by Jon Lackman | 17 May 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Journals, Theory
The latest (March-June 2010) Art Bulletin just arrived here. This one comes with another “Intervention”; in this recurring feature, a number of scholars are invited to respond to a provocative essay. The author completes the exercise by responding to the respondents, and the whole thing is published across many pages. I’m curious — do people like this series? Is it the best use of the journal’s pages? Personally I’m glad that Art Bulletin is doing it, though I feel it could do so much more. The topics are generally good, but the essays and especially the responses inevitably get bogged down in parochial concerns. There’s not enough attempt made to actually speak to a larger audience, to address the field as a whole. I do find amusing the series title, “Interventions.” For me it calls to mind thousands of alcoholic art historians being dragged into a hotel ballroom of faded grandeur, where they are to be lectured by other, recovered art historians. The problem is: Is there such a thing as a recovered art historian?
The latest intervention kicks off with a meditation by University of Chicago anthropology PhD student Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay.” (Is this the first intervention by a PhD student?) Art historians have been taking a special interest in anthropology in recent years, although the relationship has proved rocky at times. In his response to the respondents, Hamann writes with some satisfaction but also some frustration:
My goal was not a new interpretation of Las meninas, in the hopes of offering up “a convincing new reading of the painting” … My goal was a recontextualization of its imagery, bringing its surface into dialogue with other images, images of and from the New World … In fact, my essay did not originally return to Las meninas at all … however, I was repeatedly urged to bring back Las meninas at the end.
I love this series, and I could not have been more excited when this specific issue arrived. This coming fall I will be teaching an upper level undergraduate course on colonialism and postcolonialism, and I plan to use the articles as a teaching tool. The first article does a great job of applying postcolonial theory to Las Meninas. I will be able to have students read a non-postcolonial interpretation of Las Meninas in preparation for it. (Does anyone have a suggestion for this reading?) The responses will be a great way to show how dialog occurs within the humanities in journals. I will probably assign a low-stakes writing assignment along with the articles, requiring students to map out the different interpretations of the painting and which arguments are particularly compelling. Have any of you used a series of articles before in your teaching? If so I would love to see your insights here in the comments.
I haven’t seen this specific intervention, but the interventions in the past have typically shown up how disconnected and sclerotic the Art Bulletin is. The Indian avant-garde intervention was pretty typical–an argument that in another form would have been interesting, but instead seemed edited/reviewed within an inch of its life. The Nagel/Wood intervention from a few years past was the last insightful one I can remember, and even that produced a lot of bitching and moaning from some pretty prominent Renaissance scholars, indeed continues to do so. Which is to say, they could only be considered interventions at one of the most conservative art history publications out there, and produce a bevy of largely parochial reactions nonetheless. Seeing junior scholars navigate telling senior scholars that they’re idiots provides a kind of political education, but otherwise they mostly seem useless.
I agree with you, TW, that the Art Bulletin is often a conservative venue, but I think that you will be pleasantly surprised by this dialog. (Incidentally, what is your name, TW? It is always nice to know who we are conversing with.) I found Byron Hamann’s article–and the responses–to be an uplifting read. The author gives credit to the scholars whose shoulders he stands upon, and he correctly frames his work as original because it engages with methodology from other disciplines–postcolonial analysis and material culture studies. The article demonstrated that New World products are present in Las Meninas, and that the painting would have been understood–when new–as tied to a colonial economy. The discussants acknowledged what Hamann’s article was ingenious, but they also pointed out questions that remain unexplored. I was ultimately left with a richer understanding of Velázquez, and I see Las Meninas as more interesting than before. The few comments by respondents that were negative assumed that the goal of art history is to recover the mindset of artists. That was not Hamann’s goal, as he is an anthropologist and historian who took a broader set of actors and agendas into consideration.
The fact that an Art Bulletin Intervention “produced a lot of bitching and moaning from some pretty prominent Renaissance scholars, indeed continues to do so” demonstrates to me the success of the series. It seems clear that the series represents the attempt of a more traditional (conservative is an imprecise term) publication to incorporate persepectives, methodologies, etc from less traditional branches of the field in a way that provides some critical context. In regards to the series being “edited/reviewed within an inch of its life”, it should be in a publication like Art Bulletin. While the model of scholarship that the Art Bulletin represents may not be new, it is still quite relevant, regardless of your political views.