Dealing with the Visual

Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture

Caroline van Eck, Edward Winters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351160223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

One of the issues underlying current debates between practitioners of art history, visual culture and aesthetics is whether the visual is a unique, irreducible category, or whether it can be assimilated with the textual or verbal without any significant loss. Can paintings, buildings or installations be 'read' in the way texts are read or deciphered, or do works of visual art ask for their own kind of appreciation? This is not only a question of choosing the right method in dealing with visual works of art, but also an issue that touches on the roots of the disciplines involved: can a case be made for the visual as an irreducible category of art, and if so, how is it best studied and appreciated? In this anthology, this question is approached from the angles of three disciplines: aesthetics, visual culture and art history. Unlike many existing overviews of visual culture studies, it includes both painting and architecture, and investigates historical ways of defining and appreciating the visual in their own, contemporary terms. Dealing with the Visual will be of great use to advanced students because it offers an overview of current debates, and to graduate students and professionals in the field because the essays offer in-depth investigations of the methodological issues involved and various historical ways of defining visuality. The topics included range from early modern ways of viewing pictures and sixteenth-century views of Palladio's villas in their landscape settings to contemporary debate about whether there is life yet in painting.

Part One
The experience of the visual in art history, aesthetics and visual culture

1
Visual culture and the history of art

David Peters Corbett

In 1996, Routledge, the publishers of a well-known list of books on cultural theory, issued The BLOCK Reader in Visual Culture, an anthology of texts and images drawn from the fifteen issues of this important journal.¹ Between 1979 and 1989, BLOCK served as a principal focus of the New Art History, that mixture of theory and social history which characterized a generational reaction in the discipline in the 1970s and 1980s. The nature of its interests was unambiguously signalled in the first issue. The magazine intended to ‘address the problems of the social, economic and ideological dimensions of the arts in societies past and present’.² Reflecting in 1996 on what that meant, the BLOCK Reader’s editors explained as follows:

Two major themes characterised the analysis of visual culture in the decade of BLOCK’s publication. On the one hand were arguments for the understanding of art as a social, material and expressive practice determined by specific forms of production and reception. Social history, institutional critique, the cultural analysis of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu, and varieties of reception theory and ethnography all contributed to the study of the visual within the broader anthropological formulation of culture as a ‘whole way of life’. The other, related, theoretical input came from a combination of work on representation as a structure and process of ideology producing subject positions, and the social disciplining of technologies and regimes of power.³

In comparison to the homemade quality of the original issues, which were pored over in art schools, polytechnics and even some universities with an intensity elsewhere accorded to samizdat literature, the glossy, commercial production values of the Routledge book communicated a new respectability and familiarity. If the radical edge of these ideas had worn a little thin by 1996 it was not because of a failure to thrive, but, as this suggests, because the values and approaches promoted in the text had become an established orthodoxy, so that BLOCK itself could now be credibly presented as a founding moment for current studies in the field. The idea of works of art as cultural documents, approachable principally through their connections to history and society, had found a ready audience amongst art historians and had achieved by the mid-1990s secure institutional dominance.

In this essay I shall explore some of the implications and consequences of this rise to institutional power of ideas of the cultural. In particular, I shall be concerned with the parallel rise of ‘visual culture’ and the implications of the powerful challenge it currently presents to art history as a discipline and to attention to the objects which have been art history’s principal concern. What is principally noticeable about the language and interests in which the ambitions of BLOCK expressed themselves, as much in 1996 as in 1979, is the lack of attention to the specificities of works of art. Eschewing any interest in the material qualities of paintings or sculpture or in their aesthetics, this rhetoric concentrates instead on the extension of the work into social practice. Mention of the ‘anthropological’ theory of culture signals a move from a concept of culture as elite activity – such things as poetry, the novel, or easel painting – to one in which culture is understood as the ‘whole way of life’ of a society. Within this context, the tendency is to treat painting and the other arts as if they have no expressive or aesthetic dimension and are instead simply documents within a larger cultural history, a ‘visual culture’ in which the whole of the visual production and consumption of a society can be subsumed. Thus, in an important article originally published in BLOCK in 1982 and reprinted in the Reader, Nicholas Green and Frank Mort call for the abandonment of central attention to the object – ‘the object as art’ – and criticize ‘writers like T. J. Clark … and John Barrell’ because they ‘continue to celebrate the work of great artists and to be concerned with “significant” art objects’.⁴ They propose an exploration ‘of power in relation to the historical formation of practices which are centred upon visual representations’ as a contribution to contemporary cultural politics.⁵ Such an exploration sees works of art as no more than particular instances of the general image-making and semiotic systems of society. As Tom Gretton put it, writing in 1986:

This is to regard works of art as special sorts of signifiers, but no more or less special than any other tightly defined and highly institutionalized form of image, such as the advertising poster, the product label or the technical book illustration. In such a view paintings and similar objects have no a priori special status as carriers of value systems because they are works of art.⁶

Thus, once the idea of ‘culture’ as the totality of signifying activity in a society is accepted, art history’s traditional concentration on a narrow field of canonically endorsed artworks becomes hard to sustain against the claims of ‘an increasingly diversified field of cultural objects’.⁷ When the focus of interest is on the nature of the visual as social practice it makes no logical sense to privilege one small class of objects over all others as objects of interpretative attention. Instead, the whole range of visual activities within a culture, from television, advertising and dress to the representation of gender and class in popular culture become the objects of attention.⁸ Writing in 1986, when the arguments on behalf of such developments seemed most pressingly needing to be made, Victor Burgin summed up as follows:

The study of ‘visual art’ – for so long confined within artificially narrow intellectual and institutional limits – now ranges across the broader spectrum of what I have called elsewhere the ‘integrated specular regime’ of our ‘mass-media’ society. ‘Art theory’, understood as those interdependent forms of art history, aesthetics, and criticism which began in the Enlightenment and culminated in the recent period of ‘high modernism’ is now at an end … the end of art theory now is identical with the objectives of theories of representations in general: a critical understanding of the modes and means of symbolic articulation of our critical forms of sociality and subjectivity.⁹

Burgin’s ambitious essay remains one of the clearest expositions of the argument for visual culture and its corollary, the death of art history. Its success as an attack largely rests on the association of art history as a mode of investigation with specific historical developments, principally from the eighteenth century onwards, and connected with modernity. Burgin proposes the systematic attention to ‘art’ objects, like the concept of ‘art’ itself, as a transitory moment in culture, now due to be superseded, in what seemed to him writing in the mid-1980s to be clearly ‘postmodernity’, by the expanded field of visual culture.

I need to make it clear that, as will become evident below, I am not arguing that the development of visual culture is inimical or something to be resisted, nor that the type of enquiry it has given rise to is somehow illegitimate or unhelpful. On the contrary, I would want to argue for a close relationship, amounting on occasion to identity, between visual culture studies and the work of art historians. Nonetheless, it also seems to me that visual culture poses a challenge to art history for reasons which have at least as much to do with the weakness of the former as the strength of the arguments mobilized by the latter. My contention is that an expansion of the field of study, an expansion which makes perfect sense from the point of view of a ‘visual culture’ concerned mainly with the social role of signification, effectively compounds a longstanding unwillingness on the part of art history to engage with the issue of the uniqueness of its objects, on the unacknowledged assumption of which the whole rationale of the discipline in fact depends.

This problem has been vividly felt throughout the history of the discipline of history of art. Michael Podro has argued that it is an intrinsic problem, the consequence of ‘the nature of art itself … both context-bound and yet irreducible to its contextual conditions’.¹⁰ Podro goes on:

Either the context-bound quality or the irreducibility of art may be elevated at the expense of the other. If a writer diminishes the sense of context in his concern for the irreducibility or autonomy of art, he moves towards formalism. If he diminishes the sense of irreducibility in order to keep a firm hand on extra-artistic facts, he runs the risk of treating art as if it were the trace or symptom of those other facts.¹¹

Podro’s critical historians are ‘constantly treading a tightrope between’ these two poles, alive to the perception that allowing the ‘history to collapse into formalism … is a failure and not intrinsic to the enterprise’.¹² But the impulse of the ‘new’ art history in Britain was to abolish the problem of the art object’s duality by repudiating the specificity of the object entirely. Hence the criticism of John Barrell or T. J. Clark for their interest in canonical, ‘great’, artists. Once the idea of an ‘irreducible’ quality in the art object is ruled out of court, the problem ceases to be a subject for investigation or debate and there is no reason to resist the conclusion that the ‘object’ of study is the history and that history is as alive in any made object, not specifically in the work of art. Accordingly, the clear implication of visual culture studies is that the objects of art history are to be swept up into the wider enquiry, to be studied as representative instances, located among many others of all types, of the cultural history of the societies from which they spring. Their significance is to be understood in relation to the ideologies current in their time, and not, as the implicit underpinnings of art history would have it, because these objects are in some way particular, different in kind from the commonality of objects and susceptible to different protocols of interpretation and attention. In other words, ‘visual culture’ as an alternative to, or imaginative extension of, the analytical interests of ‘art history’ presents a considerable challenge to art historians to define their own interests and practice in satisfactory ways. Yet the fact is that the discipline as expressed through the institutional ‘profession’ of art history has no consensual justification to offer to the challenge to its continued existence which visual culture implies. Indeed, it has very little to offer in the way of partisan, multiple justifications. Do ‘we’ as a profession wish to continue to work with a specific class of objects? If so, how do we justify the selection of those objects? And if we cannot, then are we prepared to wind up the activity of art history and resign ourselves to a marginal place within an expanded field of visual culture studies? My concern here is at least to map some of the ground on which such challenges are posed and will have to be met.

One useful place to begin is to ask why it is that the study of art has since its inception been a ‘history’? Attention to the aspects of a work which ‘criticism’ implies – to expression, content and form – is only partly a characteristic of ‘history’ which contents itself with delineating the connections between the work and social context. The philosopher David Carrier, who has written extensively on problems in art-historical methodology, has expressed this very well. Carrier notes that, whatever the continuity of interests between art history and history as disciplines, the persistence of the objects of art history – the works of art themselves – beyond the moment of their creation arguably marks this enquiry off as ‘essentially different in kind from history’.¹³‘When I view works of art made by artists in the past and surviving into the present’, says Carrier, ventriloquizing an extreme version of this view, ‘what need have I for a history? I can see for myself what they made; I am present directly in front of the surfaces they painted.’¹⁴

Richard Wollheim is right to note that the historical emphasis of the study of art ‘is an historical accident’ and ‘is itself something that needs historical explanation’.¹⁵ The questions which Carrier’s tension between art history and history raises appear to be foundational, alive in the first moments of the enquiry which became art history, and resonant ever since. It was Vasari, who has some claim to be considered the discipline’s patron saint, who wrote the earliest moments of art history into being as a history rather than a criticism. The biographies recounted in the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550, 1568), are defined through the unfolding narrative force of Vasari’s historical conception of the arts. The shape of his book as a whole is built upon the understanding that art is aggregative and developmental, focussed towards a predetermined endpoint and marked by a sense of continuous evolution. This circumstance arises partly from the fact that history and the evolution of the arts had taken hold of the imaginations of contemporary Florentines in a way which is itself historically specific. E. H. Gombrich observed that Vasari wrote and worked in an intellectual context where the emergent idea of progress was bringing into being the possibility of imagining art as part of a history: ‘The artist who believes that the arts progress is automatically taken out of the social nexus of buying and selling. His duty lies less with the customer than with Art. He must hand on the torch, make his contribution; he stands in the stream of history.’¹⁶ The idea of progress in this sense enabled Vasari to step around some other difficulties associated with writing about the visual arts and propose an enquiry into them as the study of their unfolding within history.

Principal among the difficulties which Vasari was able to avoid by exploiting this happy accident was the inherent problem which arises in applying the analytic possibilities of language to the alien medium of the visual. The fundamental difference of the generalizing and abstracting systems of language from the particularizing and specific capacities of painting and the graphic arts presents any analyst who is obliged to rely on language with a central challenge. Michael Baxandall, who has been one of the most sensitive observers of this situation, offers this categorization of what is inadequate to such a task in language:

Language is not very well equipped to offer a notation of a particular picture. It is a generalizing tool … the repertory of concepts it offers for describing a plane surface bearing an array of subtly differentiated and ordered shapes and colours is rather crude and remote … there is an awkwardness, at least, about dealing with a simultaneously available field – which is what a picture is – in a medium as temporally linear as language: for instance, it is difficult to avoid tendentious reordering of the picture simply by mentioning one thing before another.¹⁷

Vasari’s good fortune was to encounter art as history, the simultaneous field as narrative, and thus to displace the demands of attention to the specificities of the picture, relying instead on the abstractions of history, constantly moving the point of interest away from the image and towards its historical contexts.

It is, of course, always going to be far easier to convert the visual into a linguistic form than to seek to coerce language into functioning as an instrument sensitive enough to respond to the life of objects. Such a project must in any case always bring with it the fear that writing of this type will decline into self-indulgence, u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One The Experience of the Visual in Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture
• Part Two Elucidating the Visual
• Bibliography
• Index