Visual Culture

Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey

Published by Wesleyan University Press

Bryson, Norman, et al.

Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations.
Wesleyan University Press, 2013.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/23594.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/23594

[ Access provided at 23 Dec 2020 10:49 GMT from University College London (UCL) ]
 INTRODUCTION

T
HE academy is visibly changing. Other humanities have not
suffered as much as the history of art from institutional inertia.
Literary studies, for example, has welcomed the unsettling that

pact of interpretation and criticism on literature departments in Framing

the expanded rhetoric of theory has generated. In his survey of the im-

the Sign, Jonathan Culler offers the hope that essays in the new "genre"
of theory will challenge and help reorient thinking in other fields "than
those to which they ostensibly belong because their analyses of language,
or mind, or history, or culture offer novel and persuasive accounts of
signification." 1 The growing awareness of theoretical horizons shaped,
for example, by class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gen-
der, have compelled art historians to acknowledge our discipline's in-
separability from a larger cultural and ideological world. During the
past fifteen years or so, the ideas about which we think and write have
seemed at odds with the traditional canon in which many of us were
schooled. Within the academy itself, there has arisen a questioning of
all the values it once safeguarded. As scholars of art history, we can
no longer see, much less teach, transhistorical truths, timeless works of
art, and unchanging critical criteria without a highly developed sense of
irony about the grand narratives of the past.
In this larger political arena, wranglings over visual imagery from
the sixteenth to the late twentieth century may seem somewhat insig-
nificant; but those of us involved in the debates see the larger issue of
representation itself at stake and note the ways in which works of art
have always engendered rather than merely reflected political, social,
and cultural meanings. The essays collected here span a wide array of
historical and contemporary topics, but it seems fair to say that they are
all involved in the ideological rethinking that should be an inescapable
activity of all interdisciplinary and disciplinary activity in the last de-
cade of the twentieth century. To quote Culler again: "Indeed, theory
should be understood not as a prescription of methods of interpretation
but as the discourse that results when conceptions of the nature and
meaning of texts and their relations to other discourses, social practices
and human subjects become the object of general reflection." 2
XVI I N T ROD U C T ION

History of Images, History of Art

The essays in this collection could be understood as contributions to a

history of images rather than to a history of art. They represent a gen-
eral tendency to move away from the history of art as a record of the
creation of aesthetic masterpieces, which constitute the canon of artistic
excellence in the West, towards a broader understanding of their cul-
tural significance for the historical circumstances in which they were
produced, as well as their potential meaning within the context of our
own historical situation.
The focus on the cultural meaning of the work, rather than on its
aesthetic value, can mean many things. Most obviously, it means that
works that have traditionally been excluded from the canon of great
works, images produced for film or television, for example, are now
capable of receiving the same careful consideration that was once lav-
ished upon works that made up the canon. It also means that it is
possible to approach canonical works, those said to be invested with
inherent aesthetic value, with different eyes. Instead of seeking to pro-
mote and sustain the value of "great" art by limiting discussion to the
circumstances of the work's production and to speculation about the
extraordinary impulses that may have characterized the intentions of its
makers, these contributors examine the work performed by the image in
the life of culture. Far from excluding a consideration of aesthetic value,
the essays collected here offer a new and different definition of aesthet-
ics. Instead of applying a Kantian aesthetic, according to which value
is an intrinsic characteristic of the work of art, one capable of being
perceived by all human beings regardless of their location in time and
place-a recognition that depends only upon one's status as a human
being-these writers betray an awareness that the aesthetic value of
a work depends on the prevailing cultural conditions. They invest the
work with value by means of their appreciation of its meaning both in
the cultural horizon of its production and its reception.
The importance of the shift from the history of art to the history of
images cannot be overestimated. On the one hand, it means that art his-
torians can no longer rely on a naturalized conception of aesthetic value
to establish the parameters of their discipline. Once it is recognized that
there is nothing intrinsic about such value, that it depends on what a
culture brings to the work rather than on what the culture finds in it,
then it becomes necessary to find other means for defining what is a part
of art history and what is not.
 Introduction XVIl

On the other hand, it means that, rather than being shaped by tradi-
tion, the discipline will consist of those interpretations of images that
are most effective in exploring the potential meaning of the cultural
creations of the past for the circumstances in which we find ourselves
today. In some sense, this commitment corresponds with past practice,
if not past theory. Despite its insistence on the value of an established
canon, the shape of art historical interpretation was always determined
by th()se authors whose interpretations most effectively captured the
imagination of a contemporary audience.
The transformation of the history of art into a history of images may
be seen as one of the consequences of the theoretical and methodologi-
cal developments that have affected other disciplines in the humanities.
These transformations mean that the cultural work of the history of art
will more closely resemble that of other fields than has been the case in
the past. It offers the prospect of an interdisciplinary dialogue, one that
is more concerned with the relevance of contemporary values for aca-
demic study than with the myth of the pursuit of knowledge for its own
sake. The move from the history of art to a history of images is intimately
related to the realization that full and final knowledge of the world is
a utopian dream of nineteenth-century idealism and twentieth-century
positivism. It depends on a conception of knowledge as something that
is necessarily compromised by the attitudes and values of those engaged
in its production.

The Social History of Art

Among the identifiable writing genres that currently constitute the his-
tory of art, one that has actively contributed to its conception and his-
tory of images is the social history of art. Despite the efforts of those
who pioneered the project of accounting for art in terms of social his-
tory, there has always existed the risk of its dilution into a procedure
that merely adds on to artistic masterpieces a supplementary backdrop
of "context." In practice, and at its least enlightening, the procedure
consists of locating works of art against a "background" constituted
by economic and social history, with little or no investigation of the
ways in which the latter intersect with the former. It is assumed that
the point of the juxtaposition is obvious, that the work, which is still
accounted for in terms of the formal conventions that determined its
structure, somehow synthesizes or mirrors the social and cultural cir-
XVlll I N T ROD U C T ION

cumstances in which it was produced. Such an approach characterizes

the work as the end product of cultural activity. Art is the place in which
historical developments culminate and are given their highest cultural
form. Art history's allegiance to an eighteenth-century aesthetic is thus
maintained: It is the work that prompts universal approbation or dis-
approbation in the mind of the "disinterested" and passive observer.
Since aesthetic value resides in the work, and all spectators react to it
in the same way, the theory depends upon the posited existence of a
distance between work and viewer. It is, in fact, art history's continuing
adherence to a theory of immanent aesthetic value that has prevented
historians from fully examining the ways in which the work is related
to all the other institutions and practices that constitute social life.
Several of the papers included in this volume seek to revise this notion
of the social history of art by abandoning the traditional concern with
the work's aesthetic status in order to show how it plays an active cul-
tural role, one that is just as important to the historical process as any
other social agency. To do so, these authors, Griselda Pollock, Lisa Tick-
ner, John Tagg, Wolfgang Kemp, Thomas Crow, and Keith Moxey, call
upon a variety of different theoretical sources.

I. Each of the authors invokes a semiotic notion of representation. By

defining the work of art as a semiotic representation, that is as a system
of signs, they break art history's allegiance to an accou.nt of artistic cre-
ation that is based on the concept of resemblance or mimesis. Far from
duplicating some referent in the real world, as the mimetic tradition
would insist, these authors claim that what is most interesting about rep-
resentational works is the way in which they exhibit the cultural values
of the historical moment to which the artist belonged. They are reluc-
tant, in other words, to abandon to transparency what they regard as
the richly textured semiotic discourse of the image. The fact that, after
centuries of artistic production inspired by the principle of mimesis, the
Western tradition is characterized by a pictorial history notable for its
variety rather than its homogeneity has been used as evidence to sug-
gest that the theory of representation as committed to the search for the
"essential copy" is implausible. Rather than invoke notions of quality,
such as "primitive" or "sophisticated," they insist that the work of rep-
resentation is not as simple as the traditional account would have it. The
variety of pictorial discourses is instead related to the ways in which
the work actively engaged in organizing and structuring the social and
cultural environment in which it was located.
 Introduction XIX

2. In turning to a semiotic definition of the work as a "representation,"

these writers also seek to escape from the difficulties encountered by
traditional social history inspired by the Marxist definition of society as
divided into a base and a superstructure. According to the Marxist tradi-
tion of cultural analysis, social life consists of an economic base, which
includes the circumstances of economic production and the organization
of labor, and a superstructure that includes religious, philosophical, and
artistic activity. This theory reinforced traditional aesthetic attitudes
towards the work as a cultural synthesis imbued with immanent value
by suggesting that the work was a reflection of what were regarded as
the determining historical events of the period, namely those occurring
in the economic base. Semiotic theory can be used as a way of collapsing
this distinction. By claiming that all aspects of social life, those involv-
ing the economic activities of the base as much as the cultural activities
of the superstructure, consist of signifying systems composed of signs,
these social historians abandon the possibility of seeing through one
level of culture to another. If both economic and cultural activities are
regarded as representations, then they both are equally infused with
social value, social value that must be read as different kinds of dis-
course rather than as the manifestation of developments taking place
elsewhere in the social fabric.
3. Pollock, Tickner, and Tagg also wish to escape traditional social
history's preoccupation with the notion of class as the dominant fac-
tor in interpretation. They claim that the dependence on the Marxist
base/superstructure model has accorded a privileged status to the class
struggle as the most important dimension of art historical narratives. In
doing so, these narratives have been blind to the ways in which works
of art are involved in defining and structuring differences of gender, as
well as those of class. Griselda Pollock and John Tagg are especially
interested in using the work of Michel Foucault as the basis for a social
history that would be sensitive to both of these issues. In the work of
Foucault, Tagg finds an account of social power as constituted by dis-
cursive practices that respond to a variety of different kinds of interests.
In his discussion of photography, he points out that the photograph
was capable of being made part of signifying systems that controlled
and manipulated the lives of the insane, the criminal, and the poor, that
fetishized the female body for consumption by a patriarchal society, and
that (by means of portraiture) worked to constitute a notion of self-
hood. All these systems were colored by the power relations they served
to articulate; that is, they manifested the values of a repressive state,
XX INTRODUCTION

a patriarchal family structure, and a humanist conception of the self.

Tagg's point is that Foucault's notion of culture as constituted by dis-
cursive practices that are informed by the notion of power affords us
the means by which social history can be made sensitive to issues other
than those of social class. In fact, he ends his essay on a polemical note
by calling for a "cultural" rather than a "social" history.

Griselda Pollock's essay explores Foucault's notion of discursive prac-

tice to expose the power relations that course through cultural repre-
sentations dealing with the life of late nineteenth-century miners in the
Borinage. In each case, she traces the ways in which notions of class
and gender work together to construct social difference. For her, Fou-
cault offers the means by which to explore cultural representations that
cannot be related exclusively to the class system or to patriarchy and to
study the ways in which these social values intersect and collude in the
control and manipulation of the bodies of the female proletariat.
Lisa Tickner's contribution differs from the other two by including
an analysis of the misogyny of British modernism and by applying the
notion of gender as cultural construct to an examination of male sexu-
ality. Her account picks up on the work of American scholars such as
Carol Duncan, whose pioneering essay on the misogyny of European
modernism from cubism to expressionism set the model for this type of
enterprise.3 Tickner's exploration of the way in which male modernists
sought to define the movement as a masculine one is enlivened by an
analysis of the way in which they divorced themselves from their privi-
leged middle and upper class backgrounds by acquiring the social habits
and manners of dress of members of the proletariat.
Moxey's paper examines what he claims is an early instance of the

nation of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. He

elaboration of the myth of the artist as genius by means of an exami-

is concerned to demonstrate the ways in which Bosch self-consciously

manipulated the pictorial sign systems of his day to insure that they
would be understood as self-referential gestures. To achieve his pur-
poses, Bosch turned to the grotesque secular imagery found in the mar-
gins of the religious art of the Middle Ages. By placing the peripheral
images of popular culture at the center of his princely commission and
by calling attention to the process by which the work was achieved,
Bosch also placed the personality of the artist at the center of the atten-
tion of his patron and his audience. In doing so, he effectively turned
the tables on the conventional artist/patron relationship of his day by
 Introduction XXI

subordinating the subject matter and cultural function of the commi-

sioned work to a celebration of the inventive imagination of the artist
as an exceptionally gifted individual.

painting, The Sleep of Endymion, shows clearly how questions of visual

Thomas Crow's contribution to this volume, an analysis of Girodet's

style are not ignored or bracketed by the social historian of art but
are, instead, complicated and deepened. If the history of artistic style is

the Endymion (1791) breaks with the style of Girodet's teacher, David,
thought of, narrowly, as a succession of visual formats and types, then

such as Gerard's Cupid and Psyche (1799) or Broc's Death of Hyacinth

and inaugurates a new, eroticizing classicism that is continued in works

(1802). What is then considered important about the Endymion is its

swerve away from representation of the male figure in terms of civic
virtue and self-sacrifice and towards a new kind of figure, characterized
by sensuality and private pleasure. Crow, however, finds this interpre-
tation inadequate once the painting is placed within the complex social
circumstances of its production. Instead of marking a "romantic" break
with Davidian precedent, the work should be seen, Crow argues, as
emerging from the contradictory ethos of dependency and emulation
that is so pronounced in David's studio. Girodet's painting is depen-
dent on previous models (by Drouais and David), but at the same time,
it shows its independent talent by deliberately inverting aspects of the
predecessors' work. Though the sensuality and hedonism of the picture
may seem to connote an apolitical vision of privacy and pleasure, in the

virtue (which is why David was able to absorb elements of the Endy-
context of the Revolution, athletic male beauty is able to connote civic

mion into his painting of the youthful political martyr, Bara). If we look
at the record of Girodet's involvement with Republican politics during
his stay in Rome, what we find is not a reactionary figure who turns
his back on the political arena but a Jacobin activist whose paintings
are continuous with Republican ideals. The limitations of formalism are

will miss the meanings that Endymion circulated in its own historical
clear: If we attend to matters of style in separation from context, we

moment and milieu. What is needed is a framework of analysis sensitive

both to style and to context and thus able to "read" the nuanced codings
of style in terms of their complex historical meanings.
Wolfgang Kemp's paper both articulates a theoretical position and

David's painting, The Tennis Court Oath, not only relates it to the cir-
offers us a practical model of historical interpretation. His account of

cumstances of its production but describes the way in which it was

XXll I N T ROD U C T ION

meant to function in its original location. Analyzing the way in which

the pictorial convention of one-point perspective on which the paint-
ing is based was deliberately intended to intersect with the architectural
setting in which the work was meant to be placed, Kemp sees the work
as a means by which the Revolution's legitimacy could be continually
enacted by those entering the Assembly. The same structure of interpella-
tion is also associated with the surveillance enforced by the Revolution's
"Committee on Public Safety" during the very years the painting was
being executed. The painting was left unfinished because revolutionary
struggles purged so many of the members of the legislature that once
took part in the event, including the figure of Bailly, on whose head
the organizing lines of the perspective system converge. Revolutionary
action, in other words, cut the ground from under an elaborate pictorial
structure aimed at manifesting the rationality of the new order.

Gender Studies

Though neither Kemp nor Crow addresses the gendered character of

the works they discuss, this issue is central to the arguments of many
other papers. One of the unexpected developments within the institute's
debates concerned the issue of the visual representation of masculinity.
No less than five of the contributions (the essays by Lisa Tickner, Nor-
man Bryson, and Kaja Silverman, along with those by Whitney Davis
and Ernst van Alphen) deal directly with works of art in which the con-
struction of masculinity assumes a central importance. That so many
essays on topics unrelated by period or medium should focus on ques-
tions of masculinity should not, perhaps, have surprised us as much as it
did. In the long term, the waning of patriarchy's self-confidence and the
fatigue of its stereotypes could perhaps be expected to focus attention
on aspects of masculinity in which lack and inadequacy, hollowness
and contradiction, become central features; while the emergence of gay
studies as a dynamic and theoretically informed area of research and
discussion has made the analysis of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and hetero-
sexual sexualities an urgent and crucial undertaking throughout cultural
studies.
Evident in all the papers directly concerned with masculinity and
visual representation is a break with inherited critical languages in
which art is associated with the celebration of phallic power. For Tick-
ner, Augustus John's or Wyndham Lewis' characterization of modern-
 Introduction xx 111

ism as "rough and masculine work" is clearly a response to the threat to

male privilege posed, in British society at large, by the growing claims of
women to "educational and professional opportunity, social mobility,
and democratic citizenship," and posed specifically to the community
of male artists by the ever-growing presence of female producers and
patrons. John's pursuit of imaginary self-identity as a gypsy patriarch,
or Lewis' disdain for Roger Fry and his associates at Omega as "strayed
and dissenting aesthetes" and his fantasies of hypermasculinity ("it is a
pity that there are not men so strong that they can lift a house up, and
fling it across a river") are, in Tickner's view, transparently defensive
reactions to what was felt as the weakening of male hegemony.
For Bryson, Gericault's portrayals of wounded or inadequate avatars
of masculine heroism are to be understood as critical dissections of the
cult of martial valor and masculine triumph with which the Napoleonic
adventure had commenced. What Gericault describes is not the self-
sufficiency of male heroism but the latter's fundamental impossibility
and contradiction. In his reference to Bryson's essay, Ernst van Alphen
explores further the nature of this conflict within representations of
patriarchal authority. Van Alphen argues that the denial or disavowal of
the sexual dimension of masculine power in an image can be understood

peratives of Oedipal law (to be like the father and yet not like the father
not only, as Bryson suggests, as a way of resolving the contradictory im-

with respect to his phallic privilege and power), but that the anxieties
and taboos surrounding masculine sexuality can also be seen as the re-
sult of the contradiction between the manifestation of power that the
phallus is supposed to embody in patriarchal society and the inadequate
actuality of the penis as the signifier of that power. The threat posed
by genitality is that what is seen will not be, as van Alphen puts it, "a
proud penis as a motivated sign of patriarchal privilege, but a shriveled
shrimp." The danger posed here to patriarchy is that, in the gap opened
up between symbolic power (the phallus) and the signifier of that power
(the penis), the patriarchal order itself may be revealed as an artificial
construction of signs that are only arbitrarily connected to (projected
onto, and naturalized by) the male body.

Endymion, is also concerned with the iconography of masculinity. Crow

Whitney Davis, in his response to Thomas Crow's essay on Girodet's

describes Girodet's painting in terms of Republican politics and as a

statement of affiliation and disaffiliation with the style of David, Giro-
det's teacher. Davis, however, sees the representation of Endymion as
portraying a masculinity that in its passivity and sensuality goes directly
~N INTRODUCTION

as The Oath of the Horatii, The Death of Socrates, and Brutus. Once
against the heroism and severity portrayed by David in such works

again, it is the association between art and the celebration of mascu-

line heroism that is at issue, with the discussion deliberately moving
away from the equation of art with virility-the equation that Augustus
John, Wyndham Lewis, and, arguably, David were seeking anci that for
many feminist art historians remains a hidden wish of the discipline. In
place of the masculine as stable and heroic, in these essays masculinity
is described in terms of conflict and contradiction, structural contradic-

definitions of the masculine for Davis (Socrates versus Endymion).

tion for Bryson and van Alphen, and contradiction between colliding

In Kaja Silverman's essay on Fassbinder and Lacan, contradiction and

conflict within constructions of the masculine are again at the center
of the argument. Silverman focuses on Fassbinder's refusal to provide
"affirmative" images, even to marginal and socially repressed figures,
and his insistence instead on the dependency of the ego-male as well
as female-on an array of external images. In her analysis, Fassbinder's
male characters are constructed through the gaze of others, and in such
a way as to expose their own inability to survive and function without
this perpetual play with images and masks. Behind the masks stands
nothing-the images through which Fassbinder's subjects live in the
world are not versions or refractions of some essence or core of self-
hood that they possess, but fundamental psychosocial architecture. The
characters exist as the movement towards and between the images they
try to internalize and project-a movement that can never finally arrive
at or merge with the external theater. The specularity that much recent
film analysis, like the films it analyzed, located among female characters
is now found to inhabit the heartland of masculinity.
Of the many concepts that psychoanalysis can supply to visual studies,
the Lacanian model of the Imaginary seems the most fruitful in these
papers. Interestingly, the concept is not discussed in a vacuum, as a
timeless truth of the psyche, but in each analysis is linked to history
and to class. More accurately, the imaginary is theorized as a site in
which sexual and class identity are produced inseparably and within
precise historical coordinates. Tickner shows that, in their pursuit of
a modernism full of "rough and masculine work," the British avant-
gardists turned away from the repertoire of masculine identities pro-
vided by their own class and sought their images of virility among
romanticized underprivileged groups-"costers, navvies, gypsies, 'sav-
ages.' " The process of manipulating masculine "image" is at the same
 Introduction xxv

time a complex play with the terms of class; sexual identity and class
identity are negotiated together. In Bryson's reading of Gericault's mili-
tary portraits, the contradiction between phallic presence and phallic
lack is lived out through the experience of rank in Napoleonic military
society: Superiority and inferiority, power and powerlessness, are at the
same time psychic and social or class terms. In Silverman's discussion of
Fassbinder's socially marginal characters, social oppression and phallic
insufficiency are articulated together ("the male body [is1the point at
which economic, social, and sexual oppression are registered"). Strik-
ing in these essays is their commitment to a synthesis between social
and psychoanalytic modes of discussion; neither form of analysis on
its own is evidently held to be sufficient, and whatever difficulties it
may entail, the central project here is to incorporate sexual subjectivity
within the general analysis of domination. What is new is that male, as
well as female, subjectivity now features prominently within the analytic
framework.
Although Althusser and Lacan provide the larger framework for the
essays by Bryson, van Alphen, Silverman, and Penley, a more immedi-
ate and perhaps more determining background is that of film studies,
and particularly the highly influential work of Laura Mulvey. In her
essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,"4 Mulvey argued that
the dominant forms of cinema operate a visual regime characterized by
strict separation between active (=male) and passive (=female) roles
in looking, constructing spectatorship around an opposition between
woman as image and man as bearer of the look. Vital though Mulvey's
thesis has been to the development of the theory of spectatorship in film
studies, above all in its use of psychoanalysis as a means of understand-
ing the nature of the viewing subject, Bryson, Silverman, and Penley
argue in different ways for a major modification to Mulvey'S model. For
Bryson and Silverman, the idea of "woman as image, man as bearer of
the look" now needs to be supplemented by a reverse inquiry into the
ways in which male subjectivity no less than female subjectivity is con-
structed around the image and specularity. In Penley'S examination of
"slash" literature, the work of fantasy is found to involve a greater mo-
bility of subject positions that can be accounted for by the model of strict
gender separation. As Penley has said elsewhere, "the structure of fan-
tasy ... is far more complex and flexible in its disposition of masculine
and feminine roles, active and passive drives" than can be understood
through "the model of voyeurism and fetishi'sm which dominated both
film theory and earlier feminist analyses of film." 5 In the "fanzines" that
XXVI I N T ROD U C T ION

Pen"ey discusses, the mobility made available through the operation of

fantasy permits the identification of female spectators and readers with

fantasy itself (the ritualized Star Trek universe). What is apparent is the
male protagonists, with gay sexuality, and even with the setting of the

fluidity and plurality of the subject's self-positioning and the subject's

capacity, at least in fantasy, to cross the normal thresholds of sexual
difference and sexual orientation.
While most art historical writing has remained generally indifferent
to the inquiry into spectatorship carried out within film studies, by the
I980s it was clear that feminist art history, at any rate, was becoming
responsive to and energized by the ideas coming out of the work on
cinema. Voyeurism and fetishism, for example, became key concepts in
the analysis of the kind of viewing proposed and assumed by important
categories of Western painting. When film studies itself moves beyond
the model of voyeurism, fetishism, and the strict division of gender roles
in viewing, such a development may prove crucial to those ranges of art
historical writing that set out to investigate the nature of spectatorship.
A new range of questions opens up when the complexity of the pro-
cess of identification, for men as well as for women, is acknowledged.
For example, can one speak of cross-gender identification, for male and
female spectators, in relation to painting? What is the role of masochism
in relation to male (and not only female) spectators? Has the time ar-
rived to begin openly to discuss and to analyze gay, lesbian, and bisexual
spectatorship? Such questions point towards a possible range of future
debates over spectatorship in art history, as well as in film studies.

Academic Distance

Penley's paper is remarkable not only for its presentation of cultural

material in which the mobility of the subject in fantasy is undeniably
present; one of its most notable features is its refusal to enact the familiar
kind of distance between inquirer and object of inquiry that is normally

feel so much as if I'm analyzing the women in this fandom as thinking

expected of scholarship in the humanities. As Penley puts it, "I don't

along with them." To some, this collapsing of the professionally insti-

tuted interval between a scholar and her material may seem the central
gesture of this essay, a gesture with implications that extend well be-
. yond the essay's immediate topic. If a cardinal principle of the academy
has traditionally been the separation of intellectual subject and intel-
 Introduction XXVll

lectual object and the creation of a gap between analyst and what is
analyzed-a gap believed to be the enabling space of disinterested in-
quiry-Penley's essay goes against one of the basic rules of discourse in
the university.
It cannot be accidental that this gesture occurs in an essay on popu-
lar culture, since the very term "popular culture" harbors a profound
contradiction; those who use and enjoy "popular" culture would never
normally refer to this culture or its practices in this way. The word itself

scension, a survey de haut en bas. What can be at stake in categorizing

proposes an apartness, a distinction, that is at the same time a conde-

a disciplinary field in this way, if not the privilege of a superior class

or caste as it looks down on the life of those whom its own discur-
sive strategies propose as inferior to itself? What may be troubling to
some readers about Penley's refusal to condescend is that it threatens
to expose the ways in which the academy's production of knowledge
is, at the same time, the production of a social power through which
it claims authority over other social groups. The refusal to condescend
comes close to revealing the academy's own machinery of domination,
for, by implication, it names any plea for more objectivity, more distance
between scholar and material, as a defense of caste privilege.
Michael Holly's essay on Wolfflin expresses another position in the
debate on "appropriate distance," namely that the historian's implica-

of knowledge. In her view, Wolfflin's Principles, a text elaborately built

tion in the object of his inquiry can itself become an important object

upon an opposition between the terms "Renaissance" and "baroque," is

itself an exercise in baroque historiography: The principles that Wolfflin
ascribes to the baroque (conflict, dissonance, asymmetry) are the expres-

process, so that in the end what motivates the Principles is a fundamen-

sions of Wolfflin's own outlook and his own understanding of historical

tal circularity, a profound implication of the historian in the materials

he discusses. Works of art are read as rhetorically shaping their subse-
quent historiographic accounts. For Keith Moxey, such implication by
no means renders a historical account any less "historical": "The sign-
systems of the past are invested with meaning by those of the present,"
and to deny that historical interpretations created in the present are the
products of the present would be to mystify the nature of historiography.
Perhaps the most extreme statement in the collection-of the view
that the interpretation of works of art has its origins in the contem-
porary circumstances of the interpretation-is Mieke Bal's paper on
Rembrandt. Here the critical concerns are emphatically those of the
XXVlll INTRODUCTION

contemporary viewer: The representation of the unrepresentable, the

relationship between sadism and voyeurism, the plotting of the intricate
subject-positions implied by the works of Rembrandt that she exam-
ines, these are topics pursued in the essay outside of those customary
narrative conventions of art history that require the viewpointing of all
interpretive statements to a clearly established locus in the past. While
Bal's alternative narrative mode receives institutional sanction in other
disciplines in the humanities, notably in literary studies, in art history
the assertive declaration of the place of interpretation as existing in the
present runs counter to some of the deepest conventions of the discipline.
At the same time, Bal's explicit foregrounding of the present historical
and critical horizon challenges traditional art history to justify those
of its customary procedures that assume, but rarely examine theoreti-
cally, such apparently given ideas as context, the linearity of history, and
historiographic "objectivity."
The last essay by David Summers indirectly continues this concern
with the artificial neutrality of "historical distance" in its focus on the
languages of art. Recognizing that all visual studies require an element
of formal discussion, since no art historian can avoid discussing ob-
jects, he worries over the task of accommodating the vocabulary of art
history to the force of recent sociohistorical and psychoanalytic criti-
cism. Engaging in this labor for the "simple reason" that the "working
language no longer worked," Summers traces the roots of the gendered
idea of form back to Aristotle and Plato, who wrote of form as that
principle of perfect masculine activity that shapes the passive feminine
potentiality of matter. A far-ranging intellectual history that attempts
to cover most of the important aestheticians from the Greeks to Hei-
degger, this essay persuasively argues that the form/matter polarity that
has pervaded Western thinking for twenty-five hundred years has come
to be taken as the natural order of things. If the primary metaphori-
cal language in which we discuss artistic accomplishment is rooted in
biological and sexual distinctions, we can only rethink the history of
formalist art criticism by coming to terms with the exclusions such clas-
sifications have engendered. Clearly an indictment rather than a remedy,
the essay leaves to others the task of finding a language of description
that will elicit the contributions of those erased by the imprecision and
ideological weight of the Aristotelian tradition.
One of the most original contributions to this volume, and one that
allows us to return to the theme of history of images/history of art, is
Andrew Ross' essay on "The Ecology of Images." About as far from a
 Introduction XXIX

critical appreciation of Raphael, for example, as is imaginable, Ross'

essay is concerned with the images of popular culture, those images that
are manufactured and disseminated for the largest possible audience.
Being televised, they are also fleeting and impermanent visions, rarely
being preserved on film, and then not for very long. The point of dis-
cussing them cannot be justified by invoking some notion of inherent
aesthetic value. Ross has no intention of analyzing the intention of their
makers in order to assess the intangible values with which they may have
been invested in the process of their creation. He is concerned rather
with the cultural work performed by these images after they have been
launched into a social context: the types of meaning they create in the
process of their reception. Analyzing the vast variety of representations
of nature that pervade the popular culture of our society, he argues that
these images have many different ecologies of their own. Some portray-
als of the degradation of nature, for example, are shown in contexts that
effectively counter their capacity to elicit an activist response, whereas
others serve as a naturalized background to dystopian visions of the
future that are animated by ecologically neutral or antiecological nar-
ratives. The value of his contribution lies in bringing a whole range of
neglected imagery to the forefront of intellectual debate. These images
are invested with cultural value not because of the discovery of inherent
characteristics whose neglect has prevented them from assuming their
proper place in the canon, but because of the way in which they intersect
with the intellectual and political preoccupations of the world to which
their interpreters belong.

NOTE S

1. Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Nor-
man, Okla., 1988), 15.
2. Ibid., 22.

Vanguard Painting," Art Forum (December 1973): 30-39.

3. Carol Duncan, "Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth Century

4. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3

5. Constance Penley, "Introduction" to Feminism and Film Theory, ed.

(Autumn 1975).

C. Penley (New York and London, 1988), 22.

 VISUAL

CULTURE