A Realist Theory of Art History

Ian Verstegen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138798557
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135099626
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As the theoretical alignments within academia shift, this book introduces a surprising variety of realism to abolish the old positivist-theory dichotomy that has haunted Art History. Demanding frankly the referential detachment of the objects under study, the book proposes a stratified, multi-causal account of art history that addresses postmodern concerns while saving it from its errors of self-refutation. Building from the very basic distinction between intransitive being and transitive knowing, objects can be affirmed as real while our knowledge of them is held to be fallible. Several focused chapters address basic problems while introducing philosophical reflection into art history. These include basic ontological distinctions between society and culture, general and "special" history, the discontinuity of cultural objects, the importance of definition for special history, scales, facets and fiat objects as forms of historical structure, the nature of evidence and proof, historical truth and controversies. Stressing Critical Realism as the stratified, multi-causal approach needed for productive research today in the academy, this book creates the subject of the ontology of art history and sets aside a theoretical space for metaphysical reflection, thus clarifying the usually muddy distinction between theory, methodology, and historiography in art history.

1
Introduction

The aim of history is to understand the concrete nature of societies, the changes they have undergone, and the cultural products they have produced.

Maurice Mandelbaum, The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge¹

Art historians write about “art,” the interpretation and history of individual works of art, groups of works of art or the people, corporate bodies and nations that produce these very works. This tailored definition fits with Mandelbaum’s more general definition of history given above. “Art history,” then, is one of the concrete cultural products, making up the nature of a society and its changes. Art history in the last forty years has expanded its canon of artists – that is, who is counted in its purview – it has expanded the kinds of visual culture that it studies – or what is studied – and it has expanded the ways in which these people and objects – how it is approached. But the overall definition still serves today.

Much of this book is given over to explaining why apparent inconsistencies in canon, objects, and methods do not upend the general meaning of the history of art. But that is to separate that issue from another, often conflated, one: the question of for whom and for what motive this history of art exists. Realism forces us to attend to new problems. By admitting that the products of science may be true it can then ask whether they are valuable. The failure to separate these two different questions has seriously impaired art history.

Generally, we are taught to approach the past in an ironic, detached way. We have no sympathy for our subjects and we certainly do not endorse them. Rhetorically, we reduce to authority rather than read with charity. Interestingly, we seem to have learned to believe that conviction about politics is inversely proportionate to the foreignness with which we treat our subjects. Sometimes we may be led to wonder, was there any value in whatever work just happened to have been discussed? I believe that this is a ghettoizing attitude that ultimately subverts politics itself.

Let me use an example of the habits that I believe art historians, of which I count myself one, of course, have been led. Take the discussion of the German-born scholar Erwin Panofsky by the progressive art historian Keith Moxey.² Speculations are made about Panofsky’s status as an émigré in the writing of his book on Albrecht Dürer.³ Panofsky is surmised to have given the artist qualities of ambivalence in regard to his native Germanic and adopted Italian culture, which mirror the art historian’s own limbo between his native and adopted homes. According to Moxey, Panofsky’s project on Dürer was deeply informed of personal issues relating to him in his life at the time and helped him resolve feelings about his emigration from Nazi Germany. Panofsky’s off-hand comment about how the German artist’s printmaking made Germany a Renaissance force to reckon with is made to prop ironic patriotic feelings about Germany. The way in which Dürer balanced a native irrationalism with a Latin harmony stands in for Panofsky’s own path, for “Panofsky may have identified with Dürer because he saw in the artist’s struggle an allegory of the battle between reason and unreason which characterized the political events of his own time.”⁴ The book, then, had a “complex agenda”; it “allowed the twentieth-century art historian to attribute to the sixteenth-century artist the very conflict between reason and unreason on which his interpretation depended.”⁵

Of course, these words can be taken in a number of ways. For Moxey, however, this is not just an interesting emblem but a causal argument. It is as if someone said that Panofsky’s point of view derived literally from the fact that he had one eye farsighted and the other myopic. In what boils down to a rather crude sociology of knowledge, the art historian’s attempt to situate knowledge fails the reflexivity test.⁶

We in the humanities are quite familiar with this kind of reading. Panofsky is treated like some kind of foreign compound, under our inquisitive gaze. Things in the past are historicized; things in the past are irrational. We have learned circumspection and reflexivity. The discussion takes place in a space of implicit subject positions. We don’t really believe that Panofsky was so mechanical as to register directly these anxieties but our understanding is enriched as if this were true. There are many things wrong with this scenario. It does call into account a magisterial interpretive project that was largely unquestioned for decades. But is it true? Can its methodology be sustained? And, finally, does it ultimately serve emancipatory politics? It is an unsustainable critical practice.

The success of this overall strategy was the result of a confluence of a number of factors, currently unraveling. I want to draw special attention to this situation because I think we have been led to believe we are actually quite radical where our written texts need their virtual other to sustain their point. Taken alone, they are not self-sufficient approaches to art history. I believe that the following three factors have created the current (dissolving) confluence:

• The theory–empiricism dichotomy. Traditional art history had not experienced the linguistic or theoretical turn and progressive art history had a monopoly on theoretical issues. Owing to the preoccupation of such issues in the fields of modern and contemporary art history, theory and contemporaneity have been conflated. Because theory tends to be a debate over the nature of (post-) modernity, its discussion gets concentrated on recent art. The effect has been that divisions between theory and empiricism have become entrenched.
• The politicization of epistemology. Because theory responded to an exagger-• ated objectivism or scientism of the dominant 1960s generation (Iconology, New Criticism, Vienna School Philosophy of Science, etc.) relativism is entrenched as politically “progressive” and gestures toward (ontological) realism or (epistemological) objectivism are seen as retrograde. Further, the professional isolation of political issues from the work of that generation reinforced the idea of their outlook as assenting to nascent American imperialism.
• Suspicion of the aesthetic. The “aesthetic” is assumed to be a removed domain of leisure, a category of privilege that is assumed to be insulated from social interests and pressures. The “mandarin” pedigree of that generation elided professional standards and elitism.

So long as the 1960s émigré class was the target, this synthesis could hold. But after art history had reached this postmodern compromise for several years, the field is once more in flux. The hard-fought liberalization of the discipline through various postmodern strategies (post-structuralism, feminism, Marxism), and which had emphasized in general the constructivist viewpoint, has given way to eclecticism. Any number of approaches are put being put forward, from postcolonial to neuroaesthetics, with little care for previous heated debates. Thus, as the field engages the realities of global capitalism and environmental collapse and is being impelled toward Marx, a number of traditional orientations have lost their hold. In their place, new questions emerge. Will the methodological self-consciousness typical of the postmodern generation simply be lost with the adoption of new viewpoints? Is the new different from the old? Have any institutional developments taken hold to make any of the insights of postmodernism permanent?

Ultimately, this investigation would have to go in an institutional direction. It is impossible to do a politically committed scholarship at the level only of works. This is what is responsible for the hyper-sensitivity to what is written, to its detriment. Instead, we have to look at the institutions of art history and the academy. Because of false epistemological assumptions regarding the immanence of perception and experience (an unwitting acceptance of naïve realism), it has been impossible to initiate a true institutional debate.

The institutions of art history

Art history has a semi-distinct status in many parts of the world, yet has been challenged and has in part morphed into visual culture and visual studies. While “art history” as an institution has been investigated, its relative status in the university is not sufficiently appreciated. Many lament the impotence of the humanities in general but do not recognize the dialectic that the humanities serve within the economy of knowledge. It is one thing to charge art history’s complicity with the globalization of luxury taste, the marketing of lifestyle, under the monopolization of interests with supernational corporations.⁷ Yet the critical claims made by art historians should not be taken as pure gestures of critique. It is too easy to be anti-hegemonic in the academy, rather than counter-hegemonic.⁸ Too often the ignorance of counter-hegemony neglects the “modern” in postmodern, the persistence of societal organization that cannot be idealistically upended.

There are some universities and mega-museums that engage in corporate practices, but many colleges and nonprofits, including museums, struggle to present useful points of view. Indeed, how many discussions of art and politics take into account the dynamics of the university, the overwhelming dominance of the faculties of medicine, business and law, bolstered by their private and government grants and directly fed into market concerns, and the humanities, whose revenue streams are usually tied directly to fees and modest monetary awards and the results of humanistic discourse? Is the viewpoint of the humanities thereby safe by definition or can it engage technocracy and networked late capitalism? When does anti-hegemony (or counter-identification) merely mirror the status quo?

It is my belief that many things in art history are sound if misdirected, in the same manner that a scientific realist would argue. We are learning about the world because the world is the way it is and yields to our investigations. The most romantic and escapist fantasies of art historians cannot be realized because we continue to occupy a similar position in history as when the discipline was founded. We have to work within the discipline, within the university and museum, taking into account its realities, while resisting sublime gestures of disavowal.⁹

If the institutional theory of art historical relativism is correct, then it really doesn’t matter what we call it: art history, visual studies, and visual culture. This is a pseudo-debate about what is really going on. What we really need to be aware of are nested realities: the work of art, the institutions in which it is found, and our own institutions. Realism as a theory recognizes the peculiarities of visual forms of art and, when coupled with naturalism (Critical Realism), produces a powerful theory capable of understanding the image in its full historical complexity.

To resist visual culture or some other kind of cooptation of art history can be reactionary. Sometimes it is merely pragmatic, as when Hans Belting notes that “to win for native disciplines of the image [Bildwissenschaften] like art history and archaeology more of a profile within the discourse of media.”¹⁰ But what is really at issue is a stratified, multi-causal model of vision and its products. Barbara Maria Stafford writes that visual and spatial skills must be investigated in their own right, through

an orienting and united design discipline with a strong sense of social responsibility, and a common purpose, [which] might better be able to counter the purely negative strategies of folding less dominant fields into conventionally more authoritative ones, curricular axing, and arbitrarily shutting down the production of doctoral candidates.¹¹

The only way to give proper due to images without it reverting to a reactionary defense of the same is to understand that images have properties that are important but only take their place among innumerable others in the world. This kind of stratified view of the world is found in the works developed by Roy Bhaskar.

Institutionally speaking, however, a substitution of works of Roy Bhaskar is not the answer. His specialized vocabulary might nominate him for another guru “theorist,” to set aside the theory class.¹² This is especially true not only in regard to his writing style but also his dialectical and later spiritual turns, which are ripe for appropriation.¹³ The theory class plays into the status quo of the institutionalism of art history, the handy nomination of opaque theorists for pure theoretical ends. It is for this reason that I have not sought to expound on the interesting theories, cited earlier, of Badiou and others. For example, followers of Deleuze such as Manuel DeLanda hold forward the promise of a non-essential yet realist theory of assemblages.¹⁴ But to propound a “DeLandian,” “Deleuzian” or “Bhaskarian” theory is precisely to fall into the theory trap again and abandon the comparative, non-dichotomous project I have put forward.

Instead what is needed is realism of the sort propounded by Bhaskar but not just by Bhaskar, in which theory and empirical art history can be more successfully mixed, in which texts of authors, their scopes and explanations, can be compared to underscore their differing methodologies and commitments. The result might be called “ugly” art history, one that can leave questions open, state the hypothetical, and leave the seamless authorial voice. An irony of postmodern art history is its rhetorical facility, even where the author is foregrounded in an exercise of “self-reflexivity.” Its packaging as intellectual product – books and articles – needs to be broken down. Another irony is that one of the few places such an outlet still exists in the form of short notes is in seemingly empiricist outlets such as The Burlington Magazine or the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. In publishing new documents and drawings, paintings and sculptures, it upholds indirectly the authority of traditional scholarship and the arts marketplace. But it also remains grounded in material culture of the period.

Postmodernism promised a revision of academic practice but has mostly sponsored a revision of subject. The only way that the promise of postmodernism can be played out, the hope of transformative practices realized, is through realism. As its critique has become dogma, we still need to move in the direction of a hypothetical, fallibilistic, perhaps “ugly” art history. Only when we can resist the non-transformative role of entrenched marginal theory will art history truly change. It is my belief that art history is set to forget the positive lessons of postmodernism and continue with business as usual. New theories will supplant the old and not much will change. The reason is that art history has never successfully addressed its institutional issue. Art history is a modernist idea. Modernism is more than an aesthetic idea but a complex of forces that introduced the capitalist economy and subjectivity. Althoug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is realism?
• 3 A relational approach to history and truth
• 4 Structure and knowledge
• 5 Art history and varieties of history, I
• 6 Art history and varieties of history, II
• 7 Historical evidence
• 8 Resolving historical controversies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index