by Jon Lackman | 12 August 2010 | Books, Theory
Christopher Kul-Want has just assembled a new anthology Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists that includes:
Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh’s shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud’s postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art.
I’m a sucker for books like this. I call myself a sucker because they usually frustrate me more than they inspire, and yet I seem to be compelled to read each new one that appears. In Kul-Want’s, the postmodernists get more than half the book to themselves. The full list of authors: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Adorno, Kofman, Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Agamben, Nancy, Badiou, and Rancière. Not a particularly surprising list, although he doesn’t necessarily pick the most conventional text from each author. (Not that the point of such a collection is to surprise.) The least familiar to me was Sarah Kofman, who, according to Kul-Want,
… proposes that the image is essentially lacunary: an image of loss. The image of loss does not possess a referent — the object of (repressed and envied) desire, such as that of the Oedipal Mother — since signification is composed of an infinite series of substitutions between one signifier and another … [T]he referent does not haunt representation in abstentia, since it exists only as an outcome of the structure of representation. In other words, the fiction of a referent is understood outside of a dialectical relationship to truth or idealism, a position traditionally occupied by the Oedipal Mother … [Unlike Lacan] Kofman believes that the language of representation inevitably reveals its own structure through the processes of condensation and displacement that, as Freud proposed, primarily work through fantasies, dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, and works of art.
This for me falls into the frustration category, I’m afraid.
Kul-Want includes no Marx, de Saussure, Althusser, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Irigaray, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Said, or Spivak – all of whom appear in Jae Emerling’s similarly sized 2005 volume Theory for Art History. Emerling in turn has no Hegel, Nancy, or Rancière, and I assume the selections are generally shorter, considering the longer list of authors. For a volume that includes art historians alongside theorists, try the 2009 edition of Donald Preziosi’s assuredly surprising The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. On the theory side, you only get Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Benjamin, because the majority of the book is given over to figures such as Vasari, Winckelmann, Wölfflin, Riegl, Warburg, Wind, Gombrich, Panofsky, Schapiro, Baxandall, Bal, Bryson, and Summers, as well as a host of other names, many of them lesser known.
There’s one thing worse than hearing a psychoanalyst prattle on about art – a philosopher prattling on about art!!
Hopefully this won’t dissuade actual Historians, or even Art Scholars like Andrew Graham Dixon and Martin Kemp from keeping up their great work.
H
philosophers on art should get no more credence than they give artists on philosophy …
words about art have nothing to do with art
I’m not opposed to philosophers or psychoanalysts writing on art and have enjoyed some of both at times. For me Kant and Barthes have been particularly stimulating. But there seems to be something about the anthology format that makes them seem particularly impenetrable and unlovely. Remove their words from their original context and something essential is lost — particularly when an entire book is being reduced to a short excerpt. Similarly, I rarely become enamored with a poem upon finding it in an anthology, or even in the poet’s own collected poems — the original chapbooks are the only way to go for me.
Regarding the idea that “words about art have nothing to do with art,” I have to disagree. No art arises from vision alone. Artists are inevitably affected by their reading of and conversation with friends, patrons, critics, historians, and theorists and psychoanalysts, at times. So too is the artwork’s reception affected by language.
I sometimes think we give too much credence to philosophers’ writings on art -if for no other reason than that most of the time these thinkers are writing about beauty and aesthetics, not necessarily art, though they project ideas of beauty onto art. The history of art and the history of beauty are not the same thing. Eco wrote about this in the introduction to his History of Beauty.
“philosophers on art should get no more credence than they give artists on philosophy … ”
So much for an interdisciplinary approach.
I have to agree with Jonathan. When thoughtful and intelligent people write about a topic you love (and is the foundation of your professional activity), even if it is out of their primary field, it is worth paying attention.