The Art History Newsletter

Recently in the papers:

• “Art and its mediums,” a set of links from Bookforum
• Alex Danchev reviews Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (THE)
• Jeffrey Hamburger and Anthony Grafton, “Save the Warburg Library!” (NYRB)
• Rebecca Solnit and Peter Conrad on Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain (The Guardian)
• Tom L. Freudenheim on German Master Drawings at the National Gallery (WSJ)
• Bill Brubaker, “In Haiti, the Art of Resilience” (Smithsonian); also, “Art After the Quake,” a slideshow of works by Haitian artists (New Yorker)
• Hilton Als, Angus Cook and Peter Doig, “Discovering the Art of Boscoe Holder, Trinidadian Master,” (NYRB)
• Edmund White reviews Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg at the National Gallery (NYRB), and Richard B. Woodward reviews Dennis Hopper: Double Standard at L.A. MoCA (WSJ)
• Daniel Siedell on Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct (Books & Culture)
• George Johnson reviews Craig Childs, Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession (NYT)
• Michael Dirda reviews Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss (WP), on a particularly poignant netsuke collection

One hundred years ago today painter Henri Rousseau died. This past spring the Fondation Beyeler marked the occasion with an exhibition of 40 of his works. In Le Monde, Thierry Savatier called it a “très belle exposition” and its 120-page catalogue “très beau”:

He’s presented often as the greatest of naive painters, but this qualification smacks of cliché and his naiveté was only superficial. The artist explored an entirely personal, baroque, and strange universe where the seen, the felt, the familiar, the strange, and even the incongruous intermingled. By transgressing norms, he heralded the arrival of the twentieth century as much as Cézanne did, though very differently … What finally characterizes Henri Rousseau is the oneiric quality of his canvases … [I]t was a source of inspiration for Max Ernst and Magritte, because these paintings were nothing less than the “photographs of dreams” that André Breton said defined surrealist painting.

From The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art:

The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced the appointments of members for 2010–2011. They include Joseph J. Rishel, Philadelphia Museum of Art, as Samuel H. Kress Professor; Carmen C. Bambach, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as Andrew W. Mellon Professor; and Victor I. Stoichita, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor for spring 2011. Mary Beard of the University of Cambridge has been named the 60th A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts for spring 2011.

CASVA also announced the appointment of seven senior and four visiting senior fellows, two postdoctoral fellows, 18 predoctoral fellows, and three predoctoral fellowships for historians of American art to travel abroad.

Other fellows and their projects:

Elizabeth Sears
Warburg Circles: Toward a Cultural-Historical History of Art, 1929–1964

Daniela Bohde
Disarray on Calvary: Passion Scenes in Early Sixteenth-Century German Art

Cammy Brothers
Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome

Laura Weigert
Images in Action: The Theatricality of Franco-Flemish Art in the Late Middle Ages

Sarah Betzer
Surface and Depth: Antiquity and the Body after Archaeology

Rachel Kousser
Ancient Iconoclasm: Destroying the Power of Images in Greece, 480–31 BC

John-Paul Stonard
Against Henry Moore

Heather McPherson
The Artist’s Studio and the Image of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France

Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi
The Emblematic Garden

Fredrika H. Jacobs
Dialogues of Devotion: Votive Panel Paintings in Renaissance Italy, c. 1450–1610

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
The London Square, 1580 to the Present

Megan E. O’Neil
The Lives of Ancient Maya Sculptures

Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols
Vitruvius on Display: Domestic Decor and Roman Self-Fashioning at the End of the Republic

Priyanka Basu
Kunstwissenschaft and the “Primitive”: Excursions in the History of Art History, 1880–1925

Shira Brisman
The Handwritten Letter and the Work of Art in the Age of the Printing Press, 1490–1530

Christina Ferando
Staging Canova: Sculpture, Connoisseurship, and Display, 1780–1822

Dipti Khera
Picturing India’s “Land of Princes” between the Mughal and British Empires:
Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and Its Environs

Beatrice Kitzinger
Crucifix and Crucifixion in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Breton Gospel Books: The Early Medieval Liturgical Cross and Its Representations

Jason David LaFountain
The Puritan Art World

Lisa Lee
Sculpture’s Condition/Conditions of Publicness: Isa Genzken and Thomas Hirschhorn

Benjamin Anderson
World Image after World Empire: The Ptolemaic Cosmos in the Early Middle Ages

Dana E. Byrd
Reconstructions: The Visual and Material Cultures of the Plantation, 1861–1877

Jason Di Resta
“Crudeliter accentuando eructant”: Rethinking Center and Periphery in the Art of Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone

Razan Francis
Secrets of the Arts: Enlightenment Spain’s Contested Islamic Craft Heritage

Meredith Gamer
Criminal and Martyr: Art and Religion in Britain’s Early Modern Eighteenth Century

Nathaniel B. Jones
Nobilibus pinacothecae sunt faciundae: The Inception of the Fictive Picture Gallery in Augustan Rome

Di Yin Lu
Reassigning Civilization: Cultural Property Law Enforcement in Shanghai, 1949–1978

Kate Nesin
Twombly’s Things: The Sculptures of Cy Twombly

Anna Lise Seastrand
Praise, Politics, and Language: South Indian Mural Paintings, 1500–1800

Jennifer M. S. Stager
The Embodiment of Color in Ancient Mediterranean Art

Miya Tokumitsu
“Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine”: The Sculpture of Leonhard Kern (1588–1662)

Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education painter Laurie Fendrich asks why it is “that whenever I blog on art, the reaction is deafening silence”:

A lot of people can’t understand how art of any kind conveys meaning … At the same time, many are terribly intimidated by art—especially modern and contemporary art … The stock and trade of academics is words, not images … [And] they rarely ever try their hands at creative work … In sum, even though almost everyone reacts to works of art almost instantaneously, and even though most people, either consciously or unconsciously, ascribe to the principle that all judgments about art are by nature equal, almost everyone is insecure about their art judgments.

As someone whose dissertation is a mixture of fiction and essay, I’ve been keenly interested lately in Paul Barolsky’s new book A Brief History of the Artist from God to Picasso. He writes in the preface:

I attempt to demonstrate the powerful influence of fiction in the history of art and the history of the artist. My approach goes against the grain of art history as an academic discipline, which, emerging in the nineteenth century, sought to follow a scientific model and detach itself from imaginative writing about art and artists. Although that way of thinking may now seem somewhat ingenuous, art historians nevertheless still resist thinking about the origins of their craft in poetry.

I hope to have more to say about Barolsky soon. On this topic I’m looking forward to attending the upcoming Clark Art Institute conference, “Fictions of Art History,” whose speakers include Barolsky, Thomas Crow, Alexander Nemerov, Joanna Scott, Edward Snow, Gregory Crewdson, Michael Hatt, Gloria Kury, Mark Ledbury, Ralph Lieberman, Maria H. Loh, Hélène Bonafous-Murat, Allan Sekula, Cole Swensen, Marianna Torgovnick and Marina Warner. The conference’s goal “is to address the complex relationship between art history and fiction, a relationship that will be investigated in art historians’ need to tell stories, their viewing practices, their rhetoric, their writing, and in the interest of art historical work beyond the academy.”

In Artnet sculptor James Croak hypothesizes that Thomas McEvilley’s review of the 1982 MoMA exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art “generally broadened the entire museological approach to both contemporary art and global culture,” making possible such shows as the recent MoMA blockbuster retrospective devoted to Marina Abramovic:

His irreverent review, published in Artforum and titled “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief” (variously a Hoagy Carmichael tune and a jump-rope rhyme), garnered an ad hominem response supposedly researched jointly by 35 MoMA staff members and signed by curator William Rubin, which was very poorly received. McEvilley’s text caused much soul-searching among art historians — one asked, “where were you when you read it?”

McEvilley has a new book out, on Abramovic and her collaborator Ulay, which Croak calls “an engaging read, with a narrative that is more like that of a novel than an academic treatise.”

The newspaper Nigerian Compass interviews Okwui Enwezor, who is visiting Nigeria for the first time in 8 years. It appears to ask about Sylvester Ogbechie’s recent indictment of his curatorial practice:

But how would you say your work has contributed to the the global discourse in art and in changing the general feeling about African art before you came into the scene?

I think it’s up to evaluators of what I have done to address this question … I know that I came of age as a curator [in New York] at a time of radical transitions on the global sphere … [T]he transitions were of movement, migration, the intersection of many different subjectivities; national imagination, social temporalities and so on … At this particular point, it was almost unimaginable to see the work of an African artist … So, what really set my work apart was that within this small village of New York, there were not that many young curators like myself who were thinking Africa in this particular way. It does not mean there were no African things happening …

How do you see the relationship between African artists based abroad and at home, and how do you work with them?

We do not travel as a band; there are differences in our projects. As it should be, we do not all head one direct[ion] like a delegation … I work with all artists. I understand and I am somewhat sympathetic to current debates that we have; and these debates are not new. We had it in 2002. We are repeating it now; and I see it as part of an anxiety. I am somewhat sympathetic too … [O]ne way to confront this anxiety is to create a situation in which we are not only answering to the hosts somewhere but that we also become host … I have not visited Nigeria for long. But I keep abreast of what people are doing. I would then say that there is a crisis of content production in contemporary Nigerian art … In a place like Lagos, artists here should put their heads together and, through the arts, make Lagos a place that people want to come to. Everybody wants to run to Dakar (Senegal) for example, every two years, because it is a meeting place.

Enwezor says that he plans to “come back for a comprehensive visit of Nigeria, in terms of the arts. That visit would not stop at Lagos or Nsukka. I can certainly tell you that my next visit to Nigeria will be in less than a year.”

Press clippings:

• Sarah Williams Goldhagen reviews Ćurčić and Hadjitryphonos, Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art in The New Republic (exhibition and catalog)
• “The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley 5,000-3,500 B.C.” at the Ashmolean Museum, reviewed by Neal Ascherson (LRB), and noted by Jonathan Jones (Guardian) and Paul Levy (WSJ); previously at NYU and reviewed by John Noble Wilford (NYT)
• Mark Brown, “National Portrait Gallery shines light on forgotten artist Thomas Lawrence,” The Guardian
• Blake Gopnik, “At National Gallery, Edvard Munch’s ‘Prints’ reveal artist’s methodical process,” Washington Post
• Jed Perl, “Individualism: Getting Matisse weirdly wrong, and getting Renoir weirdly right,” The New Republic ($)

Caa.reviews has started reviewing artists’ books recently. (If this started earlier, I must have missed it.) Clifton Meador (who in February reviewed a book about artists’ books) writes on The Square by Emily McVarish:

Emily McVarish is one of a handful of artists whose primary artistic output takes the form of books, books that she writes, designs, and prints—artists’ books. The publication of The Square offers the opportunity to experience a new work by this artist, a product of her long-running and deep engagement with the book as an artistic vehicle. The Square is typographically sophisticated and superbly well-produced, but its objective is not a celebration of craft, nor is it intended to be a luxury product for high-end consumption. It is an original, inventive, and transformative work of art that offers a nuanced performance of texts, an exploration of ideas about public space, rhythm, and the everyday, explored through McVarish’s poetic use of language and the typographic manipulation possible within a book.

Jennifer Tobias reviews a book by William E. Jones titled Selections from “The Anatomy of Melancholy” by Robert Burton, “an intelligent, well-executed triple appropriation synthesized into a multi-layered, transhistorical meditation on 1970s-era leather culture.” The book reflects “a dominant theme in the artist’s considerable body of work: interrogating the socially constructed nature of homosexuality through appropriation of its representations in historical and contemporary media.”

NYU’s Lucy Oakley is the current editor of caa.reviews. Tony White, of Indiana University, is the field editor for caa.reviews specializing in “Artists’ Books and Books for Artists.”

In a recent column titled “Don’t do Art History,” Mary Beard explains why she spends untold hours hunting down images and permissions for her books:

The money is one thing, but when you start to calculate just how long it takes to find a picture that you are allowed (for fee or not) to reprint, at the right level of resolution, and showing more or less what you want it to show — well, my estimate is that you are looking at one day per image … [T]he editorial rules, as usual, expressly forbid just scanning one from another book; and almost anything on the web already does have enough DPI … You start to love those electronic archives that offer free, publishable out of copyright images; and you look especially keenly at old out of copyright books with clear plans and line drawings. But even that is not hassle-free … The next thing I write is going to have NO pictures.

In caa.reviews, Roy Eriksen considers Christoph Luitpold Frommel’s 2007 book The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance:

The publisher of The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance describes it as “a landmark survey and analysis of Italian Renaissance architecture by an internationally renowned expert in the field.” The claims are true … He channels into the volume a lifetime of in-depth studies of Italian Renaissance architecture, and presents an account that is stunning in its amassment of fact and fact-based interpretations and proposed solutions … The volume provides a much-awaited bridge between continental and European or Europe-based research on the inner principles and particular dynamics producing the variegated forms of Italian Renaissance edifices … Frommel’s work is impressive, stunning, overwhelming, yes, but also non-definitive, limited, and technical in the sense of being less than open to the evidence of the exchanges between architecture and other arts and artists working alongside architects in Early Modern Italy. This avoidance is deliberate. For Frommel does not mince his words; his is a full-frontal attack on the architectural historians who have focused on historical and cultural contexts in their approaches … According to Frommel, “architecture does not narrate”

Christopher Kul-Want has just assembled a new anthology Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists that includes:

Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh’s shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud’s postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art.

I’m a sucker for books like this. I call myself a sucker because they usually frustrate me more than they inspire, and yet I seem to be compelled to read each new one that appears. In Kul-Want’s, the postmodernists get more than half the book to themselves. The full list of authors: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Adorno, Kofman, Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Agamben, Nancy, Badiou, and Rancière. Not a particularly surprising list, although he doesn’t necessarily pick the most conventional text from each author. (Not that the point of such a collection is to surprise.) The least familiar to me was Sarah Kofman, who, according to Kul-Want,

… proposes that the image is essentially lacunary: an image of loss. The image of loss does not possess a referent — the object of (repressed and envied) desire, such as that of the Oedipal Mother — since signification is composed of an infinite series of substitutions between one signifier and another … [T]he referent does not haunt representation in abstentia, since it exists only as an outcome of the structure of representation. In other words, the fiction of a referent is understood outside of a dialectical relationship to truth or idealism, a position traditionally occupied by the Oedipal Mother … [Unlike Lacan] Kofman believes that the language of representation inevitably reveals its own structure through the processes of condensation and displacement that, as Freud proposed, primarily work through fantasies, dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, and works of art.

This for me falls into the frustration category, I’m afraid.

Kul-Want includes no Marx, de Saussure, Althusser, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Irigaray, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Said, or Spivak – all of whom appear in Jae Emerling’s similarly sized 2005 volume Theory for Art History. Emerling in turn has no Hegel, Nancy, or Rancière, and I assume the selections are generally shorter, considering the longer list of authors. For a volume that includes art historians alongside theorists, try the 2009 edition of Donald Preziosi’s assuredly surprising The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. On the theory side, you only get Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Benjamin, because the majority of the book is given over to figures such as Vasari, Winckelmann, Wölfflin, Riegl, Warburg, Wind, Gombrich, Panofsky, Schapiro, Baxandall, Bal, Bryson, and Summers, as well as a host of other names, many of them lesser known.

The hefty new book The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History by Aldona Jonaitis and Aaron Glass appears to be the definite take on this fascinating subject. Exploring the pole’s origins along the Pacific Northwest coast as well as its afterlives in aboriginal and popular culture, this book “is situated comfortably within the transdisciplinary field of visual culture studies,” melding history, art history, anthropology, and media studies:

[F]or the Native chief who erected a pole originally, the totem pole is a material record of the privilege that his extended family has to depict certain images, and of the lavish potlatch – a feast at which valuables are distributed by the hosts to the guests – that celebrated the pole’s raising and enhanced the host’s standing in his community … Although aesthetic sophistication may confer additional prestige on a pole’s carver or owner, totem poles were and are not typically objects of artistic contemplation, much less worship, for the communities from which they come … The inhabitants of the [Pacific] Northwest Coast developed cultures quite distinct from those of aboriginal people elsewhere in North America … It was among these hierarchical societies blessed with abundant, easily carved cedar that the totem pole developed … They likely developed in one particular region, around Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) … There were and are variants … “memorial poles” … “mortuary poles” … “welcome posts” placed at the entry points of villages, and “shame poles” or “ridicule poles” erected to humiliate or challenge rival chiefs …

[P]oles generally depict heraldic crests representing beings that, in the past, had interacted with an ancestor and given him the privilege to portray their identifying image … However, in the contemporary popular imagination … totem poles have become signifiers of a great nation, inspirations for poetry and song, symbols of generalized indigeneity, exoticisms appropriate for fashion, strange elements in advertisements, and props for the most unlikely of film scenes … Many misconceptions have followed these poles … [P]oles do not tell narrative stories that can be “read” from top to bottom or bottom to top like a comic strip or hieroglyph … [P]ositions of figures on the pole have little bearing on their significance, despite the cliché “low man on the totem pole”: in fact, some groups put the most important family crest on the bottom, at eye level. Neither are poles suffused with spirituality, despite repeated attempts to portray them as such … Even the name “totem pole” is based on a misunderstanding … [Anthropologists] defined the totem as a particular lineage group’s protective animal that cannot be slain or eaten … However, animal images on Northwest Coast poles represent family crests or narrative characters that are neither protective nor subject to culinary taboo.

Diane Wolfthal, author of the widely reviewed books The Beginnings of Netherlandish Canvas Painting, 1400-1530 (1989) and Images of Rape: The “Heroic Tradition” and its Alternatives (1999), now has a new book out – In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe. “This book explores images whose sexual content has all too often been either ignored or denied,” examining canonical and obscure art as well as material culture. “[It] demonstrates that the insistence that sexual intercourse should be confined to marriage, performed in a particular manner and reserved for the purpose of procreation was subverted and undermined both in the visual culture of the period and in reality.”

In the Renaissance, much like today, viewers were confronted with a growth in the number and variety of sexual images. One finds an abundance of same-sex desire, adultery, prostitution, and violence. The images made and consumed by certain individuals of that era reveal them to have been more frank and open-minded sexually than many 21st-century westerners. One drypoint etching she discusses, from 1485, depicts a man and a woman, an engaged couple most likely. It contains several traditional symbols of love – the touch of the hand, the turning of the head, the walk together, the wreath, the falcon. This same artist produced, at the same time, in the same style, an etching of two men hunting. They walk, they touch, one turns his head toward the other, he wears a wreath, there is a falcon. This is also an amorous couple. There are minor differences between the two images, but the artist’s intent is clear, Wolfthal says – to depict the two couples as identical, and therefore equal. This is a powerful visual statement, and she strikingly compares it with the events of September 1, 2002, when the The New York Times began including in its Weddings pages notices of same-sex marriages (and commitment ceremonies). The image that these pages presented – photographs of gay and straight couples in identical poses and outfits – inspired double takes in readers and energized supporters and opponents of gay marriage alike.

A show at the Yale University Art Museum points to an issues that many graduate programs seems to be addressing in one way or another. Laurence Kanter says:

“Original works of art have been forgotten. They’re being used as data, without any sense of whether they’re good, bad or indifferent.”

He added: “No one wants to turn art history back 150 years. But we’re lacking an important tool that we threw out the window 70 years ago.”

In my graduate program (graduated in 2007), post-1950s theories of methodology were emphasized, even while we were encouraged to maintain an object-centered approach. Our initial assignment in my first graduate seminar was to perform a roughly ten-page formal analysis from a work of art actually viewed (not from reproductions).  As mundane as that may sound, I believe we all learned much from performing the analysis and hearing others do so.

I’m curious to hear from those with recent graduate school experience regarding the approach in their programs concerning the relationships between theory and object / post-disciplinary approaches and traditional methods such as iconography and conoisseurship.

Last February, a conference convened to discuss the “Art History of Games.” This February, a CAA session will address “Cel-Culture: The Hybrid Intersections of Art, Video Games, and Manga.” And now on view in Paris is “MuseoGames: Une Histoire à Rejouer” (“MuseoGames: A Story to be Replayed”), as ARTINFO reports:

This multimedia exhibition chronicles three decades of rapid technological advance along with the new role that video games have taken on in the home. In the “Collection” area, Atari consoles, first-generation synthesizers, and other such fossils are displayed on stands like pop-art objects … Video screens place each game into its historical context, with captions and commentary. Supported by critical and sociological analysis, the exhibition also shows the significant influence of video games on contemporary art.

The Los Angeles Times has written an interesting profile of Getty Research Institute director Thomas Gaehtgens. It seems unfortunate to me that they decided to bill this article as a demonstration that Gaehtgens has “quietly gained acclaim” and “gained the admiration of his staff,” when the only proof of this in the piece is two admiring quotes from people who report to him. Some outside perspective would have been nice. But it makes good reading anyway:

[In] early 2009 … he had to define priorities and slash his budget by 25%. (His annual budget is now $20 million, with a yearly acquisition budget around $2 million.) … [He] took the opportunity to make sure that most of his 175 employees — about half of whom have advanced degrees beyond college — had the chance to do real research, not just shelving books or shepherding other scholars’ projects … One example is the launch of the Getty Research Journal, an annual arts publication that includes articles by Getty staff … [A] dozen or so projects now underway are all over the map, including the history of alchemy in medieval Europe, a look at German art sales from 1920 to 1945 and a study of Latin American Surrealism.

Rosalyn Deutsche’s new book Hiroshima after Iraq (based on her Wellek Library Lectures) examines three contemporary video works whose subject is the 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Its press release announces that Deutsche “reveals the passive collusion between leftist critique and dominant discourse in which personal dimensions of war are denied.” In her introduction, she writes:

Two years ago … the journal October … asked: “What, if anything, demotivates the current generation of academics and artists from assuming positions of public critique and opposition against the barbarous acts committed by the government of the United States against a foreign country?” … October’s impatience with current antiwar activity in art – and its paternal demand that younger generations identify with a supposedly authentic antiwar politics – is symptomatic of a more longstanding mood in art criticism, a mood that emerged in the late 1970s and that I have elsewhere called, following Walter Benjamin, left melancholy … [M]elancholic antiwar criticism tries to divide the subjective and the material, the public and the private, and the social and the psychic as though war has nothing to do with mental life, as though there is no work of the psyche in the waging of war. In this, antiwar criticism mimics dominant discourse about the war.

Deutsche has identified three works that she believes represent “the power of contemporary art to criticize subjectivity as well as war”:

[B]ecause contemporary art, especially since the 1980s, has stressed that work of art is not a discrete entity but, rather, a term in a relationship with viewers; because, in so doing, art has developed strategies for what Theodor Adorno called turning toward the subject; and because these strategies question the rigid forms of identity and triumphalist fantasies whose maintenance helps cause war, there is, I think, a convergence between contemporary art and psychoanalysis … I want to use these essays to explore art’s ability to combine a concern for subjectivity with a concern about the problem of war and therefore to resist both dominant and left melancholic discourses.

According to Deutsche, After Hiroshima mon amour, by Silvia Kolbowski, “challenges the myth of pure identity – individual, racial, ethnic, and national … [T]he multiplicity and uncertainty of the characters’ identities … block spectatorial identification and disidentification, which work to fix identity.”

OfLet Me Count the Ways, by Leslie Thornton, Deutsche says:

[A]s Jacqueline Rose writes about [Sylvia] Plath, Thornton, too … ‘forces the viewer to enter into something which she or he is often willing to consider only on condition of seeing it as something in which psychically no less than historically, she or he plays absolutely no part.’ In the case of Let Me Count the Ways, this disavowed something has to do with group behavior, from which no individual is immune’ …it is [an] important function of the group to shield individuals from guilt feelings by sanctioning aggressive impulses.

She turns finally to Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Hiroshima Projection:

Insisting on inadequate vision, the Hiroshima Projection belongs within a feminist practice of contemporary art that produces what have been called critical images, images that undo the viewing subject’s narcissistic fantasies, fantasies that blind us to otherness, either rejecting it or assimilating it to the knowing ego or the Same .. [C]ritical images trouble the visual field, promoting non-indifferent vision and contributing to the transformation not only of the blind eye but also of the deaf ear. Wodiczko’s Hiroshima Projection increases this transformative potential by engaging viewers in a kind of seeing – and listening – known as witnessing, an act that is crucial in our time of collective, human-inflicted, traumas, such as war and torture, that call out for witnesses … [It] also facilitates the emergence of a public sphere in which the appearance of others is prized because, questioning the social order, it keeps democracy from disappearing.

I find myself buoyed by the subtlety of her analysis, the breadth of her erudition, and the optimism of her vision. I wonder if there’s any chance that these artworks will actually do the things that she imagines they can. I wonder if her (and my and October’s) hopes – that art could stand for something, do something, make itself useful – are misplaced. It’s not that I believe that “poetry makes nothing happen” or in “art for art’s sake.” It’s that I am perpetually reminded how slippery, unpredictable, and chameleon-like artworks are. How easily the pacifist’s emblem become the tyrant’s trophy. Perhaps that doesn’t matter, perhaps it’s enough that I enjoyed the book, that it could “teach the free man how to praise.”

There are of course other kinds of diversity besides those of academic background.

When completing the U.S. government’s “Survey of Earned Doctorates” today, I noticed that it asked about race/ethnicity, and so I went online to see what the latest data was on that for art history.

Of the 207 people who received PhDs in art history, art criticism, or art conservation in 2008, 161 were U.S. citizens or permanent residents. These are the only people SED tabulates ethnicity on. Of those 161 people, zero reported themselves to be American Indian, six Asian, three Black, two Hispanic, three Other, three Multi-race, and 144 White. That adds up to 89% white.

By contrast, the PhD recipients in “Letters” (English/American literature & classics) who were citizens or permanent residents were 71% white. In philosophy, the figure is 69%; in history, 65%.

An article in The New York Times reports that the Mount Sinai medical school admits a certain number of students each year who don’t have the traditional credentials (high MCAT scores and extensive coursework in biology, chemistry, and physics). This hampers the school’s U.S. News ranking, and a small percentage of these students subsequently drop out, but the rest of the students seem to fare as well as conventionally trained applicants, and they help diversify the nation’s pool of doctors.

I think the art history field would benefit similarly were its graduate programs to recruit and admit a greater number of unconventional students. Admissions committees everywhere seem to focus on the same criteria — g.p.a., test scores, the number of college art history courses taken, and recommendations from respected figures in the field — as the best predictors of how well students will do in coursework and how likely they will be to stick around for the PhD. These criteria have validity, but they exclude some highly creative individuals who don’t score well on traditional measures and don’t have extensive background in art history but have the capacity to make a big impact on the field.

Note that many undergraduate institutions have anemic art-history departments (that may or may not even offer a major in art history). Even undergraduates with access to a good department may not discover it until late in their college career, particularly when their high school education and hometown museum offerings did little to ignite their interest in art history.

Art history graduate schools are going to have to get creative if we’re to have any hope of diversifying the field. As things stand, the population of graduate students seems to be composed overwhelmingly of wealthy white students who grew up with regular access to art and/or attended the private high schools that offer (or even require) art history courses — a population that, despite its merits, doesn’t have the widest possible set of experiences and perspectives.