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Questioning the Object of Art History/Die Frage des Objekts in der Kunstgeschichte

Michael Yonan

The Suppression of Materiality in Anglo-American Art-Historical Writing

It is no small challenge to accompany a week’s worth of papers on the signiÀcance of objects with one claiming that materiality is a neglected art-historical concern. Can there really be a suppression of materiality in scholarship on art, as my title pronounces, when we have an entire congress devoted to rich examinations of objects’ social, theoretical, and semantic complexity? Likewise my use of the word »suppression« might seem excessively severe, evoking as it does military conquest, human rights abuses, and the psychic avoidance of unpleasant urges and desires. It also suggests an active, conscious motivation, with overtones of a uniÀed mission or secret plan to deny art’s object status. Of course this is not the case. Objects have long been a central component of art-historical inquiry, and in the hands of a sensitive scholar, an object’s materiality –variously understood as its physical substance, tactile qualities, medium, objecthood – can be a critical component of its interpretation. Yet examining the broad development of English-language art history over the last several decades, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that usually it has not been. As an American scholar engaged with continental European art, I am especially aware of this, since recent European scholarship has delighted in exploring the materiality of art in detail, much more so than the scholarly community in which I work. The European conference circuit has blossomed with numerous panels and symposia spotlighting materiality, the status of objects in various cultures, and importance of physical matter to the production of artistic meaning. A particularly large number have arisen in the German-speaking world, but recently this has broadened to the United Kingdom, France, and Australia. While the status of the object has likewise received recent attention from North American scholars, the trip down this path has been slower, the results more tentative, and, a few notable exceptions aside, the adoption of materiality as an art-historical concern curiously lacking in fervor. It seems that the process continually begins only to be thwarted, halted, or abandoned. Why is the case? Certainly no art historian, English-speaking or other, would deny that art history is a discipline concerned with objects, especially »high art« objects of the kind typically housed in museums. Yet the political circumstances around which English language and particularly American art history has developed renders examining that object status a troublesome activity. At best, the work of art’s materiality is simpliÀed into its medium, typically formulated as a predecessor to meaning and not a component of it. So much art historical writing assumes this to be true that contemporary methodological frameworks oɆer few tools for examining material status in great detail. Explaining why this is so, and calling for change, will be my purpose in this paper. At the outset, let me clarify that my goal will be less to describe contemporary arthistorical practices in detail, since these are extremely diverse, as much as to characterize what might be called art-historical proclivities, tendencies to turn down speciÀc paths when faced with particular intellectual problems. The privileging of idea over matter and vision over touch exemplify this kind of disciplinary proclivity, and indeed are fundamental ones for understanding the challenge of the object. Let’s begin by examining exactly what a deÀnition of artistic materiality might involve. The term is perhaps best kept somewhat vague, since the possibility of materiality is present in much writing

about art, regardless of which academic traditions one works in or what conceptual frameworks one uses to pinpoint it. Above I set out a general group of terms to encompass some of its potential for art historical writing: physical substance, tactile qualities, medium, and objecthood. Other disciplines have worked toward more precise deÀnitions of materiality that might prove useful for art-historical thought. The anthropologist Daniel Miller has proposed two deÀnitions, narrow and broad, that he has subjected to an extensive scholarly critique.1 The narrow deÀnition is formulated along the lines of my four terms: materiality combines an object’s medium, its physical form, its tactility, and its status as a discrete entity separate from other discrete entities and from human consciousness. This is similar to how the modern interdisciplinary project of material culture studies has deÀned its subjects: the world of objects, here understood as things manipulated or conceptualized in relation to human activities and desires. In this deÀnition, artistic materiality insists on the work of art as a kind of object, admittedly an object with special social signiÀcance and aesthetic qualities, but an object nonetheless. In contrast, Miller’s broader deÀnition of artistic materiality is much more ambitious. Here materiality is the full compass of human experience understood in material terms, and this includes all aspects of humanity, including the ephemeral, the imaginary, the biological, and the theoretical, in addition to and in conjunction with the physical world.2 Subjects and objects exist in a complex interrelationship with the world and materiality is an ever-present essential part of this. Everything has a material aspect and is emergent from material relations. Materiality can become therefore more than just a discussion of objects and things; it is the physical component of all knowledge, experience, and consciousness. Miller’s point is that many scholarly disciplines dematerialize their subjects by emphasizing the immaterial over the material, or the subject over the object. His theme is anthropology, but I would argue that exactly the same could be said for art history. Art is of course a component of culture, and it is a particularly interesting one to view through Miller’s broader deÀnition, since the art object is both a physical entity that draws attention to its materiality and also an interconnected concatenation of forms that invites rumination about larger ideas, concepts, philosophies, belief systems, and aesthetic criteria. In this regard, the art object is diɆerent from more mundane kinds of objects. Art asks to be seen as what it is and also to be contemplated as something beyond itself, or at least this is true of certain kinds of commonly encountered art. Art is both an object and a subject all in one. Yet this duality presents a problem for the art historical interpreter, and understanding this problem’s implications is essential for grasping the suppression of materiality that this essay claims exists. To the broader academic community, the notion that art history is somehow at odds with materiality surely seems incorrect. We are, in their eyes, closely aligned with anthropology and archaeology as the disciplines directly concerned with the material legacy of the human past. Art history studies a class of objects, just as literature studies a class of texts and musicology a class of sounds. To an art historian, however, questions of materiality frequently are considered less important, and therefore are less well scrutinized, than the issues of visuality that have become the primary focus of much art-historical activity. In the minds of many art historians, theirs is 31

Questioning the Object of Art History/Die Frage des Objekts in der Kunstgeschichte

the academic Àeld that targets optics that makes the interrogation of sight its primary goal. Yet this divergence is itself the signal to a bigger problem, which we can begin to examine if we approach things from the art-historical perspective on art’s materiality. Artworks are multisensory composites, and despite my working deÀnition of the art object sketched above, this is a fact only sporadically acknowledged in the art-historical literature. The standard academic frameworks of analyzing art typically privilege its visual aspects over other senses, a lopsided orientation that can be traced back to some of the discipline’s foundational thinkers. Heinrich WölɈin’s formalism, for example, stressed the comparative method as a means of exploring artistic style, but the actual materiality of the paintings so analyzed is only a minor part of his equation.3 Erwin Panofsky’s iconographical method, at least as promulgated in his popular essays published in the 1950s, likewise makes no strong demand on the interpreter to explore medium as a constituent of meaning.4 It may be part of the discussion, but there is no imperative to make it so and much iconographical writing produced since pays it little attention. The push in English-language art history in the 1970s and 80s toward what loosely has been called »theory,« the proliferation of social historical, Marxist, feminist, and other perspectives on art’s meanings, has likewise highlighted materiality erratically. These broader pressures and developments have had the cumulative result of privileging the idea or image over the object or thing, or put in Alois Riegl’s terms, the optic over the haptic.5 Exacerbating this tendency is the pride of place given to painting, particularly easel painting, in the formation of art-historical canons and the conceptualization of larger interpretive methodologies. The two-dimensional image remains the focal point of the great majority of art historical activity, and I think there remains a tacit presumption that painting is the ideal art-historical subject, certainly at least in studies of art since the Renaissance. Likewise the role of the two-dimensional image has come to dominate arthistorical activity as the »domain of images« has become increasingly synonymous with what art historians are expected to master.6 To some degree this prominence is the result of practical considerations. Two-dimensional images are more straightforward to reproduce than sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts, and pictorial illusionism easier to study in absentia of the work of art itself. Modern technologies of reproduction have supported and encouraged an image/object dichotomy, as well as one between idea and matter. WölɈin’s two-slide comparative method, in which works of art are displayed to students in pairs in order to compare and contrast them, operates best with the painted image. One might take this observation further by noting that the interest in illusionism, in how a work of art dematerializes into a vision, enjoys a privileged place both in Renaissance art theory and various modern reformulations. Surveys of art-historical methodology likewise privilege representation as a fundamental basis of art and therefore deÀne deciphering an image as the central activity of arthistorical practice.7 That hierarchization of the visual over the material has received an extra push through the advancement of visual culture as a transdisciplinary category of study, one involving art history but by no means limited to it. One inÁuential deÀnition of visual culture takes as its grounding claim the increased importance of imagery in contemporary society, the ways in which daily life is continually mediated, even created and experienced, through pictures.8 Visual culture provides scholars with analytical tools to address the enormous role of visuality in our world. The term »visual culture« is now also used to analyze artistic products from past societies too, and in some contexts the term replaces »art« altogether.9 This disciplinary shift has served to align art history with a number of 32

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academic areas viewed as worthwhile partners in an era of greater competition for limited resources: media studies, communication studies, Àlm and television studies, and the larger trans-Àeld of postmodern cultural studies generally. Perhaps most crucially, it has served to link art-historical discourse with the priorities and procedures of contemporary art, namely video and digital art. Visual culture has had the eɆect, it seems to me, of further skewing what was already a perilous imbalance between art’s visuality and its materiality. The degree to which those who study art are now perfectly comfortable never referencing an art object’s materiality is quite striking.10 In some respects, this is the end point of a process that has been in development for centuries, and one that has traditionally linked the tactile experience of art, and the sense of touch, to baser, more primitive modes of knowledge. As Fiona Candlin describes in a fascinating recent book, several foundational art-historical thinkers – including Riegl, WölɈin, and Panofsky – discussed touch in their scholarship, but did so principally in order to reassert the primacy of seeing over feeling.11 For these art historians being intellectually advanced meant looking, not touching, and indeed a polarity between sight and touch could be used to articulate numerous other socially based dichotomies: male versus female, modern versus ancient, Germanic versus Mediterranean.12 And in numerous ways this prioritization remains dominant in much art historical practice. Candlin clariÀes that this separation of vision from touch exists both at the level of art history’s early twentiethcentury standardization into an academic discipline and its modern transformation into visual culture. There is no doubt that the proliferation of imagery in our world has created a realm of visuality in which seeing is more than just believing, it is to some degree also being, and of course visuality is an important component of all cultures. But by conceiving the history of art as the history of vision, the danger that the artwork shall become detached from its material basis, and from the materialist contexts of its experiencing, is great. Although the best visual culture scholarship avoids this pitfall, it remains a trap, one easy to slip into. It was recognized as far back as 1996, when the journal »October« published its famous »Visual Culture Questionnaire.« In it, several art historians, most eloquently Carol Armstrong, expressed worry about the dematerialization of art.13 She wrote, »The material dimension of objects is, in my view, at least potentially a site of resistance and recalcitrance, of the irreducibly particular, and of the subversively strange and pleasurable.« I want especially to emphasize one aspect of Armstrong’s statement. This is the idea of resistance, the knowledge that the object does not lend itself to full incorporation into the human senses. It resists our senses, it remains separate from us, and perceiving of it tactilely draws attention to our inability to absorb it fully into our being. Objects maintain this resistance, I would argue, more than do images, or put diɆerently, objects draw attention to their own resistance via their materiality in a way that images do not. Many thinkers about objects have drawn attention to this fundamental relationship between humans and objects, which Armstrong sees as a positive aspect of our engagement with art. The concept is present in Martin Heidegger’s famous essay on »The Thing,« as well as in various classical, medieval, and Enlightenment theorists of sensation.14 Others, however, have sought to Ànd ways around the strict subject/object divide these writers posit. Carl Knappett has suggested that this division is never especially clear, and that the boundaries between people and things are often vague, confused, or as he puts it, »fuzzy.«15 In this claim lies the possibility that the divide can be transcended. Miller, in contrast, asks why such transcendence is desirable and, more pointedly, whose interests transcendence serves.16 He suggests that obliterating the subject/object divide

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serves the needs of the interpreter more than the topic of their study. Translating this to an art historical setting, one might say that art history routinely transcends or ignores the subject/object divide, even when that divide is acknowledged or presented as foundational. Armstrong’s evocation of pleasure is likewise worthy of note, since it highlights exactly this distinction. Visual pleasure is of course a major component of art, but her phrasing suggests how a portion of that pleasure is actually material, or maybe more precisely said a combination of material and visual. We revel in the materiality of art objects, and often we do so by imagining how they would feel if we could touch them, or by substituting an imaginary touch when we can encounter the object only optically. Much of the joy of discussing facture or the textured impasto of painted surfaces operates within this duality. Whether such pleasure is really about the object or about the interpreter’s imagination is harder to pinpoint. What Armstrong describes, I propose, resonates quite well with Miller’s broader deÀnition of materiality. Building on this connection, I would suggest that art objects are best understood when the visual and the material incorporate each other symbiotically, when they are seen as interrelated aspects of the same sensory project, when the subject/object divide is kept in play even as it is questioned and perhaps transcended. Even the most detached, phantasmic postmodern product, the digital image that can be experienced virtually anywhere, still requires a material means of conveyance to be seen, and that material conduit remains a fundamental component of the act of looking. The dangers of overemphasizing visuality become even more apparent if we go back in time. A painting is not simply an image, but also a thing, made of real materials and occupying Ànite time and space. The oft-vaunted reproducibility of art, which enables famous works of art to be seen in classrooms all over the world, does not so much destroy the originals’ signiÀcance as much as draw attention to their materiality, which tourists Áock to conÀrm by the thousands. The more spectral the image becomes, the more people obsess about its materiality. Materiality is fetishized precisely as its potentially pure visuality increased. Furthermore, to recognize the art object as both visual and material has great potential for locating art within a broader understanding of human materiality in Miller’s broader deÀnition. Rather than see materiality as a substrate to visuality, it might be fruitful instead to understand materiality as accessed through the broadest possible human sensorium, of which visuality is a part, and the art object as a moment in which the human senses are arranged in a particular way for a focused purpose. But we encounter a problem when we look to art-historical writing for conÀrmation of this conjoining of visual and material realms. Much writing about the image, especially the art-historical image, doesn’t see images as having much of a material component, or if materiality is acknowledged, it is usually subordinated. There are exceptions, of course, but the image’s demateriality remains a strong presumption, and even when it is not assumed, the resulting analysis often conÀrms a prioritization not in materiality’s favor. One might surmise from this that art history has tricked itself into thinking that it is a discipline of images, when really it has always been a discipline of objects. Some of these objects are bearers of images, some are harder to understand as such, but all are objects nonetheless. Recategorizing art history so that it is not focused around the image might seem like a mistake, but art-historical thinking has been Áirting with this possibility for a long time, at least since Riegl. It appears in the work of many inÁuential recent scholars as well. Michael Baxandall noticed it when he argued that the material of German Renaissance sculpture, limewood, bore meanings that viviÀed the subjects carved out of it.17 T. J. Clark saw it

Questioning the Object of Art History/Die Frage des Objekts in der Kunstgeschichte

too when he argued that the outraged response to Édouard Manet’s »Olympia« was due not just to its subject matter or unorthodox technique, but because its paint conveyed through insistent materiality an untranscendent modern existence.18 Materiality has arisen, in other words, even in the writings of prominent and much-cited art historians, but it has typically not been the principal concept derived from their texts. The Áirtation begins only to be thwarted. Delving deeper into one of my examples will clarify how this happens. Clark’s reading of Manet’s Olympia is a wide-ranging one that operates on many levels – sociohistorical, iconographical, psychosexual – and he includes many tantalizing observations that merit additional pondering. One particularly interesting moment occurs when he tries to characterize Manet’s use of paint, his brushwork, modeling, or roughly stated his style. Commonly discussed as »Áatness« or »looseness,« Clark rejects explaining it as a simple technical decision: »The passages [in Manet’s painting] I have pointed to insist on something more complex than a physical state, or at any rate the state of a medium. They put into question how the world might appear in a picture if its constituents were conceived – it seems they may be – as nothing but material; and how paint might appear as part of that world, the ultimate dry sign of it.«19 He later expounds on this observation to note that the factuality of this paint is itself part of the Àction of the painting, that paint itself operates within the illusion of reality Manet presents. Put more crudely, we see the paint both as material fact and as part of Manet’s illusionistic world, which then draws attention to the ironic, the socially threatening, and in sum the modern tone of the work. I would like to highlight one aspect of this idea: namely, that for Manet’s painting to achieve this, there is an element of materiality in the painted surface that must remain consciously apparent, and it is this registering of paint as matter that makes it possible. For Clark, writing in the early 1980s, the signiÀcance of materiality could only be touched on brieÁy; it appears within a much more elaborate constellation of ideas in which it is easy to miss. And, indeed, in popular recastings of Clark’s argument, the materiality of paint is not the dominant idea; instead, questions of nudity versus nakedness, of courtesans versus prostitutes, of modernity versus tradition – these are the concepts that come to the fore. To wrap up, I’d like to broach some larger questions. If I am correct in suggesting that materiality is in fact suppressed in Englishlanguage art-historical methodologies, then one must wonder why. An answer could be found by recognizing that the Platonic and Neo-Platonic tendencies in especially American art history remain strong, and wittingly or otherwise, many art historians continue to promote the Platonic idea as the goal of art-historical practice and the image as privileged conveyor of the idea.20 We look to art for transcendence, be it spiritual, aesthetic, or intellectual. Materiality is harder to subsume into this kind of Platonic framework, which encourages a distrust of the physical world in favor of a conceptual one. The image plays a Platonic role very easily; the object, less so. Another issue is that visuality is more easily conceived as shared, while the tactile remains a stubbornly individual sensation. Some of the suppression I have been charting perhaps arises from the fear that apprehending art’s materiality evokes only a personal rather than socially shared response, that it is »just« about how matter works singularly and not collectively. That touch might likewise have social values that there might be a communal history of touch – these are ideas whose development currently is in its infancy.21 Finally, I’d suggest that art history’s continual Áirtation with and alternate suppression of materiality has a quality of apotheosis to it. It takes the form of a repetitive triumph over the material world in favor of abstractions, a serial denial of base matter conquered 33

Questioning the Object of Art History/Die Frage des Objekts in der Kunstgeschichte

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by victorious philosophy. And here I return to Miller, who has noted similar tendencies in anthropological writing. As a social science, anthropology must by necessity be more aware of how its disciplinary proclivities aɆect its subjects, since those subjects are often people who comment on, respond to, or otherwise continue to live outside of their scholarly assessment. Art objects don’t live in quite the same way, but they do in fact live on and continue to exist

beyond our scholarly analyses of them. Perhaps the challenge of art history lies in Ànding a way to interpret the object for academic purposes while recognizing and respecting its material autonomy. Bypassing this challenge obfuscates the work of art. My goal has been to suggest that it is precisely in this humble objecthood, in materiality, that we might Ànd the greatest potential to understand what art has to say, and maybe even understand it closer to its own terms.

Notes 1 Daniel Miller: Materiality: An Introduction. In: Materiality. Ed. by Daniel Miller. Durham 2005, pp. 1–50, esp. 4–7. 2 Miller 2005 (note 1), p. 4. 3 Heinrich WölɈin: Principles of Art History. New York 1950. 4 Erwin Panofsky: Meaning in the Visual Arts. Garden City 1955. 5 My working deÀnition of »image« derives from W. J. T. Mitchell: Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago 1986, pp. 5–46. 6 A phrase I borrow from James Elkins: The Domain of Images. Ithaca 1999. 7 One may note, for example, that Robert S. Nelson and Richard ShiɆ open their collection of critical terms in art history with David Summers’s exploration of »Representation.« In: Critical Terms for Art History. Ed. by Robert S. Nelson/ Richard ShiɆ. Chicago 2003, pp. 3–19. 8 Nicholas MirzoeɆ: An Introduction to Visual Culture. London 1999, pp. 1–31. 9 For the sometimes confusing application of the terms visual culture, visual studies, and cultural studies, see James Elkins: Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York 2003, pp. 1–7. – And for an overview of the entire Àeld and its development, see Margaret Ditkovitskaya: Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn. Cambridge 2005. 10 Fiona Candlin: Art, Museums, and Touch. Manchester 2010, p. 9. 11 Candlin 2010 (note 10), p. 10.

12 Candlin 2010 (note 10), p. 21. 13 »Visual Culture Questionnaire«, in: October, 77, 1996, pp. 25–70, for Armstrong’s response, see pp. 27–28. – A more recent engagement with this issue that articulates a position similar to Armstrong’s, but speciÀcally concerning objects, is Mimi Hellman: Object Lessons: French Decorative Art as a Model for Interdisciplinarity. In: The Interdisciplinary Century: Tensions and Convergences in Eighteenth-Century Art, History, and Literature. Ed. by Julia V. Douthwaite/Mary Vidal. Oxford 2005, p. 6076. 14 Martin Heidegger: The Thing. In: The Object Reader. Ed. by Fiona Candlin/Raiford Guins. London 2009, pp. 113–123. 15 Carl Knappett: Thinking Through Material Culture. Philadelphia 2005, p. 16. 16 Miller 2005 (note 1), pp. 14–15. 17 Michael Baxandall: The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. New Haven 1980, pp. 27–48. 18 T. J. Clark: The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Princeton 1984, pp. 138–139. 19 Clark 1984 (note 18), p. 138. 20 Armstrong in: Visual Culture Questionnaire (note 13), p. 27. 21 Candlin 2010 (note 10), p. 9.

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