This is the preface to NORMAN BRYSON's : Word and Image, French Painting of the Ancien Regime. (1983). Text in Yellow are quotes from the author, Text in Orange are quotes from others.
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ACCORDING TO LEGEND, the birds paid homage to the great realist painter of antiquity, Zeuxis, by flying down to eat from his painted vine. The grapes of Zeuxis form the limit case of an aesthetic which has rarely been far from the centre of art in the West: the utopian dream o£ art as a perfect reduplication of the objects of the world. Yet the legend of the grapes of Zeuxis points also in another direction which art in the West has always followed, and with as much enthusiasm: the idea of art as a place where certain dimensions of the real world are to be renounced. For the birds, pursuing the utopian objective of painting as the site where objects reappear in all their original presence and plenitude, everything which stands in the way of perfect reproduction is impediment, obstacle. But for ourselves, for humanity, art begins where an artificial barrier between the eye 'and the world is erected: the world we know is reduced, robbed of various parameters of its being, and in the interval between world and reproduction, art resides.
Beginning with the very first paragraph, Bryson rolls out an ontology and art theory rather distant from my own. At least I have Pliny the Elder on my side! As his legend of Zeuxis continues, another painter, Parrhasias, painted a curtain that was so real that Zeuxis himself was fooled into trying to pull it open. Parrhasias won the contest because Zeuxis had only managed to fool a few witless starlings. And so the question of "real to whom?" has entered the discussion of reality in art. In physics and biology that question may be ignored - but the only objective, measurable criteria in the imaginative arts are cash value and popularity. Welcome to the Antiques Road Show.
One might also note that it would be more accurate to say that birds are driven by hunger rather than the pursuit of an "utopian objective" of "perfect reduplication . Once again, Bryson has presented criteria appropriate for a scientific laboratory rather than a studio where people work with imagination and desire.
Bryson's concern for "perfect reduplication " has led him to define art as a mediation between that ideal and reality. Later on in his preface, he will limit that definition to "painting in the West" - though I think its scope is even more limited than that. It would best apply to various kinds of scientific illustration and perhaps the more aesthetically minded naturalists like Audubon. If Bryson is looking for art "in the interval between world and reproduction", he will have little need to visit art museums, and I can't imagine why he would be interested LeBrun, Watteau, David, or Greuze.
Nicholas Hilliard, "Young man among Roses", 1585-1595
"For humanity, art begins where an artificial barrier between the eye and the world is erected" - and an image by Hilliard "may well stand for the universal type of the work of art, for very deep in human thought, as the anthropologists tell us, lies the idea of art as miniaturization".
Those who visit toy shops have seen more than enough miniatures that would only qualify as art to an eight year old - while those who visit art museums have seen many life size portraits that would have to be called great art if such a category is of interest. So Bryson is not distinguishing art from the rest of visual culture - presumably because he relates to "visual and cultural studies" more than "art history"
As Bryson tells us, "all miniatures have an aesthetic quality about them" - yet he did not choose Barbie’s Playhouse (shown above) to exemplify miniaturization as art. Instead he chose one of the great European painters of the late 16th Century. So there is another agenda at work here - the deflation and humiliation of high culture. Perhaps he cannot visually distinguish it himself; perhaps he believes that such an attempt would be elitist and reactionary. He does not confront the distinction head on - he just tries to sabotage it by making a Hilliard portrait and Barbie's Playhouse interchangeable.
Two impulses, one to resurrect, and one to renounce seem between them to define the painting of the West. On the one hand, what Levi-Strauss calls the 'avid and ambitious desire to take possession of the object', a desire which calls into being all those refinements within the technology of reproduction which for antiquity, as for the Renaissance, constituted painting's progressive history; and on the other hand, an impulse which runs counter to the first, demands a diminution or sacrifice of the object's original presence, and strips away from its unwanted repletion aspects which impede the release of 'aesthetic emotion'.
I can’t think of any European painting to which this dichotomy would apply other than the semi-abstract still life’s of early Modernism. Apples as painted by Cezanne for example, combine a tangible sense of presence and volume with an aggressive assertion that you are only seeing marks on a canvas.
The most striking manifestations of the second impulse concern the removal of one or more parameters of the physical world. Less obvious is the curtailment of the image through its conversion into a site of meaning. Only rarely has the image been granted full independence- allowed simply to exist, with all the plenary autonomy enjoyed by the objects of the world. Throughout its existence, painting has sought to circumscribe and delimit the autonomous image by subjecting it. as part of the overall impulse of renunciation, to the external control of the discourse.
This is a succinct inversion of formalism - and it does apply to the conceptual art of the past 60 years and all commercial art. It’s a de-sensitized way to view things - but it does appear to have become standard practice in academic art history.
By the way, it is only the art historians of our time who are denied the power to grant images full autonomy and independence. That is what their academic discipline now requires of them - and it is that institution that seeks "to circumscribe and delimit the autonomous image by subjecting it, as part of the overall impulse of renunciation, to the external control of the discourse."
The rest of us are still free to let images take us where they may.
Stylistic history takes as its mission the description of successive visual styles, following one upon the other in unbroken dynastic order. But alongside this familiar and untroubled saga of continuities lies another semantic history, only partly visible to the stylistic eye, and full of turbulence; a history not merely of meanings, but of ceaseless conflict between the image as it seeks fullness and autonomy, and the renunciatory impulse which refuses the image that primal plenitude, and seeks its conversion from an end to a means, a means to meaning. It is with a fragment of the history of that conflict that this book is concerned.
Stylistic art history also renounces the specificity of the image when it pounds all the unique, quirky art-pegs into its pattern of well machined category-holes. Semiotic art history goes even further by replacing the image entirely with text.
But neither can stop the curious eye from looking directly at the images themselves and surrendering to their magic - a project that becomes ever more exciting every year as more and larger images of art are uploaded to the internet.
And so we shall proceed to study Bryson’s book. Not because we expect the commentary to be especially enlightening , but just because it’s there - and any excuse is a good one to wander through the "museum without walls" (too bad Malraux did not live to see the internet)
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