Preface

Preziosi, Donald

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Preface

Donald Preziosi

Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science

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Author

Donald Preziosi

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.xi-xvi

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00103.004

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18655

Preface

Surveying the development of any modern academic discipline is not unlike trying to read a heavily palimpsested manuscript full of emendations, erasures, and marginalia, with innumerable graffiti added by different hands over time. Rereading the history of art history is, in particular, not an easy task. Its development is not simple, unilinear, progressive, or cumulative. The ramifications of its practices are often startlingly contradictory. Despite the accumulation of confident manifestoes, pronouncements, methodological protocols, and intricate supportive technologies, art history seems to go off in different directions at the same time or tends to dissolve and to blur as one tries to fix it in clear and steady focus. The reader often longs for a magic solvent that will disclose on the pages of art history some more coherent subtext, some clear and rational agenda that must surely be written somewhere, perhaps in invisible ink.

Indeed, one would think that for a discipline so perennially obsessed with the ultimate apt phrase and the poignant and penetrating bon mot, there might be some Olympian perspective revealing an orderly, rational, and progressive evolution.

There is no such perspective, despite what might be inferred from numerous primers. Journeying through the actual forest of art historical writing can be an unsettling experience and an unattractive task for any accustomed to viewing historical landscapes from the air or from angles (however anamorphic) that collapse the great complexity of the art historical terrain into an orderly and pedagogically neat booklet of road maps. There are certainly enough guides for the perplexed, but few guides to the discipline do more than beg the question as to why art history came into existence as an academic and critical practice, what its goals are or have been (apart from the usual missions cloned from other humanistic disciplines), and how the art historical enterprise relates to those of anthropology, sociology, history, or philosophy. And yet, this unsettling, tedious, and disconcerting journey—or, to use another metaphor, this archaeological campaign—must be undertaken if we are at all concerned with the fate of the discipline in this period of confusing transition and transformation.

What art historians do is changing—certainly too slowly for some and far too precipitously for others. Some would seem to lament that art historians today wander over a bleak and darkening landscape increasingly threatened from below by the rumblings of new taxonomic technologies and from above by new theoretical developments hovering like lowering storm clouds, portending some idealist-materialist Armageddon. Others have viewed the same clouds as signaling blustery but bracing relief from long-standing intellectual drought and see the arrival of computerized systems as a remedy to the fetishized drudgeries of bookkeeping that for so long have pretended to the status of creative intellection in art historical research.

What is left of the art historical hortus within the humanities has understandably come to seem like a narrow, trackless, and weed-filled space with fewer and fewer comforting vistas apart from the silent quiddities of one’s favorite objects. All the old road signs seem to have been effaced by adolescent graffitists or rewritten in extraterrestrial hieroglyphs by ivory-tower academicians whose heads swirl about in a starry semiological firmament.

These are extreme but not uncommon reactions to unsettling times in the discipline. Clearly, however, not all questioning of the transformations taking place in art historical practice has been sour, neoconservative w(h)ine in recycled bottles. And it is equally clear that not all those calling for accelerated change or reformation know whereof they speak, or speak in the same voice. It is surely as naive and ill informed to claim (as some have) that structuralism, semiology, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, social history, poststructuralism, or deconstruction are but different tentacles of the same alien or heterodox beast as it is to hold (as some do) that there is a singular and solid orthodoxy in traditional theory or practice. The complexity and rich diversity of historical and critical practice over the past century preclude any neatly written scenario. It is too easy and reductive to collapse that complexity into the neat packages of intellectual biography and theoretical genealogy in vacuuo so tediously characteristic of our discipline up to the present time.

The ocean of reticence once so ubiquitous in art history is drying up. This can only be a salutary development (as confusing as it may have become), for the submarine landscape now being uncovered in all its strangeness and bizarre morphology has long determined the currents of historical practice and the directions of critical thought. We are beginning to see in a clearer light some of the diverse circumstances, needs, and desires that have made art history possible and sustained it on its complex courses through the past century.

In short, we are learning how to remember art history, but in new ways. But lest we conclude too swiftly that what is being uncovered on that ocean floor represents some deeper or truer history of art history, we should remind ourselves that this increasingly (but still only partially) visible terrain of theory and metaphor has itself been shaped by the powerful and often contradictory currents of practice both within and outside the discipline.

It is that fuller text that demands rereading today. With regard to that larger picture, the present text is itself a palimpsest.

The six chapters of this book represent several probes into the archaeology of art history—several test trenches beneath the rhetorical surfaces of disciplinary practice. These chapters overlap in a number of areas, and parts of their arguments can be seen as different facets of a set of related problems. The format of the book is neither linear nor cumulative; there is no set of simple conclusions at the end. Instead, each essay focuses upon a particular matrix of strategies in art history, which we take here as exemplary conjunctions of art historical knowledge and power. The focus of each has been suggested by certain kernel and persistent metaphors, theoretical assumptions, and rhetorical strategems. As the book attempts to clarify, each of these has served, over the past century, to strengthen, legitimize, and render natural or obvious several specific perspectives on the roles and functions of artistic production and construal. At the same time, the analyses will be sensitive to the ethical and moral orders projected and legitimized by art historical knowledge.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by discussing the crisis in the discipline as it has been portrayed and debated over the past decade, particularly in the United States. This large body of crisis writing has tended to be redundant, frequently shallow, and polemically aimed at often fictive targets. What is of interest to our discussion is its avoidance of history, or at least its scant willingness to look at the history of the discipline in its complexity and contradictoriness.

Chapter 2 is concerned with that often obscure object of desire, the art of art history, and the historical oscillation of disciplinary attention between the uniqueness of its objects of study and their apparently ordered sequences of appearance and diffusion over time and geography. What kind of analytic object has the art of art history been? What problems arise when, as in recent years, almost any conceivable object has been invested with museological or aesthetic status?

While chapter 2 deals with the identity and definition of the object domain of the discipline, chapter 3 considers some of the primary ways in which the objects of that domain are made visible—or rather, the disciplinary technologies for rendering the visible legible. Here it will be argued that—rather than being simple ancillary instrumentalities or supplements to the study of artworks in vivo—photographic technology, the practices of filmic isolation, projection, and the potential for instantaneous and universal juxtaposition of all forms of imagery provided the founding definitions of art historical practice as such. Comparable in some respects to microscopy and telescopy in the sciences, photography worked to render visible an imaginary and universal table or chart of exempla, and the analytic matrix of lantern-slide projector and blank surface provided art history with a paradigmatic frame within which to erect a universal “history” of art.

This supplement—what might be appropriately termed a certain cinematic sensibility—is, in fact, the technological metaphor for the entire art historical project, defining the nature of art historical study as well as the nature of its object domain. It established a panopticist model for disciplinary knowledge in art history, resonating with Bentham’s Panopticon, that late eighteenth-century design for a perfect mode of surveillance that some have seen as a powerful paradigm for emergent scientific disciplines in the nineteenth century. This “panoptic gaze” necessarily works in tandem with a complementary technology—an archive—consisting of a network of slide and photographic libraries, art indices, electronic data-retrieval and data-storage systems, as well as a particular type of apparatus now commonly referred to as the art history survey text, in both its verbal and its architectonic (museum) format. In a manner complementary to the panoptic theater, the art historical archive works to situate the art historian in a carefully circumscribed position for the reading of images. Not unlike the various forms of anamorphic painting of the European baroque, the art historical archive projects very specific perspectives or sites from which the archival display locks into a telling and narrative order. In this way, the “anamorphic archive” works to define another disciplinary artifact, the art historian or critic.

Chapter 4 considers the historical role of various theories of meaning and signification in determining the matrix of disciplinary strategies constituting modern art history. A “coy semiology” from its very beginnings, art history has flirted with one or another facet of sign theory, from connoisseurship to iconology to modern visual semiotics, while remaining mostly true to a curiously eucharistic semiology running as a thread through theories of signification in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—in contrast to a secular, Lockean perspective on meaning and signification, and in contrast to the more radical assumptions of some of Saussure’s sémiologie. Similarities and differences between Panofsky’s iconology and more recent structuralist semiotics are considered, along with connections between the semiology of Saussure and that of his erstwhile mentor, the historian and art critic Hippolyte Taine. Finally, we consider the relationships between contemporary art historical practice and various poststructuralist theories of signification.

Chapter 5 is devoted to the question of the origins of art and the simultaneous avoidance of the question by the discipline. Tacit assumptions regarding the origins of the activities that art history takes as its object domain permeate many aspects of disciplinary practice, grounded as they have been in very particular concepts of human identity. As one of the primary defining instances of humanness, artistic creativity is characteristically seen as coterminous with the history of Homo sapiens sapiens. Increasingly, however, the study of Paleolithic cultures has come to problematize a number of traditional assumptions about artistic origins and about art itself, including certain conceptions regarding the integrity of the art object and of its modes of signification. The chapter examines some of the implications of this recent research for the future of the discipline, arguing that in one sense art history marginalized Paleolithic art because of the latter’s challenges to certain foundational disciplinary assumptions.

Chapter 6 looks back at the probes we have made with an anamorphic eye so as to highlight some of the social-historical implications of the previous chapters. This leads to a consideration of the growth of a social history of art in Anglo-American academia, viewing it as a mixed, uneven, and at times internally contradictory series of enterprises, with as many meanings and implications as there have been practitioners and apologists. Rather than constituting a school of art history during the 1970s and early 1980s, the social history of art was a watershed between modernist and contemporary practices, at times complicit (especially in certain Marxisant modes of practice) with traditional paradigms, and at times innovative, forming an important part of what is loosely referred to today as contemporary critical theory. The book closes with an analysis of a particular art historical moment—the Mnesiklean Propylaia on the fifth-century B.C. Athenian akropolis—as an emblem of where the discipline has been and of where it might be going: a view beyond the Panopticon.

Throughout the book, we shall be sensitive to the contrasts presented by the modern discipline as seen from both the outside and the inside. From without, art history often shows a kind of utopic face: a world, as Pierre Bourdieu once wrote of art, like a “sacred island systematically and ostentatiously opposed to the profane, everyday world of production, a sanctuary for gratuitous, disinterested activity in a universe given over to money and self-interest, [which] offers, like theology in a past epoch, an imaginary anthropology obtained by a denial of all the negations really brought about by the economy.”1P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 197.

Yet from within, art history, as we shall see, is rather more heterotopic, juxtaposing in a singular disciplinary space a whole series of places that are assembled after the fashion of bricolage to project a kind of ironic unity, coherence, and singleness of mission. The more one explores the carpentry of this space, the more it comes to appear as a trompe-l’oeil rather like the Trapezoidal Room of Adelbert Ames—a momentarily coherent perspective that on closer inspection is revealed as impossible and contradictory.

In this sense, art history could be seen as sharing with other heterotopic spaces within or constituting society—film, the theater, television, the ship, or even the vacation village or theme park—a programmatic projection both of illusion and compensation. There is a certain similarity in this regard between the discipline of art history and such institutions as the library or the museum: heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, accumulating everything, resonating with the will, as Michel Foucault once put it, to establish a General Archive, to “enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes; the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages; the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place.”2M. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986): 26. The essay originally appeared in the journal Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité 73 (October 1984): 6–9, under the title “Des Espaces Autres”; it was a transcription of a lecture given in Paris in March 1967. By lashing together several nineteenth-century dreams of scientificity, art history has been paradigmatic of a certain modernist, panoptic sensibility: a factory for the production of sense for modern Western societies.

In attending to the contradictions and complexities that make up the modern history of art history, the following chapters may be seen as a kind of backwoods work—each attempting to open up pathways through the dense and confusing undergrowth of conflicting assumptions, rhetorical devices, analytic strategies, and technologies that have come to characterize the discipline in its modernity.

This book is neither an apologia nor a jeremiad. Its aim is to illuminate some of the issues that have been coy within the discipline of art history to date, particularly in its American manifestations; and to suggest some of the necessary means whereby a detailed and thoroughgoing archaeology of art history might be mounted. Nor do these essays purport to sketch out a complete historiographic history of the discipline; that is a task for the future. In a simple and literal sense, Rethinking Art History is a series of interlinked prolegomena, antecedent to a history that must be written if we are to have a realistic sense of where we might be going. The following chapters have the modest aim of foregrounding some of the primary metaphorical substructures of modern art historical practice: the rhetorical framings that have for so long delimited how we speak and think about the history of art history.

1 P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 197. »

2 M. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986): 26. The essay originally appeared in the journal Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité 73 (October 1984): 6–9, under the title “Des Espaces Autres”; it was a transcription of a lecture given in Paris in March 1967. »

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