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art libraries |
35/1 2010
What is research in the visual arts?
Obsession, archive, encounter
Edited by Michael Ann Holly and
Marquard Smith
Clark studies in the visual arts.
Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and
Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008.
Distributed by Yale University Press.
215 p . : ill. ISBN 9780300134131.
$24.95 (paper)
This collection of essays is based on the proceedings
of the Clark Conference held at the Sterling and
Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown,
Massachusetts, on 27 and 28 April 2007. The
contributors are academics and independent
scholars from The Netherlands, the UK, Canada
and the USA.
The editors wish to raise fundamental questions
about what research is in art history, visual culture
studies, curatorial activities and visual art practices.
The contributors consider why such research is
performed, how it is done, and what place it has in
art-making and the interpretation of art. In this
respect the volume is a self-conscious, self-reflexive
attempt to reveal and ponder the modus operandi of
(primarily) the art historian. '[I]t considers critically
the pleasures and dangers of our obsessions and
encounters with the incoherence, chaos, and wonder
at the heart of the process of doing research, the act
of searching for the not-yet-known' (x).
The book's main text is divided into two parts,
essays more or less associatively grouped under the
headings 'Encounters and obsessions' and 'The
world and the archive'. (The distinction between the
two major groups is not always clear.)
Several contributions note what Holly calls the
danger of 'loss of wonder in the writing about the
visual' (xiii), the missing of 'the epiphanic moment'
if research contributes to 'the process of stripping
the work of art of its awe, its affect' (5). Alexander
Nemerov calls such epiphanies 'historical revelation'
- 'a sudden, revelatory awareness of the past',
journal
amounting to an 'instant when we come to see the
past in the shape of something odd' which at first
sight defies explanation (13; 28). This idea is given
an ironic twist in Marc Gotlieb's essay on so-called
'outsider art history', research undertaken by non-
specialists in art history who bring their own
technical expertise and practices with them, with
medics as a noteworthy example. These outsiders
often reduce a work of art to an unsolved puzzle, an
anomaly with a hidden meaning, in the hope of
'making not a trivial but a profound discovery -
typically the exposing of a secret structure, symbol,
a tomb, or an identity held to lie at the core of a
work's meaning' (86).
Sina Najafi, on the other hand, maintains that
research and wonder are compatible, the one
increasing the other. He argues that estrangement
can expel researchers from their familiar
perspectives through such strategies and approaches
as the meandering narrative, attention to refuse and
leftovers and what they signify, the stimulation of
chance and adventure, free association, speculation,
collecting, researching the everyday and the
overlooked, and so on. Ernst van Alphen focuses on
artists' archives, so-called anomic archives: archives
as works of art, whereby a free-associative attention
for collecting the overlooked and the trivial can
create exceptional, envisioning experiences that defy
deadening categorization and representation.
Another recurring parallel theme is art historical
research seen 'in pursuit of something it can never
catch, but that unknowability is also part of its
charm (...) the systematic pursuit of the not-yet-
known' (10). Najafi calls this 'recognizing the alien,
the remainder, and the unknowable as fundamental
elements in the world' (143).
Joanne Morra sees three main working practices -
repetition, free association (including serendipity
and contingency), and the function of time (personal
past, present continuum, future projections) - as
underlying the work of research, offering 'the
promise of future knowledge and understanding
that is yet unknown' (61). The contributions by
Celeste Olalquiaga (the leftover, the residue, the
'dead stock' awaiting resurrection), Akira Mizuta
Lippit (using Heidegger and the phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty) and Mieke Bal are developed along
similar lines.
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. art libraries .
journal 35/1 2010

In this volume the idea of the archive implies not

only an archive as information specialists know it, Peter Rogiest
but also the studio, the gallery, the museum, Head of the Reading Room and Stacks
'documents, paintings, artifacts, displays and Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience
cabinets of curiosity, collections, libraries, living Hendrik Conscienceplein 4
rooms, and so on' as objects of research (xx-xxi). As B-2000 Antwerp
an information specialist I find it refreshing to avoid Belgium
for once the functional, deterministic, reductionist Email: peter.rogiest@stad.antwerpen.be;
take on research practices which necessarily peter, rogiest @skynet. be
prevails within our proper discipline and to look at
the matter instead from the viewpoint of the
researcher, for whom the archival or library
collection is only one of various possible means to
do research.
The book is well written and handsomely
produced, with an attractive cover characteristic of
the Clark studies in the visual arts series. Its wide
margins and graceful typography make for an
agreeable reading experience. The essays are
illustrated with black-and-white reproductions,
generally well chosen to support and enrich the
essays.
There is no index, list of illustrations or general
bibliography. Notes and references conclude each
contribution. Inevitably, references to seminal texts
- Heidegger on the Weltbild, Derrida on the idea of
the archive, Appadurai on research - crop up in
several contributions.
This publication is intended for art historians and
those doing research in the visual arts. Within its 200
pages it manages to offer a broad range of ideas and
insights on research practices in the field (e.g. the
implicit juxtaposition between Holly's
foregrounding of textual reading to explain a work
of visual art versus Mieke Bal's defence of 'close
looking', the close reading of the works of art
themselves). The references contain many
interesting pointers to further reading.
A number of the contributions can be especially
recommended, including those by Marquard Smith,
Marc Gotlieb and Mieke Bal. This reviewer,
however, fails to see why W J. T. Mitchell's 'The
Abu Ghraib archive' belongs in this book. While
admittedly interesting, it deals more with the iconic
impact and continuing influence of the notorious
torture images from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison than
with research.
Even though theoretical, metaphoric and
philosophical arguments predominate in this book,
it remains a surprisingly accessible source, one
which need not be read from cover to cover to be
enjoyed.

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