by Jon Lackman | 12 June 2007 | Uncategorized
A few art historians are starting a discussion, over email, of new ways to write art history. (To join, write us.) The catalyst:
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education described an unusual attempt by a doctoral student to revise Robert Caro’s 1974 portrait of “master builder” Robert Moses, The Power Broker, which still dominates discussion today despite many recent attempts to update it:
“Emanuel Moses is up in the hotel again. It’s a problem this time because it’s been on fire for nearly fifty minutes.”
So begins Chapter 3 of Timothy M. Mennel’s Everything Must Go: A Novel of Robert Moses’s New York, an unpublished book that comprises 1,096 manuscript pages — with 1,456 footnotes.
For Everything Must Go is not simply a novel. It’s also Mr. Mennel’s dissertation in urban geography, which he successfully defended this month at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. The novel traces several generations of a fictitious African-American family as they interact with the life and works of the legendary city planner Robert Moses.
Mennel says that as far as he knows, this is the first geography dissertation in the form of a novel. How many academics at all have attempted to present their scholarship in unusual genres? In art history, a few examples come to mind, for example Linda Nochlin’s essay in the 1988 Courbet Reconsidered catalogue; Eunice Lipton’s 1992 book Alias Olympia: a woman’s search for Manet’s notorious model & her own desire; Rosalind Krauss’ 1993 book The Optical Unconscious; Molly Nesbit’s 2000 book Their Common Sense, and the 2004 book Irrational modernism: a neurasthenic history of New York Dada, by Amelia Jones.
All the above except Nesbit interject quite a bit of personal narrative, “memoir” if you like, largely for feminist reasons, many add. Some include fictional or poetic passages: Lipton narrates events from the perspective of Manet model Victorine Meurent, Jones sometimes assumes the voice of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Nesbit follows a fictional protagonist “Emile.” Jones and Nesbit interweave prose and poetry. With Jones, it’s mostly a question of alternating the two; Nesbit’s text is a nearly undefinable hybrid, one that Art Bulletin reviewer Joachim Pissarro dubbed a revival of the Enlightenment-era “didactic poem.” Krauss’ book may be the hardest to define. Her editor wrote on the back cover that it is “art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction.” (See also Joseph Leo Koerner’s short experimentation with the second-person voice in the 1990 Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape.)
Krauss noted in a December 1994 Art Bulletin article that
The desire to exchange the historian’s traditional voice, with its presumed objectivity and detachment, for a type of speech that would have the “subjective” written all over it, was a natural outcome of what could be called the “paraliterary” developments of poststructuralism in the 1970s … [Barthes crossed] theoretical writing with other literary genres: the novelistic, the autobiographical, the semoipsychoanalytic. And there were Derrida’s paraliterary declarations, as well, as in “polylogues” or his exchanges of postcards with “S.A.”
On the flip side, novelists have long incorporated history and art history into their fictions, sometimes with a scholar’s attention to detail. (See the 2001 essay collection Novel history for examples.)
Some would argue that all fiction has an element of history, and vice versa. (See, e.g., Hayden White’s 1978 book Tropics of Discourse.) Nonetheless, scholars such as Nochlin, Lipton, Krauss, Jones, Nesbit, and Mennel continue to try to distinguish their facts from their fictions in their published writings. Is that the de minimis requirement for literary scholarship to still qualify as scholarship? Is it practicable?
Have these experiments been successful? Influential? Do some or all of them present a radical challenge to the more common modes of presenting scholarship? What other hybrid forms are possible? If you’d like to join the group that is discussing these and other questions over email, write us.
