Art History Today

Vermeer’s Virtual Studio.

And speaking of Vermeer……

Defining Virtuality in 17^th Century Dutch Art

A number of scholars of 17^th century Dutch art have used the phrase “virtual reality” to describe the startling realism of many of the paintings of the period; the art seems to possess a kind of “reality effect” making it seem more than painted materials applied to a surface.[1] A painting like Van Hoogstraten’s Interior  of 1662 encourages such comparisons: with the aid of computer magnification you can take a “virtual” walk around this spacious interior, loosing yourself in the strange angles and through-views as you navigate Dutch pictorial space. In her book, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Anne Friedberg discusses the term “virtuality” and its development in the seventeenth-century:

“In seventeenth and eighteenth- century optics, “virtual” was used to describe an image that was seen by looking through a lens or that appeared in a mirror. The term “virtual” first appears in English in the writings of Sir David Brewster about the properties of refraction in his Treatise on Optics (1831). Best known for his 1816 invention of the kaleidoscope (an optical device that demonstrated the principles of reflective symmetry),  Brewster described the differing properties of an image seen by the eye and an image seen through the mediation of a lens. A “real image” is formed by the convergence of rays of light and is visible to the eye, but will also appear on a surface that is placed in a plane with the image. A “virtual image”- perceived in the brain- is visible to the eye but will not appear on a surface placed in its plane. Hence a “virtual image” in Brewster’s optics is not recuperable to representation. This meaning of “virtual” suggests an intangible, uncapturable, ineffable appearance- more imago than pictura.”[2]

Following on from this, Friedman concludes that the virtual image “has no material existence (appears in the brain, or on the retina) and the virtual image that is formed in representation signifies a subtle shift in its materiality.”[3] It is interesting to think of the artist’s studio in relation to this distinction between imago and pictura, specifically Vermeer’s studio as it appears- or doesn’t!- within his masterpiece The Art of Painting. Other painters in Vermeer’s hometown- Delft- used scientific methods in the construction of compositions. Carel Fabritius who came to Delft from Rembrandt’s studio, in the 1650s, employed a lens in his view of Delft; Samuel van Hoogstraten is his wonderful perspective box in the London National Gallery (1655-60) devises a series of virtual worlds that are only visible through the peephole of the camera obscura.

The Virtual Studio and the Art of Painting.

In an essay on the “imagined studio” of Vermeer, H. Perry Chapman ponders whether we are actually looking at Vermeer himself or the idea of the painter in The Art of Painting (1665-7). In this celebrated work Vermeer shows an artist from the back which Chapman believes could indicate Vermeer’s wish to efface himself from the painting, to negate his persona and artistic identity.[4] As Chapman says, the anonymity of the painter makes him the ideal painter, not a specific one. Vermeer was known as “the Sphinx of Delft” since his biographers do not really reveal him, probably because there wasn’t much textual data on him. Attempts to give Vermeer and his studio an identity, like in the movie The Girl with the Pearl Earring, really are romanticizing an enigma. The film shows Vermeer in his studio, but he never shows himself, except maybe in the Procuress (1656) and there he is clothed in the kind of period garments that the painter wears in the Art of Painting, which doesn’t help to place him in a specific social situation. Even when the curtain to the painter’s refuge is drawn back in the Vienna painting, the artist’s rear view seems to act as a barrier to entry to the studio, an idea that crops up in many artists’ studios examined in this series. If we need proof that Vermeer’s strategy is completely different we need only compare the allegory with another complex meditation on self-representation. As shown a few weeks ago, another 17^th century painter Johannes Gumpp turns his back on the viewer, but he shows his own features through a complex system of representation involving canvas and mirror, not self-effacement at all.  Vermeer’s artist does no such thing and that rejection of the viewer could support Chapman’s theory that this figure is an idea of painting, not Vermeer himself, or even a physical artist in a studio. 

Chapman’s reading is persuasive and might help to explain why Clio- the muse of history- is present instead of some allegorical figure representing Pittura or painting itself, as this work is supposed to demonstrate the art of painting. An example of this in 17^th century Dutch art is a woman painted by another artist, Frans van Mieris the Elder, Pictura (1661) an un-idealized female dressed in eye-catching garments, holding a sculpture- a reference either to the paragone, or the triumph of painting over sculpture.  Yet if the painter sitting in the Art of Painting is a masculine version of Pittura, and the female muse is History, where is the painter himself? Could it be that he is an invisible presence revealing the studio to the spectator, and that the seated artist is a simulacrum of the painter, a virtual Vermeer?[5] A similar idea appears in another famous representation of a 17^th century studio: Velasquez’s Las Meninas. In that complex painting, a figure framed in a doorway suggests an echo of Velasquez, maybe another simulacrum. The figure is actually a Velasquez: Jose Nieto Velasquez, steward of the palace. “Velasquez 2” seems to be entering the studio and seeing what we can’t see- Las Meninas being painted.[6] See here for more discussion of this. It’s true that in the Art of Painting, we’re allowed to see into the studio but we don’t really see what is being painted since it’s partly occluded by another Vermeer, whom I’m tempted to call “Vermeer 2.” Instead, we see  an imago, which means something that cannot be seen or measured, as opposed to the pictura, which is something that can be focused on walls and surfaces, and thus measured with an instrument like a camera obscura- see below. The pictura belongs more to the process of representing and picturing, while the imago suggests the mystery at the heart of the artist’s studio, which we are never allowed to penetrate.

Vermeer's Virtuality: Looking Through the Camera Obscura in the Seventeenth-Century.

 

In her ground breaking The Art of Describing, Svetlana Alpers cites Kenneth Clark’s comment about Vermeer’s The Art of Painting being the “nearest painting has ever come to a coloured photograph.”[7] Indeed, some modern artists have tried to capture the “look” of a Vermeer in photographs and coloured prints.  The idea of Vermeer’s paintings resembling photographs goes back to the nineteenth-century when connoisseurs employed photographs, or reproductive media such as etchings, lithographs, when identifying and presenting a painter’s oeuvre. As Ivan Gaskell shows, photographic pioneers like Fox-Talbot turned to the conventions of Dutch art:  his photograph Open Door seems to reference Vermeer’s The Little Street.[8] This interest in Vermeer’s photographic realism has centred on the device known as the camera obscura, although it is not known whether Vermeer used optics to help him create his pictures.  His paintings with their sharp clarity suggest optical precision, although there is no documentation to back up these claims. Unperturbed by the lack of textual evidence, Philip Steadman, an architect and professor of Urban Studies, has written a book called Vermeer’s Camera.[9] Steadman has meticulously reconstructed Vermeer’s studio using models of the paintings to plot out the angles that Vermeer may have used to create his “virtual” worlds.  The camera obscura (Latin dark chamber) is an optical device used, for example, in drawing or for entertainment. It is one of the inventions leading to photography. The principle can be demonstrated with a box with a hole in one side (the box may be room-sized, or hangar sized). Light from a scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface where it is reproduced, in colour, and upside-down. The image's perspective is accurate. The image can be projected onto paper, which when traced can produce a highly accurate representation. Using mirrors, as in the 18th century overhead version, it is possible to project a right-side-up image. Another more portable type is a box with an angled mirror projecting onto tracing paper placed on the glass top, the image upright as viewed from the back. As a pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, but the projected image becomes dimmer. With too small a pinhole the sharpness again becomes worse due to diffraction. Some practical camera obscuras use a lens rather than a pinhole because it allows a larger aperture, giving a usable brightness while maintaining focus. In the movie The Girl with the Pearl Earring,[10] we see Vermeer allow the serving maid Griet to look inside the magic box where she thinks the artificial model that the painter uses is located. Here we have another reconstruction of Vermeer’s studio, but this time in the cinema. The interiors are cleverly devised, but again, we have no idea if the movie is recapturing the reality of seventeenth- century Delft, or whether it is simply another virtual Vermeer created by imagination and trickery. The coordinates of Vermeer’s studio remain uncertain and his art an eternal mystery.

---

[1] For example Mariet Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585-1718, 1996, 71-98; H. Perry Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer” in Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Michael Cole & Mary Prado, 2005, 108-146.

[2] Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 8-9.

[3] Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 9.

[4] Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer”, 137-8.

[5] Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer”, 142.

[6] Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 1995, 436.

[7] Kenneth Clark, quoted in Alpers, The Art of Describing, 1984, 27.

[8] Ivan Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums, 2000, 142.

[9] http://www.vermeerscamera.co.uk/home.htm.

[10] The Girl with the Pearl Earring, 2003.

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.

 

 

 

In Memoriam: Anne Friedberg 1952-2009

The L.A. Times reports the death of the U.S.C. art historian and cinematic theorist Anne Friedberg, who has died of colorectal cancer at 57. Although trained as an expert in cinema and media-theory, Friedberg performed a number of cross-disciplinary moves with great success.

I first came across her work a year or so ago when I read The Virtual: Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006). The title caught my imagination, and inspired me to create a course looking at the relationship between scientific technologies and framed painting. Calling it Media Art Histories, I created a structure in which I examined such concepts as 'window', 'frame', 'screen' etc, the terms that Friedberg deployed in her book. My students and I looked at everything, from Alberti and Leonardo to split-screen cinema in Warhol's Chelsea Girls- and beyond. We had a lot of fun and broke down the usual paradigms of viewing.

The relationship between moving images and framed paintings is not really developed in art history scholarship, but Friedberg was committed to creating programs and initiatives that brought cinema and painting together. The thematic scope of Friedberg's Virtual Window was not only staggering- art history, architectural theory, history of cinema, critical theory, digital culture-, but its chronology was pretty impressive too. Beginning with Alberti's concept of the open window, Friedberg deployed this as a metaphor for exploring space, time and representation right up to the advent of the windows revolution in the 80s. Reading The Virtual Window encouraged me to think more about the relationship between framed pictures and the computer screen. For example, the incidental episode that occurs deep in some early modern painting far from the foreground narrative – see the Velasquez genre scene above- struck me as similar to insets on computer screens. I also seem to recall that artists and theorists were interested in similar parallels. Bill Viola compared small religious pictures in the renaissance to portable laptops. Hopefully, there'll be more interest in this idea of art works as technology, thanks to Friedberg's innovative contribution.  

The Virtual Window is testament enough to Friedberg's probing intellect and multi-disciplinary energy, but perhaps the ultimate monument will be the web site that's been created to accompany the book: The Virtual Window Interactive. It can be found here.