The New Art History

A Critical Introduction

Jonathan Harris

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134582501
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: History of Art

The New Art History provides a comprehensive introduction to the fundamental changes which have occurred in both the institutions and practice of art history over the last thirty years.

Jonathan Harris examines and accounts for the new approaches to the study of art which have been grouped loosely under the term 'the new art history'. He distinguishes between these and earlier forms of 'radical' or 'critical' analysis, explores the influence of other disciplines and traditions on art history, and relates art historical ideas and values to social change.

Structured around an examination of key texts by major contemporary critics, including Tim Clarke, Griselda Pollock, Fred Orton, Albert Boime, Alan Wallach and Laura Mulvey, each chapter discusses a key moment in the discipline of art history, tracing the development and interaction of Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic critical theories. Individual chapters include: * Capitalist Modernity, the Nation-State and Visual Representation * Feminism, Art, and Art History * Subjects, Identities and Visual Ideology * Structures and Meanings in Art and Society * The Representation of Sexuality

Chapter 1

Radical art history

Back to its future?

Prejudices, perspectives, and principles

Critical, social, or radical art history – the terms I've selected in preference to ‘new art history’ – all presume an opposite, or at least a sharp contrast, against which the former terms have been defined, and in distinction to which are claimed to represent a decisive advance. That ‘opposite’, I've suggested, has been given a number of names as well: for example, ‘mainstream’, ‘institutionally dominant’, or ‘traditional’ art history. And in relation to ‘new’ (a term, like ‘modern’, still bursting with overwhelmingly positive connotations, many associated with advertising rhetoric), it is, of course, ‘the old’ that is rejected, as comprehensively redundant and ‘out of date’. The first part of this chapter presents a preliminary investigation of these pairs of binary oppositions (new/old, radical/traditional, etc.). Not, it should be stressed, in order finally to be able to say that it's absolutely clear which art historian, text, or concept, belongs properly to either the former or latter categories within these oppositions.

Now, I do think there was (and still is) a broad agreement between practitioners of radical art history about what kind of analytic principles and procedures were (and are) inadequate, an agreement based on a range of intellectual, political, and pedagogic reasons. However, the polemical aspect to this debate, or what has symptomatically often been called a ‘crisis in art history’, has sometimes operated at a level of incautious generalisation and thumbnail sketches (on both sides).¹ More detailed consideration of a wide range of materials in art history represented as radical or traditional, old or new, would reveal, I believe, ambiguities and complexities that some protagonists on either side of the divide (whatever it is called) have usually failed, or been unwilling, to acknowledge. The categories of both ‘traditional art history’ and ‘radical art history’, I suggest, contain authentic pluralities: their materials are internally fractured, highly diverse, and sometimes contradictory in assumptions, principles, and practices.

T.J. Clark, as I have already noted, argued in 1974 that a contemporary art history ‘hot-foot in pursuit of the new’ misses the point that the development of the discipline in the early twentieth century had contained many of the core elements that a truly radical art history must incorporate. Speaking from a Marxist perspective, however, he was not prepared to discuss the relevance of the issue of gender and visual representation, which was then at the centre of radical art history's other dominant wing: feminism.² An admittedly generous interpretation of Clark's position, however, might be that the historical materialist basis of his perspective was one within which certain kinds of feminist could shape a compatible account of gender and representation – in short, a historical materialist theory of patriarchy. This may be a useful way, for instance, of characterising the work of Griselda Pollock, particularly in the period between 1975 and 1985.³

Clark remarked in that 1974 essay that contemporary scholars needed what he called an archaeology of the subject in the early twentieth century, a ‘critical history, uncovering assumptions and alle-giances’.⁴ One thing that Marxist and feminist art history has certainly made clear is its broad political allegiances and values. Clark's point was not that study of Warburg or Wölfflin or Panofsky would reveal them to have been Marxists (and certainly not feminists!). Rather, it was that intellectual work always has a base of social values and interests which initiates and then drives the inquiry in certain directions. Such founding principles and perspectives might also be described as ‘prejudices’, though this term now, like ‘discrimination’, tends to have only negative connotations (partly because they have become bound up, especially since the 1970s, with the language of multiculturalism and ‘political correctness’).

But the positive meanings of ‘prejudice’ and ‘discrimination’, within scholarly activity, are to do with acknowledging that all intellectual tasks begin with the identification of a problem or issue that requires examination. This is always a problem or issue identified by an actual person, for whom that problem or issue is important – significantly linked, that is, to their understanding of the world and of the importance of specific things within it. The genesis of all intellectual activity, therefore, is inevitably related to a person's world-view, perspective, and the interests and values associated with it. Marxist and feminist art historians in the early 1970s made clear their basic world-views, perspective, and interests and saw – indeed, often proclaimed – these as the overriding motivation for their inquiries. This attitude was certainly counter to the orthodox view held and conveyed by many in the discipline that art history, like any other university subject, essentially was a body of objective knowledge, safe in, and secure of, its neutral truthfulness.

Ernst Gombrich's work, over many decades, was a case in point.⁵ He expressed his position succinctly enough in a lecture at Oxford University in 1973, the same year as the publication of T.J. Clark's two Marxist studies of French art in the mid-nineteenth century. The following statement might stand, therefore, as an exemplification of the values of ‘traditional art history’. While what Gombrich called the ‘social sciences’ (partly a euphemism for Marxist sociology) certainly might serve as ‘handmaidens’ to art history, he admitted, providing relevant social facts and documentation, it was art history's recognition and maintenance of the canon of great art which:

offers points of reference, standards of excellence which we cannot level down without losing direction. Which particular peaks, or which individual achievements we select for this role may be a matter of choice, but we could not make such a choice if there really were no peaks but only shifting dunes.

While Gombrich concedes that ‘what we call civilisation may be interpreted as a web of value judgements which are implicit rather than explicit’ (my italics), his meaning is clearly that it is the job of the properly trained, ‘expert’ art historian, in contrast to other academics in ‘handmaiden’ roles, to recognise actual greatness in art. The perspective and values of the art historian are authentic and irreducible because they accord so accurately with the objective reality of the canon. Gombrich's statement is, therefore, a classic defence of scholarly neutrality, based on the certainty that art history's canon of artworks represents unquestionable value and greatness. (His The Story of Art, as nearly everyone connected to art history must now know, includes not a single woman artist.) The canon of great art, and its confirmation in, and by, art history, are thus both integral parts of the humanism of western liberal-democratic society.⁶

Yet many other art historians usually pigeonholed as ‘old’ or ‘traditional’, or part of the ‘institutionally dominant’ have acknowledged the prejudice and partiality of interests necessary in academic work. Such recognition has never been the monopoly of radicals in the discipline. One of Clark's heroic progenitors, Panofsky, understood that the necessary partiality of interests meant that scholars could not avoid bringing ideas, indeed theories, into their work. ‘Theory’, he remarked in 1940, ‘if not received at the door of an empirical discipline, comes into the chimney like a ghost and upsets the furniture.’ He also declared, however, that scholars in art history should maintain an openness within the conduct of their inquiry and not be blinded by their initial, inevitably prejudiced perspectives. ‘It is no less true’, Panofsky continued, ‘that history, if not received at the door of a theoretical discipline dealing with the same set of phenomena, creeps into the cellar like a horde of mice and undermines the groundwork.’⁷

Riegl, another of Clark's heroes – though associated with what some radical art historians have dismissively termed ‘formalism’ (that is, the analysis and evaluation of ‘the works of art themselves’, outside of social and historical circumstances) – also demonstrated awareness of the inescapably limited and partial nature of understanding.⁸ Would the best art historian, he wondered, be the one with no interfering subjective taste at all? Otto Pacht, a member of the so-called New Vienna School of art history, puzzled over the same issue. Particularly critical of the predominance of Panofsky's iconographic methods, based on Renaissance art, which he believed had wrongly become the basis for all art-historical analysis, Pacht questioned whether, although a modern viewpoint gave us access to a work of art that was previously a closed book, there was anything to guarantee that what was seen was true and authentic, rather than a total distortion.⁹ Hans Sedlmayr, another member of the New Vienna School, writing in the 1930s in Germany, in fact saw art's subjective interpretation by scholars as the only means through which the work's ‘aesthetic nature’ – its most important feature, Sedlmayr thought – could be revealed, along with its structure, and, ultimately, its relationship to the world and to society.¹⁰

Some art historians, then, long before the development of radical art history, acknowledged that individual and group interests and values were fundamentally and inevitably implicated in intellectual projects, in the selection of what to study, and how to understand artworks and their history. These interests and values ranged from subjective and personal factors through to aspects of attention and perspective which radical art historians would later call ‘ideological’, that is, based on the place (and questioning of the role) of scholars in social and political circumstances and institutions.¹¹ One brief example will have to suffice. In 1958 the art historian James Ackerman, scholar of Renaissance culture and senior US academic, gave a lecture at the College Art Association annual conference which berated its members’ conservatism and aimed to prompt the profession to begin to consider the relations between its academic concerns and contemporary American society. This intervention, later published in the C.A.A. journal, prefigured, according to a recent commentator, the radical developments in US academia in the 1960s. Ackerman's lecture encouraged academics to equate ‘communication with social responsibility generally’ and prompted art historians to see themselves not as disinterested interpreters of the past, but as active participants ‘in the effort to reform society by challenging its values and ameliorating its ills’.¹²

For ‘new’ read ‘old’?

It is possible to show, then, that some putatively ‘old’ or ‘traditional’ art historians understood that their scholarly work was ‘perspectival’, interest-based, and ‘prejudiced’, in the positive senses discussed above. Might it equally be the case that some radical art historians could be convicted of the traits associated with ‘institutionally dominant’ disciplinary practices? I have pointed out, for example, that feminists began to attack Marxist art history in the 1970s because of its avoidance of, or tendency to allocate marginal significance to, issues of gender, sexual identity, and representation (as traditional, Gombrichian art history did).

Rifkin's claim that feminist and anticolonialist politics and issues had been at the forefront of 1970s’ developments in the subject may also be read as an implicit critique of the place of Marxism (or, at any rate, of some work bearing that name) in radical art history. Recent evaluations of Marxist art history by critics such as Donald Preziosi and Whitney Davis – neither of whom would want to associate themselves with most of ‘traditional’ art history – make this implicit criticism explicit. Marxist art history, from their ‘deconstructionist’ position (a term discussed in Chapters 6, 7, and my Conclusion), is based, they claim, on essentialist illusions about, and idealisations of, the world and of art that are as bad as those associated with Gombrichian art history. Davis’ critique is partly based on challenging Marxist belief in the centrality of class from his analytic perspective that draws extensively on psychoanalytic principles.¹³ This is combined with identifying – as feminism does – the significance of other social and sexual identities in historical, cultural, and artistic development, about which Marxism had mostly been silent. Davis has a particular interest, for example, in the visual representation of gay and lesbian people, and in their social and political organisation (one of his essays is discussed in Chapter 7).

Preziosi, writing from the viewpoint not of an explicit ‘politics of identity’, but from the philosophical basis of post-structuralist philosophy (particularly the work of Jacques Derrida), condemned Marxism as a new form of what he calls ‘logocentrism’. By this he means that Marxism has simply supplanted one previously dominant ideology of art-historical scholarship (the belief that the discipline was appropriately concerned with the celebration of artistic genius and the universality of aesthetic quality) with another (based on belief in the centrality of class struggle and the final determination of art by socio-economic developments).¹⁴ Both Davis’ and Preziosi's judgements, it should be clear, are based on the limited sources they have chosen to exemplify a particular position or tradition which they wish to attack. To recognise this, however, is not to conclude that their analysis of Marxist art history is simply invalid. Like Davis – and feminist and black art historians – Preziosi's criticisms most importantly raise the issue of what should follow from the recognition that there are multiple social identities, modes of analysis, and forms of political struggle relevant to the study of art. The relationship between these multiple identities and possible histories of art, and the broader visual culture, is extremely important. To what extent, for ...

Table des matières

• Front Cover
• The New Art History
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Radical art history: back to its future?
• 2 Capitalist modernity, the nation-state, and visual representation
• 3 Feminism, art, and art history
• 4 Subjects, identities, and visual ideology
• 5 Structures and meanings in art and society
• 6 Searching, after certainties
• 7 Sexualities represented
• Conclusion: the means and ends of radical art history
• Index