/Brain/Behavior \nter-Faculty Initiative.
3. I develop this argument at greater length, with examples, in “Beautiful,” in Robert Nelson and Richard
Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
186 Ivan Gaskell

4. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 67.

5. “Reciprocal Readymade = Use a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board.” Marcel Duchamp, The Green
Box, in Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds., Salt Seller: The Writings ofMarcel Duchamp
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 32.
6. The ascription to Heraclitus of the most famous saying associated with him (“One cannot step
into the same river twice”) rests on the report attributed to Socrates (Plato, Cratylus, 402A), and by
Plutarch (De E apud Delphous, 392B): see the discussion by Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought
of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), no. Li, 52, 168-69.
7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (originally pub-
lished in Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung 5, no. 1, 1936) in Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn trans.,
Illuminations (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 238.
8. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 130.
Ghostwriting: Working Out Visual Culture

Nicholas Mirzoeff

It is the time of the ghost, the revenant, and the specter. The ghost is somewhere
between the visible and the invisible, appearing clearly to some but not to
others. Within the spectrum lies the spectral. In this digital age, the space
warriors want to militarize the hyperspectral as well. Some hear the ghost speak,
for others it is silent. When visual culture tells stories, they are ghost stories. They
are stories of the specter not of spirit, not ontology, but “hauntology.” The ghost
is not a retreat to the margins, whether of art history, aesthetics or cultural stud-
ies, but is rather an assertion that the virtual is real and the paranormal normal,
as what was formerly invisible comes into visibility. The revenant comes back not
to address the past but to speak in a voice which is not one to the future. As Jacques
Derrida has argued, it is “open to a future radically to come, which is to say inde-
terminate.”! The ghost is in the machine that is the network, but it is not of it. It
finds a way to reappear, but it is not everywhere. It is in between—between the
visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, the palpable and the
impalpable, the voice and the phenomenon. The ghost is that which could not
be seen in the panoptic spectrum, and it has many names in many languages:
diasporists, exiles, queers, migrants, gypsies, refugees, Tutsis, Palestinians. The
ghost is one place among many from which to interpellate the structures of
visibility that have constructed, destroyed, and deconstructed the modern visual
subject. By the visual subject, I mean a person who is both constituted as an agent
of sight (regardless of his or her biological capacity to see) and as the effect of a
series of categories of visual subjectivity.
Let’s imagine a beginning. In 1786 the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham
invented a perfect prison that he called the “panopticon.” The panopticon was
an inspection house for the reformation of morals—whether of prisoners, work-
ers, or prostitutes—by means of constant surveillance that the inmates could not
perceive, a system summed up by Michel Foucault in the aphorism “visibility is
a trap.” In Foucault’s view, the panopticon was a model for the disciplinary
society at large, but the practices of visibility were not part of his inquiry. Rather,
he simply assumed, with Bentham, that a straight sight line could be equated to
visibility. For visual culture, visibility is not so simple. Its object of study is
190 Nicholas Mirzoeff

precisely the entities that come into being at the points of intersection of visibil-
ity with social power. In the period of panopticism, the term “visuality” came into
use to describe the state of being visual. By taking another look at the constitu-
tion of panopticism, the apparently brand-new confusion of visuality in the present
might come to be seen as the breakdown of an already existing web of visuality
that has escaped its disciplinary borders. If, as most of its practitioners have
asserted, visual culture is defined more by the questions it asks than the objects
it studies, then it may be that those questions are now becoming clearer: How
was the visual subject constituted in modernity and how is it now being refash-
ioned? In what ways can a network be thought and how can a networked subject
be understood? How are the politics of visual identity to be constructed in this
latest era of globalization? And in what ways can narratives of past, present, and
future be written to account for these changes, in ways that are fashioned both
by an awareness of history and the very Western construct of “history”?

Imagining Ghosts
Pure visibility was indeed at the heart of panopticism but it proved impossible to
achieve either in theory or practice. The visibility described by Foucault was the
fantasy of clairvoyance: a crisply focused field of observation in which nothing is
obscure, literally nor metaphorically. Only in Neoclassical painting, such as Jacques-
Louis David’s paradigmatic work, could the required limpidity of the visual field
be achieved. Keeping the inmates visible at all times was a problem to be
overcome. As Foucault explains, Bentham at first suggested that two large
windows be placed in each cell, in effect backlighting the prisoners, but, as prison
administrators were quick to point out, that had the unfortunate consequence of
making it remarkably easy to escape. So he redesigned the lighting system, first
suggesting the use of mirrors, and finally, gas lighting, but he never fully resolved
the difficulty that has now been satisfied by closed-circuit television. It might be
argued that as a true panopticon was never built, these details are of no conse-
quence. However, Foucault derived from the panopticon the principle of power
itself: “Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted
distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes. . . . The Panopticon is a marvelous
machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogenous
effects of power.” If the distribution of lights, gazes, and surfaces within the
Panopticon were changed, then it would have disrupted the principle of power.
The power of visuality was in fact far from homogenous. Bentham knew what
 Ghostwriting: Working Out Visual Culture 19!

lurked within his panopticon papers: “it is like opening a drawer where devils are
locked up—it is breaking into a haunted house.”4 He even came to realize that
solitary confinement, a key part of his plan, was in fact its undoing as a system of
visibility: “in a state of solitude, infantine superstitions, ghosts and spectres,
recur to the imagination.”° In short, the marvelous machine was out of order. The
prisoner could neither be perfectly visible nor be constantly aware of disciplinary
surveillance. Consequently, they were not disciplined, but simply punished: they
became ghosts.
A striking example of this process was the transformation of Oscar Wilde
during his imprisonment. While on remand in Holloway, awaiting his first trial
in 1895, Wilde wrote to his friends Ada and Ernest Leverson, complaining of lone-
liness: “Not that I am really alone. A slim thing, gold-haired like an angel, stands
always at my side. His presence overshadows me. He moves in the gloom like a
white flower.”° He was referring, of course, to Lord Alfred Douglas, seeming here
to anticipate Alan Sinfield’s argument that he and Douglas together formed a
“queer image.”” This Romantic view of imprisonment did not long survive the
actual experience of a Victorian gaol. A year later Wilde petitioned the Home
Secretary for early release from Reading, uncannily echoing Bentham’s words
above: “It is natural that living in this silence, this solitude, this isolation from all
human and humane influences, this tomb for those who are not yet dead, the
petitioner should, day and night in every waking hour, be tortured by the fear of
absolute and entire insanity.” The very solitude ensured, in Wilde’s view, that the
mind would become “in the case of those who are suffering from sensual mono-
manias [Wilde’s self-diagnosis], the sure prey of morbid passions, and obscene
fancies, and thoughts that defile, desecrate and destroy.”® After a brief inspection
by Home Office doctors, Wilde was found sane. In November 1896, when he received
this news, Wilde completed his transformation into a specter: “I shall return an
unwelcome visitant to a world that does not want me; a revenant, as the French
say, as one whose face is grey with long imprisonment and crooked with pain.
Horrible as are the dead when they rise from their tombs, the living who come
out from tombs are more horrible still.”? The disciplinary institution had turned
the doubled, queer image of Wilde-Douglas into a single revenant, just as Bentham
had belatedly realized it would.
Bentham imagined that the panopticon would be built mostly of iron
and glass, suitably modern materials for the new system, which he called “a glass
bee-hive.”!° Had it actually been constructed in this way, the panopticon would
192 Nicholas Mirzoeff

have looked more like the Crystal Palace than the Victorian prison. In France,
it would have been a cousin to the Arcades, the covered shopping and leisure
arenas that became an emblem of the nineteenth century following Walter
Benjamin’s extensive exploration of their history. An early demonstration in the
Passage des Panoramas showed the new gas lighting to intrigued Parisians.’' From
1822, the Arcades and other public spaces began to be lit by gas as a house-to-
house network for the delivery of what was then called the “spirit” was constructed.
Here is a critical mix indeed—the panoptic institution illuminated by the new
visual technologies of gas and electricity, yet haunted by spirits and, as we shall
see, ghosts. This web of visuality was long held in place by the constraining lines
of disciplinary power, but is now starting to unravel. This essay, then, is a series
of notes toward a possible surfing of the visual network in ghost time. Ghosts are,
by their nature, beings that reappear at unpredictable times and places but with
cause. They are pure medium, transmitting in certain moments without a
published schedule.

Electric Spirits
In the nineteenth century ghosts became electric. They were supposed to mani-
fest themselves using electricity and they were detected by electricity. You can now
buy on the Internet a ghost-hunting device that detects changes in electrical
current. The transformation of European society by electricity was the subject of
constant comment in media ranging from the popular press to the rarefied world
of art history. For electricity became the light source of clairvoyant panopticism.
In his description of the Arcades, Benjamin nostalgically regretted the passing of
the flickering gas lights, but quoted Jacques Fabien describing in 1863 how
electricity came to illuminate panoptic institutions from bottom to top: “The
bright light of electricity served, at first, to illuminate the subterranean galleries
of mines; after that, the public squares and streets; then factories, workshops,
stores, theaters, military barracks; finally, the domestic interior.”!? The electricity
that modernized the Arcades also revealed ghosts and spirits. Women mediums
were suddenly able to access the spirit world on “the spirit telegraph.” Mediums
would pass a cable round the circle that would end in buckets of copper and zinc,
thereby creating a “spirit battery.”!> The séance was then a literally shocking
affair, as visitors clasped this lightly charged cord. It was held that women’s
bodies were in some ineffable way more susceptible to conducting electricity and
hence to the channeling of spirits that were, in effect, electric. I have been call-
 Ghostwriting: Working Out Visual Culture 193

ing panopticism “clairvoyant”: clairvoyance was understood in the period to mean

“seeing with the eyes closed,” an accomplishment of spirit mediums, and
especially seeing things at a distance, which is what we now call television.
Clairvoyance was, then, a desire for unlimited sight that the new technologies of
the period seemed all but ready to deliver, just as new media today promise
access to all manner of visualized knowledges. It was a willed desire for a clear
field of vision, a fantasy that could only be sustained by ignoring its anomalies.
Clairvoyance anticipated the visual technology that would come to epito-
mize it. In 1837 Mlle Pigeaire, a clairvoyant medium, was examined by the French
Academy of Medicine, two years before the Academy of Sciences was astounded
by Daguerre’s photographic medium." Soon the two media joined together. From
1861 onward, the presence of spirits was attested to by photographs that were very
widely discussed and debated. Despite endless skeptical tests, spirit photographers
nonetheless managed to produce their images. In a positivist age these plates
convinced many, for, in the words of the editor of the British Journal ofPhotography:
“the photograph itself is not for nothing.” Spiritism was in no sense anti-
modern, as they relied on the same principles of magnetism and electricity as their
materialist opponents. Spiritualists cited Freud in support of their contentions,
especially as women and effeminate men were held to be most susceptible to the
spirit influence.’
The spirits had long been a part of resistance to slavery and colonialism.!°
Descended from that history are such practices as the coming down of the spirit
in African American churches, the jazz spirit, and the clandestine religion of
Santeria. Intriguingly, colonizers in the late nineteenth century found a wave of
resistance in the spirit wars of the period, ranging from the well-known ghost
dances of the American Indians to the minkisi power figures that so disturbed
Europeans like Joseph Conrad in the Congo. The minkisi (singular nkisi) were
sculptured figures containing a medicine compartment that the operator (nganga)
would use to activate the figure and gain the help of the spirit world for tasks in
the material world, especially against an enemy. To gain the attention of the
spirits, metal objects might be forced into the figure. There are so many fine
examples in American and European museums precisely because the Belgians
believed that they worked and did everything they could to eradicate them. In a
certain sense the wisi figure is a counter-camera, as its medicine compartment
was usually fronted with glass, like a lens, and it would then be activated by
having a piece of metal driven into it—in other words, it was shot, like a camera.
194 Nicholas Mirzoeff

A Jewish Hauntology
In Europe, the city of light had its own spirit war and the ghost was at once old
and new. Jews had long been considered the internal “other” of medieval and early
modern Europe. But by 1900 this simple alternance was complicated in at least
three significant ways. In the wake of the French Revolution, nations around Europe
gradually lifted the civil and legal restrictions on the Jews, abolishing the legal
boundary between gentiles and Jews. Taking advantage of this new freedom, many
European Jews acculturated to the hegemonic civil society around them, provok-
ing critiques from within and outside the Jewish world. In addition, there were
increasingly more Jews in Europe as nations like France and Britain took in about
100,000 Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia's Pale of Settlement.
This situation made it unclear what it meant to be Jewish. For such ambivalent
Jews as Proust, Benjamin, and Freud, the answer was that they were ghosts. In the
third volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust drew an extended compari-
son between Jews and spirit photographs. Introducing a set piece description of
the salon of Mme de Villeparisis, Proust meditates on the presence of Jews
in Parisian high society at the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair. Although
Proust was himself Jewish, the narrator of the novel contemplates Jews as an
astonishing apparition: “It struck me that if in the light of Mme de Villeparisis’
drawing room I had taken some photographs of Bloch, they would have given an
image of Israel identical with those we find in spirit photographs—so disturbing
because it does not appear to emanate from humanity, so deceptive because it
nonetheless resembles humanity all too closely.”!” Here the Jew is literally a ghost,
something that resembles the human even as it is not human, rather like the
cyborg of our own time. Like the Terminator, the ghost says: “Ill be back.” And
indeed throughout Proust’s exegesis of this salon, Bloch and his concerns with the
Dreyfus Affair recur over and again, skirmishes in the spirit war that disrupted high
society's image of itself as a sealed elite sphere, just as the spirit photograph sug-
gested that materialist science could not account for the textures of everyday life.
A decade later another Jewish intellectual was forced to confront his own
image: “I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usu-
ally violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing cabinet,
and an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and a travelling cap came in. .
Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my
dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass
on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance.”!8
 Ghostwriting: Working Out Visual Culture 195

Sigmund Freud concluded that he had not so much been scared by that encounter
with his “double” as that he had failed to recognize it. He was too self-aware not
to suggest that there was a trace of what he called the “uncanny” in his mistake.
The uncanny is a rough English equivalent to the complicated German word
unheimlich, which Freud himself glossed as meaning: “everything is unheimlich
that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”!? What is
visible as unheimlich is at once everything that is not at home or domestic—and
the sense that a house might be unheimlich if it were haunted. In Freud’s own case,
the secret to be concealed is very often his own Jewishness, which he confronts as
the ghost of his father. Freud’s uncanny encounter with his own image caused him
to make a mistake because the person in the reflection seemed to be Jewish, the
Jewish father. Like Salman Rushdie in a recent story, Freud found that after los-
ing his father for many years, he re-emerged one day in the mirror. The meeting
took place not on the mythic battlements of Elsinore, where Hamlet met his fa-
ther’s ghost, but in that paradigm of modernity, the train. At the end of the
Enlightenment emancipation settlement, in which Jews were supposed to be men
on the outside and Jews on the inside (gender intended), the doubled Jew became
two people in a process that Freud called “a doubling, dividing and interchanging
of the self.””° The Jew divided between inside and outside now became two people;
or more exactly, one person and a ghost, neither being sure which they really were.
That uncertainty was viral in modern Europe, as Proust’s account shows. It made
the home unheimlich, the body a source of suspicion, and the name devoid of
meaning under the surveillance of an increasingly haunted panopticism.
In the late 1920s, haunted by the loss of the world of the Arcades, Benjamin
saw them as being the place of ghosts. He recounts a complex dream centered on
the fear of doors in which he walked with a friend, only for a ghost to appear in
the window of a house: “And as we walked on, the ghost accompanied us from
inside all the houses. It passed through all the walls and always remained at the
same height with us. I saw this, though I was blind. The path we travel through
arcades is fundamentally such a ghost walk, on which doors give way and walls
yield.”?! It seems that we walk in the Arcades not with the ghost but as the ghost,
a being for whom walls and houses are no obstacle to the gaze. As Benjamin sug-
gested, houses and doors are not unusual dream symbols. Freud read the house
as representing the body and a door as being an orifice. Benjamin’s fear of the
open door perceived with his castrated dream vision” is then the fear of the open
body, the uncivilized or uncanny body that exceeds its limits. In the Western
196 Nicholas Mirzoeff

European economy of the period (that is to say, a household), the body that can-
not be named is the Jewish body, the absent presence in the Arcades. As Benjamin
imagines himself wandering through the convolutes of the Arcades, using avatars
like Baudelaire and Blanqui, he never encounters Jews whose absence becomes a
structuring principle to the work. Writing to Gershom Scholem in 1928 at a time
when he was constantly deferring a move to Jerusalem to stay on just a little longer
in Greek Europe (to use Matthew Arnold’s term), Benjamin claimed: “This is per-
haps my last chance to devote myself to the study of Hebrew and to everything
we think is connected with it. First and foremost, in terms of my being ready for
the undertaking, heart and soul. Once I have one way or another completed the
project on which I am currently working, carefully and provisionally—the highly
remarkable and extremely precarious essay “Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Fairy
Play.’””*? At this stage, then, his Arcades project was a ghost story in opposition
to a “Jewish” experiment. In the very first draft of subject headings for the Arcades
project, there was an entry for “ghetto” that Benjamin did not develop.*4 Later
the Arcades became a Jewish-free Arcadia until the return of the ghost. The Jewish
ghost is the vantage point of this hauntology, not because Jewishness is claimed
as a new paradigm, but precisely because of the ambivalences and ambiguities of
Jewishness. How is Jewishness even to be defined? as a religion? But what of secu-
lar Jews? As an ethnicity? But isn’t that the Nazi game? As a nation? But aren't we
trying to get beyond nations now? My interest is in the unconvinced Jewish
person for whom Jewish identity is that which refuses to be defined in a singular
or exclusive way, that which cannot be reduced. In these so-called post-identity
times, perhaps Jewishness, which never figured in the multicultural identity poli-
tics of the 1980s and early 1990s, might be an interesting way into the network.
Clearly my work is itself further haunted by the ghost of the Holocaust,
from its choice of theory to its subjects like Freud and Benjamin who fled the
Nazis with differing results. Rather than being an attempt to claim a Holocaust
sublime that places one’s work beyond question, this positioning is a recognition
that the Holocaust is, for a variety of reasons, ever more central to contemporary
visual culture. In film alone, recent work ranges from mainstream films like The
Prince of Egypt and Saving Private Ryan to independent work such as Paragraph
175 or Aimée and Jaguar. What work are these Holocaust films, TV shows, art
pieces, and comics trying to do? In this connection, Dominick LaCapra has
recently emphasized a distinction between representation that simply acts out its
trauma and that which finally seeks to work it through. In my estimation, this
 Ghostwriting: Working Out Visual Culture 197

comforting alternance cannot in fact be enacted.”> Rather visual culture is

currently working out—working itself out, creating work, exercising itself—but
with no expectation of working through to another side that no longer seems
available. When Attorney General John Ashcroft has used the therapeutic
language of closure to justify the closed-circuit television relay of the execution
of Timothy McVeigh, some working out of new terms is in order. As the “West”
endlessly deploys the ghosts of the Holocaust to represent itself both as victim
and redeemer, critics of visual culture need to follow Marcellus’s old advice to
Horatio and speak to them. It is, of course, precisely silence that has so often been
demanded in the face of the Shoah, but one needs to be able to make a distinc-
tion between the abyss that has come to be known by the proper name Auschwitz
and its multiple representations in the present.
By way of example, I want to explore briefly the visual culture of perhaps
the best known ghost of the Shoah, Anneliese Marie Frank, known to the world
as Anne Frank. She began to write what might well be called her prison writings
on her thirteenth birthday in June 1942.76 By beginning on the day when a Jewish
boy becomes a man, Frank asserted another emancipation, that of Jewish women.
Soon afterward, the family was forced into hiding. Anne immediately pasted the
walls with her collection of postcards and film stars, noting: “I have transformed
the walls into one gigantic picture.”*” Some of these pictures have survived and
present a striking bricolage ranging from Greta Garbo and other Hollywood stars
to by now obscure Nazi-era screen actors, reproductions of Rembrandt paintings,
Dutch landscapes, a medieval Pieta, and family pictures. The Franks were obser-
vant enough to fast for Yom Kippur in hiding and at the same time, despite all
the problems that Anne had with her family, these Christian and other graven
images were in no way controversial. Anne’s picture wall enacted the tensions of
her past identity, at once assimilated, Dutch, Jewish, and modern, that was now
gone, a ghost. Unable to look out openly, she and her older sister, Margot, would
take turns peeking out from behind the blinds while the other bathed, turning
the front office into their own camera obscura.”® In a peculiar irony, she had
received the book Camera Obscura on her birthday, which she traded because
Margot already owned it.
The Anne that we know visually through her famous photographs was not
familiar to Anneliese. Annotating her own images, Anne wrote: “This photograph
is horrible and I look absolutely nothing like it.” Like Freud, Anne Frank was dis-
mayed by her own double, its uncanny quality enhanced precisely by her homeless
198 Nicholas Mirzoeff

condition. In response, as she grew older, Frank redoubled herself. In January 1944
she wrote to her imaginary friend: “Isn’t it odd, Kitty, that sometimes I look at my-
self through someone else’s eyes? I see quite keenly then how things are with Anne
Frank.” On another sheet, she continued: “I browse through the pages of her life
as if she were a stranger.”*° Anne looks at herself from the point of view of the ghost
and sees that she used to think of herself as “a bit of an outsider,” a position that
her imprisonment had made unavailable. In her recent series Anne in New York, the
American artist Rachel Schreiber inserted the very photograph of Anne Frank that
so displeased its subject into Iris prints of Manhattan, using Adobe PhotoShop soft-
ware. Despite the well-known possibilities of digitally altering images, the gallery
audience was surprised to find graffiti of Anne’s picture in so many places; they
found her too iconic to be a manipulation.
What is at stake in this doubled recognition and misrecognition? It might
be said that it represents a return of the real. Perhaps, so long as we agree with Avery
Gordon that “its not that the ghosts dont exist.”*! Anne Frank’s head seems at home
in New York precisely because she is always already there, for real. Anne Frank is
always already in New York because she enacts a displacement and disavowal of the
new anxieties in the ghost of the old. In New York there are many survivors of the
Holocaust in its various forms, and still more people who live at some degree of
separation from those events. In an intriguing counterpoint, the Dutch photogra-
pher Renate Dijkstra exhibited a series of large-scale color photographs in 2001 of
Dutch teenage girls the same age as Anne Frank was in captivity. These local “Annes”
have always been overshadowed by her Other, the universal Anne Frank, whose
sentence “I still believe people are good” has become a motto of liberal humanism.
This Anne has been so disturbing to some that Cynthia Ozick, in a notorious 1997
essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” that first appeared in the New Yorker, professed
that she wished Frank’s diary had been burned. The famous diary was represented
here as a travesty that had been: “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced,
reduced . . . infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized . . . falsified,
kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.”** For Ozick, if Anne is in
New York, she needs to be exorcised. In line with this thinking, a recent volume ad-
dressing the experience of children in the Holocaust (although only Jewish children
are considered) makes no mention of Anne Frank, seemingly for fear of displacing
the Jewishness of the Holocaust.*? As a new Orthodoxy seeks to define Jewishness
in as closed a fashion as possible, the universal Anne Frank has become an object of
contestation that itself reveals past and present aporias of identity.
 Ghostwriting: Working Out Visual Culture 199

In May 2001 an ABC television mini-series on the life of Anne Frank

claimed the mantle of universality by wrapping her in the family values of Walt
Disney. Disney chairman and CEO Michael Eisner appeared before both episodes
to mention the name Disney as often as possible, while warning parents that cer-
tain scenes were potentially disturbing to children. What Eisner found disturbing
was not Nazism but the glimpses of nudity in the concentration camp scenes. He
boasted that the last section would be shown without advertising but in fact only
thirty minutes of the four hours were without commercials. ABC had no qualms
about showing an advertisement for Viagra, the erection-inducing drug, just af-
ter a “teaser” clip showing Nazi violence to come in the next segment. The implied
logic that aging sadomasochist Nazi freaks** might be inspired by the clip to pur-
chase Viagra would, of course, be anathema to Disney, but today’s sophisticated
media viewers—especially children—are adept at making such connections. Anne
Frank’s ghost, then, is haunting and hunted in New York, and at the same time
invoked for the hawking of all manner of products.
It is not surprising that the Holocaust has come to be named after a young
woman in the era of globalization. For globalization has enacted a shift not just
in relations of consumption but in relations of production, as Gayatri Spivak has
argued: “The subaltern woman is now to a rather large extent the support of
production.” This condition is not acknowledged in the West except insofar as
globalization as culture is figured as feminine, which I take to be a contested
cultural category rather than a biological given. The contradiction of this
moment can be expressed in many ways but here is one: Iranian video artist Shirin
Neshat is rightly becoming a global star for her explorations of the gender divide
in Islamic culture. Neshat’s video work is lushly cinematic, creating ten-minute
epics with casts of hundreds. Black-veiled women hired on location pirouette at
the edge of the sea in a disidentification with orientalism that is nonetheless
starkly beautiful. Neshat’s critique of gender segregation in Islam fits a little too
comfortably with Western stereotypes, even as the policing of gender in her na-
tive Iran has been somewhat relaxed. At the same time, the Taliban in Afghanistan
hold public destructions of artworks, television sets, and videotapes while forcibly
constraining women to the home and making them invisible in public behind
the veil. The Taliban’s anti-modernity relies on the global media to disseminate
their actions and discipline their own subjects, even as it disavows visual culture,
in the knowledge that the least convinced Afghans are still clandestinely watch-
ing television. This counterpoint is felt most acutely in the West as part of the
200 Nicholas Mirzoeff

ongoing drama of imagining the disjunctures of global media.*° In this

hypervisual network, past and present, West and non-West, real and virtual
become inextricably confused. In the time of the ghost, there is no base or
superstructure to ground the phantom. Where, after all, do ghosts go to ground?

This paper was first written before the events of September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington
and the subsequent war in Afghanistan against the Taliban. I have kept the somewhat polemical
flavor of the original essay here, but a forthcoming longer version will consider these events and
their consequences for the analysis.
1. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 70. For a development of this idea, see my essay “The Multiple Viewpoint: Diasporic Visual
Cultures,” in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), 1-18.
2. Janet Semple, Bentham’ Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993), 120.
3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York
and London: Penguin, 1977), 201.
4. Semple, Bentham’ Prison, 16.
5. Ibid., 132.
6. Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., The Letters of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962),
389.
7. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 123.
8. Letters of Oscar Wilde, 403.
9. Ibid., 413.
10, Semple, Bentham’ Prison, 16.
ir. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth
Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988), 26.
12. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge,
Mass., and London: Belknap Press, 1999), 567.
13. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, N.C..,
and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 29—30ff.
14. Frank Podmore, Mediums of the Nineteenth Century, ed. E. J. Dingwall (New York: University
Books, 1963), 1:142.
 Ghostwriting: Working Out Visual Culture 20!

15. See Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England
(London: Virago, 1989).
16. See Jill Casid, “His Master's Obi’: Machine Magic, Colonial Violence, and Transculturation,”
in Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader 2.0 (New York: Routledge, forthcoming.)
17. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1982), 2:195. In the preceding passages, Proust used the derogatory
term “juif” repeatedly, but ascribes Bloch to Israel, thereby making him an assimilated Israelite, a
“French” rather than “Eastern” Jew. See the Pléiade edition of Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
(Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 2:489.
18. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955) 17:248 n. 1.
19. Ibid., 17:225.
20. Ibid., 17:234.
21. Benjamin, Arcades, 409.
22. Lacan argued that “our position in the dream is profoundly that of someone who does not see.
The subject does not see where it is leading, he follows,” Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis,
trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1981), 75. Benjamin’s leap was to transfer the dream state
to the historical setting of the Arcades, in accord with his notion that the nineteenth century was
persistently in a dream.
23. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, eds., The Correspondence of
Walter Benjamin, trans.
Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 322.
24. Benjamin with Frank Hessel, Arcades, 519.
25. See Dominick LaCapra, “Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians’ Debate,”
in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits ofRepresentation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge,
Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 108-27.
26. David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, eds., The Diary ofAnne Frank: The Critical Edition
(New York and London: Doubleday, 1989), 177.
a7 \bids, 217%
28. Ibid., 257.
29. Ibid., 190.
30. Ibid., 455, version a and b.
31. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 12, emphasis in original; I thank Janet Wolff for this
reference.
32. Reprinted in Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2001).
202 Nicholas Mirzoeff

33. Anita Brostoff and Sheila Chamovitz, eds., Flares of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the
Holocaust (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
34. These concerns are addressed in Rachel Schreiber’s remarkable 1996 video piece, “Please Kill
Me, I’m a Nigger Faggot Jew,” which puts into contact a family photograph album of her grand-
parents’ visit to Europe in 1937 and the artist’s on-line questionnaire to Nazi sadomasochists.
35. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing
Present (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 67.
36. These terms are adopted from Arjun Appadurai’s now-classic definition of globalization in his
Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
“Theory,” Discipline, and Institution

Stephen Melville

In the following pages, I want to sketch out the rough dimensions of a project or
a problem along two axes—one historiographical and touching on a particular
constitution of the discipline of art history, and the other more or less directly
historical and dealing with the very recent past of both art and theory.! I will close
by locating certain institutional questions at the intersection of these two axes, and
I will just signal in advance that my general sense of such questions is powerfully
informed by Bill Readings’s account of what he calls “the university in ruins” and
which he describes in terms of the collapse of “culture” into something he and
contemporary university administrations have called “excellence.”* My own short-
hand for this will emphasize the purging of the university of its objects—something
that too often feels like clarification of their epistemological status.

I will begin with Heinrich Wolfflin’s Principles ofArt History and two very
standard objections to it. Teaching this text to undergraduates recently I heard,
as if for the first time, these objections, familiar enough taken individually, in
their interconnection. The first is that Wolfflin offers nothing more than a rigid
classificatory scheme, easily mastered and devoid of further interest. The second
is that there are too many things out there that Wolfflin, penned into the narrow
compass of Western high art as well as a still narrower concern for the Renaissance
and baroque, cannot address: these would include all non-Western art, all Western
art prior to the Renaissance, the work of popular culture at any historical
moment, and the modern art that perhaps ought to have been the most salient
emergent fact of his own present. The last of these I think is and is not a special
case, and I set it aside for the moment; all the others would seem to fall into
Wolfflin’s rather commodious category of “the primitive.” I’ve referred to this as
a category, but it clearly doesn’t have anything approaching the status of either
classical or baroque in Wélfflin’s text; it’s more nearly the word he uses for what
he’s not talking about but which sometimes has to be mentioned.
The two objections can be addressed in essentially the same way, most
204 Stephen Melville

directly by putting up a pair of slides—I follow Wolfflin’s use of Van Orley and
Diirer—and working through all the ways in which Wolfflin would have you call
the one classical and the other baroque, and then replacing the Van Orley with
Hals and showing that the Diirer is now properly described as classical.* The first
thing this does is render wholly perspicuous the relation between W6lfllin’s appa-
ratus of paired concepts and his insistence that “the history of forms never stands
still.”4 “Crystallization” is the work he wants his terms to do, and that’s a term that
does not mean apart from a prior acknowledgment of fluidity and continuous
transformation.’ But the second thing it does, and that I hadn't seen before, is show
(I suppose the word should be in quotation marks) the primitive in, or as the dis-
appearance of, the Van Orley. Just as the baroque engenders the classical, so also
their dynamic engenders the primitive on which they appear to depend, and which
has no more real priority than the classical itself; the primitive may in some sense
be a condition for art’s becoming historical, but it is first of all an effect of it and
has no visibility—say, no visuality, because we need some different word for how
the primitive shows in or as its vanishing—apart from that.°
The issues might now seem to shape up this way: If you're well disposed
toward Wolfflin and so want to open his terms beyond the narrow historical scope
he uses to define them—trying, then, to discover the more various terms through
which the underlying tension between rendering things as they are and things as
they appear might be engaged across a range of cultures and times—if you want
to do something like this, you may well find his reach is longer than it seemed at
first, but you will not make “the primitive” go away; it is structurally bound to,
so reproduced by, the dynamic that otherwise appears to make inroads into the
primitive and excluded.
You might then feel that it would be better to renew your objection,
finesse Wolfflin’s terms, and take aim at this primitive directly, or at least to admit
that the region of active W6lfflinian principles is always only a local movement
within a broader cultural field not governed by them. But of course there’s a difficulty
here: the primitive as such, visual culture taken as directly available, is invisible,
disappearing into culture tout court and reappearing only when pulled out of that
embeddedness by the workings of some larger history of vision (we construct
visual culture out of a problem we must already have with “art”).”
This looks, of course, like a disciplinary choice: a principled art history,
on the one hand, always producing an imagination of culture that will escape it
or, on the other hand, a form of cultural anthropology that is closed against
 “Theory,” Discipline, and Institution 205

understanding the visuality that is the distinguishing mark of its object. If we opt
for visual culture as the presiding context for the history of art, we are bound to
rediscover it as being no more than a reflex of that history; reversing the choice
and beginning with the principles of art history, we are bound to discover that they
have as their consequence the permanent relegation of some part of the visual to
invisibility. Either way, we found our attempts at movement bound to the same
irreducible and divided structure. We are likely to be interested in the various names
we may find for what it is to move within this structure—the ways we might speak
of the primitive as the desire of visual culture, for example, or of mourning as the
shape of art history’s relation to its own historical conditions.®

I want now to work essentially the same problem from a distinctly different angle
and along a different axis. It is hard, for me at least, to imagine any serious account
of the peregrinations of recent art that does not start, one way or another, from
Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.” I don’t want to review that essay in any
detail, but I do want to note a number of particular features of it. First, a part of
its apparent inevitability in thinking about art since the mid-1960s is the rather
distinctive fact that even those most adamantly at odds with its judgments have
tended to strongly embrace its descriptions of the minimalist—or, following Fried,
literalist or theatrical—work it attacks. A second feature follows directly from this
but deserves separate statement: Fried’s argument turns on what he takes to be a
certain repeated failure—on the part of both artists and viewers—to attend to their
own experience; this is the general form of the argument as a whole, which is why
my first fact is so very peculiar. It gets a particular salience at the moment in which
Fried tries to get the reader to see that Tony Smith has—what should one say here?
“mistaken”? “betrayed”? “failed”? how about “not had”—what he would otherwise
call “his own experience.”? And this point opens in turn to the third thing 'd want
to emphasize at the outset, which is the extent to which the essay is readable
in terms of two contrasting construals of “interest.” What’s explicit is Fried’s
disparaging of Judd’s use of the word “interest” to name what seems a relatively
optional and strongly subjective attitude very much at the disposal of the viewer
and to which the object may, more or less successfully, appeal. Implicitly, Fried
must, I think, be drawing on a rather different notion of interest, one that would
make much of the word’s etymological sense of “being between,” as if “interest”
206 Stephen Melville

approached a term like Heidegger’s “care” in naming the actual extension of our
being in the world.!° An interest in this sense is subject to both discovery and
refusal or denial, and not simply to having or not having. It is possible, for example,
to take or fail to take an interest in one’s experience, just as it is possible to mis-
take that interest or that experience. Presumably, Fried is free to argue that those
who embrace his description of the work but not his judgment of it participate in
the mistaking of experience and the attenuated grasp of interest that, on his view,
informs the work itself. In doing so, he would be taking the same liberty to “cor-
rect” their experience that he evidently feels free to take with Tony Smith."
These are relatively deep features of an argument that at its more prop-
erly descriptive level insists on the peculiar presence put into play by the literalist
work. Here one could say a great deal—most of Fried’s essay is devoted to parsing
the terms of this presence—and I will simply underline one of its most salient
features, the distinctly confrontational quality that Fried ties to the literalist work's
way of claiming to be an object only by and as the concealing of a subject,
imposing on the viewer a marked awareness of itself as, in effect, both pinned down
and folded back upon itself.!? One will note here remarks by Fried to the effect
that “the object, not the beholder must remain the center or focus of the situation;
but the situation itself belongs to the beholder—it is /is situation” or that there is
a “special complicity that the work extorts from the beholder . . . when the fulfill-
ment of that demand consists simply in being aware of it and, so to speak, in acting
accordingly” or, finally, from the tail end of an often-cited passage, that the work’s
relation to the beholder is one in which “it refuses to stop confronting him,
distancing him, isolating him.”!?
My images have of course already given the point away (or, if they haven't,
I’ve lost the point and nothing I can say will win it back): Fried’s 1967 account of
minimalism and Michel Foucault’s 1977 account of the panopticon" are extraor-
dinarily resonant with one another. The relation between these two images is
historically ambiguous: if we read them in one direction, we'll say that what the
image from Foucault’s book brings into view is a particular historical formation
that is a part of minimalism’s broad, and perhaps deep, context. But it may also be
important to read the history in the other direction, and so to say that Smith’s work
shows here as part of the determining context in which Foucault’s showing of his
image will be—has actually been—received. If we make the widespread mistake
of taking Discipline and Punish as offering a theory of vision, we'll think it “proves”
something about minimalism (or, perhaps vice versa); if we take it, correctly, as an
 “Theory,” Discipline, and Institution 207

historical or genealogical diagnosis of a practice of vision integral to the emergence

of the modern social sciences and the mechanisms of control continuous with
them, we may well have a question about our continuing willingness—if that’s the
right word—to inscribe ourselves within them. One form of that question might
be: What are we to make of the passage from the panopticon to minimalism to
Fredric Jameson’s description of the structuralist discovery as of “the prison house
of language” and so to our desire, receiving Discipline and Punish, that Foucault
should be a theorist of vision and not its diagnostician?}>
This question has some extensions worth getting very quickly out into the
open. The presumed “theory of vision” running around here is essentially Sartrean—
a theory of the objectifying, even mortifying, force of the gaze. If one understands
Foucault to diagnosing rather than holding this theory, one will see that Sartre
must also be among his targets, so the diagnosis bears not only on the social
sciences but also on an entire imagination of freedom and human being that may
well appear to set itself against such objectification but that is absolutely complici-
tous with its terms. We will then be very interested in locating Jameson's work, and
especially his early and influential account of structuralism and _post-
structuralism, within this context, and we will be equally interested in what seems
to be our repeated desire to embrace the Sartrean theory of vision while attribut-
ing it elsewhere—to Foucault in this instance, but certainly also to Lacan.'° We
will be interested also in thinking once again about the various kinds of render-
ings of or addresses to the human or the social that arise in the wake of minimalism
(and we may take a special interest in, for example, the moment in which Jameson
turns his attention to the work of Hans Haacke). We will be interested in Fried’s
resort, wittingly or not, to the Sartrean term “situation” in order to describe what
he takes to be problematic in minimalism, just as we will be interested in the way
the architectural fact of the gallery now seems to surge up around that “situation”
as the walls of the panopticon surge up around the Benthamite prisoner. And
finally we may well want to start exploring the possible relations between Fried’s
way of taking up “experience” and “interest” and what seems to me the best
overall gloss we can give to Foucault on “power.” Unlike vision, this is something
he has a direct, and difficult, interest in having a theory of, and I think Foucault’s
repeated effort, probably most nearly achieved in the first volume of the History
of Sexuality, is to grasp power as, above all, an effect of action, with the political
question then always being about who does or does not have under, one condition
or another, access to those effects.
208 Stephen Melville

This has all been very quick and sketchy, but I nonetheless hope I’ve man-
aged to get out enough to get out at least a rough sense of what's at stake here—say,
a question of how we are or are not able, in our theory and perhaps also in our
lives (and certainly in our recent artistic and intellectual history) to admit various
interlacings or dispersions of objectivity, experience, and interest or exposure.'7

“Art and culture.” In 1961, when Clement Greenberg used this phrase to entitle a
volume of selected essays, its grammar was secure enough that there was no ambi-
guity in it, no surprise in finding that art just was “culture in its highest and most
authentic sense” '8’—and that was reason enough to both distinguish and link the
two terms. The book itself, its arguments and influences, has a particular place in
relation to the recent history staked in the second part of this paper, while the evi-
dent failure or loss of the grammar it assumed is perhaps what the first part has staked.
What would it mean to speak of a grammatical failure here, of a certain
loss of legibility not in the big serious words like “art” and “culture,” but in the
little “and” that makes a phrase like this an articulation and not just a name? It
would certainly mean that when we say this phrase we do not know what it means,
not because that meaning is mysterious or hidden or in need of some clarification
that would come from attending more closely to what we meant by “art” or “cul-
ture” or both; rather, we do not know what it means because it does not and
presumably cannot meet the conditions of meaning. We don't, as it were, know
how “art” and “culture” give themselves over to binding and separation, do not
know how to use them—as we were so often asked to do in (what was sometimes
but I suspect is no longer called) grammar school—“in a sentence.” Some of the
sentences in which we are currently asked, even obliged, to use them are the kind
that compose (or fail to compose) a paper like this. Others, though, are sentences
written on or as more complex surfaces—the kinds of sentences that compose a
curriculum or constitute a university, the kinds of sentences that can sometimes
be read directly off a campus plan or the articulations visible in an administrative
hierarchy or are parsed in all those elements—course titles, prerequisites, distribu-
tion requirements, and so on—that make a curriculum something other than a list
of items available for consumption.
Greenberg's way of using “and” to link “art” and “culture” is what has
historically been written and rewritten all across the modern university. “Culture”
 “Theory,” Discipline,
and Institution 209

is the more embracing term, and it is institutionally articulated both in its nor-
mativity (through the social sciences) and in its “highest and most authentic”
achievements (through the humanities).!? To say that this grammar has failed, is
no longer legible, is to say that while we can of course still walk from one build-
ing to another or take one course after another, we do not manage to mean anything
in doing so—or that if we do nonetheless manage to mean something our access
to that meaning, say to the effects of our action, is somehow blocked or damaged.
This is pretty much a paraphrase of Bill Readings’s diagnosis of the con-
temporary university, and I think that diagnosis is pretty much right. What we’ve
come to call “theory” is very much an element in the difficult sentences we write
in and with our institutional lives, and so we do well to take in the full force of
(for example and something more than example) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
writing that: “The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance.
The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction,
‘and...and...and....’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and up-
root the verb ‘to be.’””°
The opposition of filiation and alliance is from Claude Lévi-Strauss. It
structures the grid of sense that becomes available to human beings in the wake of
the arbitrary cut of the incest taboo (and because the cut is arbitrary, the human
beings are always some human beings, plural, uneasy in the limits and sharing of
their humanity).”! It’s part of Lévi-Strauss’s analysis that there be two axes here—
call them, following Lévi-Strauss’s own linguistic lead, “paradigmatic” and
“syntagmatic,” or “metaphoric” and “metonymic,” or call them, following the gram-
maticalization of A Thousand Plateaus, “is” and “and”—and see how in doing this
neither you nor Deleuze and Guattari gain any relief from the difficulties of that
grammar.”* You are at best newly obliged to read and to write, to find there what
you can of things that interest you. The permission given—and so freely taken by
Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus—to stroll as you will or must is an
imposition and not a lifting of responsibility.”
We are—I mean that to have force of something like “we be”—in igno-
rance of our own grammar, do not know what grammar we speak—and find
ourselves returned again and again to the arbitrariness of the cuts on which we
nonetheless depend. This is a lesson of theory we have taken badly, weakly, and
the effects of which we have yet to make institutional sense of. I have, in effect,
granted someone often called “the formalist” —W6lfflin in one guise, Fried in
another—a certain lead in trying to show this, and I suspect this is because I take
210 Stephen Melville

what the formalist knows, if he or she knows nothing else, is that no “field of knowl-
edge” exists except as a writing on objects. This means that such writing is answerable
to the folds and fissures that define that object, and answerable as well to the ways
in which these make writing something like a dimension of that object as well as
an extension of it. Such objectivity itself is always divided, always has impurity as
its condition” and so may find itself subject to purging in a university that would
rather imagine itself as offering a certain line of pure products. If objectivity—the
having of objects—is shaped and divided like this, then our senses of theory and
discipline must also be so divided if they are to have any seriousness at all.
This collection of essays asks, among many other questions, “Can we still
define the parameters of what should properly constitute the objects of the history
of art?,” and I suppose what I’ve wanted to do in this paper is get at some of what
it would take to respond by asking, “Can we begin to define the parameters of
what must improperly constitute the objects of the history of art?” Presumably the
ability to further rewrite that question would be one among those parameters.

1. Because this paper was intended from the outset as a relatively informal sketch, I have done very
little to revise it for publication. The conference organizers did suggest that revision might include
some attention to a number of questions clearly raised by the conference over all, and I have tried to
comply with that request by adding a series of footnotes unpacking elements of the argument in light
of one or more of those questions.
2. See Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
See also my remarks on art history and visual culture in October 77 (Summer 1996).
3. Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles ofArt History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art,
trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 42—43, 136. My point depends, of
course, in bringing these particular images together in a way Wélfflin’s text systematically avoids but
that is nonetheless fully responsive to the actual terms of his argument. (This is not the last place I
will remark on W6lfHlin’s tendency to blunt or diffuse his own arguments.) The general reading from
which my observations follow is Marshall Brown, “The Classic is the Baroque: On the Principle of
Wolfflin’s Art History,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 2 (December, 1982). See also my “The Temptation of
New Perspectives,” October 52 (Spring 1990).
4. WolfHlin, Principles of Art History, 230.
5. In this respect at least, Wolfflin seems oddly close to Robert Smithson—as, for example, in Smithson’s
remark (from “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan”) that “Art brings sight to a halt, but that
 “Theory,” Discipline,
and Institution 21 |

halt has a way of unraveling itself.” See Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 129.
6. Wolfflin’s recognition of this is typically hedged. “The point of departure must, of course, be given
.... But that a classic art comes into being at all . ..—that is by no means a matter of course”
(Wolfflin, Principles ofArt History, 229). The historical work of retroaction and after-effect is—no
surprise at all—just what one also runs up against in imagining origins to language; Wélfflin’s style
terms do to a high degree the work that is done by the interplay metaphor and “literal meaning” in
those imaginations, and his writing repeatedly runs up against and almost loses itself in the resultant
complexity. It’s hard not to feel the presence of Hélderlin in remarks like:

We denote the series of periods with names like Early Renaissance, High
Renaissance, and Baroque, names which mean little and must lead to misunder-
standing in their application to south and north, but are hardly to be ousted now.
Unfortunately the symbolic analogy bud, bloom, decay, plays a secondary and
misleading part. If there is in fact a qualitative difference between the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, in the sense that the fifteenth had gradually to acquire
by labour the insight into effects which was the free disposal of the sixteenth,
the (classic) art of the Cinquecento and the (baroque) art of the Seicento are
equal in point of value.
The word classic here denotes no judgment ofvalue,
for
baroque has its classicism too. Baroque (or, let us say, modern art) is neither a
rise nor a decline from classic, but a totally different art. The occidental devel-
opment of modern times cannot simply be reduced to a curve with rise, height,
and decline: it has two culminating points. (Wé6lfflin, Principles of Art History, |3—|4).

7. To the organizers’ question “What happens to art history once its adherence to the canon has been
questioned? What arguments can be fielded to support its centrality for the discipline?,” Wolfflin ev-
idently has a two-pronged answer: On the one hand, since both the classical and the primitive are
ultimately driven, shaped, and reshaped, by the baroque, there is nothing that can be called “the
canon’ except from within some particular present that will, necessarily, change and so change (undo,
redo) that canon as well; on the other hand, the logic that binds baroque, classical, and primitive to
one another renders canonicity—there being some canon (“some canon”: “one canon or another”
but also “a bit of canon”)—a necessary consequence of (as well as condition for) there being a work
at all (for its appearing as such).
8. I’m thinking here primarily of Michael Holly’s recent writings on this topic, but also, somewhat
differently, of Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2001).
2/2 Stephen Melville

9. As Philip Armstrong has reminded me, the desire to take experience as “one’s own’—-say essentially
private and corrigible only from within—is a symptom of what is at issue and not an address to it.
10. Jean-Luc Nancy, in such works as The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1996) and The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey Librett (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), in effect translates or revises Heidegger's “care” as “exposure,” a possibly use-
ful term in thinking through what amounts in this argument to a deconstruction of experience.
u. The phrasing here is intentionally somewhat breezy. One may well wonder what kind of liberty
this is, and the answer will be that it is presumably the kind of liberty reading permits—a liberty that
has some significant element of obligation, or, as I will tend to put it, objectivity.
12. The grammatical ambiguity of this sentence was initially unintended but is also incorrigible (it’s
a part of what Fried is diagnosing) and so has been more firmly embraced in revision than in the ini-
tial presentation. I am tempted to take it as the best place from which to respond to the organizers’
question about method—*“Can visual culture aspire to a methodology, or does the very concept mili-
tate against its objectives?”—by saying that the situation set up here is one that in reducing the
complexities of a work’s presence to a sort of unstable epistemological riddle and thus repeatedly re-
producing “subjects” and “objects” as pure distances from one another, both continually creates and
continually frustrates a demand for “method” as a way of either overcoming or fixing that distance.
“Methodology” in this sense would be opposed to (although it might also be imagined as a weak de-
rivative of) the principled disciplinarity that depends much more explicitly on working through a
prior relation constitutive of objectivity as such.
133. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in his Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 154, 155, 163-64.
14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan. (New York: Random House, 1977).
15. Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian
Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
16. On Lacan and the gaze, see “Division of the Gaze, or Remarks on the Color and Tenor of
Contemporary “Theory,” in Stephen Melville, Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context (Amsterdam:
G+B Arts, 1996).

17. This is perhaps as good a place as any to take up another of the organizers’ questions about
“the fate of aesthetics in light of the anti-universalist assumptions that fuel visual culture.” This is
the general form the question ofaesthetics took throughout the symposium, and I believe it to be
a bad form, resulting in aesthetics taking a notably bad—and at moments nearly McCarthyite—
rap at the symposium. The leading target here was, properly enough, Kant and references to
“universality” mostly meant “Kant.” But I would argue that the real center of aesthetics, especially
Kantian aesthetics, lies not in any claims to universality but in more specific claims for the par-
ticularity of aesthetic judgment—a judgment that is peculiar because it is, on Kant’s account,
 “Theory,” Discipline,
and Institution 213

necessarily voiced (thus different from cognitive judgments) but at the same time spoken in a voice
not simply the speaker’s own (thus not simply subjective).
Final revision of this paper was interrupted by, among other things, a ride on the Maid of
the Mist into the heart of Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls. As our boat turned away from the sustained van-
ishing of the world into an almost limitless apeiron of mist and spray and light and air, a man who
had been standing near us in the bow remarked, “Schoen, hein?” To his knowledge he and his com-
panion were the only German speakers within earshot, but he was not speaking exactly to himself,
nor was he speaking to her—not as he had on the way out nor even as he had when we were in the
midst of the thing. This is perhaps why “remarked” feels like the right verb here—of the verbs English
can use to name speaking, it is the most “objective’—a “remark” is as much a feature of a thing as it
is of our address to it, just as “remarkability” is something we easily attribute to the world or things
in it. Things we offer as remarks we are unusually willing to have pass unheard or let be only over-
heard. It’s very tempting to say that aesthetic judgments of the Kantian kind are in their actual
existence more often remarks than propositions; in any case, everything about this moment seems
to me on the Kantian mark: its confusion of tongues, the uncertainty in who is speaking to or for
whom, and even the uncertainty about whether “schoen” might not be just the wrong word here or
what it might mean that this word was spoken not in the midst of the falls, but in the turning away.
The forms of judgment Kant distinguishes as aesthetic—the judgments of taste and of the
sublime—amount to ways in which we might feel ourselves to have discovered something of how
we are, respectively, at home in the world and not finally subject to it (things not discoverable either
as matters of knowledge or morality); universality is certainly something variously claimed and tested
in these judgments—it’s tempting to say it belongs, above all, to both the necessity and nature of
their voicing—but it is not their core.
This relates closely to the further question, “Does the notion of ‘art’ necessarily imply the
concept of autonomy?” Here it seems to me the Kantian response bears upon the grounds of judg-
ment and the distinctness of those grounds, and so those judgments, from those of other judgments
we also make; and Kant claims, in effect, that we can and do draw that distinction regularly. This
does not mean that things we judge beautiful or call “art” are somehow lifted out of the world; rather,
they are places where we discover a particular and crucial dimension of our experience—and “we”
are at stake in that discovery.
18. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 33.
19. On this general topic, see both Readings, The University in Ruins and Foucault, The Order of
Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970).
20. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B, Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25.
21. Jean-Luc Nancy closes The Muses by writing of “/art et les gens,” a phrase Peggy Kamuf smartly
214 Stephen Melville

leaves in French, noting only that “when used in a general or indefinite sense, [gens] is ordinarily
translated as ‘people.”” Nancy’s own remarks on the term (“a vestige word if there ever was one”)
point out its relation to both genre and gender, its rootedness in the Latin gens (singular, unlike the
French gens—this internal passage between singular and plural is a part of Nancy’s interest in the
word) and gentes (“tribes”). Further variations arise from hearing est for et, is for and, and from hear-
ing, uneasily, both légend and Jégion for les gens. The first is not quite French but brings “art” into
conjunction or identity with what might be rendered either as “a story told from the past” or “a cap-
tion” or, more literally, “reading,” while the second underlines its multiplicity. In English “legend”
has some history of being (abusively, the OED says) used in this latter sense, but the abuse is hardly
deep: legion and legend alike derive from Jegere, whose capacity to draw together reading and gath-
ering reflects its own derivation from the Greek Jogos. Les gens: a name for what departs from itself.
22. Although it may well be that your sense of “grammar” is transformed (in roughly the way your
sense of meaning is transformed) when “metaphor” and “metonymy” come to stand in the place of
“paradigm” and “syntagma.”
23. It’s perhaps useful to hear also Emerson as Stanley Cavell is fond of quoting him: “‘I shun father
and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-
post, Whim.’ ... The point I emphasize here is only that the life-giving power of words, of saying
‘I,’ is your readiness to subject your desire to words (call it Whim), to become intelligible, with no
assurance that you will be taken up (‘I hope it may be better than Whim at last, but we cannot spend
our day in explanations’).” Stanley Cavell, Jn Quest ofthe Ordinary: Lines ofSkepticism and Romanticism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 114.
24. The quotation marks on “field of knowledge” mark a certain formalist inability to understand
this field as other than derivative from a prior formation that will be described in other terms.
Dialectics of Seeing

Hal Foster

I missed the import of Rembrandt's The Three Trees, the poster image for our con-
ference: I didn’t catch that they were supposed to stand for art history, aesthetics,
and visual studies. I also blanked after Michael Ann Holly presented her litany of
famous trios in art history, all those graces and allegorical threesomes: all I could
think of were famous trios in nursery tales. But then the most obvious ones, such
as the Three Little Pigs and the Wolf, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears, might
work for me. As a young art critic in the 1980s, I identified with the Big Bad Wolf:
my milieu of artists and writers thought, arrogantly enough, that it could blow
down the ramshackle edifices of art history and aesthetics with a huff and a puff.
(Maybe we thought the third hut, visual studies, would be made of brick, but at
the time the third term was critical theory, not visual studies, and it was on the
side of the wolf. What has happened to it? Is it now absorbed into the other huts,
hybridized into the other trees? Or is it regarded as so much debris and rot?) Now,
as a not-so-young art historian in the 2000s, I identify more with Goldilocks: I’m
always tasting somebody else’s porridge, and frequently sleeping in the wrong bed,
whether that of art history, aesthetics, or visual studies. Or rather, like Goldilocks,
I’m moving, uncomfortably, from bowl to bowl and from cot to cot, with some
bad tastes, interrupted dreams, and bearish grumblings behind me as I go.
On that note of displacement I want to shift from our given trio of art
history, aesthetics, and visual studies in order to consider a different threesome:
modern art practice, art museum, and art history. I want to consider “the
memory-structure” that these three agencies have co-produced over the last 150
years or so (I trust this term will become clearer). More precisely, I want to sketch
a “dialectics of seeing” in this memory-structure, and to do so across three or four
different moments during this period. I will try to specify each moment with a
particular pairing of figures and texts. For better or worse, all my figures are men
and all my texts canonical, but the men are not triumphant, and today the canon
is less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through. (This was a minority
opinion at this conference, but I hold to it nonetheless, especially as I think it
distinguishes the critical present, politically and strategically, from the recent past.)
My first pair is Baudelaire and Manet. “Memory,” Baudelaire writes in
 216 Hal Foster

Fig. |. Théodore Géricault (French, 179|—1824), The Raft of the “Medusa,” 1819. Oil on canvas, 16 ft. x 23 ft. 6 in. (490 x 716 cm).
Musée du Louvre, Paris

his Salon of 1846, “is the great criterion of art; art is the mnemotechny of the
beautiful.”! What he means, I think, is that a great work in an artistic tradition—
and for Baudelaire this is ambitious painting after the Renaissance; he denigrates
sculpture—must evoke the memory of major precedents in this tradition as its
ground or support. But (and here I follow Michael Fried) the work must not be
overwhelmed by these precedents: it must activate the memory of such impor-
tant images subliminally—draw on them, disguise them, transform them.? As a
positive instance of this “mnemotechny of the beautiful” Baudelaire points to the
persistence of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (fig. 1) in Delacroix’s Barque of Dante
(fig. 2). This kind of subtextuality of mnemonic afterimages—to be distinguished
from any sort of pastiche of overt citations—is what constitutes an artistic
tradition for him, almost in the etymological sense of “tradition” as a passing-on
of potential meanings.’ In this light memory is the medium of painting for
Baudelaire. Iwo quick points. First, in a reversal that has become familiar at least
since T. S. Eliot wrote “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), these after-
images may also be retroactive: the Barque may work its way back into the Raft
 Dialectics of Seeing 217

as well, that is, into mnemonic elaborations of it. In this way tradition is never
given but always constructed, and always more provisionally than it appears (it is
important not to project too much onto it). Second, this model of artistic prac-
tice is already art historical, as it were, and it already presumes the space of the
museum as the structure of its mnemonic effects, as the place (more imaginary
than real) where an artistic tradition happens. Put differently, this mnemotechny
of the beautiful assumes a relay between atelier and studio, where such transfor-
mations are made, and exhibition and museum, where they become effective. In
short, in the Baudelairean scheme, painting is an art of memory, imprinted in
workshop imitations, and the museum is its architecture.‘
Manet emerges soon after this Baudelairean intervention in the mid-
nineteenth-century discourse of artistic memory. He disturbs the Baudelairean
model somewhat, as his practice pushes the subtextuality of mnemonic afterimages
toward a pastiche of overt citations. More explicitly than his predecessors, Manet

Fig. 2. Eugene Delacroix (French, 1798-1863), The Barque of Dante, 1822. Oil on canvas, 74 x 947s in. (189 x 242 cm).
Musée du Louvre, Paris
 218 Hal Foster

exposes a memory-structure of European painting since the Renaissance, or at least

one allusive cluster in this complicated text. (Again, as this memory-structure is not
given, “expose” is not the right word; perhaps “posit” is better.) In any case, ac-
cording to Fried, Manet is overt in his citations because he aspires to subsume the
past synecdochically—through part-to-whole allusions that range from French art
to Spanish art to Italian art (the relevant allusions to Le Nain, Velazquez, and Titian
among others—his Old Musician [1862] is a kind of compendium—are now fa-
miliar).> In this way he produces, perhaps for the first time, the effect of a
trans-European art, of a near totality of such painting—an effect that soon allowed
painting to be imagined as Painting with a capital “PB” and later associated Manet
with the advent of modernist art. One obvious test case here is Le Déjeuner sur
lherbe (fig. 3), not only in its well-known evocations of Renaissance masters like
Raphael (as in the famous engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after the lost Raphael
Judgment of Paris (fig. 4] that Manet cites), but also in its unusual combination of

Fig. 3. Edouard Manet (French, 1832-1883), Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, 1863. Oil on canvas 6 ft. 9 in. x 8 ft. 10 in, (213 x 269 cm).
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
 Dialectics of Seeing 219

traditional genres of painting such

as the nude, still life, portraiture,
and landscape, all of which are
transformed into a “painting of
modern life.” For Fried this text
of images and combination of
genres create a heightened unity
of painting, and it is this unity
that he values from the neoclas-
sical tableau espoused by Diderot
to the late-modernist abstraction
Fig. 4. Marcantonio Raimondi (Italian, c. 1470—c. 1527), Engraving after the lost
Judgment ofParis by Raphael. Print Room, The British Museum, Londonachieved by Frank Stella: a unity
within painting that promotes an
autonomy ofpainting. Baudelaire saw things differently: with his ambivalent homage
to Manet as the first in the “decrepitude” of his art, he implies that the memory-
structure of painting, its continuity as a subtextuality of afterimages, is in danger of
corruption with Manet, perhaps because his citations are too explicit, too various,
too “photographic.”° Rather than choose one critic—Baudelaire or Fried—over the
other, we might reconcile the two if we propose, in a manner not as paradoxical as
it seems, that the memory-structure of post-Renaissance painting is already strained
at the very moment that it is also first grasped.
Let me underscore two points mentioned above: that modern art is
already conceived by Baudelaire and Manet in implicitly art historical terms, and
that this conception depends on its museal setting. Again, this museum is mostly
imaginary, an extended Louvre based on mnemonic traces, graphic reproductions,
and workshop imitations, a museum without walls before André Malraux declared
it so, or perhaps better, a museum with myriad walls, both real and fictive. And
yet this memory-structure is also very limited, centered strictly on painting and
run on a narrow geographical track (mostly Paris to Rome, with a few detours to
Holland and Spain—hardly trans-European). It is also fiercely Oedipal, built on
a structure of paternal workshops and rivalrous groups from “David to Delacroix”
and beyond.’ Yet these very limitations are what makes the transformations of its
language, and the displacements of its desire, so effective. For the most part these
conditions still provide the matrix of the “Valéry Proust Museum” that Theodor
Adorno locates, in his essay of that title, toward the end of the nineteenth century.
(Here then, with Valéry and Proust, our next moment in this “dialectics of seeing,”
220 Hal Foster

we are a few decades on from Baudelaire and Manet.) Yet the views on this
museum have changed. Valéry represents the view that the museum is where “we
put the art of the past to death.”® “Museum and mausoleum are connected by
more than phonetic association,” Theodor Adorno writes, as if in the voice of the
great French poet-critic. “Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art.
They testify to the neutralization of culture.”? According to Adorno, this is the
view of the producer of art in the studio who can only regard the museum as a
place of “reification” and “chaos,” and he distinguishes it from the view that Proust
represents for him. In the Adornian scheme Proust begins where Valéry stops—
with “the afterlife of the work”—which Proust sees from the vantage point not of
the producer of art in the studio but of the viewer of art in the museum. For the
idealist viewer 4 la Proust the museum is a kind of phantasmagoria of the studio,
a spiritual place where the material messiness of artistic production is distilled
away—where, in his own words, “the rooms, in their sober abstinence from all
decorative detail, symbolize the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws to
create the work.”! Rather than a site of actual reification, then, the museum for
Proust is a place of fantastic reanimation, indeed of spiritual idealization. And
rather than a chaos of works, the museum for Proust stages “the competition among
works [which] is the test of truth” (here Adorno speaks for him).!! Although Proust
presents it as benign, this “competition” is essentially the Oedipal dimension of
the memory-structure mentioned above; it is more overt, more agonistic, than the
subtextuality of afterimages implied by Baudelaire.
In the end, however, the Valéry and Proust accounts of the art museum
are no more opposed than the Baudelaire and Manet models of artistic memory.
Rather, each of these pairs points to a dialectic of reification and reanimation in
all such reflections. Of course the first term, reification, is developed by Georg
Lukdcs, not long after the statements of Valéry and Proust, from Marx on com-
modity fetishism. In his great essay “Reification and Class Consciousness” (1922)
Lukacs implies that spiritual reanimation is an idealist compensation for capital-
ist reification; in effect reification and reanimation make up one of “the antinomies
of bourgeois thought” that he details there.!* This antinomy also permeates “the
history of art as a humanistic discipline.” And this (to state it bluntly) is my
principal implication here: that art history is born of a crisis—tacitly assumed,
sometimes projected, often repeated—of a fragmentation and reification of tradi-
tion, which the discipline is pledged (I want to say: founded) to remedy through
a project of reassembly and reanimation. I don’t mean, as Karl Kraus once remarked
 Dialectics of Seeing 22!

of psychoanalysis, that art history is the illness of which it thinks it is the cure. The
memory crises to which the discipline responds are real enough; but precisely
because they are actual, art history cannot solve them but only displace them,
suspend them, or otherwise address them again and again.' This phrase, “the
history of art as a humanistic discipline,” is familiar to art historians; it is the title
of a 1940 essay by Erwin Panofsky in which this father of the modern discipline
defines art history in terms that also point to this dialectic of reification and re-
animation. (Here again, with this third moment of our “dialectics of seeing,” we
move forward a few decades.) “Archaeological research is blind and empty without
aesthetic re-creation,” Panofsky writes, “and aesthetic re-creation is irrational and
often misguided without archaeological research. But, ‘leaning against one
another,’ these two can support the ‘system that makes sense,’ that is, an historical
synopsis.”!4Written in the face of fascism (which Panofsky addresses in his con-
clusion), this text presents the historian as humanist and vice versa, and asserts that
“the humanities . . . are not faced by the task of arresting what otherwise would
slip away, but of enlivening what otherwise would remain dead.”!> This too is an
idealist credo: just as Proust wanted the studio reanimated in the museum, its
materials sublimated there, Panofsky wants the past reanimated in art history, its
fragments redeemed there. This idealist position must be counterposed to the
materialist position of a Walter Benjamin, who, in his “Theses on the Philosophy
of History,” also written in 1940 in the face of fascism, all but inverts the Panofskian
formulation: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the
way it really was,” Benjamin writes. “It means to seize hold of a memory as it
flashes up at a moment of danger.”!°Rather than reanimate and reorder tradition,
Benjamin urges that its fragments be emancipated “from its parasitical dependence
on ritual” and pledged to the present purposes of politics (as he puts it, famously,
in his 1936 essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”).!7
In this way, if Panofsky attempts to resolve the dialectic of reification and
reanimation in favor of reanimation, Benjamin seeks to exacerbate this same dia-
lectic in favor of reification, or rather in favor of a communist condition posited
on the other side of reification. Many leftists in the 1920s and 1930s (such as Antonio
Gramsci) took up this call to fight through “the murky reason” of capitalism, which,
as Siegfried Kracauer argued in The Mass Ornament (1927), “rationalizes not too
much but rather too /ittle.”'® Through the “Artwork” essay Benjamin holds to this
“Fordist” line as well: the shattering of tradition, advanced by mechanical
reproduction, is both destructive and constructive; or, rather, it is initially
222 Hal Foster

destructive and so potentially constructive. At this time Benjamin still had a vision
of potential construction—the Constructivist experiments in the Soviet Union—
which would sweep away the fragments of bourgeois culture or reassemble them,
radically, in proletarian culture. But with the Stalinist suppression of the avant-
garde in the early 1930s this mirage had evaporated, and Benjamin never reached
the other side of reification. Indeed, what seemed imminent in his “The Author as
Producer” (1934) had become Messianic by the time of his “Theses on the Philosophy
of History.” Like the celebrated Angelus Novus in that essay, the 1920 watercolor by
Paul Klee he once owned, Benjamin feels the winds of modernity in his wings, but
they have turned foul: “His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps
piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”!?

Let me clarify what I have intended so far: it is to pose—in terms more heuristic
than historicist—three different ideological frames or “archival relations” among
art practice, museum, and history, and other forces such as mechanical reproduc-
tion, in three different modernist moments: the first associated with Baudelaire
and Manet in the mid-nineteenth century, the second with Valéry and Proust at
the turn of the twentieth century, the third with Panofsky and Benjamin on the
eve of World War II. I borrow the term “archival relation” from Michel Foucault,
who once defined the archive as “the system that governs the appearance of state-
ments,” that structures the particular concepts of a particular period.”° An archival
relation is neither affirmative nor critical; it simply supplies the terms of discourse.
Foucault also sketched an archival relation between Manet and the museum (and
Flaubert and the library): “Every painting now belongs within the squared and
massive surface of painting,” he writes in “Fantasia on the Library” (1967), “and
all literary works are confined to the indefinite murmur of words.”?! For Foucault
too, this archival relation proposes a totality, but a totality of fragments, which
Manet and Flaubert manipulate in works like Le Déjeuner sur herbe and Bouvard
and Pécuchet. This is the museum and the library that modernist successors, such
as “Joyce, Roussel, Kafka, Pound, Borges” and Picasso, Duchamp, Ernst,
Rauschenberg, Warhol, will soon set “on fire.”
For Benjamin, as we know, the instrument of this torching is mechanical
 Dialectics of Seeing 223

reproduction: in the “Artwork” essay it works to strip art of context, to shatter its
tradition, to liquidate its aura. Not only is the “cult value” of art lost in this new
regime, but its replacement, the “exhibition value” of art, its making for the
market and the museum, is also challenged, and in lieu of these old and new
rituals Benjamin advocates a political refunctioning of art. Such is his dialectical
account of the second archival relation as it passes into a third. But this account
was disputed, directly and not, by other voices. I mentioned Panofsky, but Malraux
may be more pertinent here, for he was in dialogue with Benjamin at the time of
the “Artwork” essay, which was important to his initial formulation of the musée
imaginaire.’> Malraux glimpses the same archival transformation as Benjamin, but
he draws different conclusions. For Malraux mechanical reproduction not only
erodes originality; it can also locate it (we might say: construct it).24 And though
the artwork may lose some of its properties as an object, by the same token it gains
other properties, such as “the utmost significance as to style.”> In short, where
Benjamin sees a definitive rupture of the museum forced by mechanical repro-
duction, Malraux sees its indefinite expansion. Where mechanical reproduction
shatters tradition and liquidates aura for Benjamin, it provides the means to
reassemble the broken bits of tradition into one meta-tradition of global styles for
Malraux—a new Museum without Walls whose subject is the Family of Man.
Indeed, for Malraux it is the very flow of a liquidated aura that allows all the
fragments to course together in the River of History, or what he calls “the persist-
ing life of certain forms, emerging ever and again like spectres from the past.”?¢
Here the reified family sepulchres in the museum of Valéry become the reanimated
kindred spirits in the museum of Malraux. Here too the angel of history-as-
catastrophe imagined by Benjamin becomes the technocratic humanist embodied
in Malraux who works to recoup local crises for global continuities, to transform
imagistic chaos into museological order.
In sum, if Baudelaire and Manet trace a first archival relation, which Valéry
and Proust revise in a second relation, then together Benjamin, Panofsky, and
Malraux describe a third relation, another moment in this dialectics of seeing, one
under the full impact of mechanical reproduction. There are other critical voices
to add in this third moment, of course, and I have not touched on the myriad
modernist practices supported by it. Clearly too, there is a fourth archival relation
to consider, one that emerges with consumer society after World War II, and is
registered in different ways by the Independent Group in England, the Situationists
in France, Rauschenberg and Warhol in the United States, Gerhard Richter and
224 Hal Foster

Sigmar Polke in Germany, and so on.”” But here the question I want to pose (and
only to pose) concerns our present: is there yet another archival relation, a further
moment in this dialectics of seeing, allowed by electronic information? If so, does
it shatter tradition and liquidate aura all the more 4 la Benjamin on mechanical
reproduction, or, on the contrary, does it permit the finding of ever more stylistic
affinities, the fostering of ever more artistic values, 4 la Malraux on the musée
imaginaire? Or (a third option) does it render this opposition, indeed all these
terms, this entire dialectic, somehow outmoded, somehow defunct? What cultural
epistemology might a digital reordering underwrite for art practice, art history, and
art museum alike? These are no longer futuristic questions, obviously, but I can’t
respond to them effectively yet (the debate in general still seems dominated by
affirmation and reaction). So in the space left to me here I want to double back to
my hypothesis that the modern discipline of art history is informed by a dialectic
of reification and reanimation—that it is born and reborn as a response to recur-
rent crises of fragmentation and reification—and to point to another pairing in
this “dialectic of seeing” that is more central to the discipline, and perhaps more
resonant for the present.
Here my paired figures—Heinrich Wo6lfflin and Aby Warburg—are not
as dialectically counterposed as Baudelaire and Manet or Benjamin and Malraux,
and they are located ambiguously between these other pairs.”8 Like their near con-
temporaries Valéry and Proust, Wélfflin and Warburg inherit the archival relation
associated here with Baudelaire and Manet, the one that projects both a new to-
tality of European art and a museal chaos of fragments. Seen in this light, this
archival relation all but demanded the synthetic kind of model-terms that these
“critical historians of art” proposed: I mean the diacritical “styles” of Wolfflin and
the “pathos formulas” of Warburg, not to mention the “artistic wills” of Alois Riegl
a little before and the “symbolic forms” of Panofsky a little later. At the same time
the model-terms of Wélfflin and Warburg anticipate the archival relation associ-
ated here with Benjamin and Malraux, the one that elaborates the cultural vicissitudes
of mechanical reproduction in its capacity both to disturb tradition and to rework
it in other ways. (For example, the diacritical styles of Wolfflin, based on the
ur-opposition of classical versus baroque, depend on photographic comparisons,
and Warburg traced his pathos formulas in an unfinished picture-atlas made up of
photographic arrangements.) More precisely, the discourses of Wolfflinian style
and Warburgian pathos formula emerge in such a way as to defend against one side
of both these other archival relations—against the museum as a chaos of fragments
 Dialectics of Seeing 225

in the Bauderlaire-Manet moment, and against mechanical reproduction as a

shattering of tradition in the Benjamin-Malraux moment. They defend against
these forces in the service of unity, or at least of continuity, and also, in the case of
Wolfflin, in the name of the connection of art to national culture, singular sub-
jectivity, original work, and so on.
In the service of unity or continuity. When, in his Principles ofArt History
(1915) Wolffin asks “The Why of Development,” perhaps this “why” betrays an
anxiety that, even then, art might no longer have “development.””? (Warburg
shared this anxiety, and both men worked through it in their art history, in a sense
as their art history.) W6lffin published his Principles only in 1915, though it was
finished well before. The delay is telling, as Martin Warnke has argued, for Wolffin
regarded his Principles “as a repository of sensory prewar experience,” an archive
of refined prewar sensibility destined to be shattered in the Great War—in effect
a memory-structure of European art transcribed for pedagogical preservation.*°
(Again, Warburg also suffered this crisis, perhaps more profoundly—as is well
known, he was committed to an institution for a time—and, especially as a Jew,
he faced the additional threat of an emergent fascism.) Certainly the Principles
did not match up with art practice after the war, and the text was stillborn, epis-
temologically speaking, in 1915. Consider this date in art. It is the year that Duchamp
develops his readymade concept in New York, a model of art that mocks style-
discourse, especially its encoding of singular subjectivity and original work. It is
the year that Malevich exhibits his early Suprematist paintings and Tatlin his early
Constructivist reliefs, two initial attempts to overthrow style-discourse altogether,
especially its encoding of bourgeois forms of production and reception. It is the
year that Picasso reverts to drawing 4 la Ingres, that is, to a kind of postmodern
pastiche avant /a lettre that complicates any historicist narrative of styles (far more
so than the nineteenth-century eclecticism that Wélfflin was pledged against).
And so on. Yet if Wélfflinian formalism could not address avant-garde art, some
of its legatees felt that it could be adapted to modernist painting, first French,
then American. Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried extracted a “dialectic of
modernism” from such painting that is expressly Wolfflinian.*' It was driven by
the same dynamic of palling in perception and problem-solving in form that
Wolfflin saw at work in his history of styles, and it too was pledged to the
reanimation of art and vision against reification—against the reification of “kitsch”
(in the case of Greenberg) and “theatricality” (for Fried), that is, of mechanical
reproduction and commodity culture. Again, all in the service of unity and, even
226 Hal Foster

more so now, of continuity. (“Modernist art,” Greenberg liked to insist, “has never
meant anything like a break with the past.”)°?
For all kinds of reasons this Wélfflinian modernism ran into the sand in
the 1960s. Again, painting was the medium of this modernism, as it was for the
memory-structure of art since Baudelaire, and the various negations of painting
at this time—in minimal, process, and conceptual art—could only reinscribe this
structure for so long. Moreover, the space of this memory—the architecture of
the museum—soon fell under attack with site-specific and institution-critical art,
and not much later its Oedipal logic also came under siege with feminism. In this
way this modernism began to break down in the 1960s. It did radiate an afterlife
(a half-life?) in the form of postmodernism, but for all intents and purposes this
antagonist began to break down in the ’90s as well: certainly today it no longer
drives much that is new in artistic or theoretical practice. To make matters more
complicated, the historical other of this paired model of modernism and post-
modernism—I mean the paired model of a prewar avant-garde and a postwar
neo-avant-garde—is now mostly dysfunctional too.* In short, neither the logic
of the “post” nor the logic of the “neo” suffices as a paradigm for artistic practice
or as a narrative for critical history, and today no other model is strong enough
to stand in their stead. For many this is a good thing: it permits diversity. I’m not
so sure: it can also abet a flat indifference, a stagnant incommensurablity. Certainly
the default position of most artists, critics, and curators is to assume, even to
affirm, the End of Art, which is also, in one way or another, to embrace its sub-
sumption into culture in general, to endorse the marketplace of the art world, to
accept the museum as a posthistorical showroom, and/or to embrace the return
of Beauty and Spirituality as the timeless subjects of art. I don’t lament the old
historicist dimension of art history, but I don’t like these posthistorical options
either. All of us (artists, critics, curators, historians, viewers) need some sort of
narrative—situated stories, not grands récits. As it is, we are swamped by the double
wake of modernism and postmodernism.“
So—surprise!—art practice, history, and museum are again in crisis. Nothing
could be less new, for the discipline, as I have argued, is driven by a recurrent
anxiety that its object—whether art, history, or the project to mediate the two—
is (about to be) lost, an anxiety that tends to cast the discipline as a reclamation
project, redemptive at best and reactionary otherwise. Of course we face neither
the world war nor the fascist threat that Wolfflin and Warburg faced, but there are
other parallels to the crisis of nearly a century ago: a far deeper challenge to the
 Dialectics of Seeing 227

Eurocentric tradition, an equally dramatic transformation of the technological

bases of society, a greater extension of capitalist Empire, and so forth—certainly
enough to provoke a renewed anxiety about the memory-structure of artistic
practices and historical discourses today.
This anxiety is effectively treated—not merely acted out—in two recent
interventions in art historical methodology: The Judgment of Paris (1992) by Hubert
Damisch, which traces a “judgment” specific to art history, and The Intelligence of
Art (1999) by Thomas Crow, which registers an “intelligence” specific to art. The
spirit of Warburg hovers over both texts, explictly so in the Damisch.*° In terms
of disciplinary models today, Wélfflin in his formalist guise is beyond the pale; so
is Panofsky, at least in his iconographic guise, at least for the modernist field. Rieg]
was called up, because of his interest in marginal forms and neglected periods, in
the service of canon-critique during the postmodernist heyday, so a late Riegl
industry already exists. But Warburg is attractive now for reasons beyond the process
of elimination. Certainly his personal troubles speak to our traumatophilic times,
but more important is his broad method that suggests a kind of interdisciplinar-
ity within art history that touches on concerns, both psychoanalytical and
anthropological, that invite the discipline to extend as well—and that continue to
interest many of us today. (I don’t mean that the encounter between art history
and visual studies is not a real and present one, but only that it has occurred
before, and that there are resources for each to be found in the other.) Perhaps in
the present context Warburg is most compelling because of his deep interest in the
mnemonic survival of the image (however problematic his near-conflation of the
mnemonic and the traumatic may be), in the living-on of art. This cannot help
but touch us at a time when, again, such memory-structures seem all but worn
away. In any case, like Warburg, Damisch, and Crow, some of us are concerned
with a transformational logic that is not immanent to art but nonetheless specific
to it. Hence, we do not view art as autonomous but we do see art history as
distinctive. This is the line that we walk. It’s not a rock-hard canon; it’s not even a
sturdy tree; it’s a tightrope looped to supports that we throw up as we go along.

1. Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in Jonathan Mayne, ed., The Mirror ofArt: Critical Studies
of Charles Baudelaire (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 83.
2. See Michael Fried, “Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet,”
228 Hal Foster

Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (March 1984): 510-42. I am indebted to this suggestive essay throughout
this and the next paragraph.
3. I prefer the term “survival” as a living-on of such meanings, a Nachleben or “afterlife” in the sense
of Aby Warburg (more on which below). As Christopher Pye pointed out to me at the conference,
both the Géricault and the Delacroix thematize surviving as well.
4. [mean to imply that some of the mnenomics that Frances Yates traced from antiquity to the Renaissance
in her fundamental book The Art ofMemory (1966) might be continued in the modern museum.
5. Fried, “Painting Memories,” 526-30.
6. Baudelaire, 1865 letter to Manet, in Correspondance, 2 vols. (Paris, 1973), 2:497.
7. On this Oedipal structure in nineteenth-century French painting see Norman Bryson, Tradition
and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
8. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1981), 177.
9. Ibid., 175.
10. Ibid., 179; Marcel Proust, A /’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 2 vols. (Paris), 2:62—63.
11. Adorno, Prisms, 179.
12. Georg Lukdcs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1986), 110.

13. On memory crises see Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1993). In “Tradition’s Destruction: On the Library of Alexandria,” October
100 (Spring 2002) Daniel Heller-Roazen argues that mnemonic loss is foundational to the archive
(library and museum), not catastrophic to it, that memory crisis is its very raison d’étre. But these
crises also occur only at particular pressure points in history (more on which below).
14. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 19.
15. Ibid., 24. This formulation speaks to a central (Hegelian) concern of the discipline: how great
art can be both “a thing of the past” and available to contemporary consciousness. On this point
see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982),
especially the introduction.
16. Walter Benjamin, ///uminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255.
17. Ibid., 224.
18. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1995), 81. To deepen the third archival relation I have associated here
with Benjamin and Panofsky, a pairing of Kracauer and Warburg, who complement each other
uncannily on the relation between the photographic and the mnemonic, should be developed; but
Benjamin Buchloh has already done so, brilliantly, in “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic
Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999). )
 Dialectics of Seeing 229

19. Ibid., 257.

20. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology ofKnowledge (1969; reprint, New York: Harper Books, 1976), 129.
21. Foucault, “Fantasia on the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard
(1967; reprint, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 92-93. For important elaborations of Foucault
in this regard, see Eugenio Donato, “The Museum's Furnace: Notes Toward a Contextual Reading
of Bouvard and Pécuchet,” in Textual Strategies, ed. Josué Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1979), and Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’ Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
22. Ibid., 92.
23. On this relation see Denis Hollier, “On Paper,” in Cynthia Davidson, ed., Anymore (New York:
Any Foundation, 2001). Also see Rosalind Krauss, “Postmodernism’s Museum without Walls,” in
Reesa Greenberg et al., Thinking about Exhibitions (New York: Routledge, 1996).
24. Yet this too is implicit in the “Artwork” essay, though most commentators overlook it. “At the
time of its origin a medieval picture of the Madonna could not yet be said to be ‘authentic,” Benjamin
writes in a footnote. “It became ‘authentic’ only during the succeeding centuries and perhaps most
strikingly so during the last one” (J//uminations, 243).
25. André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1978), 112.
26. Ibid., 13. Malraux is hardly alone in this totalizing mode; this was a moment for grand specula-
tions on art and architecture by Siegfried Giedion, Gyorgy Kepes, Henri Focillon, Joseph Schillinger,
and others.
27. It is no accident that my narrative of four archival relations loosely follows the various peri-
odizations of spectacle proposed by Guy Debord, T. J. Clark, and Jonathan Crary.
28. The late work of Alois Riegl—the Riegl of “The Cult of Monuments” (1903), say—might serve
as well here.
29. Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles ofArt History: The Problem ofDevelopment ofStyle in Later Art, trans.
M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), 229. This is not only a question of the belatedness of art
history, of the philosophical owl of Minerva stirring at dusk, though art history does provide many
examples of artistic problems thought in theory only when surpassed in practice (e.g., in the early
1920s Panofsky writes brilliantly on perspective and proportion just when they are voided in mod-
ernist painting). It is also a question of the redemptive logic inscribed in the dialectic of reification
and reanimation (more on which below).
30. Martin Warnke, “On Heinrich Wolfflin,” Representations 27 (Summer 1989): 176.
31. See, for example, Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum),
reprinted in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
32. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965): 199. In an impor-
tant article Frederic J. Schwartz has demonstrated how the W6lfflinian vision of style is articulated
230 Hal Foster

tacitly against the reality of fashion. See “Cathedrals and Shoes: Concepts of Style in Wolfflin and
Adorno,” New German Critique 76 (Winter 1999).
33. This is difficult for me to admit, as my critical life has proceeded from the former model to the
latter. On the latter model see especially Peter Biirger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael
Shaw (1974; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001); and Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1996). In the (post)modernist model a kind of mnemonic continuity was provided
through refinement first and critique second; in the (neo)avant-garde model through negation and
transformation. What might provide it now? There is lately a set of attempts, practical and theoretical,
to find in art of the 1960s a renewed point of departure, along the lines of the “neo” model, but it
is too early to evaluate its success.
34. When this condition of aftermath is not met with denial, indifference or mere oblivion, it is met
with melancholy, which is the position of several important modernist historians. But this condition
need not be regarded so.
35. In The Judgment of Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Hubert Damisch advances
the cause of an “analytic iconology” in expressly Warburgian terms, one that attends to the trans-
formational logic specific to the work of art that also interests Crow. This is the “work” of the work
of art for both art historians—an “encoded reiteration that eventually affects our reading in both
directions” in time (Judgment, 78).
Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture

W. J. T. Mitchell

I had hoped to provide for this volume a highly entertaining paper on “The Work
of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction,” a multimedia demonstration of
the power of visual studies or visual culture as a critical methodology, and a
survey of some of the most exciting new developments in contemporary art and
media. But as the time for the Clark Conference drew nearer, and the meaning of
its ambitious title (“Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies”) began to sink in,
I realized that something more focused and fundamental was required, something
that would attend to the basic assumptions of the emergent field of research and
pedagogy known as “visual studies.”! This essay, therefore, will not be as enter-
taining as “Biocybernetic Reproduction,” and in fact that it will have a rather gray
and colorless tone, addressing all those rather abstract and boring questions that a
discipline must answer as it attempts to establish itself. What will be the object of
research for visual studies? What are the boundaries and limiting definitions of the
field? Is it a field at all or simply a moment of interdisciplinary turbulence in the
transformations of art history, aesthetics, and media studies?
After almost ten years of teaching a course called “Visual Culture” at the
University of Chicago, I still do not have categorical answers to these questions.?
What I can offer is my own take on where the field of visual studies is going
today, and how it might avoid a number of pitfalls along the way. The following
is based mainly on my own formation as a literary scholar who has been involved
as a migrant worker in the fields of art history, aesthetics, and media studies. It is
also based on my experience as a teacher attempting to awaken students to the
wonders of “visuality,” practices of seeing the world and especially the seeing of
other people. My aim in this course has been to overcome the veil of familiarity
and self-evidence that surrounds the experience of seeing, and to turn it into a
problem for analysis, a mystery to be unraveled. In doing this, I suspect that I am
rather typical of those who teach this subject, and that this is the common core of
our interest, however different our methods or reading lists might be. The prob-
lem is one of staging a paradox that can be formulated in a number of ways: that
vision is itself invisible; that we cannot see what seeing is; that the eyeball (pace
Emerson) is never transparent. I take my task as a teacher to be to make seeing
232 W.J.T. Mitchell

show itself, to put it on display, and make it accessible to analysis. I call this “show-
ing seeing,” a variation on the American elementary school ritual called “show-and-
tell,” and I will return to it at the conclusion of this paper.

The Dangerous Supplement

First, with the gray matters—the questions of disciplines, fields, and programs that
are intersected by visual studies. It is useful at the outset to distinguish between
“visual studies” and “visual culture” as, respectively, the field of study and the
object or target of study. Visual studies is the study of visual culture. This avoids
the ambiguity that plagues subjects like “history,” in which the field and the things
covered by the field bear the same name. In practice, of course, we often confuse
the two, and there is a certain elegance in allowing “visual culture” to stand for
both the field and its content, and to let the context clarify the meaning. Visual
culture is also less neutral than “visual studies,” and commits one at the outset to
a set of hypotheses that needs to be tested—for example, that vision is (as we say)
a “cultural construction,” that it is learned and cultivated, not simply given by
nature; that therefore it might have a history related in some yet to be determined
way with the history of arts, technologies, media, and social practices of display
and spectatorship; and (finally) that it is deeply involved with human societies,
with the ethics and politics, aesthetics, and epistemology of seeing and being seen.
So far, I hope (possibly in vain) that we are all singing the same tune.?
The dissonance begins when we ask what the relation of visual studies is
to existing disciplines such as art history and aesthetics. At this point, disciplinary
anxieties, not to mention territorial grumpiness and defensiveness, begin to emerge.
A representative of cinema and media studies, for instance, might ask why the dis-
cipline that addresses the major new art forms of the twentieth century has been
excluded in favor of fields that date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.* A
representative of “visual studies” might see the triangulation of this field in relation
to the venerable fields of art history and aesthetics as a classic pincers movement,
designed to erase visual studies from the map. The logic of this operation is easy
enough to describe. Aesthetics and art history are in a complementary and
collaborative alliance. Aesthetics is the theoretical branch of the study of art. It
raises fundamental questions about the nature of art, artistic value, and artistic per-
ception within the general field of perceptual experience. Art history is the historical
study of artists, artistic practices, styles, movements, and institutions. Together,
then, art history and aesthetics provide a kind completeness; they “cover” any
 Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture 233

conceivable question one might have about the visual arts. And if one conceives
them in their most expansive manifestations, art history as a general iconology or
hermeneutics of visual images, aesthetics as the study of sensation and perception,
then it seems clear that they already take care of any issues that a “visual studies”
might want to raise. The theory of visual experience would be dealt with in aes-
thetics; the history of images and visual forms would be dealt with in art history.
Visual studies, then, is from a certain familiar disciplinary point of view,
quite unnecessary. We don’t need it. It adds an ill-defined body of issues that are
covered adequately within the existing academic structure of knowledge. And yet,
here it is, cropping up as a kind of quasi-field or pseudo-discipline, complete with
anthologies, courses, debates, conferences, and professors. The only question is:
what is visual studies a symptom of? Why has this unnecessary thing appeared?
The disciplinary anxiety provoked by visual studies is a classic instance of
what Jacques Derrida called “the dangerous supplement.” Visual studies stands in
an ambiguous relation to art history and aesthetics. On the one hand, it functions
as an internal complement to these fields, a way of filling in a gap. If art history is
about visual images, and aesthetics about the senses, what could be more natural
than a subdiscipline that would focus on visuality as such, linking aesthetics and
art history around the problems of light, optics, visual apparatuses, and experience,
the eye as a perceptual organ, the scopic drive, etc.? But this complementary func-
tion of visual studies threatens to become supplementary as well, first in that it
indicates an incompleteness in the internal coherence of aesthetics and art history,
as if these disciplines had somehow failed to pay attention to what was most cen-
tral in their own domains, and second, in that it opens both disciplines to “outside”
issues that threaten their boundaries. Visual studies threatens to make art history
and aesthetics into sub-disciplines within some expanded field of inquiry whose
boundaries are anything but clear. What, after all, can fit inside the domain of
visual studies? Not just art history and aesthetics, but scientific and technical imag-
ing, film, television, and digital media, as well as philosophical inquiries into the
epistemology of vision, semiotic studies of images and visual signs, psychoanalytic
investigation of the scopic drive, phenomenological, physiological, and cognitive
studies of the visual process, sociological studies of spectatorship and display,
visual anthropology, physical optics and animal vision, and so forth and so on. If
the object of visual studies is what Hal Foster calls “visuality,” it is a capacious topic
indeed, one that may be impossible to delimit in a systematic way.°
Can visual studies be an emergent field, a discipline, a coherent domain
234 W.J.T. Mitchell

of research, even (mirabile dictu) an academic department? Should art history fold
its tent and, in a new alliance with aesthetics and media studies, aim to build a
larger edifice around the concept of visual culture? Should we just merge every-
thing into “cultural studies”? We know very well, of course, that institutional efforts
of these sorts have already been underway for some time at places like Irvine,
Rochester, Chicago, Wisconsin, and no doubt others of which I am unaware. I
have been a small part of some these efforts, and have generally been supportive
of institution-building efforts. I am mindful, however, of the larger forces in aca-
demic politics which have, in some cases, exploited interdisciplinary efforts like
cultural studies in order to downsize and eliminate traditional departments and
disciplines, or to produce what Thomas Crow has called a “de-skilling” of whole
generations of scholars.° The erosion of the forensic skills of connoisseurship and
authentication among art historians in favor of a generalized “iconological” inter-
pretive expertise is a trade-off that ought to trouble us. I want both kinds of expertise
to be available, so that the next generation of art historians will be skilled with both
the concrete materiality of art objects and practices and the intricacies of the
dazzling PowerPoint presentation that moves effortlessly across the audio-visual
media in search of meaning. I want visual studies to attend doth to the specificity
of the things we see and to the fact that most of traditional art history was already
mediated by highly imperfect representations such as the lantern slide, and before
that by engraving, lithographs, or verbal descriptions.’
So if visual studies is a “dangerous supplement” to art history and aesthetics,
it seems to me important neither to romanticize nor to underestimate the danger,
but also important not to let disciplinary anxieties lure us into a siege mentality,
circling our wagons around “straight art history” or narrow notions of tradition.®
We might take some comfort from the precedent of Derrida’s own canonical
figure of the dangerous supplement, the phenomenon of writing, and its relation
to speech, to the study of language, literature, and philosophical discourse. Derrida
traces the way that writing, traditionally thought of as a merely instrumental tool
for recording speech, invades the domain of speech once one understands the
general condition of language to be its iterability, its foundation in repetition and
re-citation. The authentic presence of the voice, of the phonocentric core of
language, immediately connected to meaning in the speaker’s mind, is lost in the
traces of writing, which remain when the speaker is absent—and ultimately even
when he or she is present. The whole onto-theological domain of originary self-
presence is undermined and re-staged as an effect of writing, of an infinite series
 Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture 235

of substitutions, deferrals, and differentials. This was heady, intoxicating, and

dangerous news in the 1970s when it hit the American academy. Could it be that
not only linguistics, but all the human sciences, indeed all human knowledge, was
about to be swallowed up in a new field called “grammatology”? Could it be that
our own anxieties about the boundlessness of visual studies are a replay of an
earlier panic brought on by the news that there is “nothing outside the text”?
One obvious connection between the two panic attacks is their common
emphasis on visuality and spacing. Grammatology promoted the visible signs of
written language, from pictographs to hieroglyphics to alphabetic scripts to the
invention of printing and, finally, of digital media, from their status as parasitical
supplements to a position of primacy, as the general precondition for all notions
of language, meaning, and presence. Grammatology challenged the primacy of
language as invisible, authentic speech in the same way that iconology challenges
the primacy of the unique, original artifact. A general condition of iterability or
citationality—the repeatable acoustic image in one case, the visual image in the
other—undermines the privilege of both visual art and literary language, placing
them inside a larger field that, at first, seemed merely supplementary to them.
“Writing,” not so accidentally, stands at the nexus of language and vision, epito-
mized in the figure of the rebus or hieroglyphic, the “painted word” or the visible
language of a gesture-speech that precedes vocal expression.!? Both grammatology
and iconology, then, evoke the fear of the visual image, an iconoclastic panic that,
in the one case, involves anxieties about rendering the invisible spirit of language
in visible forms, in the other, the worry that the immediacy and concreteness of
the visible image is in danger of being spirited away by the dematerialized, visual
copy—a mere image of an image. It is no accident that Martin Jay’s investigation
of the history of philosophical optics is mainly a story of suspicion and anxiety
about vision, or that my own explorations of “iconology” tended to find a fear of
imagery lurking beneath every theory of imagery.!!
Defensive postures and territorial anxieties may be inevitable in the
bureaucratic battlegrounds of academic institutions, but they are notoriously bad
for the purposes of clear, dispassionate thinking. My sense is that visual studies is
not quite as dangerous as it has been made out to be (as, for instance, a training
ground to “prepare subjects for the next phase of global capitalism”)!? but that its
own defenders have not been especially adroit in questioning the assumptions and
impact of their own emergent field, either. I want to turn, then, to a set of fallacies
or myths about visual studies that are commonly accepted (with different value
236 W.J.T. Mitchell

quotients) by both the opponents and proponents of this field. I will then offer a
set of counter-theses which, in my view, emerge when the study of visual culture
moves beyond these received ideas, and begins to define and analyze its object of
investigation in some detail. I have summarized these fallacies and counter-theses
in the following broadside (followed by a commentary). The broadside may be
handy for nailing up on the doors of certain academic departments.

Critique: Myths and Counter-Theses

Ten Myths about Visual Culture

1. Visual culture entails the liquidation of art as we have known it.’
2. Visual culture accepts without question the view that art is to be defined by its
working exclusively through the optical faculties.
3. Visual culture transforms the history of art into a history of images.
4. Visual culture implies that the difference between a literary text and a painting
isa non-problem. Words and images dissolve into undifferentiated “representation.”
5. Visual culture implies a predilection for the disembodied, dematerialized image.
6. We live in a predominantly visual era. Modernity entails the hegemony of
vision and visual media.
7. There is a coherent class of things called “visual media.”
8. Visual culture is fundamentally about the social construction of the visual field.
What we see, and the manner in which we come to see it, is not simply part of a
natural ability.
9. Visual culture entails an anthropological, and therefore unhistorical, approach
to vision.
10. Visual culture consists of “scopic regimes” and mystifying images to be over-
thrown by political critique.

Eight Counter-Theses on Visual Culture

1. Visual culture encourages reflection on the differences between art and non-art,
visual and verbal signs, and the ratios between different sensory and semiotic modes.
2. Visual culture entails a meditation on blindness, the invisible, the unseen, the
unseeable, and the overlooked; also on deafness and the visible language of ges-
ture; it also compels attention to the tactile, the auditory, the haptic, and the
phenomenon of synesthesia.
3. Visual culture is not limited to the study of images or media, but extends to
 Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture 237

everyday practices of seeing and showing, especially those that we take to be im-
mediate or unmediated. It is less concerned with the meaning of images than with
their lives and loves.
4. There are no visual media. All media are mixed media, with varying ratios of
senses and sign types.
5. The disembodied image and the embodied artifact are permanent elements in
the dialectics of visual culture. Images are to pictures and works of art as species
are to specimens in biology.
6. We do not live in a uniquely visual era. The “visual” or “pictorial turn” is a re-
current trope that displaces moral and political panic onto images and so-called
visual media. Images are convenient scapegoats, and the offensive eye is ritually
plucked out by ruthless critique.
7. Visual culture is the visual construction of the social, not just the social con-
struction of vision. The question of visual nature is therefore a central and unavoidable
issue, along with the role of animals as images and spectators.
8. The political task of visual culture is to perform critique without the comforts
of iconoclasm.

Commentary
If there is a defining moment in the concept of visual culture, I suppose it would
be in that instant that the hoary concept of “social construction” made itself central
to the field. We are all familiar with this “Eureka!” moment, when we reveal to our
students and colleagues that vision and visual images, things that (to the novice)
are apparently automatic, transparent, and natural, are actually symbolic con-
structions, like a language to be learned, a system of codes that interposes an
ideological veil between us and the real world.'4 This overcoming of what has been
called the “natural attitude” has been crucial to the elaboration of visual studies as
an arena for political and ethical critique, and we should not underestimate its
importance.) But if it becomes an unexamined dogma, it threatens to become a
fallacy just as disabling as the “naturalistic fallacy” it sought to overturn. To what
extent is vision unlike language, working (as Roland Barthes observed of photog-
raphy) like a “message without a code”?!® In what ways does it transcend specific
or local forms of “social construction” to function like a universal language that is
relatively free of textual or interpretive elements? (We should recall that Bishop
Berkeley, who first claimed that vision was like a language, also insisted that it was
a universal language, not a local or national language.)!” To what extent is vision
238 W.J.T. Mitchell

not a “learned” activity, but a genetically determined capacity, and a programmed

set of automatisms that has to be activated at the right time, but that are not learned
in anything like the way that human languages are learned?
A dialectical concept of visual culture leaves itself open to these questions
rather than foreclosing them with the received wisdom of social construction and
linguistic models. It expects that the very notion of vision as a cultural activity nec-
essarily entails an investigation of its zon-cultural dimensions, its pervasiveness as
a sensory mechanism that operates in animal organisms all the way from the flea
to the elephant. This version of visual culture understands itself as the opening of
a dialogue with visual nature. It does not forget Lacan’s reminder that “the eye goes
back as far as the species that represent the appearance of life,” and that oysters are
seeing organisms.'* It does not content itself with victories over “natural attitudes”
and “naturalistic fallacies,” but regards the seeming naturalness of vision and
visual imagery as a problem to be explored, rather than a benighted prejudice to
be overcome.!? In short, a dialectical concept of visual culture cannot rest content
with a definition of its object as the “social construction of the visual field,” but
must insist on exploring the chiastic reversal of this proposition, the visual
construction of the social field. \t is not just that we see the way we do because we
are social animals, but also that our social arrangements take the forms they do
because we are seeing animals.
The fallacy of overcoming the “naturalistic fallacy” (we might call it “the
naturalistic fallacy fallacy”) is not the only received idea that has hamstrung the
embryonic discipline of visual culture.*° The field has trapped itself inside of a
whole set of related assumptions and commonplaces that, unfortunately, have
become the common currency of both those who defend and attack visual studies
as a dangerous supplement to art history and aesthetics. Here is a résumé of what
might be called the “constitutive fallacies,” or myths of visual culture, as outlined
in the broadside above.
1. That visual culture means an end to the distinction between artistic and
non-artistic images, a dissolving of the history of art into a history of images. This
might be called the “democratic” or “leveling” fallacy, and it is greeted with alarm
by unreconstructed high modernists and old fashioned aesthetes, and heralded as
a revolutionary breakthrough by the theorists of visual culture. It involves related
worries (or elation) at the leveling of semiotic distinctions between words and
images, digital and analog communication, between art and non-art, and between
different kinds of media, or different concrete artifactual specimens.
 Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture 239

2. That it is a reflex of, and consists in a “visual turn” or “hegemony of the

visible” in modern culture, a dominance of visual media and spectacle over the
verbal activities of speech, writing, textuality, and reading. It is often linked with
the notion that other sensory modalities such as hearing and touch are likely to
atrophy in the age of visuality. This might be called the fallacy of the “pictorial
turn,” a development viewed with horror by iconophobes and opponents of mass
culture, who see it is as the cause of a decline in literacy, and with delight by
iconophiles who see new and higher forms of consciousness emerging from the
plethora of visual images and media.
3. That the “hegemony of the visible” is a Western, modern invention, a
product of new media technologies, and not a fundamental component of human
cultures as such. Let’s call this the “fallacy of technical modernity,” a received idea
that never fails to stir the ire of those who study non-Western and non-modern
visual cultures, and which is generally taken as self-evident by those who believe
that modern technical media (television, cinema, photography, the Internet)
simply are the central content and determining instances of visual culture.
4. That there are such things as “visual media,” typically exemplified by
film, photography, video, television, and the Internet. This, the fallacy of the “vi-
sual media,” is repeated by both sides as if it denoted something real. When media
theorists object that it might be better to think of at least some of these as “audio-
visual” media, or composite, mixed media that combine image and text, the fall-back
position is an assertion of the dominance of the visual in the technical, mass me-
dia. Thus it is claimed that “we watch television, not listen to it,” an argument that
is clinched by noting that the remote control has a mute button, but no control
to blank out the picture.*!
5. [hat vision and visual images are expressions of power relations in which
the spectator dominates the visual object and images and their producers exert power
over viewers. This commonplace “power fallacy” is shared by opponents and
proponents of visual culture who worry about the complicity of visual media with
regimes of spectacle and surveillance, the use of advertising, propaganda, and snoop-
ing to control mass populations and erode democratic institutions. The split comes
over the question of whether we need a discipline called “visual culture” to provide
an oppositional critique of these “scopic regimes,” or whether this critique is better
handled by sticking to aesthetics and art history, with their deep roots in human
values, or media studies, with its emphasis on institutional and technical expertise.
It would take many pages to refute each of these received ideas in detail.
240 W.J.T. Mitchell

Let me just outline the main theses of a counterposition that would treat them as
I have treated the naturalistic fallacy fallacy, not as axioms of visual culture, but as
invitations to question and investigate.
1. The democratic or “leveling” fallacy. There is no doubt that many people
think the distinction between high art and mass culture is disappearing in our time,
or that distinctions between media, or between verbal and visual images, are
being undone. The question is: Is it true? Does the blockbuster exhibition mean
that art museums are now mass media, indistinguishable from sporting events and
circuses? Is it really that simple? I think not. The fact that some scholars want to
open up the “domain of images” to consider both artistic and non-artistic images
does not automatically abolish the differences between these domains.”” One could
as easily argue that, in fact, the boundaries of art/non-art only become clear when
one looks at both sides of this ever-shifting border and traces the transactions and
translations between them. Similarly, with semiotic distinctions between words
and images, or between media types, the opening out of a general field of study
does not abolish difference, but makes it available for investigation, as opposed to
treating it as a barrier that must be policed and never crossed. I have been work-
ing between literature and visual arts, and between artistic and non-artistic images
for the last three decades, and I have never found myself confused about which
was which, though I have sometimes been confused about what made people so
anxious about this work. As a practical matter, distinctions between the arts and
media are ready-to-hand, a vernacular form of theorizing. The difficulty arises (as
Lessing noted long ago in his Laocoén), when we try to make these distinctions
systematic and metaphysical.”°
2. The fallacy of a “pictorial turn.” Since this is a phrase that I have coined,
Pll try to set the record straight on what I meant by it. First, I did not mean to
make the claim that the modern era is unique or unprecedented in its obsession
with vision and visual representation. My aim was to acknowledge the perception
of a “turn to the visual” or to the image as a commonplace, a thing that is said ca-
sually and unreflectively about our time, and is usually greeted with unreflective
assent both by those who like the idea and those who hate it. But the pictorial turn
is a trope, a figure of speech that has been repeated many times since antiquity.
When the Israelites “turn aside” from the invisible god to a visible idol, they are
engaged in a pictorial turn. When Plato warns against the domination of thought
by images, semblances, and opinions in the allegory of the cave, he is urging.a turn
away from the pictures that hold humanity captive and toward the pure light of
 Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture 24]

reason. When Lessing warns, in the Laocoén, about the tendency to imitate the
effects of visual art in the literary arts, he is trying to combat a pictorial turn that
he regards as a degradation of aesthetic and cultural proprieties. When Wittgenstein
complains that “a picture held us captive” in the Philosophical Investigations, he is
lamenting the rule of a certain metaphor for mental life that has held philosophy
in its grip.
The pictorial or visual turn, then, is not unique to our time. It is a
repeated narrative figure that takes on a very specific form in our time, but which
seems to be available in its schematic form in an innumerable variety of circum-
stances. A critical and historical use of this figure would treat it as a diagnostic tool
to analyze specific moments when a new medium, a technical invention, or a
cultural practice erupts in symptoms of panic or euphoria (usually both) about
“the visual.” The invention of photography, of oil painting, of artificial perspec-
tive, of sculptural casting, of the Internet, of writing, of mimesis itself are conspicuous
occasions when a new way of making visual images seemed to mark a historical
turning point for better or worse. The mistake is to construct a grand binary model
of history centered on just one of these turning points, and to declare a single “great
divide” between the “age of literacy” (for instance) and the “age of visuality.” These
kinds of narratives are beguiling, handy for the purposes of presentist polemics,
but useless for the purposes of genuine historical criticism.
3. It should be clear, then, that the supposed “hegemony of the visible” in
our time (or in the ever-flexible period of “modernity,” or the equally flexible
domain of “the West”) is a chimera that has outlived its usefulness. If visual culture
is to mean anything, it has to be generalized as the study of all the social practices
of human visuality, and not confined to modernity or the West. To live in any
culture whatsoever is to live in a visual culture, except perhaps for those rare
instances of societies of the blind, which for that very reason deserve special atten-
tion in any theory of visual culture.” As for the question of “hegemony,” what could
be more archaic and traditional than the prejudice in favor of sight? Vision has
played the role of the “sovereign sense” since God looked at his own creation and
saw that it was good, or perhaps even earlier when he began the act of creation with
the division of the light from the darkness. The notion of vision as “hegemonic” or
non-hegemonic is simply too blunt an instrument to produce much in the way of
historical or critical differentiation. The important task is to describe the specific
relations of vision to the other senses, especially hearing and touch, as they are elabo-
rated within particular cultural practices. Descartes regarded vision as simply an
242 W.J.T. Mitchell

extended and highly sensitive form of touch, which is why (in his Opzics) he com-
pared eyesight to the sticks a blind man uses to grope his way about in real space.
The history of cinema is in part the history of collaboration and conflict between
technologies of visual and audio reproduction. The evolution of film is in no way
aided by explaining it in terms of received ideas about the hegemony of the visible.
4. Which leads us to the fourth myth, the notion of “visual media.” I
understand the use of this phrase as a shorthand figure to pick out the difference
between (say) photographs and phonograph records, or paintings and novels, but
I do object to the confident assertion that “the” visual media are really a distinct
class of things, or that there is such a thing as an exclusively, a purely visual medium.”
Let us try out, as a counter-axiom, the notion that all media are mixed media, and
see where that leads us. One place it will not lead us is into misguided character-
izations of audio-visual media like cinema and television as if they were exclusively
or “predominantly” (echoes of the hegemonic fallacy) visual. The postulate of
mixed, hybrid media leads us to the specificity of codes, materials, technologies,
perceptual practices, sign-functions, and institutional conditions of production
and consumption that go to make up a medium. It allows us to break up the reifi-
cation of media around a single sensory organ (or a single sign-type, or material
vehicle) and to pay attention to what is in front of us. Instead of the stunning re-
dundancy of declaring literature to be a “verbal and not a visual medium,” for
instance, we are allowed to say what is true: that literature, insofar as it is written
or printed, has an unavoidable visual component which bears a specific relation to
an auditory component, which is why it makes a difference whether a novel is read
aloud or silently. We are also allowed to notice that literature, in techniques like
ekphrasis and description, as well as in more subtle strategies of formal arrange-
ment, involves “virtual” or “imaginative” experiences of space and vision that are
no less real for being indirectly conveyed through language.?’
5. We come finally to the question of the power of visual images, their ef-
ficacy as instruments or agents of domination, seduction, persuasion, and deception.
This topic is important because it exposes the motivation for the wildly varying
political and ethical estimations of images, their celebration as gateways to new
consciousness, their denigration as hegemonic forces, the need for policing and
thus reifying the differences between “the visual media” and the others, or between
the realm of art and the wider domain of images.
While there is no doubt that visual culture (like material, oral, or literary
culture) can be an instrument of domination, I do not think it is productive to
 Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture 243

single out visuality or images or spectacle or surveillance as the exclusive vehicle

of political tyranny. I wish not to be misunderstood here. I recognize that much
of the interesting work in visual culture has come out of politically motivated
scholarship, especially the study of the construction of racial and sexual differ-
ence in the field of the gaze. But the heady days when we were first discovering
the “male gaze” or the feminine character of the image are now well behind us,
and most scholars of visual culture who are invested in questions of identity are
aware of this. Nevertheless, there is an unfortunate tendency to slide back into
reductive treatments of visual images as all-powerful forces and to engage in a
kind of iconoclastic critique which imagines that the destruction or exposure of
false images amounts to a political victory. As I have said on other occasions,
“Pictures are a popular political antagonist because one can take a tough stand on
them and yet, at the end of the day, everything remains pretty much the same.
Scopic regimes can be overturned repeatedly without any visible effect on either
visual or political culture.”®
A more nuanced and balanced approach might be located in the equivo-
cation between the visual image as instrument and agency, the image as a tool for
manipulation, on the one hand, and as an apparently autonomous source of its
own purposes and meanings on the other. This approach would treat visual cul-
ture and visual images as “go-betweens” in social transactions, as a repertoire of
screen images or templates that structure our encounters with other human be-
ings. Visual culture would find its primal scene, then, in what Immanuel Levinas
calls the face of the Other (beginning, I suppose, with the face of the Mother): the
face-to-face encounter, the evidently hard-wired disposition to recognize the eyes
of another organism (what Lacan and Sartre call the “gaze”). Stereotypes, carica-
tures, classificatory figures, search images, mappings of the visible body, of the
social spaces in which it appears would constitute the fundamental elaborations of
visual culture on which the domain of the image—and of the Other—is con-
structed. As go-betweens or “subaltern” entities, these images are the filters through
which we recognize and of course misrecognize other people. They are the para-
doxical mediations which make possible what we call the “unmediated” or
“face-to-face” relations that Raymond Williams postulates as the origin of society
as such. And this means that “the social construction of the visual field” has to be
continuously replayed as “the visual construction of the social field,” an invisible
screen or lattice-work of apparently unmediated figures that makes the effects of
mediated images possible.
244 W.J.T. Mitchell

Lacan, you will recall, diagrams the structure of the scopic field as a cat’s
cradle of dialectical intersections with a screened image at its center. The two hands
that rock this cradle are the subject and the object, the observer and the observed.
But between them, rocking in the cradle of the eye and the gaze, is this curious in-
termediary thing, the image and the screen or medium in which it appears. This
phantasmatic “thing” was depicted in ancient optics as the “eidolon,” the projected
template hurled outward by the probing, seeking eye, or the simulacrum of the
seen object, cast off or “propagated” by the object like a snake shedding its skin in
an infinite number of repetitions.” Both the extramission and intramission the-
ory of vision share the same picture of the visual process, differing only in the
direction of the flow of energy and information. This ancient model, while no
doubt incorrect as an account of the physical and physiological structure of vision,
is still the best picture we have of vision as a psycho-social process. It provides an
especially powerful tool for understanding why it is that images, works of art, me-
dia, figures, and metaphors have “lives of their own,” and cannot be explained
simply as rhetorical, communicative instruments or epistemological windows onto
reality. The cat’s cradle of intersubjective vision helps us to see why it is that ob-
jects and images “look back” at us; why the “eidolon” has a tendency to become
an idol that talks back to us, gives orders, and demands sacrifices; why the “prop-
agated” image of an object is so efficacious for propaganda, so fecund in reproducing
an infinite number of copies of itself. It helps us to see why vision is never a one-
way street, but a multiple intersection teeming with dialectical images, why the
child’s doll has a playful half-life on the borders of the animate and inanimate, and
why the fossil traces of extinct life are resurrected in the beholder’s imagination. It
makes it clear why the questions to ask about images are not just “what do they
mean?” or “what do they do?” but “what is the secret of their vitality?” and “what
do they want?”

Showing Seeing
I want to conclude by reflecting on the disciplinary location and pedagogical
implications of visual studies. I hope it is clear that I have no interest in rushing
out to establish programs or departments. The interest of visual culture seems to
me to reside precisely at the transitional points in the educational process—at the
introductory level (what we used to call “art appreciation”), at the passageway from
undergraduate to graduate education, and at the frontiers of advanced research.2°
Visual studies belongs, then, in the freshman year in college, in the introduction
 Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture 245

to graduate studies in the humanities or arts and sciences, and in the graduate
workshop or seminar.
In all of these locations I have found it useful to return to one of the ear-
liest pedagogical rituals in American elementary education, the “show-and-tell”
exercise. In this case, however, the object of the show-and-tell performance is the
process of seeing itself, and the exercise could be called “showing seeing.” I ask the
students to frame their presentations by assuming that they are ethnographers who
come from, and are reporting back to, a society that has no concept of visual cul-
ture. They cannot take for granted that their audience has any familiarity with
everyday notions such as color, line, eye contact, cosmetics, clothing, facial ex-
pressions, mirrors, glasses, or voyeurism, much less with photography, painting,
sculpture, or other so-called “visual media.” Visual culture is thus made to seem
strange, exotic, and in need of explanation.
The assignment is thoroughly paradoxical, of course. The audience does
in fact live in a visible world, and yet has to accept the fiction that it does not, and
that everything which seems transparent and self-evident is in need of explanation.
I leave it to the students to construct an enabling fiction. Some choose to ask the
audience to close their eyes and to take in the presentation solely with their ears
and other senses. They work primarily by description and evocation of the visual
through language and sound, telling “as,” rather than “and” showing. Another strat-
egy is to pretend that the audience has just been provided with prosthetic visual
organs, but does not yet know how to see with them. This is the favored strategy,
since it allows for a visual presentation of objects and images. The audience has to
pretend ignorance, and the presenter has to lead them toward the understanding
of things they would ordinarily take for granted.
The range of examples and objects that students bring to class is quite
broad and unpredictable. Some things routinely appear: eyeglasses are favorite ob-
jects of explanation, and someone almost always brings in a pair of “mirror shades”
to illustrate the situation of “seeing without being seen,” and the masking of the
eyes as a common strategy in a visual culture. Masks and disguises more generally
are popular props. Windows, binoculars, kaleidoscopes, microscopes, and other
pieces of optical apparatus are commonly adduced. Mirrors are frequently brought
in, generally with no hint of an awareness of Lacan’s mirror stage, but often with
learned expositions of the optical laws of reflection, or discourses on vanity, nar-
cissism, and self-fashioning. Cameras are often exhibited, not just to explain their
workings, but to talk about the rituals and superstitions that accompany their use.
246 W,.J.T. Mitchell

One student elicited the familiar reflex of “camera shyness” by aggressively taking
snapshots of other members of the class. Other presentations require even fewer
props, and sometimes focus directly on the body image of the presenter, by way
of attention to clothing, cosmetics, facial expressions, gestures, and other forms of
“body language.” I have had students conduct rehearsals of a repertoire of facial
expressions, change clothing in front of the class, perform tasteful (and limited)
evocations of a striptease, put on makeup (one student put on white face paint,
describing his own sensations as he entered into the mute world of the mime; an-
other introduced himself as a twin, and asked him to ponder the possibility that
he might be his brother impersonating himself; still another, a male student, did
a cross-dressing performance with his girlfriend in which they asked the question
of what the difference is between male and female transvestism). Other students
who have gifts with performance have acted out things like blushing and crying,
leading to discussions of shame and self-consciousness at being seen, involuntary
visual responses, and the importance of the eye as an expressive as well as recep-
tive organ. Perhaps the simplest “gadget-free” performance I have ever witnessed
was by a student who led the class through an introduction to the experience of
“eye contact,” which culminated in that old first-grade game, the “stare-down”
contest (the first to blink is the loser).
Without question, the funniest and weirdest show-and-tell performance
that I have ever seen was by a young woman whose “prop” was her nine-month-
old baby boy. She presented the baby as an object of visual culture whose specific
visual attributes (small body, large head, pudgy face, bright eyes) added up, in her
words, to a strange visual effect that human beings call “cuteness.” She confessed
her inability to explain cuteness, but argued that it must be an important aspect
of visual culture, because all the other sensory signals given off by the baby—smell
and noise in particular—would lead us to despise and probably kill the object pro-
ducing them, if it were not for the countervailing effect of “cuteness.” The truly
wondrous thing about this performance, however, was the behavior of the infant.
While his mother was making her serious presentation, the baby was wiggling in
her arms, mugging for the audience, and responding to their laughter—at first
with fright, but gradually (as he realized he was safe) with a kind of delighted and
aggressive showmanship. He began “showing off” for the class while his mother
tried, with frequent interruptions, to continue her “telling” of the visual charac-
teristics of the human infant. The total effect was of a contrapuntal, mixed-media
performance which stressed the dissonance or lack of suturing between vision and
 Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture 247

voice, showing and telling, while demonstrating something quite complex about
the very nature of the show-and-tell ritual as such.
What do we learn from these presentations? The reports of my students
suggest that the “showing seeing” performances are the thing that remains most
memorable about the course, long after the details of perspective theory, optics,
and the gaze have faded from memory. The performances have the effect of acting
out the method and lessons of the curriculum, which is elaborated around a set of
simple but extremely difficult questions: What is vision? What is a visual image?
What is a medium? What is the relation of vision to the other senses? To language?
Why is visual experience so fraught with anxiety and fantasy? Does vision have a
history? How do visual encounters with other people (and with images and ob-
jects) inform the construction of social life? The performance of “showing seeing”
assembles an archive of practical demonstrations that can be referenced within the
sometimes abstract realm of visual theory. It is astonishing how much clearer the
Sartrean and Lacanian “paranoid theories of vision” become after you have had a
few performances that highlight the aggressivity of vision. Merleau-Ponty’s abstruse
discussions of the dialectics of seeing, the “chiasmus” of the eye and the gaze, and
the entangling of vision with the “flesh of the world,” become much more down
to earth when the spectator/spectacle has been visibly embodied and performed in
the classroom.
A more ambitious aim of “showing seeing” is its potential as a reflection
on theory and method in themselves. As should be evident, the approach is in-
formed by a kind of pragmatism, but not (one hopes) of a kind that is closed off
to speculation, experiment, and even metaphysics. At the most fundamental level,
it is an invitation to rethink what theorizing is, to “picture theory” and “perform
theory” as a visible, embodied, communal practice, not as the solitary introspec-
tion of a disembodied intelligence.
The simplest lesson of “showing seeing” is a kind of de-disciplinary
exercise. We learn to get away from the notion that “visual culture” is “covered”
by the materials or methods of art history, aesthetics, and media studies. Visual
culture starts out in an area beneath the notice of these disciplines—the realm of
non-artistic, non-aesthetic, and unmediated or “immediate” visual images and
experiences. It comprises a larger field of what I would call “vernacular visuality”
or “everyday seeing” that is bracketed out by the disciplines addressed to visual
arts and media. Like ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, it looks
at the strange things we do while looking, gazing, showing, and showing off—or
248 W.)J.T. Mitchell

while hiding, dissembling, and refusing to look. In particular, it helps us to see

that even something as broad as “the image” does not exhaust the field of visual-
ity; that visual studies is not the same thing as “image studies,” and that the study
of the visual image is just one component of the larger field. Societies which ban
images (like the Taliban) still have a rigorously policed visual culture in which the
everyday practices of human display (especially of women’s bodies) are subject to
regulation. We might even go so far as to say that visual culture emerges in sharpest
relief when the second commandment, the ban on the production and display of
graven images, is observed most literally, when seeing is prohibited and invisibility
is mandated.
One final thing the “showing seeing” exercise demonstrates is that visual-
ity, not just the “social construction of vision,” but the visual construction of the
social, is a problem in its own right that is approached, but never quite engaged, by
the traditional disciplines of aesthetics and art history, or even by the new disci-
plines of media studies. That is, visual studies is not merely an “indiscipline,” or
dangerous supplement to the traditional vision-oriented disciplines, but an “inter-
discipline” that draws on their resources and those of other disciplines to construct
a new and distinctive object of research. Visual culture is, then, a specific domain
of research, one whose fundamental principles and problems are being articulated
freshly in our time. The showing-seeing exercise is one way to accomplish the first
step in the formation of any new field, and that is to rend the veil of familiarity and
awaken the sense of wonder, so that many of the things that are taken for granted
about the visual arts and media (and perhaps the verbal ones as well) are put into
question. If nothing else, it may send us back to the traditional disciplines of the
humanities and social sciences with fresh eyes, new questions, and open minds.

1. I’m grateful to Jonathan Bordo, James Elkins, Ellen Esrock, Joel Snyder, and Nicholas Mirzoeff
for their valuable comments and advice.
2. For anyone interested in my previous stabs at them, however, see “What Is Visual Culture?” in
Meaning in the Visual Arts: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky’s tooth Birthday, ed. Irving Lavin
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), and “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin
77, no. 4 (December 1995): 540-44.
3. If space permitted, I would insert here a rather lengthy footnote on the many kinds of work that
have made it possible to even conceive of a field such as “visual studies.”
 Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture 249

4. For a discussion of the peculiar distancing between visual studies and cinema studies, see Anu
Koivunen and Astrid Soderbergh Widding, “Cinema Studies into Visual Theory?” in the on-line jour-
nal Jntrodiction, at http://www.utu.fi/hum/etvtiede/preview.html. Other institutional formations that
seem notably excluded are visual anthropology (which now has its own journal, with articles collected
in Visualizing Theory, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1994), cognitive science (highly
influential in contemporary film studies), and communications theory and rhetoric, which have
ambitions to install visual studies as a component of introductory college-level writing programs.
5. In Vision and Visuality (Seattle: New Press, 1998).
6. See Crow’s response to the questionnaire on visual culture in October 77 (Summer 1996).
7. For a masterful study of art historical mediations, see Robert Nelson, “The Slide Lecture: The
Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring
2000): 414-34.
8. I’m alluding here to a lecture entitled “Straight Art History” given by O. K. Werckmeister at the
Art Institute of Chicago several years ago. I have great respect for Werckmeister’s work, and regard
this lecture as a regrettable lapse from his usual rigor.
9. See Derrida, “The Dangerous Supplement,” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
10. For further discussion of the convergence of painting and language in the written sign, see “Visible
Language: Blake’s Art of Writing,” in Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
u. Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mitchell, Zconology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).

12. A phrase that appears in the October 77 questionnaire on visual culture.

13. Each of the following statements is a direct quotation or exact paraphrase of published remarks
about visual culture by recognized scholars. A prize will be given to anyone who can identify all the
sources!
14. This defining moment had been rehearsed, of course, many times by art historians in their en-
counters with literary naiveté about pictures. One of the recurrent rituals in teaching interdisciplinary
courses that draw students from both literature and art history is the moment when the art history
students “set straight” the literary folks about the non-transparency of visual representation, the need
to understand the languages of gesture, costume, compositional arrangement, and iconographic mo-
tifs. The second, more difficult moment in this ritual is when the art historians have to explain why
all these conventional meanings don’t add up to a linguistic or semiotic decoding of pictures, why
there is some non-verbalizable surplus in the image.
15. See Norman Bryson, “The Natural Attitude,” chapter 1 of Vision and Painting: The Logic of the
Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
16. See Barthes, Camera Lucida (1981; trans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
250 W.J.T. Mitchell

17. The Theory of Vision or Visual Language (1733).

18. Lacan, “The Eye and the Gaze,” in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1981), 91.
19. Bryson’s denunciation of “the natural attitude,” which he sees as the common error of “Pliny,
Villani, Vasari, Berenson, and Francastel,” and no doubt the entire history of image theory up to his
time. Vision and Painting, 7.
20. I owe this phrase to Michael Taussig, who developed the idea in our joint seminar, “Vital Signs:
The Life of Representations,” at Columbia University and New York University in the fall of 2000.
21. Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1959), 10.
22. I am echoing here the title of James Elkins’s recent book, The Domain of Images (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1999).
23. See the discussion of Lessing in Mitchell, /conology, chapter 4.
24. Picture Theory, chapter 1.
25. See Jose Saramago’s marvelous novel Blindness (New York: Harcourt, 1997), which explores the
premise of a society suddenly plunged into an epidemic of blindness, spread, appropriately enough,
by eye contact.
26. See Picture Theory for a fuller discussion of the claim that “all media are mixed media,” and
especially the discussion of Clement Greenberg’s search for optical purity in abstract painting. Indeed,
unmediated vision itself is not a purely optical affair, but a coordination of optical and tactile
information.
27. See my chapter “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory.
28. “What Do Pictures Really Want?” October 77 (Summer 1996).
29. See David Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976), 2-3.
30. It may be worth mentioning here that the first course in visual culture ever offered at the University
of Chicago was the “Art ror” course I gave in the fall of 1991 with the marvelous assistance of Tina
Yarborough.
Current Issues in Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies

David Carrier

The essays assembled in this volume collectively provide a richly suggestive sum-
mary on the state of art history, aesthetics, and the emerging field of visual studies.
Originally delivered as lectures at the 2001 Clark Conference “Art History, Aesthetics,
Visual Studies,” the presentations were enriched by two days and three evenings
of intensive discussions among the speakers and visitors. What currently engage
scholars dealing with visual art are discussions of novel contemporary works of
art, such as Cindy Sherman’s photographs, or previously marginalized modernist
art, such as Romare Bearden’s collages; extensions of the canon to include non-
Western art; and reflections on how museums, novel technologies of image
reproduction, and critical studies of race and gender influence our experiences of
art. From a close-up view, these commentaries may seem to offer a bewildering
variety of competing approaches. Listening to the good-spirited debate at this
conference, I found that it was not easy to identify the shared concerns of these
panelists. And so, one way to get a perspective on these present-day methodo-
logical concerns, and identify our shared period style, is to look back a generation,
when art history was done very differently.
W. Eugene Kleinbauer’s Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (1971),
too modestly subtitled An Anthology of 20th-century Writings on the Visual Arts,
offers in its 105-page introduction, with 239 footnotes, a summary of the state of
the field.! Modern Perspectives contains essays on connoisseurship, formalism, iconog-
raphy, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. It includes an early translation from Alois Riegl,
Erwin Panofsky on “Renaissance and Renascences,” and a selection from Henri
Focillon’s history of Romanesque sculpture. From our present perspective, what is
equally revealing is what Kleinbauer’s anthology does not include. There is no
account of feminism, nothing about structuralist and post-structuralist theorizing,
and no explicit discussion of the concerns with rhetoric and historiography.
Kleinbauer’s essays deal with medieval and Renaissance European painting, but say
relatively little about modern art, apart from American architecture, and there is no
essay about non-Western painting or sculpture.” Nor is there any discussion of the
relationship between high art and mass culture, of film, or other popular art forms.
Kleinbauer’s essays are focused on European Christian painting and architecture.
252 David Carrier

When in 1996 Michael Ann Holly argued that “representational practices

encoded in works of art continue to be encoded in their commentaries,” she iden-
tified one important preoccupation of recent scholarship. In “writing about the
past,” she suggested, “we may be striving to look at its visual traces without realiz-
ing that those works of art are also forever looking back at us.”? Her account draws
upon the ideas of Jacques Lacan. In Kleinbauer’s anthology, Ernst Kris presents a
psychoanalytic interpretation of a medieval psychotic artist, linking this man’s art
to his biography, but he does not deal with this Lacanian issue. And when in his
recent The Practice ofPersuasion Keith Moxey, moderator of one Clark Conference
panel, identified his central concerns to include “the status of the canon, the nature
of aesthetic value, the character of historical knowledge, the relation of that knowl-
edge to fiction and memory, and the discipline’s unconscious indebtedness to a
particular philosophy of history,”4 he marked off the distance of many present-day
scholars from Kleinbauer’s authors. Moxey’s concern with the role of rhetoric in art
writing is not an explicit issue for the writers in Kleinbauer’s anthology.
Kleinbauer’s essays fail, for the most part, to deal with the most lively new
intellectual trends of the day. In 1971 American literary studies already were being
dramatically transformed by translations of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and other
French writers. But as Norman Bryson and other commentators have observed,
only much later did art historians also take up these concerns. In 1983, in what
became a highly influential account, Bryson, speaking of “the immanently social
character of the painterly sign,” wrote: “A// the codes of recognition flow through
the image just as they do throughout the social milieu; as part of the global struc-
ture of signifying practice they interact at every point with the economic and political
domains.”° The distance between his semiotic way of thinking and Ernst Gombrich’s
“Light, Form and Texture in Fifteenth-century Painting,” reprinted in Kleinbauer,
which is based upon perceptual psychology, now appears immense. Major selec-
tions of Walter Benjamin’s writings appeared in English already in 1969; only in
1999 were such canonical early modernist books as Alois Riegl’s Zhe Group Portraiture
ofHolland and Aby Warburg’s The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity available in trans-
lation.® And so at present one of the most pressing tasks for art historians is
understanding the early modernist foundations of their discipline.
Part of what was at stake at the conference was identifying the status of
aesthetics itself, in relation to art history, and grasping the obvious tensions
involved in applying ways of thinking developed in Germany in the late eighteenth
century in our very different context. When someone calls something beautiful,
 Current Issues in Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies 253

Kant writes, “he judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and then speaks
of beauty as if it were a property of things.”” Few present-day scholars think it
possible for anyone to judge for a// men and women, or for all people of all
cultures. And so, in developing a philosophy that does justice to the multiplicity
of possible perspectives, it is natural to return to look critically at the origins of
aesthetics. As Mark Cheetham shrewdly observes in his recent book Kant, Art,
and Art History, “Kant’s reception in art history and the visual arts is paradigmatic
of a relationship among disciplines that leads to a redefinition and reshaping of
their priorities and methodologies.”® “Aesthetics,” Richard Wollheim wrote in
1968, “may be thought of as the attempt to understand” what he calls the
“envelope in which works of art invariably arrive.”? As the title of his book Art
and Its Objects suggests, he identifies that envelope with the theorizing without
which a great deal of 1960s art would hardly be identifiable as art. Today that
envelope tends to be described differently.
No scholar of his generation had wider-ranging interests, or a more sym-
pathetic view of mass art, than Meyer Schapiro, who in 1959 wrote that the “art
of advertising . . now commands the public surfaces in the streets and buildings.
Like almost all art today, it is addressed to the individual observer, but as a
consumer of commodities. . . . Can true art ever replace in the public sphere this
insincere and clamorous commercial art?”'° We need but compare his account
with Roland Barthes’s accounts of mass culture to observe a massive change in
sensibility. What also is new in present-day art history and visual studies, if not
aesthetics, is the tendency to cultivate a more personal self-consciously literary
style than most of Kleinbauer’s writers: “The painter is standing a little back from
his canvas. He is glancing at his model; perhaps he is considering whether to add
some finishing touch, though it is also possible that the first stroke has not yet
been made.”!! Or, “One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph
of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852.”!* The models, the first
by Foucault and the second by Barthes, have been immensely influential. Along
with the new interest in the rhetorical dimensions of older art history writing goes
a self-conscious awareness of the literary qualities of such writing.
In the 1960s English-language aestheticians tended to pay more attention
to Kant and the Kantian tradition than to Nietzsche. Today that situation has
changed dramatically. Rejecting the belief in “an eye turned in no particular
direction,” most present-day writers think that, to quote Nietzsche: “there is only
a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to
254 David Carrier

speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one
thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.”!”
As Alexander Nehamas has noted, a long tradition of Nietzsche scholarship has
sought to sort out the implications of this elusive doctrine: “Perspectivism entails
that some cases are not decidable, not that none is. There probably are perspec-
tives that share so little ground that though they compete with one another—
though no one can live with both of them at the same time—it is still impossible
for their adherents to resolve their differences even under the best possible condi-
tions of communication.”!4What remains as yet unachieved is an adequate account
relating this abstract philosophical argument to the practice of art history.
Like art historians, aestheticians have traditionally focused on high art,
giving only a marginal role to popular art forms. We find this hierarchical evalua-
tion not only in formalists and iconographers, but even in a Marxist philosopher
like Arnold Hauser. “The thesis that folk art consists of ‘cultural goods that have
drifted downward’ is a commonplace that hardly anyone now thinks of doubt-
ing... . The art of the élite, when popularized and ruralized, loses not only its
appropriateness to the times, but even as a rule its aesthetic quality.”!* Today that
commonplace thesis seems implausible. Noél Carroll’s recent discussion reflects
a sea change in our thinking about popular culture. “A taste for easily accessible
art will not evaporate soon, nor will the pleasure to be had from sharing artworks
with large numbers of our fellow citizens. . . . We enjoy reading, seeing, and
listening to the same things, and then talking about them. We enjoy working
references and allusions to them into our conversations. . . . It is an important
element of possessing a common culture.”'® Carroll challenges the theorizing
associated with visual studies, but accepting as given the importance of popular
culture, refuses to think it inferior to high art.
Non-Western art, it is worth noting, also poses substantial challenges to
traditional histories of art and aesthetic theorizing. Chinese civilization, James
Cahill writes, “is the only tradition in world art that can rival the European paint-
ing in the sheer quantity and diversity of its output, the number of recorded artists
of note, and the complexity of aesthetic issues attached to it, as well as the
sophistication of the written literature that accompanies it through the centuries.”!7
When in his account of Islamic theories of decoration, Oleg Grabar complains of
“an intellectually assumed and emotionally felt attitude among art historians that
the major issues of visual understanding are the ones elaborated in the grand
tradition of Western art,” he notes a problem that is not easily resolved.!8 No one,
 Current Issues in Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies 255

as yet, can really imagine a satisfactory theory accommodating European, Chinese,

and Islamic art and aesthetics.
Just as no one today thinks that Kant’s account of the universality of aes-
thetic judgments is satisfactory, so too no one accepts as given Hegel’s (or Marx’s)
social histories of art. “The Chinese, Indians and Egyptians,” Hegel writes, “never
get beyond formlessness or a bad and untrue definiteness of form. They could not
master true beauty because their mythological ideas, the content and thought of
their works of art, were still indeterminate, or determined badly.”!? Hegel’s
historicism is compatible with a more generous view of non-Western art, but his
theory of art as social expression is bound up with a metaphysics which is difficult,
if not impossible to reconstruct convincingly. The same is true, I think, of Marx’s
aesthetics. Certainly a full history of the post-Kleinbauer ways of thinking about
art and politics would need to take account of the decisive role of Foucault’s ac-
count of power, and defeat of leftist ambitions as described recently by such eminent
veteran Marxist historians of art as Otto Karl Werckmeister: “What is at stake is
no longer the adequacy or inadequacy of a Marxist critique of the relationship
between society and culture, but whether the manifest dysfunctionality of
Communist politics has stopped such a critique from drawing any political
conclusions.”*° Or T. J. Clark: “[Farewell to an Idea] was written after the Fall of
the Wall. That is, at a moment when there was general agreement, on the part of
the masses and elites in most of the world, that the project called socialism had
come to an end.”?! How then in our political environment it will be possible to
develop a properly critical account of visual art remains to be determined.
In his now-classic description of the rise of what he called postmodernism,
Leo Steinberg speaks of how “the deepening inroads of art into non-art continue
to alienate the connoisseur as art defects and departs into strange territories leav-
ing the old stand-by criteria to rule an eroding plain.”?? Or as Baudelaire, in
responding to a similar situation, the transition from the Old Master art of Eugéne
Delacroix to the modernism of Edouard Manet, wrote: “the great tradition has
been lost, and. . . the new one is not yet established.””’ In ways Steinberg could
not have anticipated more than three decades ago, our moment of transition in
2001 also involves the need to identify new criteria. In an account published less
than a decade after Steinberg’s, Rosalind Krauss presented some ideas that remain
highly relevant to our situation. “The historical period that the avant-garde shared
with modernism is over. That seems an obvious fact. What makes it more than a
journalistic one is the conception of the discourse that brought it to a close. . . .
256 David Carrier

It is thus from a strange new perspective that we look back on the modernist ori-
gin and watch it splintering into endless replication.”*4 Twenty years later, that
relationship of what she calls discourse and the history of art remains, still, diffi-
cult to comprehend.
If historical experience provides any guide, one useful way to understand
such transitions is by appeal to a larger historical and political perspective. That
art history and aesthetics have changed so much, and the new field of visual studies
has developed, may reflect larger political and social changes. In his The Life ofa
Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art, Jonathan Gilmore
asks how what he has identified as the “internal manner of change” might be dis-
tinguished by an externally motivated change. “Such external causes,” he explains
in developing this contrast, “do not emerge out of, and therefore are not explained
by, any natural feature of the earlier style.”*> To understand what I am calling the
stylistic change defined by the contrast between the methodologies as presented
in Kleinbauer’s anthology and the Clark Conference, should we appeal to an
account of an internal manner of change, or is the relevant cause external? This
seemingly simple question is not easy to answer.
On one interpretation of the history, what motivated this change in styles
of thinking about visual art was a felt dissatisfaction with earlier forms of analysis.
For example, Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock published in 1981 a now famous
statement: “Our intention is to explore women’s place in the history of art. Recognising
that it is only in the twentieth century that women artists have been systematically
effaced from the history of art, we pose what we think is the more important and
fundamental question: “Why has this happened?’”?° Should we understand them
as calling attention to a manifest limitation of earlier art historical explanations,
or bringing to the discipline ways of thinking coming from outside, nurtured within
the feminist movements? How we answer that question depends, I believe, upon
controversial assumptions about the relationship of such academic disciplines as
art history and aesthetics to their external environment. Without claiming to solve
this problem, I do think it possible to identify useful resources that lie at hand.
Other readers will, I am sure, offer other perspectives. In the acknowledgments to
his Kant after Duchamp, Thierry de Duve tells of meeting with Michel Foucault
in 1980 or 1981, when he worried about whether it was possible to write a Foucaultian
archaeology of modernism. Foucault, he reports, replied: “Don’t worry. . . . Do
what you think you have to do, and let your readers decide. Perhaps your work
will make the transition.”2” This, I would suggest, is good advice right now.
 Current Issues in Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies 257

Given the dramatic differences in the conceptions of art, history, and

politics of Fredric Jameson and Arthur Danto, is it not suggestive that in
remarkable ways Jameson’s conception of postmodernism is allied to Danto’s
account of the post-historical? Jameson writes: “Postmodernism theory is. . . the
effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments, and in a situation
in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an ‘age,’ or zeitgeist
or ‘system’ or ‘current situation’ any longer. I take it as axiomatic that ‘modernist
history’ is the first casualty and mysterious absence of the postmodernist period.”®
And Danto: “It is . . . the sense of no longer belonging to a great narrative, register-
ing itself on our consciousness somewhere between uneasiness and exhilaration,
that marks the historical sensibility of the present, and which . . . helps define the
acute difference, of which I think that awareness only began to emerge in the mid-
1970s, between modern and contemporary art.””? Early in their careers, it is worth
noting, both Jameson and Danto wrote books about Nietzsche, whose ways of
thinking now seem to anticipate these observations about postmodern or post-
historical historical narratives. Coming from very different starting points, and
employing quite distinct reasoning, both Jameson and Danto confess to a skep-
ticism about the relevance or value right now of large-scale historical narratives.
What is striking about the history of art history is how, until very
recently, methodological innovation has been accompanied by an extension of
the range of artifacts under investigation. Historians turned their attention to
pre- and post-Renaissance Italian art; they looked outside Europe to the arts of
Africa, China, India, and Oceania; they included modernist and postmodernist
art in their histories; and the older distinction between high and popular art forms
was dissolved when academic scholars took serious interest in film, advertising,
and even the comic strip. The novel historical structures invoked in identifying
ours as a postmodernist or post-historical period involve awareness that this
expansion has come to an end. The art museum must now display an essentially
bounded array of objects, and the academic study of art history, aesthetics, and
visual studies must also reflect this recognition of bounds. But no one as yet really
knows how this transition will work itself out.
“Crises are a necessary precondition for the emergence of novel theories,”
Thomas Kuhn writes in The Structure ofScientific Revolutions. In this moment of
a paradigm shift, “the proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to
try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy,
and to debate over fundamentals, all these are symptoms of a transition from
258 David Carrier

normal to extraordinary research.”*° I cannot think of a better description of the

present state of art history, aesthetics, and visual studies, as defined by the 2001
Clark Conference.

1. W. Eugene Kleinbauer, Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century

Writings on the Visual Arts (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).
2. Kleinbauer’s introduction discusses studies of modernism and non-European art.
3. Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1996), xiii, xiv.

4. Keith Moxey, The Practice ofPersuasion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1.
5. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1983), 139.
6. Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 1999); Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999).
7. Immanuel Kant, The Critique ofJudgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1952), 52.
8. Mark Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 5.
g. Richard Wollheim, “Preface,” Art and Its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics (New York, Evanston,
London: Harper & Row, 1968).
10. Meyer Schapiro, Worldview in Painting: Art and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1999), 184.
11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. anon. (New
York: Vintage Books, 1973), I.
12. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1983), 3.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy ofMorals, trans, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdate
(New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 119.
14. Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), 147.
15. Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy ofArt History (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company,
1963), 294, 295.
16. Noél Carroll, A Philosophy ofMass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 13.
17. James Cahill, “Approaches to Chinese Painting,” in Yang Nin et al., Three Thousand Years of
 Current Issues in Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies 259

Chinese Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press; Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,
1997), 5-
18. Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 239 n. I.
19. G. W. FE Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1975), 1:74.
20. Otto Karl Werckmeister, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the
Fall of Communism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), I.
a1. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1999), 8.
22. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1972), 91.
23. Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, trans. Jonathan Mayne
(London: Phaidon Press, 1965), 116. This transition is discussed in my High Art: Charles Baudelaire
and the Origins ofModernism (University Park and London: Penn State Press, 1996).
24. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge,
Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1985), 170.
25. Jonathan Gilmore, The Life ofa Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 112, 122.
26. Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (New York: Pantheon,
1981), xvii.

27. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1996), xiii—xiv.
28. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1991), xi.
29. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 5. be
30. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd enlarged ed. (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1970), 77, 91. On the use of Kuhn’s model for art history, see Moxey,
The Practice ofPersuasion, 87.
Mixing Metaphors and Talking about Art

Janet Wolff

It did seem that if only we could select the right metaphor, or the right visual
image, we would be well on the way to addressing the question of the relationship
between the disciplines of aesthetics, art history, and visual studies. To begin with,
there was the conference’s own image—Rembrandt’s The Three Trees—and
participants were talking about the event, even before getting to Williamstown, as
the “Conference of the Three Trees.” During the presentations and discussion at
the Clark, other suggestions were made—improvements on the perhaps too static
model of adjacent trees: the “rhizome” (Stephen Melville) and even the “weed”
(Hal Foster); the “cut” (invoked, in quite different ways, by Kobena Mercer, dis-
cussing the art practice of Romare Bearden, by Griselda Pollock in relation to Lacan,
and by Melville, talking about the incest taboo and the production of culture); and
the “ghost” (the theme of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s paper, and also a presence for Pollock
in artwork about the Holocaust). But as Michael Holly made clear in her opening
remarks and her amusing—and thought-provoking—presentation of a series of
alternative images of threesomes (beast with three heads, three ages of man, three
witches, three Graces), such tropes are not innocent. They either beg the question
of the relationship between the elements (progress, competition, hostility, co-
operation, and so on), or they pretend a neutrality whose openness may be less than
helpful as a choice of metaphor. The immediate problem with the trees, of course,
is that although there is no built-in privileging, and certainly no indication of
historical (or moral) progress, the very solidity and equivalence (and separateness)
of the trees dooms the project of exploring interdependencies. Hence, I suppose,
the turn to Deleuze and the rhizome. Perhaps it is best, though, to leave Rembrandt
as an attractive image for the conference poster, and to begin the discussion
without any such metaphor.
The motivating question for the conference was what difference the new
discipline of visual studies has made to the practice of both aesthetics and art
history; the corollary question, the nature of a reconstituted aesthetics in the
contemporary moment. One thing that quickly became clear—and equally quickly
moved us away from the trees—was the importance of challenging any assumption
that the three disciplines are, in fact, so distinct. W. J. T. Mitchell, in the final
 Mixing Metaphors and Talking about Art 26]

paper of the conference, pointed out that in many ways aesthetics and art history
were already visual studies, and suggested that the “disciplinary anxiety” provoked
by the emergence of the new field of study might be quite unfounded. In the
University of Rochester’s Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, the list of courses
currently includes classes on the baroque, on Russian avant-garde art, and on the
sublime—classes which could just as easily be found in art history and aesthetics
curricula. But of course we know very well that visual studies is often regarded with
suspicion by many in those other disciplines; and, conversely, that those in visual
studies tend to be dismissive of the pre-critical (traditional, ahistorical, positivis-
tic) work they believe characterizes the older disciplines. With regard to the latter
rejection, I take the view (and this was something also mentioned in passing by
Mitchell) that we do well to respect the expertise of those in established fields of
practice—philosophical training, historical knowledge and skills, connoisseur-
ship—even if, in the end, we want to engage with this knowledge in new ways.
Certainly in the twelve years that the Rochester program has been in existence we
have found, over and over again, that we were quite dependent on the participation
(in teaching, on dissertation committees) of colleagues with such expertise. In
general, I would say that visual studies, as an interdisciplinary field, can only thrive
in continued dialogue with other disciplines, including art history and aesthetics.
As it happens, the conference provided some kind of explanation for the
mystery of the presumed separateness and mutual hostility of the three fields. Partly
prompted by Michael Holly’s question—Why do art historians (and particularly
critical art historians) no longer read journals like The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism?—the discussion turned to the internal transformation—and narrow-
ing—of the discipline of aesthetics itself. This point was made by philosopher Gary
Shapiro, in response to Holly’s question, but it was also the subject of both Michael
Kelly’s and Karen Lang’s papers. Lang spoke about philosophers (notably Heidegger,
but also Kant) whose approach to the aesthetic incorporates the historical. Michael
Kelly explored the move to an ahistorical universalism in the work of the
contemporary philosopher of art Arthur Danto. Although he was more interested
in contrasting Danto’s approach to the work of Cindy Sherman with that of Rosalind
Krauss, we could also see Danto’s work (on Kelly’s account) as a shift (a narrow-
ing) from an earlier approach to the aesthetic. (Keith Moxey has made a similar
case with regard to the mid-twentieth-century moves of art history—the
abandonment of critical method and the adoption of a positivist approach.)' The
idea of a different, more self-reflexive, aesthetic was also present in the papers of
262 Janet Wolff

two art historians: Irene Winter's critique of the type of limited aesthetic that
results in both ethnocentrism and false universalism, and Thomas DaCosta
Kaufmann’s opposition of a conservative art history that ignores most non-Western
art (the art of central Europe was his example) to an approach that eschews
national stereotyping. The point here—one that emerged intermittently but per-
sistently—is that although aesthetics, art history, and visual studies may indeed be
firmly counterposed and fundamentally distinct, this is by no means in the nature
of these disciplines or, indeed, their past or present practices. And this has the
effect of casting in a rather different light the project set out by the conference,
which now becomes one of examining the historical “narrowing” (and consequent
exclusionary tendencies) of aesthetics and art history in some circumstances, and
of exploring the more interesting intersections and overlaps of work done in
ostensibly different disciplinary contexts. Griselda Pollock, in the final roundtable
discussion, urged that we focus on practices, rather than objects of study, and
certainly this would enable an openness to questions of discipline and discipline-
crossing. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind the institutionalization
of disciplines (within the university, in professional organizations, in discipline-
based journals) as producing real structures that permit or impede certain kinds of
intellectual work.
Once we see the complexities of the three disciplines in question, as well
as their interrelationships, the question of time also becomes a little more compli-
cated. The conference was structured thematically into three sections: In Time,
Out of Time, and With Time (with the final panel discussion organized under the
heading Timeliness: Problems and Issues). Although this wasn’t always entirely
clear, and it wasn’t usually explicit, the idea seems to have been that the first
section would focus on art history (whose project situates its subjects in historical
time); the second on aesthetics (with the assumption that the philosophy of art
considers its object outside history); and the third on visual studies (the “with”
perhaps referring to the anti-positivist acknowledgment of the engagement of the
researcher him/herself in the process of research). Perhaps inevitably, the papers
did not always fit neatly into this division. But the categories themselves turn out
to be rather problematic. As I’ve suggested, aesthetics is by no means always “out
of time.” And if art history is (by definition?) “in time,” the question is what kind
of time is in play. Art historical work that presents chronology and sequence, but
that concentrates on the lineage of artists and styles, is at the same time “out of
time” in ignoring broader social and historical factors that participate in the
 Mixing Metaphors and Talking about Art 263

production and consumption of culture. As became clear during the conference,

though, aesthetics and art history may very well play out not only “in time” but
also “with time,” insofar as they are themselves already visual studies. The ironic
thing—and this is something I will come back to in a moment—is that it is visual
studies itself which is too often distorted by a new kind of “timelessness.” This lack
of grounding in the social and historical, as I will suggest, was in evidence at
certain moments in the Clark Conference.
The critique of the myth of timelessness is, of course, most often
encountered in connection with the exposure of ethnocentrism in art history and
its cognate disciplines. Those transcendent, universal values (aesthetic or other-
wise) have generally turned out to be Anglo-European values, whose promotion
as neutral and transhistorical has the effect of negating or diminishing alternative
aesthetics and the populations they represent. Two papers addressed this question
directly—Irene Winter’s discussion of the ancient Near East, and Thomas DaCosta
Kaufmann’s analysis of how it is that artistic canons and the aesthetic theories of
writers from Vasari to Kant, Riegl, and Gombrich operate on the basis of implicit
racial and national stereotypes. In both cases, the solution is seen to reside in a new
aesthetic—or, perhaps, in the return to an older aesthetic—which, as Winter put
it, engages in its own contextualization. That is, she suggests, rather than aban-
doning the concept of the aesthetic in relation to non-Western cultures, we can
“retain and reconfigure” the aesthetic, now no longer premised on the myth of
timelessness and universalism. Kaufmann’s notion of an “anthropogeography” is a
similar call for an aesthetics and an art history “disentangled” from its own preju-
dices. Both discussions confirm the emerging insight of the conference, that the
three disciplines need not be, or be perceived as, distinct and oppositional. (Mitchell
talked about the “triangulation” implicit in the three trees metaphor, and the
assumption of a “pincer movement” in which aesthetics and art history combine
to eradicate visual studies.) Rather, a more generous conception of aesthetics and
of art history acknowledges the critical, self-reflexive impetus historically present
and always available within those disciplines—their own internal visual studies
potential. In the related, but somewhat different, case of the “other” (non-Western)
within Western culture, Kobena Mercer explored the visual strategies of the artist
Romare Bearden, whose challenge it was to do justice to issues of black represen-
tation without abandoning a commitment to modernism. Here modernism’s
universality is undercut by the dialogic effects of Bearden’s specific practice
(montage, collage, and the “cut”—the paper tear); at the same time, the artist works
264 Janet Wolff

within the boundaries of an anti-realist modern (Cubist) art practice, employing

its critical strategies not to endorse the usual modernist ideology of transcendence,
but to make clear the composite nature of social reality. One might say that (in
spite of his inclusion in the In Time panel) Mercer’s work falls squarely within the
field of visual studies. But I think the point is that valuable work on these
questions of art, ethnicity, and geographical diversity can be done (is being done)
in aesthetics and in art history, too.
At one point in the conference, Nicholas Mirzoeff made the plea (only
partly, I took it, as a joke) that we should “keep English out of visual studies.” He
referred to the absorption of cultural studies into English departments when, in
the 1980s and 1990s, it made the transatlantic crossing from its original home in
Britain. This is a critique of “the Americanization of cultural studies” that has been
made by others,” and it usually consists in the argument that cultural studies in its
American mode has been depoliticized, being more an academic practice that reads
texts (high art and popular culture) in new ways (semiotic, psychoanalytic, hermeneu-
tic) than an analysis that sees texts in relation to institutions, power relations,
extra-textual discourses. To put it another way, the sociological imperative of British
cultural studies has evaporated in this kind of work, particularly where it is done
in humanities departments (notably departments of English) rather than, say, in
departments of communication and media studies. The critics are not usually
proposing a return to an unreconstructed sociology. It is generally acknowledged
that post-structuralist and postmodern theory has transformed intellectual work
so radically that sociology, too, has to consider what is at stake in the employment
of social and cultural categories.* Perhaps because of my own background (in British
cultural studies and sociology) and my own prejudices, I am inclined, too, to want
to see textual analysis grounded in the social. For one thing, the necessary
dismantling of the older certainties—aesthetic value, transcendent beauty, uni-
versal categories—in general seems to provoke an anxiety about judgment. (As an
aside, it is worth pointing out the interesting phenomenon of art historians
beginning to look to the natural sciences as a kind of life raft. Irene Winter alluded,
toward the end of her talk, to the possibility of psychological or neurobiological
approaches to the explanation of aesthetic value; in general discussion, John
Onians—who used the metaphor of boats sinking and rowers escaping—promoted
neurobiology and neuropsychology as disciplines that can accomplish this rescue.)
But more importantly, I think, the recognition of the discursive construction of
the social can operate as license for an abandonment of careful historical analysis,
 Mixing Metaphors and Talking about Art 265

as well as for an invocation of the political that can risk seeming gratuitous.‘ I want
to explore this a little further, in connection with one or two of the conference
papers and the discussion they engendered.
Philip Fisher presented a fascinating (and poetic) account of the “loss of
darkness” in the experience of painting in the twentieth century. His focus was on
the kind of encounter with the object that demands time, takes place in darkness,
and involves an experience of engulfment on the part of the viewer. While such an
experience continues to characterize our engagement with music, poetry, and
literature, Fisher argued that the museum discourages such engulfment, by virtue
of its organization and the habits of circulation it promotes among visitors. (He
finds an exception in the work of Jasper Johns—and I imagine we might each think
about which artist we would consider a candidate here.) I am not sure whether or
not he is right to suggest that the visual arts occupy such a radically different
position in the contemporary present compared with the other “high arts.” More
particularly, though, I wanted to see this very interesting meditation recast in the
kind of terms proposed by Lawrence Levine and others, who have shown exactly
how (and why) the “sacralization” of high culture developed in the nineteenth cen-
tury in the context of very specific relations of class and culture.’ It is clear from
this social-historical scholarship that such sacralization (which involves immersion,
darkness, individuation of reception) is a relatively recent phenomenon, contrasted
with the kind of collective, engaged aesthetic encounter we now associate with
popular cultural forms, but that was characteristic, before the mid-nineteenth
century, of all aesthetic experience in art, music, and theater. It was interesting,
then, to hear the paper that followed Philip Fisher’s—Jonathan Gilmore's discus-
sion of the modern development of the defense of art against censorship in terms
of formal autonomy (rather than, as earlier, in terms of content). Gilmore situated
this important transformation firmly in the context of the rise of mass culture in
the early nineteenth century, suggesting that we understand the new focus on form
as the necessary opacity constructed to differentiate high art from popular culture
(and, at the same time, high art consumers from the masses). This kind of “ground-
ing” of visual studies in the social relations of the visual goes further, | would say,
than a descriptive account of transformations in the aesthetic. The latter, however
suggestive, always leaves open the crucial question of why such changes occur when
they do.
My final example is Nicholas Mirzoeff’s paper on “ghostwriting.” I have
a particular interest in this, because I too have recently found this vocabulary of
266 Janet Wolff

“haunting” useful in my own work.® Mirzoeff, in his extremely wide-ranging dis-

cussion of cultural texts and moments (Bentham’s Panopticon, Benjamin's Arcades,
nineteenth-century spiritualism, Conrad in the Congo, Proust, Anne Frank, the
artist Shirin Neshat), claimed that “visual culture’s stories are ghost stories.” I under-
stand by this the acknowledgment that it is the job of critical visual studies to bring
into visibility those (individuals, cultures, beliefs) rendered invisible by our
dominant discourses and structures. This is something, for example, that James
Donald and Rosalyn Deutsche have both addressed in relation to the city and the
way (to quote Donald) it is “imagined.” For both of these authors, it is the task of
cultural analysis to investigate how the discourses of the city (discourses of
government, town planning, medicine, sanitation, sociological analysis) illuminate
certain practices and populations and obscure others.” Mirzoeff’s project, as I under-
stand it, is very much on these lines, and it offers the opportunity to explore
significant absences in the stories we tell about the past. But the sociological ground-
ing, so crucial to the identification of these absences, seemed to me to be lacking
in his paper, and although this may well have been the result of the compression
of a complicated essay into a thirty-minute presentation, it had the effect of
rendering his particular “ghosts” less convincing. For instance, he spoke of the
absence of Jews in the Paris arcades (or, perhaps, in writings about the arcades).
While this may very well be true (in reality or in the texts), what we need, in
order to understand this as a constitutive absence, is a careful (social-historical)
analysis of the situation of Jews at that time, and of their actual absence
(disappearance?) from the arcades; and a systematic discussion of the discourses of
modernity, the city, and the arcades, which makes clear the ideological operation
of inclusion and exclusion. (A parallel example, better known, is the “absence” of
women in the early twentieth-century city, which contemporary feminists now
perceive rather as the blindness of dominant discourses ofmodernity and the city,
which fail to illuminate—because they refuse to speak about—women’s actual
passage through the city streets. In this sense, we could say that the women are
“ghosts.”) I do think the concept of “haunting” is potentially a very useful one for
cultural criticism and, a fortiori, for visual studies. But it has to be situated in a
solid analytic framework, rather than being mobilized rather randomly to talk
about those “others” who are not there.®
I realize that it is beginning to sound as though I want to propose a fourth
tree—the discipline of sociology (or social history). But of course I have already
suggested that we have to abandon this kind of imagery if we are to understand
 Mixing Metaphors and Talking about Art 267

the relations between disciplines and the impact of a new discipline on more
traditional ones. In his paper, Stephen Melville spoke about the “interlacings” of
objectivity, experience, and interests, and I think that might do as a useful way of
thinking about the study of the visual. Melville also claimed that our regular “gram-
* mar” (of art and culture) had failed—a point that was taken up in discussion by
others, who wanted to find new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between
questions of aesthetic judgment, art historical study, and visual-critical analysis.
And although, as I have been saying, I want to insist on the central place of at least
the sociological imagination (if not the discipline of sociology) in this continuing
endeavor, I take very seriously the point made by W. J. T. Mitchell at the conference,
that it is not just a matter of perceiving the visual as socially produced: the social
itself is visually produced (in the sense that visual and other discourses make the
world in which we live). If it has been a useful historical exercise to investigate the
growth and development of the disciplines of aesthetics, art history, and visual
studies, as well as to think about their sometimes antagonistic relations, I would
say that it is now much more important to move on from this discussion and to
take advantage of the potentially cooperative and respectful relationship between
these disciplines—very much in evidence at the conference—and of the great
opportunities the developing interdisciplinary activity sometimes—but not only—
known as visual studies offers us today.

1. Keith Moxey, The Practice ofPersuasion (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 93.
2. See, for example, Cary Nelson, “Always Already Cultural Studies: Academic Conferences and a
Manifesto,” and Joel Pfister, “The Americanization of Cultural Studies,” both in John Storey, ed.,
What is Cultural Studies? AReader (London: Arnold, 1996).
3. This is not always the case. Some of the essays in Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding, eds.,
Cultural Studies in Question (London: Sage, 1999) still hold out for a “pre—post-structuralist” cer-
tainty about the solidity of social and economic categories, avoiding the uncomfortable recognition
that these are themselves discursive constructions.
4. Two examples of this at the conference were Nicholas Mirzoeff’s claim that his paper was “haunted
by the Holocaust and by the Rwanda genocide,” which may well have been true, but which—per-
haps because of pressures of saying a good deal in a short time—was neither evident to the audience
nor explained in the paper itself; and Griselda Pollock’s adoption of the familiar (but almost always
problematic) term “after Auschwitz”
—a time category and a political claim which is generally
268 Janet Wolff

intended to invoke a radical historical break (but what és that break?) and (perhaps) a necessarily new
aesthetic (this sometimes founded on a misunderstanding of an Adorno comment), and which at
the same time obviates criticism and questions by its invocation of what is seen as both the ultimate
horror and the sacrosanct.
5. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in Amertea (Cambridge,
Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1988). See also Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entre-
preneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture
in America,” in Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary
Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
6. Janet Wolff, “Gender and the Haunting of Cities, Or the Retirement of the Flaneur,” in Wolff,
AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in England and the United States (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, forthcoming).

7. James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
Rosalyn Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass., and
London: MIT Press, 1996).
8. An excellent book on this topic is Avery EF Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Contributors

David Carrier is Champney Family Visiting Professor at Case Western Reserve

University/Cleveland Institute of Art, 2001-2002. His forthcoming books include
Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism; Sean Scully; and The Art
ofArtwriting.

Philip Fisher is the Reid Professor of English at Harvard University. His books
include The Vehement Passions; Still the New World; Wonder, the Rainbow, and the
Aesthetics ofRare Experiences; Making and Effacing Art; Hard Facts; and The New
American Studies. He is currently completing a book on prolonged attention and
the museum experience called “Walking Past Works of Art.”

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin ’17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton
University and is co-editor of October Magazine and Books. His most recent book
is Design and Crime, and Other Diatribes.

Ivan Gaskell, the Margaret S. Winthrop Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and

Decorative Arts at Harvard University Art Museums, is the author of Vermeer’
Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Museums and is editor of Vermeer
Studies. He is joint general editor of Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts.

Jonathan Gilmore is a Cotsen Fellow in the Humanities in Princeton University’s

Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. He is the author of The Life ofaStyle:
Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art.

Michael Ann Holly is Director of Research and Academic Programs at the Clark
Art Institute. A co-founder of the Visual and Cultural Studies Graduate Program
at the University of Rochester, she was also chair of the Art History Department
there for thirteen years. The author or co-editor of several books on the subjects
of the historiography and theory of art history, she has also been co-director of two
NEH and two Getty summer seminars on similar subjects for humanities faculty.
270 Contributors

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann is Professor in the Department of Art and

Archaeology, Princeton University, and the author of Court, Cloister and City,
The Mastery of Nature, and The School of Prague. His forthcoming books include
studies of the geography of art, Dutch and Flemish painting, and Central European
drawings.

Michael Kelly is managing editor of the Journal of Philosophy and Adjunct Associate
Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is the editor-in-chief of
The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and is currently writing a book on iconoclasm in
contemporary philosophical aesthetics.

Karen Lang is Assistant Professor of Modern European Art at the University of

Southern California, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German
art and aesthetic theory. She has published on German monuments and issues of
national identity, Kantian aesthetic theory and its relation to art history, and the
spectator of the eighteenth-century English garden.

Stephen Melville is Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University,
specializing in contemporary art, theory, and historiography. He has served as
resident faculty at the Getty Summer Institute in Visual and Cultural Studies and
as co-curator of As Painting: Division and Displacement, a major exhibition of
contemporary painting. His publications include Seams: Art as a Philosophical
Context, Vision and Textuality, and Philosophy beside Itself! On Deconstruction and
Modernism.

Kobena Mercer writes on the visual arts of the black diaspora and teaches in the
Department of Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University, London. Recent
publications include a catalogue essay for Africas: An Exhibition and a Journey
and monographs on Isaac Julien and James VanDerZee.

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Art History and Comparative Studies at SUNY

Stony Brook. In 2002, he was Leverhulme Professor at the University of Nottingham.
He is the author of An Introduction to Visual Culture and editor of The Visual
Culture Reader, second edition.
 Contributors 271

W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of

Chicago and is the editor of Critical Inquiry. His books include The Last Dinosaur
Book, Iconology, and Picture Theory, which won the Morey Prize for Art History
from the College Art Association. He is currently at work on a book entitled “What
Do Pictures Want?”

Keith Moxey is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Art History at Barnard College
and Columbia University. He is the author of a number of books, including The
Practice ofPersuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History, and is the editor of several
anthologies. Together with Michael Ann Holly he directed two summer institutes
on art history and visual studies for art professionals from Central and Eastern
Europe, which were sponsored by the Getty Foundation and held at the University
of Rochester in 1998 and 1999.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art in the

Department of Fine Art at the University of Leeds, where she is also director of
the Centre for Cultural Studies. She has written extensively on the feminine in the
social history of art and in cultural and psychoanalytic theory. Her publications
include Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts; Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender
and the Colour ofArt History; and Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the
Writing ofArt Histories.

Irene Winter is the William Dorr Boardman Professor in the Department of Art
and Architecture at Harvard University. She has conducted fieldwork in Iran,
Turkey, and Syria, and her recent publications include the co-edited volume Seals
and Seal Impressions and a forthcoming study of Mesopotamian aesthetics, of which
the present article will form a part.

Janet Wolff is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of the Arts at
Columbia University. She was formerly director of the Program in Visual and
Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and founding director of the Centre
for Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her publications include The Social
Production ofArt; Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture; Resident Alien:
Feminist Cultural Criticism; and “AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in England
and the United States.”
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Photography Credits

Permission to reproduce illustrations is provided by courtesy of the owners as listed

in the captions. Additional photography credits are as follows:

© Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y. (p. 216); Département des Antiquités Orientales,

Musée du Louvre, Paris (pp. 7 [bottom], 12, 14 [bottom]); © Bracha Lichtenberg
Ettinger (p. 163); © Giraudon/Art Resource, N.Y. (pp. 151, 217); © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York (p. 11); © National Gallery, London (p. 149); The Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago (p. 14 [top]); © President and Fellows of
Harvard College, photo Rick Stafford (p. 101); © Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art
Resource, N.Y. (p. 218); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (p. 178); © Romare Bearden
Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. (pp. 29, 40, 41); © San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art (p. 102); © Scala/Art Resource, N.Y. (p. 164); courtesy
Cindy Sherman and Metro Pictures (pp. 131, 134); The Trustees of the British
Museum (pp. 6 [top], 7 [top], 219); The University Museum, University of
Pennsylvania (p. 13); All rights reserved (pp. 6 [bottom], 15)
ra
ty s,
J CAERLEO N
SERVICES
a INFORMATION
2 AND
“G2 LIBRARY
ART HISTORY, AESTHETICS, VISUAL STUDIES

Edited by Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey

With essays by David Carrier, Philip Fisher, Hal Foster, lvan Gaskell,

Jonathan Gilmore, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Michael Kelly, Karen Lang,

Stephen Melville, Kobena Mercer, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W. J. T. Mitchell,

Griselda Pollock, Irene J.Winter, and Janet Wolff.

Art history, aesthetics, and visual studies today find themselves in contested

new philosophical and institutional circumstances. Based on the 2001

Clark Conference, Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies explores both the

connections and divergences among thése three modes of investigating

visual representation. What are the dominant aesthetic assumptions

underlying art historical inquiry? How have these assumptions been

challenged by visual studies? Are questions of aalicy, form, content,

meaning, and spectatorship culturally specific? Can we still define the

parameters of what should properly constitute the objects of the history

of art? Have art history and visual studies anything to learn from one
another? Where do ideas about the aesthetic begin and end, both in the

academy and in the museum? Fifteen eminent scholars critically examine

the relationships among arthistory; aesthetics,
and visual studies from their
founding moments through their contemporary practices.

Cover design by David Edge

Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London

ISBN 0-300-09789-I

STERLING & FRANCINE a nL

CLARK ART INSTPETS 7 Printed

intheU.S.A.