Making Art History

A Changing Discipline and its Institutions

Elizabeth Mansfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415372350
• eBook ISBN: 9781134703296
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Making Art History is a collection of essays by contemporary scholars on the practice and theory of art history as it responds to institutions as diverse as art galleries and museums, publishing houses and universities, school boards and professional organizations, political parties and multinational corporations.

The text is split into four thematic sections, each of which begins with a short introduction from the editor, the sections include:

• Border Patrols, addresses the artistic canon and its relationship to the ongoing 'war on terror', globalization, and the rise of the Belgian nationalist party.
• The Subjects of Art History, questions whether 'art' and 'history' are really what the discipline seeks to understand.
• Instituting Art History, concerns art history and its relation to the university and raises questions about the mission, habits, ethics and limits of university today.
• Old Master, New Institutions, shows how art history and the museum respond to nationalism, corporate management models and the 'culture wars'.

Part I
Border patrols

Art history as identity

Introduction

Art history maintains a chicken-or-egg relationship with the canon. Was the discipline formed in response to an already existing hierarchy of cultural expression? Or does art history itself conjure these collections? The authors presented in this section proceed from different assumptions on this point, though all agree that the art-historical canon represents more than a mere corpus for intellectual or aesthetic contemplation: the canon shapes not only the identities of the cultures chosen for inclusion (and, thus, those excluded as well), it also positions the art historian culturally, socially, and economically. While none of the authors here advocates an abandonment of the canon—both Marlite Halbertsma and Steven Nelson argue that it remains an essential tool for art history—all insist that the discipline must respond to the canon with greater reflexivity. The canon, as the following essays reveal, offers the most reliable testimony about the aims and practices of art history today. Included in the recent disciplinary developments in which the canon played a role was the professionalization of art history in the west during the twentieth century.

Sociologist Andrew Abbott argues in The System of Professions that professionalization is essentially a process whereby authority or jurisdiction over a particular realm of knowledge is successfully asserted.¹ Thus, the most important step to be taken by a discipline seeking professional status is circumscription of its purview. For art history, its purview might be taken generally to be “art,” but in concrete, quantifiable terms it is the canon that defines its jurisdiction. In this way, the canon can be seen as the central organizing principle of the discipline itself. This point was not lost on those aiming to professionalize the field in the early twentieth century. For instance, in the United States, the College Art Association promoted professionalization through dissemination of a canon to its members by publishing curricula as well as lists of essential study photographs, casts, books, and, later, slides.² The canon would be further reinforced with the promotion of a standardized qualifying examination recommended for all college students with questions supplied by the Association.³ A clear purview—the art-historical canon—was understood to be essential to the discipline’s professionalization.⁴

A profession experiences instability, according to Abbott, primarily when it registers threats to its jurisdiction. For the profession of art history, then, this would involve a critique of or challenge to the canon. The disciplinary “crisis” in which art history has been variously engaged since the 1970s can, therefore, be understood essentially as a reaction to renegotiations of the canon as it has been variously expanded, contracted, reasserted, and rejected outright in response to influences as diverse as Marxism, post-structuralism, feminism, and post-colonial studies as well as neoconservatism and globalization. Perhaps the most sharply felt recent critique of the art-historical canon—and, hence, of the discipline itself—has come from visual studies, a discipline claiming jurisdiction over all forms of visual culture, including those traditionally considered part of the art-historical canon. This incursion, which advanced during the late 1980s and 1990s, provoked a fair amount of wagon circling among those committed to the profession of art history.⁵ While much of the discussion by art historians concerning the “legitimacy” of visual studies seemed to focus on questions of method, another source of anxiety consistently emerged: visual studies’ threat to the integrity of the canon. By refusing to abide by a hierarchy of the visual arts, visual studies threatened to “level” culture, to lose sight of whatever distinctive character (aesthetic, political, material) made those works part of the art-historical canon. This would lead not only to the erasure of “art” as a distinctive class of material culture but also, some warned, to the loss of viewers’ ability to discriminate among visual signs, to discern either the formal or ideological differences between images. By eliminating the canon, many art historians argued, visual studies would undermine rather than strengthen the aesthetic, political, and material autonomy of works of visual culture.

To what extent does preservation of the art-historical canon enable a clearer understanding of culture? This is one of the questions taken up by Marlite Halbertsma in her essay, “The call of the canon: why art history cannot do without.” Arguing that the canon is essential to the study of art history, Halbertsma dismisses the idea of abandoning the canon “as ridiculous as studying theology without God.” Instead of arguing about whether or not art history should have a canon, Halbertsma focuses her attention on the history of the concept of the canon itself. First tracing the idea back to antiquity, Halbertsma then follows the notion of the art-historical canon to the eighteenth century where she discerns the emergence of the modern canon, or canons—the Enlightenment, she explains, produced two forms of canon: a classical canon and a Romantic canon. The classical canon valorizes timeless aesthetic categories, admitting works without concern for cultural or historical specificity. This classical canon is elastic, Halbertsma argues, accommodating new works so long as they conform to the universal standards maintained by the canon. The Romantic canon, on the other hand, rejects universal aesthetic principles in favor of local specificity: artworks are embraced precisely for their success in conveying the essence of a particular culture or period. The Romantic canon, according to Halbertsma, demands authenticity without regard for quality. It is this Romantic offshoot, she contends, that gave rise to the rigid, exclusionary, and oppressive canon that has been under fire since the 1970s.

Steven Nelson likewise offers a defense of the art-historical canon, though his conception of the canon and its utility differ sharply from that of Halbertsma. In “Turning green into black, or how I learned to live with the canon,” Nelson begins with an account of the history of the canon of African American art. Developed in the early twentieth century as a means to assert cultural parity in a society where institutionalized racism had for so long denied the possibility of legitimate artistic expression among people of color, the African American canon evolved into a standard of difference as much as equality. The political expedience of a canon that valorizes blackness above other criteria has run its course. To be part of the late-twentieth-century African American canon, Nelson explains, an artist or artwork needed somehow to express essential blackness. This restrictive approach, he argues, has resulted in the exclusion of important African American artists because their work does not conform to narrow standards about what it means to be or to represent blackness. Rather than eliminate the canon, Nelson proposes “to stretch it, not only in terms of the artists it includes but also with respect to the theoretical tools in its arsenal.” Toward this end, he proposes a new canon of African American art that sees race not as something monolithic or essential but as a set of identities and practices that involve contradiction and ambivalence as well.

Finbarr Barry Flood does not offer an apology for the canon, though he shares Nelson’s and Halbertsma’s concerns about the canon’s overweening emphasis on authenticity and originality. In the field of Islamic art, the canon reflects Western cultural and political assumptions regarding “non-Western” artworks. As Flood explains in “From the Prophet to postmodernism? New World Orders and the end of Islamic art,” only those works that exhibit sufficient “authenticity” are admitted into the canon of Islamic art. To be authentic, the work must have been produced prior to contact with colonizing Europeans. This means that most accounts of Islamic art break off in the eighteenth century, leaving two centuries worth of cultural production unacknowledged. Works that display traces of modern Western influence are rejected as contaminated and not sufficiently authentic. The canon of Islamic art is, therefore, better understood as a kind of cultural quarantine, ostensibly intended to protect Islamic forms from Western contamination, though Flood finds evidence that the infection from Islam may be the real concern. He outlines the irony of contemporary, politically motivated (though generally well-intentioned) appeals for the visual arts to be used to facilitate greater cross-culture understanding between predominantly Muslim regions and the West. Because the canon of Islamic art contains only objects produced before the nineteenth century, it serves mainly to reinforce assumptions about Islam as a culture of the past, immune to progress, resistant to change. Thus, the canon of Islamic art only confirms what seem insurmountable differences.

Attempts at policing cultural “purity” are not only a concern for those working with non-Western cultural artifacts. Even a field as seemingly divorced from contemporary political exigencies as fifteenth-century European manuscript illumination finds its canon subject to cultural gerrymandering. Gregory T. Clark provides an account of the consequences of the changing linguistic, political, and cultural character of modern Belgium for contemporary art historians. Of central concern to scholars and citizens of Belgium are references to “Flanders.” For those living outside northern Europe, the region of Flanders and the descriptive term “Flemish” carry little other than generally geographic or stylistic meaning. Students in the United States, for instance, will find in most survey textbooks a unit on “Flemish” art that treats the adjective as much as a stylistic designation as a geographical or political one. But for modern Belgians and their neighbors, Flanders stands for much more than a northern school of early modern art. While Halbertsma’s observation that “art history hardly pays any attention to national divisions” may be true, Clark reveals that art historians pay a great deal of attention to these boundaries. What is more, contemporary political disputes and assumptions can influence not only an art historian’s access to artworks but also the aesthetic and cultural status of the works themselves.

Taken together, these essays show that the canon ultimately has little to do with purely formal, aesthetic, or even commercial concerns. Instead, the canon serves as a means to demark cultural and social boundaries. The canon establishes not only what is in or is out, but, more importantly, who is in or out. A realization of a culture’s self-conception, the canon asserts an idealized cultural identity by embracing what a culture wishes to be as it rejects what it doesn’t wish to be (or refuses to believe it is). The art-historical canon, perhaps more than any other canon, allows a society to visualize itself in the form it imagines itself to hold. Unlike a literary or historical canon, a canon of artworks gives material form to a society’s fantasy of collective identity.

Notes

1 Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988) pp. 2, 250.

2 A report on the list of books appeared in Art Bulletin (1917); the list itself appeared in Art Bulletin in 1920.

3 In 1926, the Committee on Standards was asked by the board to develop a comprehensive examination/contest for students of painting and drawing. Art Bulletin IX 3: 281.

4 See Holmes Smith, “Problems of the College Art Association,” The Bulletin of the College Art Association, I(1) (1913): 6–10.

5 See, for instance, the responses to the “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” sent by the editors of October magazine to several scholars in October 77 (Summer 1996): 25–70; and Eloy J. Hernandez, “Art History’s Anxiety Attack,” in Afterimage 2 (May/June 1997): 6–7.

Chapter 1
The call of the canon

Why art history cannot do without

Marlite Halbertsma

“Canon,” like “classic” or “culture,” is a word that is often used loosely. When attempting to define it more precisely or account for its content, it becomes apparent that various disciplines in the arts use “canon” in different ways. In literature the canon consists mainly of the basic texts that are taught to students at university level whereas in history it comprises the historical facts that pupils at primary and secondary school learn. In recent years newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands have featured numerous articles about the way history is taught, arguing that it should be more national and international in order to accommodate multicultural classes in Dutch schools. Education should relate more to the international backgrounds of the different sections of society while, at the same time, providing more informati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: making art history a profession
• Part I Border patrols Art history as identity
• Part II The subjects of art history
• Part III Instituting art history The academy
• Part IV Old masters, new institutions Art history and the museum
• Index