Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions Since 1990

Eva Kernbauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000467703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte contemporanea

This book examines contemporary artistic practices since 1990 that engage with, depict, and conceptualize history.

Examining artworks by Kader Attia, Yael Bartana, Zarina Bhimji, Michael Blum, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Omer Fast, Andrea Geyer, Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno, Hiwa K, Amar Kanwar, Bouchra Khalili, Deimantas Narkevi?ius, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Walid Raad, Dierk Schmidt, Erika Tan, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions since 1990 undertakes a thorough methodological reexamination of the contribution of art to history writing and to its theoretical foundations. The analytical instrument of anachrony comes to the fore as an experimental method, as will (para)fiction, counterfactual history, testimonies, ghosts and spectres of the past, utopia, and the "juridification" of history. Eva Kernbauer argues that contemporary art—developing its own conceptual approaches to temporality and to historical research—offers fruitful strategies for creating historical consciousness and perspectives for political agency.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, historiography, and contemporary art.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 license.

1 Art as Historiography

DOI: 10.4324/9781003166412-2

Art that deals with history is frequently accompanied by the appropriation and/or transformation of familiar popular or academic presentation formats: (artists’) books, photographs, films, and videos are its predominant media, both in documentary and other approaches. Fictionalisation, reenactment, and counterfactual history, too, are modes employed by scholarly and art works. Mark Godfrey has explored the connections between these in his essay “The Artist as Historian,”¹ which uses the well-known phrase “The artist as …” to illustrate the ever-expanding range of tasks performed by artists. Godfrey’s essay is mainly dedicated to artist Matthew Buckingham, who explicitly deals with the theory and methodology of academic history. With references to the research of Hayden White,² Reinhart Koselleck,³ Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, Buckingham explores experimental approaches to history that are of lasting influence on contemporary art. In an art-historical review, Godfrey observes that, generally speaking, conceptual art and appropriation art—even when taking up historical topics and materials—were more interested in questions of representation. He locates a shift only in the 1990s, in the works of Steve McQueen, Santu Mofokeng, Fiona Tan, Anri Sala, Jeremy Deller, and Walid Raad, which, while still making use of conceptualist approaches, explicitly formulated an interest in the exploration and representation of history. While I agree to this observation in principle, it should not be used as a strict art-historical timeline. Important works on history, such as Gerhard Richter’s painting series 18 October 1977 (1988) and William Kentridge’s animated film series Felix in Exile (1989–99), were committed to their own genealogies (namely, a critique of media and the examination of political memory).⁴ Artistic explorations of history emerge at different moments out of distinct contexts, social urgencies, and interests.

Since the beginning of modernism, the relationship between artistic and scholarly history has been characterised by ambivalences: connected by common interests and, often, methods, practitioners still attempted to remain separate whenever seriously tested. For art, turning to history entailed delving into a field of interest established as a scholarly discipline only in the course of the Enlightenment, initially by way of an expansion of philosophy. History was often viewed as closely aligned to the (visual) arts but, in the course of the trend towards its establishment as a science, tried to emancipate itself from these unwanted ties. This chapter will explore how this close but fraught relationship was constantly negotiated and modified during the nineteenth century, and which roles and functions were ascribed to art within the newly emerging practice of history during this transformative period, when it emerged as an academic (“scientific”) discipline.

Depicting History

“Art” and “history”: both concepts were conceived at the threshold of modernism, around 1800. When history was established as a scholarly discipline, debates on its relationship to the neighbouring fields of philosophy, politics, the “exact” sciences, and art played an important role. A frequent point of departure for these considerations was—and still is today—the double meaning of the term “history,” which connotes both past events and their representation.⁵ Nineteenth-century scholars developed different approaches to pacify this friction-laden homonymy,⁶, linking the new discipline either to philosophy or to poetics. For connections to the latter, a classical quotation served as a common reference: Quintilian’s “Historia est proxima poetis et quodammodo carmen solutum” (history is closest to poetry and is, as it were, a poem in prose).⁷ In nineteenth-century thought, this could simply imply a recommendation that history should be beautifully or well written, but there were more ambitious approaches as well:

In our language the word ‘history’ combines both objective and subjective aspects and signifies the historiam rerum gestarum as well as the res gestae themselves, the historical narrative as well as the events, deeds, and happenings themselves—aspects that in the strict sense are quite distinct.⁸

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel deduces from this oft-quoted observation the necessity that historical narrative give meaning to events. In his opinion, this achievement actually surpassed the competencies of history and was, therefore, to be assigned to philosophy. “Writing history” and “making history,” therefore, could be merged in meaningful narratives, bestowing a kind of pseudo-sovereignty—at least on the level of its interpretation—to individuals otherwise powerless against the course of history.⁹

Significantly, history thus did not just entail researching, recording, and reconstructing the past but also creating, shaping, and forming it. It is probably not surprising that these processes came to be attributed to history’s artistic aspects as well. In his conception of history (which was of lasting influence as it opened up the discipline to aesthetic processes), Schiller depicted the work of the historian as like that of the artist. Wilhelm von Humboldt developed this approach further in a widely disseminated address to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, 1821, “On the Historian’s Task,”¹⁰ locating the kinship of artistic and historical work in the presentation or depiction (Darstellung) of history rather than its narration. “The historian’s task,” he began, “is to present what actually happened.”¹¹ While retaining the classical analogy to poetry, his concept was apt to include the visual arts as well:

An historical representation, like an artistic one, is an imitation of nature. The basis of both is the recognition of the true form, the discovery of the necessary, the elimination of the accidental. […] For it is the greatest virtue of a work of art to reveal the inner truth of forms which is hidden in their actual appearance.¹²

Following Schiller, Humboldt’s aim was not to align history to either poetry or philosophy by a focus on historical “narrative” (Erzählung) but to draw an analogy between art and historical “depiction” (Darstellung). Even though he often referred to poetry and poets, his notion of depicting history allowed for a theoretical inclusion of the visual arts as well. According to Humboldt, the historian’s basic working principles are related to those of the artist, even if the former is more committed to imitating nature than the latter, who is inclined to follow creative imagination. Just like the poet-artist, the historian must

work the collected fragments into a whole. […] The historian worthy of his title must show every event as part of a whole, or, what amounts to the same thing, must reveal the form of history per se in every event described.¹³

Interestingly, while remaining true to some of his classical sources, Humboldt followed less an idealistic than a naturalistic concept of art (and history), which led to a radical reversal of the Aristotelian subordination of history to poetry (which had argued that history was only concerned with the representation of details, not the whole).¹⁴ Humboldt considered history’s potential to be rooted precisely in its relation to tangible, individual reality, arguing that its truthfulness was threatened by philosophical rather than poetic treatment, since subordination to greater causes impaired a clear understanding of individuals and their actions. He admitted that “all history is the realization of an idea […] realized by mankind in every way and in all shapes in which the finite form may enter into a union with the idea.” But “this idea can be recognized only in the events themselves,” and the historian “must take great care not to attribute to reality arbitrarily created ideas of his own.”¹⁵ A rejection of speculative philosophical history was essential to Humboldt’s conception: history’s orientation towards art instead of philosophy would guarantee a strong connection to reality. Summing up, he wrote: “In its final, yet simplest solution the historian’s task is the presentation of the struggle of an idea to realize itself in actuality.”¹⁶

Three and a half decades later, Johann Gustav Droysen quoted this sentence verbatim in an ambitious “Lecture upon the Encyclopedia and Methodology of History,” which was later condensed into Historik “Outlines of the Principles of History”.¹⁷ But he explicitly rejected what had meanwhile become a conventional assertion, namely the affinity between art and history:

I do not know what must be further from our minds than viewing the principles of history […] as the theory of an artistic treatment of history, an investigation into the artistic character of historiography.¹⁸

At first glance, this appears to be a rejection of any orientation of history towards art. However, Droysen was writing not against Schiller’s or Humboldt’s concepts but against those of his chosen opponent Leopold von Ranke.¹⁹ In contrast to Ranke’s approach, which Droysen presented as philological and narrow-minded, he calls his own conception of history a Hegelian “master theory.” Ranke had built upon Quintilian in his lectures:

History is distinguished from all other sciences in that it is also an art. History is a science in collecting, finding, penetrating; it is an art, because it recreates and portrays that which it has found and recognized. Other sciences are satisfied simply with recording what has been found; history requires the ability to recreate.²⁰

In fact, however, after this nod to the conventional relation of history to art, there was little space for any poetical dimension. History only borrowed from aesthetics a “holistic” claim on the universal representation of reality. Its vital criterion of “love of truth” was guaranteed by the historian’s impartiality and personal self-effacement.²¹Historians did not need to actively generate meaning at all: they only had to find the already existing structure of meaning in history, faithfully tracing and recording their sources to produce an entirely unartistic “recreation” of history. In a fascinating essay, Frank Ankersmit has described how Ranke shifted the poetic character of history to the past “itself,” which for him was “an aesthetic phenomenon of an authentic and sublime beauty”; how he thereby poeticised historical reality instead of assuming a process of poeticisation in historical representation.

The result of this amazing inversion of the domains of reality and of aesthetics was that Ranke thus projected poetry upon the things themselves instead of enclosing poetry and fiction within the domain of language. […] As a result Ranke could uphold the aesthetic dimension of historiography and at the same time urge the complete, ‘objectivist’ submission of the historian to the past itself and to scientific method.²²

Ranke’s claim to objectivity was itself shaped by nineteenth-century conventions.²³ Droysen dismissed it out of hand as a “triviality”²⁴ that obscured the historian’s actual work:

Those, then, who view the historian’s supreme task as […] simply letting facts speak, fail to see that the facts do not speak at all, except through the mouth of one who has perceived and understood them; that the facts do not exist as such, only in remnants in which we recognize them as the causes that bring about events or in the form of memories […], which to a great extent bring with them those subjective moments that are forbidden to the historian.²⁵

This rejection of objectivity (in Ranke’s and others’ readings) was theoretically grounded as well as politically motivated. This has led to very different assessments of Droysen’s work as a historian. Droysen developed his theory and methodology of historiography in a university lecture upon the “Encyclope...