Научные метоты изучения искусства / arnold_dana_iversen_margaret_art_and_thought

x Notes on Contributors

Michael Camille, Blackwell, 2001); Fingering Ingres (with Susan Siegfried, Blackwell, 2000); and About Michael Baxandall (Blackwell, 1998).

Jonathan Vickery is Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Warwick. Previously he was Henry Moore Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Art History and Theory, University of Essex. He is preparing a book on sculpture and theory in the 1960s.

Series Editor’s Preface

New Interventions in Art History was established to provide a forum for innovative approaches to and perspectives on the study of art history. In this initial volume the way in which the discipline itself seems to be expanding and dispersing is the focus of enquiry. Traditional disciplinary boundaries are giving way to a productive exchange between art history and a wide range of disciplines. As a result art historians have become increasingly reflective about the nature of their field of enquiry and questioning of the limits of what counts as art history’s objects and methodologies.

The original essays gathered here engage debate at a point where art history and philosophy intersect. In this volume distinguished writers in both disciplines test out new ways of harnessing philosophical concerns – epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical – for the practice of art history to present a theoretically refined and accessible analysis.

Art and Thought aims to present an incisive investigation into the intellectual preoccupations which inform the complex narratives of our aesthetic culture. It introduces the reader to the work of a broad range of thinkers, including Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Kristeva, in relation to works of art from Titian’s paintings to the architecture of Tate Modern.

Dana Arnold

London, August 2002

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quite different from the claim that Puttfarken makes with respect to Titian’s mythological paintings. He argues that the influence of Aristotle’s Poetics on Titian led him to invent a dramatic form of tragic painting. This approach is a challenge to the two competing and equally problematic interpretations of Titian’s late mythological cycle, one which seeks to attach allegorical, moral or Christian significance to the histories that Titian painted so voluptuously and the other which emphasizes the sheer erotic provocation of the female nudes. Puttfarken argues that Titian followed Aristotle in painting moments of recognition and peripety and by compressing a logical sequence of events into a single frame in a way that arouses pity and fear. The (male) viewer’s erotic contemplation of the female nude recapitulates the moment of downfall of the tragic hero, implicating him in the story’s motivation and consequences. Here there is no contradiction between the seductive artistry of the painted scene and the revelation of a moral truth.

Jay Bernstein’s paper, “Wax, Brick, and Bread: Apotheosis of Matter and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy and Painting,” makes the transition to the modern articulation of art and thought which has to do with conceiving of art as a form of knowledge. In his essay, Bernstein proposes two contrasting models or theories of knowledge summed up by the figures of a piece of wax and a brick wall. The piece of wax refers to Descartes’ famous thought experiment in the Second Meditation where the substance changes all its perceptible properties when subjected to fire. Descartes concludes that our conception of the wax is not something available to the senses, but an ideal object transparent to the mathematical gaze. Bernstein contrasts this Enlightenment delegitimation of sensory knowledge with an alternative model of knowledge that is manifested in the painting of Pieter de Hooch. The finely rendered brick walls in de Hooch’s courtyard scenes stand as testimony to the artist’s attention to and knowledge of everyday sensuous reality that is now lost to us. Dutch art represents, for Bernstein, “a challenge to the claims of Cartesian Enlightenment” and so also “a powerful critique of rationalized modernity.”

If Bernstein uses the distance between the brick wall and the piece of wax as mathematical object to illustrate a gap that has opened up between art and science, observation and discursive thought, mind and body, Podro sees the exceptional closing of this gap in the experience of the beautiful as proposed by Kant in his Critique of Judgment. Michael Podro argues in “Kant and the Aesthetic Imagination” that, although Kant excluded judgments of the beautiful from his theory of knowledge, they are set in relation

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to cognition via his notion of the reflexivity of aesthetic judgment. This means that, instead of the concept dominating the object as in cognition, the object in all its sensible particularity is held in imagination while the understanding tries to make sense of it. The kind of satisfaction one derives from aesthetic contemplation is, then, not merely sensuous, but a harmonious relation of the faculties, ordering both capacity and sensory receptivity. One enjoys the spontaneity of the mind’s constructive activity while at the same time appreciating the way the object seems fit for this activity. This latter aspect has the further implication that our immersion in the phenomenal world need not limit our freedom. The centrality of this text for all subsequent philosophical speculation about the relation of art and thought can hardly be over emphasized.

The themes pursued in Bernstein’s and Podro’s papers are given a feminist interpretation in Amelia Jones’s contribution, “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology in Art History.” Bernstein observes the relative autonomy de Hooch gives his women as compared with those we see through Vermeer’s desiring gaze. And Podro alludes to the sense of gesture, as developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to elucidate the way we might think about art spanning the gap between art and thought. Jones is interested in both these issues, but more especially in the way we might, as spectators, find a way of including the body in our encounters with art. She challenges the abstraction of Descartes and the disinterestedness of Kant by situating Courbet’s notorious Origin of the World in a mesh of particular desiring identities of artist, subject, patron, and interpreters. She draws on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, particularly his sense of one’s embodied subjectivity and intersubjective relations. Subject and object are chiasmicly intertwined in “the flesh of the world.” Extrapolating from this, Jones argues that it is impossible to interpret a work of art without it impinging on and changing us. However, Jones goes further than Merleau-Ponty by insisting that we take account of the specific identity of the embodied subjects whether they are painting, interpreting or depicted.

If, as Amelia Jones’s essay testifies, Merleau-Ponty’s work has been mainly associated with efforts to formulate an account of our relation to things as embodied and non-verbal, Alex Potts draws out the limitations of this view. His essay, “Art Works, Utterances, and Things,” intervenes in one of the most contested debates in twentieth-century art theory – the question of the relation of language and visual art. Potts’s key text is MerleauPonty’s “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” first published in

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1952.1 It was a riposte to André Malraux’s Voices of Silence, a book that celebrated the mute expressivity of art works as presented in the “imaginary museum” – the spectacle of decontextualized images created by modern museums and collections of photographic reproductions. Merleau-Ponty countered Malraux’s view of art on the grounds that the immediate visual effect of an art work could not convey the historical and conceptual awareness articulated in language. The art object does not speak to us in the way a text does. In this he anticipated later Conceptual artists who actively opposed the idea that art had a meaning that could be projected at a purely visual, non-linguistic level. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty conceived of art as activating a mute embodied sense shared by verbal utterances. These too he thought of as intersubjective acts whose substance formed part of the fabric of everyday life. In common with later writers who critiqued a modernist privileging of visual form, Merleau-Ponty had a political motivation for stressing the way works of art are embedded in the “accident of the milieu out of which they are born.” The imaginary museum of Malraux, in contrast, erases the contingency of art objects by presenting them as reified images that emit a silent, transcendent meaning. Something essentially caught up in all the complexity of human interaction, including its uglier aspects, is served up as something subjective, individual, and intuitive.

All of the essays in this volume raise questions about the ethics of looking

– some indirectly, some emphatically. This is also what particularly concerns Jonathan Vickery in his essay, “Art and the Ethical: Modernism and the Problem of Minimalism.” The essay goes to the heart of what has been one of the most important and persistent debates since the late 1960s. He asks what was at stake in the confrontation of modernist aesthetics, as exemplified by Michael Fried’s position, and Minimalism. Vickery proposes that the reason why Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” has elicited such response is that it involved serious claims about the nature of art and thought. In order to deepen our understanding of Fried’s argument, he relates Fried’s essay to the work of his intellectual interlocutor, Stanley Cavell. Modernist art, on this account, resists the rationalization of contemporary society and its form of knowledge. Cavell and Fried value it because of its capacity to overcome the Cartesian diremption of the particular and the general, the sensual and the conceptual, subject and object. Fried, like Kant, sought the value of aesthetic experience in its reflexivity, that is, its capacity to reveal something about the nature of our knowledge of the world, especially its conditioned, limited, conventional character. We

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acknowledge its otherness in the way we ideally do confronting another person – endowing it with “presentness,” beyond its presence as an object.

Griselda Pollock’s “Does Art Think?” pursues what has emerged as one of the most insistent themes in this volume: the place of art between the body or sense experience and language or thought. Pollock addresses this issue by exploring the triangulation of feminist theory, artistic practice, and psychoanalysis. She draws on the writing and art practice of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger who proposes an archaic form of quasi-representation, the pictogram, situated between corporeal intensities and thought. If such a psychic register can be posited, there is scope for innovative forms of cultural representation close to feminine experience and phantasy, but not reducible to the female body. As Pollock’s subtitle “How Can We Think the Feminine Aesthetically?” suggests, an engagement with the art practice of women may be one way of beginning to think differently, to alter the current symbolic order that so one-sidedly corresponds to masculine experience. As Julia Kristeva argued, poetry and art draw on archaic sources, pre-oedipal, pre-symbolic, allowing the artist/theorist to generate new signifiers articulating what is excluded from language and thought. Working in this way, a feminist artist would be able to make inroads into what is currently unthinkable. As Lichtenberg Ettinger puts it, “Artists continually introduce into culture all kinds of Trojan horses form the margins of their consciousness; in that way the limits of the Symbolic are transgressed all the time by art.”

One of the key debates of the last decades of the twentieth century concerned the question of what constitutes post-modernism in the visual arts. Stephen Melville’s essay approaches the question from an oblique and original angle, asking instead, “What was Postminimalism?” Melville takes his lead from Rosalind Krauss’s important essay of 1979, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”.2 In order to understand the nature of contemporary “sculpture,” she argues, we have to cease thinking of it as a set of objects with certain properties and instead conceive of it as a system constituted by the pair of terms landscape/architecture, their negations and combinations. Melville draws out the similarity between Krauss’s expanded field of sculpture and Hegel’s “system of the arts.” It is as though the reductive Kantianism of Greenberg or Fried, is opened up through this contact with Hegel. Melville tests this idea of Postminimalism or PostModernism against the work of Robert Smithson, an enduring touchstone of contemporary art. His mirror displacements in outdoor sites, gallery constructions, photographs, and texts inscribe within them a consciousness

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of their “dialectical” status, that is, of their not being freestanding works. The surprising conclusion that Melville draws from this is that contemporary art is closer in spirit to Hegel’s description of the moment of painting, which unlike the moment of the primacy of sculpture, knows itself to be ultimately inadequate to its aims and only able to sustain itself as a term in the system of the arts.

Against Melville’s emphasis on painting and its internal division, Diarmuid Costello appears to find his dominant art in architecture. Costello engages in this discussion by taking Tate Modern – its architecture, spectacle, crowds, non-chronological displays – as a true work of art of our age. While Melville found in Hegel a way of describing the contemporary condition of art, Costello turns to Heidegger. He makes unorthodox use of the philosopher’s conception of the work of art as a strife between world and earth in order to make Heidegger’s thinking productive for debates in contemporary art theory. The work of art, according to Heidegger, is the “opening of a world,” a form of life that is distinctive and new. The Greek temple is one example he offers of a work in this special sense. Yet the work also makes the “earth,” the opaque materiality of the stone and rocky surrounds, “shine forth.” Costello’s paper aims to show that the relation between the building, the works that it houses and the way they are displayed, taken as a totality at Tate Modern and other large art spaces such as the Guggenheim Bilbao, are the functional equivalent for our time of the Greek temple.

The essay by Adrian Rifkin is placed last in this volume, not just because it attempts an overview of possible ways of conceiving the relation between art and thought, nor because its central exhibit, Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, is recent. Rather, it is because his approach is so singular and experimental. In their various ways, all the papers straddle the disciplinary boundaries between art history and philosophy. Rifkin takes psychoanalysis as his main point of reference, and in this respect his essay is most closely related to Pollock’s. Drawing on the writing of Julia Kristeva, both are concerned to articulate art’s proximity to what we have not yet been able to think. Although a thought may seem to be first adumbrated in art, Rifkin wishes to avoid the sequential, causal logic this observation may imply. Rather he looks to the achronicity of the unconscious or the “deferred action” of trauma to understand the relation of art and thought. For example, the ceiling of a church in Rome that shifts between trompe l’oeil and flat paint, mimes Lacan’s theoretical insight into the way we slip in and out of subjectivization in the symbolic. Or, Goya’s

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famous print, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, is a thought that can only be articulated post-Freud, post-Holocaust: “It is a symptom of something that will have happened.” For Rifkin, Eyes Wide Shut has a structure, or unstructure, that engages the spectator’s oblique awareness of what is on the screen. This type of reverie may be the best place for thought to begin.

We began with Puttfarken taking issue with the two competing interpretations of Titian’s paintings as high-minded Christian allegory or high-class soft porn. In retrospect, these diverse views can now be seen as symptomatic of a fault line running through our culture. The Cartesian Enlightenment, as Bernstein described it, is apparently still very much with us, separating mind from body, discursive thought from sense experience, and making our reception of art problematic. Kant’s conception of the Beautiful, as Podro makes clear, was an attempt to bridge that gap, as were the subsequent phenomenological investigations of Merleau-Ponty invoked by Jones and Potts. Vickery also indicates that Cavell and Fried owe much to this phenomenological tradition. The penultimate two essays have more of a historiographic agenda, although they too draw on phenomenology. Both attempt to conceptualize the condition of contemporary art and both advance the view that we are prevented from thinking about recent art properly by our outmoded, reified conception of the individual work of art. If Melville imagines an expanded field of practices that should find an echo in our art historical and critical practices, Costello presents the possibility of a new and difficult barrier to our traditional practice: if the authentic contemporary work of art is best exemplified by the whole complex that is Tate Modern, then what becomes of the individual works of art it houses? How can they retain their density and opacity in this environment? What is perhaps most notable in both these conclusions is the premium both these essays place on criticism and description rather than interpretation within the practice of art history. This may indeed be the most salient consequence of any effort to address art as a mode of thought. Pollock and Rifkin would concur as both regard the enigmatic core of art, its baffling character, as the surest indication that art really does think, but in ways that we do not as yet have words to describe.

This volume is part of a growing body of literature that re-evaluates the theories and practices of art history. Michael Podro’s groundbreaking book, The Critical Historians of Art (1982) opened the field of art history to reflection by recalling its highly philosophical origins. Donald Preziosi’s Rethinking Art History 1991 provided an overview of the theoretical and institutional history of the discipline of art history which refutes the image

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of art history as in crisis, asserting rather that many of the dilemmas of the discipline today can be traced back to its founding, institutionalization, and expansion since the 1870s. This expansion of the discipline of art history has required a reassessment of methods and terminology. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff ’s helpful edited volume, Critical Terms for Art History (1996) is both an exposition and a demonstration of contested terms from the current art historical vocabulary, reading each through current debates and methods. Some recent work addresses the most basic questions about cultural production, questions such as how images function and how expectations and social factors mediate what we see. These questions are the concern of The Subjects of Art History edited by Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (1998). It examines the historiography and theoretical approaches of the history of art and provides interpretations of the history and contemporary relevance of such important methodologies as semiotics, phenomenology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, museology, and computer applications. In both the latter two volumes different theoretical modes of analysis and interpretation are explored by demonstrating how a particular approach can be applied to the understanding and interpretation of specific works of art.

Marxist sociological models of the analysis of visual culture or the psychoanalytical preoccupations of cultural studies set up a dynamic where theory informs the object at the expense of a consideration of the aesthetic. These theoretically-driven approaches can be seen as being in opposition to a more traditional form of art history with its emphasis on formal and iconographic analysis. In contrast to these antithetical methods of analysis, this volume explores the aesthetic as a means of mediating the relationship between the senses and thought with particular emphasis on post-Kantian philosophy and how the art itself informs these modes of thinking. This allows us to explore the tradition of the aesthetic as distinct from other models for the consideration of art which may place more emphasis on sociology or the effects of mass culture, both of which merit volumes in their own right.

Notes

1M. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

2Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).