What would you like to get from reading a book of art history?
The word "context" could cover most of it: social, political, religious, philosophical, cultural, technological, biographical.
But at the center - there has has to be art worth caring about - and a sense that the writer cares about it for the right reasons and not just because it’s really famous.
What are those right reasons? Good luck trying to explain them — but most of us find our own reasons to be sufficiently important. If a writer’s preferences and reasons seem incomprehensible - why care about how they contextualize ?
And so we come to this brief essay by a well spoken art historian who bemoans the changing conceptual foundations of his field and takes a moment to articulate his own.
I look forward to reading one of Lavin’s books about Bernini some day
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The Crisis in Art History from the Art Bulletin LXXIII, 1996
Irving Lavin (1927-2019)
When I started out, theory still had its classic sense of an abstract structure in which individual phenomena might be accorded a reasonably explicable place, and within the parameters of which an evolutionary process might be discerned without value judgments or any other form of tendentious manipulation. Theory now has a very different meaning, of which tendentiousness has become, unabashedly, the very trademark. The revision has been progressive, passing through a sometimes bewildering series of more or less interrelated ideologies, from Marxism to multiculturalism. Marxism had prewar roots, but many of those who espoused Marxism in the twenties and thirties (most notably, in our field, Meyer Schapiro) became disenchanted when confronted by the brutally repressive realities of Stalinism and dictatorship by the proletariat. The later neo-Marxists ignored, rationalized, or sublimated these contradictions, producing, instead, an art history that chronicled, explicitly or implicitly, the brutally exploitative realities of capitalist culture, culminating in that Evil Empire of the West, the great citadel of consumerist vulgarity, the United States of America. The subsequent flood of interpretive "strategies" (to co-opt a usage normally applied to the artist, but now increasingly to the historian as well)-structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, symbolic anthropology, patronage, rhetoric (which includes not only the devices the artist employs on behalf of his work, but also those he deploys on behalf of himself, collective social history (mentalilés), microhistory, new historicism, cultural studies, critical theory, reception theory, feminism, queer studies, multical-turalism-has enriched the field beyond measure. Besides attesting to the intellectual and social ferment of our time, each development has broadened the perspective from which works of art may be viewed with profit (rarely with pleasure), revealing unsuspected facets of meaning and value. Not only has the discipline been greatly expanded; it has also in turn become accessible to scholars throughout the humanities_-historians, philosphers, anthropologists, sociologists, literary historians, musicologists_-for whom art has now become to an unprecedented degree an integral part, if not the main subject, of their study. But these acquisitions have have not been made without cost. One counterproductive effect, ironically, has been attendant upon the emergence of theory itself as a field of specialization, with vocabulary and syntax often quite inaccessible even to professionals, never mind the general public with whom Ackerman was so preoccupied.
An almost non-tendentious way of putting things. The field was enriched by all these "strategies" - though at the same time it’s vocabulary became incomprehensible to non-specialist readers.
Lavin politely deplores that Aesthetics/connoisseurship has been driven from academic art history - but it was always marginal anyway - wasn’t it? It does not lend itself to the disciplined explanations required by academic study. This is why aesthetic proofs of authenticity (is this really a Rembrandt?) are always problematic. (and why so many hopelessly bad pieces have been accepted into the canon)
Devisualization/Hypercontextualization
Disparate as were the individual approaches of the pioneers who built the conceptual framework of art history, they shared a common purpose. They were intent upon establishing the autonomy of visual experience, the basic premises from which the nature of works of art could be grasped in purely formal terms. They were by no means unaware or unheedful of other factors that condition artistic creation, but other factors are not unique to art history, whose autonomy as a discipline ultimately rests on its capacity to comprehend works of visual art on sight, as it were.' The focus of theory has since been inverted to the point that two of its original mainstays, the analysis and history of style as such, and connoisseurship (localization, dating, and attributoon), have all but disappeared from the art historian's ken.
Attention has shifted almost entirely to the circumstances under which art is created--social, economic, political, and psychological factors are the suspects usually rounded up--so that the visual taxonomy of art has become a lost art. Perhaps inevitably, art history has itself been subjected to the same process with the fetishization of "interdisciplinary approaches" that have effectively reversed its position of leadership in the humanities. The interest and value of art-historical studies are now determined almost in direct relation to the methods and terminology they display that have been appropriated from elsewhere.
Sign me up for "the autonomy of the visual experience" ! It suggests that there may always be something there that the eye has yet to discover. Also for the autonomy of reading literature and listening to music. Let these things speak for themselves - unfiltered by reductive commentary.
But can anything really be "grasped in purely formal terms"? Formal terms seem so inadequate - at least regarding my experience of things. And it’s only a few recent artists or their patrons who would make such a claim about what they made or bought. My own reaction is primarily emotional. How does the thing make me feel?
And how important, really, is a taxonomy of styles? The same style is shared by every great artist and his legion of followers — but the qualities that make that master endlessly interesting are not.
So I am really no closer to the "pioneers who built the conceptual framework of art history" than I am to the anti-aesthetic revisionists.
Instrumentalization
A concomitant of the devisualization/ hypercontextualization process has been the tendency to regard the work of art primarily as a response to the external circumstances of its creation, and finally as an effort to manipulate them. The artist is no longer thought of as expressing himself but as representing (read promoting) himself, and the art historian has become a kind of voyeur who "sees" the reality behind the façade. The work of art becomes an instrument designed to achieve success and power for the patron (buyer) or the artist, or both. The attitude has its proximate derivation in aspects of symbolic anthropology, in which artifacts (including social practices, also called rituals) are endowed with the affective aura of fetishes to effect a willing acceptance of a given social order. The motivation for this view is fundamentally political, and the key to the strategy is the notion of "empowerment," which thereby acquires a fetishistic aura of its own. The whole mechanism can be ratcheted up, or down, a notch and applied to the historian himself, so that now the agenda of the metahistorian is concealed beneath his own self-representation as an "authentic" voyeur of his colleagues, past and sometimes present. Reality vanishes in a concentric sequence of colorful but ultimately empty Russian dolls. In view of all these developments it might be said with some justice, I think, that the present crisis of art history is that it is no longer itself. Art history has lost its identity. A Natural Science of the Spirit. How the field will survive these assaults on its integrity remains to be seen, but it surely must, and on the chance it might be helpful I conclude by repeating here the principles of a sort of professional credo of my own. They are excerpted from a rumination, much aware of Ackerman's, written in response to an invitation from Lucy Freeman Sandler, then president of CAA, to address the convocation at the annual meeting in 1983.5 The credo consists of five tenets--I call them assumptions because I doubt whether in the long run any of them is demonstrably valid or invalid_-underlying my conception of art history, which I defined as a "natural science of the spirit."
Does art history have to be called "a natural science of the spirit" if it prioritizes the autonomy of the visual experience? "Human nature" has become ever more problematic as human cognition is studied as a social construct.
But isn’t every statement about either nature or society insufficient? As Lao Tse once asserted, whatever you can say about the Tao (the totality of the way things are) is wrong.
Notions about nature seem to have a greater toleration for the inexplicable - and at least for me - that includes the greatness of the artworks that interest me.
So go ahead and call it a natural science - as long as we accept that just as in quantum physics, ultimately, it may never be understandable.
Assumption 1: Anything manmade is a work of art, even the lowliest and most purely functional object. Man, indeed, might be defined as the art-making animal, and the fact that we choose to regard only some manmade things as works of art is a matter of conditioning.
Our conventions in this respect are themselves, in a manner of speaking, works of art.
But who cares about the merely functional stuff - outside of whatever you need to know about how it is made, sold, or used? A crowbar or brick has little to do with a "natural science of the spirit" - nor would it concern the pioneers of art history. It sounds like Lavin has joined the academic movement away from elitist art and towards ‘visual culture".
Assumption 2: Everything in a work of art was intended by its creator to be there. A work of art represents a series of choices and is therefore a totally deliberate thing--no matter how unpremeditated it may seem, and even when "accidents" are built into it deliberately. We can never be sure that the artist did not know what he was doing or that he wanted to do something other than what he did even when he declares himself dissatisfied with his creation.
I like this one. Art historians should begin with this assumption until it’s proven wrong - even if it’s something you can’t stand looking at.
Assumption 3: Every work of art is a self contained whole. It includes within itself everything necessary for its own decipherment. Information gathered from outside the work may be useful, but it is not essential to the decipherment. On the other hand, outside information (which includes information from or about the artist himself) is essential if we want to explain how the work came to have its particular form and meaning.
I would modify that first sentence to read "every work of art is a self contained whole if it feels that way. The viewer’s capacity for comprehension is critical - and with so much to look at (even more for Lavin’s "everything man made") initial feeling must serve as the gate keeper.
Lavin does not mention it - but an important corollary would be that your visual experience trumps whatever has been written about it — even if by the artist himself.
Assumption 4: Every work of art is an absolute statement. It conveys as much as possible with as little as possible. The work of art is one hundred percent efficient, and to paraphrase Leon Battista Alberti's classic definition of Beauty, nothing could be added, taken away, or altered without changing its message. Alberti was referring simply to the relationship among the parts, whereas I mean to include the very substance of the work itself.
Thus seems to be a restatement of Assumption #3 - and I have the same problem with it.
Assumption 5: Every work of art is a unique statement. It says something that has never been said before and will never be said again, by the artist himself or anyone else. Copies or imitations, insofar as they are recognizable as such, are no exception, since no man can quite suppress his individuality, no matter how hard he may try. Conversely, no matter how original he is, the artist to some extent reflects the work of others, and it is purely a matter of convention that we tend to evaluate works of art by the degree of difference from their models.
An interesting twist here. If you can recognize something is a copy - then it’s unique. If you can’t - you still have to call it unique even though you may be wrong. But what if documentary evidence proves it’s a copy even though you cannot visually distinguish it from the original? This is more of a marketplace issue than an aesthetic one. But it would be important to historians trying to build a history of styles.
As a museum goer, I do like to know if something (like a Roman statue) is a copy (of a Greek original).
And I do not believe that evaluation by "degree of difference from their models" is entirely conventional. Yes - it is more important for Europeans than Chinese. But still — there is a special thrill about something that is both attractive and very, very different from everything else.
The chief virtue of these assumptions is that they help to assure each human creation its due. What it is due may be defined as the discovery of the reciprocity it embodies between expressive form and content.
Yes - give each human creation it’s due. For me - that means letting it speak for itself (for as long as I want to listen). But I have zero interest in the reciprocity of form and content - unless the form compels that interest. And I suspect Lavin feels the same way — it’s just that professional art historians are not supposed to blatantly promulgate their own taste. After all —- he does specialize in Bernini - not the monster dolls sold in Walmart.
I do not pretend that my own work has ever met the criteria implicit in any of my assumptions. Yet they are much more to me than philosophical abstractions. They represent the obscure but persistent demons that prod me to think about a work in the first place.
And, once the process begins, they are intellectual pangs of conscience that lead me to mistrust distinctions between conscious and unconscious creativity, between mechanical and conceptual function, between the artist's goal and his achievement. Finally, they are what drive me from the work itself into archives, libraries, and classrooms, in search of Illumination.
Perhaps those like me who own and proclaim personal taste could never have a career in academic art history today - but still - I’d like to see someone try.
Like any other human ability - if you don’t really focus on cultivating taste, it’s not likely to improve.
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The Kantian and Hegelian traditions – in their different ways, each saw historical factors as partially constitutive of artistic meaning; whilst the great tradition of German art history from Riegl to the early Panofsky fully understood that art historical change centred on issues of aesthetic transformation. The reciprocal dependence of art historical and aesthetic significance was here acknowledged by both schools, even if not fully understood. The importance of this insight has long been forgotten. In fact, recent developments in art history and aesthetics actively suppress it. In this little discussion I shall consider some of its ramifications mainly in relation to the limitations of contemporary art history. A first problem arises from an influential consumerist mind set whose major manifestation is a (putatively) ‘anti-foundational’ cultural relativism. This derives, in large part, from an unquestioning acceptance of the self-contradictory discourses of Foucault, Derrida, and the like
1. Such relativism has distorted both art practice and the interpretative discourses consequent upon such practice. More specifically it has reversed the order of dependence between these so that art practice is now understood primarily as a vehicle for the reflection of modes of reception and theory rather than as a mode of making. This reversal is also consolidated by the contentious supposition that Duchamp’s ready-mades centre on the creation of something artistically different, rather than something different from art. A supposition of this kind is tacitly racist to the profoundest degree (as well as being conceptually flawed)
2. The reason why is that whilst, for many thousands of years (and across many cultural boundaries), art has been bound up with the making of aesthetically significant images and forms, the Duchamp precedent seems to demand a redefinition. Rather than being acknowledged as – at best a marginal western art-critical strategy – it is seen as the paradigmatic art-creation activity in relation to which all else should be understood. The primacy of making is dismissed with a condescending sneer, or worse. Art per se is taken to amount to little more than ideas, theories, and their contexts of occurrence. The dominant contextualist modes of recent art history
3, in particular have internalized this view with dogmatic insistency. They reduce artistic meaning to factors bound up with the image’s documentary and persuasive effects, and the social and other contextual elements which enable these. Apart from the occasional discussion of technique and artists’ materials, such approaches are overwhelmingly consumer and context orientated
Yes - the triumph of the consumer model was when art museums, like the Art Institute of Chicago stopped curating their own annual exhibits of the best in American or local art, and just let the market decide what was worth showing.
You might call this a phenomenological approach.
I’m looking forward to reading one of Crowther’s many books.
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