by Jon Lackman | 5 April 2010 | Theory
In the Brooklyn Rail, Sasha Suda interviewed Willibald Sauerländer:
… the time will come when you study the art of the other civilizations with equal right as European art. With the global art world there’s one difficulty I spoke with [Hans] Belting about: In a deep structural sense art history was a European project because Europe had arranged a process of secularization where religious art suddenly became aesthetic art. This process, which to my limited knowledge, never happened in Africa, or India, not even in China despite great breaks they’ve made with their past. So, it’s not easy to expand the European concept of art history to the other civilizations because it means bringing European concepts to them. We are in a peculiar situation at the moment because there are still people who pursue traditional research topics and there is also a new interest in what I would even describe as artifacts. It’s a new interest in the signs and monuments of religion, life, and public life that has created what is called cultural studies—not a very beautiful term but a strong trend. How, in the face of this trend, will you save the professional knowledge of traditional art history and expertise? All of these are open questions that are not discussed enough …
We have to ask ourselves what is looking? Is looking a strictly visual process or is it a deep, emotional process? We should test and totally absorb the emotional process in front of a work of art and then, as art historians, we should undergo the critical task of asking ourselves whether the emotional impact of the art is identical with the historical, or original, mission of the object. One must ask oneself what the tension between these two things is and then bring them together. Today in the art history of Bildwissenschaft or media studies people want to throw away the emotional side of art history so that works of art become examples of information. We must defend the emotional effect of art even if, in Germany, we experienced irrationalism among art historians who swam in their emotional impressions alone. So, we have the task of putting our emotional impression through critical enlightenment, but if we remove the emotional side then we can close shop.
Sauerländer subsequently wrote in to clarify a few things.
