by Jon Lackman | 13 November 2006 | Uncategorized
Kathryn Tuma interviews T.J. Clark in The Brooklyn Rail: “I think [Left art history is] stuck with an out-of-date sense of the issues. As if it mattered any longer—as if it had any present political point—to prove for the umpteenth time that what we poor suckers had imagined was a difficult and double-edged picture of the human condition was really, hey presto!, just another instrument of ruling-class oppression… Here’s Bruegel for you—provider of sneering moralistic services for a bunch of bourgeois Puritans. Where does one start with this? Maybe by looking back at the canonical quote from Walter Benjamin, and reminding oneself of what it did and did not say. It did not say that ‘There is no document of civilization which is not really, when you look at its origins and function, a document of barbarism.’ It said: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ This is a dialectical thought, not an anti-canonical put-down. The work of art is a document of civilization and of barbarism. The job of the materialist is to think the two identities—the two kinds of belonging to history—together. Not to reduce one to the other. A materialist will presumably be interested in what it was, in the sets of possibilities offered by a specific medium, a specific practice, that opened the space in which a jolly denunciation of peasant foolishness became something else.
And always in the back of my mind is the question: Where does the Left actually get its picture of the humanity that class society stifles and travesties if not, in part, from Bruegel and Poussin? Is it all there in the pages of Marx and Foucault? I don’t think so (neither did Marx). Or is it that Left art historians lead such rich and unalienated lives that they simply don’t need their picture of humanity enriched by other people’s representations? That must feel good…But all of this, in any case, is so remote from the questions posed by actual image-war going on around us—that’s the point. The ‘canon question’… The ‘great art question’… The sins of museums… Wake me when it’s over.”
