Field Notes on the Visual Arts

Seventy-Five Short Essays

Karen Lang

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789380170
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

What is the relation of art and history? What is art today? Why does art affect us? In Field Notes on the Visual Arts, 75 scholars, curators and artists traverse chronology and geography to reveal the meanings and dilemmas of art. The eight topic headings – Anthropomorphism, Appropriation, Contingency, Detail, Materiality, Mimesis, Time and Tradition – are written by historians of art, literature, culture and science, archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, curators and artists, and consider an astonishing range of artefacts. Poised somewhere between Neil MacGregor's A History of the World in 100 Objects and an academic volume of essays on art, Field Notes brings together voices generally separated inside and outside the academy. Its open approach to knowledge is commensurate with the work of art, aiming to make clear that the work of art is both meaningful and resistant to meaning.

MATERIALITY

Figure 50. Martha Rosler, Gray Drape, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series, 2008 (artwork Martha Rosler © 2008).

Martha Rosler

Materiality and Objecthood: Questions of Sedimented Labor

Where does meaning reside? How do we read the shape of significance in things imbued with human interest? We can regard the embodiment of something, its objectness, separately from its physical existence and irrespective of its presence. Fixity is never far from human imaginings, from within the immaterial world we inhabit as the real, but modernity brings into question the solidity and permanence of objects in its own characteristic ways. In modernity’s historical trajectory, science investigates atomic structure, and the space between atomic particles debunks the solidity of objects; artists embrace optical theories to produce representational paintings; and gentlemen chemists and others figure out how to fix a shadow, eventually even moving ones, allowing the visualization of units of space/time divorced from human sensory capacity, and further confronting viewers with the dilemmas of fidelity and the problematic boundary between metaphor and metonymy. Canals, then railroads and planes, free travelers from topography, while messages are sent through wires and then without wires, and other wires carry energy that allows human life to resist diurnal cycles. Attacks from the air, by balloon and then by plane, make death into a visualized abstraction. An artist of the revolution paints a black square over a whited-over landscape, announcing a new reality under construction, a preoccupation shared with members of the Western avant-garde—and all share a fascination with the aerial view. Texts, seeming more and more to be fixed, become unfixed, and the materiality of the text itself could be held to reside in the context of human reception, conferring on it a fluidity of signification despite its concrete realizations.

Surrealists doubled the presentation of everyday objects as simultaneously concrete and as significations, sweeping them into the realm of the uncanny; the schizophrenia of critical detachment in the reception of art experiences has been laid at the door of Marcel Duchamp, while perpetually living in the future has been the ordinary condition of everyday life for a century or more in the industrializing economies. The conditions of daily life have been cradled or buffeted by the pace of technological change, pulling the rug of the present out from under us. Heraclitus’s aphorism “everything flows, nothing stands still” challenges the fixity of Platonic forms. (Plato’s solution was to posit a distinction between the worlds of the sensible and of the real.)

The great economic and cultural transformations of the 1960s took place in the context of globalization and anticolonialism. A new worldwide mass image culture and a huge jump in the capitalization of artworks helped spur the radical redefinition of the work of art. From Fluxus and performance to multiples and Conceptualism, artists took aim at received ideas about visuality, objecthood, ownership, and the very telos of art. Forget authorship! How necessary is it even to realize a work—might a set of instructions suffice? What if the work became the environment in which you (might) stand—as “installation,” say?

Michael Fried, setting “presence” against “presentness,” provided a handy way to frame the artistic chasm between artists’ revolt and the expectations of high modernism. Reacting to Minimalism (or, as he dubbed it, literalism), Fried rejected the “theatricality” and temporal performativity—“duration”—of the work sharing the same physical space as the viewer, championing instead the critical distance he saw epitomized by “instantaneity.” Fried’s antiliteralism hangs onto the immateriality of the work of art (or to a conception of materiality as that which is in motion toward […]), a “thing” harboring an essence. In this rigid view, the problem with Conceptualism, another great concurrent movement, lies in its ever-present suggestion that it could as well reside in the collective memory of people as in concrete materiality or in that transcendent space, which—now that God was dead—could remain only immanent.

As tempted as I might be by the thought of a wholly immaterial/nonphysical artwork, in my own work I find the world of objects and their apparent impenetrability, their immobility, interesting enough. As a young painter, I had tried to answer the question how one locates a visual idiom that goes beyond a formal exercise and becomes a mode of representation. Despite the repressive and isolating doctrines of high modernism, the concerns of “citizenship” (for want of a better word) reasserted themselves; suddenly the “art world” became visible in relation to other social institutions and “systems,” which helped enlarge the arena of action. Materiality and objecthood, questions of sedimented labor and the commodities circulating in the art world, became matters of intense interest to artists like me. Countercultural values and social activism pierced Cold War quiescence and acquiescence, giving rise to new social movements. I saw artists seeking greater autonomy from art world gatekeepers, those controlling monetary value and cultural value alike. Women artists were engaging in hermeneutical readings of modernist objects, contesting their reception as wholly genderless, while insisting on the deformalization of artistic production; this was the place for me.

I found it useful to reverse Fried’s valuations, embracing what he condemned as theatricality; but rather than literalism, I moved toward Conceptualism’s deemphasis of objecthood. I considered the familiar passages in Karl Marx on commodity fetishism and its origins in the mode of production; commodity fetishism, Marx posits, shapes our responses to much of the object world. Here was a more powerful route of inquiry, by my lights, than transcendence or sheer, dumb materiality.

It is this fetishism and the vexed status of the work of art to which I keep returning. My work puts forward a decoy, something that takes a familiar shape but that attracts people toward something else—an object or event, perhaps—that opens a door to a rather different set of concerns. The decoy challenges a naive concreteness, a commonsense positivist­empiricist view of things. Its thingness may be apparent, depthless while still impenetrable, yet it becomes, in effect, transparent in its wooden insistence on being there in front of you, with you. Looking for meaning, you are forced to look through it. Change the conversation! A “Garage Sale,” a messy salesroom of discarded ordinary items, why is this array of unworthy objects in the art gallery? Propositions may lurk among the objects of desire and disgust—but where exactly is the work of art? That video of a woman reading the manual for an electric wok; is there something worth considering in an appliance manual?

Figure 51. Martha Rosler, Martha Rosler Library, Paris, 2007 (artwork Martha Rosler © 2007).

Here is a room full of books, with tables and comfortable seating: a traveling library (Fig. 51). The books can be read and pages photocopied; where is the artwork here? If it is the library, is it looking at the artist or at the viewer, or does it make visible a universe of discourse out of which art is made, thought, performed? Photographs of skid-row storefronts are paired with lists of words, while the ostensible subject, the drunks, are nowhere to be seen; portraiture by other means, perhaps, but of whom—“us” or “them”? A partly erased TV newscast is overlaid with snippets of the newsman’s words, making that flow suddenly visible, if not material. Images from a theater of war coincide, in the same frames, as anodyne ads for happy homes; we know about them both, but not in the same thought. Or take these flat-footed photographs of airports, ordinary roads, streets: we have been there, but what are they doing here?

The decoy, the “as-if”-ness, depends on a materiality that like any text is realized only in the contexts of its reception, which means that while materiality powerfully sets up a work, the thing itself, whatever it is, is not fixed, static, as a generation of audience studies has set out to prove. As Allan Kaprow observed, “Today,” thanks to Duchamp, “critical discourse is inseparable from whatever other stuff art is made of.” My work, standing amid the world of cultural objects, also wishes to make propositions and hypotheses for the receiver to make her own.

Caroline Walker Bynum

Medieval Materiality

We have long been told that theology in the European Middle Ages attributed to religious images a threefold function of teaching doctrine, preserving memory, and triggering a turn toward the divine. Or, as the titles of two important recent volumes put it, they induced “looking beyond” or “spiritual seeing.” Yet, we are coming to realize that medieval devotional objects—panel paintings, three-dimensional sculptures, winged altarpieces, relics in their reliquaries, books of hours, altar furnishings, and so forth—should be understood as the immediate presence of the holy more than as indexes, icons, or symbols pointing to something else. They are not merely Lorraine Daston’s “things that talk” but vibrantly active stuff, a locus of divine agency.¹ Although sacraments, relics, and images make the holy present in different ways, they were far less distinct to the medieval devout than modern studies suggest. And in the later Middle Ages, they all demanded of the viewer/recipient responses that were tactile, sometimes even gustatory, as well as visual. Pietàs and manuscript pages as well as relics and reliquaries were grasped, stroked, even kissed and tasted. We hear of devout persons who bit into relics or who, while praying, felt the stone of a statue become living flesh under their hands.

I focus here on the subset of religious objects modern scholars usually characterize as “images” or “art,” although it is important to realize that the word imago in medieval discussions more often refers to a textual image, such as an analogy or concept. I want to argue that medieval images call attention to, indeed, thematize, materiality in ways art historians have not fully understood.

First, medieval images refer to their specific stiffness as what it is. The point of the leather that is pasted onto the robe of a wooden Madonna or the oval crystals inserted into the stomachs of Mary and Elizabeth in a Visitation group is not illusion or naturalism. The added materials call attention to themselves as such. The crystal is a crystal as well as a womb; its material announces it to be a valuable container parallel to a reliquary. In a Renaissance painting where the damask backdrop of a Madonna is painted to convincingly mimic cloth, the illusion calls attention to the painterly skill that produced it; exactly by tricking our eyes, it announces that it is not what it appears to be. When a medieval Madonna is literally clothed in brocade, the viewer admires not the skill of the execution but the actual stuff, which remains, to our eyes, stuff.

Second, medieval images thematize their materiality not merely by making crystals, brocade, and so forth apparent as such but also by referring explicitly to themselves as material. In an example I discussed in my recent book, Christian Materiality, the artist depicts on a manuscript page (that is, on parchment) Christ’s body as a charter offering salvation.² The image presents Christ as skin (body) becoming skin (document) that is on skin (parchment). Or to take another example, images of the side wound of Christ announce in rubrics written inside the wound that it is a length that can be multiplied to obtain the real measure of Christ’s wound or of his height; such images were also reproduce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• ANTHROPOMORPHISM
• APPROPRIATION
• CONTINGENCY
• DETAIL
• MATERIALITY
• MIMESIS
• TIME
• TRADITION
• Contributors
• Short Bibliography
• Index