IN[ ]VISIBLE CULTURE AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL FOR VISUAL STUDIES
Attachments
of Art History
by Stephen Melville ©1999 ![]() 1 I want to start by talking a bit about imaginations of what we tend to call "historical distance," and then to push that talk toward a thought about the forms of objectivity available to the history of art. In doing so I hope also to be able to demonstrate something of one art historical object; it is a part of my argument that there is no imagination of art history or art historical method that does not depend upon, does not emerge from, such demonstration. Let me begin by simply remarking there is no compelling reason in the nature of things to imagine that what separates us from the past is best named "distance" nor any particular reason to think that this separation is different in kind from other ways in which we are separated from one another (we don't actually know what qualification "historical" is adding to the notion of a "distance"). This is, of course, not to say that the notion of historical distance is not native to us, both in general and more specifically as art historians; it is in fact a notion in which we are very much at home. As concerns art history, much of our, perhaps more or less specifically American, dwelling in this notion has been powerfully shaped by Erwin Panofsky, so I will start there. I take the following points to have been more than adequately established now, largely through the efforts of Michael Podro and Michael Ann Holly: 1. Panofsky imagines appropriate distance to be integral to the work of the history of art. 2. The model for such appropriate distance is established first of all in the art of the Italian Renaissance. 3. This appropriate distance is characterized by a clear distinction between subject and object and thus also a correct understanding of the relation between motif and content. 4. The model for such objectivity is given by the practice of rational perspective. Panofsky works out this position in a series of essays written in Germany in the 1920s. The most important of these are Perspective as Symbolic Form and The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles, but one can also include the 1930 essay on the first page of Vasari's Libro and several further essays on Dürer from the 20s. The essays on perspective and on human proportion are, in effect, a pair, jointly testifying to the Renaissance adjudication of subject and object and so structuring discussions of art historical method around this polarity. Much of this is clearly
visible in the major methodological statement Panofsky produces in the
U.S., "Iconography and Iconology," and I will take it as not
in need of any further special remarking. Instead, I want to focus briefly
on the example Panofsky uses to conclude the methodological portion of
the essay"a picture by the Venetian seventeenth-century painter
Francesco Maffei, representing a handsome young woman with a sword in
her left hand, and in her right a charger on which rests the head of a
beheaded man."1 Panofsky knows thisor perhaps its better to say that he knew it once, in 1932 when he wrote, in a text that did not make the passage to English but was instead supplanted by "Iconography and Iconology:" In his book on Kant, Heidegger has some remarkable sentences about the nature of interpretation, sentences that on their face refer only to the interpretation of philosophical texts but at bottom characterize the problem of any interpretation. "Nevertheless, an interpretation limited to a recapitulation of what Kant explicitly said can never be a real explication, if the business of the latter is to bring to light what Kant, over and above his express formulation, uncovered in the course of his laying of the foundation. To be sure, Kant himself is no longer able to say anything concerning this, but what is essential in all philosophical discourse is not found in the specific propositions of which it is composed but in that which, although unstated as such, is made evident through these propositions . . . . It is true that in order to wrest from the actual words that which these words 'intend to say,' every interpretation must necessarily resort to violence." We do well to recognize that these sentences concern also our modest descriptions of painting and the interpretations we give of their contents to the extent that they do not rest at the level of simple statement but are already interpretations.4 "Iconography and Iconology" is the developed forgetting or repression of this position, and its invocation of Salomé or Judith is, one might say, the symptomatic return of a violence that remains both integral to and invisible within the theory and practice of interpretation advanced to art historical centrality by that essay. 2 If we turn from Panofsky toward Heidegger, the ground will be sufficiently shifted that we cannot expect to find the topic of "historical distance" directly available under this name or some equivalent to it, so I will begin by simply pointing to some of its more or less scattered aspects. The first is the one we have already seen: something of what Panofsky sets up as "historical distance" now appears as the "distance" (if that is the right word) between thought and unthoughtthat is, it has become internal to the object of interpretation. It no longer appears as "historical distance" because "history," understood as something like the object's continuing and transformative presence, is one of its effects. Such distance is something to be more nearly discovered in the object than a precondition for our approach to it. A second aspect becomes visible if we turn back to the early formulations of distance itself in Being and Time. The analysis of human spatiality is fundamental to Heidegger's account of being-in-the-world and what he calls "the worldliness of the world." Human being, Dasein, "being-there," is for Heidegger fundamentally characterized by a primordial entanglement or engagement with the world that places itself always beyond itself, thrown into ecstatic projection. Thus: When we attribute spatiality to Da-sein, this 'being in space' must evidently be understood in terms of the kind of being of this being. The spatiality of Da-sein, which is essentially not objective presence, can mean neither something like being found in a position in 'world space' nor being at hand in a place. Both of these are kinds of being belonging to beings encountered in the world. But Da-sein is 'in' the world in the sense of a familiar and heedful association with the beings encountered in the world. Thus when spatiality is attributed to it in some way, this is possible only on the basis of this being-in. But the spatiality of being-in shows the character of de-distancing and directionality. . . . De-distancing means making distance disappear, making the being at a distance of something disappear, bringing it near. Da-sein is essentially de-distancing. As the being that it is, it lets beings be encountered in nearness. . . . Only because beings in general are discovered by Da-sein in their remoteness, do distances and intervals among innerworldly beings become accessible in relation to other things.5 Our dealings with things are always already an overcoming of distance, and there is no possible reduction to a situation of simple and rationally negotiable distance (things cannot be put in perspective).6 One useful way to rephrase this is to say that the distance we are the overcoming of does not belong to us but is something like a dimension of objects as such; severance or distantiation is a condition of our proximity to them (and so also, contra Panofsky, prejudice is not a barrier to but a condition for interpretation). This is, in general, the direction in which Heidegger takes these thoughts in his later writing; in particular, Heidegger's imagination of the work of art seems a particular regathering and redistribution of these two earlier moments. I will not try to review the whole, rather complex, writing and argument of "The Origin of the Work of Art," but instead simply pick out a few key assertions pertinent to my argument. The work of art is held to be the origin of things in such a way that the "thingliness" both of the work and of the thing is held to be, in effect, an abstraction from the self-secluding of the "earth" within the "world" opened up by the work7this is, one can say, the moment of severance or distantiation that appears as such only under the condition of de-severance or de-distantiation. Here again Heidegger is concerned to trace the logic of this into the work itself, so the work appears as, in its inmost structure, a "rift"say, an establishing of distance as the very means of the work's intimacy with itself (what one might call its autonomy).8 Heidegger's formulations here are difficult and worth hearing: But as a world opens itself the earth comes to rise up. It stands forth as that which bears all, as that which is sheltered in its own law and always wrapped up in itself. World demands its decisiveness and its measure and lets being attain to the Open of their paths . . . . The rift does not let the opponents break apart; it brings the opposition of measure and boundary into their common outline.9 Some of what I think needs hearing in this is the way in which the passage from what is "sheltered in its own law" to the demand for "decisiveness" and "measure" is precisely a critical passage, a passage into the space of judgment, and one might hear also the way in which the rift, bringing measure and boundary together, functions as a limit, as what both contains and opens, defining the dimensions of the work and doing so by means of a kind of cutting that both cuts in insofar as it opens the work and finds the terms of its internal measure, and cuts out insofar as it marks the work off from what is not it. Within the abstractness of this description one can feel the pressure of various more concrete imagesmost strongly a certain image of sculpture, probably derived in large part from Rilke's writings on Rodin, and, to a lesser degree, an image of painting that can come to a certain focus well beyond, certainly, Heidegger's own ken (one might think, for example, of Pollock). Heidegger himself finds it easiest to render these thoughts concrete in dealing with poetry, where he can attach measure to meter (as well as the caesura that interrupts it) and so make most fully apparent the play between internal articulation and external boundary that at various times one will call "composition" or "structure."10 One way Heidegger phrases this is as follows: The strife that is thus brought into the rift and thus set back into the earth and thus fixed in place is figure, shape, Gestalt. Createdness of the work means: truth's being fixed in place in the figure. Figure is the structure in whose shape the rift composes and submits itself. This composed rift is the fitting or joining of the shining forth of truth. What is here called figure, Gestalt, is always to be be thought in terms of the particular placing (Stellen) and framing or framework (Ge-stell) as which the work occurs when its sets itself up and sets itself forth.11 But here some important things are beginning to slip in Heidegger's account: the term "Ge-stell," offered as a sort of summary of the work of figuration proper to art and most especially to what Heidegger calls its "createdness" (as opposed to its preservation, which would be the giving of the work over to history, thus the fact that its originality does not escape its own effects), this term "Ge-stell" will soon play a leading role in Heidegger's description not of art but of technology, which in its form as aesthetics amounts to the covering over or forgetting of art's actual work of origination, something from which Heidegger is actively working in this essay to wholly separate the work of art.12 In this passage we glimpse the Ge-stell in its actual supplementarity, naming both what is essential to and completing of the work and what is imposed upon it from the outside that is, in this case, one of its effects. It is, one might say, the revenge or at least the becoming explicit of the frame so carefully elided or sublated in the essay's pivotal encounter with Van Gogh's shoes. Jean-Luc Nancy, working in the wake of Derrida and within the Derridean recognition of the supplementarity of the Ge-stell, in effect turns Heidegger's imagination inside out in trying to describe what he calls "the unimaginable, the gesture of the first imager."13 Nancy thus insists on the primacy of the rift or cut over the presence to which it gives rise.14 As he puts it, the hand of the first imager advances into a void, hollowed at that very instance, which separates him from himself instead of prolonging his being in his act. But this separation is the act of his being [in Nancy's French, l'acte de son être, in which one can also hear l'acte de son naître, the act of his birth.] Here he is outside of self even before having been his own self, before having been a self. In truth, this hand that advances opens by itself this void, which it does not fill. It opens the gaping hole of a presence that has just absented itself by advancing its hand. . . . For the first time, he touches the wall not as a support, nor as an obstacle or something to lean on [all of which might equally have left prints, none of which will have counted, will have done this workat least not until this work has been done], but as a place, if one can touch a place. Only as a place in which to let something of interrupted being, of its estrangement, come about. . . . The world is as if cut, cut off from itself, and it assumes a figure on its cutaway section. . . . The line divides and sets out the form: it forms the form. It separates at the same momentwith the same deftness, with the same drafted linethe tracing animal and his gesture . . . . Not a presence, but its vestige or its birth, its nascent vestige, its trace, its monster [one will want to hear in this last "monstrance" and "demonstration"].15 These revisions make the history the work effects not a destiny but a drift with no greater or deeper ground than the self-division of the mark that is the very condition of its appearing.16 Like Heidegger, Nancy sees this as having the force of "pure fact," ("factum est," says Heidegger) but this createdness is now itself already also displacement, given over to both preservation and loss, constitutively a vestige. This canshould betaken as a reading or revision of Hegel's "Absolute," as also of Heidegger's rewriting of it as "Ab-solvent," cut away. And it is a reading of this Absolute that does not let it escape its material conditions, thus one that grants art its own irreducible historyon the difficult condition that the history be always of a vestige. Historical distance and presence are the two edges of the same cut, and that cut is what we stand before with, for example, Maffei's or Strozzi's or Pagani's Judith or Salomé holding the head of John or Holofernes. These disjunctions are the stuff of the painting's identity, the places in which its meanings are both caught and adrift, that to which they are answerable. 3 There are a number of ways
to describe what's in play as we pass from Panofsky to first Heidegger
and then Nancyit's a kind of trade-off between history without an
object and the emergence of an object in which one's interest is not clearly
historical, and in terms of intellectual history this is, among other
things, the exchange at stake in the Since I set off from a decapitation,
I'd like to stay with that theme but return from the uncertainties of
Maffei and Strozzi and Pagani, about whom I know nothing, to Caravaggio,
with whom the theme can be said to gain its hold on their attention and
about whom I know at least a little, although not much. There is, unquestionably, a violence at work in Caravaggio's painting, and one of its most prominent expressions is clearly to be found in his various Davids and Salomés and Judiths. My general claim has been that, faced with such paintings, Panofsky can only reduce them to distinct meanings and has no way of capturing the interest that informs them precisely as paintings. A cheap way to make the pointthat I do not for all its cheapness take to be completely emptyis to pair the 1597-98 Judith Beheading Holofernes17 with a Jackson Pollock and then to suggest that Caravaggio is interested in his subject because it permits him the moment of pure paintthe great multiple jet of bloodthat is what also interests and informs everywhere Pollock's painting (the same painting, perhaps, that I earlier suggested might seem well caught by Heidegger's remarks on rift and line and abyss). I do indeed want to say something of this kind, but I want to do it along a slightly different trajectory, one for which I can make a slightly more responsible and expansive case, although I also hope that I can keep something of the simultaneous dumbness and improbability of the pairing. So I want to talk loosely around another pairCaravaggio once again, and Christian Bonnefoi, a contemporary French painter in whose work I have been interested for several years. What would make these a pair worth discussing would be a presumed shared interest in cutting. This appears at first as merely a thematic concern in the Caravaggio, while in Bonnefoi's case it is embedded in his practice as a painter in ways that arise quite directly out of a fundamental relation to collage, so this juxtaposition as it stands without any further elaboration looks at best metaphorical and willful. There are at least two relatively
recent studies of Caravaggio that move in my direction: Louis Marin's
To Destroy Painting18
and Michael Fried's . . . the logic of this particular mode of mirror-representation . . . is such that the painting appears to insist on its virtual identity with the absent mirror while at the same time representing itselfitself "orginally," in the process of being paintedas nonidentical with the picture surface.20
Overall, Fried urges the centrality to Caravaggio's painting of a "double or divided relationship between painter and paintingat once immersive and specular, continuous and discontinuous, prior to the act of viewing and thematizing that act with unprecedented violence . . . ."22 Marin's equivalent formulations here stress how far Caravaggio's Medusa in particular appears as nothing other than a rift, cut, or caesura. Both of these analyses can be usefully set along side Jean-Luc Nancy's discussion of Caravaggio's Death of the Virgina more informal piece of work that finds its repeated point of appeal in the play between the represented drapery and the canvas itself, a play Nancy attaches both to the ravishing force of the painting and to its way of making the painting a pure threshold in which separation and adhesion occupy the same problematic place: "From the inside of (the) painting to the outside of (the) painting, there is nothing, no passage. Here, (the) painting is our access to the fact that we do not accedeeither to the inside or to the outside of our selves."23 Despite the differences in approach that separate Marin and Fried, both of their accounts can be called "structural" insofar as they are concerned to find analytical terms that allow both formal and thematic address to the work and that can show it as generative of specific effects (and here one can add that both Fried and Marin are deeply interested in Caravaggio's ability to project instantaneity as the effect of a more complex quasi-temporal structure of "moments" or "aspects"). Christian Bonnefoi's work
emerges from a relatively continuous postwar French tradition that takes
painting as more nearly a material than a visual practicea practice
crucially grounded in such things as canvas and stretcher and pigment.
One can see a distant reflection of this line of work in, for example,
And if one wanted now to
pick up on the easy and abandoned juxtaposition of Caravaggio and Pollock
that I so briefly I am then proposing a view of art historical objectivity that does not depend uponindeed refusesthe mediation of historical distance in favor of discovering an internal rhythm of dis-severance or ab-solution that shows what counts as event, as historical attachment or detachment, within and among works but also between works and their shifting circumstances. Such objectivityany objectivity of this general kindcannot happen apart from its objects, which is to say it cannot proclaim itself in advance of the work it shows, and it cannot claim to show everything. Its interest in theory is not methodological. 4 When I say that what I have
tried to sketch is a model for how art historical objectivities are constituted,
I do not mean that sketch to stand simply as an alternative to Panofsky's
settlement of historical distance. It should count also as a reading,
or a diagnosis, of the actual structure of what Panofsky so successfully
made seem a natural way of standing toward something called "the
past." That is to say, Panofsky engenders his objectivity in ways
wholly parallel to those in which I have constituted minefastening
himself to certain objects and teasing out of them the terms of their There is, after all, a history that passes from Northern German St. Johns-on-a-charger not only through Carvaggio and such followers as Strozzi, Pagani, and Maffei, but also through the vera iconinterestingly touched upon by Marin in his discussion of Caravaggioand that finds one of its ultimate and pivotal expressions in the self-portraits of Albrecht Dürer, self-portraits that are intimately bound up with, among other things, Dürer's systematization of human proportion, which Panofsky then takes as evidence of the emergence of a grasp of subjectivity appropriate to the objectivity of the perspective Dürer also formalizes. The moment here is complexand it is been both illuminated and evaded by Joseph Koerner in a recent study of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien, that, like this paper, means ultimately to show something of the inner rhythms of historical detachment and attachment.26 A considered account of that study might lead one to further remarks about how Panofsky's art historical detachment not only ties itself to a particular notion of appropriate fit of motif and content but also finds a crucial prop in Dürer's self-attachment, and so also to further consideration how Panofsky's "founding" of modern art history repeats Dürer's "origination" of Northern art's history. These last remarks might then open into a still further consideration of the pairs Panofsky/Dürer and Heidegger/Hölderlin that would thicken and transform the terms of the field I've tried to sketch. The theoretical issues that set up this talk have, then, never stood apart from the objects that support them, because there is no other place to stand. And because that place is always divided, art history is pledged to the invention of objectivities that are the consequence and measure of the absoluteness of its objects.
Notes: 1. Erwin Panofsky, "Iconography
and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,"
in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955), 36.
2. It should be noted
that Strozzi is one of those to whom Panofsky appeals in establishing
a North Italian type of "Judith with a Charger." 3. This paper is shameless
in its willingness to trade "meaning" against "painting"
for the sake of its argument. But of course in any adequately imagined
or addressed case, this will not be simply a trade. The core point is
to conceive meaning always as an effect rather than a precondition of
a practice or structure. 4. "Zum Problem der
Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst,"
Logos XXI, 1932, pp. 103-119. As cited from Ballangé's translation
by Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant L'image: Question posée
aux fins d'une histoire de l'art (Paris, Éditions de Minuit1990),
126-127. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being
and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York,
1997), 97. The Macquarrie and Robinson translation supplied "dis-severance"
for Heidegger's "ent-fernung." 6. This doesn't mean that
it may not also be true that things are always in (one or another) perspective.
What's at issue is not perspective or even rational perspective so much
as its value, or the terms of its embeddedness in the world. 7. I don't take the Heideggerean
meaning of these terms to be obvious to all readers. They can usefully
be taken as what is left of the more standard "content" and
"form" by the time Heidegger has worked his way through them.
One can also plausibly take earth and world to be opposed as something
like "sheer stuff" and "significance," with the proviso
that sheer stuff only appears under conditions of significance. 8. Heidegger here seems
to be revising or radicalizing Kant, making what Derrida picks out as
the "coupure pure" still more deeply internal to the work itself.
9. Martin Heidegger, "The
Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought,
trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 63. 10. Heidegger's primary
poetic reference is, of course, to Hölderlin, and his explorations
of meter and measure in this context should be considered also negotiations
with Hegel's "speculative proposition." 11. Heidegger, "Origin,"
64. 12. On this, see Martin
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays,
trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row,1977), especially "The
Age of the World as Picture." 13. Jean-Luc Nancy, The
Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1996),
74. 14. This is perhaps overstated;
outside of the contrast with Heidegger it would be more accurate to say
that Nancy is concerned to register an interlacing of presence and absence
in which neither term has primacy. 15. Nancy, 75-76. 16. Nancy goes on to
write of the first painter seeing the approach of "a monster who
holds out to him the unsuspected reverse side of presence, its displacement,
its detachment, or its folding into pure manifestation, and the manifestation
itself as the coming of the stranger, as the birth into the world of what
has no place in the world". 17. Galleria Nazionale.
18. Louis Marin, To
Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995). 19. Michael Fried, "Thoughts
on Caravaggio," Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 13-56.
20. Fried, 31. 21. Marin, 123. 22. Fried, 22. 23. Nancy, 61. It should
be noted that I have simply dropped the thread of self-representation
in favor of the more general question of cutting, limits, and so on. That
self-representation can occupy a place of particular privilege within
the object I'm sketching is an important feature of it. 24. Bonnefoi has been
particularly insistent on the priority of technique over "form"
in his work. 25. If I am unable to
know how serious I might be about the whole Caravaggio-to-Bonnefoi example
I'm playing with here, it is one I am nonetheless willing to take seriously
the more closely it bears upon questions of painting in the wake of Manet,
and in these terms the invocation of Stella marks a major crux. The fiddling
about with Pollock, "purity," and "absoluteness" is
also potentially serious in something like this way. One might, for example,
look again at those moments in which Pollock cuts into his skeins of paint.
26. See Joseph Leo Koerner,
The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993). |