by Jon Lackman | 15 February 2007 | Conferences, News, Theory
This morning, the Physical insistently re-asserts itself at the highly cerebral panel “The Status of Interpretation in Art History.” Two bodies cannot occupy the same space, and therefore this panel was hastily relocated to Gramercy Suite when it became apparent that its original ballroom had been double-booked. The new Suite holds the 100-odd attendees comfortably, but has a rather Lilliputian screen for slides, its computer system is reluctant to show images at all (“this is a theory session, but pictures would still be useful,” someone quips) its door clangs every time someone enters or exits (which is often, of course), and its thin walls periodically let in psych-lab-style beeps and licks of exuberant techno music well-suited to a b-grade science-fiction film.
Chair Robert S. Nelson persists, and delivers an introduction: “Theory as a club was used to bash older art historians … It led to the so-called ‘crisis in the discipline’ … and to the ‘two disciplines’ … Art history was replicating a strategy artists had long used … Once art historians had worked with important artists, now they worked with important theorists … at some point theory became less important … nobody rang a bell when the time of theory was over … some now see it as a bad dream … but there can be no return to the past, only revivals which are never quite the same … theory can never disappear … There is no orthodoxy today … research-based and social methods seem to be yielding to other strategies but slowly … perception, the body, and the mind all appear to be important issues.”
Hanneke Grootenboer jumps off from an extravagant 1724 still life by Jan van Huysum. “Any concrete starting point for a reading of this painting is doomed, yet our gaze may creep in.” She purports to explain how the human gaze travels through the picture, step by step. Such tracings are inevitably subjective, which she might have mentioned; that said, hers is compelling. She then points to a void left by a fallen tulip, which she sees as a rich semiotic moment, as is a dewdrop that looks as if it is about to fall into the cup held by a putto carved into the flowerpot that occupies the lower part of the painting. (van Huysum, ever the virtuoso, “generously applied dewdrops to all his flower paintings, perhaps too generously.”) This dewdrop, she argues, is about to enact a shift from the mimetic (the highly realistic dewdrop) to the fictional (the putto relief, which is itself mimetic of course since it is painted, but reads more as narrative).
Grootenboer asks – “what is the painting thinking, what is it philosophizing?” – inspired by Poussin (who was among the first to talk of thought in painting) and by Damisch’s famous book on perspective. According to Deleuze and Guattari, another of her touchstones, thought in art is a confrontation of chaos, a restoration of the infinite to the finite. Painting is “mute philosophy rather than mute poetry.” Can we go beyond subject matter, beyond narrative, even beyond meaning – to the painting’s thought? She says we can, by “returning to the work of art as such.” One of her final questions, which remains tantalizingly open-ended, is: If the thought in the painting precedes or stands apart from its composition, subject matter and meaning, where does it reside?
Another paper, another entrance for Deleuze and Guattari. Lisa Lipinski examines Magritte’s “Le Viol” (often translated as “The Rape”). This famously painting shows a face where eyes have been replaced by a woman’s breasts and the mouth by her pubic hair. Many have tried to forget this painting, and few have succeeded, including Andre Breton (who was a fan). Magritte wrote to a friend around this time, “I have produced paintings in which the eye must think.” Deleuze and Guattari view desire as a positive and productive force produced by the interlocking machines that are our bodies (not as Freud did, as the result of a lack). A 1992 Lacanian analysis saw the woman in “Le Viol” as essentially mouthless, muted, trapped in her body yet again, but Lipinski demurs. She invokes Artaud, who argued that “nothing is more useless than an organ”; when you make a body without organs, you free this man from his unconscious desires, from suffering, commerce and organized religion. Lipinski then makes much of the idea of the idea of a “body without organs,” the “b.w.o.” as she repeatedly, comically refers to it. The laugh only lasts so long. Finally, “it is up to us to realize the monstrous possibility he revealed in ‘Le Viol.’”
Kent Minturn urges “a return to Damisch,” especially to the Damisch who engaged directly with works of art. Damisch, according to Minturn, is the leading scholar on Dubuffet, but is rarely acknowledged as such. “Damisch stands as one of a handful of thinkers who attempted to develop a methodology capable of dealing with images that resist interpretation.” Alas, Minturn’s paper also resists interpretation by the on-the-spot diarist.
Joan Hart began her talk: “I hope I can stand long enough to give this talk.” (She awoke at 3 a.m. to reach the conference from Indiana.). Just noticeable difference is that which is not even noticed consciously when first perceived. This psychological effect has been used by contemporary artists but is also relevant to the work of older artists who could not have consciously known much of it. Robert Irwin’s “Untitled” of 1968 is four tungsten light bulbs and an acrylic disk and a painted stripe. Where does the work end and the wall begin? Impossible to say. There is no figure and no ground. Irwin and James Turrell conducted experiments in sensory deprivation and other psychological states, which influenced their art. In another work, a grey rectangle is actually a hole in the wall, which you don’t realize until you try to touch it and fall into space. In a Bill Viola video that plays at 1/15 speed, figures eventually seem to be moving slightly, but one can’t say in what way until examining it for a long time. A Nam June Paik, “Hoosier Tree,” creates an opposite sensation, which flickers rapidly and then only slowly allows the viewer to identify distinct elements. How do our perceptual pathways affect the reality of what we see? How did they in the past? In Hart’s mind, we need to know much more than we do. Human perception has been a primary concern of artists from Raphael to Seurat. We depend on our perceptions so unthinkingly, as a matter of survival perhaps, but artists are always provoking us, challenging us, to do better.
The final speaker, Elizabeth Sears, states that “Art history knows too little about itself,” despite the efforts of late. It is expanding but also contracting, become trapped in specialist eddies. Riegl scholars who only speak to each other. She surveys the history of art historiography. Eventually she ends up at the recent volume “Theory for Art History.” What about “theory inflected by art history” or “theory as affected by art history?” A recent book, “Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany,” takes a good step in this direction.
Should art history tell stories? In Q&A, Minturn asserts that in art history, “Narrative is inevitable. Self-conscious narration is needed.” According to Hart, art historians are falling apart, not speaking to each other. Sears notes that the papers today had considerable commonality. Why are Deleuze and Guattari and Damisch leading the way for all of us? Did the panel’s chair choose similar papers on purpose? He doesn’t say, concluding with a call for a return to the art object … “the frontier of interpretation.”
