Writing (and) the History of Art
Author(s): Paul Barolsky, David Carrier, Ivan Gaskell, Joseph Kosuth and Linda Schele
Source: The Art Bulletin , Sep., 1996, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Sep., 1996), pp. 398-416
Published by: CAA
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3046192
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A RANGE OF CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES
Writing (and) the History of Art
Writing Art History
Paul Barolsky
Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out
tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to
move the stars to pity.
-Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Art-historical writing is for the most part clotted with jargon
and larded with cliche, impenetrable in its density, analytic
and contentious to a fault, and, worst of all, utterly predictable.
Too often lugubrious, the industrialized prose of
professional art history is a sorry affair. This fact is well
known to some art historians and even one editor of this
journal recently asked, if somewhat perfunctorily, where had
"the poetry" gone from such writing? There are, of course,
exceptions to this generalization of which we all have our
favorite examples, but these do not provide much solace.
To be sure, writing art history is not the same thing as
creating poetry or fiction, but one wonders why art history
cannot share some of the qualities of imaginative literature,
why such prose should not be beautiful, playful, witty, and
inspiring-in short, a pleasure to read. Why, one wonders,
cannot art history tell a good story and tell it well, that is, with
drama, excitement, and, above all, with a lively, indeed
vibrant language? Many art historians are, like poets and
novelists, passionate about art, about its theory and circumstances,
but their language, often neutralized to the point of
desiccation, does not reveal the passion that drives their
scholarship, that reflects their-dare I say it?-love of art. I
know art historians who read Proust and James, masters of
language, but who themselves write in leaden prose, as if they
had nothing to learn from our great writers. I know art
historians whose eyes sparkle with life when they talk about
art but whose prose is stillborn on the page when they write
about it. Why cannot art historians learn to write in artful
forms worthy of the art they interpret?
I think the answer to these questions is relatively simple.
Most art historians who write do not think of themselves as
writers, even though, paradoxically enough, that is what they
are-by definition. If art historians thought of themselves as
writers, most of them would have to face the fact that they are
indeed bad writers, uninspired and uninspiring. Even many
art historians who are good writers by art-historical standards,
to the extent that there are standards in the field, are
at best ordinary by higher criteria of prose style. Professional
art historians do not conceive of themselves as writers
because they are not trained to think in such terms. They are
rigorously schooled in theory, methods, historiography, and
scholarly techniques (stylistic analysis, iconography, patronage,
and so on), but writing is something to which only lip
service is paid in graduate training. If anything, profession
art historians are encouraged to distrust writing that is
enthusiastic or rich in metaphor. I have a friend, an art
historian of international distinction, who often says that i
she reads a scholarly work that is entertaining, she is
immediately suspicious. Many art historians are fearful that
aspiring to write an entertaining prose, they will give th
impression of unseriousness, even of frivolousness, that their
prose will be mistaken for mere "belletrism" or "apprecia
tion"-as if graceful prose and seriousness of purpose wer
incompatible.
Neither the "old" art history nor the self-styled "new" art
history has a monopoly on bad or even dull writing. Traditional
art history has been written in the form of the scholarly
monograph or article, types of writing that often, but not
always, have tended to abstract art from life by reducing it to
formulas-sequences of forms, symbols, and conventions,
like so many flavorless linked sausages. The more recent art
history has been less concerned with art than with the
circumstances in which it was made, especially with patronage
and with the social, economic, political, and institutional
factors that shape art. The writing of this kind of art history is
often, however, equally lifeless, pedantic, and without grace.
The story of an artist or of a patron, as of a work of art, should
be a good story, a story told well. Old or new, art history has
often not been a story at all, certainly not a lively, exciting
story; rather, it has defined itself as an accumulation of
arguments, documents, attributions, or theoretical speculations.
No wonder, therefore, that for all the conferences,
symposia, articles, books, anthologies dedicated year in and
year out to both traditional themes and recent concerns with
art-historical interpretation-indeed with "what's wrong with
art history?"-virtually no attention is given to the simple
question of how we write, of how our style of writing is
intimately related to what we have to say. For all our
theoretical dissatisfaction, we are utterly complacent about
our own bad writing.
The situation I describe is not peculiar to art history, for it
is part of a broader scholarly malaise rooted in the professionalization
of scholarship in the nineteenth century to which we
are heir. The study of art and literature, of history and other
related disciplines, came to be seen as a kind of "science,"
and although we have moved beyond such a misguided
conception of historical studies, we have not stripped ourselves
of its baggage-that of writing in pedantic, often
astringent, overly analytic, and technical prose. Even historians,
to whom art historians are related, since after all art
history is a form of history, have acknowledged a problem
overlooked by their cousins, the art historians, that of
"narrative," or "plot," of having a good story to tell. Historians
began not so many years ago to miss the story in their
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WRITING (AND) THE HISTORY OF ART 399
technical analyses, and they pointed to the exceptional,
exemplary, almost novelistic book by Carlo Ginzburg, The
Cheese and the Worms, as a salutary sign of the return to
narrative, to storytelling. Another book that comes similarly
to mind here is the deeply imaginative, vividly told, and
profoundly scholarly biography Machiavelli in Hell, by Sebastian
de Grazia. I know almost nothing like these books in art
history, good stories well written, well told, nothing remotely
like Iris Origo's extraordinarily entertaining and learned The
Merchant ofPrato.
We are so fully absorbed in our own scholarly procedures,
lost in our own habits of mind, that we do not reflect much
upon the simple fact that as professional art historians we
have cut ourselves off from the imaginative tradition of
writing about art that extends from Philostratus to Dante,
Vasari, Bellori, Diderot, and Winckelmann. We read such
writers for historical reasons to see what we might learn
about past thought, but it does not occur to us to consider
what we might learn from these exemplary authors as
writers. Their tradition did not die, however; we merely
removed ourselves from it. It remained alive in the nineteenth
century in the writings of Goethe, Gautier, Taine,
Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Pater, and it survives in our own century,
for example, in the work of Proust, Claudel, and Ortega. We
sometimes study these writers for what they tell us about
changing taste or attitudes. We seek to distance ourselves,
however, from their "poetry," from their "impressionism,"
doing so at a price, for we cut ourselves off from rich veins of
narrative and metaphor, from the tools of vivid writing. The
imaginative tradition of writing about art remains alive today
in the poetry and prose of numerous poets. In our own
country, Mark Strand, Richard Howard, Gjertrud Schnackenberg,
Richard Wilbur, and W. D. Snodgrass are among the
authors who have written with gusto, power, and learning
about art, even though they were not "trained" in the
techniques of art-historical analysis. These poets, not we art
historians, have best articulated what art has to do with life,
why it matters.
The success of poetical writers depends not only on their
literary craft but also on their accessibility. Whereas we write
dryly and spiritlessly for each other, often only for those in
our particular branch of art history, these poets, often deft
essayists, address themselves to a broader audience of nonspecialists,
once called the "common reader," although
admittedly such readers are less common than they once
were. We have more than a little to learn from such
imaginative writers about how to look and how to describe
what we see, about the exposition of ideas, about the very
language of description, about the ways of explaining the
relations of art to life in a manner that is both intelligent and
inspiring, even to nonspecialists-in short, about the very
sense of an audience.
The dreariness of art-historical writing is so acute that it is
not uncommon for readers of this journal, presumably the
premier journal of art history in the land, to glance through
an issue when it arrives and to read only the reviews of books
in their particular fields before putting it aside. Subscribers
are not inspired to read because the articles are often dense
and opaque, which is not to say they are unlearned or
unoriginal. Unappetizing and indeed uninviting, they frequently
do not welcome the reader. Their tone is sometimes
contentious, and here we come to one of the central factors in
bad scholarly writing. For contentiousness, which runs deep
in the discipline, breeds bad writing. It is trained into us at
the earliest stages of our professional education when as
young scholars we are taught to analyze scholarly literature
in order to find fault and error-an easy thing to do because
no work is beyond criticism in some respect. Trained assassins,
scholars become skilled at shooting holes in the work of
others. This fact has consequences for writing itself, because
it makes scholars aware that they are similarly vulnerable to
attack. And so, as they themselves write, they build bastions
and bunkers in words, fortifying their arguments with endless
examples, qualifications, details, and footnotes in an
effort to forestall attack. Such defensiveness breeds prose
that is dry, fussy, nervous, overwritten: in short, bad writing.
The desperate attempt to defend oneself cramps one's very
style. Knowing that all generalizations are vulnerable, scholars
will often resist making them, but at a price. For writing
void of generalization is void of general interest.
As scholars, we tend to overwrite, that is, to press our
evidence too hard, frequently to bury our readers in detail or
minutiae. I have never read an art-historical article or book
that could not have been improved by editing, by compression
into a tighter form. I think we can abridge our writing,
reduce the bulk of "evidence" we present without sacrificing
our ideas or arguments, in this way making what we say more
inviting and understandable. Brevity is itself an art, the art of
clarifying ideas, even complex and difficult ideas, making
them more lucid and accessible. It is born of the process of
winnowing away one's prose, of distilling and refining one's
ideas, and laying them bare-the very antithesis of scholarly
accumulation or piling on of examples or of "arguments
from authority."
Such brevity is exemplified by that supreme form of artful
prose, the essay. As an experiment in speaking briefly, the
essay stands in an almost polar relation to the scholarly
article. Whereas the article aspires to be definitive, the essay,
more flexible, is suggestive. And here we come to the heart of
the problem. As scholars, we tend to overinterpret, to offer
overly reductive interpretations. Our inferences, hypotheses,
speculations, no matter how hard we press them, are at best
hunches. We would do better to present our guesses as such
rather than disguise them in the fiction of conclusiveness.
The essay is the perfect vehicle for suggestiveness.
How one writes is a matter of imitation and, I believe, we
have much to learn from our finest essayists, no matter what
their subject. Italo Calvino is an exemplary figure whose
Lezioni Americane, translated as Six Memos for the Next Millennium,
are rich and scholarly despite their brevity. In these
essays, Calvino celebrates qualities that he finds in imaginative
literature and that we find in his prose: leggerezza, which
might be translated as "lightness of touch"; rapiditd, which I
prefer to call the "pace" of one's prose; esattezza, or precision
of detail (not incompatible with suggestiveness); visibilitd, the
power to make visible with language; and molteplicitd, or
variety. Calvino's lightness of touch and pace, which allows
him to wear his learning lightly, is an example to us all. I can
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400 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1996 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 3
well imagine essays on the arts of Africa, Raphael, Berthe
Morisot, Pre-Columbian sculpture, and any number of other
art-historical subjects written with the same swiftness, sparkle,
and gossamerlike prose that we find in Calvino by contrast to
the plodding arguments we ordinarily make in our traditionally
grave scholarly discourse. I can equally imagine essays on
Gothic architecture, Chinese landscape painting, Botticelli,
the arts of the French Revolution, and Rajput miniatures all
written with the same deftness, wit, cunning, and scholarly
precision that we find in Nabokov's Lectures on Literatureessays
that open our eyes rather than close them as we nod
off under the weight of scholarly gravity. We may not be born
with the literary gifts of a Calvino or a Nabokov, but we can
learn from them about concision, vivacity, and metaphor,
about celebrating the joys of art and its history in a poetic
prose that itself gives pleasure. As Calvino says: "I think
pleasure is a serious matter."
Many of the qualities we find in Nabokov and Calvino and
in our finest essayists abound in one of the most magical
books on art and its history to appear in years, Charles
Simic's Dime-Store Alchemy, a brief prose-poem or series of
prose-poems that not only evokes the art and life of Joseph
Cornell but is also ultimately a meditation on artistic imagination.
I have read this slim volume many times, and each time
it has metamorphosed itself into another, quite different
book. Rarely have I encountered a discussion so suggestive of
what art is and does to us. Read slowly, Simic's book will yield
up many secrets. Were I to teach a course on art theory or
methods I would surely assign Dime-Store Alchemy to my
students. No matter that it does not pretend to offer a key to
art based on philosophy, linguistics, science, anthropology,
psychology, theology, or any other form of the reductionism
that clips the wings of imagination. Rather, Simic's alchemical
prose mimics the rhythms of art and stimulates the reader
to approach art on artful terms. In such a course I would have
students read Borges's little book, Seven Nights, to show them
how a scholar, as Borges surely was, can approach such
subjects as Dante, Buddhism, or nightmares with a nimbleness
and ease that serve as models for how we might write
about the arts of Persia or Picasso.
In such a seminar I would explain to my students that
many of the thorniest theoretical issues of interpretation of
our day are grappled with by such writers as Calvino,
Nabokov, and Borges, even though they do not speak of
"theory" as such or use a technical vocabulary. I would
remind them that, after all, "theory" (for all our academic
window dressing) is, in the root sense of the word, how one
"sees," and I would encourage students to find a language as
precise and evocative as possible to describe what they see. I
would remind them that they are writers, and I would
encourage them to develop in their prose their own sensibilities,
their own style, urging that there are potentially far
more ways of writing about art than they might realize, some
of which have yet to be envisioned or invented. I would
encourage them to resist the easy "truths" of current academic
fashion and remind them that they belong to a
tradition of writing about art far broader and deeper than
the parochially professionalized study of art history suggests.
I would have them realize that although at least one distinguished
scholar has written what is called "the" story of art,
there are, of course, many stories of art, some of which have
yet to be told, and that all of these stories can be written with
passion, clarity, and wit.
In a broad sense, all art, even abstract or decorative art, is
in some measure representational, and as such is an illusion
or at least allusive, even when its meaning is elusive. The
word "illusion" is rooted in the word ludere, "to play,"
reminding us that all art, no matter how serious, is a form of
play-whether we speak of the carving of a surprising animal
head on a walking stick, the improbable grotesques on the
frame of an altarpiece, the witty, plantlike arabesques of
stucco on a bedroom wall, the rusticated stones that play
upon the fagade of a palace, or the fabulous beasts that
slither across the page of an illuminated manuscript. What
might well be restored to the study of art is the sheer delight
of observing such play for its own sake, the joy of seeing the
very play of the imagination, of finding suggestive but
informed ways of describing the play of the artist's fantasy. I
do not advocate a programmatic approach to art or the
writing of art history, for systematic approaches to scholarship
only generate dogmas, schools, formulas, epigonism,
and passing fashion, and we have already had plenty of that.
I advocate instead a sensitivity to the art historian's potential
as a writer with the capacity to tell a good story, to describe
works of art vividly and suggestively, indeed beautifully. I
dream of an art history that is learned, imaginative, sensible,
theoretically sophisticated, well wrought, and thus worthy of
the very art it celebrates. I dream of an art history that, itself
artful, is a pleasure to read.
Commonwealth Professor of the History of Art at the University of
Virginia, Paul Barolsky is the author of several books, which
include Michelangelo's Nose, Why Mona Lisa Smiles, Infinite
Jest, and The Faun in the Garden. He has recently been
rereading Keats [Mclntire Department of Art, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, Va. 22903].
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WRITING (AND) THE HISTORY OF ART 401
Artcriticism-writing, Arthistorywriting,
and Artwriting
David Carrier
I speak of artcriticism-writing and arthistory-writing to emphasize
differences between two modes of writing about
visual art; and mention what I call artwriting to allude to
shared concerns of critics and art historians. Compare and
contrast, for example, two samples of artwriting:
1977: a college sophomore, naive, addicted to obfuscation,
I visited the Jasper Johns retrospective ... with my
friend, a violinist with the eyes of a Bellini Madonna... I
wished to impress her ... I wanted to be straight, to be a
guy. Could the museum help?
The painting that galvanized me was In Memory of My
Feelings-Frank O'Hara, 1961 ... primarily because it
prompted me to read O'Hara.
The format .. . a horizontal rectangle with a smaller
rectangle marked out in the upper left, suggests the
design of the American flag; as if it is meant to be a
"memory" of the original 1954-55 Flag ....
Picasso is the only artist prior to Johns . . who actually
focused attention on silverware in some of his works.
The hinges joining the two panels are references to
previous still lifes....
The silverware and hinges are most likely intended to
be Duchampian references as well.'
The differences between Wayne Kostenbaum's art-critical
and Roberta Bernstein's art-historical accounts are so striking
that it may seem surprising to find that they describe the
same artwork.
"Experimenting with voice." a critic has written, "is one of
this job's greatest pleasures."2 Any number of art historians
are excellent writers, but I cannot imagine an Art Bulletin
contributor saying that. One real, too little acknowledged
pleasure associated with artcriticism-writing is perversely
enjoying writers whose voices are opposed to one's own. I
enjoy the voices of Benjamin H. D. Buchloch, Hal Foster,
and Hilton Kramer in the way that Roland Barthes loved
reading Ignatius Loyola, Charles Fourier, and the Marquis
de Sade. This is not to urge that criticism can be read
apolitically, especially today when much art is explicitly
concerned with politics. But it is to point to the literary
aspects of such texts. Like a lyrical poet, Kostenbaum creates
a convincing voice. Who wouldn't read on to learn why he
found In Memory of My Feelings-Frank O'Hara so special? By
contrast, Bernstein, who elsewhere mentions her long friendship
with Johns, writes as an art historian, distanced and
objective.
Writing as an art critic, Linda Nochlin responds subjectively
to the work of Lucian Freud, whose "representation of
the male genitalia makes one wonder why his grandfather
believed so fervently in penis envy: why would anyone not
already encumbered with one want that pathetic, flaccid,
droopy excrescence?"3 Since she has championed Philip
Pearlstein, how unexpected is her reaction to what a less
imaginative reviewer might identify as relatively straightforward
nudes. When, by contrast, Nochlin writes about Courbet,
she writes as an art historian. Acknowledging her
subjectivity-"I am a woman quite consciously reading as a
woman"-she identifies Courbet's woman in The Painter's
Studio "as a Baudelairian type," setting this painting
relation to various nineteenth-century paintings and phot
graphs.4
Art critics will find it surprising that in a collection of
writings on "the new art history" an essay by the feminist film
critic Constance Penley is praised because "one of its most
notable features [is] . . . its refusal to enact the familiar kind
of distance between inquirer and object of inquiry that is
normally expected of scholarship in the humanities."5 Surprising
because such a refusal comes naturally to the critic.
When, for example, he writes about Courbet, Peter Schjeldahl
says: "Sex is the key to Courbet. Like Whitman ...
Courbet kept the business of life simple: possess everything
that possesses you. When he painted The Origin of the World
. . Somebody should probably have punched Courbet in the
jaw."6 By contrast, when in her account of the Arnolfini
Portrait, Linda Seidel adopts a personal tone-a natural
procedure nowadays in discussing a painting about marriage
and property-her subjective engagement with these issues
builds upon traditions of commentary: "Having argued
throughout against the notion of detached scholarship, I
acknowledge in conclusion ... that my concern with the
generation of refugee art historians who were my first
teachers was not simply an academic interest."7
For art critics, there is often no distance between them and
the object of inquiry. This is why critics, so many of them
poets, seem unlike scholars. I cannot speak for you, nor you
for me; I need not worry whether my present account is
consistent with what I wrote earlier. I can only speak for
myself right here and now. Notwithstanding the attempts of
so many theorists to undermine this autonomy of visual
thinking and any such appeal to the immediate presence of
the artwork or this conception of a "voice," total trust in
direct experience is a natural way of thinking for us critics.
Now and then texts revealingly fall in between this division
between artcriticism-writing and arthistory-writing. Bill Berkson's
essay on Piero della Francesca, detailed in its analysis of
the literature, reveals his interests as critic when it identifies
perspective as "the crux of how his people keep their balance
staunchly in the world we know, the world of contingencies,
1. W. Kostenbaum, "Jasper Johns: In Memory of My Feelings--Frank
O'Hara, 1961," Artforum, xxxII, no. 7, 1994, 75; R. Bernstein, Jasper Johns'
Paintings and Sculptures, 1954-1974: "The Changing Focus of the Eye," Ann
Arbor, 1985, 80.
2. H. Muschamp, "Critical Reflections," Artforum, xxxIII, no. 9, 1995, 73.
3. L. Nochlin, "Frayed Freud," Artforum, xxxII, no. 7, 1994, 58.
4. L. Nochlin, "Courbet's Real Allegory: Rereading The Painter's Studio," in
S. Faunce and L. Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum,
Brooklyn, NY., 1988, 27, 28.
5. N. Bryson, M. A. Holly, and K. Moxey, eds., "Introduction," in Visual
Culture: Images and Interpretations, Hanover, N.H., 1994, xxvi.
6. P. Schjeldahl, The Seven Days: Art Columns, 1988-1990, Great Barrington,
Mass., 1990, 87.
7. L. Seidel, Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon, Cambridge,
1993, 225.
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402 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1996 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 3
while retaining something recognizable from elsewhere."8
Writing on historical subjects in the style of an art critic, as do
Dave Hickey, Robert Hughes, and Christopher Knight,
identifies the outsider to art history. As a critic, Sartre wrote
with authority on Giacometti, but his account of Tintoretto is
lively amateur arthistory-writing.
No doubt, as historians have told me, my view of these
issues is naive because, apart from auditing a few grandly
eloquent lectures by Meyer Schapiro, I never formally studied
art history. Since my sense of things comes from reading,
I understand artwriting by analyzing texts. For me the
interesting differences between historians and critics appear
in comparing the Art Bulletin with the art-critical journal
whose present prestige and historical importance make it the
obvious comparable American publication, Artforum. Like
this journal, Artforum has book reviews and articles with
footnotes about major artists, but it also publishes accounts
of film; columns on talk radio, politics, and rock albums;
interviews; exhibition reviews; and, of course, a great deal of
advertising. Jack Bankowsky, the editor, has defined his
program: "I do not believe that we can maintain a valid
relationship to art without attending to the larger realm of
visual culture, the advent of technologies, the movements of
peoples, the broader field that has come to be called cultural
studies."' His commissioned articles can require extensive
editorial work; and so, more than with an academic journal,
the result represents the individual editor's point of view.
After reading Artforum for almost twenty years, I never
cease to be amazed at its capacity to startle, and occasionally
to bring out the philistine in me. Its capacity for constant innovation
shows the successive editors' skill as capitalist entrepreneurs;
by contrast, the New Criterion and October, removed
from commercial pressures, have become inbred. Art criticism
still produces on occasion "know nothing" responses, as
recently in the New York Times where quotation out of context
was used to make a good clear review by Donald Kuspit
sound silly.1' Such philistine reactions arise in part because
criticism has such an obvious connection with commerce; in
some ways, Artforum, which pays contributors, must be more
like Road and Track or Vogue than an academic journal.
Reading Artforum, you feel that its writers, aware that you
are fickle and ready to break away, will do anything to keep
your attention. This carnivalesque scene, where even the
staidest academic is determined to act as wildly as possible,
feels very unlike the gray-on-gray world of art history. We art
critics remind me of myself trying to engage an auditorium of
unruly freshmen on a sunny day when they would prefer to
be outside. (Would they pay more attention to my lectures on
Descartes's Meditations, I sometimes wonder, were I dressed
up in seventeenth-century costume?) Criticism is expected to
be personal because, in the limiting case, a useful approximation,
the critic responding to work not previously written
about has only his own response to go on. In this tradition of
Diderot, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and Frank O'Hara--
represented in our day by Jan Avgikos, Gary Indiana, and
Marjorie Welish-criticism is reportage.
Today's critics and historians are quoting many of the
same texts-the literature of feminism, gay studies, cultural
studies, and poststructuralism-and rejecting formalism,
but to very different effect. For me, the most striking recent
change in Artforum has been its turn from extensive commentary
on early modernism to focus on the concerns of cultural
studies. The effect is to define a historical break, the way of
thinking presented in Fredric Jameson's much-discussed
texts. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is
as confidently far-ranging as The Phenomenology of Mind, but
what impresses me when I stop to read critically is how
selective are Jameson's examples. In sculpture, Robert Gober,
not Catherine Lee or William Tucker, who have more
concern with tradition; in painting, Andy Warhol, not Catherine
Murphy's realism or Elizabeth Murray's abstractions." Is
there then a real break in history, or is "postmodernism"
merely the result of a novel style of narration? I find that
question hard to answer.
What implicitly defines a period style, it might be said, is
that figure whose views are rejected by everyone. The period
style of our "postmodernist" artwriting is defined by ritualistic
denunciations of Clement Greenberg, and in art history
by the figure who plays a similar role, Ernst Gombrich, whose
rejection of semiotic theories and feminism and association
with liberalism make him the enemy of "the new art history."'2
Despite Gombrich's book on decoration and his
pioneering work on comics, his theorizing is seen as centered
on European high culture. What most radically separates
both Greenberg and Gombrich from art critics today is their
shared emphasis upon historical continuity. Just as Gombrich
finds continuity from Giotto to Constable, so Greenberg
emphasizes tradition in the history of modernism.
Finding continuity requires a master narrative underplaying
differences in favor of some deeper unity over time. In
looking at the historical record, it is always possible to find
both continuity and discontinuity. It would be possible to
describe the best-known 1980s artists in terms of tradition:
Barbara Kruger, it could be said, follows John Heartfield;
David Salle surely learned from Roy Lichtenstein; and Cindy
Sherman's photographs are related to Surrealist images of
women. But that way of thinking has not been successful.
No doubt this felt need for a "postmodernist" historical
break was overdetermined. We needed our own period style;
and this break is described by reference to the economics of
"late-Capitalism"; perhaps such technologies as the personal
computer, e-mail, the video disk, and the associated changes
in our conception of public space require that art achieve
radical novelty. And economic issues have some importance.
Art history could continue even if no new art were being
made, so long as there were interestingly new ways of
describing earlier work. But art criticism, dependent upon a
gallery support system, could not continue in its present
8. B. Berkson, "What Piero Knew," Art in America, LXXXI, no. 12, 1993, 117.
9. J. Bankowsky, "Editor's Letter," Artforum, xxxII, no. 1, 1993, 3.
10. D.J. Schemo, "The Jabberwocky of Art Criticism," New York Times, Oct.
23, 1994, sec. 4: 1, 16.
11. F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
Durham, N.C., 1991, 161-72, 8-10.
12. This way of understanding Gombrich's work, Mark Roskill has reminded
me, does not take account of his early concern with semiotic
theorizing or his long-standing interest in conventions in pictorical representation.
See E. H. Gombrich, "Comment on 'Theoretical Perspectives on the
Arts, Sciences and Technology,' " Leonardo, xIII, no. 2, 1985, 126.
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WRITING (AND) THE HISTORY OF ART 403
form unless there were a felt sense that major new kinds of
artworks were being made.
Writing by critics is data for historians, who are expected to
summarize earlier commentary before presenting their own
interpretations. For the historian, tradition cannot but have
weight; even if earlier commentators be judged entirely
wrong-headed, the need to present their claims gives the
historian's argument a slower rhythm than the critic's analysis.
This procedure tends to create an effect akin to eclecticism
in painting. If a painting alludes to Watteau, Chardin,
and David, it is hard for the viewer to see that work as
transcending its references; so, analogously, if your text must
grapple with the prior commentary by Anita Brookner, T. J.
Clark, and Thomas Crow, then it is difficult to establish your
own voice. Much Artforum writing has almost no footnotes.
For a critic it suffices to say, "I like (or dislike) such-andsuch,"
and to give reasons which, upon critical reflection,
may seem highly subjective; the historian typically aspires to
objectivity. When a former editor of this journal rejected my
submission, suggesting that because the style was personal, it
belonged in a publication devoted to criticism, his action was
perfectly just. For a historian there is something odd about
writing on Matisse as if he were a hitherto unknown artist
whom the writer was the first commentator to encounter.
Writing as a philosopher, I find that what ultimately
interests me most about art criticism is the problem of truth
in interpretation. An art critic aims to speak only for him- or
herself, and so it is unsurprising thatJed Perl's view of things
differs so radically from Lynne Cooke's, or that Lucy Lippard
and John Ashbery do not see eye to eye, They are, I imagine,
pretty different people. For critics, it seems, "there is only a
perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'; and the more
affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes,
different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more
complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,'
be."13 In art history, by contrast, I expect objectivity in
interpretation. But citing Nietzsche's perspectivism merely
identifies one striking difference between artcriticismwriting
and arthistory-writing. To adequately explain the
connections between these varieties of artwriting would take
a much more extended analysis.
David Carrier is a philosopher who writes art criticism. The author
ofPoussin's Paintings, The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy
and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s,
and High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origin of Modernism,
he is working on a philosophical study of the comic strip
[Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh,
Pa. 15213].
Writing (and) Art History:
Against Writing
Ivan Gaskell
Do we need to write or speak about art in order to express
coherent ideas about it? No. Philosophers, as well as critical
and psychoanalytical theorists, have long discussed the
linguistic articulation of visual and other sensory apprehension.1
Although I would follow Wittgenstein and Heidegger
in acknowledging that linguistic structure as a mode of
ordering constitutes the depth structure of experience, here
I shall suggest that interesting demonstration need not
necessarily be predominantly linguistic in the iterative or
textual sense. I shall discuss a way of dealing with art that
minimizes speaking and writing. While ordering is necessary
to this practice, speaking and writing are not. Further, I shall
argue that this practice is critical as distinct from arthistorical,
and is properly conducted in art museums.
The consideration of practical criticism in art museums is
part of a wider discussion of interpretation. In an earlier
essay I distinguished between history and art history, even
when both are concerned with visual material. Both historians
and art historians can use visual material for their
respective disciplinary ends, though those ends, and
means of achieving them, may differ.2 Here I intend
distinguish between art history and a specific form of cr
cism. I wish in particular to draw a distinction between t
proper concerns of academic art historians (mostly teach
in tertiary education) and art-museum scholars. The la
are practical critics who put critical judgments into predom
nantly physical, rather than written, form (and are thereb
be distinguished from critical essayists and theorists).
There is bound to be some overlap in the practice
academic art historians and art-museum scholars, some
considerable sharing of concerns and procedures. They are
members of the same family. University art history is the
grandchild of four eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forebears:
amateur scholarship, commercial scholarship, Kantian
and Hegelian aesthetics and history, and museum scholarship.3
We might now credibly imagine museum scholarship,
having engendered university art history, standing ready to
13. F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann, New
York, 1967, 119.
I am grateful to Salim Kemal for his comments on an earlier version of this
paper.
1. In the late 6th century B.c. Heraclitus stated, e.g., "Eyes and ears are
poor witnesses for men if their souls do not understand the language";
Fragment xvI: Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought ofHeraclitus: An Edition of
the Fragments with Translation and Commentary, Cambridge, 1979, 34-35,
106-7. Between the 4th century B.c. and the present day many thinkers have
had interesting things to say on this question: Aristotle, John Locke, Bishop
Berkeley, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to name but four. For a recent discussion,
see The Language of Art History, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell,
Cambridge, 1991, with many further references.
2. See Ivan Gaskell, "The History of Images," in New Perspectives on
Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, Cambridge/University Park, Pa., 1991,
168-92. This essay was intended primarily for historians. I examined several
art-historical and historical aspects of the study of visual material discussing
four topics: authorship, canonicity, interpretation, and history.
3. Henceforward I use the terms "museum scholarship" and "museum
scholar(s)" to denote the profession and its practitioners in art museums. I do
this merely for the sake of convenience, and without wishing to imply a
hegemonic attitude toward museums as a whole. Museum taxonomy is
obviously a highly problematic issue well beyond the scope of this essay,
though I acknowledge that much material of visual interest in the extended
context of "art" is to be found in museums that are not art museums.
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404 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1996 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 3
"gg,4
..........~??-.::~~~'
1 View of the exhibition "What, If Any
Is an Object?" organized by Clive Diln
Ivan Gaskell, Fogg Art Museum, 1994
(photo: Evelyn Rosenthal)
detach itself from its grandchild in order to develop further
as a quite distinct intellectual and scholarly practice.4 That
practice is in essence critical (in a more direct sense than that
in which art history is critical) and interdisciplinary. Academic
art history is also obviously amenable to interdisciplinary
practice (as witness the discussion in these pages by Carlo
Ginzburg and others),5 but the ingredients differ from the
interdiscipline of museum scholarship. When addressing
visual material museum scholarship need give no more
weight to art-historical concerns than to anthropological,
psychoanalytical, sociological, or philosophical concerns (to
name but four). Indeed, there are occasions when art history,
however constituted, is an irrelevance to museum scholarship,
and its intrusion is actually obfuscatory or worse (a
claim I substantiate with an example below). That is, museums
can legitimately treat objects of visual interest as having
no pasts, and as occupying no field other than the immediate
circumstances of those museums themselves. (I would not
argue, however, that to do so exclusively would be responsible
museum practice: I merely seek to demonstrate that the
constitutions of art history and museum scholarship as
interdisciplines differ.)
Although many other responsibilities are equally legitimate
for museum scholars (such as the acquisition of objects,
the conservation of objects in consultation with conservators
and scientists, advising members of the public about objects
in their possession, and deaccessioning, if permitted), I
believe that the public presentation of visual material itself
must be their core concern. Further, I suggest that this is the
case not for reasons of social responsibility or social expectations,
but rather as an implicit condition of the nature of
museum scholarship itself: that is, it would be so even if
museum scholars were the only viewers of the displays they
contrive. I know that there are those who view responsibility
for the public presentation of visual material as a distraction
from scholarship, just as there are university teachers who
view teaching as a distraction from activities they greatly
prefer for fair reasons, including research and publication.
We should beware of drawing too close an analogy between
teaching and preparing displays when comparing the professions,
even though some institutions, both museums and
universities, have legitimated such distinctions by promoting
organizational hierarchies whereby relief from teaching duties
on the one hand and from exhibit preparation on the
other-in favor of the opportunity to conduct uninterrupted
research-is given a position of institutional privilege. Ideally,
teaching is an exchange between equals in which there is
a disparity of experience but not of intelligence (on the
Oxford and Cambridge model). In practice, this is frequently
not the case and understandable impatience with the process
on the part of the teacher results. For the museum scholar
the ideals of exhibit preparation can also be frustrated by the
intrusion of questionable assumptions about the character of
expected or intended viewing constituencies, but the accommodation
of viewers' legitimate expectations is an integral
part of the preparation of any display where the museum
scholar is as much a viewer with expectations as anybody else.
That is, the process by which museum scholars construct
exhibits is the unavoidable process of visual scholarship
itself: it is necessarily heuristic and informs all else they do. In
this it differs in practice from much teaching.
Further, in the execution of this responsibility, the museum
scholar's principal medium is not the written word, but
rather visual material itself and its physical setting (that is,
exhibits). This means principally, though not exclusively,
public presentation by means of gallery displays, whether
temporary or long-term. The written word is, of course, an
important adjunct to such exhibits, incorporated both within
them and in accompanying publications. The documentation
of visual material, which calls for the maintenance of
records, the pursuit of art-historical scholarship, and the
publication of permanent collection catalogues, is vital but
secondary. These secondary responsibilities might be said to
constitute one area of overlap with art-historical practice of
the kind mentioned above. However, if public presentation
by means of exhibits is the core responsibility of the museum
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WRITING (AND) THE HISTORY OF ART 405
2 Constantin Brancusi, Hand of Mademoiselle Pogany, 1920,
yellow marble. Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum, Harvard
University Art Museums, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Max Wasserman,
1964.110 (photo: Harvard University Art Museums)
scholar (both as a functional, social responsibility and as a
way of furthering scholarship for diffusion by other means),
and such presentation can legitimately be informed by
non-art-historical concerns-even by concerns antipathetic
to art history-those concerns will legitimately also inform
the execution of responsibilities that have an art-historical
component, such as documentation and cataloguing. As
museum scholarship changes we shall see progressive changes
in the execution of these text-based tasks.
As promised, I shall provide one brief example of museum
display as non-art-historical, practical critical scholarship.
Between January and July 1994 the Fogg Art Museum held a
small exhibition entitled "What, If Anything, Is an Object?"
(Fig. 1). It was the result of a collaboration between myself
and Clive Dilnot, then associate professor of visual and
environmental studies at Harvard University. We took one
object of visual interest-Constantin Brancusi's Hand of
Mademoiselle Pogany (Fig. 2)-and placed it in a gallery at the
center of a conceptual field governed by two centrally
intersecting axes denoting "representation-function," and
"cognition-decoration." Other objects were distributed within
the field with respect to their share of one or more of these
qualities and their corollaries. These objects of visual interest,
drawn from many cultures and time periods, were
selected to exhibit formal similarities when juxtaposed, as
well as conceptual relationships. The objects included ancient
Roman terra-cotta votive body parts, a Marshall Islands
navigation chart made of palm-leaf midribs, two Inuit ivory
snow knives, and a group of Phillipe Starck "biomorphic"
toothbrushes. The selection and arrangement of these objects
transgressed all art-historical considerations. Although
quotations from texts concerning the relationship between
people and objects were placed high on the gallery walls and
the axes were inscribed, no labels were included beside the
individual objects on display in order to banish textual
intrusion from the sensual (specifically visual) field. (All the
objects could be identified by consulting a handlist.) The
relationships that viewers were invited to perceive were
wholly non-art-historical: indeed, they were of a kind usually
inhibited by art-historical criteria. Instead, viewers were
presented with an opportunity to explore the complex
possibilities of relationships between objects and the people
who use them. Furthermore, Brancusi's sculpture was given
the opportunity to work in quite another way from that
normally encountered in museums or described in arthistorical
texts. The exhibit was a wholly sensual (visual)
exercise in cognition.
Although enthusiastically received (by the press and visitors,
according to an evaluative survey), public access to
"What, If Anything, Is an Object?" was, in fact, incidental to
our collaborative research, which could only be carried out
by the very process of creating and subsequently examining
that display itself. This is not to say, however, that either
Clive Dilnot or I considered public access to be anything
other than desirable. Although I would be the first to
acknowledge that the exhibit was stimulated by ideas expressed
in written form, and that the project was subsequently
published as a scholarly article,6 my point here is that
museum scholarship as practical criticism took a form both
non-art-historical and atextual. This, and not the writing of
art history, seems to me to be the unique business of the
museum scholar.
We may well ask, in this case, why in the United States at
least do we expect art-museum scholars to have doctoral
degrees in art history conferred by universities? If we regard
such an attainment as something more than a general
education-that is, as the functional acquisition of knowledge
and procedures essential to the proper discharge of a
museum scholar's responsibilities-we may be justified in
asking whether such an education is indeed anything other
than partially relevant. In supporting such assumptions by
recognizing as legitimate scholars only those museum scholars
who hold a doctoral degree, are not universities arrogating
to themselves a function not properly theirs? Are art
museums neglecting their responsibilities to educate future
scholars for their staffs by abdicating that formal role in favor
of the universities? Might we not profitably look to the
French example where university art history and artmuseum
education are entirely separate, and the fast track to
a national museum career is achieved by education at the
Ecole Nationale du Patrimoine?
I pose these questions in the hope of stimulating
discussion, one that takes nothing for granted, of the prop
professional education of museum staff. Each question obviously
raises many complex issues to which, to my knowledge
there is no simple answer. A comparison with France, f
example, may be of only limited use, for social and educ
tional circumstances are obviously culturally specific, and n
simple transfer of foreign institutional models would b
either feasible or desirable. Government in France takes a far
greater responsibility for civil society and its institutions than
is the case in the United States, where the business of
supporting and sustaining civil society has in many ways been
taken up by the universities. Nonetheless, we may wish to
4. Ivan Gaskell, "The Curator's Role: A View from the Department of
Paintings and Sculpture, Fogg Art Museum," in Harvard's Art Museums: One
Hundred Years of Collecting, Cambridge, Mass./New York, 1996, 156-61.
5. "A Range of Critical Perspectives: Inter/disciplinarity," Art Bulletin,
LXXVII, no. 4, 1995, 534-52.
6. Clive Dilnot, "The Enigma of Things," Harvard University Art Museums
Bulletin, II, no. 2, 1993-94, 54-68.
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406 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1996 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 3
entertain the possibility of a future in which professional
legitimation in the United States is conferred by a plurality of
institutions, as is the case elsewhere, rather than almost
exclusively by universities.7 In particular, we may want to
recognize more formally than at present that the ideal
preparation for a career as a museum scholar may include,
but ought not to be confined to, learning to write art history
in the form of a Ph.D. dissertation (or any other form for that
matter).
I invited a comparison between universities and art museums
as institutions and as sites of scholarship at the outset,
but I submit that this is not really to compare like with like
when we come to consider the transmission of necessary
knowledge. In this respect (and in others) the art museum
approaches more closely the hospital than it does the
university. Pierre Bourdieu has described the differences in
education conferred by medical faculties and by faculties of
arts and science.8 He demonstrates that whereas in the latter
the production and reproduction of knowledge is formalized
and transmitted rationally, medical education is the acquisition
of an internalized set of skills constituting an art. In
consequence, the relationships between the teacher-patrons
and the pupil-clients differ markedly within the two institutions.
Conditions in art museums more closely approximate
the medical model than they do those of the arts and science
faculties. Bourdieu writes:
It is indeed enough to think of the qualities required of
the "great surgeon" or the "supremo" of a hospital
department who must exercise, often with great urgency,
an art which, like that of a military leader, implies a total
mastery of the conditions of its practical accomplishment,
that is to say a combination of self-control and confidence
able to inspire confidence and dedication in others. What
the co-optation technique must discover and what the
teaching must transmit or reinforce in this case is not
knowledge, not a package of scientific knowledge, but skill
or, more exactly, the art of applying knowledge, and
applying it aptly in practice, which is inseparable from an
overall manner of acting, or living, inseparable from a
habitus.9
For Bourdieu's "'great surgeon' or the 'supremo' of a
hospital department" we need only substitute "museum
director" or "head of a curatorial department." The pupilclients
in this instance are not Ph.D. candidates (they may or
may not have received this degree), but rather interns or
junior curatorial staff. Their process of learning is one of
clientage, of accompanying a teacher-patron on his or her
rounds; and writing art history (or learning to do so) is the
least of their mutual concerns.
If we accept this analysis, it follows that the most effective
education for the future practical critic in the museum is the
internship. Many museums, with the support of both the
National Endowment for the Arts (though for how much
longer?) and private and foundation sources, offer internships
(by which I mean affiliations of at least one academic
year, not short-term visits that often go by the same name). If
art museums are to be viable sites of scholarship and
therefore have the secure foundations from which to serve
ever-broadening public constituencies effectively, more internships,
grouped in coherent programs (such as that at the
Harvard University Art Museums), are essential. University
art museums, such as Harvard's (I make no apology for
partisanship), and major museums that have fostered excellent
working relationships with university institutions, such
as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, would seem
to be the optimum sites for such educational initiatives.
Internships, ideally of at least two years' duration, should be
aimed at postdoctoral candidates, not for the sake of any
specific skills they may have acquired in the writing of art
history, but because a Ph.D. is the only way in which
Americans can acquire a general education in some depth
within an academic discipline. Only when we acknowledge
that the education of a museum scholar is more akin to that
of a physician or surgeon than to that of a university teacher
will we be able to foster visual studies proper to practical
criticism. This practical criticism is what must propel art
museums, with all their scholarly and public responsibilities,
well beyond the fulfillment of merely art-historical agendas.
There are many occasions when the writing of art history is
appropriate to the museum scholar's tasks, but it can only
ever be ancillary to the main event, which is irreducibly
visually (and otherwise sensually) defined, and constitutes a
form of criticism that I have called here practical. When we
acknowledge these conditions, the scope for fruitful interdisciplinary
exchange between museum scholars, art historians,
and others will grow enormously. Perhaps, then, ever more
interesting art-historical writing will result.
Ivan Gaskell is Margaret S. Winthrop Curator of Paintings and
head of the Department of Paintings and Sculpture at the Fogg Art
Museum. His most recent books, edited with Salim Kemal, are
Explanation and Value in the Arts (1993), and Landscape,
Natural Beauty and the Arts (1993) [Harvard University Art
Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138].
7. In Britain, e.g., admission to professions such as the law, architecture,
and accountancy is not the concern of universities, although aspirants may
have studied related subjects at a university, may have studied quite different
subjects at a university, or may not have attended a university at all.
8. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier, Cambridge/
Stanford, 1988, 53-69.
9. Ibid., 57.
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WRITING (AND) THE HISTORY OF ART 407
Intention(s)
Joseph Kosuth
Intention (Artists)
Intention is the forward-leaning look of things. It is not a
reconstituted historical state of mind, then, but a relation
between the object and its circumstances.-Michael Bax-
andall'
When art historians, even the best of them, write about
intention there seems to be a presumption that you have two
things: the work of art and the artist's intentions. As an artist
I find this, perhaps more than any other single thing, the
major division now between how artists understand their
work and how art historians see them. While the primacy of
the object has long been questioned by artists, it remains the
basis for much of the art-historical enterprise. This difference
in the two disciplines, I feel, has been brought into focus
by the issues raised by the context of art with which my own
work has been long associated: Conceptual art. Paradoxically,
it is some recent writing on this movement which has
now brought art-historical writing into a crisis of meaning of
its own.
Conceptual art, simply put, had as its basic tenet an
understanding that artists work with meaning, not with
shapes, colors, or materials. Anything can be employed by
the artist to set the work into play-including shapes, colors,
or materials-but the form of presentation itself has no value
independent of its role as a vehicle for the idea of the work.2
Thus, when you approach the work you are approaching the
idea (and therefore the intention) of the artist directly. The
'idea,' of course, can be a force that is as contingent as it is
complex, and when I have said that anything can be used by
(or as) a work of art, I mean just that: a play within the
signifying process conceptually cannot be limited by the
traditional constraints of morphology, media, or objecthood.
Art can manifest itself in all of the ways in which human
intention can manifest itself. The task for artists is to put into
play works of art unfettered by the limited kinds of meanings
which objects permit, and succeed in having them become
not the autonomous texts of structuralism, but the production
of artists as authors within a discourse, one concretized
through subjective commitment and comprised of the making
process. It is the historically defined agency of the artist
working within a practice that sees itself as such a process, in
which an artist's work becomes believable as art within
society. To do that, work must satisfy deeper structures of
culture than that surface which reads in the market as
tradition and continuity. The more enriched our underst
ing of that 'text' of art becomes, so does our understandi
of culture. A focus on meaning, by necessity, has focused
concerns on a variety of issues around language and conte
These issues pertain to the reception and production
works of art themselves. The aspect of the questioni
process that some now call 'institutional critique' began h
too, and it originated with Conceptual art's earliest work
The relevance of this to the question of intention is in w
it implies: the disappearance, perhaps with finality, of
threshold between what had been the art object (that whic
now simply art) and the intentions of its maker. Inde
there can no longer really be a separation between the wo
and the intention of the artist: the work of art, in this cas
manifested intention. Ultimately, we might want to ask,
course, if intention is the text itself, or the production of
screen upon which the greater social text appears-eve
the fragments and overlaps are of many projections: r
creed, gender.
Recently I have corresponded with an art historian w
wrote her master's thesis on my Passagen-Werk, a la
installation I did for Documenta IX, in Kassel.4 In one lett
discussing artistic intention, she writes, "the relativi
position of the art historian says 'even if we can know w
the artist intended, it isn't that important. What is impor
is the work of art and how it generates meaning.' " I d
1. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of
Pictures, New Haven/London, 1985, 42.
2. I would cite my work from 1965-66, the Protoinvestigations, of which
One and Three Chairs would be a representative example. This work, using
deadpan 'scientific-style' photographs which were always taken by others,
also employed common objects and enlarged texts from dictionary definitions.
The elements were never signed, with the concept of the work being
that this 'form of presentation' would be made and remade. The reason for
this was an important part of my intention: eliminate the aura of traditional
art and force another basis for this activity to be approached as art,
conceptually. Ownership of the work is established by the production
instructions which double as a certificate. This is signed, but as a deed of
ownership, not as a work of art. Thus, I've made it clear that these certificates
are never to be exhibited, and they rarely are. The art itself, which is neither
the props with which the idea is communicated, nor the signed certificate, is
only the idea in and of the work. As it was for other artists at that time, the
issues of modernism were rapidly becoming opaque. One effect of this work
was to 'sum up' modernism for me, and once that was visible I was able to use
that view to get past it, as the work which followed shows. Thus, for me, this
work was both a 'summation' of modernism and the way out of it.
3. The use of tautology in the Protoinvestigations has generated a variety
of confused responses. One aspect of this work was the attempt to actualize a
Wittgensteinian insight: by drawing out the relation of art to language, could
one begin the production of a cultural language whose very function it was to
show, rather than say? Such artworks might function in a way which
circumvents significantly much of what limits language. Art, some have
argued, describes reality. But, unlike language, artworks, it can also be argued,
simultaneously describe how they describe it. Granted, art can be seen h
self-referential, but significantly, not meaninglessly self-referential. Wh
shows in such a manifestation is, indeed, how it functions. This is reveal
works which feign to say, but do so as an art proposition and reveal
difference (while showing their similarity) with language. This was, of co
the role of language in my work beginning in 1965. It seemed to me t
language itself could be used to function as an artwork, then that differ
would bare the device of art's language game. An artwork then, as su
double mask, provided the possibility of not just a reflection on itself, b
indirect double reflection on the nature of language, through art, to cul
itself. "Do not forget," writes Wittgenstein, "that a poem, even though i
composed in the language of information is not used in the language-gam
giving information." Whatever insights this early work of mine had to sha
did, and it initiated within the practice an essential questioning process w
is now basic to it. It should be obvious that the 'baring of the device' o
institutions of art would begin at the most elemental level: the point
production itself, the artwork. Seeing the artwork, in such a context, for
scrutiny of its conventions and historical baggage, such as the painti
sculpture dichotomy. First inside the frame and then outside. One goa
work such as The Second Investigation, 1968, was to question the institut
forms of art. If the work that preceded this confronted the institutiona
form of authority of traditional art, this work pressed the point out of
gallery and museum into the world, using public media.
4. See Deborah Zafman, "Joseph Kosuth's Passagen-Werk (Docume
Fldnerie): An Installation of Ideas," M.A. thesis, University of Califor
Berkeley, 1994.
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408 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1996 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 3
i: i
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What this sugg
of conspiracy, e
chise my activi
inception, then
in the world as an artist is also nullified. The artist becomes
just another producer of goods for the market, where the
work finds its meaning.
This, it seems to me, was exactly where we came into the
picture in the sixties, when Noland, Olitski, et al. would
never need to leave their studios; just paint 'em and ship 'em
out, and let Clement Greenberg and his minions provide the
meaning. For them, art and politics were separate, and their
practice reflected that. What is seldom discussed is how one
looked at those paintings and saw the theory. I think this
greatly explains why, for so many now, such work is held in
the low esteem it is. Perhaps I should make clear that I am
not suggesting that artists are the only ones capable of
discussing works of art. On the contrary, art historians and
critics play an important role in the struggle of the work's
'coming to meaning' in the world. But that is the point: they
represent the world. That is why a defining part of the
creative process depends on the artists to assert their
intentions in that struggle.
One of the greatest lessons defending the primacy of the
intention of the artist, and the increasing importance of
writing by artists on their work, is provided by this period of
the sixties.5 Our more recent experience of the return to
painting in the eighties reminds us again of the bankruptcy
of a form of art that relies on its meaning to be provided by
other than its makers. If Conceptual art means more than a
style, its defining difference is established here in the
rethinking of artistic responsibility in the production of
meaning.6 Without this, the politics which inform work
remain homeless, only a topic among others that distin
guishes style.
Artists working within such a practice have a particular
responsibility not to permit their work at its inception to b
defined 'by the world.' What the work is (that is, what
distinguishes it from what preceded it) must be established
by the artist before 'the world' includes it within all that is
given. 'The world' begins as a process of institutionalization,
and the art-historical and critical establishment is its first
moment: without it there would be no 'professional' artists.
Here is where one finds the true 'aesthetics of administration,'
and it is a structural, and apparently inescapable,
feature of the process of a work coming into the world.
Only a state of deep denial could keep an artist from
avoiding the fact that seeing isn't as simple as looking: the
text the viewer brings to a work organizes what is seen. The
production of that 'text' has become a primary part of the
artistic meaning-making process. The productive result of
this understanding, beginning with Conceptual art, has been
precisely the emergence of an 'art of intention' as I discussed
above. If the actual people standing behind works of artwho
provide the belief, in a sense, as they take subjective
responsibility for the meaning of what is produced-think
that an object 'speaks for itself,' they are sorely mistaken. The
(making) process of putting a proposition (that signifying
action which may or may not employ the object, performance,
video, text, et al.) 'into play' is only one of the
responsibilities of the artist. The act of putting it into the
world is empty unless an artist also fights for its meaning.
This informational framing of the proposition itself increasingly
becomes part of the artistic process. Thus, a key to the
changed role of intention and the artist's self-perception of
his or her practice, is the role of writing by artists. On this
subject, in the introduction to "The Play of the Unsayable," a
curated installation I made for the Wittgenstein centennial in
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WRITING (AND) THE HISTORY OF ART 409
1989 in Vienna and Brussels, I made the following state-
ment:
One question remains unsaid: what is this text? This text
owes its existence to the parentheses of my practice as an
artist. This text speaks from that first and last. While
philosophy would want to speak of the world, it would
need to speak of art as part of that, if only to deny it. That
which permits art to be seen as part of the world also
nominates it as an event in social and cultural space. No
matter what actual form the activity of art takes, its history
gives it a concrete presence. Framed by such a presence
then, this theory is engaged as part of a practice. Such
theory I'll call primary. Secondary theory (by this I refer to
art-historical and critical writing) may be no less useful (in
many cases, more useful) but the point I'm stressing is that
it has a different ontology. Primary theory is no more
interesting than the practice, in toto, is. However, theory
about art not linked to an art practice is unconcretized (or
unfertilized) conversation after (or before) the fact. It is
the fact of an artistic process which, having a location as an
event, permits the social and cultural weight of a presence
independent of a pragmatic language. It is, in fact, the
nominated presence of the process which allows secondary
theory its external object to be discussed. Behind
every text about art rests the possibility of an artwork, if
not the presence of one.
Texts about artworks are experienced differently from
texts that are artworks. It is abundantly clear by now that
we do not need to have an object to have an artwork, but
we must have a play manifested in order to have it seen.
That difference which separates an artwork from a conversation
also separates, fundamentally, primary theory from
secondary theory,
The work of art is essentially a play within the meaning
system of art; it is formed as that play and cannot be
separated from it-this also means, however, that a
change in its formation/representation is meaningful only
insofar as it effects its play. My point is that primary theory
is part of that play, the two are inseparably linked. This is
not a claim that the commentary of secondary theory can
make. Talking about art is a parallel activity to making art,
but without feet-it is providing meaning without an
event context that socially commits subjective responsibility
for consciousness produced (making a world). Standing
guard, just out of sight, is the detached priority of an
implied objective science.7
There is another consideration of artistic intention, also
A ::::- :: :: :::: -:--- ::--_?--: 1:- .. :--:-:::::j ::~~~
2 Kosuth, The Second Investigation, 1968-69, from the
exhibition "When Attitudes Become Form," Kunsthalle
important. It is part of the intention of this particu
for the works to engage the viewer/reader's particip
the meaning-making process. By bringing with th
they do in their approach to the work, they thereby
it. They are every work's 'local' site. This role w
rendered passive, and would provide only a mom
consumption, without work which is anchored to
process of signification. Thus the speaker is desi
embedded in the human meaning which artistic i
constitutes. No speaker, no listener.
Intention (Art Historians)
In considering this exchange of the objective voice
subjective one, I, of course, contemplated the g
confessional writing. But that seemed too obvio
easy. Instead I decided on ventriloquism. I would wr
though through the first-person account of many
characters, actual historical characters, whose narr
would, by the mere fact of bringing them into the
my own subjectively developed voice, suspend some
between history and fiction.-Rosalind Krauss8
5. Ad Reinhardt painted black paintings. But anyone who knew him, who
knew how he thought about art, would tell you that he was more than just a
producer of paintings; he was a producer of meaning. It is this total activity as
an artist which ultimately provided those paintings with a cultural life as it
preserved Reinhardt's reasons for making them, which you see when you look
at them. By his ceaseless participation in panel discussions, his lectures, his
texts such as "Rules for a New Academy," his teaching, and his cartoons, he
made it very difficult for others to coopt his work for their own purposes.
Indeed, his work had to resist a critical atmosphere in which work that was
outside of a certain orthodoxy was either made to fit, or was dismissed. The
limits of Clement Greenberg's vision are probably witnessed with no greater
clarity than in his statement on Reinhardt, that he "has a genuine if small gift
for color, but none at all for design or placing" (quoted in the regrettable text
of Yve-Alain Bois, "The Limit of Almost," in Ad Reinhardt, exh. cat
of Modern Art, New York, 1991, 18).
6. In the context of such a practice, I see an insurmountable con
for those colleagues of mine who have permitted art historians and
provide the theoretical basis for their work. What is thus bro
question is the very grounds of its authenticity.
7. See Joseph Kosuth, "A Preface and Ten Remarks on Art and
stein," in Das Spiel des Unsagbaren: Ludwig Wittgenstein und die Ku
Jahrhunderts, exh. cat., Wiener Secession, Vienna, 1989, n.p. In E
German.
8. Rosalind Krauss, "We Lost It at the Movies," Art Bulletin, LXXVI, no. 4
1994, 579.
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410 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1996 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 3
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WRITING (AND) THE HISTORY OF ART 411
It's a dangerous moment for artists. The models of art
historians writing on contemporary art give every indication
of being in transition. The inherited model of art history's
self-conception, part of its professional 'unconscious,' as it
were, is one in which an old apparatus has not yet been
completely dismantled. It implied that art historians speak
with an authority which is 'objective and scientific.' The
art-historical enterprise's links to academia do not contradict
such authority, which originated with the internalized values
of a regnant science upon which intellectual life in the
university was founded. The social sciences must mimic the
hard sciences, the assertion went, as this is the economy of
academic standards and discipline. Thus, the question remains,
does the art-historical enterprise speak with the voice
of objectivity, even when its mission is contradictory to it?
That contradiction becomes increasingly pronounced as
the works of artists are approached in a distinctively new way:
as inspiration for the production of essentially subjective,
creative texts by auteur writers on art. A rather ironic
development, considering that the 'death of the author'
discussed by Barthes and Foucault decades ago hasn't
prevented the stylish use of French theory otherwise. Such
theory, although making claims as art-historical text, betrays
a hope that their production will gain status itself as a
cultural object, post-S/Z. (Keep the power, have the fun?)
It's one thing to commingle discourses, but, within this
transformed discipline, what, finally, is the intention of the
art historian that emerges? That seems a fair question, since
the result of such writing on individual works (or, for that
matter, an activity spanning a lifetime) selected for this
treatment can be both deeply unfair and inaccurate.9
Perhaps what has initiated this transmigration of models,
or, should I just say it, the source of this license, has been
critical theory. It is one thing, however, to anchor one's
writing within a discourse such as critical theory, with its
position theoretically compelled to something like consistency
vis-A-vis, for example, the originary and the historical
narrative. At least their texts have a perceivable principled
basis and there is no confusion about the writing of history in
its more 'objective' conventional form. One can then perceive
the (ethical) space within which the writer is operating:
reader/buyer beware. Here, all 'texts' are equal, the work
and the text it generated all being a part of the same surface,
and any claims of objectivity are suspended as they are made
irrelevant.
The hybrid of which I speak combines such a license with a
conventional form of authority. This practice occupies a very
different and self-servingly ambiguous ethical space. Having
a mixed parentage has given us an interesting patrimony:
rather like little Frankensteins of Art-Language (a license at
least partially sired by Charles Harrison's fictive histories of
the Art & Language group), we have another, and mutant,
form of art theory as art, except this time it is not the
production of artists but of art historians. Maybe I'm partly to
blame, writing as I did in Art-Language in 1970 that "This art
both annexes the function of the critic, and makes a middleman
unnecessary."l0 I didn't realize at the time, however,
that the art historians might join our ranks under cover. This
emerging professional class of writers seems to want celebrated
careers like those of artists while they keep their
protective perch, and its detached view, with the perquisites
and power of recorders of history. It appears that there is a
palpable, if admittedly vague, dimension of something like a
'conflict of interest' if those given the responsibility to
inscribe history are under a powerful and conflicting need to,
instead, make it.
This leaves us with a brand of art-historical 'intentions'
which begin to produce an ambiguous ethical relationship
with the artist, in curating as well as writing. The history of
recent art history leads one to conclude that there is a
conservatism which pervades the art-historical and critical
establishment, in which convention necessitates a view of
artists as bewildered children playing with lumps of wet clay,
in dire need of the paternal art-historical and critical presence
to swoop down and make sense of it all. If you are one of
the artists who risk standing up to this conception, prepare
to be vilified."I As I've asked myself and others before: is our
production, as artists, really only nature, from which critics, as
historians, make their own 'culture'? And doesn't it violate
society's sense of fair play that they are permitted to do so
behind a mask of implied 'objectivity' without having to take
the kind of subjective responsibility for the production of
consciousness which artists have historically had to, and
which has previously distinguished the two activities?
Who now seriously believes that the decisions made by
such art historians in the performance of their craft are really
any less subjective than those made by an artist, given the
career needs and the social relationships of art historians
such writing reflects? Previously there seemed to be some
kind of moral imperative for art historians to be above such
considerations out of a sense of professionalism. Having it
both ways seems, at this receiving end, like an extremely
unjust, and even corrupt, development. I always thought that
critics, as journalists, could discuss the meaning of an artist's
present production with the public in ways that indicated
that the critics either got it or didn't (and artists could either
deal with that or not.) The assumption was that, in the long
run and after the smoke cleared, at least the historians could
be counted on to be basically fair and accurate in saying who
did what and when, why, whom it influenced, and the like. I
assumed that the trail of evidence one leaves as a practicing
artist with a public life would, in some sense, secure an honest
9. My own activities as an artist have recently been subjected to what I can
only call an organized form of abuse by writers associated with October who
seem to want to keep the voice of authority presumed by the former while
having the 'creative' flexibility of the latter. See, e.g., October, no. 55, Winter
1990; no. 57, Summer 1991; no. 69, Summer 1994; and no. 70, Fall 1994.
This has continued, as well, in various public lectures, panel discussions, and
exhibition catalogues by the same writers.
10.Joseph Kosuth, "Introductory Note by the American Editor," ArtLanguage,
I, no. 2, 1970, 1-4, esp. 2-3, repr. in idem, Art after Philosophy and
After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, ed. Gabriele Guercio, Cambridge, Mass.,
1991, 37-70.
11. See "Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp," Round Table, in
October, no. 70, Fall 1994, as an example. We know that there is a place for
polemics. What I feel I can reasonably object to is when my work and
historical position are intentionally misrepresented as a consequence of the
polemical mission of writers who enjoy an authority as institutionally affiliated
historians. Is it not an ethical issue when academic validation, which at least
has the implication of scholarly disinterest, is used for such purposes?
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412 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1996 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 3
record." That record is, however, nothing more than a
history of the intentions of particular individuals living in a
given moment. The record of those intentions is the anchor,
perhaps, which puts weight on the ethical responsibility of
the art-historical enterprise. Without the meanings which
such a record suggests, our cultural production as artists is
reduced to being a playpen, a free-for-all of interpretation,
institutionalizing history as a creative act-but only for its
writers.
Finally, the reason we don't really consider the paintings
by monkeys and children to be art is because of intention;
without artistic intention there is no art. The subjective
presence which stands behind a work of art and which takes
responsibility for its meaning something, which I have
discussed here, is what makes it authentic as a work. This is
the human power which informs, in a sense gives life, to what
would otherwise be empty forms and objects. Just as the
grunts and groans of language would be gibberish as only
physical properties of sound in themselves, within a system of
relations they become meaningful. There is a tenacious
formalism lurking in the art historian's argument which
wants art as a language dead-archaic and unreadable, its
meaning the province of whoever owns it-for they are free
to make a decorative trophy of it and that would be its final
meaning. In this view it is the role of the art-historical process
to locate the value of art in the cadavers of passing artistic
forms and materials, an institutionalizing process which
severs the language from its speaker, so that it can give up its
meaning to the market.
Joseph Kosuth is a founder of the Conceptual art movement. His
work was recently seen in "Reconsidering the Object ofArt" at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Kosuth's exhibition in
1990 at the Brooklyn Museum helped reverse NEA policy. He is a
professor at the Stuttgart Kuntstakademie [591 Broadway, New
York, N. Y. 10012].
History, Writing, and Image
in Maya Art
Linda Schele
"To reflect upon the choices and values that inform your own
art-historical writing," read the letter inviting me to contribute
to this issue of "Perspectives." That is what I have
decided to do, but I do not intend my reflections to be
prescriptions for how other art historians should work or
what the discipline should be. I am reflecting on the
transformations I have observed, because my field has
undergone a revolution of perception and interpretation
during the last twenty-five years. The driving force behind
that revolution has been the ongoing decipherment of the
Maya hieroglyphic writing system and its contribution to the
understanding of Maya cultural history.
Although art historians have played major roles in this
revolution, the arena of discourse has not been primarily in
art history, but rather in the fields of anthropology and
archaeology. This fact has meant that the response has been
couched in the terms of archaeologists and anthropologists
more than in those of art historians. One criticism, for
example, has been that epigraphy and the study of imagery
is "unscientific," and another has asserted that since everything
the ancients wrote and depicted was propaganda, the
corpus of information is unreliable and should be discarded.
While art historians and anthropologists can study the
same things-that is, the object as artifact, aesthetic product,
and carrier of symbolism and social intention-the two
disciplines ask questions in different ways and often work
toward different goals. A historian of Chinese art once put
the contrast to me in this way: "Art historians study artists
and their society in order to understand an object, while
anthropologists study objects in order to understand the
society that made them." This is a simplistic way of characterizing
the contrast, but it is one I have found cogent.
Anthropological thought on social processes and evolution,
state formation, economic and power structures, kinship
systems, historical linguistics, ethnography, and similar areas
of inquiry have been central to interpretative work on Maya
art, architecture, and archaeology. For me, the critical
questions have concerned how human beings organize societies,
create ideologies, encode their understandings of the
world, and materialize these understandings in cultural
production.
I have found myself in the situation of reconstructing a
history and recovering a lost world view from the artwork I
study, rather than using history and a world view to inform
the objects. When I began my encounter with the Maya in
1970, I entered a field in which the decipherment process
had reached a critical mass. The great Mayanist Tatiana
Proskouriakoff had published three seminal articles on the
inscriptions of Piedras Negras and Yaxchilin proving that
the contents of the writing system were primarily historical.1
She identified men and women both by their glyphic names
and their portraits, and she placed their actions in a
chronology accurate to the day. Other Mayanists, including
12. After nearly thirty years as anprocess of the art-historical enterprise
artist, I have recently been surpriseditself. The vendettas of such fashions
to learn that this may not be true, atof history (and their petty and perleast
in the short run, if certain indi-sonal banalities) may fade from
viduals, for ad hominem motives ormemory, but their historical view may
careerist expediency, decide other-not. Perhaps whatever altruism rewise.
We need to keep in mind thatmains might force our reconsideration
such writing lowers the level for all ofof the dubious value of what may have
us. The concern is that it becomes partbeen written as a result of such intenof
a record, one which is restated (andtions. Indeed, we need to ask: are
restated again, eventually taking onthese art-historical intentions, or are
the quality of a 'fact') as a naturalthey something else?
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WRITING (AND) THE HISTORY OF ART 413
myself, followed her lead and began to recover the dynastic
histories of individual sites.
During the early years, I worked with a group that met at
Dumbarton Oaks in a series of miniconferences that occurred
regularly between 1973 and 1979. The team included
Floyd Lounsbury, a renowned linguist and kinship specialist;
David Kelley, an anthropologist and ethnohistorian; Merle
Robertson, an artist; Peter Mathews, an archaeologist and
epigrapher in training; and myself, who was an artist at the
time. Our collaboration not only brought different specialities
and sensitivities to bear on common problems, but the
synergy we developed also took all of us beyond our individual
limitations. During those meetings our team worked
out the syntactical and discourse structure of the hieroglyphic
writing, and we used distributional and structural
studies of iconography and archaeological context as parallel
fields of data to tease meaning out of the archaeological
record.2 The result offered an extremely productive opening
into the interpretation of imagery, architecture, and artifact.
The ancient Maya coordinated different systems of information
in their objects so that pottery painting, narrative
sculpture, and architectural decoration not only pictured
action, person, and context, but also included parallel and
often complementary information in written texts. In a small
percentage of examples, Maya artists relied on only pictorial
or only written information, but the majority of art objects
fused the two systems into one image.
The texts usually give us very precise information about
who the actors were, the actions in which they were engaged,
and the days on which the actions occurred. Even this
simplest level of information often contains valuable data,
including titles revealing status, rank, occupation, parentage,
and political affiliations. More complex texts can link
together activities within the lifetime of one ruler, across
several generations, and for entire dynasties that span
hundreds of years. Moreover, scribes used legendary events
from the remote past to give context to historical events, and
they framed both in mythological time. Creation mythology,
especially, provided the framework for political charter and
historical causality.
The chronological placement of these actions was quite
precise because the Maya used an era-based calendar to
anchor events in the time stream.3 By cross-referencing all of
the dates of actions recorded in the inscriptions of a single
site with other factors such as life spans, reproduction age,
and so on, we have been able to reconstruct sequences of
events with great certitude. Much of my work has been
engaged in precisely this: reconstructing the dynastic history
of individual sites, identifying the commissions of specific
kings and lords, and investigating information about political
exigencies, religious context, ritual, pageant, and other
domains of experience that were encoded in such texts and
images.
Even though the histories of these dynasties are under
continual review and revision by the growing number of
epigraphers working in the field, the reconstruction of
history has gone to the next level of regional interactions and
pan-Maya history. Epigraphers are finding cross-references
to the same sets of events as viewed at different sites, so that
we are getting both losers' and winners' perspectives. Although
these wider sweeps of history are still under debate,
they allow us to see how imagery worked on the larger scale
of site interactions and how these reveal political and social
strategies. Moreover, major archaeological projects are testing
the veracity of these histories in the field by documenting
the response or lack of response to events recorded in the
inscriptional record in terms of changes in the material
record.
The interaction between object, image, and writing has
given us more information than just time, action, and actor,
because the texts often sought to place the action in larger
historical and supernatural contexts. The background for
political history could be the legendary past when the first
civilizations of Mesoamerica thrived, or the time of creation
when the order of the cosmos was established. Scholars such
as Michael Coe have shown that myths recorded during the
sixteenth century are survivals of critical mythology from
Pre-Columbian times.4 The Popol Vuh, for example, played
much the same role for the Maya as the Iliad and the Odyssey
in Greek cultural history. Texts have provided the names of
gods and other supernatural beings, and have thrown light
on the way in which they are manifested in imagery. Texts
have elucidated the relationship between object and supernatural
force, definitions of transformation and encounters
with the supernatural, and the Maya perception of a divine
context. Iconographic studies have not only identified what
things are, but their context and distribution patterns have
also provided information about strategy and social inten-
tion.
For the ancient Maya, art objects constituted two general
classes: objects meant to be used in practice and ritual, or to
create the context of spectacle, pageant, and ritual; and
narrative imagery of people in historical action. Objects of
the first type get to be represented in narratives of the second
1. Tatiana Proskouriakoff, "Historical Implications of a Pattern of Dates at
Piedras Negras, Guatemala," American Antiquity, xxv, 1960, 454-75; and
eadem, "Historical Data in the Inscriptions of Yaxchilan, Parts I and II,"
Estudios de Cultura Maya, III, 1964, 149-67 and Iv, 1964, 177-201. (Proskouriakoffs
earlier work had included a comprehensive study of style, A Study of
Classic Maya Sculpture, Carnegie Institution of Washington no. 593, Washington,
D.C., 1950, that is still used today). Another critical contribution came in
1952 from the Russian scholar Yuri Knorosov, who discovered the spelling
system. Other scholars who made important early contributions were the
Mexican Heinrich Berlin and the Americans David Kelley and Michael Coe.
See Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code, London, 1992, for a full history of
the decipherment.
2. Other people were following the same procedures in the seventies and
also achieving results. Particularly notable early studies included Joyce
Marcus, Emblem and State in the Classic Maya Lowlands, Washington, D.C.,
1976; and a comprehensive study of the ceramics and art of Tikal in
Clemency Coggins, "Painting and Drawing Styles at Tikal: An Historical and
Iconographic Reconstruction," Ph.D diss., Harvard University, 1976.
3. The base date of the Maya calendar was Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. The Maya
used a complex calendar system that counted from this date into the
historical present by using a base-twenty system, using cycles of 360-day years
aggregated into groups of 20 years, 400 years, 8,000 years, and so on. Scribes
could give the exact number of days elapsed since this "zero" date, or they
could anchor events to cycle ends. This system created a history in which the
vast majority of events can be dated to a precise twenty-four-hour period, and
sometimes we even know whether they occurred during the day or night.
4. Michael Coe first demonstrated the presence of Popol Vuh mythology in
Classic-period art in The Maya Scribe and His World, New York, 1973.
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414 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1996 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 3
type and sometimes in the glyphic system. What the texts say
about these objects, their archaeological context, and the
way in which the Maya depicted them in use furnish clues to
their meaning. Finally, ethnohistorical records and modern
ethnographies can also inform ancient meanings, if the
connections are carefully made.
As the Maya produced objects, especially those that displayed
historical narratives, the objects themselves became a
part of the material record that conditioned future production.
When the Maya made public history through their
objects, they made it in full awareness of the artistic history of
their own kingdoms. Individual kingdoms and regions developed
styles that functioned as identity, just as style distinguished
Maya art from other Mesoamerican art traditions.
The Maya artists, probably under the direction of their
patrons, used style as an instrument of ideology and politics
on local, regional, and intercultural levels. Among such uses
were the emulation of earlier art work, appropriation of
styles from conquered or more prestigious sites, and the use
of style as a statement of origin and political affiliation.
By building comparative frameworks with art objects from
different sites and regions and across Maya history, scholars
have attempted to reconstruct political context. Detecting
fields of variation and distribution has allowed Mayanists to
identify the evolutionary histories of images and propose
meanings. Over the years, more and more people with
different experiences and biases have joined the debate over
these interpretations. As a result, the rate of discovery has
grown exponentially and vigorous debate has created a rapid
evolution of interpretation. Most practitioners regularly
reexamine the entire interpretational field, including the
most basic premises, in light of new discoveries. This continuous
adjustment has led to discomfort among many archaeologists,
who yearn for a single interpretation that will never be
subject to change.
The relationship between writing and Maya art has yielded
another class of information particularly important to art
historians. The young epigrapher David Stuart identified
artists' signatures in 1986. This led to the decipherment of
dedication phrases that included the proper names for many
of the major monuments and buildings, the Maya terms for
types of objects, the names of the owners of the objects, and
the names of artists. Although exploitation of this domain
has started in exhibitions such as "Painting the Maya
Universe,"5 there is much to learn about how Maya artistic
patronage and production worked.
When I first began writing about this new history and my
interpretations of the imagery associated with it, I emulated
the writing of the people I admired. I wrote primarily for
other professionals in the field, seeking to use the kind of
jargon and discourse structure that would gain their approval
and respect. I was steered into a new path when the
Kimbell Art Museum contacted me about organizing an
exhibition on Maya art, "The Blood of Kings," in which Mary
Ellen Miller of Yale University became my partner. Both of
us viewed Maya art objects as windows into the world view
and history of the people who made them. By 1985, when we
began designing the exhibition, the process of decipherment
and its results were twenty-five years old. We set about
presenting some of the new history and understanding of the
Maya world view to the public.
The Kimbell asked us to write a catalogue that would stand
on its own after the exhibition had ended. That was my first
experience of writing for a general audience. It was not easy.
I remember the moment when Emily Sano, who was the
curator in charge of the exhibition and editor of the
catalogue, threw one of the first drafts down on my diningroom
table and said that it would not do. Emily's specialty
was Japanese art, so she had no vested interest in our
arguments: her only concern was that they should be cogently
and clearly presented for a nonspecialized audience.
She crafted our writing and ideas so that ordinary people
could understand them. I learned a lot from that experience,
including the fact that specialized language and jargon often
act to obscure meaning rather than enhance it.
The Blood of Kings was successful as an exhibition and as a
catalogue. It caused a change of paradigm in the public's
mind. The peaceful, pastoral Maya gave way to a historical
Maya who practiced war, bloodletting, politics, and religion
in a way that was knowable and understandable. Proskouriakoff
had begun the revolution and many people had kept it
going, but the Blood of Kings brought it home to the public
and the media. The ramifications of that change are still
playing themselves out in unexpected ways.
In 1986, the success of the Blood of Kings led an editor to
invite me to submit a proposal to William Morrow for a book
on the Maya. I accepted the invitation and asked David
Freidel, an anthropologist and archaeologist I respect, to
join me as co-author. I prefer working in collaborative
situations because of the synergy that develops between
authors of different training and perspective. We decided to
write a history of the Maya to illustrate how we could extract
intentional behavior, political context, and historical processes
from the archaeological and artistic record. Many
Mayanists had been talking of history in this way, but the
resulting interpretations had not yet been presented in a
public forum.
For A Forest of Kings, we chose a series of crucial episodes
about which we had considerable data from imagery, inscriptions,
and archaeology. We began with an episode in the
Preclassic period (ca. 100 B.C.) and ended in the Terminal
Classic (A.D. 950). Each episode concerned a different kind of
political or dynastic problem. We assumed that the imagery
and texts had been commissioned by lords who had personal
and political agendas. They were not "objective" views of the
history, but ones that presented a take on the events that
served the winners best. We were criticized for using the
indigenous records as historical sources because they were
propaganda, but for us their value came precisely from their
built-in bias.
We used archaeology and cross-references from within the
site and at other sites to test the veracity of any particular
5. See Dorie Reents-Budet, Painting the Maya Universe, Durham, N.C.,
1994.
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WRITING (AND) THE HISTORY OF ART 415
assertion in the ancient records. Freidel's knowledge of social
structure, state formation, and ethnographic analogy played
a crucial role in developing our interpretations. We attempted
to detect social intention and the strategies of the
various participants in grappling with the problems faced by
the Maya in each incident. In hindsight, we were wrong in
some of the detail, but generally correct in the main trajectory
of history as we reconstructed it.
Other scholars have continued to build on this first
attempt at history, changing and adapting it to new decipherments
and continuing excavations. In fact, this has been one
of the great lessons I have learned. All any of us can do is
publish the best interpretation of the fields of data that we
perceive at any one moment, but the common stream of
understanding and the patterns within the underlying data
continue to change-and so must the interpretation. If
interpretation is data-driven, it is necessarily ephemeral and
in a continuous state of evolution.
If I believed the Blood of Kings had taught me how to write
for the public, I was wrong. A Forest of Kings (1990) was to
prove far more difficult to write than my first effort. Our
editor at William Morrow, Maria Guanaschelli, required us to
use an experienced writer to convert our first manuscript
into something that the public could absorb. We had a bad
case of "academese," but she did not ask us to eliminate the
evidence we needed to support our arguments. This we put
in extensive notes. We could keep all the detail we wanted,
but she required a good story that would hold the reader's
attention. Learning to craft an argument in language that an
educated, interested public can absorb requires strategies
very different from those needed to write for a professional
audience. To combine both in one work was difficult indeed.
In our next book, Maya Cosmos (1993), Freidel and I
continued to write for a diverse audience, including the
general public, aficionados of Maya civilization, students at
all levels, professional academics in our own and related
fields, and the modern Maya. The general theme of this book
was the assertion that the ancient Maya framed their knowledge
of the world and society within a coherent theory of
cause and consequence. We argued that they encapsulated
their understanding in a story of creation that was encoded
in myth, metaphor, and symbol. It operated as a process that
unfolded historically, as a social practice through ritual
performance and the material context in which the performance
occurred, and as a religious paradigm. We proposed
that this universalizing and unifying view of creation endured
as a process and developed over the entire span of
Maya history, and that we could trace it in the material
record left by the Maya.
In our view, there were practical implications to be drawn
from our thesis and the way in which we sought to present it.
As an archaeologist, Freidel asserted that the deposition of
an archaeological record in the first place was governed by
this universalizing understanding of the world. For example,
we argued that the Maya believed that they brought soul
force into the places they built and the objects they produced
through dedicatory rituals, and that places so consecrated
required deactivation when they were to be buried, destroyed,
or abandoned. Both dedication and termination left
intentional depositions that can be recovered by archaeologists
sensitive to their presence. For an art historian, the
artifacts that come out of these contexts are art objects that
carry encoded information about meaning and the rituals
that led to their deposition. Archaeologists have recorded a
great deal about these contexts in the past that can now be
understood in light of what the Maya themselves wrote
hieroglyphically and showed pictorially about their own
cultural production. At the same time, archaeological context
gives crucial information to the art historian and
epigrapher that can elucidate what the Maya said and
showed in their art.
The opportunity to write books for multiple audiences has
changed my attitude about writing art history and the role it
can play. Ten years ago I began giving workshops on Maya
hieroglyphic writing to Maya people in Guatemala, and later
in Yucatan. For five hundred years, the Maya have had their
history ripped from them and refashioned to suit the needs
of their conquerors. In more recent times, information from
archaeological and historical research is only rarely available
to them, because most of the publications on Maya history
are in English, and because the Maya do not have access to
the kind of education that would allow them to become part
of the national institutions that oversee archaeology, especially
in Guatemala.
I have led these workshops with Nikolai Grube of the
University of Bonn and Federico Fahsen of Guatemala. We
have learned as much from the Maya as we have taught them.
The exchange has been on many levels, including the
different kinds of specialized knowledge and experience that
both we and the Maya bring to the meetings. The Maya have
opened windows of understanding into their symbolism,
ritual, and languages of a kind that is known only to native
speakers who have been raised within a cultural tradition. We
have brought the Maya the means of deciphering their
ancient histories and the tools to debate and adapt the
histories we are attempting to create. Our hope is that there
will be Maya epigraphers, archaeologists, and art historians
in the future who speak directly to their own people.
Working with the Maya has made me sensitive to the
power of words and how they can harm or help, often
unintentionally. The paradigm shift that Mary Miller and I
triggered in the Blood of Kings has created a perception of
Maya violence that has not been placed in the context of
world history. By speaking of Maya violence so nakedly,
while neglecting the violence in the history of the European
peoples and their colonies, scholars, writers, and television
producers privilege our own heritage and penalize the Maya.
In the light of the genocide suffered by Maya people in the
eighties and nineties, some Maya have challenged not the
veracity of what we published, but its potential impact on
their lives.
On the other hand, many more Maya see the history
locked in the inscriptions as one of the keys to taking back
their intellectual sovereignty. Our work has political implications
as powerful and far-reaching as archaeology in Israel.
People on all sides of the political debates in Central America
use perceptions of the Pre-Columbian past to support their
positions.
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416 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1996 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 3
In the summer of 1995, an incident occurred in Guatemala
that brought home to me the importance of these histories to
the Maya community. My friend Nikolai Grube had arranged
for a group of German politicians and businessmen to meet
with Maya leaders in order to discuss how best to help the
Maya communities. One of those leaders, an academic
specializing in mass communication and education, told the
visiting Germans that one of the biggest problems for the
Maya is how to move into the twenty-first century as participants
in the world culture without losing their identity as
Maya. He declared that the Maya would do it in the same way
as we do-through knowledge of their history-and that the
greatest part of that history is preserved in the inscriptions
and images left by their ancestors.
I find myself contemplating a conflict between academic
freedom on the one hand, and responsibility for my words on
the other. I would like to pursue the abstract goal of
following the data wherever it leads me without regard to
anything but the "truth." Yet the Maya have made me
acutely aware of the responsibility that comes with writing
history and of the power of words. It is notjust what I say, but
how I say it that is important. For most people in the world,
the written history of the Maya and the ancient descriptions
of their world view and ritual performance are matters of
exotic curiosity. For the Maya, they are matters of identity
and the validation of their heritage as human beings.
Linda Schele first journeyed to Mexico as a painting teacher in
1970. She published a number of articles on Maya epigraphy and
iconography before receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Texas
in 1980. She is working on her fifth book on Maya art and history
[Department ofArt and Art History, University of Texas at Austin,
Austin, Tex. 78712].
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