by Jon Lackman | 1 May 2009 | Books, Conferences
Due out this month from Yale UP: Dialogues in Art History, from Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century, proceedings of a 2005 symposium held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. to celebrate the twenty-fifth birthday of its Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. The center’s dean, Elizabeth Cropper, edited the proceedings. In her introduction, she writes:
The essays were presented in pairs, focusing on an issue, a period, or a crux of scholarship … Authors were encouraged to exchange essays [beforehand] … and to engage in discussion at the symposium, and afterward, with differing results: some authors exchanged essays more than once, whereas others chose to allow the audience to draw connections through simple juxtaposition …
Betsy M. Bryan and Marian H. Feldman, working in the different cultural fields of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, both propose ways to read monuments as interacting with their environments, whether cosmic or terrestrial, rather than as discrete formal entities …
The limited usefulness of the dichotomy of text and image is confronted by Elizabeth Hill Boone in her discussion of graphic communication in preconquest Mexico. Boone also challenges the conventional binary of style and iconography in Mayan studies … [Joanne] Pillsbury, using the terms of linguistic and cultural anthropology, underlines the difficulty of producing an emic view of history and culture in the absence of any texts at all …
Charles Dempsey and C. Jean Campbell are … engaged in a revisionist campaign to change the shape of art historical time. Unlike those who have sought to deconstruct and even destroy the notion of the Italian Renaissance, Dempsey and Campbell, whose essays form a true pair, seek a radical redefinition of the period based on the new vernacular sensibility in the world that flourished from the Trecento on, rather than on the revival of antiquity that began in earnest only a century later …
Joseph Connors and Louise Rice directly acknowledge each other’s work in their approach to the reconstruction of living contexts for fundamentally performative aspects of baroque culture in seventeenth-century Italy …
Both Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Philippe Bordes, focusing on François Boucher and Jacques-Louis David, respectively, concern themselves with a new kind of “self-portrait problem” in eighteenth-century France. Lajer-Burcharth is interested in Boucher’s materialization of self through a commercial diffusion of self-image … Bordes lays out the dialectical problem of seeing [self-images] (and portraiture in general) both in close detail and in social and historical perspective, both as paintings and as images of the soul …
[I]t is to the museum itself that the last pair of essays is devoted … [Hal] Foster touches on several issues raised in the preceding essays: the role of chronology, the value of iconographical themes, the limited validity of medium-specific classification … and especially the cult of the commodity, the “financial fetishes” and “refined capital” … His proposals to present different genealogies of advanced art always begin, however, with a critical articulation of the art itself, rather than with the imposition of a set of abstract terms … Jeffrey Weiss agrees, placing even more emphasis on the needs of individual works of art for appropriate company and sympathetic (not archaeologically reconstructed) viewing conditions, unencumbered by the cacophony of demands from educators, sponsors, and even architects …
In the twenty-first century, the dangers of inattention to both complexity and coherence, dangers to which Foster calls attention, face art historians as much as they face artists, and indeed the culture as a whole. The essays here … may indeed, to paraphrase Foster, help the history of art to “seek out possibilities for the future in possibilities overlooked in the present or lost in the past.”
Other pairings included Finbarr Barry Flood and David J. Roxburgh, Wu Hung and Yukio Lippit, and Svetlana Alpers and Mariët Westermann
“Yve-Alain Bois and Wanda Corn preferred not to publish their essays,” for reasons not enumerated, leaving their partners, Marc Gotlieb and Michael Leja, “in one-sided dialogues on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and American art. They are now paired here to productive effect, given the authors’ shared interests in the rhetoric of elite culture and its search for expression of authentic experience.”
