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WD_392/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 31.1 x 21.4 | | Size (mm): | 790 x 544 | | Catalog #: | WD_0392 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
The Language of Art History.
From: Art Journal - Date: 6/22/1993 - Author: Bisanz, Rudolf M.
In the first book, an art historian surveys the history of art history, its luminaries, and its intellectual assets over the centuries. He assumes, as a matter of course, that an academic discipline known as "art history" in fact exists, however plagued it may be nowadays with methodological problems. The editors and most of the authors of the second book, arriving on the scene from different quarters--i.e., philosophy--pretend nothing of the sort. Judging by their writings here, they seem to be innocent of both the intellectual evolution of the discipline over the past two and a half centuries and the fabric of its current culture. They accost the problem of art history's "language" as if its historical and theoretical premises did not exist and their own aesthetic intentionalities were all that matters. In short, the two books seem to cancel each other out.
While Kultermann presents the history of a scholarly pursuit and academic discipline, Kemal and Gaskell's anthology grapples with the language of aesthetics or, more often, language as a means of communicating ideas per se. Accordingly, here we have a case of applied semiological hermeneutics: the target is (the philosophers' inchoate notion of) art history. The one advances in orderly fashion through the thicket of historical evolution and the differentiation and refinement of the concepts of a discipline, paying careful attention to its paradigmatic changes over time and the miscellany of woes in its current so-called crisis. The other abrades to the quick what it surmises to be the pretext of academic civility legitimating a field of studies that, as defined by its own keepers, the editors think is unable to withstand the rigors of their philosophical examination. However, they are unmoved by such founding principles of the "language" they are examining as are indicated by Kultermann's survey and the history, theory, methodology, practice, collegiate protocol, and diverse literature of art history. Kultermann presents the evolution of art history as a processing of broadly consistent, if varied, ideas about art over the ages, including its formal, social, cultural, and psychological ramifications. By contrast, Kemal and Gaskell's anthology discusses autarchic, philolinguistic issues, paying scant regard to its titular subject as such. Can both be on the right track?
Without giving away the conclusion, this prolepsis: conceptualizing a kind of art-historical language as a causa sui can have its selfless, abstract intellectual rewards. But have the authors of the anthology also met the proper professional test or practical conditions of a learned discussion by substituting their ostensive context, art history, with their real agenda, art history's annexation to philosophy as critique of language? To put in the vernacular: if it doesn't quack, can it still be a duck?
This review examines the German-language edition of Kultermann's book; the forthcoming English-language edition (prospectively, The History of Art History) will be expanded in the plate section, while remaining identical to it in all other respects.(1) In his prefatory axioms, Kultermann sounds a note of anxiety and caution. He warns that, as the existence of art history is being questioned by many and its methodology subjected to its severest test ever,(2) the discipline needs to justify its continuation in academia today. To remedy the situation, he asserts, the closed loop of art historians writing for other art historians must be broken, a link with the general public established, and the subject repopularized as a socially and existentially meaningful pursuit. Art history must be understood historically, as evolving and continuously changing in its critical positions. Such a historical understanding must be able to isolate the constant or eternal (bleibende, p. 12) values of the subject from passing fancies, and avoid specialist jargon. Heinrich Wolfflin's principle that art and art history run parallel with and influence each other should be observed. Accordingly, we need to understand and organize the history of art history on the basis of the art contemporary with it. Kultermann also claims that any discussion of art theory and aesthetics should aim only at explaining the growth of ideas in art history itself. His volume fulfills virtually all of these prefatory axioms and more. To the extent that it matters here, I share many of his basic critical positions.(3)
The body of the text is grouped organically around paradigmatic historical events, defining cultural moments, and prominent ideological currents affecting art; or around major shifts in art-historical thinking and the key personalities responsible for them. In most cases a welcome coterminous treatment of art history and the study of its history as a branch of learning is achieved. Leaving aside myriad associate concerns, a small sampling of the historical causes that have occasioned the division of the immense material into twenty-two chapters includes the changing social and doctrinal role of the artist from antiquity to the Renaissance; the shifting intellectual parameters of the Enlightenment and their effects on the reading of art history; the positioning of art history as a "science" by the generation of Neoclassicists and Romantics; the seminal developments of the Vienna School and its lasting effects on modern art history; and the foundation of iconology as a subbranch of studies. Of the two concluding offerings, "Art History Today" has been totally rewritten, while "The Art Historian" is new, both making for additional fascinating reading.
Over time, scholars have divided and subdivided the study of art, its historical examination, and the metapresumptions of art history, to say nothing of aesthetics and the philosophy and theory of art into several discrete branches of academic study. Kultermann's holistic approach succeeds to an admirable extent in uniting that which naturally belongs together: art, art history, art theory, the theory(-ies) of art history, aesthetics, biography, and so on. Just as significantly, he also brings a potentially arid discussion of disembodied ideas to life by linking them to actual human beings and anchoring them in real life. His often-engrossing biographical narratives humanize theoretical abstractions as flesh-and-blood realities. By these means he meets the art historians of the past on their own terms, within their own historical realities. (Due to its special problems, "Art History Today," potentially a book-length project in its own rights, may fall short of such personalization and theoretical clarification.) The bountiful gallery of portrait plates featured throughout the volume helps in further visualizing these personalist traits.
Kultermann acknowledges the historical fact that art history is a "German discipline"; by virtue of its overwhelming share of seminal scholarship, especially in the crucially important areas of theory and methodology, that country has dominated the field. Germany can also look back on the oldest regular academic tradition in the discipline--it originated there in the late eighteenth century--while in most other countries the subject was absent from curricula until well into the twentieth century. But he also scrupulously attends to many other countries. He elaborates especially on the United States, where world leadership in art history has recently shifted by virtue of a numerical preponderance of relevant academic departments. Kultermann's study is punctiliously complete; it is chronologically exhaustive and global in its geographic sweep.
In the concluding chapter, "The Art Historian," Kultermann may offer his finest insights on the contemporary situation. He thinks that art historians today must defend their very existence as specialists against accusations (by J. Burckhardt and Ortega y Gasset, for instance) of being "Banausen" (artless Philistines), "Schuttschlepper" (garbage collectors), and "Techniker" (technicians). Having been put to the test of adapting to various integrative studies, including feminism and multiculturalism, they must change or face the prospect of vanishing. While challenged to adopt methods from emerging investigative approaches in other fields--structuralism, semiotics, deconstructionism--they confront great theoretical, technical, and methodological difficulties in doing so.
Kultermann feels that art historians have lost their intellectual cutting edge in society, hence their political clout in affecting cultural decisions. (The contrast is especially stark with the influential giants of German art history in the late nineteenth century.) Since they have lost their vision in articulating cultural values, they have forfeited their role as intellectual leaders of society. And because he thinks that culture, as he understands it throughout his book--as motive power of normative art history, as a harbinger or measure of social values, and as high culture or the ennobling element of national culture as a whole--has virtually ceased to exist anyway, the art historian has been socially marginalized to the role of effete aesthete and remote eccentric.(4)
Perhaps most damningly, according to Kultermann, art historians today no longer stand in a professionally sound relationship to contemporary art; contrary to their nineteenth-century forerunners, they no longer understand art's relationship to the cultural totality of contemporary existence. Consequently, they are unable to fathom the connection between past, present, and potential future art. Kultermann raises, but does not elaborate upon, the tantalizing option of art historians seriously adapting themselves to the procedures or the collective intellectual regime of art criticism. He also sees other opportunities for the art historian: overcoming the bias of reading art history as a mere style history; interdisciplinary studies; and doing actual studio work. Finally, he envisions a professional reempowerment by taking advantage of the general questioning of academic and cultural boundaries currently in progress. He senses similar breaks in the new freedom and creative strength that potentially flow from the chaos of the present situation. I agree with Kultermann that art history does not exist as a "steady" science but that, as a reflection of changing cultural values, it is constantly rewritten. And I concur with Conrad Fiedler, whom he quotes, that the "safety" of the historical method must first be destroyed, and the hindrance of "art history as usual" overcome. Only then can a "new position" regarding art be reached, empowering the individual to again be able to "feel her way toward" an "intimate and productive relationship" with art (pp. 241ff.).
On the whole, Kultermann's approach is chronological (according to art periods), biographical, and anecdotal--the last-mentioned quality censured most strenuously by German critics. Thus Kultermann's methodologically eclectic treatment may result in a certain sense of disjunction between his presentation and the ideology we have shaped about art history in recent decades, which pretends to be unencumbered by biographical quirks, historical accidents, and partisan shenanigans, fostering instead the notion of a sovereign ideative progression, free of the vicissitudes of life. Such criticism may be partly justified on thematic/theoretical grounds, but it may also be partly the result of applying a posteriori findings to past art-historical practice, which may not be justified by historical facts.
Elsewhere, I am not sure if I understand Kultermann's position on the role of art theory in his presentation of the history of art history. If, as he claims, art contemporary to a given period in art history is the clue to the reading of art history, then art theory, the handmaiden of art and art criticism, should play a larger role in the discussion than he is willing to assign to it as, for the most part, he does not enter into the discussion of art theory as distinct from art-historical theorizing. Of course, massive involvement with art theory is out of the question for him because of space restrictions. But because he systematically reduces art theory to a secondary role, some subchapters do not quite measure up to his own ideals. That on Romanticism is, according to his own theoretical measure, asymmetrical: he selectively includes here, as throughout his book, some important art theorists-critics at the expense of others (A. J. Carstens, Ph. O. Runge, C. D. Friedrich, B. v. Rahmdor are slighted). On the basis of Kultermann's premises, lastly, this problem of integrating art-historical theory with art theory and criticism becomes fully unmanageable in his treatment of the later nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Moreover, this, his premier theory, explaining art historical theorizing on the basis of art contemporary with it, is unevenly applied. His selective employment of other strategies--the history of ideas, or cultural history--weakens his own central thesis because he does not make it appear to be a universally applicable doctrine.
A further problem arises from his valiant and, I believe, largely successful attempt to write simultaneously for the specialist and the larger public. One can well imagine some opposition to this tactic from the "experts." Anecdotal material on the individual scholars helps in fleshing out their personalities and makes for captivating reading, too. Significantly, these anecdotes achieve the more serious purpose of demonstrating how ideas are linked to personal experience. But it may also be perceived as a hindrance by some specialists in their (understandable) rush to rapidly survey the intellectual accomplishments of these scholar-heroes and quickly "fix" their location in the pantheon of art-historical ideology. Foregoing the biographical-anecdotal approach, however, could threaten for other readers, particularly non-specialists, to bury the ontological body of art history in arid intellectualism.
On another score, considering the fabulous successes of museum "hit shows" and best-seller catalogues of late, Kultermann may be too rash in dismissing art historians as cultural-political eunuchs. And in his repeated assertions that art history must save itself from bankruptcy by getting in touch with contemporary art, he neglects the melancholy fact that, with art facing its own rumored bankruptcy, the exercise he proposes may well mean the halt leading the blind. Or does it?
As previously noted, the ambitious chapter on "Art History Today," with its hundreds of names, suffers from a surfeit of material. Whatever its obvious usefulness as something like a world map of the vast territory of international scholarship, it barely penetrates the warren of intellectual subdivisions marking the field. Kultermann neglects to differentiate here between methodological/ideological divisions and near-mechanical listings of art historians' areas of specialization. This oversight results in a kind of catalogue of worldwide art history department faculties. Is this because Kultermann cannot see the forest for the trees? Or does his presentation correctly reflect an enormously distended body of researchers and their collective lack of direction? I sense that he may well accurately reflect an insipid, chaotic, and incommensurable situation; nevertheless, Kultermann's earlier admonishment to mind the bleibende values of art history has now been mostly (intentionally?) lost sight of. Lastly, the author mentions such philosemiologists as Jacques Derrida (deconstructionism), Jacques Lacan (language harbors being), and Michel Foucault (normality is contingent), for example, as providing meaningful extradisciplinary stimuli for the future study of art history. But owing to his universalist purview (and probably also due to the restrictions of the format of a handbook) he fails to elaborate incisively on the intellectual ramifications of his disclosure.
German reviewers of Kultermann's book have praised the magisterial lucidity of the organization of the vast material that he treats and the novellike ease with which he guides his readers through myriad intellectual currents and historical details. I concur. I am also impressed by his brilliant scholarship and rich and copious documentations. The eventual appearance of the English translation of this physically attractive volume will be a very welcome event. It will be both the best available text and the most abundant reference volume obtainable on the subject. I would recommend it for college courses in art history on all levels, especially in methodology, and as affective reading matter for the interested public.
The Language of Art History, the premier volume of a projected series, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts, is an anthology of writings on aesthetics, semiotics, phenomenology, and the psychology of perception, consisting of ten essays by philosophers and art historians.(5)
In order to be fair to each individual author and do justice to his or her particular contribution, it is necessary to discuss each separately and individually. While this may pose something of a burden on readers--requiring constant shifts of attention from one author's knotty presentation and complex purview to another's even more intricate layout--it is, after all, in the nature of an anthology to be sampled segment-by-segment. And unless we undertake a part-by-part analysis of a book that promises us in its title to explore "The Language of Art History," we shall have to take on faith alone what is hidden between its covers.
In their introduction, "Art History and Language," the editors, Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, mount a tortuous apologetic for the term "art history" in the title of the book, a discipline they consider to be time-conscious, academic, and inclusive of art criticism. Then they undiplomatically demote the rejected (but more logical) choice, "art criticism," to the status of an extratemporal, journalistic, and opportunistic activity. They also sound a requiem for aesthetics: by attempting erroneously to buttress it with a "religious dimension"; by pointing to the growing ability of art to speak on its own behalf with its own aesthetic voice--art as philosophy--obviating the need for aesthetics; and by informing us that by "writing about writing about art," aesthetics has effectively lost art and become a dependency of art history/criticism. To expand their reader base, they proclaim that the purpose of the book (which consists essentially of linguistic metacriticism) will be to expose the "philosophical approach" in art historians' use of language. By defining their intentions in this way, the editors may curry the favors of their desired audience, art historians. But in an astonishing, perhaps Freudian, slip, they denigrate the art historian's "day-to-day language," claiming that it is absorbed in such pedestrian matters as "who made a given art object, by what means, where and when?" And they protest that such language is "intellectually unglamorous" compared to "the philosopher's more accurate understanding" of the art historian's work.
In the first, extremely informally written essay, Jean-Francois Lyotard's mock-dialogic "Presence," the author emphasizes romancing the individual art object at the expense of general aesthetic theory: "Painting is doing alright, and aesthetics is dying off". Hegel's conceptually totalizing prophesy of the victory of aesthetics over art is put back-to-front: art triumphs over philosophy. A diversion on the hegemony of form over figure, space-time, and narrative precedes a variation on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's description of perception as an "immediate pre-reflexive transitivity" 22). As aesthetics dies, modern/postmodern art as philosophy is born. Art's magically opalescing presence allows it to engage the viewer's mind meditatively. Lyotard's allusive delivery resembles less a Platonic dialogue than a pas de deux--like stream of consciousness. Closure of argument or connection with art history is nowhere achieved; no such terminations were ever intended. Instead, scintillating, Rococoesque, inferential philosophy-as-the-art-of-poetic-allusion, reminiscent of Derrida, flickers by in a fin de siecle twilight of soliloquies. "Presence" is a Gallic bouquet of oblique and evocative phrasings in search of a creative "reader response." Lyotard's end-to-end aphorisms reflect a European belletrism in its late, late, late, perfumed and evanescent mellowness. This is writing about writing about art as rhythmic cadences of solipsisms quivering between stimulation, bemusement, and ennui: "When the mind jumps into the soul ... the eye of the body is sanctified".
In his "Writing and Painting: The Soul as Hermeneut," Stanley Rosen takes up the age-old debate about the nature of perception between the Platonists--interpretation follows form (viz., Philebus)--and the Kantians--form follows interpretation (viz., Critique of Pure Reason). What ensues is a tight discourse on nomenclatural minutiae revolving around antithetical syntactical word pairs: Erscheinung (appearance) and Vorstellung (imagination, "interpretation") vs. phainomenon (phenomenon). Or doksa (his spelling of doxa; belief, opinion, judgment) vs. aisthesis (insight). Rosen concludes that writing and painting are posterior to memory and aisthesis, "the faculties by which we apprehend the independent being. We remember, so to speak, what we are about to understand". He correctly postulates Kant as the forerunner of modern philosophy's preoccupation with language (as witness Wittgenstein). But Rosen's title literally demands reflection on Friedrich Schleiermacher; I am surprised, therefore, that the undisputed originator of modern "soulful hermeneutics" has not been honored along with Kant.(6) While its connection with art history is exceedingly tentative, this essay could perhaps best be classified as an elegant obiter dictum on Ernst Gombrich's famous psychophenomenological theorem, "making" (after schemata) and "matching" (after nature), as the genesis of artistic creativity.(7)
In the brilliant but, art-historically speaking, inconclusive aesthetics of "Correspondence, Projective Properties, and Expression in the Arts," Richard Wollheim compares the phenomenon of "correspondence" (our collective penchant for allusion recognized by Swedenborg and Baudelaire, that a given scene in nature harmonizes with an emotion) with "predication" (our innate instinct to name things in nature directly after human traits). Thesis: psychological predicates are applied to nature for reasons of symbolic correspondence; that to which they refer is "projective properties" Wollheim subsequently hints at what such properties might be ("a partly affective experience") but states, surprisingly, that "I shall not ... investigate the nature of projection itself". Why he stresses a given critical point and then goes out of his way to tell us that he will not discuss it we are not told. As to relating his (equivocal) beliefs about expression in the arts, we are told, in a nutshell, that man relates to nature via correspondence, while the artist relates to his work via correspondence and projective properties. The comparison here should be, I think, with the German Romantics and definitely (again) Gombrich's psychology of perception, although, unlike him, Wollheim does not seem to bring into completely satisfactory agreement the artist's "inner vision" with the "creative act" itself. As with "expression," he pessimistically neither considers it to have been "pre-theoretically grasped," nor theoretically capable of being conclusively assailed.
Michael Baxandall, an art historian whose approach is shaped by linguistics, regards, in "The Language of Art Criticism," the critic's expression as generally "crude" and "ostensive" (referential to instances from similar examples) rather than heuristic (analytical), and on the whole insufficient. He claims that all description is inadequate to cope with the properties of art. He identifies three kinds of "indirectness: comparative or metaphoric, causal or inferential, and subject or ego-words". He finds the "oblique" language of the critic to his liking, as his "constantly veering orientations ... dance toward a sufficiently demonstrative act." Whereas, criticism in literature proceeds along a linear path, owing to the chronological unwinding of action, Baxandall sees "the perception of a picture (as) a rapid, irregular darting about and around on a field," obviating a literary, linear approach (shades of Lessing?). Therefore he counsels on behalf of an "inferential criticism" that abstains from "hard causal schedules," (as in social art criticism), and espouses a conjectural or suppositional approach, hardly music to the ears of aetheticians in pursuit of "linear" language Baxandall may stand alone in this anthology with a critical analysis of "art language" that seems to have immediate relevancy to art history, both empirically and normatively. Moreover, he presents his findings in a language and style that is cogent, art-critically speaking, and compelling in terms of its relevancy to art history.
However, Catherine Lord and Jose A. Benardete, in "Baxandall and Goodman," quickly take Baxandall to task for not having enough faith in the power of language to cope with art. While they agree with Baxandall that aesthetics largely "talks about talking about art," they oppose him with Nelson Goodman's theory, which claims that "paintings are constituted . . . by their verbal import". With Goodman, they espouse a form of Neo-Nominalism (one painting at a time), contra Plato's "Realism" (universals exist before things). They hope thereby to help metaphor regain the status of a kind of "proto- or quasi-poetry." Alluding to the terminology of a famous German logician, Gottlob Frege, they bounce Bedeutung (meaning) against Sinn (a kind of meaning of meaning), arriving at the thesis that a painting is a "non-linguistic semiotic device." They are especially opposed to Baxandall's notion that words relate to art catachretically (in a malaproprian manner), holding that words can and do enter deeply into the thematic appreciation of art.
Carl R. Hausman, too, in his "Figurative Language in Art History," criticizes Baxandall. He points out (casuistically) that the metaphoric nature of the language of art history cannot cope with the "newness" of art. He then proposes his intriguing "interactionist theory of metaphor" to deal with the problem. For example, in the statement "man is a wolf," connotations stemming from each component interact and congeal in a meaningful metaphor. More alluringly, he claims that in Cezanne, for example, connotations and references to "plasticity" and "color" stand in a relationship of tension to each other and interact, resulting in a fresh stylistic constellation. In contrast to Baxandall's disparaging of (linear) language as catachretic, Hausman claims that "works of art themselves exhibit a structure or set of dynamic relationships that have a family resemblance to verbal figures of speech." Do we detect shades of Wolfflin in Hausman's assertions? Regardless, while the tissue of his presentation is certainly porous enough to allow of many interpretations of his positions, none can be said to be certain. Effectively, therefore, this is another very problematic step in the direction of elucidating "the language of art history."
In "Cezanne's Physicality: The Politics of Touch," (the only article that is illustrated), Richard Shiff, whose style begins to approach normative art criticism, sensibly stakes out a median position: in order to be affective, the language of art must be "impure," part catachretic metaphor (i.e., ambiguous, mismatched, misleading, wrong), part normative metaphor (p. 150 and passim). He identifies the nature of the problem of Cezanne to be the nature of brushwork, especially the "combination of contact and lateral movement--pushing, dragging, drawing"--stressing "touch." He then launches a book review--like discussion of Gustave Geffroy's, Meyer Schapiro's, and Harold Rosenberg's criticisms of Cezanne's style, and their respective emphases: the individual mark, formal self-referentiality, gesturalist-tachistic trends, the ambiguity factor, traditional mimesis versus (Cezanne's) analogue reality. All along, his focus is on the respective critical languages used by these writers. He then closes the loop by alleging that Cezanne and Picasso, too, partook of the visual equivalent of literary catachresis. Shiff's arguments, while rather appealing, could be made even more persuasive if they were anchored in solid historical reasoning with regard to the self-life of style in art, as in formalist art history. Herewith a sample of Schiff's prose, to indicate not only the nature of his presentation but also much of the supererogatory tenor of the book as a whole: "Ironically, when viewed as a product of an action, Cezanne's mark loses the authorial specificity associated with the indexiality of artistic touch; while the visual form of his characteristic mark, its generic iconicity, retains a sense of the specific".
In the next essay, David Summers contrasts Ferdinand Saussure, the father of modern structural linguistics, with Gombrich (again!), in whom he discovers (correctly) a nexus between psychology, Gestaltism, aesthetics, and art history. He finds subtle differences between Saussure and Gombrich's and his own assessments in "Conditions and Conventions: On the Disanalogy of Art and Language," and elaborates on a variety of postulations: Aristotle's criticism of art as mimesis--art is equivalent to reality--has had unfortunate consequences for art history; normative iconography "reinforces the erroneous notion that images are equivalents of texts" (p. 206)(8); conditions for making art are colored by socio-cultural exigencies that affect the continuities of period styles; our experience of historical art is occluded by our own cultural background; and art traditions are also traditions of craft (a Gombrichian notion). We are gratified that Summers arrives at such correct conclusions via linguistics, structuralism, and aesthetic semantics. But it is also true that art history arrived earlier at remarkably similar conclusions via mature iconology, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte, social art history, and formalism.
"A Minimal Syntax for the Pictorial: The Pictorial and the Linguistic--Analogies and Disanalogies," the last entry, is by Andrew Harrison. He argues that alleged disanalogies between linguistic and pictorial material
are exaggerated and that linguistically we relate to pictures as we do to general reality. Cultural conditioning empowers general psychology to cope with understanding pictures and texts alike. But, he asks, "do pictures have sense?" He quarrels with Wittgenstein's famous reverse analogy, derived from Plato's Phaedrus, that a picture provides a model for language,(9) while calling Gombrich's equation of art with mirrors and maps "manifestly absurd". With his "projective seeing" (is this identical with "intentionality"--not reality but a mental act?) Harrison gambols with Leonardo da Vinci's much-touted ability to fathom battle scenes and landscapes in a stained wall. And with his "demotic of picturing," he plays on our amateur ability to appreciate but not "make" drawings ourselves. Harrison provides fewer clear conclusions than suggestive hints, leaving the reader mystified about what the many strands of often brilliant observations might add up to for art history in the end. However stimulating his excursi may be in the psychology of vision as such, regrettably he does not relate his ideas to, for instance, relevant studies of neoprimitivism, art theory (especially that of Klee and Kandinsky), or the history of formalism. As with most of the other authors, therefore, we can only wish for an ampler context in art history.
Undoubtedly, this collection of essays offers many valuable points in the current dialogue on the atrabilious state of contemporary aesthetics, scores of estimable insights into criticism of art criticism, various brilliant syntactical formulations and poetic flashes, and yes, even occasional near-glimpses of "art-historical light at the end of the tunnel." Nevertheless, I hold that the (hopeful) title is a form of catachresis: Reader beware. While it ostensibly desires to connect with art history, on the whole the anthology regrettably fails: it does not, as a matter of necessary routine, employ art-historical or art-theoretical literature in its assumptions, arguments, or criticisms, or--rare exceptions to the contrary notwithstanding--subject such literature to criticism. Accordingly, it fails to educe the quandary of art history in academia today, let alone help clarify it.
Any serious attempt at an extradisciplinary examination of the language of art history, a discipline beset by its own crisis, should be welcomed. However, this book's near-total avoidance of the putative object of its investigation, the language of art history as such, combined with its exclusive aesthetics-driven and semiology-originant, and often unnecessarily complex, phraseology, strike one as a form of collective (subconscious?) omission--or, to use a favorite linguistic phrase of several of the authors, "elision."(10) The great seminal art historians and their ideological successors are conspicuous by their absence from the debate. Accordingly, the essays achieve, on the whole, neither a professional rapprochement nor intellectual closure nor mutual technical illumination of the two disciplines, art history and philosophy. Instead, the book seems to open up a wider lacuna between them than is customarily assumed to exist. A more appropriate title for the work, though one promising far fewer readers, seems to be suggested by Lord and Benardete when they discuss the decline of philosophy from Hegel's idealism to scientism and a parallel declension of aesthetics from a philosophy of art to a philosophy of art criticism: "The Crisis of Aesthetics and Semiotic Strategies for Overcoming it."
One of the most useful results, by default, of this anthology's dysfunctional title and cynical audience targeting is to embody the tragedy of academic overspecialization: breakdown of communication. In the hostile and chaotic climate today besetting the traditional branches of scholarship, we desperately need to understand each other's language. One such passage might lie in greater reliance on the more generally read modern philosophers as mediating links with the less widely appreciated semiologists and "philosophers of mind" whom they influenced and who form the direct intellectual matrix for the authors of this volume. Another avenue might be more utilization of seminal art-theoretical writings by artists. Yet another approach might capitalize more on the writings of those art historians and critics whose methods are comparative and interdisciplinary to begin with.
Regardless, no understanding of the language of art history can ever be hoped for without paying at least some attention to the actual language that art historians typically use in their methodology, philosophy, and assumptions. But in this book, whatever its merits in aesthetics, the ambitions of the editors to elucidate what they call "the language of art history" and the functional, structural, and normative reality of that language simply fail to intersect. In the end a mutually desirable flow of understanding and the wider goal, comprehending the language of art, can only be achieved via a liberal two-way language traffic between aestheticians and art historians, something that, on the whole, this collection of syntactical studies seems to be bent on blocking. In short, The Language of Art History does not deal with the language of art history nearly as much as it does with the language of aesthetics, absorbed by semiotics, in search of a "modern" mission--philosophy looking for a job.
Notes:
1. Udo Kultermann was born in 1927 in Stettin (now Szczecin, in the Polish part of Pommerania), studied art history, archaeology, and philosophy at the University of Greifswald, and received his doctorate in art history from the University of Munster in 1953. From 1959 to 1964 he was director of the City Museum Schlo|Beta~ Morsbroich in Leverkusen (North-Rhine Westphalia). Currently (and since 1967) he teaches the history and theory of architecture at the School of Architecture, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. Two German editions of his Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte predate that currently under review: Vienna, Dusseldorf: Econ-Verlag, 1966; and Frankfurt, Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1981 (paper). The following are the published and planned foreign-language editions of his book: Romanian edition, Bucharest: Editura Meridiane, 1977, 2 vols.; Japanese edition, Tokyo: Chuo Koron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1993; Spanish edition, Madrid: Akal, 1993; and U.S. edition, Pleasantville, N.Y.: Abaris Books, 1993. (Due to technical and translation problems and changes in ownership of Abaris Books, various and long delays in the publishing date originally set for the book occurred over time.) The book has received a mostly favorable, occasionally enthusiastic, reception from German and other specialists (E. Panofsky, K. Gerstenberg, A. Neumeyer, M. W. Alpatow, et al.), with negative opinions centering on its alleged unresolved or problematical relationship between historical and theoretical issues, on the one hand, and the popularizing tenor of the book--its narrative and anecdotal component--on the other. Kultermann's most recent book, Kunst und Wirklichkeit: Von Fiedler bis Derrida, Zehn Annaherungen (Munich: Scaneg Verlag, 1991), deals with art theory and aesthetics.
2. Kultermann's sense of urgency is shared by many authors who have made specific contributions to the current topic and the criticism of art history of late. Among those on my short list: Kurt Badt, Mieke Bal, Oskar Batschmann, Hermann Bauer, Michael Baxandall, Hans Belting, Rudolf Bisanz, Frances Borcello, Norman Bryson, David Carrier, Heinrich Dilly, Oleg Grabar, Joan Hart, W. McAllister Johnson, Donald Kuspit, Wolfgang v. Lohneysen, Heinrich Lutzler, Michael Podro, Donald Preziosi, A. L. Rees, Michael Roskill, David Summers, Thomas Zaunschirm, Henry Zerner.
3. The closest rival of Kultermann's study is a book by W. Eugene Kleinbauer and Thomas P. Slavens, Research Guide to the History of Western Art (Chicago: American Library Association, 1982), now out of print.
4. For an in-depth discussion of these and closely related problems, consult Rudolf Bisanz, "Art History, Art Criticism, and the Ideological Birth of Modern Art: Professors, the Avant-Garde, and Creative Originality in Wilhelminian Germany," Art Criticism 6, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 1-18.
5. Responding to an inquiry from the Art Journal, the publisher provided the following information about the authors: Michael Baxandall, Department of Art History, University of California, Berkeley; Ivan Gaskell, Harvard Art Museum; Andrew Harrison, Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, England; Carl Hausmann, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University; Salim Kemal, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University; Catherine Lord, Department of Studio Art, University of California, Irvine; Jose Benardete, Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University; Jean-Francois Lyotard, 62 rue Blomet, 75015 Paris, France; Stanley Rosen, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University; Richard Schiff, Department of Art, University of Texas at Austin; David Summers, McIntire Department of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Richard Wollheim, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley. Of course, it would be nice to know more about the authors--their studies, specializations, and publications. However, the publishers do not provide the kind of adequate backgrounds on their authors that one expects from a quality anthology.
6. Schleiermacher is the father of modern hermeneutics. Cf. "Hermeneutics: Conversation with History," in Keith Clemens, Friedrich Schleiermacher (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).
7. See Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961).
8. Summers tells us to consult Cesare Ripa's Iconologia concerning the symbol of truth, but refers to Panofsky in the accompanying endnote. However, the original source--Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (1760; facsimile edition, New York: Dover, 1971), 50, shows that the symbol of veracity in the woman's hand is the sun-face motif, not, as Summers claims, "a peach."
9. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge Humanities Press International, 1988), 21, pars. 4.01ff.
10. For a discussion of the actual language used by art historians, meaning their functional nomenclature, consult Rudolf Bisanz, "More on a Discipline in Crisis and Some Possible Remedies: General Methodology in Art History and a Special Application to the Nineteenth Century," Art Criticism 4, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 1-11.
RUDOLF M. BISANZ, professor of art history at Northern Illinois University.
© 1993 College Art Association.
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