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Journal of Visual Culture
DOI: 10.1177/1470412905050637
2005; 4; 75Journal of Visual Culture
Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey
Visual Studies, Historiography and Aesthetics
http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/1/75
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journal of visual culture
Visual Studies, Historiography and Aesthetics
Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey
journal of visual culture
Copyright  2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 4(1): 75-90 [1470-4129(200504)4:1]10.1177/1470412905050637
Abstract
This dialogue is an opportunity for Mark Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly
and Keith Moxey to speak together in print for the first time since their
edited collection entitled The Subjects of Art History (1998).
Concerned, in that volume, with the prospect that `art history, like
many other fields in the humanities, has entered a post-epistemologi-
cal age', the three editors wrote opening `position papers' outlining,
respectively, their concern for the (Kantian) philosophical imperatives
of/in art history, and how the specters of context haunt the writing of
the history of art, and the historiography of art history as Hegelian.
Overall, their collection was a chance to reassess the role that the
philosophies of history of Kant and Hegel and other philosophical,
semiotic, queer, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and museological tradi-
tions concerned with `history' have played, and continue to play, in art
history's efforts to legitimate its past and predict its future. In many
ways, then, The Subjects of Art History was an attempt, from within the
discipline of art history, to picture that area of inquiry in an expanded
field that we may continue to call art history or might be more usefully
designated as visual studies. The dialogue in this issue of the journal
of visual culture is an opportunity to continue that conversation.
Specifically, it is a chance to rethink the question of the place of both
`aesthetics' and `history' in and through visual studies. As such, this
dialogue seeks to address questions such as: how might visual studies
rethink what we thought we already knew? Are both critics and sup-
porters of visual studies right to believe that `aesthetics' has nothing to
do with visual studies? Why might they be right, or wrong? (And if they
are wrong, how does visual studies offer us an occasion to engage with
aesthetics in new ways?) What status do or should the philosophies of
history of Kant and Hegel, say, have in visual studies? How does visual
studies affect such models of history, or what does it mean for it no
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Keith Moxey (KM): The idea of a conversation on some of the issues raised
in The Subjects of Art History (1998) is a provocative one. Among many other
things, the essays in that volume raised questions about the nature of `history'
and `aesthetics' ­ the Scylla and Charybdis of art-historical historiography.
There have been moments when art history threatened to dissolve into the
morass of contextual detail that inevitably surrounds the creation of what we
call `art', so that its `autonomy' either went unremarked or was assumed, and
times were when all that mattered was an internal history of the object that
insisted on its freedom from cultural entanglement. I suppose that in saying
this I am opposing Erwin Panofsky's `iconology' and Michael Baxandall's
`social history of art', with, say, Heinrich Wölfflin's notion of `style', Alois
Riegl's `Kunstwollen' and Clement Greenberg's `flatness'. History and
aesthetics might be said to be the poles around which the discipline has
organized its activities and negotiated their relation to one another to consti-
tute what we mean by art-historical writing. Every time the profession
decides to favor one of these poles, the other suffers and vice versa.
Mark Cheetham (MC): Yes, the alternation of paradigms seems still to be
with us, if we define ourselves as art historians active in a broad, but nonethe-
less mappable, field. Of course, as you and Michael both know from your
conference (2001) and publication (Holly and Moxey, 2002) from the Clark
Institute entitled Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, as well as numerous
earlier activities, coordinates do seem to change once we add `visual culture'
to the conversation. There is a challenge both to history and to aesthetics,
traditionally conceived. I wouldn't want to say prematurely what these
challenges are, but from a visual studies perspective ­ really from all of the
perspectives under scrutiny here ­ clearly we need to rethink the objects of
inquiry, both their status within a western canon and perhaps especially
those that come from other traditions. Traditional aesthetics, that is practiced
by self-identified philosophers, to me remains often too pure a discourse,
one that assumes (or wishes) that ideas can be compared and improved
journal of visual culture 4(1)76
longer to believe it needs History at all? Or, to put it more kindly, is
there something that visual studies can teach us about Kant and Hegel
and subsequent historiographical thought? By no means looking to
resolve these questions, this dialogue is motivated by an urge to prob-
lematize in productive ways the accusation that visual studies does not
do, care for, take into consideration, or otherwise understand `history'.
It hopes to indicate why visual studies has to deal with history,
however conceived, if for no other reason than at least (and most
importantly) that it can attend necessarily to the genealogies of the
study of our visual cultures.
Keywords
aesthetic communities  cosmopolitanism  globalization  historiography
 practices of teaching and research  visual studies
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upon, more or less in a vacuum. Visual studies (and much art history) of
course challenges this way of working. I doubt that art history alone would
have made these discrepancies in method so apparent. How does the profes-
sion `decide' to move in any direction? I would like to think about how we
decide as putative individuals, how we choose our research topics, confer-
ence papers, grant proposals and what we will teach. What I should say here
is that Michael and I disagree about the nature of the `decision', as to how
exactly one comes to one's research. While I acknowledge our lack of auto-
nomy or volition, I still try to take a more sociological point of view of how
it is that we do what we do.
Michael Ann Holly (MAH): The Scylla and Charybdis dilemma in art history
is not one that troubles me. In fact, I revel in its capacity to unsettle. Even
supposing that we could do without either history or aesthetics (as some of
the most glib [mostly student] work in visual studies does mistakenly
presume) or even disabling just one of the poles would be to disarm com-
pletely one of the most venerable (ha!) disciplines in the humanities. Do we
take the art out of history, or the history out of art? If we managed to perform
that surgical operation, we would have much more to lose than to gain. I'm a
historiographer through and through. Responsibility to both questions about
aesthetics (not only when or where aesthetics comes in, but what it is at that
moment of interpretation, etc.) and questions about history (for whom, to
what purpose, what evidence, etc.) dog us relentlessly, but that doesn't mean
scholars of the visual arts will ever escape the need to turn around and con-
front them. In fact it is in the confrontation that entirely novel insights arise.
When we composed The Subjects of Art History, we asked each essayist to
take an explicit approach from the `new' art history and rub it up against an
`old' object and see what happens. I don't think we could ask for the same
naive approach now, but it seemed to work then. And one more matter,
gentlemen. When we choose our corner of the scholarly terrain, we cannot
forget that it is also the case that the terrain (or at least the kaleidoscopic
shake-up of it today) chooses us ­ time changes questions that the artwork
puts before us, different objects call to different subjects at different
moments, new political angles make new objects come into view. So the
`deciding' is always a see-sawing enterprise. Mine is more a phenomenologi-
cal conviction, Mark, as compared to your sociological view.
KM: Yes, that see-sawing is certainly evident. However, the situation is per-
haps singularly fraught with difficulty at the moment because there is little
agreement as to how either of the poles might be defined. Our traditional
confidence in a Hegelian model of history, with its reassuring evolutionism,
its inspiring teleology and its reliance on the concept of genius, has been
shaken beyond repair. Georges Didi-Huberman's Devant le temps (2000)
and Mieke Bal's Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous
History (2001) have demonstrated the inevitable anachrony of the art-
historical enterprise. In drawing attention to the role of the present in the
construction of history, they pose the old question: `What is to be done?'. Are
there any principles according to which history is to be told, or should we
recognize once and for all that history must depend on the nature of the
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interpreting subject? If this is indeed the case, then what is to identify
history as a genre that would distinguish it from, say, fiction?
MAH: Perhaps because it should have an ethical commitment, a dose of
intellectual rigor, a temporarily accepted protocol of investigation, a clear
delineation of argument, etc. ­ and more, Keith.
MC: I agree that the Hegelian model of evolution has been challenged
frequently and powerfully, but ­ and I never thought I'd echo Ernst
Gombrich in print ­ I also think that we have to watch carefully for examples
of this sort of thinking still holding sway. I was at a symposium recently on
the topic of `Making History'. A prominent curator spoke passionately about
the spirit of the times driving artmaking and its critical response. I objected
strenuously to these potentially misleading mystifications, but I sensed that
many people in the audience felt quite comfortable in abdicating any sort of
agency or responsibility for the art history that most would agree is made,
rather than motivated from within. We have to take responsibility for our
choices as art historians, critics and curators. On the other hand, we aren't
always even partially aware of why we do what we do, and no doubt many of
our `decisions' are the result of institutional conditioning. I don't see that we
can step outside this cycle and I do not believe that a `critical' position
requires that we do so.
MAH: Or as Gombrich would say in his well-known rant against Hegel,
dispense with the metaphysics and concentrate anew on the critical choices
and their relationships. But how do we know what choices? What criticality?
Consider Horkheimer:
Critical theory appears speculative, one-sided and useless ­ it runs
counter to prevailing modes of thought ... Those who profit from the
status quo entertain a general suspicion of any intellectual independ-
ence. (1972[1968]: 218, 232)
But of course that would also include Gombrich.
So, how do we proceed? Shouldn't the protocols of interpretation be often
ironic, turning one thinker (past or present) round another, twisting one
idea (past or present) inside another? That's genuine `intellectual independ-
ence', the kind that you hope will help the interpreter (or his or her
students) think anew, producing new knowledge rather than reproducing
the old.
MC: I agree, and I believe that this was very much the purpose of The Subjects
of Art History. It wasn't naive to ask contributors to our collection to put
their methods into proactive contact with art-historical subject matter in a
more or less practical demonstration. It worked and it still does. Some form of
history (if not historiography): this idea came to us about 10 years ago, even
though the collection appeared in 1998. It seemed like a good plan for the
target audience and was suggested by Cambridge University Press, which was
keen to present the book as a useful `text', which it has been.
*
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KM: If traditional notions of history have been placed in question, as we've
already begun to outline, is the situation any clearer when it comes to
aesthetics? As a consequence of the long reign of `objectivism' that art history
went through following the Second World War, it became incumbent on art
historians to conceal the nature of their aesthetic relation to the works they
discussed. The social history of art has perpetuated attitudes developed
during the heyday of iconography and iconology, in which the last thing
expected of the historian was the subjective expression of his or her aesthetic
response. The result has been the deep naturalization of Kantian and
Hegelian ideas. It is perhaps the modernist field, with its investment in the
criticism of contemporary art, that has demonstrated the greatest creativity in
the application of the Frankfurt School aesthetic theory of Adorno, Benjamin
and others, as well as the phenomenological traditions associated with the
work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Yet even this field must find its
certainties challenged by an ever-increasing awareness of the artistic produc-
tion of those parts of the world not usually identified with the modernist
tradition. How is contemporary African art to be evaluated? On what grounds
are aesthetic discriminations to be made? To what extent will the stories we
have been telling ourselves about the quality of artistic objects apply in these
circumstances? Should we begin to think in terms of `aesthetic communities'
rather than in the universal terms usually associated with the idea of aesthetic
value?
MAH: Neat idea, but doesn't that stretch the word beyond all recognition? Or
maybe you're right ­ we can just burrow inside the concept and inhabit it in
a new way. Its appropriation then becomes part of a new politics of recogni-
tion. But, then again, how can any one scholar understand, much less
question, even a minority of the `aesthetic communities' of the world? To be
unaware of even a few of them jeopardizes what any one of us might wager
to say about her or his own chosen community.
MC: I like the notion of more localized, specialized interpretive communi-
ties. I think that's what we have, however universalist our fantasies may be at
times. I've just given an example of the naturalization of Hegel that Keith
notes, but on the other hand, there is now and has been for some time a
widespread denaturalization of the philosophical elements of art history.
What I'd like to see is avid rereading of these texts (in addition to others, and
with no special priority) so that, say, new `Kantian' ideas can be put into play
in the fields concerned with the visual arts. I tried to do this in my book on
Kant and the visual arts (Cheetham, 2001) by reading Kant's autonomy
aesthetic against itself and against its social and political contexts of creation
and reception. He becomes less important as a formalist when we think of
his powerful example in the political arena c.1800 or his obsessions with
bodies, notably his own. To be frank, I wasn't thinking explicitly about the
expansion of the discourses around the visual made by visual studies. My
approach was deconstructive in many ways. But I felt then (in the late 1990s
when I was writing) and believe still that art history has become an increas-
ingly capacious and flexible field over the past years. Perhaps there is a point
at which for some art history shades over into visual studies because of the
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approach or the work in view, but I have tended to blithely assume (as a way
of insisting) that we can go ahead and call this art history if we so desire.
MAH: May I interject something here ­ your and Keith's references to the
almost unconscious hold that Kant and Hegel have on art history remind me
of Fernand Braudel's quest
to convey simultaneously both that conspicuous history which holds
our attention by its continual and dramatic changes ­ and that other,
submerged, history, almost silent and always discreet, virtually unsus-
pected either by its observers or its participants, which is little touched
by the obstinate erosion of time. (1966[1949]: 16)
Is that what you're advocating: a recognition of a submerged history that
cradles the eruptions and disruptions of surface perturbances ­ which today
might be called visual studies?
MC: Yes, I like this formulation. Lately I've been thinking about Bruno
Latour's Politics of Nature (2004), which also seeks to recognize crises rather
than regularities.
But as I anticipated, argued and have had confirmed by the reception of my
own work on Kant and art history, disciplinary assumptions still get in the
way of this sort of open exchange. A lot of philosophers have felt the need to
defend Kant against my supposed criticisms of his place in art history. What I
haven't articulated fully in my published work, but would like to entertain
here, is that we take Kant seriously when he calls in his political writings for
a `cosmopolitan' relationship among interlocutors. Could we productively
move his ideas on geopolitical interaction to the arena of conflict ­ and co-
operation ­ among art history, aesthetics and visual culture? My own answer
is `yes' and my tactic, again, has been `just' do it (although this is a poor
excuse for my passivity in the debates about these disciplinary changes). For
example, I devoted the final chapter of my Kant book to a consideration of
his `image', including obscure miniatures from his own lifetime, phrenologi-
cal photographs of his skull, mail art disseminations of his famous head
and the role that Kant statuary plays in the current realignment of national
identities in the Baltic region. The result was not normal art history because
I discussed almost no canonized works of art or well-known artists. My own
sense is that I explored the visual culture of Kant's head, though others may
see the work differently.
KM: Very much in keeping with Mark's account of his recent work, paradoxi-
cally enough the development of visual studies may allow students of the
visual to address both `history' and `aesthetics' in a more flexible and creative
manner than has been possible hitherto. Far from rendering the concept of
aesthetics obsolete, for example, the study of visual culture as a whole may
allow us to see more clearly the discriminations we make when we separate
`art' from the rest of the realm of visual artifacts. Instead of falling back
on aesthetic principles that have animated art historical writing in the past,
instead of talking about `pleasure', `originality', `disinterested contemplation',
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`complexity', `coherence', `freedom', `beauty', `transcendence' and the `sub-
lime', it may be possible to perceive the very different kinds of value that not
only different classes and age groups belonging to a single culture ascribe to
those objects they seek to privilege with the name `art', but it will be inter-
esting to learn the value with which analogous objects are invested in other
cultures. Not only does the death of modernism allow us to see the artificial-
ity of the borders that were once built around `art' to keep it `pure', but also
the rise of postcolonialism and the process of globalization enable us to see
the power relations that guaranteed the dominance of its historical narrative.
All this brings us to the very interesting question of the `value of value'. What
might be the point of finding exceptional interest ­ philosophical fascination
­ in some objects rather than others? It is here that Hal Foster's concept of
`strategic autonomy' (Foster, 2004), recalled in an interview in a recent issue
of the journal of visual culture, is relevant. Far from drawing the conclusion
that the death of the grand narratives brings the age of aesthetic autonomy
to an end, it seems to me that it complicates and enriches the question of
autonomy in interesting ways. It recognizes that there can be no `essential'
definition of what autonomy might consist of, and places new stress on the
responsibility of the historian or critic to articulate the grounds on which
autonomy is claimed.
MAH: Good point; I would even expand it. The value of visual studies is that
its historians and critics often find themselves in this position of `responsibil-
ity', defining and redefining core concepts such as aesthetic autonomy, or
conceptions of the artist, or definitions of art, or characterizations of the pub-
lic, not to mention many others. And can't one genuinely make the claim that
for over 100 years, traditional art history has gained its `legitimacy' over and
against repeated challenges to the assumptions or values on which it is
grounded? Keith, Norman Bryson and I were being too short-sighted when
we claimed in the introduction to Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations
(1994) that: `During the past fifteen years or so, the Ideas about which we
think and write have seemed at odds with the traditional canon in which
many of us were schooled.' Leave it to the young and brash to think they are
reinventing the wheel. We not only gave too little credit (although we did
give some) to the role of feminism and Marxist social history (e.g. Nochlin
and Clark) 15 years before we were writing, but to ignore the role of writers
such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Riegl and (for me especially) Warburg was histo-
riographic heresy. Warburg has been invoked constantly in the last decade as
the `founder' of the `expanded field' of contemporary visual studies. At the
time I believed that he was the perfect intellectual sponsor for a variety of
new developments in art history that are now loosely connected under the
rubric `visual and cultural studies', and I still partially subscribe to a good
part of that genealogy. The study of art was for him a serious study of history
and the power of history to shape contemporary consciousness. In his quest
to discover meaning in the past, he excluded nothing: from salt boxes to
altarpieces, from Native American rituals to Renaissance murals. His erudite
eclecticism is precisely what continues to appeal to postmodernist art
historians, even if we have lost the sense that there is any meaning there to
be discovered. The problem sets in when we try to enlist Warburg as an
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intellectual predecessor and patron in more than the most general genealogi-
cal line. As much as I admire them and have devoted my intellectual life to
these figures from the past, I have grown increasingly skittish about the insid-
ious ways in which this compulsive return to earlier theoretical art historians
­ say Warburg, Riegl or Panofsky ­ is contributing to the disparagement and
dilution of genuinely novel thought. Just at the moment when all sorts of
new subjects and approaches are coursing through our field, we seem to
have succumbed to a conservative urge to revisit earlier authorities, as
though to emphasize that this sort of thinking has been part of art history for
a very long time. Invoking precedents in order to tame the untamable. In
other words, the past sometimes gets in the way of the present, something
Nietzsche recognized long ago. One of the most serious issues raised by the
current practice of art history is whether its cultural foundations in a partic-
ular intellectual milieu flourishing at least three generations ago can sustain
the usages and practices derived from it. In the United States at any rate,
there's a great deal of significance in changing the name `art history' to
`visual studies'. For the latter refers more to an intellectual attitude than a
field of study. It names a problematic. It's the banner that proclaimed 10 or
15 years ago that `the times, they are a-changin''. But of course we only
recognize change if we study, historiographically, where we have been. So
what am I saying? I don't think that there has been a major theoretical shift
recently, but rather a working out of the implications of an earlier seismic
one that occurred a couple of decades ago, rather than a century. The theo-
retical shift of the 1960s and 1970s ­ which reached art history most fully in
the 1980s ­ has been followed by the practical application of these earlier
ideas. In other words, developments in visual culture now would be incon-
ceivable without Foucault, gender theory, deconstruction, postcolonialism,
etc. Our mothers and fathers, rather than our venerable great grandfathers,
should be held most directly accountable for our behavior.
MC: Michael, these are provocative questions. Your query was to Keith, but I
want to ask if Warburg was a predecessor ­ now rediscovered ­ or an influ-
ence? Like you, I've heard a lot of papers on his work recently, but he seems
to be taken more as a model for a certain kind of creative and conceptual
thinking-through of questions concerning the cultural history of art history
and visual studies and not examined historiographically as such. Do those
looking back at Warburg and others see them as part of a traceable lineage,
or as examples to be emulated but without a continuous historical effect
between their time and ours?
Going back to Keith's point about autonomy, Modernism is in part defined
by the autonomy topos, or the rhetoric of autonomy, whichever specific
strain one articulates. Whatever else we may say, many species of that
paradigm seem to be past, which means that we can now understand the
modern as a period and set of tendencies with a beginning and end. But of
course many scholars would disagree ­ for example, Arthur Danto and
Thierry de Duve ­ which at least proves the point that modernism in some
way continues to hold sway.
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MAH: By the way, following up on the matter of Warburg and historiography
and historiography in visual culture, I always wonder why `visual studies'
equally cannot refer to a new theoretical understanding of old art ­ of the
Renaissance, for example? Why is modernism always invoked? Just a question
(or a desire to return to Warburg!). When the term `visual culture' was first
nominated by Michael Baxandall in Painting and Experience (1972) and
seconded by Svetlana Alpers in The Art of Describing (1983), it was, after all,
about Renaissance images and Dutch visual culture and thereby ripe for a
re-energizing of early period studies.
MC: Modernism comes up so often because so many of us work in this
period and, perhaps more importantly, because we wonder if the modern is
indeed somehow over. I think it's past in an historical sense but remarkably
influential still as a set of paradigms. I'm also bemused by the increasingly
frequent bashing of postmodernism, often from a conservative position in
the sense that it asserts the ongoing primacy of modernist paradigms. I'm
thinking here of much of Thierry de Duve's writing and the visual production
of Jeff Wall. There was a paper delivered at the recent CIHA (Comité
International de l'Histoire de l'Art; Hadjinicolau, 2004) conference in
Montreal that sought to dismiss the importance of pretty much all French
poststructuralist thinking on the study of the visual arts. Thankfully, Keith
spoke to this elision. I really don't know to what extent these debates involve
visual studies. But to respond to you directly Michael, I think that we can
always find earlier and earlier examples of a paradigm recently identified.
What's the purpose of such a quest for authenticity in origin? But you've
shown the positive side of such archaeology: many pay overdue attention to
Riegl and many others now. I'd really rather use texts and ideas and images
than say who got to what and where first, which strikes me as disciplinary
posturing. It's likely true that there is more emphasis on modern and con-
temporary art than on other areas, as you say, but again I think the reasons
are sociological and institutional.
KM: Even if visual studies follows its ancestor cultural studies in dedicating
itself mainly to synchronic analyses of contemporary cultural production, the
concept of history seems inescapable. Not only will the passage of time need
to be acknowledged in one way or another, but the historicity of the analyst's
own position will figure either explicitly or implicitly in any narrative. In both
cases it is possible that the encounter with visual traditions whose pasts have
been shaped by forces distinct from those traditionally associated with the
history of art, as well as the development of new subject positions from
which to view them, will offer opportunities for creative new solutions to the
problem of `artwriting'.
MC: For me as well, it is imperative that art writers ­ whatever their focus ­
have a working sense of their own historicity and those objects or themes
that they explore. We must instill the sense that the past was different but that
our access to it, our writing of it, posits a connection in the present. There is
no time travel, but there is what we call time and we must account for its role
in the changes we seek to account for in art.
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MAH: Back to an old art historian. I cannot help myself (despite my suspicions
of a few minutes ago), for there is where the philosophical grappling with the
assumptions of art history seems so frequently to reside. Riegl (1982[1903])
already worried about this conundrum in his essay on monuments. Drawing a
distinction between `historical-value' (that which elucidates the past) and `age
value' (that which imbricates the viewer in his own ruminative sense of the past
as no longer), to which should we be more responsive in the practice of
artwriting (pace Carrier, 1987)? Historians or poets? And do philosophers fall
in-between? Why have we abdicated the `pasts' of art history for the `presents'
that studies of visual culture give us? What have we sacrificed? What about the
act of writing itself? What change of commitment and direction in research
would it take to say that in visual studies we work towards more understand-
ing than `proof'? Even more `poetry' than analyses?
MC: Your question reminds me of Richard Rorty's (1981) vision of analytic
versus continental philosophy and what counts for truth. A few more
thoughts: perhaps we could each comment on how we teach material related
to our collaborative edition now, your recent course at MIT, for example, and
mine upcoming at the University of Toronto. What do you have people read?
What do they look at? Do they find this sort of program useful, and how
so? And have you both changed at all in what you teach and what you think?
Another way to put this: if we were doing The Subjects of Art History now,
what would we change, roughly 10 years on? I haven't taught `theory in art
history', as we call it, for several years. The last time, I used our book in con-
junction with Donald Preziosi's excellent The Art of Art History (1998). But
Subjects has sold its print run and is unavailable in English. One needs to be
able to read Korean to get a copy now ­ 2000 copies of a Korean translation
will be published soon ­ which is perhaps indicative of where art history is
going, in a positive sense. My sense is that the demand for this sort of book
­ a methods and theories of art history book ­ still exists among students. I
do not subscribe to the argument that `theory' has been so absorbed by our
discipline that to teach it separately is to ghettoize; most who float this line
do so from a conservative position. So, I'm using Preziosi as a main text with
Subjects available on library reserve. I'm also making a new book available:
Robert Williams, Art Theory: An Historical Introduction (2004). But what
will still be missing in my students' readings will be a sustained reading of
the debates over the terrain of visual culture. I will bring this up as an issue.
And what about your research, any changes in direction or desire since the
advent of visual studies? What would you write now if there were no institu-
tional restrictions, if you had no other obligations? Personally, I would curate
more contemporary art. Why? Because I believe that working with contem-
porary artists (aside from all the other reasons that it is exciting and worth
doing) opens one's eyes to some of the debates exercised here. This is my
other answer to Michael's question about why there is such a modern or
contemporary focus in visual studies. To be polemical, one finds out more
about the motivations and intricacies of visual culture from its practitioners
than any other source.
KM: In attempting to answer Mark's important question, I'd like to return to
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the issues of history and aesthetics with which this conversation began. Both
seem to depend on universal structures of thought born in the
Enlightenment that have proven both empowering and distinctly inimical to
the way in which we approach non-western cultures. Partha Chatterjee's
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1993) and Dipesh
Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (2000) have shown how inappropriate western notions of histori-
cal development are to the analysis and interpretation of Indian history. As
fruitful as subaltern studies have been in rewriting the history of British
India, for example, the Marxist model on which this was undertaken had its
distinct limitations. Having never experienced capitalist industrialization nor
seen the rise of a bourgeoisie ­ the necessary conditions for proletarian
revolution ­ subaltern historians often characterized Indian history as incom-
plete and deficient. India's peasant culture allegedly condemned it to play a
backward role in contemporary historical developments. In Chakrabarty's
terms it is necessary to `provincialize Europe' if historians are to do justice to
the unique qualities of Indian history.
However, what does `provincializing Europe' amount to? Chakrabarty is not
utopian enough to suggest that the understanding of the Indian past can do
without the theoretical models of the Enlightenment, but that these cannot
be applied uncritically to historical and cultural circumstances for which they
were never intended. Inevitably, the theoretical structures developed by the
dominant cultures of Europe and the United States will continue to inform
every attempt to contest them. As valuable as the construction of new and
alternative identities may be in the assertion of cultural difference, their
strategic value will be obviated if their contingency is not recognized.
In terms of teaching, it seems important to me that we recognize the power
relations that have shaped ­ and continue to shape ­ the nature of our
discussions of visual culture. We live in the shadow of modernism and it
would be hard to insist that artistic developments in, say, a major city in a
non-western culture receive the same amount of attention as those taking
place in New York. Currently, we can recognize that it is the economic, mili-
tary and cultural power of the industrialized nations of Europe and the
United States that supports their claims to aesthetic superiority ­ rather than,
say, `manifest destiny'. This allows us to relativize the dominant narrative so
as to gain insight into its claims on our attention. We can see through the
fabled `autonomy' of the western artistic tradition to the cultural interests
that motivate it. An awareness that aesthetic value is situational and local
makes us leery of universalizing claims to transcendental value. It makes us
appreciate the philosophical strategies on which claims to autonomy actually
rest. As a consequence, I think that postcolonial studies and the globalization
debate are necessarily embedded in the visual studies curriculum. The
important authors here would be Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, James Clifford,
Fredric Jameson, Arjun Appadurai, Gayatri Spivak and García Canclini. Said,
Bhabha, Clifford, because they are canonical to postcolonial thinking and
Jameson, Appadurai and García Canclini, because they represent radically
different approaches to the project of understanding globalization, Spivak for
both reasons.
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MAH: Keith and I just finished co-teaching a graduate course this past semes-
ter in the History, Theory, Criticism Program at MIT that we rather preten-
tiously entitled `Art History After the "End of Art'''. In it, we addressed the
aesthetic traditions that have animated the history of art history, posing the
question: `What does aesthetics still mean for art history today?' The choice
of readings, from Kant to Benjamin to Bürger to Belting and beyond, was
prompted by our shared sentiment that if art history was ever to become
philosophical again (as the best work in visual studies needs and urges it
to be), it would be on the basis of questioning not only what we mean
by `history' today, but what we mean by `aesthetics' as well. Watching the
foundational concepts for our discipline metamorphose through author,
time and cultural location may not provide singular definitions, but that was
the point. Intellectual history goes a long way to making us all think anew.
KM: While we live with historical models more subtle and more sophisticated
than either Hegel or Marx, we should be aware that even a Foucauldian
notion of `epistemes' may have little relevance for our understanding of cer-
tain cultural circumstances. While the notion of time- and culture-sensitive
epistemologies is of enormous assistance in thinking about knowledge in an
age of globalization, we should never forget that the very tools we use to
understand the clash of epistemological systems bears the imprint of the
culture in which it was developed. We thus live in the age of paradox, one in
which `both/and' and `either/or' reign supreme. As sophistic and unsatis-
factory as it may be to assert continually the limitations of our understand-
ing, we may be too much aware of the dangers of epistemic universalism to
do anything else.
Much the same may be true of aesthetics. While the power of this idea has
enabled the artifacts of the world to be collected and appreciated under the
rubric of `art', it has also tended to erase the very distinctiveness that made
these artifacts fascinating in the first place. The profound sadness resulting
from a walk through the galleries of the Louvre last summer, where the
creative works of radically different periods and places were reduced to
sameness by means of an exhibition policy that implied that they were some-
how equivalent to one another, was quite depressing. While the walls of this
great museum are still dedicated to the `history' of western Europe (includ-
ing those geographies that have been annexed to its story so as to enhance
its transcendental significance: for example, Egypt, Mesopotamia and
Greece), a gesture has been made to the rest of the world by including a
selection of works from Africa, Oceania and the Americas. We are informed
that this is a prelude to a much more systematic representation of world `art'
in a renovated Musée de l'Homme(!). Whether or not the drabness inflicted
on diverse cultural artifacts because of their categorization as `art' will be
avoided in this new setting remains to be seen.
It is perhaps because of the failure of the ideology of modernism, our current
reluctance to subscribe to an evolutionary view of artistic development, that
allows us to rethink the heroic narrative of western art history in the 20th
century. It is now possible to pay attention to what had necessarily to be
neglected if that narrative was to be accorded the power and privilege it
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demanded. For example, it is now possible to consider South African post-
Impressionists and Brazilian surrealists without rejecting and subordinating
them on the grounds of their alleged lack of `originality'. There is a new
generation of scholars at work attempting to understand the significance of
western-inspired artistic forms developed in non-western circumstances.
Often their stories have an `Alice in Wonderland' quality to them. We go
through the looking glass as we realize that what had one kind of meaning in
Paris or New York had quite another in Johannesburg or Rio de Janeiro. Even
if the scholars engaged in this project happen to be, say, South African or
Brazilian, they encounter the histories of the art of their own cultures
through a lens imposed on them by the dominant story of Euro-American
modernism. The value of the new work is that it serves to demonstrate that
the success of the dominant story depends on power relations between
industrialized and non-industrialized nations rather than on rational neces-
sity. Another important dimension of this work is that it allows us to gauge
the extent to which artists active at the hegemonic centers of the western
narrative were aware of artistic developments in other places, even if this
knowledge was often repressed. The value of these developments, it seems
to me, lies not in replacing one type of history with another, but to compli-
cate and relativize what we once regarded as `the' story.
Just as the passing of a modernist aesthetic allows us to tell new and differ-
ent stories about the aesthetic histories of the non-western world, so the
introduction of visual studies enables us to pay attention to forms of visual
creativity that previously have been ignored due to art history's dedication
to the canon of `high' art. Even if the `new art history' extended the art-
historical canon by attending to overlooked artists and works by insisting that
the variety of subject positions from which the history of art might be told
mattered, much of its energy remained focused on those works to which
traditional art history had dedicated its attention. The arrival of visual studies
in a context of aesthetic relativism means that art historians can no longer fall
back on an inherited canon to guarantee our professional activities without
betraying a lack of self-awareness about the nature of what we do. While the
construction of local and specific `aesthetic communities' characterized by
their unique characteristics seems a necessary dimension of what aesthetics
might currently mean, these communities still exist in the context of aesthetic
judgments that have the backing of the dominant artistic institutions of
the West. While it may now be possible for us to do justice to the aesthetic
potential of what Garcia Canclini calls the `industrialized arts' of television,
advertising and the new media, the traditional canon of painting and sculp-
ture may still be assigned a privileged status, within art history at any rate, in
relation to other forms of visual culture.
The real opportunities of our current situation (and this is where these ideas
are affecting both my teaching and writing) seem to lie in the way in which
revised notions of both history and aesthetics allow us to rethink the nature of
our scholarly work. Non-Hegelian philosophies of history (Benjamin, Foucault)
and non-universalizing approaches to aesthetics (Bennett, Shohat and Stam)
invest the study of the visual with new philosophical and political relevance.
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MAH: One of the insistent issues that has been perplexing me in my role as
director of a research institute is: `What does research in art history today
mean anyway?' The scientific paradigm that once-upon-a-time kept art
history focused on empirical data is undeniably bankrupt when it comes to
its legitimation as a discipline in the humanities. Consequently, the concept
of research needs some investigation so as to elicit its philosophical implica-
tions and commitments. The same goes for visual studies.
And something more besides. What worries me most is that the scurrying
about in the name of research that goes on in visual studies, as well as art
history, loses something along the way. Heidegger once put it this way: `Art-
historical study makes the works the objects of a science ... In all this busy
activity do we encounter the work itself?' (1971: 40). The manipulations and
maneuvers of any research paradigm can contribute to the process of strip-
ping the work of its awe, the awe that makes art still matter. I guess what I
am still troubled by is the loss of wonder in the writing about the visual. I
hear you challenge me: `Doesn't research resist, by necessity and necessarily
so, the "wonder" that is at the heart of the aesthetic experience?' I understand
that question. Just so that we don't envelop ourselves in the pernicious haze
of art appreciation, we need to ask those insistent questions about why? For
whom? According to which archive? etc. On the other hand, I sense that some
of contemporary visual studies so willingly seems not only to have found the
glib route to answering these serious questions, but also to have sacrificed a
sense of awe at the power of an overwhelming visual experience, wherever
it might be found, in favor of an easy identification of the `political' connec-
tions that lie beneath the surface of this or that representation. To me, that's
neither good `research' nor serious understanding. All I am saying is that
there are many times when I yearn for something that is `in excess of
research'. But `what is that wonder?', I hear you ask. And where did it go?
Can we get it back? Why do we want it back? How do we generate the very
conditions for `wonder' to take place ­ whether it's a more philosophical or
a critical `wonder' at the character of archives, art objects, artifacts, whatever,
in their specificity and singularity, how they work, mean, fail to be intelligible,
etc? These are undoubtedly incisive questions, ones that cut to the pulsating
heart of art history. The art of art history. The romance of research. The
recreation, in words, of a thoroughgoing visual encounter. Hasn't this visual
`pull' also something to do with aesthetics? Does the act of writing in either
art history or visual studies yearn towards a recreation of a visual `aesthetic'
experience, even if there is little or none there to be found? Is the desire to
write about a subject the first `aesthetic' choice? Or does it, rather, lie in our
histories?
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Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Mark A. Cheetham is a Professor in the Graduate Department of History
of Art and Director of the Canadian Studies Program at the University of
Toronto. His current work includes a book titled Abstract Art Since the `60s:
Against Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and the co-
edited collection Editing the Image (with Elizabeth Legge and Catherine
Soussloff, University of Toronto Press, forthcoming).
Cheetham et al. Visual Studies, Historiography and Aesthetics 89
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Address: Department of Fine Art, University of Toronto, Room 6036, Sidney
Smith Hall, 100 St George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada. [email:
mark.cheetham@utoronto.ca]
Michael Ann Holly is Director of the Research and Academic Program at
the Clark Art Institute and Co-founder of the Visual and Cultural Studies
Program at the University of Rochester. Her writings focus on the history of
art history and critical theory.
Address: Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA.
[email: mholly@clarkart.edu]
Keith Moxey is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor at Barnard College
and Columbia University. He is interested in the philosophy of history and
historiography as well as the history of Flemish and German art of the 15th
and 16th centuries.
Address: Department of Art History, Barnard Hall, 3009 Broadway, New
York, NY 10027, USA. [email: pm154@columbia.edu]
journal of visual culture 4(1)90
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