Art History Today

Giraffe Art History

The Berlin-based artist Martin Missfeldt has sent me links to some of his wonderful cartoons. These are cartoons of canonical works given a giraffe theme. Martin has given me permission to reproduce some of them on my site. The rest can be found here. Just click through the galleries.

I've heard of a monkey Laocoön, but a giraffe one…

 

Durer's Knight, Devil and Dog get tangled up in giraffe parts….

 

My favourite, I think. Dr Tulp and pupils necks look like intestines
…..

 

Looks a bit like a twiglet…

 

Thanks to Martin for these.

BTW, I've created a new section for links to practicing artists. I'll populate it as time goes on.  

 

Wired Art History- slight return.

This story should be seen in terms of the last post.

Wired Art History

How wired is your art history? I've found some interesting blogs (here and here) that debate the way the internet and cyberspace is making us more wired in the sense of not only being connected to the web, but also distracted by computer technology that competes for our attention. It got me thinking about such conditions as multi-tasking and to give it another name, continuous partial attention, is for better or worse, affecting our productivity as art historians, both educators and students.

I'm getting more and more into a wired state. I have 3 computers, one for writing, archiving, etc, a netbook linked to a large monitor, always tuned to the internet, and a laptop downstairs by the T.V. When I get up in the morning, just like my coffee, I have to get my fix of Artdaily, the aptly named Artfix and all the various art info sites; watching TV at night, I cannot resist checking mails, Twitter, Facebook, art blogs, to see what is happening in the field. Who's published what? What exhibitions are coming up? In what direction is the art market heading? Any interesting conference opportunities on the horizon? And so on…. I know I should scale this virtual dependency down, but I like it because it reinforces the impression that art history is in flux, ceaselessly mutating, morphing from one shape to another- exploding with ideas and energy. It think it's a reaction to a time before the internet when information moved slower, not shooting packets down the superhighway, but gridlocked in publication schedules, slow turnaround times and similar. I know that world still exists- I have a number of publications that will eventually emerge as result of this process- but on-line publishing, for better or worse, has meant that ideas spread and are debated faster.

Despite this, web based technology is taking a long time to be absorbed into the traditional structures of assessment and teaching, especially art history. Our discipline hasn't exactly made things easy; it has a history, if not exactly of Luddism, then certainly distrust of new technologies and their applications. This is most evident in connoisseurship which, we know from recent events, still hasn't really come to terms with X rays, inflectography or the cutting edge of scientific method in general. Incidentally, I do use image software to zoom in on details in classes on connoisseurship and visual methodology, but I don't see much evidence of this in universities.

Now in 2010, I must confess disappointment that the windows revolution has made little impact on the teaching of art history. Why, given the discipline's visual emphasis, hasn't there been such a push for it from leaders of the field, especially as it's omniscient in our culture? One of the books that diagnoses our predicament for me is the late Anne Friedberg's marvelous book on visuality and the windows phenomenon. Friedberg uses a mixed metaphor- window and desktop to describe the interface between computer and user.

"Each window is in essence a variable- size virtual screen that reflects the progress of some activity. The general effect is of looking at a small desk with papers of varying size lying partially on top of one another. The "window" here refers to a "variable size virtual screen" but is also a component of a mixed metaphor: a window and a desk. The desktop metaphor of a stack of papers, in overlapping array, implies a view from above. The window metaphor implies looking into or out of an aperture, a "perspective" position facing an upright perpendicular surface. Stacking windows on top of each other, piling documents in layers, meant that the user could minimize the limited "real estate" of the relatively small screen. The space mapped onto the computer screen was both deep and flat. It implied a new haptics in the position of its user: in front of and above."  

I think Friedberg has unwittingly provided a metaphor for the failure of art history to engage with the computer proactively: most art historians see the computer as a virtual desk, an extension of the research archive or database, but not a window in the sense of perspective that opens upon onto the wired world; although some like me have cottoned onto the potential of that. Friedberg drew on Walter Benjamin's ideas on reception and distraction to explore the phenomenon of multi-tasking in relation to the way windows are split on one computer as well as the fractured experienced caused by working between different computers. As Friedberg says, computer multi-tasking made it possible to "combine work with leisure", running an academic or financial doc while shopping on Amazon or other outlets. With the windows revolution, productivity should be equated with "a fractured subjectivity." Linda Stone, an expert on attention issues, goes further in order to make an interesting distinction between multi-tasking and what she calls continuous partial attention.  

"In the case of continuous partial attention, we're motivated by a desire not to miss anything. We're engaged in two activities that both demand cognition. We're talking on the phone and driving. We're writing an email and participating in a conference call. We're carrying on a conversation at dinner and texting under the table on the Blackberry or iPhone.

Continuous partial attention also describes a state in which attention is on a priority or primary task, while, at the same time, scanning for other people, activities, or opportunities, and replacing the primary task with something that seems, in this next moment, more important. When we do this, we may have the feeling that our brains process multiple activities in parallel. Researchers say that while we can rapidly shift between activities, our brains process serially.

Continuous partial attention involves a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With cpa, we feel most alive when we're connected, plugged in, and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities – activities or people – in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, "What can I gain here?"

It's difficult to monitor how technologically determined distraction will evolve where the individual work habits of art historians are concerned, but we can analyses one area- the use of gadgets like audio guides in museums, and their effect on the contemplation of the pictures. As Artworld Salon rightly points out, the disadvantages of applications on devices like IPhones- and audio guides resemble them more these days-greatly outweigh their benefits:

"So what's not to love? Quite a bit, I think. For museums especially, such apps come loaded with subtle butterfly effects that techno-evangelists ignore at their peril.

First, they represent to an incursion of technology into a refreshingly gadget-free domain heretofore devoted to physical objects and direct collective experience. There is a case to be made, perhaps, for exempting some areas of life from the relentless digitization and intermediation of everything. Of course it's easier to find the great blue whale by letting your PDA guide you. But what about the joy of aimless browsing and discovery? Here as elsewhere, technology has a way of taking the mystery and the surprise – not to mention the unpremeditated educational encounter – out of cultural experiences. What's more, it subtly transforms a group dynamic into a bespoke, private pursuit. Analogies with newspapers abound."

A few weeks ago at the Renaissance drawings exhibition at the British Museum, I got an idea of how the museum was becoming more wired in the sense discussed here. I was amazed to see visitors not only listening to audio commentary through headphones, but simultaneously holding IPhone-like screens on which the drawing they were looking at was digitally displayed. There are implications here for public museology and connoisseurship issues, but I'll leave that for another post.

For myself, I think I need to reach a balance between the contemplation of art and the use of the technology that undoubtedly distracts me. Is it possible to obtain the serene meditation of the Buddha whilst being bombarded by information overload, over-stimulation and the assault of the wired world in general? Well, at least I don't own an IPad.  

Images

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway, 1995.

Mr PC and the windows revolution.

The Virtual Window

The Fractured Experience

Nam June Paik, T.V. Buddha, 1974.

 

 

 

The Starry Messenger

What's wrong with this picture? That was the question confronting Sherlock Holmes in the last episode of the new BBC adaptation, Sherlock. With a life at stake, Holmes had to solve the mystery of a Vermeer, or what looked like a variant based on the View of Delft. Imagine that painting with a starry vault, and you'll get the idea

We hear a lot about connoisseurs getting it wrong, but they usually have lots of time to examine their artworks and make their mistakes. Holmes had a more pressing deadline: 10 seconds to save the case and save a child. Young Moriarty had orchestrated a great game involving a series of puzzles that involved victims wired up like suicide bombers; only solving the mysteries saved the victims. As the time ticked away and we saw the sleuth's thoughts represented by words flitting across the screen, it looked as if all was lost. "It's a fake," said Holmes, but Moriarty wanted more. After scanning the signature, the facture and other parts of the canvas, it suddenly hit Holmes that a series of paint splotches were arrayed in the shape of an astronomical cluster That was it! The fraudster-artist having a penchant for astronomy, had painted a supernova or an exploding star in the sky; but the snag was it was only visible in 1858, over a hundred years after the work was supposedly executed. A stellar performance in more ways than one. The joke here is that Holmes is not interested in the solar system because it falls outside the science of deduction. Still, as he told an amused Watson, while admiring the night sky, "That doesn't mean I can't appreciate it."

The writers of this updated Sherlock know their Conan Doyle; they know that the writer famously has Holmes say "art in the blood is liable to take the strangest of forms." In the books Holmes says he is descended from the Vernet dynasty of painters; and his artistic side has not been forgotten in this series despite his sleuthhound persona. In last week's episode Holmes consulted an art expert at the National Gallery to help him decode a set of symbols in an updated version of 'The Dancing Men'. This turned out to be a graffiti artist a la Banksy who sprayed-painted the walls of that venerable institution before being chased off by the police.  

I've enjoyed this makeover of Sherlock Holmes, and it looks as if lots of other people have too. The two actors, Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) are well-matched, and the series captures the nervous rhythm of our times well. Currently, I would expect Holmes to be a techie, at ease with texting and e.mail, not to mention web-surfing; I also like the lumber-room of his brain compared to a hard drive from which certain information has been deleted. Likewise, it makes sense to make Watson a blogger and an unemployed locum! I'm not so sure about Moriarty's Paul McCartney sound-alike though!

My favourite line in this episode. Holmes (drily to Watson) "Where would I be without my blogger?"

 

Thanks for Voting!

Just a very short message to thank all those who voted to put AHT in the Top 50 Art/Art History blogs. It's really gratifying to know the posts are appreciated by the readers. AHT will aim to keep up the good work and will wear its award with pride!

Looking Modern, Feeling Renaissance

In his engaging memoir, A Sweeper Up After Artists, the American critic Irving Sandler recalls a conversation he had at a dinner honouring the very eminent Sir Ernst Gombrich. The subject of modern art, specifically Duchamp, came up, a tactic thought by Sandler to have been used by his eminence to vilify all of modern art. Reading this account puts me in mind of a tennis match. Duchamp comes over the net only for Klee (the only modernist tolerated by Gombrich) to be sent back over, then Sandler blasts Mondrian at Gombrich who races to the art historical baseline to volley Botticelli back at the alert American who aces his European opponent with the smash: "If anybody living today painted as skillfully as Botticelli, would you accept him?" "Probably not," concedes a stubborn Gombrich. Game, set and match to Sandler, I think.

As a spectator at this art historical match I know who I'm rooting for, and no it's not Gombrich despite my renaissance credentials- it's Sandler. I suspect that Sandler despite being an expert on modern art, would keep an open mind when looking at the art of the renaissance, hence his remark about Botticelli's skill. Many renaissance scholars have zero-tolerance when it comes to modern art. I recall an AAH annual conference organized around modern art; despite the conference's organizer's plea for them to engage with it, the renaissance scholars hit the road; I stayed on and chaired a panel on Walter Benjamin, a lonely convert to the importance of modern art and modernism for earlier periods. Although I've had this attitude in the past, the blinkers really fell from my eyes when I saw the abstract expressionist Philip Guston's marvelous retrospective in London in 2004, which brings me back to Sandler.



One of Sandler's heroes, pictured with the author on the cover, is Guston, one of a number of artists and friends who recognized the value of renaissance art for their own practice. Sandler recounts an all-night session during which Guston kept the author and his wife enthralled with copies after Piero della Francesca's frescos at Arezzo, which the painter knew thoroughly. Turning aside from what he saw as self-indulgent explorations of the void, Guston opened a conversation with renaissance masters like Piero, for him one of the first painters to seek abstraction in a composition. For another critic, Dore Ashton, Guston's pared-down, schematic drawings of the 1960s evoked the idea of the 'first morning of the world in Piero's Baptism. Here Ashton through looking carefully at Guston's art saw theological ideas as derived from the picture-making of Piero which she accordingly matched with Guston's increasingly theological turn of phrase. As Guston sunk deeper and deeper into a morass of self-doubt about his art, he resorted to a language of theology to articulate his concerns about how the anxieties of artistic creation were inextricably bound up with more profound issues such as the location of man in the evolutionary scheme of things. But Guston would not have been able to develop his ideas on faith and painting without recourse to past artists: each new borrowing from an old master not only helped to define Guston artistically but also spiritually; the art of the past was a testing-ground for working out problems about faith in a hostile universe, just as much as a way of dealing with the thorny abstraction v figuration debate hanging over New York art circles.

There's a section in Sandler's memoir on another recusant from abstract expressionist authority, Al Held. Jewish like Guston, Held trod a similar path, although his art doesn't seem be so weighed down by the tragic quality that much of Guston's painting bears. Inspired by depth and illusion, not flatness, Held studied renaissance perspective in order to create beguiling geometric forms dancing in space. There is an optimistic current running through Held's art. As Sandler puts it:  

"Al found inspiration in the Christian humanism of Renaissance old masters and their vision of a heavenly paradise, particularly after he spent six months in Rome in 1981. He kept the humanistic and futuristic vision, and dropped the Christian component."

As Sandler says, Held modernized renaissance art. Imagine Giovanni Belli's humanist dreamland of the late 1490s shorn of all its Christian aspects; it could have been conceived by a surrealist abstractionist like Giorgio di Chirico who in his turn encouraged both Held and Guston to journey back to renaissance art to discover for themselves how to escape from the tyranny of modernist authority. The renaissance liberated these artists- that's why it's significant for debates about modern art. I still don't think I could convince my renaissance colleagues to go to modern art conferences and sessions though.

Works

Philip Guston, Pantheon, 1973, Private Coll., NY.

Piero della Francesca, Baptism of Christ, 1450s, NG., London.

Al Held, Pachinko, 1989, Private Coll.

Giovanni Bellini, Sacred Allegory, 1490-1500, Uffizi.

 

Crossed Out

Why are we still arguing over the crucifixion as a subject in art without attending to the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of different renderings of the subject, not to mention technique? This is the point made by a commenter on an article about the current Cross Purposes: Shock and Contemplation in Images of the Crucifixion exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery in London. I can't help echoing this individual's viewpoint, especially when we're dealing with the crucifixion as painted by modern artists like Marc Chagall, Graham Sutherland (above) and, ahem, Tracey Emin.



There exists a modern art tradition within which the subject matter of the crucifixion is not of primary importance; what counts is the way the crucifixion can be worked through aesthetically and formally in the artistic process. You won't find such luminaries as Bill Viola, who's done more than most to incorporate a religious dimension into modern art, directly referencing the crucifixion or the resurrection within a specific historical or cultural context. His video of a man swimming in water only evoked Christ because it was situated in Durham Cathedral. Although he utilizes many examples of religious art from the renaissance and early modern periods, the message of the crucifixion and other such religious happenings are meant to be absorbed subliminally, outside a recognizable iconographic framework. Viola believes that the image of the resurrection and crucifixion belong to the whole world, not specific sects or denominations.

In the case of an earlier modernist figure, Francis Bacon, whose paintings of the 1950s and 60s were called 'Crucifixion', or 'Fragment of a Crucifixion'- above-this artist used the crucifixion in order to work through themes and problems in his paintings. This is a minority view, namely that despite the absence of religious tradition of representation in modern artists like Bacon, these religious themes eventually emerge through painting itself; some would even argue that the act of painting in the modern or postmodern condition renders art atheistic rather than spiritual. Perhaps we could see Bacon's crucifixion themes in this manner, an intriguing idea put forward by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze who actually met Bacon and wrote a highly original book about his art in 1981. Deleuze proposed that Bacon, and by implication those modern artists who followed his example, could be completely indifferent to the subject matter of the crucifixion.



However, Deleuze had in mind Bacon's predecessors as well as followers since he observed,  

"What is at stake here is no longer just Bacon, but undoubtedly the whole history of Western painting. If we attempted to define this western painting, we could take Christianity as our first point of reference. For Christianity subjected the form, or rather the Figure, to a fundamental deformation. Insofar as God was incarnated, crucified, descended, ascended to heaven, and so on, the form or the Figure was no longer rigorously linked to essence, but to what, in principle, is its opposite: the event, or even the changeable, the accident. Christianity contains a germ of tranquil atheism that will nurture painting; the painter can easily be indifferent to the religious subject he is asked to represent. Nothing prevents him from realizing that, because of its now-essential relation with the accident, the form can become, not a God on the cross, but more simply a "napkin or a rug on the point of unrolling, the handle of a knife ready to be detached, a little loaf of bread falling into slices as if of its own volition, an overturned cup, all sorts of vases or fruits tumbled into a heap, and overhanging plates." All of this can be put on Christ himself, or close by him: Christ is besieged, and even replaced by accidents. Modern painting begins when man no longer experiences himself as an essence, but as an accident."

Christ as the victim of the "accidents of painting?" A tragic vision in which painting is used to define humankind in relation to a fall of some kind? Maybe, but I'm more interested in what Deleuze is saying about the way the crucifixion is metamorphosed into still-life and the rendering of everyday objects- the things that the artist positions and paints in the studio. Deleuze is obviously thinking of Cézanne's apples and napkins here, but I can't help thinking of Courbet's famous visual statement, The Painter's Studio, in which a man in the pose of Christ on the Cross hangs limply at the side of the artist's easel. Courbet seems to be saying that the crucifixion is now a studio prop completely subservient to art itself. Christ has literally gone out of the picture here; he has been decentered, crossed out, painted out by the act of painting itself. Courbet's brush hovers over a passage in the painting he is working on, but Christ is absent- it's a landscape.

Isn't that the sort of debate that this so-called controversial exhibition should be provoking, the relationship between the crucifixion and the act of painting itself, played out in the evolution of modern art, not denouncements about the "unsuitability" of the cross for a Jewish museum? It's not about Jewish or Christian theology; it's about the mysterious processes of art. That's the true religious issue. Deal with it.

Artists in the exhibition: Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer, Duncan Grant, Eric Gill, Craigie Aitchison, Emmanuel Levy, Lee Miller, Tracey Emin, Francis Souza, Marc Chagall, Norman Adams, Betty Swanwick, John Armstrong, Samuel Bak, Robert Henderson Blyth, Gilbert Spencer, Michael Rothenstein, Sybil Andrews, Maggi Hambling, Roy de Maistre and David Jones.

Other interesting responses to the show can be found here, here and here. More posts on art and the crucifixion here and here.