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ISSN: 0004-3389 (Print) 2471-4100 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdat20

Out of America: ‘This Deadly Coexistence’

Colin Richards

To cite this article: Colin Richards (2000) Out of America: ‘This Deadly Coexistence’, de arte,
35:61, 61-74, DOI: 10.1080/00043389.2000.11761305

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 REVIEW ARTICLE

of !America:
Out
trJfiis 1Jead[y Covcistence}
CDLIN RICHAROS*

"Professor Zapp, I did so enjoy your lecture;' she said ... "Well thank you, AI," said Morris Zapp. "I certainly en-
joyed giving it. I seem to have offended the natives, though:'

"I'm working on the subject of romance for my doctorate," said Angelica, "and it seemed to me that a lot of what
you were saying applied very well to romance:'

"NaturallY,' said Morris Zapp. "lt applies to everything:'

"I mean, the idea of romance as narrative striptease, the endless leading on of the reader, the repeated post-
ponement of an ultimate revelation which never comes- or, when it does, terminates the pleasure of the text .. :'

(David Lodge, Small World)

This impressive collection of essays 1 is part of
what is now a veritable tradition in, or on the
edge of, Anglophone Art History. The title
outlines the figure current 'advanced' Amer-
ican art history might be said to cut as it enters
the stage of what editors Cheetham, Holly and
Moxey call the 'postepistemological age'
(p 2). And it is a dandy figure indeed.
The rhetorical play in the title- the 'subjects'
of art history - suggests an intellectual orienta-
tion loosely associated with the so-called
'new' Art History. Within this alleged 'newness',
such rhetorical play signals strains of cultural
and visual analysis most influenced by 'de-
constructive' critical tendencies.
While open to and occasionally engaged in
sociological or social constructionist analyses
of art and its histories, such tendencies are
often more 'textualist' than 'sociological'. The
sociological and the textual share more than a
mutual tension. Apart from a selective view of
each other, they also currently share the fact
that neither is usually contested on fundamen-
tal grounds. Indeed a favoured target of the
anti-essentialist, anti-foundationalist, relativis-
ing thrust of both contemporary sociological
and textualist approaches to visual art is
exactly the possibility of any such grounding.
The grounds for such targeting, in turn, would
not be shared by either. Without too much
distortion we could now argue that decon-
structive 'textualism' and 'sociological' ac-
counts of art constitute a new, increasingly
hegemonic intellectual orthodoxy in visual
culture.
lt is perhaps this increasing if not yet decisive
dominance that is 'new' in the art history
embraced by this collection. Two of the

• Colin Richords is on Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwotersrond.

~; ,;,;1;_,61
61
 OutojtA:merica
editors, Holly and Moxey, and a number of the
contributors - Mieke Bal. Norman Bryson,
Stephen Melville, for example - have been
active in developing this largely American
sphere of critical visual culture (see Bryson,
Holly and Moxey 1991 and 1994). I say 'Amer-
ican' even though some of the institutional
affiliations and intellectual debts incurred by
these writers are more Anglo-European than
'new world'. The imprimatur of Cambridge
University emblazoned on the book's spine
bears witness to the copious cultural capital
accruing to this 'new' intellectual orthodoxy.
This collection thus offers a sophisticated
and heterogenous introduction to the volatile
terrain occupied by a significant current
tendency in Anglophone art history. And it is
more appropriate, I think, to speak here of
terrain, of art history's spatiality, than of
'discipline' or even 'field'. These last, com-
monly used terms point to a rigidity and
enclosure which is becoming less tenable in
knowledge production and dissemination in
this rapidly globalising information age.
In fact Mark Cheetham, in his opening essay
'Immanuel Kant and the Bo(a)rders of Art
History', makes something of a spatialised
notion of art history. Cheetham means to
outline and locate 'shape and place of Art
History' (p 8), its 'disciplinary behaviour' (p 7) in
space he admits rather predictably to be
'multidimensional and radically pliable'
(p 13). However mutable this space, Chee-
tham conceives it as loosely triangulated by
art, art history, and philosophy. Against this
structuring he meditates on the 'sites' or
emplacement (p 19) of the increasingly fragile
middle term- art history.
There are many strengths to Cheetham's
approach. These are mostly echoed in much
•• u;l& 61
e COLIN RICHARDS
of the writing comprising this collection. One
strength - and not the least one - is an
intellectual agility and breadth responsive to
both art historical discourse and the visual
phenomenon the analytic approach seeks to
summon forth and ensnare. But such an
approach also risks considerable critical ca-
sualties. Cheetham's text is, on reading, frus-
tratingly abstract. Embedded in this
abstraction are links to highly specific material
forms, a strategy which results in a stressed and
rhetorical set of associations. Anselm Kiefer's
'Kantian forehead' would be a case in point
(p 14).
This writer's strategy - if it is one - delivers a
text which behaves uncannily like the auton-
omous, self-referential modernist picture. Little
seems readily transferable and generalisable
in Cheetham's account. The immediate epis-
temological yield appears less important, less
significant, than the staging of a textual
performance. Is this perhaps what knowledge
looks like in the 'postepistemological age'?
One of the difficulties of using spatial
metaphors to reference and articulate a
domain of disciplinary activity is a peculiarly
telescoped or collapsed temporality. Amongst
other things this spatialisation can frustrate the
'history' in and of art history, undermining
what, for instance, sociological interrogation
of the artworld might offer by way of critique.
The subtitle of this collection - 'historical
objects in contemporary perspective'- points
obliquely to this problem, and we are right, I
think, to worry at this form of articulating
temporality.
What, precisely, is a 'historical object'? Is
there something as clear-cut or even distinc-
tive as a 'contemporary perspective', some-
thing to project beyond the mere restatement
62
 Outof!America
of a truism? Might we not argue that the world
of things is always historical, if not evenly or
immediately so? Are not things, like 'subjects',
embedded in and part of the traffic of social
relating? Is saying 'contemporary' here saying
much beyond pointing rather redundantly to
intellectual activity at a given moment? Any
current perspective has a history, even if not all
historical perspectives have currency now. All
this might seem quibbling, but I think such
questioning points to important issues begging
closer scrutiny, especially if these collected
texts on 'the subjects of art history' aspire to be
more than obscure exercises in casuistry.
II
To help us identify at least part of what might
be at stake here we might remind ourselves of
earlier attempts at articulating different 'per-
spectives' in Anglophone art history. What
comes readily to mind here is W Eugene
Kleinbauer's (1971) rather grandly titled Mod-
ern Perspectives in Western Art History and
Mark Roskill's (1976) ambitious sounding What
is Art History?. For Kleinbauer the key critical
categories of art history include 'connoisseur-
ship', 'iconography', and 'the (sic) psychology
of pictorial representation' (p viii), while for
Roskill these embrace
the problem of attribution ... the re-assembly
of an artist's work leading to the discovery
of a virtually unknown genius, the recon-
struction of complex works to arrive at an
understanding of how they originally looked
and were taken in by the viewer, the
detection of forgery ... and finally the light
which an art historical approach can shed
even on a modern work (pp 12-13).
Bluntly, Kleinbauer and Roskill's understand-
ing of the art historical project is emphatically,
~.;:·
e COLIN RICHARDS
even naively empiricist, fragmented, techno-
centric and functional. The exclusions opera-
tionalised by Kleinbauer provide a sense of
shifting shapes within art history as practised
then and now. According to Kleinbauer
(s)ince art history can best be understood
from actual applications, rather than from
programmatic statements of methodology,
it seemed appropriate to exclude articles
that expound method in theoretical terms:
barren prescriptions, speculations on the
nature of art history, interpretations of the
historiography of art, investigations of art
theory, and papers by aestheticians, philo-
sophers, and professional art critics (p ix).
In a sense, the book under review in this article
neatly marks the distances and directions we
have travelled from the triumphalist humanism
and theoretically innocent discourse under-
pinning the art history most of us can remem-
ber.
What was amiss in this rather arcane kind of
art history, even if Kleinbauer and Roskill are
not the best representatives of it, was of course
assayed in Rees and Borzello's (1986) collec-
tion The New Art History. Taking a leaf out of
Rees and Borzello's book we find this neat and
not wholly negative summation of 'the tradi-
tion' of art history:
When the tradition is given the detailed
critique which the accusations of the new
art historians demand, it will be seen that it
did not concern itself exclusively with high
art and genius. Nor was the tradition wholly
Eurocentric ... Even its hostility to theory was
mostly directed against Hegel (and, by
extension, Marx). Rather than lacking in
ideas it could as easily be accused of
having too many and those too arcane.
iJ;J161
63
 0 u t of 9\: me ric a e CC L IN R IC H A R 0 S
And ... a thin red line of historians has always
stressed art's relationship to society. None-
theless, the issues which inspired the new art
history's reaction- the tradition's claim to
be value-free, its belief in the impartiality of
historians, its refusal to admit aesthetics and
criticism as part of historical study, its suspi-
cion of theoretical reflection, its obsession
with fact-gathering and its blindness to class
and gender- are less easy to defend (p 7).
When viewing this compilation through the
critical prism offered by this extract, one
wonders whether matters have moved much.
In a very real sense have the deeper questions
changed significantly? In a sense this question
is thematised and anatomised in the editors'
discussion of the images on the front and back
covers of the book. Included in this considera-
tion of stills from Barbara Steinman's video
installation Icon (1990) are the following: the
dream of scientific objectivity, the assumption
that 'works of art have meanings that are
hidden and in need of revelation' (p 3), the
value of painting over photography (very
dated, this one), the construction of canons,
the autonomy of the art object and the
cultural field, and the boundary between facts
and fantasy. Mapping this set of concerns
onto the quote from Rees and Borzello of more
than a decade earlier gives a sense of how we
might answer the question posed above.
Continuity, discontinuity and change in art
history becomes slightly clearer if we briefly
contextualise this study within the tradition it
most strongly exemplifies. We might emplot
the tradition of 'new' art histories across
different space-time co-ordinates. Any such
plot presupposes and is constitutive of a
distinctive set of origins, ends, narratives and
a critical lexicon.
Jd ;,.;j;61
64
One way of identifying a plot- serpentine,
eccentric but not off the mark - would be
through the authors collected in Rees and
Borzello (1986), Norman Bryson's collection
Calligram: Essays in New Art History from
France (1988) and Donald Preziosi's recent
The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology
(1998). In between we might glimpse, even
glare at John Roberts' provocative Art Has No
History: The Making and Unmaking of Modern
Art (1994), which worries at various permuta-
tions of the 'art' and 'history' contained in its
title. Coming from left field again, we might
add two or three further texts. Robert Witkin's
Art and Social Structure ( 1995) offers a useful
and quite nuanced reading of the relations
between art and social structure. The second
text I have in mind takes 'art history' on more
frontally, if sometimes reductively. This is Gen
Doy's polemical and critically bracing Materi-
alizing Art History(1998). Finally, ian Heywood's
thoughtful Social Theories of Art ( 1997) reflects
on a range of 'social theories of art' from an
unusual perspective. Lodged uneasily but
magisterially in this conflicted textual terrain
would be Michael Podro's earlier Critical
Historians of Art (1982). Readers could doubt-
less supply others.
But it is perhaps in less disciplined, greyer
zones that the more vital dimensions of this
'new' art history may be discerned. There are
many excellent books which cover in rather
scatter-shot way the terrain occupied or
evacuated by 'traditional' art history. Some
of these are overtly 'textualist' (see Silverman
1994, cf Ellis 1989; 113-136), and some come
from the burgeoning domain of 'visual cul-
ture', 'art theory' and 'material culture'; see
inter alia Carroll (1990), Chaplin (1994), Bryson
Holly and Moxey (1991, 1994), Bal and Boer
( 1994), Jenks ( 1995), Melville and Readings
 Out of 9tmerica e C 0 LIN RICHARDS
(1995), Nelson and Shiff (1996), Morzoeff
( 1998). Tim Dant' s Material Culture in the Social
World (1999), and John Walker and Sarah
Chaplin's Visual Culture: An Introduction
( 1997) both provide perspectives from outside
the commonly and tacitly accepted disciplin-
ary terrain of art history which help clarify the
external contours and internal structures of
that terrain.
Ill
Given the ambition and sophistication of the
project, it would be useful to look more closely
at how the editors envision their readers and
the function of their collection. The editors
speak of the book as 'a kind of theoretical
primer' (p 2) intended for 'graduate students
and .. . advanced undergraduates as well'
(p 2) They are provocative, in that these writers
hold that the putative revolution in art history
comes from below:
Graduate students, intrigued by interpretive
complexity and diversity, have clamoured
for courses and texts that address the
plethora of interpretive issues up front in-
stead of burying them under the auspices of
disinterested scholarship (p 2).
am not sure graduate intrigue or market
pressure from below or above provide a sound
epistemological basis for an intellectual revo-
lution, however surely they play their part in
organising our intellectual culture. A similar
problem seems to underpin the selection of
the sixteen specially commissioned essays. It
appears that the selection of the 'perspec-
tives' represented was on the basis of 'the
most visible' (p 2) in the field. Again, this feels
like more market driven than intellectually
based selection. These caveats notwithstand-
ing, Cheetham et of's anthology does wear its
~;
'interestedness' on its sleeve, seeking as it does
to 'convert the unconverted' (p 2).
Reading these sometimes formidably dense,
variously compelling and unparaphrasable
essays I felt the constant pull of basic, even
simplistic questions. One of the most nagging
and irritating in its generality has to do with the
dauntingly difficult matter of 'truth'. I find
myself unconvinced about nee-nihilistic post-
modernism's truism that 'history is not about
truth' (p 2) (see inter alia Attridge, Bennington
and Young (1989)). Surely it is. If not 'about',
then inextricably 'entangled with'. Is history not
exactly about conflicting 'facts', about con-
flicting truth claims, about conflicting frame-
works of value, about conflicting pasts serving
a contested present? Should they stray into this
arcane terrain South African readers may
justifiably pause at this kind of statement in
the light of our changing past and embattled
present. And we would not be alone or
exceptional in this. The absence of a transhis-
torically grounded 'Truth' surely does not
reduce to the weak relativism implied by this
kind of thinking.
Back to the book. Part One, titled 'Philoso-
phy of History and Historiography' addresses
some of the philosophical foundations of
contemporary Western aesthetic historiogra-
phy. The principal intellectual pillars providing
the foundations and architecture of current
aesthetic historiography are, perhaps predic-
tably, Kant and Hegel. There is much that is
interesting and valuable in the essays by the
three editors. There is a consistency, or a
congruence of focus in this part of the
collection which seems lacking in the other
two. Atomisation or fragmentation is always a
risk in collections such as this. And, I feel
constrained to add, the only alternative to
such atomisation or fragmentation is not that
iJ;J161
65
 0 Ut 0 f !America
post-modern shibboleth, the 'totalisation'
lodged in some or other 'master narrative'.
I have already given some space over to
Cheetham's paper. In his 'Art History's Hege-
lian Unconscious: Naturalism as Nationalism',
Keith Moxey engages teleological narrativisa-
tion and interesting connections between
nationalism and naturalism to interrogate the
process of producing historiography. I want to
draw out just one aspect of this essay, as
typical as it is tendentious in this kind of writing
and which is linked to the matter of 'truth'
already touched on. Here I am referring to
Moxey's affection for what one might call
pantextualism. On this Moxey offers the follow-
ing:
Once the idea that written histories corre-
spond with events that may have taken
place in the past is abandoned so that the
concept of truth is necessarily irrelevant to
the historian's project, the status of history as
text acquires a new significance' (p 26).
(my emphases).
There is much to irritate and argue with here,
even if the more salient, usable lessons of the
'post-structuralist' tendency in this postmodern
moment are taken to heart. It seems that
many of the issues Moxey raises, like the place
of the historian's subjectivity in the act of
producing meaningful narratives (self-reflexiv-
ity), neither rests on nor requires an ultimately
levelling, homogenising pantextualism. Like
some of the others, Moxey's essay has a rather
'staged' feel about it. This arises in part, I would
hazard, from the possibility that it is burdened
by a largely unacknowledged linguistic im-
perialism not uncommon in this kind of visual
cultural analysis.
Subjectivity too, and the 'methodological
u~· i.J;1~61
e C0 L IN RICH A RD S
unconscious of the discipline' is the aspect of
the historiography of the history of art that
preoccupies Michael Ann Holly. For Holly
'(h)istoriography is in the position of being able
to offer compelling comparisons and critiques
of master narratives of the past by highlighting
the inextricable situatedness, the inescapable
motivatedness of its historians' (p 53). So far so
good. Moxey's chosen figure is fin de siecle
Vienna; the Vienna of Freud ruminating on the
past, the 'Vienna school of art history',
peopled by inter alia Alois Riegel, Otto Pacht,
and Max Dvo6k. In the end, and there is one
after a long and complex discussion, Holly
seems to opt for engaging in and teasing out,
in historiography, an unending skein of 'tex-
tuality'. Holly finally, or nearly finally, finds
herself asking 'U)ust how far can historiography
go?' And she answers '(e)verywhere', extend-
ing 'from an exploration of the most physical or
institutional explanations to the most meta-
physicaL or even psychoanalytic' (p 64).
Again, Holly's ending provokes serious ques-
tions about the heuristic and analytic value of
rehearsing ritually the 'openness' of unending
critique and what looks suspiciously like cri-
tique for critique's sake. Without a duly articu-
lated and supported limit or frame, can any
critical work worth the name be done?
Whither 'truth' in an incontinent, promiscuous
textuality reproducing itself ad infinitum? Their
declared 'interested ness' notwithstanding,
what of the 'inextricable situatedness, the
inescapable motivatedness' of these editors,
their authors, this collection? What of their
actual place and time, their spatio-cultural
location, the geo-political geography and the
intellectual ecology of their ideas? In a way
the rest of the collection could be seen as a
differentiation, specification and diversifica-
66
 Outoj9tmerica e COLIN RICHARDS
tion of the sort of unending historiographic
project Holly has in mind.
The longest part of the book, Part Two,
comprises 'The Subjects and Objects of Art
History', presented in eight essays. The opening
piece is Mieke Bal's working through the 'use
of semiotics for the understanding of visual
art', while the closing essay is James D
Herbert's challenging 'Passing between Art
History and Postcolonial Theory'. A capacious
critical trajectory is bounded by these two
essays. We are treated, in turn, to feminisms,
queer studies, phenomenology, deconstruc-
tion (with reference to photography), recep-
tion and psychoanalysis. Few if any of these
would be unfamiliar to the contemporary
scholar in art history. Amongst the most
provocative essays of these is Mieke Bal's
exposition of semiotics and Whitney Davis on
'Homosexualism'. Given the flawed and for-
ceful position currently occupied by psycho-
analytic discourse the most question-begging
essay is probably Stephen Levine's on art
history and psychoanalysis.
Part Three presents a mixture of institutional
sites, discourses and modes of visual culture;
museums (Stephen Bonn), Galleries (Gerald
McMaster), Film Studies (Bruce Barber), Archi-
tecture (Anthony Vidler) and Computer Tech-
nology (William Vaughan). Here, I found
Stephen Bonn's entry exacting and incisive,
while William Vaughan's was technically useful
but conceptually constricted. Even so, all the
essays are thought-provoking and as a whole
this collection makes an extremely valuable
contribution to debate about the place of art
history in contemporary cultural discourse on
visual art.
Many productive questions are stimulated in
reading the essays in this book, and I can only
~~-
touch on a few here. Apropos Bal's article,
one wonders, for example, what a semiotics of
'abstract' art might look like? Levine's presen-
tation on psychoanalysis, while engaging,
suggests a field far less rich and riven than is
the case.
Another question involves 'materiality', from
the physicality of the object or event to the
complex registers of articulation and media-
tion in visual culture. 'Materiality' in art seems
effectively to have been overlooked in this
collection. It could, for example, have fea-
tured prominently in the discussion of semio-
tics, or have enjoyed sustained attention in
Stephen Melville's interesting discussion of
phenomenology and hermeneutics. This ab-
sence must count as a missed opportunity,
and one to which I will have cause to return.
Another of the things which struck me when
reading these essays was the persistent and
pervasive blurring of the distinction between
art historical and art critical analysis. This
blurring has become a practical if not institu-
tional reality, largely as a result of new
research and writing on the subject. It is a
reality in many texts taken to be 'primers' of
the sort this collection has ambitions to be,
even if its intellectual horizon is rather more
elevated than we might usually expect of
such 'primers'. One example of such a 'primer'
would be Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff's
Critical Terms for Art History(l996), although a
more accurate example would be Laurie
Schneider Adams's The Methodologies of Art:
An Introduction (1996).
Adams's intellectually slighter (or lighter)
book is more ~pt perhaps as it too aims to
be 'primer' of current perspectives in art history
and art theory. It might usefully be compared
with the text under review. For the record
i.J;.i161
67
 Outof:America
l Cheetham, MA, MA Holly & K Moxey (eds) 1998. The
Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contempor-
ary Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, page 63.
Adams's 'methodologies' include 'What is
Art?', form, style and iconography, the so-
called 'contextual' approaches of Marxism
and Feminism, biography and autobiography,
semiotics (structuralism, post-structuralism and
deconstruction), and psychoanalysis (Freud,
Lacon, Winnicot, Fry, Barthes).
This blurring of art historical analysis and art
critical analysis points, I think, to at least
another major omission in this collection. I
should say outright that this omission is not, on
my part, an attempt to make whole a partial
j,;;· ;,; j b 61
e COLIN RICHARDS
inventory of perspectives under the sway of
some fantasied comprehensiveness. Rather.
this omission is telling in terms this collection
might accept. I refer here to a substantive
examination of the complicated relationships
between image and text and the writing in, of,
and about art history. These essays are, at a
most basic level, written texts. Many important
questions to do with materiality, mode of
representation, 'truth' and the like could have
been worked through in the absent essay(s).
The actual writing, rhetorical strategies in and
of art historical discourse, the relations be-
tween the pictured and the spoken or written
could have enjoyed sustained attention, not
least in response to the sort of discursive
'situatedness' Holly et a/ might accept and
indeed demand. This domain of critical dis-
course has developed much in recent years
(see inter alia Mieke Bal (1991), W J T Mitchell
(1987, 1994), and Wendy Steiner (1982, 1988)).
It is thus highly visible, and would warrant
inclusion in terms the editors would embrace.
If I were to seek a telling emblem for this
absence in the book - and for some of the
other problems I have touched on - it must be
the poorly reproduced digital image printed
on p 63 and reproduced here again (1). This
image, the caption tells us, is
Figure 9. The expulsion from Paradise, from
the book of Genesis in Vienna, 4th century.
Early Christian manuscript page, ink on
vellum. Photo courtesy of Austrian National
Library.
Just excavating this picto-textual event -
picture, caption, relation to body of text- in
an appropriately framed analytical archaeol-
ogy along the lines suggested by Holly reveals
some of the more avoidable gaps in this
compilation. Such an excavation would also
68
 Out of 'America e COLIN RICHARDS
have been a rich and rewarding exercise in
and of itself.
This scripta-visual scene is a veritable
('true'?) archive of those conventions we
often take for granted, engaging such matters
as simulation, the copy and (re)production
through to the claims and status of attribution,
provenance and origin. Extraordinarily, noth-
ing is made of the fact that this is a digitally
distorted copy of something we are expected
to take as 'true'. This is not as trivial as it might
sound. That this digitally disfigured simulation is,
ironically, overlooked in an apparently self-
reflexive search for some kind of 'thick de-
scription' is telling. It seems the fascinations of
intellection may have us missing what is in fact
in front of our eyes.
This reproduction and its pendant caption
point us to yet other gaps, other ways of
understanding and appreciating material vi-
sual culture. For instance this presumably
inadvertent act of digital iconoclasm, like
iconoclasm itself, raises really interesting ques-
tions. It might have been eminently worthwhile
to engage with the phenomenon of icono-
clasm in contemporary culture, for this is the
nodal point of those transient and highly
particularised lived relations involving affect
and emotion that so often escape the dis-
ciplinary gaze of the art historian (see inter alia
Freed berg ( 1989), Gamboni ( 1997), and
Goody (1997)).
Similarly, and this relates to the matter of
materiality touched on earlier, a wider discus-
sion of new technologies of mediation, the
realm of cyborgs and cyberspace, of body,
prosthetics and performance, the implications
of virtual networks as medium, and indeed
fantasy so prevalent in today's visual culture,
might have enjoyed sustained deliberation.
69
Here the various writings of Slavoj Zizek (see
Zizek 1997) would have contributed much.
Finally, given the multiple and sophisticated
readings generated by the perspectives pre-
sented in this book, it might have been
worthwhile to dwell long and hard on our very
need for explaining and understanding art-
works and other cultural constructions. I refer
here to that impulse which in part sees pictures
as puzzles. Here James Elkins' Why Are Our
Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of
Pictorial Complexity would be a stimulating
beginning.
Meditating on this reproduction suggests
also, I suspect, just how far we have been
expelled from the Garden of the Tree of
Knowledge, just how far we have retreated
into the depths of Plato's cave- or for us the
postmodern mall - of smoke and mirrors.
IV
Now, at the end of a longer journey than
intended, I want to return to an admittedly
dated but still prickling critique I encountered
in the 'first' new art history.
Introductions are surely one of the most
pivotal texts in any collection of essays. It is
here, for example, that the precise relationship
between the different essays and the 'per-
spectives' they adumbrate might be articu-
lated and worked through. Without this
articulation the different essays live in rather
splendid isolation. Their critical and ultimately
cultural-political import risks intellectual solip-
sism, while their conceptual reach and grasp
remains, for the most part, at once vague and
narrow.
Is it, for example, sufficient to simply mention
that the multiplicity of perspectives might
often be in 'indirect conflict with one another'
 Outof!America e COLIN RICHARDS
(p 2)? Might we not reasonably expect that
the epistemological grounds upon which any
method rests and to which it returns to be
crucial? Intellectual laissez fairism seems no
less critically corrosive than disciplinary 'isola-
tion' and 'innocence' (p 3). For one thing, and
this is hardly noveL such a view flirts with a
supremely commodified, 'supermarket' atti-
tude to ideas and method.
Intellectual laissez fairism seems to underpin
the rather weakly 'pluralist' framing of the
book. The cover blurb tells us that by
examining a variety of theoretical ap-
proaches, the editors and contributors to
this volume provide interpretations of the
history and contemporary relevance of
such important methodologies as semiotics,
phenomenology, feminism, gay and lesbian
studies, museology, and computer applica-
tions, among other topics.
The politics of perspectival pluralism, theore-
tical eclecticism, critical voluntarism and florid
intertextualism was something warned of in the
earlier renascence of the 'new' art history.
Many commentators and critics have com-
mented on such pluralism at length and the
effects of pluralism remain intractably difficult
to duck.
Perhaps the best known early statement
addressing methodological 'diversity' is T J
Clark's in The Times Literary Supplement of
May 24, 1974. Clark nails his methodological
colours to the mast of the social history of art,
importantly disavowing any interest in
the social history of art as part of a cheerful
diversification of the subject, taking its place
alongside the other varieties - formalist,
modernist, sub-Freudian, filmic, feminist, ra-
dical. For diversification read disintegration.
~:.:·
And what we need is the opposite: con-
centration, the possibility of argument in-
stead of this deadly coexistence.
Deadly coexistence risks suffocating contem-
porary art history. The controversial Donald
Preziosi ( 1989), discussing Clark's position at
length, gives the following simplified but re-
presentative statement of the situation some
decade and a half later:
Currently, the discipline of art history seems
like a department store of methodological
options from which we might choose or mix
and match, according to the dictates of
personal taste, selecting particular instru-
ments suited to interlock with the configura-
tions of perceived problems ... To be sure,
such apparent diversity normally masks an
implicit and tenacious hierarchy of methods
as well as an apparently widening rift
between art history as a form of history
and art history as a form of art - or between
(not always the same thing) a secular
practice and a metaphysical one. Yet this
seemingly innocuous pluralism is but the
equally extreme polar correlate of an
opposite reductionism wherein everything
is treated as a nail because we all possess a
hammer. The views illuminated by, or re-
vealed through, the apparently differently
crafted windows of heuristic attention under
such rubrics as iconography, connoisseur-
ship, stylistic analysis, semiology, critical
theory, social history, deconstruction, and
so on are neither different perspectives on
the same objects, nor differentiated facets
of some uniform master instrument (p 34).
Fifteen years later still, with Preziosi's (1998) own
edition of different essays the problem of
'innocuous' pluralism remains intractable.
iJ;1161
70
 Outojfltmerica e COLIN RICHARDS
Of course one might argue that eclecticism
is but the weak face of any interdisciplinary
project. But this is not the only visage of
interdisciplinarity, and the interdisciplinary pro-
ject is not hereby fatally flawed. A critical part
of a revisioning of art history must involve the
rigorous articulation of the conflict of perspec-
tives in which methodological faultlines can
neither be filled nor ignored.
In fairness, the editors do mention 'facile
pluralism' (p 2) in their introduction, but this is
unsatisfying. Choice of method does seem to
risk becoming a matter of taste here, and if so
carries with it the same epistemological weight
as preferring peppered pumpkin to poached
peas. There is surely more at stake. Perhaps this
matter of taste is a function of something
mentioned about Cheetham's essay. As I
observed earlier, little seems readily transfer-
able and generalisable from his account. The
immediate epistemological yield this becomes
is arguably less critical than staging a persua-
sive textual performance.
These days the tiring question of pluralism
may have become more sophisticated, but
that sophistication sometimes obscures impor-
tant critical and ultimately cultural-political
points. The introduction could have addressed
this problem rather than routinely stating the
obvious; viz
So much has happened to the discipline: so
many controversies, conflicts, even crises.
Far from remaining in a state of scholarly
torpor, the history of art today promises its
students neither a unified field of study nor a
time-tested methodology for analysing vi-
sual images (p 1).
As I have already mentioned, the irony here
is that the much vaunted and much-maligned
;]~· i,a;J~ 61
71
originality, self-referentiality, autotelism and
autonomy of the modernist artwork seems, as
an effect of pluralism, to have slid from object
to perspective and method. The fetishisation
and aestheticisation we often virtually sponta-
neously associate with art proper is displaced
onto equally auratic figments of discursive
framing and perspective.
This said, the introduction is, in my view,
intensely disappointing. It would have been
useful to test, in a more sustained way, the
argument that
the discipline has entered a moment of self-
consciousness that is substantially different
from the heady invigoration of the theore-
tical matrices it has witnessed since about
1980. 'Theory' in art history, as in art, now
needs no apology (p 3-4).
v
I close by citing the most recent construction I
have read on the practice, purview and place
of current art history:
While art historians traditionally concerned
themselves primarily with the 'aesthetic'
dimensions of cultural artefacts, leaving
other aspects of the lives and functions of
objects to historians, anthropologists, ar-
chaeologists, philosophers, and psycholo-
gists, in the latter half of the twentieth
century they increasingly attended to a
wider range of evidence deemed neces-
sary to the basic task of explaining why
objects appear as they do. The last quarter
of the twentieth century was characterised
by intense disputes over the primacy and
necessity of one or another approach to
disciplinary knowledge-production, and the
beginnings of an acknowledgment of an
inevitable and possibly inescapable diver-
 Out of !America e COLIN RICHARDS
sity of disciplinary subject-matters, theories
and methodologies. Whether in the twenty-
first century what is now called art history
comes to resemble a diffuse, heteroge-
neous field such as present-day anthropol-
ogy, or diversifies into several institutionally
distinct areas of interest and expertise, is
unclear (p 577).
This is Preziosi (1998) again. Whether the 'basic
task' of art history is, in fact, 'explaining why
objects appear as they do' is itself debatable,
but probably as good as any account of what
art history does. Why it does this, why this needs
to be done, are, of course, difficult questions.
On this the book under review here remains
largely silent.
Perhaps this is inevitable given the speed of
change in art itself in the last century of the
second millennium. Art 'objects' are notor-
iously open and tenaciously under or over-
determined. And the current 'objects' of art
history are no longer so much 'objects' as
concatenations of materials and events ...
scenes, tableaux, performances, texts, ges-
tures. Art objects range from physical entities
readily co-ordinated in relatively stable time
and space to the merest tremors of transient
connectivity in virtual networks.
Whatever the 'object' of art history is, one of
the 'subjects' of art history - ourselves -
remains central to the cultural equation. And
our relation 'in history' to the art object 'in
history' must perforce be affect-laden. That
that object has a specific materiality, a
phenomenal opacity which may exceed,
escape or spring the snare of many of our
founding critical categories, be they style,
content, subject matter, context, iconogra-
phy, symbolism, structure, form ... site, remains
pivotal to the enterprise of a reflexive art
;]~·
history. In a sense this revisits the critical tension
between understanding and appreciating,
and restages the problem of value, of inter-
pretation and (dis)pleasure at the heart of this
enterprise.
Reading this compilation I was often chal-
lenged to discern any of those lived passions a
reflexive writer might have harboured for the
'object' or 'subject' of their gaze. Included
here would be skeptical, agnostic and dysto-
pic passions. This is an important point. It is
here, for example, that some treatment of art
historical writing itself would have offered
much.
In fond memory of Nelson Goodman's
(1976) rejection of the 'immersion tingle'
theory in aesthetics 2 , I am going to close by
risking a dip of my own into perilous critical
waters. The following piece of entertainment
was attributed to Rosalind Krauss in her one-
time role as editor of Artforum. It presents a
conversation which rather goes against the
grain of aspects of this paper, and is authored
by Janet Malcolm (1992).
(Krauss) Lawrence Alloway was forever
sneering at me and Anette (Michelson) for
being formalists and elitist and not under-
standing the social mission of art ... Neither
Annette nor I would buy into this simplistic
opposition they set up between formal
invention and the social mission of art. Our
position was that the social destiny, respon-
sibility- whatever- of art is not necessarily at
war with some kind of formal intelligence
through which art might operate, and to set
up that kind of opposition is profitless. It's
dumb. I remember having all these stupid
arguments with Lawrence, saying things like
'Why are you interested in art in the first
place?' and pointing out that presumably
i,;1;; 61
72
 Out of !America e COLIN RICHARDS
one gets involved with this rather particular,
rather esoteric experience with it - and that
presumably this powerful experience then
makes you want to go on and think about it
and learn about it and write about it. But
you must have at some point been rav-
ished, been seduced, been taken in. And
it's this experience that is probably what
one calls an aesthetic experience (232).
Whither seduction and pleasure in a newly
reflexive art history? What of the affect
attached to our primary encounters with art?
Is to ask these questions to ask something
which turns on a simple matter of taste, either
taste as such or taste for sociology or aes-
thetics? Or has this to do with the very
'inextricable situatedness' and 'motivated-
ness' that Holly (p 53) seeks? With the very
'inextricable situatedness' which seems so shy
in many of the approaches and much of the
writing in this ambitious anthology, and indeed
in most current art historical discourse? That
said, this is bound to be a useful book.
NOTES
This piece was originally written as a review of
the book The subjects of Art History: Historical
Objects in Contemporary Perspective (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), edi-
ted by Mark A Cheetham. Michael Ann Holly,
and Keith Moxey. The result proved too long and
an article was mooted. Only minor changes
were made to transform the review into the
article you are reading. As a result certain
simplifications and reductions inevitable in a
review remain. I would want to argue that such
simplifications and reductions as do remain
should not distort unduly the terms in which the
basic positions are framed.
2 I would take 'aesthetics' to be a stressed
entanglement of theory and history. For Good-
~;;;·
man 'the aesthetic properties of a picture
include not only those found by looking at it
but also those that determine how it is to be
looked at'. This rather obvious fact would hardly
have needed underlining but for the prevalence
of the time-honoured Tingle-Immersion theory
(Attributed to Immanuel Tingle and Joseph
Immersion (co 1800)). which tells us that the
proper behaviour on encountering a work of art
is to strip ourselves of all the vestments of
knowledge and experience (since they might
blunt the immediacy of our enjoyment), then
submerge ourselves completely and gauge the
aesthetic potency of the work by the intensity
and duration of the resulting tingle. The theory is
absurd on the face of it and useless for dealing
with any of the important problems of aes-
thetics; but it has become part of the fabric of
our common nonsense' (p 112).
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