by Jon Lackman | 10 April 2007 | Theory
Art Bulletin continues its series of “interventions.” In the March 2007 issue, Michael Ann Holly opens a discussion on the melancholy aspects of our discipline: “The experience of visual captivation (when the two become one) is transitory, even ephemeral, however powerful its aftereffects. In ‘workaday consciousness,’ its consolation lingers, and like ruins contemplated across many cultures and several centuries in faraway places, these material objects provoke a sad and romantic yearning for something that has long ago passed away … I am going to make a case for bestowing a name on our disciplinary companion: Melancholy.” Excerpts from two of the responses:
Stephen Melville: “… I resist to some degree Holly’s attempt to forge a very particular, more or less necessary, link between the condition of art history’s objects and a disciplinary orientation to mourning and melancholy … I suspect that I tend to think of [melancholy art history] grounded less in the condition of the art historical object than in the more general fact and thought of modernity.”
Hayden White: “In referring to art historical writing as ‘melancholic,’ she alludes to a psychoanalytic manner of construing the relation between past and present … one might attempt to classify the kinds of writing about art history in terms of the principal kinds of neuroses: paranoid, hysterical, obsessive-compulsive, and fetishistic … If ‘writing is loss,’ then it is loss of the second, virtual kind [unlike, say, the loss of a limb], which means that far from being a cause of melancholy (about which more later), it is or at least can be the instrument of its cure or diminution … The loss in question, though, is … that in the commodification of the whole of culture, it is ‘art’ itself that has been lost. Yet the loss, or, as it is called, ‘the end’ of art is rather like that ‘end of history’ lately proclaimed by Dr. Francis Fukuyama. In the latter case, what has come to an end is a certain notion of history’s true ‘substance.’ So, too, in the former case, what has come to an end, it turns out, is that notion of its substance that prevailed in the West between the Renaissance and Abstract Expressionism.”
Karen Lang and Stephen Bann also respond. Holly, then, responds to them all.
