Looking In

The Art of Viewing

Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135208684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Mieke Bal is one of Europe's leading theorists and critics. Her work within feminist art history and cultural studies provides a fascinating alternative to prevailing thinking in these fields. The essays in this collection include Bal's brilliant analyses of the: Myth of Rembrandt Imagery of Vermeer Baroque of Caravaggio Neo-Baroque of David Reed Culture of the museum Visual representation of rape Closet in Proust Bal brings a keen visual sense to these studies, as well as an understanding of how literature represents visuality and how the ethics and aesthetics present within museums affect the cultural artifacts displayed. In his engaging commentary, eminent art historian Norman Bryson shows how Bal's original approach to the interdisciplinary study of art and visual culture has had wide- reaching influence.

introduction: art and intersubjectivity

for E. van A.

The problem for theory is how not to surrender to the tyranny of humanism which will only recognise the products and epochs of art in their singularity, their individuality; and which considers illegitimate, even in-admissable, any inquiry into the invariants, the historical and/or transhistorical constants from which the plastic fact lets itself be defined in its generality, its fundamental structure.

—Hubert Damisch¹

The very terms we are using here, I and you, are not to be taken as figures but as a linguistic form indicating “person.” Now these pronouns are distinguished from all other designations a language articulates in that they do not refer to a concept or an individual.

—Emile Benveniste²

MIEKE BAL’S WRITING ON VISUAL culture differs from classical or “normal” art history in several crucial respects. In the first place, there is a reformulation of where the work of art (by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Caravaggio) stands in time. In classic art history, the labor of the historian consists in restoring the work to its original temporal horizon, the social and cultural context of its first appearance.³ The essential problem is to establish how the work came into existence, and what forces made it assume the form that it did. In principle there is no limit to the number of determining factors the account may adduce—provided that they are all found to “converge” in the work of art. From this perspective, which is dominated by a concept of causality, the work appears at the end of the line; here all the chains of determination join and terminate. In more recent art historical discussion this causal mode of analysis has, to be sure, undergone some important revisions: the work of art is recognized as not only reflecting its context but mediating it, reflecting upon it; and the work is understood as not simply passive with regard to the cultural forces that have shaped it, but active—it produces its own range of social effects, it acts upon its surrounding world. Nevertheless, these concessions still unfold within the tense that Benveniste called “historical”:

Events that took place at a certain moment of time are presented without any intervention of the speaker in the narration.… We shall define historical narration as the mode of utterance that excludes every “autobiographical” linguistic form. The historian will never say je or tu or maintenant, because he will never make use of the formal apparatus of discourse, which resides primarily in the relationship of the persons je: tu. Hence we shall find only the forms of the “third person” in a historical narrative strictly followed.⁴

Whatever is said about works of the past must be viewpointed to the third person, the period observer; it must never appear to emanate from the discourse of art history, here and now. But for Mieke Bal, the art of the past exists undeniably in the present, where it continues to generate powerful cultural effects. The “historical” tense, lacking as it does the means to place the speaker within the narration, is structurally disequipped to describe such effects. Yet the present life of images is part of their ongoing history; if we cannot describe that, our sense of the span of images in history will be drastically truncated. The problem with the historical tense is that it is not historical enough. A truly historical art history must have the means to be able to say je, tu, maintenant. Which is where Bal makes her intervention in art history.

The essays in this collection part company with the discipline of art history in another respect as well: there is a different understanding of the scope—and the limits—of the work of art’s meaning. Classic art history based its account of meaning on what was then, in the period when art history emerged as a modern discipline in the early part of the century, the leading model of communication—expression: by means of certain signs a speaker (or artist) conveyed his or her thought to a listener (or viewer). It was the task of the art historian to retrieve that original intention, standing behind the work; an intention which, at the moment of its expression, would have had a clear outline and form.

Bal’s work on visual art begins from a later, semiotic understanding of symbolization that profoundly problematizes each step in the seemingly simple series speaker: message: hearer.⁵ The fact that works of art occupy a different kind of space from the space of other objects in the world—a space which in the case of painting is marked by the four sides of the frame—means that the work is built to travel away both from its maker and from its original context, carried by the frame into different times and places. The frame establishes a convention whereby art is marked as semantically mobile, changing according to its later circumstances and conditions of viewing. Each later viewer brings to the work his or her specific cultural baggage, and it is through viewing codes now brought to bear on the work in its new situation that it is seen and interpreted. Yet this state of being “completed” by the viewer is not only a result of the work’s journey through time: even in its original context, different viewers would have responded to the work in varying ways. Since paintings involve highly saturated, dense, and complex patterns of signification, there is no way that even in the year of a work’s first appearance any specific viewer would have been able to exhaust the sum of possibilities it contains.

Rather than being a “relay” conveying an intention from artist to viewer, the work is thus an occasion for a performance in the “field” of its meaning—where no single performance is capable of actualizing or totalizing all of the work’s semantic potential. However coherent or persuasive a given interpretation may be, there will inevitably be a remainder not acted upon, a “reserve” of details that escape the interpretative net. This can be true, by the way, of the image as well. When a painting represents, say, the story of Danae, or Bathsheba, or Narcissus, its version of the received story activates some, but not all of the story’s semantic potential. Although the picture may “direct” the story along a particular path, again certain details will escape the net. To the viewer of art such details can be highly significant, despite or even because of their marginal status; they can become the basis for a quite different understanding of the painting.

Pressing on details, especially when these have been marginalized, is an essential feature of Bal’s interpretative style.⁶ In this, her writing goes against the goal most art historians believe they are pursuing: the central, most plausible interpretation, the one that covers and gives order to the greatest possible number of visual elements. That dominant style of art-historical writing recognizes, of course, that there may be a remainder in the picture which the interpretation does not presently deal with. It may even acknowledge that a great many alternative accounts are possible, laying no claim to the final word. But in its own construction and trajectory it is obliged to pursue the “central form” (in Reynolds’s phrase) of explanation, the account that absorbs the maximum number of details into a coherent and unitary interpretation. Bal begins and stays with the detail, where the devil is: what has had to be relegated to the margins of the image, for its coherence to be maintained? what details do not fit prevailing explanatory patterns? This makes for some sharp observation of paintings.

Few viewers, I would guess, have paid much attention to the strange depressions in the plaster above the picture of the Last Judgment that hangs on the wall in Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.). Yet in a painting whose subject is balance—twice over, in the scales the woman holds in her hand, and in the heavenly judgment above—the way a picture is balanced may indeed be critical. Hanging a picture on a wall is no easy task, as anyone who has done it knows. It is hard to get things right the first time; you have to move the nail, and the mark of its previous position is a permanent reminder of the picture’s having once been out of balance.

Bal notes that Vermeer’s careful recording of how the Last Judgment was once, in this room, out of balance, introduces an antithetical note into the scene. For unlike many contemporary pictures on the subject of the woman with the scales, this one does not incline toward any obvious allegory. The woman in the Vermeer is not greedily inventorizing worldly goods—which would make a pointed contrast between her (female) vanity and the (male) spirituality of the picture behind her, where souls are weighed. Nor does the picture detain us anecdotally with what she is balancing, as it would if it wanted to present a genre scene of daily life. The emptiness of the scales is an invitation to reflect on what “balance” is, on how priorities are made. Is this a representation of the sacred as having a greater Value than the profane? or is it the opposite: is the sacred a dim and secondary realm, is it the actuality of this everyday room and of this evidently pregnant woman standing within it that counts as the immediate, even the higher, value? The detail that discloses “imbalance” in the picture opens up interpretative possibilities which this particular Vermeer seems unwilling to foreclose. The marginal detail can become the center of the picture; it can infiltrate its whole surface with provisionality. And in turn, reading for detail, as Bal does in “Dispersing the Image: Vermeer Story” (chapter 2), can become a model of the non-curtailability of interpretation.

This might seem a recipe for finding infinitely “open” texts—yet Bal’s approach differs from that of Derridean deconstruction. Works of art cannot, Bal argues, signify indefinitely in all directions, for the reason that it is particular viewers who activate their potential, in their specific circumstances. Meaning-making is an activity that always occurs within a preexisting social field, and actual power relations: the social frame does not “surround” but is part of the work, working inside it. Which leads to a third point of difference between Bal’s writing and orthodox art history, besides its understanding of the work of art’s temporality, and the fundamental polysemy of its signs. The meaning of a work of art does not, for Bal, lie in the work by itself but rather in the specific performances that take place in the work’s “field”: rather than a property the work has, meaning is an event; it is an action carried out by an I in relation to what the work takes as you. Despite art history’s rhetoric of professional impersonality, even the most “historicist” account of a work of art is rooted in an encounter with the work in the present. Bal’s objective is to acknowledge this encounter, to describe it, and, above all, to personify the encounter in writing. What is the best way to write about art in a manner that problematizes the use of the “third person” as the compulsory, the one and only, agent of sight? And what occlusions and repressions occur in the visual field, when the latter is understood as centered on the third person, not only in art history or in curatorial practice, but in the conceptual models we use to think through questions of power in vision, questions of the gaze?

There can be little doubt that in the past two decades of scholarship on visual representation, much of the most innovative and energetic writing about spectatorship has derived, directly or indirectly, from the work of Laura Mulvey.⁷ Although the impact of Mulvey’s ideas was immediately felt in film studies, before long art historians began to realize the enormous potential that the theory of the gaze possessed in relation to the “fine arts.” The particular appeal of Mulvey’s thinking to art historians lay partly in the feeling that here, at last, was what had been missing for a long time from the modern discipline, a theory of the viewer—and one that was deeply grounded in social history.

Modern art history had no trouble investigating the makers of art. Ever since the development of connoisseurial studies after Morelli and Berenson, and even more so with the rise of the monograph on individual artists as the principal form of writing for professional art historians, the focus on the artist had become a central and seemingly inevitable feature of art-historical inquiry. Yet there was little by way of a corresponding focus on the function of spectatorship. The way viewers experienced their encounter with works of art, and the way that social and cultural forces directed their response, had been generally neglected, or (worse still) consigned to the history of “taste.”

There were exceptions. Riegl’s account of the Dutch group portrait, for instance, had been centrally concerned with the ways in which the interplay between collective and individual identity, which was dramatized in the group portrait, proposed and assumed a viewer who negotiated that interplay at the level of the picture’s perception.⁸ Riegl’s text in fact opened up the whole question of the historicity of viewing practices, and his emphasis on painting’s interaction with spectators might, in a different evolution of the discipline, have led to an emphasis on the historical investigation of reception, on a par with the study of art’s makers. In the more recent past, Michael Fried’s fascinating book Absorption and Theatricality had placed the picture’s relation to its audience at the center of his study of French painting of the eighteenth century.⁹ Analyzing a picture’s way of addressing the spectator, Fried distinguished between a “theatrical” mode—in which the picture directly addressed the viewer, as though fully cognizant of being displayed to its audience—and an “absorptive” mode, where the picture adopted the fiction that none of the depicted figures were aware of being on display, so that the viewer seemed not to be addressed at all, but entered the scene as an invisible, undetected observer. In another domain of the discipline, social historians of art increasingly turned to period documentation that recorded particular audiences’ reactions to exhibited works of art: T. J. Clark and Thomas Crow, especially, made brilliant use of Salon reviews in order to establish how a painting’s initial audience may have understood the work before them.¹⁰

It was not that art history had no theory of spectatorship. But it was impossible to ignore that next door to art history, film studies was developing an understanding of spectatorship that was capable of attending to the inward process of viewing, and at levels ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the series
• Introduction: Art and Intersubjectivity
• Dispersing the Gaze: Focalization
• Dispersing the Image: Vermeer Story
• Calling to Witness: Lucretia
• On Show: Inside the Ethnographic Museum
• On Grouping: The Caravaggio Corner
• Vision in Fiction: Proust and Photography
• Second-Person Narrative: David Reed
• The Knee of Narcissus
• Afterword: Looking Back
• List of Figures
• References