BA (Hons) Art (Practice and
History) (and combined)
BA (Hons) Art History (and combined)
BA (Hons) Modern Visual Culture
(and combined)
Level 2 semester 1
Paul
Shakeshaft and Nina Lubbren
Introduction to
Lectures and Seminars
Weekly Outline
of Lectures and Seminars
The module is
concerned with some of the broader questions raised in the study of art and
visual culture.
We shall be thinking
about the history of visual history and theory, whether ‘art’ objects and
images constitute a distinct category, the classifications which might be
applied to the visual, the ways in which the visual cultures of other times and
places might be understood, the validity of possible approaches to the
interpretation of images, the problem of how images originate, the reasons why
art undergoes transformation, questions of discrimination and evaluation, the
place of psychoanalysis, the significance of the spectator’s response, the validity
of perspectives concerned with differences of class, gender and race, the ways
in which non-western visual cultures might be understood, the issues of
partiality and relativism, the relationship between verbal and visual language
and the relationship of ‘Modernism’ and its sequels to all of these issues.
This module is unlike
any of the other modules offered in the Study of Art field in that it almost
entirely based upon reading. You will
need to read several texts every week.
10 and 20 credits
If you are taking the
module for 20 credits, by its completion you should be able to
1. to
retrieve and select, with guidance, relevant visual and theoretical information
on visual representation from a variety of sources
2. demonstrate
a critical understanding of the central visual theoretical debates
3. evaluate
the evidence presented by scholars in these debates and formulate a position in
relation to them
4. analyse
the critical assumptions of selected writers on art
5. communicate
arguments in the language of these debates, interacting effectively with the
learning group
If you are taking the
module for 10 credits, you will be expected to achieve 2, 4 and 5
Student taking the
module for 20 credits should study the weekly photocopies, the reading and aspects of the further
reading. You will be expected to
read the essential texts before the seminar and to attempt at least some of the
further reading during the week of the topic, or thereafter. The further reading lists appear quite
daunting but remember that you are not expected to read everything; set
yourself the objective of reading part of at least two of these texts. You should come to each seminar with one
line taken from a passage in one of the further reading texts which you have
found particularly interesting. Be
prepared to speak about the line.
Students taking the
module for 10 credits, study the weekly photocopies and the reading but they are not expected to tackle
the further reading.
Whether you are
taking the module for 10 or for 20 credits, you are expected to attend both the
lectures and the seminars. The
10-credit students write the first essay only
(see Assessment below)
Each week, we shall
be examining a broad theoretical issue.
The lecture is intended to set out
the principal questions generated by the theme of the week and to assemble some
of the arguments which have been developed around the questions.
The seminars
will provide the opportunity to examine the arguments in more detail, assisted
by readings from key texts.
It is important that
you come to the seminars prepared:
1. You
will need to have attended the lecture in order to understand the general
outlines of the debate
2. You
should have developed some preliminary thoughts about the questions set out at
the head of each week’s entry in the module booklet
3. You
will need to read the photocopies
for each week (see the pigeonholes outside of rooms 65/6).
4. You
should have completed the readings from the set book (Fernie – see below),
together with aspects of at least some of the other recommended texts for the
week. Remember each week to bring to
the seminar a copy of Fernie.
5. If
you are taking the module for 20 credits, you should have found at least two of
the texts in the further reading section and you should be prepared to comment
on an idea from at least one of them.
The principal reader
we shall be using is Eric Fernie
(1996), Art History and its Methods, published by Phaidon @ £14.99
and available in Browne’s Bookshop.
(There are copies in the library but you are strongly advised to buy
your own).
Other anthologies you
might want to buy are: Donald Preziosi
(1998), The Art of Art History: A
Critical Anthology, published
by O.U.P.@ £15.99 and J. Evans & S. Hall, eds. (1999), Visual
Culture: The Reader, London,
published by Sage. (The library holds copies of both).
This week’s principal
questions:
What
theories have been advanced to argue that there is a category of object and
images called ‘art’?
Can
‘art’ be regarded as a universal category, evident in the visual culture of all
societies in all places at all times?
How
do notions of ‘art’ relate to social theories?
Is
the ‘aesthetic’ a mode of perception rather than a quality inherent in objects
and images?
Should
we substitute the term “visual culture” for “art”?
The use of the words
“art” and “artist” to describe a particular class of objects and images, or a
person who practices a distinctive activity, is deeply ingrained in western
languages and culture. We talk of art
museums, art departments, fine art degrees, art teachers, art students. The language presupposes not only the
existence of a category called ‘art’ but that there is some consensus about
what this category might be. Debates
about contemporary art, however commonplace or abstruse they may be, often
circle around the problem of where an object or image stands in relation to
other objects or images already regarded as ‘art’. At the same time, in recent years the word “art” has been
substituted in some quarters by terms such as the “visual” or “visual culture”,
in recognition both of the difficulties in defining the term and what has come
to be perceived as its limited applicability.
We shall begin by
rehearsing some of the possible answers to the question of how art might be
defined. Most of answers can be routed
through one or other of two approaches.
The first approach to the problem of how, or
whether, a category called ‘art’ can be defined, brings together two tendencies
which have been around for a long time and refuse to go away.
Could it be that
there is something intrinsic to certain objects that persuades us that they
deserve special consideration? Do they
have a certain appearance which draws our attention, by virtue, for instance,
of their materials, or the skill invested in them, or the shape or composition
they take, or the novelty of their configuration? The intrinsic, or essentialist theorists, might very well come to
similar conclusions about what is valued in the object or image to those put
forward by the social historians and cultural anthropologists but for different
reasons. They might maintain that these
visual qualities are not simply an invention of the societies which produce
them but have a more general, perhaps even universal, value.
Theories which employ
the idea of ‘beauty’, not much in vogue now but still there below the surface
in many minds, appeal to the conviction that we have a pre-dispostion to
separate the beautiful from the ugly, that this pre-disposition can be trained
and that some forms of ‘art’ and its criticism are devoted to its display. The theory is not a trivial one; it
underlies much of western ‘art history’.
‘Beauty’ has been understood to be a quality of the natural world, which
the artist has attempted to transcribe, or as an ideal form which can only be
visualised through the imagination of the artist. Either way, theories of ‘beauty’ will usually suppose that
‘beauty’s’ essence is not circumscribed by the original cultural elite which
sponsored its representation.
For those who regard
‘art’ as a category which is not ultimately contingent upon the society which
originally defined it, there is another type of argument which has an
essentialist dimension, but it is one which shifts attention from the object or
image to the observer. This view
recognises the difficulty of attempting to define any intrinsic qualities in
objects or images which mark them out as ‘art’. If there is an intrinsic quality, it is to be found in the
spectator. In its popular guise, this
is the ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ argument. In its developed form, this approach
suggests that one of the most highly developed human faculties is our ability
to detach our understanding of things from considerations of usefulness so as
to view them aesthetically, that is, for the sake of the quality of their
visual appearances alone. Therefore, following this line of reasoning, what
affects us ‘aesthetically’ is, necessarily, ‘art’. What affects us ‘aesthetically’ may have an emotional
element. Of course, this argument can
only work if we accept that some objects have the sorts of visual qualities
which mark them off from other objects and encourage in us an ‘aesthetic’
appreciation.
This approach might
seem, as Clive Bell believed, unsusceptible to scientific examination but
attempts have been made recently to develop neurological theories of art linked
to ideas of evolutionary biology (see Ramachandran and Hirstein photocopy).
The second approach, now forming something
of an orthodoxy in British art history departments, draws on ideas developed by
social historians, cultural anthropologists and linguistic semioticians. The idea common to these viewpoints is that
‘art’ is a category constituted by particular cultures. These societies encode their beliefs and
practices in visual forms and these forms are shaped by that other great system
of encoding, verbal language. All
societies produce visual forms in bewildering abundance; in order to ensure
that certain objects achieve the special status required for the encoding and
transmission of the dominant ideas of the group, a distinctive and revered
category of objects is defined by the cultural elites.
Status will be
conferred on these objects for a number of reasons: because they display rare
materials or great skill, because of their size or location, because of the meanings
they bear or the functions they fulfil, because of the inspiration of their
makers or simply because the high priesthood sanctifies them. So, this theory can still, in its less
challenging form, reserve for art historians a group of objects for special
consideration.
Particularly
influential in recent years have been the ideas of Arthur C. Danto and George
Dickie. Danto believes an object
attains the status of ‘art’ by its position in relation to other art objects
and by virtue of the art talk which develops around it. George Dickie’s institutional theory has it
that an object becomes ‘art’ only within the institutional frameworks which
validate it.
The social
historical/anthropological approach can be used to question the continuing
validity of the definitions of past times of ‘art’. We might broaden our area of interest to include the visual
appearances of all the objects, great and small, made in that world, subsuming
the privileged category of ‘art’ in the process. By this means, we might not only find out more about the ways
which elites influenced the beliefs of common people, but we might also learn
how the beliefs of the common people found expression in the objects they made
and used.
This way of looking
at ‘art’ requires, first and foremost, that we use the definitions of ‘art’
which applied in the original culture.
If a group from another culture, say our own, attempts to apply its own
definitions of ‘art’ on the art of other times and places, then theorists of
this persuasion would want to examine the group’s motivations as well as the
language it uses. They might agree that
there are objects which seem to be accorded significance across time and
cultures but would argue that this can be accounted for in terms of the shared
interests of cultural groups.
From this conclusion
it is just a small step to reasoning that the proper purpose of visual studies
should not be defined by the narrow interests of art history. In recent years, the term ”visual culture”
has come to replace “art history” in the vocabulary of many academics. Visual culture can be regarded as embracing
all forms of the visual, without attempting to separate out a privileged
category of objects and images.
Roger Fry (1909): An
Essay in Aesthetics from his Vision
and Design (1922), London
V.R.Ramachandran and William Hirstein The
Science of Art; A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience from
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6,
1999, pp.15-51
Eric Fernie, Art
History and its Methods. Read the excerpts in Fernie by Vasari, Winckelmann, Morris, Fry, Hauser, Clark and Oguibe and try to
establish under what definition of ‘art’ they are writing. Also see
Preziosi, The Art of Art History, readings by Warburg,
Solomon and Mitchell. See also Edwards, S. (1999), Art and its Histories, O.U.P.,
Introduction’ (pp.1-15) and Cheetham, M. (1998), The Subjects of Art History, C.U.P.,
chapter 1, Kant and the Borders of Art
History.
How
do we determine the relative importance or significance of objects and images?
Is
‘significance’ decided by ‘aesthetic’ value and, if this is a consideration,
how are such judgments made?
Can
we determine value in terms of ‘content’ or ‘meaning’?
What
is the role of originality in determining value?
Does
each individual, group or culture determine its own scale of values for its own
purposes or are can we talk in any useful way about universal values?
What
part does the artist, maker, patron, spectator, exhibitor and critic play in
determining significance?
The previous week’s
topic, devoted to the problem of the definition of a category which we might
call ‘art’, raised the question of evaluation.
If we accept, using either historical or essentialist arguments, that
there is a category of objects which demand particular attention by virtue of
their difference from other objects, then some theorists would argue that it is
difficult to resist the proposition that within this privileged category, some
objects deserve more attention than others.
The ‘art’ world is continually making judgments about the significance
of the objects which it regards as special to it. The curators of museums, the publishers of art books, the
designers of university degree courses, the buyers and sellers of art, all make
evaluative decisions about the relative significance of visual objects and
images.
A radical way of
dealing with this problem, is to argue that no image, of itself, is any more or
less significant than any other. What
makes an image significant is the attention we pay to it and this attention
will be guided by the line of inquiry we happen to be pursuing. For instance, if we are investigating the
visual culture of the peasant, the design of the scythe and sickle will be
important; if we are researching the history of the cartoon, the illustrations
from Mad magazine will become significant; if we are interested in the history
of the altarpiece, then Leonardo’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’ will be essential. Who is to say that one line of research is
of greater value than the other? The
most consistent advocates of relativism would deny that there can be a
verifiable hierarchy of significance applied to objects and images. Can there be any objective criteria for
measuring the quality of a Rembrandt etching against a common piece of
graffiti?
Over time, most
critics and historians have taken another view. Although it would be difficult to find a writer who was not
acutely aware of the precariousness of taste, it would be difficult to find a
critic considered in this module who did not believe in the need for
distinctions which implied a discrimination of significance or value. Curators, dealers, scholars, teachers and
publishers may argue about the relative merits of artworks but have often
operated under the assumption that it is possible to discern merit and
construct canons. The contemporary
fashion for denying the possibility of establishing agreement about what a
canon might be has not quite let critics and scholars off the hook of defining
their own canon, however contingent and provisional that might be.
The arguments which
have been devised to evaluate objects and images broadly follow the lines of
those used to argue about definitions of ‘art’. Thus, it is possible to approach the problem as a social
historian or cultural anthropologist who believes that judgments about
significance, quality and value are made within a frameworks of belief
developed within particular societies to serve their own, often hidden, ends. It is the investigator’s job to discover the
sociological basis of these judgments and to discover in whose interests the
values are operating and for what reasons (one way to do this is to examine the
language in which the evaluations are expressed.).
On the other hand, it
is also possible to take the view, which we examined in week one, that there
are certain intrinsic qualities, which are apparent to a higher degree in some
objects or images than others.
Both these approaches
will often refer to the very same criteria we saw being applied in the ‘what is
art’ debate. Here are some of the
grounds that have been used to support judgments about the significance, or
quality, of an art object:
the skill with which
it has been made, the value of the materials which it contains, the form it
takes, its resemblance to the world of appearances, the uses to which it was
put, its authenticity, the authority of its makers and patrons, the meanings it
encodes, the emotion it is capable of generating, its moral seriousness and
didactic power, its connection to tradition, its originality, its
subversiveness.
Clement Greenberg: A
selection of reviews from (1989) The Collected Essays and
Criticism vol 1, Chicago
Clive Bell An Aesthetic Hypothesis from
his (1914) Art, London
All of the
contributors to Fernie operate
theories of evaluation. We shall look
particularly at Giorgio Vasari:
(1), Karel van Mander (2), J J
Winckelmann(4), Goethe (5), William Morris (7), Giovanni Morelli (8), Roger Fry
(12), William Fagg (20). In Preziosi, you might look at Riegl,
Solomon, Duncan.
See
also Clive Bell (1914), Aesthetic
Hypothesis’, in Neill, A. and Ridley, A.
(1995), The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, New
York, (9). A very lucid introduction to the issues is provided by Sheppard, A. (1989), Aesthetics,
Oxford, ch. 5, Art, beauty and aesthetic
appreciation 6, Criticism,
interpretation and evaluation and 9, Art
and morals. We will also need to
consider excerpts from Greenberg, C.
(1988), Collected Essays and Criticism (2 vols), New York, and esp. his
essay Modernist Painting’(see Neill and Ridley). You might look at Fry, R. (1922), Vision and Design,
London; Bell, C. (1914), A rt. London, Greenberg, C. (1976), Art and Culture, New York; Clark, K. (1974), What is a Masterpiece?, London, Ackerman, J., On Judging
Aesthetic Absolutes, Critical Inquiry, Spring 1979; Gombrich, E.H., “They
were all Human Beings - So much is plain.” Reflections on Cultural Relativism in the Humanities’, Critical
Inquiry, Summer 1987; Gombrich,
E.H., Art History and Social Science,
(see articles collection P709), in Ideals and Idols: essays in values and
history in art, London, 1971; see also his essay in the same volume; The Tradition of General Knowledge
Week 3 Categories
This week’s principal
questions:
What
are the major visual categories used to group objects and images?
What
forms of temporal classification have been used? What value should we place upon the idea of the ‘period’ ,‘age’
or ‘movement’?
How
has visual culture been subdivided on geographical grounds and what role has
nationalism and colonialism played in such categorisation?
What
arguments can be used to support stylistic classifications of visual data,
based upon morphological analysis?
Is
it useful to classify according to function or subject or meaning?
This week, we shall
be considering the ways in which the objects and images have been categorised
by historians, theorists and curators. This is a large subject and one which
was introduced to many students in the level B modules Framing Modernism and Introduction
to Art History: the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Since the origin of
art history as an academic discipline in the 19th century, its practitioners
have regarded classification as one of their primary responsibilities. How to divide the vast array of visual
objects and images so that they not only become more manageable and amenable to
study but also make more apparent their fundamental structures and the reasons
for their genesis and change. Art
history, for much of its history, harnessed to the great museums of the west,
has attempted to operate in a way which is comparable to the organising
ambitions of the natural sciences.
The most obvious way
in which this organising has taken place is by arranging objects and images in
chronological order, attempting to find groupings in ‘periods’ or ‘ages’ which
relate to political and social formations or, more ambitiously, ways of
thinking (‘mentalities’). This project
has persuaded its practitioners to try to find relationships and connections
between ‘periods’. Alongside this
approach has been the attempt to associate art with the places within which it
was made and seen, typically in terms of the city, the region, the linguistic
or racial grouping, the state and the continent. Often such endeavours have been directed by nationalistic and,
sometimes, racist motivations.
(The terminology here
is highly contentious and very current.
The new Government QAA guidelines (Benchmarks) for art history degrees
require that students should study in depth two “periods” and two
“regions”. We might be entitled to ask
the authors of the Benchmarks: what they mean by “period” and “region”!).
One approach to
categorisation, which has had a pervasive influence on art thinking, is that of
morphology, from which comes the term ‘style’.
Is ‘style’ a purely visual quality and, if so, what are its identifiers
and how are they to be recognised in objects which belong to the same
class? Contemporary writers will often
go to great lengths to avoid using the term ‘style’ though they still
habitually look for the common denominators of form which groups of objects can
be said to share. Is it possible for stylistic
characteristics to be codified and applied to all visual formations?
What relationship can
be said to exist between styles and the cultures which produce them? Is there, as Hegel proposed, a common spirit
which somehow pervades all the cultural forms, including all things visual, inevitably
and thoroughly. Can we recognise the
period style of, say the 1490s or the 1960s in everything from the design of a
shoe or bottle to the grandest of architectural projects? Do all objects and images, whatever their
purpose or significance, made at certain times or in particular places, take on
the features of a series of related styles, perhaps only recognisable to those
who come after?
Do styles develop or
mutate and, if so, in what ways do they change and for what reasons? Wolfflin considered these questions to be
the central problem of the history of art and offered one answer, that art is
semi-autonomous of culture and is partly self-sustaining, moving inevitably
from the classic to the baroque manner and back again. These views, Hegelian in grandeur and
wave-like in pattern, were conceived as a totalising explanation of history
with a predictive potential which has beguiled many followers of Wolfflin.
Marxists of various
persuasions continued to maintain the belief that it was not just possible but
absolutely necessary to discover the laws which explained the changing history
of style. For the most part, though, they sought material explanations, which
doubted the possibility of autonomous mutation.
Today, the fashion
amongst many academics is for a form of extreme scepticism, which denies the
possibility of constructing large-scale explanatory histories of art. The
interest in establishing grand stylistic categories has waned and the tendency
is towards fragmentary, tentative and provisional narratives.
E.H.Gombrich, The
Tradition of General Knowledge, from his (1979) Ideals and Idols, Oxford
Steve Edwards, Introduction,
from Edwards, S. (1999), Art
and Its Histories, Open University
In preparation for
the seminar, examine the contents page of Gombrich,
E.H. (1984), The Story of Art,
London (or, alternatively, any other of the survey books, for instance, those
by Hartt, Janson, or Honour and Fleming) looking at the ways in which history
is subdivided. What forms of
periodisation and geographical identification does he use and how does he apply
stylistic ideas to them? In Preziosi, look at the essays, both
entitled ‘Style’, by Schapiro and Gombrich. Read the excerpt from
Wolfflin’s Principles of Art History
in Fernie (10). Another version appears in Preziosi, together with an excerpt from
Hegel.
Look also at the excellent essay in Preziosi by David Summers, Form, Nineteenth Century Metaphysics, and
the Problem of Art Historical Description.
Fernie has a number of relevant
readings; see Giorgio Vasari (1), Alois Riegl (9), Giovanni Morelli (8), Roger
Fry (12), E H Gombrich (19). Also, Brown, M., The Classic is the Baroque: On the Principle
of Wolfflin’s Art History, Critical
Inquiry, Dec 1982. The library
holds copies of the Dover edition, Wolfflin,
H. (1915), The Principles of Art History,
New York, which you should read at some time during the module. Look at Podro,
M. (1985), The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven, ch. 11, ‘Hegel’, V1, Wolfflin and Classic Art’ and V11, The Principles and its
Problems. Also, Moxey, K. Art History’s Hegelian Unconscious in Cheetham,M., Holly,
M.A.,Moxey, K.(1998) The Subjects of Art
History, Chicago. For museums and
the ordering of art history, see Duncan,
C. (1995) Civilising Rituals, London and Baker,
E. ed. Contemporary cultures of
display, OU.
Week 4 Imitation,
expression and convention
This week’s principal
questions:
What
is the nature and status of ‘imitation’?
Is
the artist ever able to ‘express’ individual feelings or states of mind?
What
part do artists play in the creation of the artwork?
Is
what the artist does already predetermined by the conventions of the genre
within which the artist operates?
One
of the central concerns of western theorists, from Plato to Gombrich, has been
the resemblance of the image to the reality which it represents. This week we shall be considering the
significance of theories of mimesis, or imitation and illusion, exploring the
paradox that the more apparently truthful an image is of the thing which it
represents, the more deceptive it must be.
To what extent is realism attainable in the visual arts and what are the
constraints upon it? Readings from
Nelson Goodman, Norman Bryson and E.H.Gombrich will help us explore the role of
convention and schema in the construction of the seemingly realist work.
Since the 15th
century, the classical view, that the most significant art is the result of
exceptional moments of inspiration by the most gifted of individuals, has
mutated and developed. The Romantic
movement idealised the transcendent and visionary genius capable of
illuminating the minds of others as a result of spasms of spontaneous
creativity. Expressionism’s cult of the
tormented individual, and Surrealism’s revelation of the artist’s subconscious
world, could be said to be 20th century manifestations of related thinking.
In the later 20th
century, such ideas have come under concerted attack, from historical
materialists and from structuralists and post-structuralists.
One of the most
complex thinkers on the problems of creativity and subjectivity is
E.H.Gombrich. In his devotion to a
canon of masterpieces (The Story of Art),
he appears to subscribe to the belief that great art is the most admirable
achievement of human culture and that it is the work of the most gifted
individuals. However, he has also
developed the view that the history of the visual arts is a history of the
transmission and transformation of images.
Artists are not free agents: they can only express themselves by using
and modifying given visual images which inevitably shape what they create.
He argues that we
must understand the ‘schema’ of art, those visual configurations which evolve
over long periods of time, giving shape to ideas. For Gombrich, such schema form a complex visual language, passed
down from age to age, constantly in a state of modification and adjustment. He does not try to minimise the influence of
social and cultural changes on the appearances of the schema but still insists
that these forces act on a pre-existing visual matrix which possesses
formidable powers of survival. The
intelligent observer watches the ways in which artists redesign the schema and
arrange them in new patterns in response not only to changing ideas about the
nature of the world but to the acquisition of new skills and techniques. This
is a view of art which, though very unlike Wolfflin’s in most regards, also
looks to the internal history of art for the reasons why art has a
history. It is a view which has enabled
Gombrich to take a highly sceptical approach to much to 20th century art,
particularly the work of artists who have claimed that their creativity has
sprung from their ‘feelings’.
The American
philosopher, Nelson Goodman, has occupied an extreme position on this question
of the ways in which visual representations are determined by the ‘languages’
in which they are expressed..
Nelson Goodman, Reality Remade from his (1976) Languages of Art, Indianapolis
Norman Bryson, The
Natural Attitude, from his (1983) Vision and Painting, London
The key book for our
study is Gombrich, E.H. (1961) Art
and Illusion, London. Read also
Fernie: E H Gombrich (19). Return to Gombrich, E.H. The Story of Art
and try to find evidence there for his application of his ideas about stylistic
change to a general history of art. In preparation for the seminar, you
should have read or re-read the following texts form Fernie, asking yourself
what view did the author take about stylistic change: Giorgio Vasari (1), Alois Riegl (9), Heinrich Wolfflin (10), Paul
Frankl (11), Henri Focillon (13), Alfred H Barr (14), Arnold Hauser (17). In Preziosi,
read the fine essay by David Summers,
which examines the thinking of Gombrich, as well as the two passages on Style
by Schapiro and Gombrich himself.
Consult any of Gombrich’s collections of essays held
in the library: Ideals and Idol, London, 1979, (esp, The Tradition of General Knowledge pp 9-23), Symbolic Images, London, 1985; Sense
of Order, London, 1981, Reflections on the History of Art,
London, 1988. See especially his essay
on Hegel: The Father of Art History
in Tributes, London, 1984, pp 51-69. Carrier, D. (1991), The Principles of Art History Writing,
Pennsylvania, discusses Gombrich’s views (amongst many other things). A demanding essay is Mitchell, W.J.T. (1983), Nature and Convention; Gombrich’s Illusions,
in Iconology,
Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago. See also
Podro, M. (1983) Critical
Historians of Art, London, for a history of German Hegelianism and M
Iverson: Alois Riegl, London, 1993 (especially chapter I on Kunstwollen). A valuable collection of essays on Gombrich
appears in Woodfield, R. ed. (1995),
Gombrich
on Art and Psychology,
Manchester; see esp. Introduction;
mapping the ground and B R Tilghman: A
conceptual dimension of art history(6).
Principal questions
for the week:
Is
there a useful distinction to be made between ‘cultural’ and ‘social’
histories?
How
persuasive is the view that art is a form of ‘social production’, determined in
every respect by the society within which it is ‘produced’ and ‘consumed’?
How
do social and cultural historians define ‘art’ and construct its histories?
What
methods of interpretation do social historians employ and with what results?
Are
social historians necessarily ‘relativists’ and can they develop evaluative
criteria?
In week 4, we began
to consider the answers which social historians of art have offered to the
question of why art changes. We have
seen that social historians believe that the primary explanation for why art changes
is because society changes, though some social historians, conceding that art’s
behaviour is not always directly co-ordinated with major social change, will
grant art what is sometimes called a ‘relative autonomy’.
The social historians
are related to, and in some ways preceded by, the early cultural historians and
the distinction between the two sometimes appears to be not so great. Winckelman and Burckhardt stand out as
leading cultural historians, writing in the Hegelian tradition, and therefore
concerned to relate art to a context of philosophy, religion, law and
literature - the leading ideas or spirit of the age.
One of the key
problems in this approach is what counts as context? Social historians will be particularly concerned with the material
culture and will attempt to relate imagery to economic, social and political
history as well as to the more traditional cultural history. A key notion is that of ‘ideology’,
particularly as it has been defined by Althusser, the controlling, though often unacknowledged, patterns of belief
used to justify the arrangements of power in any society. ‘Ideology’ in this view is usually deceptive
and is to be found in all forms of visual representation. It is the social historian’s mission to
reveal to us its true character.
The tendency of such
an approach in recent years has been towards close synchronic study, analysing
a particular period in great detail, rather than a diachronic history,
explaining changes over time. This is
odd, in some ways, as Marxism was originally Hegelian and historicist, seeking
the grander patterns of history. At the
same time, modern social historians have themselves developed new forms of
cultural history which, abandoning narrower forms of art history, consider
visual culture in its widest manifestations.
Often, their methods adopt the discourse analysis of Michel Foucault,
which related exercise of power to the formations of discourses of knowledge.
We shall have to
establish the assumptions which these thinkers act upon and test their validity
and establish their limitations. Social
historians have had some difficulty developing convincing theories of value and
have had problems adapting psychoanalytic theory. Their origins in positivist materialism has put them at odds with
the linguistic structuralists and post-strucutralists.
The
centrepiece of this week is the work of T J Clark, who has been the leading
exponent of advanced social history in the last quarter of the 2Oth century and
a fierce opponent of formalism and essentialism. He, and his followers, can be credited with attempting to apply
social history to both synchronic and diachronic modes of historical
narrative. It often appears that this
school of thought has come to constitute one of the contemporary orthodoxies in
English speaking countries. How has
social history attained this degree of prominence?
Linda Seidel Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini
Portrait: Business as Usual?, Critical Inquiry, vol 16, 1989, pp 55-81,
T.J.Clark Introduction from
his (1985) The Painter of Modern Life, London
In preparation for
this week, you should read in Fernie
the following extracts: Jacob Burckhardt
(6), Arnold Hauser (17), E H Gombrich
(19), T J Clark (21), Michael Baldwin et al (23) as well as T J
Clark: Preliminaries to a Posssible
Treatment of ‘Olympia’, reprinted in Frascina,
F. and Harris, J. (1992), Art in Modern Culture, OU. (5).
Clark, T.J. (1973), Image
of the People, London; Clark,
T.J. (1973), The Absolute Bourgeois, London; Berger, J. (1972), Ways of Seeing, London; Barrell, J. (1979), The Dark Side of the
Landscape, London; Baxandall, M. (1972), Painting
and Experience in 15th century Italy,
Oxford, (especially part 1). For a
discussion of ‘ideology’, see also Eagleton,
T. (1983), Literary Theory: An Introduction, pp 10-15 (reprinted in Walder, D. ed. (1987), Literature in the Modern World, London, chapter 3). It is also worth looking at the work of
authors such as Gary Schwarz (see
his books on Rembrandt, 1985, and Saenredam, 1990, to see how a social
historian will attempt to reconstruct a milieu and deconstruct an artist’s
reputation). A populist attempt at a
similar approach is Buck, L. and Dodd,
P. (1991), Relative Values, London.
A sociological view is offered by Wolff,
J. (1988), The Social Production of Art, London. Look also at the writings of Michael
Baxandall, especially (1972) Painting and Experience in 15th
Century Italy, London and The Limewood Sculptors of Germany, London.
A very influential essay on the role of institutions in the formulation of the
art world is George Dickie: The New Institutional Theory of Art (17) in Neill
and Ridley (op cit).
Week 6 Visits’
week
There will be no
classes this week.
You should use the
days of the week when you are not making a visit as reading days. No doubt there will be plenty of catching up
to do, especially with the further reading (and there’s no harm in reading
ahead, either). You should also now be
choosing the book (or video) you are going to review for assignment 2 (see ‘Assessment’).
In week 12 you will be called on to make a 10-minute presentation on
your book/video.
Week 7 Interpreting
images – iconology and intention
Do
images mean anything or is it only words which have meanings?
If
they do have meanings, how do we go about elucidating them?
How
can we judge the validity of conflicting interpretations?
Who
determines meaning and with what authority?
We might question
whether it makes sense to talk about images meaning something. Images are visual configurations; what is
essential to them is non-linguistic.
Perhaps it is what we say about images which means something. A more radical view, offered by formalist
critics such as Fry and Greenberg, is that, even if an image can be said to have
meanings, whatever meaning a image might have is irrelevant to our appreciation
of it; it is a secondary form of knowledge.
Susan Sontag takes an even more uncompromising view: the search for
meaning prevents an authentic response.
Erwin Panofsky belonged
to a different tradition, one which derives from biblical exegesis. He believed that high art images (he didn’t
consider that any others were worth serious consideration) contain complex
meanings which are encoded in the artist’s representation. By consulting the rich archive of the
culture which gave rise to the image, and by applying a sort of informed
intuition, a highly attuned investigator can decipher the original code and
recover the meaning. Panofsky’s
approach was especially influential in the field of Medieval and Renaissance
studies, where his research into the meaning of images involved the development
of an incomparable erudition in the words and the images of these cultures.
He described the two
related approaches that he developed to uncover meaning as ‘iconography’ and
‘iconology’. His approach, with its
close attention to the sign and what it signifies, is closely related to the
semiotics of Pierce and Saussure.
Panofsky believed
that attempts at the interpretation of images, though beset by the most
intellectually taxing of problems, are not only possible but absolutely
necessary. He regarded the elucidation
of the meanings of those images which he regarded as lying at the heart of
western culture as a central responsibility of the humanities. His was a mission not only to recover the
revered values of former cultures but to do so using methods which were
scrupulously designed to establish a form of truthfulness in interpretation.
Michael Baxandall is
a social and cultural historian who, like T J Clark, has devoted much of his
attention to the recreation of a particular visual culture, such as that of
15th century Florence, in order to discover its peculiar way of seeing , the
so-called ‘period eye’. As with many
social historians, for Baxandall, an essential aspect of his attempt to
reconstruct the period eye is the interpretation of images but, unlike many
contemporary social historians, Baxandall has attempted to retain something of
the method of Panofsky. In attempting
to reconstruct the philosophy and theology of a culture, Baxandall, like
Panofsky, focuses on the artist’s mind.
He brings the controversy surrounding the notion of artistic intention
up-to-date and attempts to formulate the rules of good interpretative practice. It might be added that establishing the
artist’s intention is not only a way of trying to secure the validity of an
interpretation of an image but also of helping to explain how the image came to
be made.
Much of the debate
around artistic intention has been carried on by English literary critics, in
Britain and in the United States, and we will have to assess the relevance of
their thinking for visual studies. For
many modern commentators, the pursuit of the artist’s intention is an exercise
in futility; it cannot be recovered.
The artist is dead. However, the
biography, the most enduring of art historical narrative forms, requires the
writer to gain access at some level to the thought processes of the
artist. What persuades the advocates of
this approach, Baxandall amongst them, that this is a necessary form of art
historical investigation?
Erwin Panofsky Jan
van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, originally published in the Burlington Magazine, reprinted in
Gilbert, C. ed. (1970), Renaissance Art
Erwin Panofsky (1955) Melancholia
from his Durer, pp. 156-163, 171, Princeton
Michael Baxandall (1983) Patterns of Intention, pp.120-135, Yale
You should read the
following excerpts from Fernie: Erwin Panofsky (15); Susan Sontag (18); Michael
Baldwin et al (23), Svetlana Alpers (24), Hans Belting (25). In Preziosi,
you should look at the essay on Poussin by Panofsky and the essay by Damisch.
New York; re-read L Seidel: Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait: Business
as Usual? You might also dip
into one of the following: Panofsky, E. (1924), Perspective
as Symbolic Form; Panofsky, E. (1939), Studies
in Iconology, Oxford; Wind, E. (1958), Pagan
Mysteries of the Renaissance, London, 1958; Wind, E. (1964), The Eloquence
of Symbols, London; Wittkower, R. (1972), Allegory
and the Migration of Symbols,
London; Cassidy, B. ed. (1993),
Iconography at the Crossroads, Princeton, esp. Introduction:
Iconography, Texts and Audiences. See the fine essay by Hirsch, E.D., The Validity of Interpretation, reprinted in Sim, S. ed. (1992), Art, Context and Value, O.U.; and Sheppard A. (1987), Aesthetics, Oxford, ch.
7, Intention and Expectations. Refer
also to the following essays in Neal, A.
and Ridley, A. ed. (1995), The Philosophy of Art; Readings Ancient and
Modern, New York, W Wimsatt and M Beardsley: The Intentional Fallacy (27), Roland
Barthes: The Death of the Author
(28), E D Hirsch: In Defense of the Author (29). See also Terry Eagleton’s attack on the search
for artistic intention in (1981), Literary Theory, London, chapter 2,
pp 67-71.
Week 8 Interpreting
images – semiotics, structuralism and post-structuralism
What use to
the study of visual culture are the theories associated with structuralism and
post-structuralism?
In
what ways is our understanding of art governed by the need to express our views
in verbal language?
What
truth is there to the claim that we can respond to art in a non-verbal way
(which is a claim central to some forms of modernist and expressionist
criticism)?
How
useful is it to draw analogies between visual forms and verbal language?
The terms of the
debate around these issues have been established by two influential modern
theories, structuralism and post-structuralism, both essentially linguistic
theories. As the terms suggest, these
two beliefs are closely related yet the second sets about undermining the
first. They are related by the common
view that verbal language is an artificial construction which has no necessary
connection with the world it purports to describe and cannot be relied upon to
give a realistic account of the world.
They are opposed in their views about the arrangement of language;
structuralism sees it as governed by order based upon the similarities and
differences between the words themselves; post-structuralism sees language as
incapable of sustaining order as its words can never maintain a constant
meaning; they are forever shifting and sliding.
Your reading and
discussion this week will require you to examine the ways in which these
systems of belief have influenced the ways in which we think about visual
culture. Semiotics (or semiology)
attempts to provide a method of visual analysis which takes the principles of
its theory from the linguistic philosophies of Ferdinand Saussure and
realist-empiricist C.S. Peirce. The
hope of semiotics was to replace iconology with a more scientific system which
could be extended far beyond the limits of traditional art history and be
applied to all visual artefacts, particularly those of the contemporary world.
Those art theorists
and historians who have attempted to use post-structuralist ideas (Norman
Bryson would be a good example) have developed styles of thinking and writing
which deliberately depart from the traditions of clarity, order and empiricism
of the older school. It is easy to be
impatient with this manner but in the very obscurities and tortuous
convolutions of some of this writing lies the post-structuralist conviction
that language is forever subverting its own meanings.
The question you will
need to keep before you is what bearing these essentially linguistic theories
can have on our understanding of art.
It is easy to grant that structuralism and post-structuralism might
offer penetrating insights into the ways in which art history and criticism
uses verbal language. The harder case
is whether visual forms operate like a written language, with the visual
equivalents of an alphabet, vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, syntax, similes
and metaphors. In other words, is it accurate
to talk, as we increasingly do, of a ‘visual language’ as if it were parallel
in some ways to a verbal language and, if this parallelism is justifiable, can
we apply the methods of structuralism and post-structuralism directly to the
visual forms of art?
Mieke Bal, Seeing
Signs: The Use of Semiotics for the Understanding of Visual Art, from
Cheetham, M., Holly, M.A., Moxey, K. (1998), The Subjects of Art History, CUP
Roland Barthes, Rhetoric
of the Image and Myth Today, from Evans,
J. & Hall, S. (1999), Visual Culture,
the Reader, London
Read Fernie’s Glossary of Concepts for entries on ‘post-modernism’,
‘post-structuralism’ and ‘semiotics’.
Again, a bright way of entering this territory as by way of T Eagleton (1983), Literary Theory, London,
ch 3: ’Structuralism and Post-Structuralism’ and ch 4:’Post-Structuralism’.
See what you can make
of Kemal, S. and Gaskell, I. (1991), The
Language of Art History, Cambridge, esp. ch. 1. Another difficult read is Mitchell, WJT (1994), Picture Theory, Chicago, but try to tackle at least ch 1, The Pictorial Term. Also
Bryson, N. (1981), Word
and Image, London, 1981, esp. ch 1, Discourse,
Figure or his (1991) ed., Visual Theory: Practice and Interpretation,
London and Shapiro, M., On Some Problems
in the Semiotics of Visual Art in Innis,
R. ed.: Semiotics: an Introductory
Anthology. London, 1981; and Krauss,
R., In the name of Modern Culture, Hebdige,
D., Post-Modernism and the Politics
of Style’in Frascina, F. and Harris,
J. (1992), Art in Modern Culture, OU.
A helpful survey of semiotic thinking is Alex
Potts, Sign, in Nelson, R.,
Shiff, R. (1996) Critical Terms for Art
History, Chicago. Bryson, N., Bal, M. offered an
influential defence of the use of semiotics in Semiotics and Art History: A Discussion of Context and Senders in Preziosi pp.242-256. For discourse theory and Michel Foucault (who stands a little
outside some of these debates), see the excellent Rose, G. (2001) Visual Methodologies, London, chapters 6
and 7.
Week 9
Spectators and reception
What
is the role of the spectator?
What
does the spectator need to know?
Should
the spectator abide by certain rules when looking at the artwork?
What
value should we place on theories of the gaze, the look and the glance?
What
place should there be for feeling and emotion?
The importance of the
spectator’s responses has been a constant theme of western art criticism. All commentators on art, even those who have
appealed to unchanging values like Bellori or those who have sought to
construct a science of criticism such as Wolfflin, have recognised the role of
the spectator and the spectator’s judgment. The conviction in the importance of
the beholder is particularly important for the aesthetics of both Kant and Hegel
and for the formalists. Much modernist
art criticism has been based upon the primacy of the response of the
viewer. We have seen how Fry, Bell and
Greenberg sought to lay the responsibility for the evaluation of an image upon
the individual observer, recommending a response unencumbered by the
requirements of interpretation. For
these critics, the most valuable responses were authentic, subjective and even
intuitive though founded in long experience and reasoned appreciation. Susan Sontag passionately supported the
primacy of instinctive emotional response, unencumbered, so far as it is
possible, by learning or convention.
As Fernie points out,
so-called ‘reception theory’ has gained a renewed significance in the past
fifty years, as followers of German hermeneutical philosophy, such as
Merleau-Ponty, and French post-structuralism, such as Derrida, have devoted
some of their attention to the examination of the role of the spectator. Some of these thinkers, despairing of the
projects to establish valid accounts of the origins of the work of art, or of
the intentions of the artist, or of the original meanings of the image, have
turned to the contemporary spectator, whose responses can at least be examined
immediately if not reliably. Scepticism
about the possibility of capturing the original character of the work of art is
a characteristic position of post-structuralists, who are unconvinced by the
rhetoric of all forms of historical evidence.
Some have resigned themselves to examining their own responses to the
image, others to developing highly personal word-plays which make no attempt to
analyse the object.
In recent years,
theories of looking have been elaborated around the notion of the ‘gaze’, which
has had a particular impact upon film studies, following on from the writings
of Laura Mulvey.
Social historians
have also concentrated upon the spectator, especially the original spectator,
but for quite other reasons. Retaining
a degree of faith in the ability of history to construct a plausible account of
the past, social historians have interested themselves in the experiences of
the original spectators, as literal eye-witnesses. Much modern writing on art involves the often fraught enterprise
of recreating the original conditions of seeing and the history of reception.
Feminist theorists
and critics have used reception theory to discuss the notion of forms of vision
which are peculiar to each gender. This
question of whether there are characteristics of perception which are typical
of women and of men is perhaps the most contentious issue debated by
feminists.
Photocopies
Michel Foucault, Las Meninas , from his (1986) The Order
of Things, London.
Jacques Derrida Passe-Partout from his (1987) The Truth in Painting, Chicago
Brendan Prenderville, Merleau-Ponty,
Realism and Painting: psychophysical space and the space of exchange, Art
History, vol.22, no 3, Sept 1999.
The reading for the
week begins with Fernie: Giovanni
Morelli (8); Alois Riegl (9); Roger Fry (12); Erwin Panofsky (15); Susan
Sontag(18); Svetlana Alpers (24). Refer
also to the patchy Wollheim, R.
(1987), Painting as an Art, London, esp. to chapter 11 What the spectator sees and chapter 111 The spectator in the picture.
Alpers, S. (1983), Interpretation
without Representation, or the Viewing of ‘Las Meninas, in Representations
1, 1983, pp. 31-42. A lively
introduction to reception theory is to be found in Eagleton, T. (1983), Literary Theory: an Introduction, London, chapter 2. A difficult but important book, mentioned by
Fernie, is Fried, M. (1980), Absorption
and Theatricality, Chicago.
Refer also to Belting, H. (1990), The
Image and its Public in the Middle Ages. Freedberg, D. (1991), The Power of Images, Chicago, is an
ambitious but flawed attempt to investigate the impact of images upon the
spectator. For the increasing influence
of ideas about the nature of looking, see particularly Olin, M. The Gaze, in
Nelson, R., Shiff, R. (1996) Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago, pp. 208-219. For cinema, see esp. Mulvey, L. (1988), Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, London. For the views of the Situationists, see Debord, G. (1983), The Society of the Spectacle, Chicago. See also Norman Bryson, The
Gaze in the expanded field in his (1988) Vision and Painting: the logic of
the gaze, CUP.
Week 10 Cultural
difference and anthropology
Principal questions
for the week:
Are
western notions of ‘art’ applicable to the visual cultures of other societies?
In
what ways can someone from one culture understand the objects of another
culture?
What
role has anthropology played in the study of non-Western artefacts?
How
does pre-modern Chinese art theory compare with that of western thinking?
How
should a Westerner approach the visual culture of Islam?
Writers such as
Edward Said and Olu Oguibe have been concerned about the ways in which a
Western art history has imposed its own understanding of the visual cultures of
other societies.. Art history emerges
from an alliance of the Christian and the Judaic traditions of scholarship,
which has helped to give shape and definition to the concept of ‘the
West’. It can be argued that, when this
art history deals with non-Western art, its inherently rascist tendency is to
behave imperialistically, imposing its definitions of art and its values on
other cultures. The West has spent
centuries plundering the art of other people, expropriating their most precious
objects in order to fill the museums and auction houses of Europe and
America. Even when modern artists such
as Picasso and Kirchner draw on non-European art they do so in a way which
appropriates forms without showing any recognition of their original
meanings. For Westerners, the art of
Africa and Asia is the Other, belonging to a world which is outside, remote,
beyond the margins, beyond comprehension.
It is strange and different, it does not belong.
These views about art
and difference are given urgency by the tensions created by the increasing
globalisation of western culture, particularly as it as impacted on Islamic
societies.. First there is the question
of how non-Western art is to be displayed, viewed, evaluated and interpreted in
a Western context, an issue partly dealt with by William Fagg (see Fernie). Then there is the problem of how Western art
is to be understood in non-Western cultures.
Thirdly, there is the question of how cultures assimilate and utilise
the art of other cultures - is this ultimately a matter of power, in the sense
both of its imposition and of its subversion?
Further, how
applicable are western concepts of ‘art’ when applied to other visual
cultures. What language should be
adopted? What form of critical
appreciation or contextual understanding, if any, is appropriate? What visual theories obtain in other
cultures?
Photocopies
Raymond Firth (1992) Art and Anthropology, from
Coote, J. & Shelton, A. (1992) Anthropology,
Art and Aesthetics, OUP
Bernard Faure (1998) The
Buddhist Icon and the Modern Gaze, Critical Inquiry, Spring 1998
There are three key
texts in Fernie, those by Baldwin,
Harrison and Ramsden (23), Fagg (20) and Oguibe (27). In Preziosi, look at Timothy Mitchell’s piece on Orientalism
and the Exhibtionary Order pp.455-472 and
Aby Warburg’s Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians
of North America pp.177-207.
See Frascina, F. ed. (1992), Art
in Modern Culture, O.U., section 14, Edward Said, Orientalism; Coote, J. (1992), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics,
OUP, especially the introduction and chapter 1. See also Hiller, S. ed. (1991), The Myth of Primitivism,
London. Also Davies, S. Non-Western Art and
Art’s Definition in Carroll, N. ed. (2000) Theories of Art Today, Wisconsin. For the influence of western formalist
aesthetics on museum display, see Court,
E. Africa on display – exhibiting art
by Africans in Baker, E. ed. (1999), Contemporary cultures of display, OU.
For orientalism, see Said, E.W. (1978)
Orientalism , Yale and (1993) Culture and Imperialism, Yale. For a response to the ideas of Edward Said
on orientalism, see Mackenzie, J.M.
(1995) Orientalism: history, theory and the arts, Manchester. Use the
uneven Root, D. (1996), Cannibal
Culture; Art, Appropriation and the
Commodification of Difference, New York with caution.
Week 11 Gender
Principal questions
for the week:
How
significant should the question of gender be in the study of, and making of,
art?
To
what extent can differences in the ways in which art is made and seen be
attributed to differences in gender?
Are
artworks indelibly stamped with the signs of the gender of the maker?
Do
we see the world differently as a result of our gender and, if so, are these
different ways of seeing socially determined?
Should
the ambition of the artist be to accentuate or suppress gender difference?
The case for the
significance of gender will be put by feminist writers (though in recent years
so-called ‘masculinist’ and ‘queer’ theorists have appeared). Feminists argue that conventional art
history is patriarchal in a number of ways.
It has been blind to the achievements of women artists and constructed a
male-dominated canon. It has skewed its
priorities towards the types of art which, traditionally, have been reserved
for men and has promoted the values which this art represents. It has devalued the forms of craft in which
women artists have excelled. It has not
acknowledged the ways in which women artists have been systematically excluded
from the structures of art, attributing the failure of women to enter the canon
to gender inferiority. It has neglected
the ways in which art has contributed to the construction of forms of ‘Woman’
and hence her oppression. It has
habitually misinterpreted and misrepresented the imagery of the past in ways
steeped in masculinist prejudice. These
arguments are used by writers such as Pollock to promote new forms of art,
which will no longer be subjugated to patriarchal systems.
In its most ambitious
mode, as in the writings of Griselda Pollock and Patricia Mathews, feminist
analysis is not seen as an additional method to add to the others we have
studied but a world view and a committed politics devoted to the dismantling of
sociocultural hierarchies of distinction and difference that remain central to
the constitution of values and meaning in Western cultures today. Deconstruction and psychoanalytical theory
are methods typically employed, often expressed in a dense post-modern
language.
Recently, feminist
scholars, particularly in the United States, have worried that the growing
divisions amongst them, over essentialism and deconstruction but also over
racial questions, are distracting attention from the true purposes of feminism.
Fernie questions the
methods and the intentions of feminist critics. He asks whether it is
legitimate to conduct a political campaign by scholarly means, what advantage
is to be gained from insisting on approaching visual culture in only one way
and what are the gains and losses of using a language only easily accessible to
a particular group. For some critics, the exclusive tendencies of some feminist
theorists appear hardly more defensible than the old male-dominated ways they
seek to replace. Another objection
might be that feminism has not developed a method of its own but parasitically
uses the methods of others, the psychoanalysts, the structuralists and
post-structuralists and the marxist social historians, all, according to
feminist analysis, masculinist constructs.
Mary Garrard, Judith, from
her (1989) Artemesia Gentileschi,
Griselda Pollock, Differencing;
Feminism’s encounter with the canon, from her
(1999) Differencing the Canon, London
There
are four key texts in Fernie is Pollock (26) but also read Fernie’s
commentary and his entry in the ‘Glossary of Concepts’ for feminism. In Preziosi, see especially Nanette Solomon, The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission and Mary Kelly and Paul Smith, No essential Femininity (370-383)
See also Tickner, L. The Body Politic:
Female Sexuality and Women Artists since 1970, in the journal ‘Art
History’, vol. 1, 1978, pp. 236-251.
For our purposes, Edwards, S. ed.
(1999), Art and its Histories, a Reader, Yale, section 3 Gender and Art’ and section 5, Views of Difference is very useful. For the construction of the canon, see the
Preface to Chadwick, W. (1996), Women, Art and Society, London. For a thorough survey of current thinking,
see also Mathews, P. The
Politics of Feminist Art History in Cheetham,
M. ed. (1998), The Subjects of Art History,
CUP. For feminist views on the
spectator, look at Parker, P. and
Pollock, G. (1981), Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology,
London; and Pollock, G. (1987), Vision
and Difference, London and Garb,
T., Gender and Representation’in Frascina, F. et al (1993), Modernity
and Modernism, French Painting in the
Nineteenth Century, New Haven, chapter 3. On the question of essentialism, refer to Robinson, H. (2001), Feminism-Art-Theory, Oxford, for the
essay by Whitney Chadwick (523-527) and Diana Fuss (527-534).
Week 12
Presentations
There will be no lecture this week. The lecture and seminar times will be given over to student presentations (see Assessment below).
If you are taking the
module for 20 credits (SAD2038), you complete both assignments (including the
presentation).
First assignment: max. 2000 word essay (50%)
Choose two objects,
one which might be described as ‘Western’ and one which might not. When discussing them, which questions would
you give priority to and why?
(n.b.
you are not being asked to analyse your two objects!)
Besides demonstrating
your ability to fulfil the assignment cover-sheet criteria, you will be given
credit for:
·
recognising the complexities of the
issues under consideration
·
giving evidence of substantial reading,
referring particularly to relevant recommended texts in the module booklet
·
showing that you have engaged with the
issues considered in the lectures and seminars
·
demonstrating a mature appreciation of
both the arguments, and any possible objections to these arguments, in the
debate
·
taking a critical approach to the
analysis of any texts which you quote or refer to
·
writing in a lucid and lively way
due by 1 pm, Wednesday
18 December.
Second assignment: 1800 word essay and presentation (50%)
Choose any book
devoted to an individual artist and examine the assumptions of the author(s)
and, if relevant, the publishers.
You are encouraged to
formulate your own questions, although you may find it helpful to consider
some, or all, of the following:
·
why has the author chosen the subject?
·
what system of evaluation or
discrimination is operating in this book?
·
what view of originality and creativity
does the author hold?
·
how does the author construct an
account of the artist’s character?
·
how does the author account for changes
in the artist’s work?
·
what is the author’s notion of
tradition and how is the artist placed in a tradition?
·
how does the author deal with social
and cultural history?
·
what reasons can you find for the
choice and arrangement of the images?
·
how does the author deal with the
question of style?
·
what attitudes govern the way in which
the author analyses the images?
·
what forms of language does the author
employ and what interests do these forms betray?
·
what assumptions does the author make
about the spectator and the reader?
·
can the author be accused of serving
the purposes of the art market?
·
what interest does the author take in
questions of class, race and gender?
·
to which approaches to art history
covered in the module can you relate the author’s views?
·
what about the book
is characteristic of the period in which it was written/published?
In week 12, you will
be expected to give a short
presentation, for which you will be allocated an 8-minute slot (5 minutes
for the presentation and 3 for questions). The presentation will be marked,
using the field criteria, and allocated 10% of the marks given to the first
assignment. You will be given an
assessment feedback form.
In the short presentation you will present to
the class with your preliminary views about the book you have chosen as the
subject of your assignment. You should
offer opinions about some (certainly not all!) of the questions listed in the first
assignment brief. Try not to read from
notes – address the class directly, as if talking to interested friends. Bring
the book along so that it can be passed around. Remember that the aim is
not to summarise the book but to examine the assumptions and the methods of the
author (and, in some cases, the publisher).