Art History Newsletter

The Art of Blindness

14 May 2008 | Journals

The latest issue of Art Journal is devoted to “microblindness and blindsight”:

Research has shown “microblindness” to occur when subjects encounter emotionally difficult visual material, while subjects with impaired visual processing may nevertheless be capable of “blindsight,” noting visual detail without being conscious of having seen it. Essays in this issue of Art Journal explore these two interrelated effects through materials that are affectively charged and in some cases emotionally challenging.

JSAH on its editor’s exhibition

12 May 2008 | Museums, Architecture

The March 2008 issue of JSAH contains a review by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers of the recent Robert Moses exhibition curated by JSAH editor Hilary Ballon. Following the review is an “Editor’s Note”: “Hilary Ballon, JSAH editor, was not involved in commissioning, editing, or publishing this review.” One is left to imagine that these roles were filled by the issue’s Exhibition Review Editor, Anthony Alofsin. For what it’s worth, Ballon and Alofsin collaborated on the 2005 book Prairie Skyscraper: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower, according to the Rizzoli website. (JSAH’s website indicates that Ballon’s and Alofsin’s editorships are now held by David Brownlee and David DeLong respectively.)

Rogers seems inclined to pass judgment on the exhibition’s arguments, but hesitant to follow through. (Its main argument, in the words of The New York Times, is that “too little attention has been focused on what Moses achieved, versus what he destroyed, and on the enormous bureaucratic hurdles he surmounted to get things done.”) The closest that Rogers gets is with statements such as these: “[The exhibition] seeks to resuscitate the reputation of the master builder” [emphasis added]. “Although Moses is rightly cast as the villain in these fights, he operated within the urban planning orthodoxies of the time.”

She does criticize the exhibition design. Of the Queens Museum section she writes that

The relatively small, monochromatic renderings hung in high-ceilinged galleries, a confusing spatial flow, and hard-to-read labels are mitigated by the fascinating subject matter.

This is the second time Rogers calls something in the exhibition “fascinating.” But is she saying that the exhibition is fascinating, or just that Robert Moses is always fascinating? This line from her concluding paragraphs would seem to suggest the latter:

Overall, it is the subject of these three related, ephemera-heavy exhibitions, not their design presentation, that holds our attention.

‘Living off art history’

9 May 2008 | Career

An article in Die Welt examines the job prospects for German art historians:

Currently around 800 unemployed [art historians] are registered at the federal employment agency. That is almost a whole year’s worth of art-history graduates, given that, of around 11,000 students of this field, around 900 conclude their studies each year.

The Accidental Theorist

8 May 2008 | Theory

In the May 2008 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, Katy Siegel interviews Richard Shiff (her former Ph.D. advisor):

[”What are the issues at stake when a historian becomes a critic?”] … I would fault many of my contemporaries for romanticizing the present by seeing it through moments of past history. They either understand the past era better, or, more likely, have simply romanticized it by identifying it with a figure they wish were right beside them in the present time. Walter Benjamin is a critical writer I myself admire for his remarkable acumen, but I wouldn’t apply his politics to the politics of our own time—it won’t work.

[”What do you see as the pitfalls of theory?”] The problem with theory is that it often does little more than provide terms of generalization, as when we dismiss a view because we classify it as “Cartesian” or “patriarchal” or dismiss an argument because we classify it as “idealist” or “dialectical.” We let the classification make our decision, rather than asking whether the view or the argument is getting a job done regardless of its likely classification … We get into intellectual trouble when we begin to believe what we theorize.

[Could you talk a bit about the development of theory in art writing of the past 30 years or so, from your participatory vantage point?] Like so many other Americans, I quickly developed a liking for Derrida and de Man during the late 1970s … Sometimes you have to resolve to resist your own intellectual tendencies. You can decide arbitrarily to move to the side of what attracts you and attracts most everyone else. A simple but effective strategy is to look for alternative sources of philosophical or theoretical stimulation, sources that answer the same need. No body of thought is so original that you won’t find something like it somewhere else (or maybe our ingrained habit of thinking analogically causes us to think so). An alternative—Peirce instead of, say, Deleuze—will help you avoid falling into one of the patterns of authoritative argumentation that, for better or worse, identifies your generation. It’s easier to have a personal reading of a text when it’s one that few of your peers are reading. Peirce isn’t obscure, but some of the parts of Peirce that seem most interesting to me are rarely used. I sometimes take a book from my library shelf at random and let it inspire the next stage of an unfinished essay … It keeps you from developing too many intellectual habits. You avoid formulaic answers to interpretive questions.

‘The Fresh New Look of Sheepherding’

7 May 2008 | Conferences

The May issue of CAA News includes Donny George’s convocation address for the 2008 CAA Annual Conference in Dallas, “The Looting of the Iraq National Museum”; an interview with the next CAA president, art history professor Paul Jaskot (”It says a lot—and probably raises a few eyebrows—that the Board would choose as its president someone who proclaims he’s a Marxist art historian, is part of the Queer Caucus for Art, and is committed to activism”); and a note on the Dallas conference by Dale Kinney, who helped organize it:

During an intense day-long meeting in October [2006] … The sessions for the Dallas–Fort Worth conference were chosen … Eighty-three proposals were selected, exactly half of the 166 submitted. Reading the proposals is eye opening … Members did not want to hear about the chapter headings of traditional textbooks (Classical, Renaissance, Sculpture, etc.) but about such topics as utopias, failed exhibitions, food art, evolutionism, and one of our favorites, “cute.” … Trends—or at least balloons of interest—sprang out at us: money and markets, global or transcultural movements, art and politics, art and science, art and culture, and the use and optimization of technology in art practice and teaching. Once sessions are chosen, the process is turned over to session chairs to select the papers. As always, some sessions we picked never made it to the conference program (did they fail for lack of papers?); others changed titles and were unrecognizable (did we really approve a session called “The Fresh New Look of Sheepherding”?); others flourished and even expanded to two sessions (hooray for “Neuroscience and the History of Art”!).

CAA News is available in pdf form.

‘MoMA exhibit dies five weeks into show’

5 May 2008 | Contemporary

From The Art Newspaper:

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died … [Curator Paola] Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”

Obit: Enrico Donati, 99

1 May 2008 | Uncategorized

In 1938 Dalí presented a taxi as art, but it was a real taxi that precipitated the death last week of Enrico Donati, the “last of the Surrealists.” Unlike his good friend Marcel Duchamp, who only dabbled in the worlds of business and perfume, Donati, according to the New York Times,

was for many years as engaged in the business world as he was in the world of art … In the early 1960s, he joined the board of Houbigant Inc., one of the oldest purveyors of French perfumes and eau de cologne. In 1965 he bought the company, which was privately held. In 1978 Fortune Magazine reported that as chairman and chief executive, he had “revived the sagging fortunes” of the company, then worth $50 million.

The Artist as Housewife?

30 April 2008 | Modern, Books, Theory

In the May 2008 issue of Art in America, Sue Taylor writes on recent histories of the erotic image. She dives into scandal straight away, of the scholarly kind:

In his 1987 Secret Museum, a lively and polemical history of pornography, Walter Kendrick shows how Western culture is still riven by a debate begun in ancient Greece … “Pornography,” he states, “names an argument not a thing.” His assertion captures the contingency of the category so aptly that we can almost forgive Kerstin Mey for filching it [in her 2007 book Art and Obscenity]. “Obscenity names an argument rather than an object,” she announces.

Mey, Taylor writes,

has produced an ambitious if flawed survey … When Wikipedia appears as a source in an endnote, we’re alerted to the author’s unreliability … [she] misspells the names of Bernd Becher, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Stewart Home, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marc Quinn, Pipilotti Rist and Salman Rushdie … it’s hilarious but also maddening when she writes “seamen” for “semen.”

Of Alyce Mahon’s 2005 survey Eroticism and Art, Taylor writes:

A more intelligible writer than Mey, Alyce Mahon … believes that pornography involves power not sex, whereas “erotic art is about equality between members of the opposite and same sexes.” In this politically correct approach, Mahon relies on analyses developed 40 years ago by feminists struggling against the objectification of women while trying to maintain a place for women’s pleasure. She ignores subsequent discussions of the complex psychic mechanisms of fantasy as well as theories of spectatorship that admit viewers’ cross-gender identification with various subjects in an image, male or female.

Taylor then praises Jennifer Doyle’s 2006 book Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire for its “dazzling insights”:

In her essay “Tricks of the Trade: Pop Art and the Rhetoric of Prostitution” … Doyle theorizes that the rhetoric of prostitution in criticism manages a fear that art, like money, “has no inherent value, no value outside relations of exchange” … Doyle ingeniously probes the meaning and legacy of [the prostitute], showing how the sexually compromised woman (Olympia, Nana, Sister Carrie) becomes an allegory of the artist in relation to the market — both are forced to sell something that should have no price, that should indeed be priceless … [critics also despaired] to distance the labor of the artist from the labor of the housewife, performed out of love and commitment and for free. This type of work would be the ideal analogue for the work of art — were it not the exclusive purview of women.

Biennale Brouhaha

30 April 2008 | Africa

Artnet News surveys the Artforum debates over the most recent Venice Bienniale, declares a pox on all their houses:

… The dispute has gotten delightfully nasty, if you like that sort of thing, with some of the art-world’s most sophisticated curators acting like so many playground bullies … One thing seems clear from the contretemps, and that is that none of these curators take criticism well … In the end, Storr makes an undeniable point — that none of the three reviews of the 52nd Venice Biennale actually said much of note about the actual art in the show … He might have garnered more sympathy had he simply kept quiet; the same letters page contains a concise and eloquent defense of the 52nd Biennale against Morgan’s “spiteful ad hominem attack” by Irving Sandler … Buried in what amounts to colorful art-world infighting is the only point worthy of real controversy — the questions that plagued Storr’s attempt to “bring the representation of African art into the core areas of the Biennale.” … With luck, the biennale will leave us with more than an ugly lesson about curatorial ego and bad faith. In 1984, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Primitivism” exhibition set off a vigorous exchange in Artforum, and led to a rethinking of the way non-Western art was shown, “[p]erhaps the beginning of multiculturalist theory in the art world,” as Jerry Saltz put it in his recent “New York Canon.” Similarly, the dispute over the African pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale should provoke a more thorough-going investigation of the role played by contemporary art and patronage in the real world, as well as in the ivory tower.

Obit: Michael Podro, 77

24 April 2008 | Uncategorized

We read in The Times of London that art historian Michael Podro “died of cancer on March 28, 2008″:

Michael Podro was one of a handful of pioneers who transformed art history, here and abroad, into an ambitious humanities discipline comparable with philosophy, literature and history … In 1956, under the joint supervision of [Ernst] Gombrich and the philosopher Richard Wollheim, Podro began a PhD on the 19th-century German neo-Kantian theorist of art, Konrad Fiedler. In 1959 he renounced painting to concentrate on art history. He obtained his PhD in 1961 …

Podro’s three finely honed books manifest his educational commitments. Central to The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (1972) is Schiller’s account of the way that the drive to play engages with our experience of works of art. In excess, reason and sensory experience can be constraining influences, whereas play and the arts provide us with a sense of freedom unfettered by practical concerns. Ten years later Podro gave this insight a historical dimension in The Critical Historians of Art (1982), his most influential book, which earned him an international following. Podro’s key idea is that art is a form of thought … Podro made art historians aware of the philosophical underpinning of the German tradition, which did not offer a systematic methodology so much as models for how to attend to the complexity of thought embodied in art … In Depiction (1998) Podro turned to some of his favourite artists: Donatello, Titian, Rembrandt, Hogarth and Chardin. A major idea concerns the ways in which the spectator can use the imagination playfully to achieve an orientation to the image. His approach is always ingenious and often produces highly original insights into the artistic process …

Podro was a highly convivial man; the department resounded with laughter, as did the train home from Colchester to London, often to the consternation of other passengers. His approach to academic life was collaborative. He generously read and commented perceptively on drafts of books and articles written by colleagues, at Essex and beyond, whose careers he also nurtured. He worked closely with Michael Baxandall, author of Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, whom he met at the Warburg when they were research students in the late 1950s.

The Independent writes that he “helped generations of students and fellow art historians to think widely and deeply about the subject of art, provoking them with frequently opaque, but often quixotically inspirational ideas about the practice of art.”

The Guardian writes that “Podro was someone whose belief in the life of the mind ran very deep. Art for him was special because it had a real hold on us at the level of common, shared experience, not as something inherently esoteric.”

‘Faculty Productivity Index Offers Surprises’

22 April 2008 | Uncategorized

We belatedly take note of the third annual rankings of the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The index, designed to compare faculty using objective measures such as books published or times cited, has been criticized most for using faulty data. “Many want to see the National Research Council’s long-anticipated new data … before deciding how much legitimacy to grant the council’s more commercial rival.” The council’s data, much delayed, is now scheduled for release in September.

Without further ado, the latest Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index ratings for programs in “Art History and Criticism”:

1. Harvard U.
2. Columbia U.
3. U. of Pennsylvania
4. New York U.
5. Yale U.
5. U. of Virginia
7. U. of Texas at Austin
8. U. of California at Berkeley
9. U. of Chicago
10. U. of Pennsylvania

(A reader points out that U. of Pennsylvania appears twice! Hmmm. We’ll have to email the Index and see if we can find out why.)

Senses and Symmetry

21 April 2008 | Ancient, Medieval, Theory

The latest issue of World Archaeology (39:4) is largely devoted to two themes: the senses and “symmetrical archaeology.”

C. Pamela Graves writes:

In the Middle Ages the senses were considered two-way processes. The senses ‘enabled tangible qualities, and indeed, spiritual or intangible qualities, to be passed from one party to another’ and were acknowledged as gateways to the soul … Seeing something was in effect to touch it … The concepts of sensory environments, e.g. sensuous geographies, acoustic space, soundscapes, aromascapes have been experimented with in application to prehistoric contexts. The challenge for historical archaeologists … is to produce situated analysis … Many commentators have concluded that the acoustic properties of the great medieval churches were not an intentional part of the design, but that ‘for those who repeatedly attended services in these religious spaces, aural and visual symbolism became tightly linked’ … [However] There are known instances … of definite planning with respect to acoustics and religious architecture.

Christopher L. Witmore writes:

The ‘principle of symmetry’ begins with the proposition: human and non-humans should not be regarded as ontologically distinct, as detached and separated entities, a priori. Indeed, modernism’s burdened ’subjects’ and ‘objects’ are regarded as the purified ‘products’ of our particular relations to the world. Therefore, neither our analyses nor our explanations nor our interpretations should ever begin with such asymmetric dualisms. Thought and action, ideas and materials, past and present are thoroughly mixed ontologically …

The humanities and social sciences are awakening to an archaeological sensibility at large. We are witnessing a return to things. Here, there is a great urgency for archaeology to step up. In a world pervaded by short-term thought, archaeology … has never been more relevant. But we cannot sufficiently answer this calling unless we come to agreement over how to engage with the material world, unless we recognize the simultaneous action of material pasts in our contemporary lives.

New Takes on ‘Tradition’

18 April 2008 | Books

What’s new with tradition? The International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), “an active network of individuals and institutions dedicated to the creation of human and harmonious buildings and places which respect local traditions … [it] brings together those who design, make, maintain, study or enjoy traditional building, architecture and places.” The proceedings from its inaugural conference, on the meaning of tradition, are now available in book form. Topics covered include Islamic art, contemporary sculpture, anthropology, gastronomy, law, philosophy and letter-cutting. Sculptor Alexander Stoddart writes:

As a central consequence of the Modernist experience there has arisen in modern culture a profound lack of aesthetic discernment. We live, today, in a world where knowledge of differing styles and manners seems almost to have disappeared … Who could not marvel at the prospect of a major British architect, featured on television recently, mistaking the Parthenon for the Pantheon? Does not hte heart race with wonder when Henry Moore is lauded by the contemporary art authorities as a great sculptor in the classical tradition?

Klimt Catalogue Controversy

17 April 2008 | Modern, Books

Die Welt notes that Alfred Weidinger’s new catalogue raisonné of Gustav Klimt’s paintings (which was selected as the best art book of the year by Frank Whitford in The Times of London and by Tom Rosenthal in The Independent) has come under attack from fellow Klimt scholar Otmar Rychlik.

New CAA Award for Distinguished Feminist

16 April 2008 | Awards

From CAA News:

At its October 2007 meeting, the CAA Board of Directors voted to establish a twelfth Award for Distinction: the Distinguished Feminist Award. The award honors a person who, through his or her art, scholarship, or advocacy, has advanced the cause of equality for women in the arts. A three-member jury, appointed by CAA’s Board president and the vice president for committees from an open call for nominations and self-nominations, selects the recipient each year, beginning in 2008 for the 2009 awards.

‘Venice and the Islamic World’

14 April 2008 | Uncategorized

In caa.reviews, Emine Fetvaci considers Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797, the catalogue for the recent Metropolitan Museum exhibition:

With its rich essays on the historical and cultural background, focused studies on individual media, and technical examination of paint pigments, textile weaves, metalwork inlay, and lacquer and glass production, the catalogue is an impressive showcase of the resources compiled by its editor, Stefano Carboni, who also served as the exhibition’s curator … Venice and the Islamic World contributes significantly to the growing scholarship on cross-cultural exchange in the early modern Mediterranean. The sheer variety of objects examined here brings to life the particularly rich and long-lasting intercultural relationship between Venice and her Eastern trading partners, and the documentation of individual interactions suggests that these relationships were rather complex. With the repeated emphasis on Venice’s unique situation, however, the essays create the impression of a peaceful Mediterranean rarely troubled by war, an era with no calls to crusades or conversion polemics. Yet the exquisite objects examined are interesting precisely because many were created or collected during periods of conflict: they attest to the resilience of mercantile and cultural exchanges. The authors whet our appetite by alluding to Venice’s intimate and colorful relationship with the Islamic world, especially in the early essays in the catalogue; but the nuances of that relationship are not, for the most part, brought to bear on the material examined in the rest of the catalogue. Perhaps the fascinating dynamics evoked by the book could be explored even further, with a more multifaceted approach, especially as it pertains to the issue of “Orientalism.” Venice and the Islamic World leads the reader down an intriguing path, and one wishes it would guide us even further.

Sedlmayr still controversial

11 April 2008 | Books

In Die Welt, Alexander Gauland defends Sedlmayr’s 1948 book Verlust der Mitte (Loss of the Center) from charges leveled recently by Rolf Schneider. Gauland argues that the book isn’t Nazi, it’s just conservative. (For more on Sedlmayr, we recommend the 2000 Vienna School Reader edited by Christopher S. Wood.)

Rediscovering Poussin

10 April 2008 | Museums, Baroque/Neoclassical

“Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions” is now on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bloomberg News has an entertaining short interview with “the Met’s Keith Christiansen, who curated the exhibition with Pierre Rosenberg, the retired director of the Louvre”:

Hoelterhoff: In pulling this show together, did you make any discoveries?

Christiansen: I think the one near-discovery, rediscovery we might call it, is the landscape from Belgrade. It hasn’t been outside of Serbia since 1934. We negotiated to bring it back here to the Metropolitan where it was cleaned and restored and it makes its debut in this exhibition.

Hoelterhoff: Where was it hiding?

Christiansen: Pierre Rosenberg, who organized the show with me, said he once saw it in Tito’s office.

‘Impenetrable prose from the Whitney Biennial’

9 April 2008 | Museums

From Carol Diehl, “Impenetrable prose from the Whitney Biennial“:

…It is the problematizing of expectations and formalisms through destruction and transformations that is the heart of the continuing project…. (Todd Alden on Mika Tajima/New Humans)
——————–
…invents puzzles out of non sequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial…inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion… (Trinie Dalton on Amanda Ross-Ho)
——————–
…Thomson’s inherently conversational practice both gamely Pop-ifies its often antiaesthetic historical precedents and resituates that generation’s thought experiments in the social realm. (Suzanne Hudson on Mungo Thomson)

[ … there’s more …]

(via Time)

Feeney wins Pulitzer

8 April 2008 | Awards

Mark Feeney has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, “for his penetrating and versatile command of the visual arts, from film and photography to painting.” An excerpt from one of the Boston Globe articles that won him the award:

Something astonishing happened over the second two-thirds of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th, something so unprecedented as to come almost immediately to be taken for granted. It was, quite simply, this: Optics and engineering combined to reinvent seeing. One would have to go back to Lascaux and the first cave paintings to find a comparable shift in visual perception.

The most obvious form this reinvention took was the motion picture. Yet the movies only marked the culmination of a decades-long series of developments that included dioramas and flip books (the latter was patented as recently as 1868), such rudimentary devices for projecting motion as the zoetrope and thaumatrope, and the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. For the first time, duration entered visual representation.

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