The Object of Art History

The Object of Art History
Author(s): David Freedberg, Oleg Grabar, Anne Higonnet, Cecelia F. Klein, Lisa Tickner and
Anthony Vidler
Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 394-410
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3046035
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A RANGE OF CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES
The Object of Art History

and the National Museum
The statements grouped together hereInstitution
were commissioned
Indian.
for publication as the first in a continuing
series that will
of the American
appear under the rubric "A Range of Critical

Perspectives."
Growing
out of a trickle of studies in the early 1970s, a new
Their purpose is to bring diverse points wave
of view
to bear has
upon
of art historians
begun to explore the implications
issues of interest and to generate discussion
of the factacross
that the a
artbroad
objects of the West also have functions
spectrum of Art Bulletin readers. In this
that
case,
go beyond
authors
purely
were
aesthetic ones. The realization has
comeon
that
suchtopic
functions
need no longer be excluded from
invited to write approximately 2,500 words
the
"The
Object of Art History"; no other guidelines
the history
were of
provided.
art. The view that we fail to do justice to
-The Editor
pre-Reformation images when we regard them solely under
the category of art has gained widespread acceptance. Many
of us acknowledge that by calling objects art we tend to drain
them of the effects we more readily attach to objects we call
Context, Visuality, and the Objects
of Art History
images. But while the history of images has become a
legitimate domain, its relations with the history of art remain
problematic.
"Art comes before gold and gems, the author before
These have been years in which art history has been
strug-declares the inscription on one of the plaques
everything,"
gling to redefine itself. Borrowing from a number
discifor of
a shrine
or altar commissioned by Henri of Blois from a
plines, it has not really succeeded in finding its own
Mosanvoice.
goldsmith in the third quarter of the twelfth century.
The tensions and confusions have been clear. But in what
Ever since a famous article by Meyer Schapiro, art historians
does the particular texture of art history consist? What
have
isbeen
it willing to admit that medieval images were
David Freedberg
that art historians have to offer that is different from the
admired and ranked for their artistic status as well as for their
effectiveness. The same applies to objects that were

work of history, psychology, and anthropology? And how ritual
can
it go beyond the hermeneutic and semiotic strategiesonce
of grouped together under the term "primitive." Yoruba
poststructuralism?
and Baule people possess a range of aesthetic terms to apply
to ritual objects that seems to exceed in refinement the
In one respect at least the field has come into its own. It has
terms of aesthetic description in the West. In
done so by way of a paradox. By confidently extendingavailable
its
Aborigines remove paintings from a gallery on the
boundaries beyond art, art history has begun to realizeAustralia
its
of their sacredness but also because they are by the
potential. No longer limited to the confining spacegrounds
of
aesthetics, art has been allowed its claim on social and
great painter Yirawala. The borderlines between art and
individual domains hitherto supposed to be beyond the

images-and all the prejudices associated with each of those
reach of art history. Images, too, have begun to receive their
territories-are not easy to establish.
due. Not just seen in terms of art, they have been endowed After all, it is not only a matter of acknowledging that
objects we might not normally classify as "art" are capable of
again with the plenitude of function that arises not simply
from context, but from the exchange between context and
being seen for their aesthetic qualities, whatever their ritual
and cultic status; or that works of art have effects which go far
visuality. It is in the area of this exchange that the distinctive
work of the art historian lies.
beyond the rules of aesthetic evaluation, in ways that apAs so often, the development of a discipline has inter-proach more closely what we think of as ritual or cultic; or
sected with the politics of culture. Acknowledging the reli- that they may also arouse violent emotions and strong
passions. These are all phenomena that can be documented
gious and historical status of sacred objects within their
possession, museums have come to be increasingly willing tostraightforwardly enough. The value of understanding the
work of art (however so considered) in the context of the full
repatriate them to their original owners. Although their
range of images of the visual culture in which it is embedded
success has by no means been general, Hopi, Navajo, and
Pueblo peoples in this hemisphere, Maori and Aboriginehas been insisted upon often enough in recent years. But still
peoples in the other, have successfully reclaimed such worksthe questions remain: where does the distinct work of the art
for their original and intended contexts (or their closehistorian begin, and in what does it consist? One could, of
course, declare, as many now do, that one is simply a
equivalents). "Once returned, the sacred objects will again
historian or an ethnographer working with art; but surely
assume their religious functions within the Pueblo rather
is more to the task than that.
than being placed on display within a museum," declared there
a
recent press release by the Pueblo ofJemez, announcing the In the first place, I take it that there can be no history of
the object without a subject. However else defined, objects of
restitution of eighty-six ritual objects from the Smithsonian
THE OBJECT OF ART HISTORY 395
responses to the images and objects we do not call art. Th

art are species of images. Whatever power images may be
after all, are by definition unprotected by the Kan
behold them (or who gaze at them, or even who cursorily
injunctions to set such interests aside. Any analysis o
of art history must take into consideration
pass them by). Their powers cannot be thought of apart objects
from
comparative
lessons to be learned from objects that
the desires, needs, projections, and learned expectations
of
their viewers. But at the same time, it is essential to acknowloutside the pale of art. Effects provoked by lesser im
said to have derives from their relations with those who
edge that the very figuredness of images distinguishesinstruct

them
us about the effects of higher ones, simply bec
from other kinds of objects-pieces of wood, stone, and
we are
so franker about our responses to what we do not re
as art.
on. This central distinction is too easily forgotten, especially
when it comes to thinking about the effects images arouse.
Even
It
in an age of mechanical reproduction, works
retain a kind of ritual or cultic status. "The cult value,"
is impossible to understand the power of any kind of visual
representation, whether art or image, outside the fact Walter
of its Benjamin said, "does not give way without resisfiguration. Only because they are formed and figured
(inI would prefer to say that it never really gives way at
tance."
whatever sense one wants to take those words) can one all.
speak
As object, as image, and as substitute, the work of art is
always fetishized; so too is whatever it takes to turn or to
of the ontology of images at all. And without this one cannot
speak fully-or even adequately-of their contextual elevate
status image into art. Underlying the ontology of all images
and their effects.
(and the case is clearest with religious imagery) is the logic of
Furthermore, it is because of nothing less than their
the relations between visuality and desire. To think of the
visuality, as Freud made clear, because they are things to be

image as wholly depleted by mass reproduction or by its
looked at, that works of art arouse the kinds of interest (in the modern transience is to deprive figuration (whether represenKantian sense) that transcend their purely formal effects. tational or formal) of its essential force, of the drama that
Just as with images that are not (or not supposed to be) art,
they are displacements from and of reality; but it is precisely
arises from the compulsive status of the exchange between

viewer and object. It is the distance from or closeness to the
because of our recognition of this fact and our consequent real that is both celebrated and fetishized in the image, even
drive to force them closer to a comprehensible reality that
they exercise their hold. By one form of projection or
when the image/object stands at some degree of remoteness

from what we recognize as real (as in the case of "abstract"
another they must be made to approximate to what we know
art). In the end, the importance of illusion lies not in the
or feel or have felt. All this applies as much, if differently, to
tricks of representation, but in the way in which it instructs us
moving images and to the whole class of reproductive images
about our desire for the real (or for avoiding it). Representation is always substitutional, and by its visuality tempts its
studied. So too are the ways in which not just the category but beholders with the possibility of restoring the rupture bethe very possibility of the unique have progressively disinte- tween what it is and what it promises to show.
grated.
By long practice art historians acquire a kind of experience
The problem, however, is that art historians continue to
in the analysis of visual things and their effects that is rarely if
give the impression of wanting to insulate and protect works
ever acquired in other fields. How it is acquired does not
of art from just the effects and interactions that we now so
seem so crucial to me, even though most of us are still likely
as it does to unique objects. Those differences are to be
readily attribute to images. I do not doubt the formal value of
to be sentimentally inclined in favor of this form of education
such insulation; in skilled hands it can produce fine results,
through art. By always being mindful of the essential rela-
and it may even be consistent with research into what has

come to be called the "period eye." But perfect insulation
can never be anything but a chimera, and there still is room
for more self-consciousness about the ways in which the
institutionalization of works of art deprive them of much of
tions between visuality on the one hand and human intention-
ality, desire, and response on the other, art historians can

reclaim some of the particular texture of a field they may
rightly call their own; and also contribute to that of others.
The art historian's advantage arises from the ability,
their effect. In places like museums the "interest" we have in
acquired both by training and engaged familiarity, to make

works of art is turned into a kind of formal "disinterest."
comparative visual judgments. This distinctive skill may be
They are not supposed to be too arousing, or to move one
toto uses that go much further than the traditional ones.
put
devotion and emotion. They are turned into objects which

For example, the downward transformation of canonical
can be formally analyzed-or documented, or socially objects
situ- into more popular and everyday forms and the
ated-but they are not allowed to infringe on what
is
incorporation
and appropriation of elements from "lower"
regarded as the domain of the image and of the everyday.
images into higher ones remain insufficiently explored. The
Or, to put it another way, they are not allowed to infringe
on of these tasks has hardly been undertaken at all, the
first
that vast terrain in which people have exchanges with forms
second only in the case of modern and contemporary art
of visual representation that have little or nothing to do (when
with in fact the implications for older art are rich and
the category of art. But even works of art retain something
of
substantial).
The recognition and charting of the frequency
the effects that they may have when considered outsideand
that
repetition of motifs, and of visual habits in general, offer
category, or when they visually approximate to lesser images.
a basis for the study of the varieties of individual and
The value of the study of images for the art historian arises
communal obsession and preoccupation, as well as of less
from the fact that it is much easier to recognize the kinds

of forms of preference and affection. Such analyses of
driven
interest we have in works of art when we examine our
the transformations and fates of visual forms are the true
396 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1994 VOLLME LXXVI NUMBER 3
domain of the art historian and they form the raw material-turn to engage in the kinds of documentary and cont
researches whose disciplines we learn from other field
not the final result-of his or her investigations.
With aims such as these in mind, there seems to be little
These are some of the ways in which we as historians
reason to downgrade the worth of traditional art-historical and of images may begin to speak with authority
exercises such as the making of monographs and the problems and issues that cannot simply be resolved
application of the special skills and techniques of thatanalysis of contextual factors and the social construct
unfortunately named subdiscipline, connoisseurship. Of response and (say) the conditions of creativity. To
course, there is no doubt about the potential of such such analyses could as well have been done by other k
practices (monographs, the making of attributions, and sohistorians, and better. Frequently they have seem
on) for abuse; but the moral issues are consequential, not
essential. They are by-products of the commercial fetishiza-
bypass their ostensible objects altogether, or have r
the lack of focus that arises from a neglectful blindnes
visual reality of the object itself. The art historian may
tion of certain kinds of high art and of the institutions

choose to deal with art and art objects, but he or she
associated with them. But both the practice of making
also to be trained to deal with the whole range o
monographs and the skills of connoisseurship are rooted in
things-from the variety of moving pictures to the ful

an involvement with the material object that rightly counts
of visual strategies by which the world is reduced
amongst the most distinctive features of the discipline. Even
blances of order, from schematic pictures to every fo
a history concerned with consumption and response candiagram, grid, and table. These too lie within the par
never totally divorce itself from the production of objects. and legitimate domain of the art historian. The o
The loss of prestige of the activities associated with the name description of the project-thus expanded well beyond
of connoisseurship has as much to do with a justifiable we call art-may seem ambitious; but if historians of a
revulsion at its elitist connotations as with a widespreadnot undertake it, who else will?
reluctance to learn its techniques. But as little as other

historians renounce the need to examine and determine the
David Freedberg zs professor of art hzstory at Columbza Unz
He has wrztten wzdely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-centur
authenticity of documents, so little need art historians shrink

well as on past and present problems of zconoclasm, censor
from the problems of attribution and authenticity whenresponse.
it
His books znclude Dutch Landscape Prints
comes to objects. In this respect, the object is to theSeventeeth

art
Century, Rubens: The Life of Christ af
historian what the document is to the historian and the social
Passion, and The Power of Images [Department of Art
group to the anthropologist; once we accept this, we may

andArchaeology, Columbia Unzverszty, New York, N.Y. 1
Different But Compatible Ends

Oleg Grabar
Two sets of impulses have led to what we call now, probably
not very accurately, the history of art. One set is the universal
human tendency to order and classify whatever is known.

Within the immense mass of knowable materials some are
indispensable tools for the classification of objects or

built environment. The traditional "eye" of the conno
requires the support of microphotography and the ch
analyses of materials, just as most physicians begin a
artifacts made by man and primarily perceived visually. sis

Theyby taking blood samples. And all these spec
techniques are used for so many different sets of artifa

range from the flints strewn around by our paleolothic
term "work of art" has become either meaning
ancestors to the now abandoned (or about to be) hugethe
steel
applicable to every thing made by man.

objectives
suggested by this set of impulses
grandmother's attic or of a museum's storeroom. In The
order
to
mills of the industrialized world and the contents of a
derived from the material attributes of whatever man has
deal with these "things," a large number of methods and

made
and, ultimately and in a slightly caricaturized fo
techniques for definition, description, classification,
restora-
they are the perfect fiche, the bar-coded label which conta
tion, preservation, and presentation have been developed.

all one could wish to know about whatever one happens
Used properly, these techniques can handle all those resee. We can only speculate on what led men and women
mains from the distant past or from the creativity of the last
this passion for ordering things, but the parallel with
decade which are (or can be made) part of our collective and
natural and physical sciences during their own classificati
individual visual experience and which often foster considerperiods is obvious. The main difference between Linnean
able pride of possession among individuals or communities.
Mendeleevian achievements and those of art historians is the
The multiplication of primarily taxonomic techniques
is as (or conclusion) of the categorical and typologica
assumption
amazing as the range of objects or built ensembles finiteness
to which of the natural world as opposed to the infinit
they are applied. Dozens of specialties accompany

fieldof human creations available from the past an
number
archaeology, for centuries the exclusive retrieval technique

being made continuously just about everywhere. This is one
for lost or hidden artifacts. The archival functionsofof
keep-reasons why the taxonomic task of the art historia
several
ing, protecting, and presenting documents no longer

conis never
completed and never will be. The specifics of th
sists in labeling storage boxes or hanging pictures. particular

Dendro- argument need more elaboration than can be
given
it in this essay, but the objective of a complet
chronology or codicology are just two of the more
orto
less
mapping such as seems possible to biologists cannot be
processes of knowledge I am suggesting is that every object,

every work of art, once described and, so to speak, measured
in terms of its material "vital statistics," stands at the
The second set of impulses is the complex human practice
of reacting to what is seen by engaging in various forms intersection
of
of two different, if not divergent, histories. One
extended to the remains of human material creation.
behavior (moving left or right, stopping, going, praying,cryis its pre-history, that is to say, everything that went into its
ing, laughing), by feeling various forms of pleasure or even
being whatever it was at the moment of its first appearance to
pain, and by evaluating or even judging whatever is perbe used or seen. It includes its techniques of manufacture,
ceived according to spelled out or subsumed rules and

the social and cultural contexts which affected it, the prac-
canons. Whereas the first set of impulses leads to waystices

of and aims of its artists, the ambitions and resources of its
description and of identification, often very sophisticated
patrons, the models it used, and the identification of its time
ones, applied to objects which are "out there," the second set
and place. Nearly every conclusion or statement within these
is a human response modifying, at times transforming, the
categories of analysis can, at least in theory, be reached
user or observer, the "receiver" of the object. Many varialogically, rationally, and objectively, in the sense that such
and most of such conclusions are true or false
tions, at times incompatible ones, exist within this setstatements
of
impulses as well. There is the simpleminded but quite
within existing evidence and can be modified by new ev
dence.
common "I know what I like," with theoretically total
freedom of judgment and an implication of aesthetic anarThen there is a post-history. It begins with the first reaction
chy. As elaborated in some of Bakhtin's literary studies and
of the first person to see something or to use it. Abbot Suger
caricatured in Woody Allen's "Kugelmass machine," there is
or Salon and exhibition critics may have been affected by all
also a transformation of the observer by the object and then,
they knew or guessed about the pre-history of whatever they
eventually, the transmission of that transformation to the
saw, but their most significant response lay in their opinions
object itself. There is a sensory, even sensuous, reaction

and interpretations projected onto the works with which they
which can lead to the need for exclusive possessiondealt.

of Such opinions and interpretations are reactions to
whatever one loves and enjoys or, more prosaically, to what
something seen which are neither necessary nor exclusive to
used to be called "art appreciation." There are several

the understanding of these works. Their range depends as
intellectual constructs or grids, Marxism for instance, which

much on the viewer as on the object. The scholar may tend to
have become, for some, a necessary filter for any reactionsee
toprimarily the pre-history of any object, to be constantly
things made and which always lead to a judgment, a verdict
reminded of what preceded it and of what "looks like" it. The
of some sort, about objects. There are several psychological

lover of pattern and of color will interpret icons differently
impulses, for instance the recognition of deep-seated comfrom the ways of the deep believer. The formalist will see
monalities between disparate forms like circles, the Golden
abstractions and designs where a specialist may uncover
Mean, frontality, symmetry, or color patterns.
iconophoric meanings. The psychologist sees hidden impliThe central feature of this set of impulses lies in the
cations and the publicist or the politician argues for the
making of choices within the mass of classified or classifiable
expression of national, ethnic, or spiritual values eternally
material. Even if eventually justified in terms of allegedly
associated with certain things and monuments. An almost
objective criteria of description pertaining to the objects
infinite number of post-historical discourses are possible, as
themselves, these choices are always inspired, probably even
every generation, every subculture, and many individuals will
necessitated, by emotional, psychological, sociological, always
or
continue to reinterpret human creations according to
other characteristics of men and women looking at thingstheir
or own needs and impulses and to react to them, even to
using them, not of the things made by them. If the ideal fiche
love them, anew, if differently. The finiteness and the
is the ultimate aim of the first set of impulses, a judgmenttheoretically
of
logical rigor of pre-history is replaced in postlove-acceptance or rejection, possession or worship, even,
history by the immense, constantly changing, and in some
sense cumulative wealth of human taste and emotions. Past
at possible and occasionally actual extremes, destruction and
hate-is the outcome of the second one.
and present are engaged in a continuous dialogue in which

Obviously enough, the two sets do not operate indepenthe scientific or absolute truth about something is less
dently of each other. Many approaches-Gombrich's "matchimportant than the satisfaction of a need or yearning which I
ing and making," the binary opposites sought and never
will call, reluctantly, the aesthetic impulse. As it is usually not
found by proponents of the anciens and the modernes

in
encumbered
by the immensely varied technical, linguistic,
Western Europe, China, or Japan, as well as by structuralists
and cultural necessities for any sort of contextual or prein more recent times; the various theories of mediation
historic analysis, this impulse allows for all those who feel
appearing off and on over the past two hundred years; the visually, regardless of their learning or sophistication, to
identification of canons and types-require or imply someexpress their thoughts, pleasure, or emotions. The only
sort of interaction between the two. The first set identifies
constriction on them is that of the power and effectiveness of

something as fifteenth-century and French; the second one
their ability or desire to communicate.
seeks to define the "Frenchness" of certain works of art or
Why be reluctant to call this impulse "aesthetic?" The

main reason is that attitudes toward or doctrines about
compares fifteenth-century French and Persian creations.
The two sets need each other. While precision and completebeauty-whether formal or informal, philosophical or se
ness focused on an artifact are central to the first one, choice
sory-are only one component of that impulse. Others a
of operative attributes becomes typical of the second.
pride of possession, ethnic or national glory, patriotic righ
The important conclusion to be derived from the two

to ownership, intellectual or technological functions in ma
398 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1994 VOLL ME LXXVI NL MBER 3
kinds of arguments, personal memories and associations. and subfields is beyond the capacity of most scholars and
Literary or political examples of all these strands are easy to critics who have not devoted themselves to that field.
Post-history is equally impossible to grasp as a whole. Only
provide, but they are only involved with "aesthetics" to the
extent that the absence of a reaction to seen artifacts would
in architecture is it a recognized aspect of studies, as the

have made them impossible. The point, however, needsnature
a
of the medium compels repairs, changes, and rehabilimuch longer elaboration, as we seem to be better informedtation with or without variations in function. It is partly
on how we see than on why we react in so many different ways
established as an independent history of taste where it is
to whatever we see.
closely tied to literature, music, fashion, and the like, but
There are, then, two different histories of art. One, based only where a regional Western centrism reigns and the upper
classes dominate. Matters are not any easier if we consider

on a deep instinct for the ordering of experience, is focused
on the discovery and expression of demonstrable truths. The
the critical scene. We all partake of contemporary cultural
other, issuing from more diffuse "aesthetic" impulses, satistrends, and a few practitioners of scholarship have been able
fies immediate needs or reflects deep-seated psychic and
to appropriate gender concerns involving half of humanity.
But the new tastes in China and India (well over half of
emotional drives. It is at times expressed in poetic or
humanity) or the films and television series which are the
philosophically abstruse language, it is occasionally passing
and trendy, and it may simply restate in current termsprimary visual culture of 80 percent of humanity are hardly
well-known and well-honed truths. Its values are its immeautomatic parts of the intellectual or emotional makeup
prevalent in the profession. If pre-history is being strangled

diacy, its relevance to current life, and especially its continu-
by necessary specialization, post-history is only too often

ous ability to enrich the potential for meaning of anything
for its dependency on passing associations and on

made by man. These values are added to the artifact vacuous
and
become part of its message and of its factual truth.
relationships to ever changing forms of social snobbery.
On the whole, however, professional self-flagellation, exThe vehicles for scholarship or information about both
histories are also varied in kind. Pre-historians have devel-
pressions of anguished anger at the tasks left undone and at
oped a whole range ofjournals, meetings, colloquiums,lack

andof appropriate recognition for this or that topic, or sighs
associations which, no doubt, contribute to knowledgeof
and
hopelessness are not very useful activities. It may be more
fruitful to consider and debate propositions formulating
help in professional networking. Yet they make exchanges
acceptable priorities for the profession to suggest directives
between subfields more difficult, if not impossible, as subtle
for the formation of the coming generation of men and

professional and intellectual segregations and hierarchies
women inspired by passion for the visual arts. There are, I
render some fields and some topics more accessible and
would
more magisterial than others. As a result, the isolation
of argue, three established "objects" of art history,
somewhat
arbitrarily isolated here for purposes of argument.
often significant thought and information increases, even
as
One is to describe and to define what something is-a
the possibility of access to them is being revolutionized by
neolithic flint, Chartres, the Sistine Chapel, or a set of
new technologies.
dresses from the twenties. The second is to explain how and
The vehicles of learning in post-history are at the same
why something came to be what it is at the time and in the
time omnipresent and elusive. Post-historical attitudes domiplace where it happened to appear. The third is to evaluate
nate the art criticism of the press, both mass and restricted,
artifacts according to their fate after their creation through
which is compelled to make choices in coverage and easily
finds solace in conscious or unconscious trendiness. Such
intrinsic modifications as with architecture, through changes
in use, or through the endless expression ofjudgments about

attitudes also occur in a specialized critical press with shifting
alliances. With a few notable exceptions here and there,them.
they Over a lifetime, any one individual may indulge,
willfully
or not and more or less successfully, in all three of
are absent from the journals and magazines which reflect
the
these objectives. But it is essential to reiterate that each one
academic and intellectual concerns of the profession.
of them is a form of knowledge requiring different, if at times
Does this analysis lead to thoughts or suggestions about
shared, competencies. Each one of the latter tends to

what to do? Can it help to formulate a program, to establish
become a secluded kingdom inaccessible to all but faithful
hierarchies of needs in such vital problems as jobs, grants,
knights and attendants with the right credentials.
rewards, fellowships of all sorts, teaching, exhibitions? Should
The task facing us all is to find the practical and especially
we seek, for instance, ways of matching pre- and postthe intellectual means to share knowledge and passions
without sacrificing the quality of either. There may well,
The last is, I submit, impossible. The main reasons are
historical endeavors?
then, be a fourth "object" of art history, which is to discover

obvious. The growth of specialized knowledge in pre-history
or develop the mediating ways that could make the immenis such that no one is able any longer to control information
and scholarship in traditional fields like medieval, Baroque,sity of specialized knowledge accessible to all. We cannot any
longer rely on the paradigms of one hundred years ago

or Islamic, even Spanish medieval, Italian Baroque, or
which neglected three-quarters or more of humanity and
Iranian Islamic. The Western European and New York-tothen half of all human beings within the remaining quarter.
Los Angeles parochialism of most nineteenth- and twentiethAnd the abstractions which engaged most of us over the past
century historical studies is evident to anyone who has
thirty or forty years turned out to be too theoretical for the
traveled in the rest of the world and inquired about local
concreteness and immediacy of the art historian's experiartistic interests and activities. The linguistic breadth neces-
ence. A world of visual forms without a finite number of

sary to the proper pursuit of any one of the established fields
simply as possible artifacts emerging into visual experience

phonemes could not be handled by the linguistic, structuralfor reasons other than historical. At this stage, the object of
ist, and even semiotic ways developed separately from visual
the professional man and woman will become an ethical one.
experiences and adapted too rapidly to a very special mode
It will not be the traditional ethics of selling or buying,

of knowledge and communication. The search for this fourth
objective may well have to be the main "object" of thestealing or borrowing, but the deeper ethics of the limits to
profession over the decades to come, if we are to avoid thebe given to knowledge. In a world where more is available
than can be known and understood, the reasons why we

maintenance of existing independent intellectual baronies
choose to know one thing over another are conscious or
and the constant creation of new ones.
Or, perhaps, we may argue that, in a world of expanding
unconscious moral choices. The elaboration of an ethic of
aesthetic impulses can lift the mass of mundane engineering

techniques overwhelming the humanities to a level of debate
availability of data and of images is so staggering that new
which can do justice to the physical joy and the intellectual or
technologies of information, the potential increase in the
and unexpected visual connections will be possible, in fact

emotional excitement all historians of art feel in front of
are being made, without access to, or even need of, the
man's unending creativity.
"objective" definitions and data central to the traditional
scholarly discourse. Buddhas and Christs will appear atOleg Grabar, for many years the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art
requests for images of holiness, Inca textiles and Matisse
at Harvard University, has recently published The Mediation of
paintings will react to a query on color patterns, the AlhamOrnament (1992) and is now completing a study of early medieval
bra and the Parthenon will respond to the Golden Mean.

Jerusalem [School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton, N.J. 08540].
The object of art history will, then, be only one of labeling as
On the Object
Anne Higonnet
Objects constitute my field. I differentiate my work from the
work of literary critics, historians, and philosophers (among
others) by my attention to material objects. If devotion to
objects has limited the scope and the importance of a field
called art history, it is because art history has so tightly

restricted the range of objects it has studied, and because
even objects within art history's canon have been understood
primarily in terms of their production. The point is hardly to
stop studying elite art forms, but rather to consider them as

dominant modes of visuality within the larger field of visual
AIW
culture. My challenge is to situate both objects and their

functions historically. And this challenge, it seems to me,
cannot be met hypothetically, but only in practice, since the
object signifies in practice.'
Two seamstresses pose for a photographer (Fig.1). The

photographer has recorded his identity as M. de Charly,
dated the image 1862, and labeled it Dans l'atelier (which
translates either as "In the Studio" or "In the Workshop").
He has also recorded the seamstresses' identity, inasmuch as
the appearances he photographs constitute an identity. He

might have brought his equipment to their workshop, but
technical reasons argue instead that they have come to his

studio.2 Dressed in fine products of their skill, the seam-
stresses have surrounded themselves with tokens of their
trade: scissors, tool basket, cut fabric in front of them,

pattern pieces behind them to the left, assembled dresses to
the right. We know nothing else about these women: no

names, no dates.
1 M. de Charly, Dans l'atelier, photograph, 1862. Rochester,

The image knots form, class, and gender into a historical N.Y., International Museum of Photography at George
meaning. But when I say "historical meaning" I beg my own Eastman House (photo: George Eastman House)
1. What follows has been adapted from a larger

essay: "Real Fashion; Clothes Unmake the Working
Woman," in Realism, Sexuality, and Gender, ed.

Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast,
2. In the 1860s photographic equipment was still

too cumbersome and artificial lighting still too
unreliable for most indoor sites other than a photographer's studio. On the subject of this in relation to
photographs of work sites, see Michael Hiley,

Victorian Working Women: Portraits from Life, Boston,
1980, esp. chap. 5: " 'Honest Labour bears a lovely
face,' " 61-80.
University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming.
400 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1994 VOLUME LXXVI NUMBER 3
question, the question of visual historical meaning, which I seamstresses by some famous artist in much the same way a
believe is never purely visual. Here the idea of the combina-historian uses photographs: to reinforce the conclusion of a
toire seems useful to me. Combinatoire translates from French
prior argument about something else. The history of photog-
only very awkwardly as "combinator" or too familiarly as raphy has included some remarkably supple and innovative
"combination." In 1980, Michel de Certeau introduced his
essays,5 but they have been marginal within a formalist
theory of culture as "combinatoires d'operatzons,"3 while in photographic history that patterns itself on the history of
1975, Frederic Jameson, himself citing Charles Mauron and painting, and that ignores in photographs exactly those
Tzvetan Todorov, explained: "the combznatoire aims at reveal- factors of class and gender that would constitute Dans
ing, not the causes behind a given form, but rather thel'atelzer's
realism for social historians.
Painting, sculpture, and architecture have histories, albeit

an image, in this case the photograph Dans l'atelier, can be histories that are limited by an unquestioning acceptance of
thought of as a combinatoire, then what is it combining, how, those media's boundaries. Some other media, notably photoand why? How do the aspects of one image's meaning fit graphs and prints with artistic intentions, have received the
together at one moment? And then how do its visual and same treatment in subordinate versions. Historians of paintverbal components slip out of alignment, jolting into new ing have long been engaged in studying popular imagery as
combinations with other meanings?
a function of issues pertinent to painting. We have, however,
conditzons ofpossibility of its existence" (the emphasis is his).4 If
Any investigation of an image's historical meaning is very few historical studies of reciprocal relationships among
necessarily-I believe-an investigation into what has been image types. Which is to say that we have no clear or
called realism. What effect of the real does any image comprehensive histories of visual culture, let alone histories
produce, and how do visual and verbal modes of realism that mesh visual culture with social and literary history. The
interact? In what sense is any image a form of history, and method by which we could write the historical meaning, the
what place can its material factuality occupy in narratives realism, of an image like Dans l'atelier will have to be
written always after the fact? In contrast to a specificallyinvented.
It should already be clear that I believe such a project
literary realism, what interests me are the forms of realism
entails studying how the object that materializes a historical
moment unites the meanings so disparately treated by the
mode of realism always playing against, supplementing, fields of history and art history. The object forces us to see
complementing, or contradicting textual modes of realism. how meanings function at one moment in relation to each
What interests me are modes of realism that work not only other. It forces us to see how meanings act as functions of
produced by images, not merely considered as a question of
their subject matter's optical verisimilitude, but rather as a
through subject, but also through visual form and cultural each other, with no independent significance, as elements of
conditions of sight, modes of realism that imply a history notcombznatoires. In the combznatoire, no meaning can be prior to
just of subjects, but of visual culture. De Charly's photograph any other, privileged over any other. The only origin is the
object itself, yet none of its meanings is inherent to the

subject seems to give it a privileged place among images object. Each of the combinatoire's elements refers to past
within social history, and because its medium seems so meanings which themselves are just the most recent links in
draws my attention to these issues both because its unusual
realistic.
an endless regression of citations. As Roland Barthes wrote
It would be easy to say that de Charly's Dans l'atelzer simply in S/Z, invoking images: "Thus realism ... consists not in
records how a visually underrepresented type-women work- copying reality, but in copying a (painted) copy of reality.""6
ers-really looked. This response would be the standard Neil Hertz identifies this regressive process as the "irreducesocial historian's. Yet social historians do not, in practice, able figurativeness of one's language," which he derives from
take photographs like Dans l'atelzer very seriously. By and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic concept of "repetition comlarge they consider images only to illustrate prior meanings. pulsion."7 Nonetheless, the object and its moment are
According to such a procedure, the social historian, having constituted by a particular intersection of these regressions.
investigated class and gender in mid-nineteenth-century The configuration of that intersection, the pattern formed by
France, would then invoke Dans l'atelier to show the appear- different vectors of meaning, their respective velocities, their
ances of a history that can be, has been, written already. If capacity to deflect or even absorb each other, together
Dans l'atelier is construed to show how seamstresses actually- constitute the combinatoire. That pattern determines the
really-looked, it could only be because their identity had combznatozre's function, temporarily. The very energy of the
been produced prior to the photograph. For most social elements that enter into it, and the transformation of those
historians, images do not produce meaning, and therefore energies by their mix, guarantee that the combznatozre can
neither last nor reproduce itself exactly, but rather concannot function as integral elements of history.
Art historians dismiss photographs like Dans l'atelzer in stantly mutates into unprecedented forms and functions.
their own way. The methods that have dominated art history
De Charly used his photograph as one among eleven
have no place for such images. De Charly is not a known images assembled into an album. The album was intended to
photographer, he belongs to no canon either on his own teach women the truth about themselves. Each page gave a
lesson about a reality of gender, class, and respectability that
merits or by association, and his picture is somewhat inert
formally: banal in its composition, light effects, and printing. underlay false values. De Charly relied primarily on photogBasically, Dans l'atelzer does not qualify as art. At best an art raphy's reality effect to convince his audience. He called the
historian would compare Dans l'atelzer to a painting of album Pirigrznatzons d'un objectzf, a title that when translated
into the English "Peregrinations of a Lens" loses the reso-them within a history of visual culture. I would also argue that
any essay with methodological intentions requires concentranance of "objective." Yet on every page of the album, the
tion on a few exceptional objects. In work with a broader
photograph that was going to reveal the truth visually has
been textually framed by explanatory captions above andscope, it would be preferable to deal with patterns of objects
evolving over time. The limited scope of an essay calls for
moral axioms below. Visual meanings were supposed to be
natural and self-evident, yet textual meanings are heresingle objects which carry within themselves, mise en abyme,
the signs of their own conditions. To recognize and value
invoked to speak the "truth."
Visual and textual meanings always together set the terms such objects, finally, requires an understanding of the object
as allegory. De Certeau wrote that his goal was to "make of
for realism's contracts, as they do, for instance, in de Charly's
album. If at any one moment either kind of meaning claims analysis a variant of its object."8 John Berger quoted Walter
to represent truth or nature or reality more effectively thanBenjamin quoting Goethe: "There is a delicate form of the
empirical which identifies itself so intimately with its object
the other, that claim will always, as in the case ofDans l'atelier,
that it thereby becomes theory."'
facilitate an ideological work whose unexpected conseFidelity to the material object forces a relational analysis of
quences will eventually require the intervention of its putaits references. Yet the recognition that those references are
tively more artificial semiotic counterpart. Nor can configura-
relational makes the object into their merely transient
tions of visual and textual meanings be replicated or

meeting place, into an isolated historical moment. The
controlled any more reliably than any other aspect of
combinatoires. De Charly maintained an evenly authoritative
object's significance lies not in being itself paradigmatic or

exemplary, but in acting poetically as the sign of a historical
tone thoughout his album, with one exception-page 8, the

reality our writing can never attain but only evoke. The
page that includes Dans l'atelzer. When it comes to this
object, this photograph of seamstresses, by its obdurate
photograph, he cannot draw any conclusion. All he can write,

materiality, by the fact of its survival, stands allegorically for
confounded by the conflicting signs of his subjects' appear- the lived human experience.
ance, is: "petit travail grande toilette" (small craft grand dress).
We are left with a contradiction he cannot resolve into moral
prescription, with an apposition of words unconnected gramAnne Higonnet is the author of two books on the Impressionist
matically.
Berthe Morisot and ofa dozen articles or book chapters on aspects of
It might be objected that Dans l'atelier is too exceptional an
object to sustain any argument larger than itself. I would first
respond that many apparently ordinary objects would prove

to be equally complex if anyone seriously attempted to place
3. Michel de Certeau, L'lInventzon du quotzdzen: i.
Arts defaire (1980) Paris, 1990, xxxvi.
4. Frederic Jameson, "Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre," New Lzterary Hzstory, no. 1,
Autumn 1975, 158.
5. Most pertinently, some excellent investigations
into gender, class, and the place of the photographic medium in 19th-century visual culture,
including Andr6 Rouill6, "Les Images pho-
tographiques du monde du travail sous le Second
Empire," Actes de la Recherche en Sczences Soczales, no.
modern visual culture. She is currently writzng a history ofprivate
art museums founded between 1848 and 1940 and organizing a

symposium about images of desired children [Department of Art,
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass. 02181].
54, Sept. 1984, 31-44; Abigail Solomon-Godeau,

du moins saisi ' travers la gangue picturale dont on
"The Legs of the Countess," October, no. 39, Winter
l'enduit avant de le soumettre a la parole: code sur
1986, 65-108; and Leonore Davidoff, "Class and
code, dit le realisme."
Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur
7. Neil Hertz, "Freud and the Sandman," in The
J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick," Femznzst Studzes,End
v, of the Lzne, New York, 1985, 97-121. Signifino. 1, 1979, 87-141.
cantly, this concept stages Hertz's very unusual skill
6. Roland Barthes, S/Z, Paris, 1970, 61: "Ainsi le
in meshing visual and verbal meanings.
r6alisme (bien mal nomm6, en tout cas souvent mal 8. De Certeau, as in n. 3, xxxiii: "faire de l'analyse
interpr6te) consiste, non a copier le r6el, mais gA une variante de son objet."
copier une copie (peinte) du r6el: ce fameux reel,

9. John Berger, "The Suit and the Photograph," in
comme sous l'effet d'une peur qui interdirait de leAbout Lookzng, New York, 1980, 28.
toucher directement, est remis plus lozn, diff6r6, ou
Objects Are Nice, But ...

Cecelia F. Klein
Objects are nice. I've always liked them, especially dolls.as well as sentimental value, and as such they function in my
When I was a child I collected dolls, which I regarded as my home much like true works of art. I have even seen dolls just
own children. I treated them accordingly, tucking them in atlike mine on display in several museums.
night, combing their nylon hair with my own comb, dressing My own dolls, in fact, are now displayed next to a "real" art
them in little clothes my mother made them, feeding theobject, a recently commissioned wood carving of an ancestral
"youngest" with liquids that trickled out of a little hole at thekava kava figure from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) of the sort
center of the left buttock, where its approximation to that was hung from rafters in private homes except when
taken out and worn around the neck during ceremonial
cause embarrassment to adults. When my "babies" cried, asdances. Like the old kava kava statues collected by European
some were programmed to do, I tried to comfort them. I still sailors in the late eighteenth century, after which mine is
nature's design of the human body was not close enough to
have those dolls, but today metal stands support their inert patterned, my statue represents a naked, bent over, emacibodies on glass shelves in my living room, and plastic covers ated old man with erect phallus, grimacing mouth, bushy
keep off the dust that accumulates from lack of handling. I eyebrows, and glaring, shell-inlaid eyes. The figure's apparno longer talk to my dolls, nor do they "cry" for my attention.ent rage and misery are so immense that small children often
They have become, well, just objects, now of some financial cry out and back away when first confronted with it. I have
402 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1994 VOLLME LXXVI NUMBER 3
never thought of trying to calm or comfort this frighteningcently, usually figurative and naturalistic, creating another
figure, however, nor would I ever refer to it as a doll. And correlation-this time between "great art" and imagery.
although, on ancient Rapa Nui, its predecessor's loins wereUntil the mid-twentieth century, outside of architecture,
what we call "great art" has typically taken a figurative form
usually covered with a fiber garment, a feature that the carver
of my statue shrewdly omitted, I would never considerthat directly references, and so allegedly provides us with
dressing it myself. Unlike its predecessors, my kava kavaaccess to, its original meaning. "Significant form," then, has
figure does not need to be treated like a living human being come in our culture to imply forms that express the most
because in my culture, and thus for me, it represents a work important, most intellectual and spiritual values and ideas of
of art.
the day in a representational, figurative manner. When we
Art objects are nice. I've always loved them and for a long see an object that has been elaborately and carefully crafted
time, from childhood through my undergraduate years as a to reference imagistically a major concept or narrative in our
"studio" art major, I even made some. Today, as I've already culture, we assume that it provides us access to what was or is
indicated, I own a few artworks, and as an art historian, I most "significant" to the people of that place and period.
The reason that this doesn't always work outside of the

statue indicates, however, the focus of my professionalEuro-American framework is that in other cultures the most
attention long ago veered away from my own cultural important values and most profound ideas are sometimes
study and depend upon them in my work. As my kava kava
heritage, shifting instead toward fields formerly, and at best expressed through forms that are not (wo)manmade, are not
euphemistically, labeled as "primitive" and "non-Western."imagistic, and/or are not executed with the materials and
In my efforts to document and understand the visual cultures"care" that we expect of "great art." Examples are legion,
of these unfamiliar peoples, I frankly have found the Euro- but let me mention just a few. When Europeans first
American concept of the "art object" not only inadequatecontacted and subsequently settled in Tahiti in the eighand limiting, but at times positively misleading as well.teenth century, they collected a number of portable stone
According to conventional Western notions of art objects, for and wood figures called ti'z whose polished, carefully carved
example, traditional Rapa Nui kava kava figures, becauseplanes and angles have qualified them as "art" in at least
they were dressed and treated like living beings, bettersome European and North American museums. These carvresemble the dolls our children play with than the sculptureings, which constitute the largest figurative images from
that we display in our homes and museums. The damageancient Tahiti, could thus be seen as "clues" to, or "signs" of,
inflicted by such a semantic system can be enormous, for a what for Tahitians was once assigned the highest value. The
person lacking the critical ability to override such analogical assumption would seem to be supported by contemporary
errors may too easily conclude not only that eighteenth-travelers' reports to the effect that these figures originally
century Rapa Nui wood carvers were not "real artists"-that served as temporary receptacles for certain spirits who were
is, that the kava kava figures are not and never were "true" periodically invoked by religious practitioners. At the time of
works of art-but, far worse, that the behavior and thought contact, however, tz'i were of far less importance as religious
processes of all Rapa Nui people once were, and may evenobjects than another type of object that represented the
still be, childish. Similar conclusions, as is well known, have Tahitian war god, Oro. Oro, who was considered so sacred
been drawn for many colonized peoples over the centuriesthat he could not be portrayed in human form, was mani-
separating the modern Western world from the so-calledfested as a simple wood stick wrapped with braided sennit
into which red feathers were inserted. These "nonrepresenta"age of expansion."
There are many reasons why our concept of the art object tional representations" of Oro were placed inside huts at the
so often fails us when we step outside the Euro-Americancenter of sacred ceremonial precincts called marae, whereas
culture in which it was born, but the need for brevity here the figural tz'i so beloved of European and American collecpermits mention of only a few. Many of our difficulties stemtors were relegated to a relatively insignificant place at their
from our long-held definition of "great art" as highly edges.

significant (wo)manmade form. The problem is less with our The most "significant" form at the ancient Tahitian marae,
fundamental association of "art" with exclusively (wo)man- in other words, was the nonfigurative, to us relatively unim-
made (or at least [wo]man-modified) forms than with ourpressive sennit-and-feather representation of Oro, a form
notions of what makes these forms "significant." In Renais- that we would not regard as a work of art. But Oro
sance and post-Renaissance Europe, art objects were alwaysexemplifies yet another objection to Western art history's
assumed to constitute the most significant forms, and indeed cult of the object, for the materials that represented him were
the highest values and most "profound" concepts were used in an essentially natural, unworked, organic state. This
typically embodied by artworks. The frescoes in the Sistine choice of natural materials to embody the most sacred forces
Chapel are a good example. The most expensive, best-in the spiritual realm has been documented time and again
crafted, and most valuable works of art in the West, in otherthroughout the non-European world. In the Americas, for
words, traditionally have been expressions of what have beenexample, the most sacred objects and the most important
and/or are regarded (by those whose opinion has beensources of social and spiritual power were often unworked
crucial) as the most significant spiritual and political ideas ofmaterials drawn directly from nature. In the Great Plains of
their place and time. Artistic form implies the most signifi-what is now the United States, as throughout preconquest
Mesoamerica, godly essences and power objects in such
cant subject matter.
These expressions, moreover, were, until relatively re-forms as an eagle's claw, a buffalo tail, an obsidian mirror, or
examples far outstrips the space I can allot here, but a few
a group of thorns were kept wrapped in highly sacred cloth
or leather bundles. In like vein, the most sacred building inwill suffice. The Dayaks of what is now Malaysia and Kaliman-
tan (formerly Borneo) once practiced head-hunting, ever

the Inka empire, the Qorikancha, or "Golden Enclosure,"
located at the center of the capital city, named Cuzco,seeking fresh heads from their enemies to avenge their own
dead and imbue the living with renewed health and vigor.
enshrined an unworked stone representing an ancient culThese heads were displayed from poles and rafters, but not
ture hero. According to some colonial written sources the
before being dried out through a heat process, incised and
stone represented the petrified remains of the first Inka
with sometimes ornate designs, provided with false
ruler, Manqo Qhapaq, who long ago had been sent forth painted
by
his father, the sun, to found the Inka capital and the royaleyes, and decorated with leaves. In the West such embellishdynasty. According to other sources, this rock representedments would theoretically qualify these objects as "sculpture," and thus "art," but the objects' corporeal basis has
the "captain" of a group of rocks on the plain north of Cuzco
prevented us from so classifying them. The same stigma
which had turned into men in order to help a later Inka ruler
attends the elaborately dressed and decorated mummies of
defend the capital from attacking neighbors. The other rocks
ancient Inka rulers, all of which were destroyed by the
in this army were distributed at other shrines throughout the
Spaniards in the course of conquest. Like the Dayak heads,
city without being reworked into the form of the men into
these royal corpses were placed on display, in the Inka case
whom they had been temporarily transformed. The point
here is not that Native Americans did not make and have use
right next to the living rulers during public rituals, and, like
decorated Dayak heads, those removed from deceased
for images in the Western sense of likenesses or "icons"; asother
a
matter of fact, most of them did. It's just that those images
family members, were usually kept at home where they were
often were not the most significant forms in their own
regularly fed and honored by the living. What keeps us from
cultures and that what did constitute the most "significant"
recognizing these sometimes heavily adorned and greatly
forms would not qualify as "art" in ours.
revered dead bodies and body parts as "sculpture" is not
The contents of Plains Indian bundles were, of course,
their form or usage, but the unacceptable nature of their
seldom (wo)manmade, and therefore fall outside our usual substance. For in cases like these, as in so many instances of
definition of the art object on that ground alone. But what
"significant" form throughout the "non-Western" world, the
makes it all the harder for the West to understand their value
object literally partakes of its own subject matter. When
to their owners is the fact that the materials represented wereAustralian aborigines painted with blood, when victorious
seldom those that we ourselves value. This matter of materi-
Aztec warriors donned trophy masks made of tanned human

skin or skulls, when Batak priests placed charred body parts
object in the modern, Euro-American world derives from the of a kidnapped boy into cavities in their carved wood staves
value placed on the materials with which it has been made. At of office in order to activate and empower them, the great
one level, this is an economic matter, since for us it is the
problems of life and death were addressed-as well as at
als is not minor, for much of what is valued about an art
rarest, most expensive, most elaborately refined materials least partially resolved-by means of the natural world, of
that are most highly valued; gold and silver are excellent the body, themselves. The boundaries between "art" and
examples. But the issue is more complicated than this, for nature, object and subject, in other words, were perceived by
gold and silver, as we have seen, are metals and, as such,
these peoples as far more fluid and permeable than by
inorganic, and both require extensive processing if they are
to be useful to artists. Their value therefore lies in part in
Euro-Americans, and "significant" form was form that refer-
their distinction, their distance from organic nature. The

same can be said of most artists' materials favored by our
system; even the pigments used by painters are heavily
processed when organic, and many of our colors are syn-
substance.
thetic. The value, and thus the "significance" of the art object
in the Western world, in other words, are closely correlated

with the origins and refinement of the materials from which
it was composed, with the most valuable materials being
enced the natural world in terms of that world's very
The West's radical separation of art and nature, subject
and object, moreover, parallels its hard distinctions between

mind and body, the material and the nonmaterial, that which
can be seen as opposed to the invisible. For most of us today,
reality lies in this world of material things, and "truth" can
only be verified empirically. It is because we still endorse the
those that are not directly derived from, and therefore do not
old adage that "seeing is believing" that the object has

attained such a prestigious place in our lives, and that art
themselves reference, raw-in particular organic-nature.
history has been charged with fetishizing it. In many times
I emphasize this because it points to a characteristic

Western assumption about the art object that has long
trast, either such categorical boundaries did not exist or the
prevented us from coming to terms with significant form in
categories themselves were understood to be interdependent
and places outside of the Euro-American present, in con-
other parts of the world. In many places outside of the or capable of shifting. Among the ancient inhabitants of the
Euro-American sphere of influence, the favored media for Americas, for example, objects did not represent a fixed
artists are in fact objects found in nature, constituting reality defined in wordly terms, but rather were means of
elements of the landscape and the body. Far from distancing
meaningful form from natural substances and processes, and
thereby reducing it to a mere sign of its subject matter, these
artists reference the natural world metonymically through
their choice of materials. Once again the number of possible
reflecting and accessing a reality that was cognitively determined, and that thereby defied the integrity of empirically
determined categories. Thus for the prehispanic Inka, as for
the Australian Aborigine in the nineteenth century, the

landscape mapped the past, which was immanent in every
404 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1994 VOLUME LXXVI NUMBER 3
to them. The object of art history becomes a kind of blinder

tree, every water hole, and every rock formation, each
that permits only a narrow, necessarily distorted view that in
perceived as the place where an important primordial
turn can be-and too often is-used to characterize those
human event had taken place, and each therefore imbued
peoples in terms of lack. Art historians working with t
with historical significance. For the Inka, as we have seen,
certain of these rocks represented the ancestors themselves,tional Euro-American expectations of the object often co
clude that others "lack" artistic skill, they "lack" creativ
some of whom could actually come back to life, turning into
human beings capable of fighting a mutual enemy alongsidethey "lack" the ability to replicate natural appearances.
are or were, in other words, inferior. Since one of the ori
"real" men. The Aztecs, for their part, told how a local ruler
encountered, hanging on his kitchen wall, a mask that was functions, if not object(ive)s, of art history was precise
justify such denigration of conquered and colonized popu
audibly moaning. Convinced that the mask's moans portended war, which he did not wish for his people, the rulertions in order to facilitate their exploitation, I think it is
tore the mask from the wall and dashed it to the floor.
history's moral as well as intellectual obligation to redefin
In the examples discussed above there is no sharp division object. Art history needs to recognize, above all, tha
between the world of objects and human beings as subjects.
though objects are surely nice, they are not everything;
This is why inanimate forms can have "souls" and why some should never be the primary subject matter, the m
of them, like the Rapa Nui kava kava statues, must be treated objective of the discipline. The art object, as I've trie
like living beings. Among some rural Nahuatl speakers demonstrate, under the best of circumstances cannot alw
today, stones are still believed able to come to life at night to tell us what we really want or need to know about e
attack their owners. The form of an object, moreover, often significant form or the formulation of significance. By it
has been dictated to a person by a dream or vision, the ripped from its own historical, cognitive, and moral cont
nature of which, because it is a source of personal power, in fact, the object can be quite misleading.
It doesn't really matter, in other words, whether or not
must be kept secret. As the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter has noted, such forms, for this reason, may be encoded as dolls are works of art, nor does it matter whether or not
cryptic pictographs, or else kept well hidden, if not sooner or kava kava statue is a doll. What matters is that, together,
later destroyed. Some are simply never represented in can teach us something about the many ways, some diffe
material form at all. In this realm of what Carpenter calls and some remarkably similar, in which people the w
"invisible art," objects are seldom merely "signs" that can be over-including Euro-Americans-have conceived of
easily decoded and "read," for objects do not just refer to used objects. More important, they can shed light on
things; they themselves are, or are of, those things. In people construct meaning in their lives-on how they ne
semiotic parlance, there is a point at which they function as tiate the tensions between the material and the nonmateri
both the signifier and the signified. Such objects, moreover, between the worlds of form and formlessness. This, it se
do not automatically occupy a privileged place in the to me, is where the big questions tend to lie, and t
epistemological scheme of things, for they represent only therefore should be the real object of art history.
one form of reality, one of several ways of knowing. In these

cognitive galaxies the role of the object is necessarily qualitatively different from its role in modern Euro-America, where Cecelza F. Klein is professor of pre-Columbzan art in the Dep
the most significant forms are typically objectified, and ment of Art Hzstory at UCLA, where she also supervises gra
where "great" art objects typically represent the most signifi- research in Native American and Pacific Islands art. She specz
in the art of the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs of prehispanic C
cant forms.
Because we bring to the study of other peoples our own Mexico and zs currently working on the rhetorical role of g
culture-bound, historically determined notions of what an art signs in Aztec art [Department of Art History, Universi
object is and should be, we often miss what is truly significant Calzfornza, Los Angeles, Calif. 90024].
The Impossible Object?

Lisa Tickner
There is no (single, or upper case) "Object" of art history in
any of the immediate senses of: (a) a given and undisputed

disciplinary field; (b) a category of artifacts self-evidently
constituting the material basis for such a field; or (c) a given
disciplinary purpose or intent. A discipline connects a set of
objects of inquiry to a set of principles and methods of
inquiry. It affects to do so disinterestedly, in the pursuit of
knowledge, but knowledge is always "interest-linked and
perspectival."' History is always for someone.
terms of theoretical paradigms to what has become kno

the linguistic, semiotic, or psychoanalytic "turn." The r
canonical objects-indeed objects at all as against somet

closer to "the traffic in signs"-is a critical issue. An
ends of art history, who and what it'sfor (in the academy
market, the museums, the media, and the culture indus
generally) is a matter of argument rather than habit.
All of these things can be caricatured (and have be
none is entirely new, none is a certain recipe for the hi

The field of art history, the objects of art history, and the we most want to read. It would be a mistake to take nov
for rigor, to overlook the fact that some apparently diver
ends of art history are newly in question. The disciplinary
field is subject to the pressure of ideology critique (from approaches share a consensus on disciplinary object(s), or
Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial scholarship), and in underestimate art history's capacity for absorbing and do
ticating challenges to those objects. The discipline is now, as attention. Erwin Panofsky pointed out long ago that every-
Donald Preziosi puts it, more Roman than Greek, "like the
one's monuments are everyone else's documents and vice
versa.4 As Adrian Rifkin forces the issue in relation to
Pantheon ... a vast aggregate of materials, methods, proto-
cols, technologies, institutions, social ritual, and systems of Demoiselles d'Avignon, in what museum should it be put? In
circulation and inventory."2 But within this diversity some the museum of colonial oppression and liberation (its "prim
paradigmatic assumptions about the boundaries, objects,tivism"), the museum of gender formation (its siting, like th
and purposes of the field are clearly suffering from fatigue,
of so many of the canonical works of modernism, in t
and where that's the case any "new" or more properly criticalbrothel and its anxieties about venereal disease), or th
art history "kills only the dead."3
museum of social climbing (as the product of a provinc
To speak of "art" is to speak with a certain intensity of a Spaniard making a name for himself in the Parisian avantspecially valued but arbitrarily constructed category of hu- garde)? To put the question in this way is to caricature it,
man production. It could be argued that when the discipline he says, but also to highlight the naturalizing of "serie
emerged in its modern form "art" was (almost) still objects"
a
into fixed categories of attention."
consistent if honorific category. Most of the visual field was The art historian deals with physically surviving, intentio
taken up with buildings, crafted objects and surfaces, sculp-ally crafted, and (often) emotionally resonant objects, rath
tures, paintings, prints, and perhaps illustrated books that than the historian's documents and events. This offers the
we might recognize as conventional objects of art-historical illusion of continuity-of contact with a real and knowable
study. Even if this was once the case, it hasn't been so for
past-that can mask both the artifice of history and the
more than a century. Art has become a mandarin activity inradical instability of the object.
the age of mechanical (and electronic) reproduction. Daily The surviving object is not the "same" object. Physical
life is dominated by a kind of visual ecology of cinema,depradations will almost certainly have marked it, sometimes
television, photography, advertising, and printed ephemera in ways anticipated or even intended by its maker, but
of all kinds. This mass "visual culture" is the object of cultural
beyond reversal, and beyond any identifiably pristine state to
studies, another discipline-or inter- or antidiscipline-- which conservation can return it. More to the point, an object
welded together from component parts (in this case sociol- that encounters new sites, new audiences, and therefore new
ogy and literary and film studies). In effect, a division of labor
ways of seeing and talking about "art" is changed by those
took place. Art history, rooted in nineteenth-century distinc-encounters. The altarpiece leaves its liturgical context and
tions between "civilization" (a matter of social and technologi-enters the museum; the Mona Lisa, after three hundred
cal advancement) and "culture" (as a repository of the

years as a portrait, becomes in the context of nineteenthhuman spirit not to be correlated with technical progress), century Romanticism the embodiment of the femme fatale;6
preserved its high-cultural objects of study. Cultural studies,
swathes of objects are transferred from nineteenth-century
for which "culture" is to be understood in Raymond Wilethnographic collections to twentieth-century art museums,
liams's terms as "a whole way of life," has concentrated on
and Navajo blankets-tribal artifacts woven by women-are
mass and popular arts. There is no good reason for this: thatexhibited in American galleries as the works of anonymous
is, there is no reason why art history cannot extend beyond"masters" of innocent abstraction;7 so that the question to
its conventional (and conventionally valued) objects, though ask, as Nelson Goodman famously put it, is not so much
"What is Art?" but "When is Art?"8
it may have to revise its procedures; and no reason why
"cultural studies" analyses should not extend to high cultural Art history takes the object for granted as that which the
objects of study.
discipline explains, or interprets, or in some way accounts
Every discipline is constituted not only by its objects but byfor; but art history, which may have or borrow theories of
that to which it objects, disputing claims to the same epistemoagency, causation, social determination, or psychic investlogical territory and outlawing certain projects as somethingment, has no clear conception of the ontological and semielse (studies in patronage, perception, psychology, criticism,otic status of objects and their relation to language. As
or sociology). Art history objects-its inception depends on
Michael Baxandall has pointed out, unraveling a passage by
it-to any sense that "art" might be even at moments an
Kenneth Clark on Piero's Baptzsm of Christ, we tend to read as
unremarkable aspect of everyday life, or so fully imbricateda seamless description of an object an account made up (in
with other activities as to be the unnecessary or impossible this case) of "causal," "comparison," and "effect" words that
object of specialist inquiry. Art history requires not only a is really a description of its perceived effect.9
concept of art (and therefore of "not-art") that may or may Objects are always in circulation and embedded in disnot be consonant with the cultures it studies, but also a field
course, which is to say in shifting and overlapping systems of
of objects sufficiently unified and continuous to justify value
a
and meaning that don't pause at the "frame." It is the
"history"-a descriptive, explanatory, and interpretativeobject as "text," a more porous entity than the physical
narrative-and (now) a "museum," a special site of publicartifact, that is the object of study of all approaches centered
1. J. Wolff, Aesthetics and the Soczology ofA rt, London, 4. E. Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic 7. R. Parker and G. Pollock, Old Mistresses, London,
1983, 58.
Discipline" (1940), in Meaning in the Vzsual Arts, 1981, 68-69.
2. D. Preziosi, Rethinking Art Hzstory, New Haven, Garden City, N.Y., 1955, 33.
1989, 34.
8. N. Goodman, Ways of Worldmakzng, Indianapolis,

5. A. Rifkin, "Art's Histories," in The New Art Hzstory 1978, 66.
3. S. Bann (borrowing from Harold Rosenberg),(as in n. 3), 159.

9. M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, New Haven,
"How Revolutionary Is the New Art History?" in 6. G. Boas, "The Mona Lisa in the History of 1985, 5-6
The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and F. Borzello,Taste," Journal of the Hzstory of Ideas, 1, 2, 1940,
207-24.
London, 1986, 19.
406 ART BLLLETIN SEPTEMBER 1994 VOLUME LXXVI NUMBER 3
on the social production of meaning (including the iconoother, and psychoanalysis-the discourse that problematizes
graphic, the psychoanalytic, the semiotic, and the sociohistorigender-can slip back into the unproblematic gendering of
its categories (as Stokes himself does in his discussion of

cal). This is not to say that a work can be translated into
language without residue or loss. If the object solidifies in the
carving and modeling)."' But it can provoke reflection on
market, the difficulty here is that it dissolves: the effort what

to
Mark Cousins identifies as the implicitly juridical model
ground it historically can result in a conception of theof historical inquiry (a matter of evidence and reliable
witnesses);'14 on the subjective investments in '"judgment"
artwork as a transparent vehicle for (to be sure, social and
itself (which Freud described as a continuation of the original
historical) "meanings" conveyed to a passively consuming
spectator. There is a related, methodological difficulty hereprocesses of introjection and expulsion, by which the subject
in that artworks are explained in terms of the social context
takes things into itself or expels them according to what it
deems good or bad, pleasurable or unpleasurable);'5 and on
of their production and initial reception, and "context"-like semiosis-has no end outside the historian's narrative.10
what art and art history do for us. "Indeed, our love of the
The problem lies precisely in conceiving the object as a social aesthetic object is partly founded in our need to inquire of its
product of conscious agency, without reducing its explana- context or framework, which serves to epitomize our own
tion to an account of the artist's intentions or pathology, or ofstatus as the product of a framework. There can be no history
any particular zeitgeist, ideology, or set of social relationswithout a potential history of ourselves."'6
that might be assumed to have emerged, like a photograph

Claire Pajaczkowska has argued that just as Marx underin a darkroom, onto the surface of the canvas. The object is at stood the product of capitalist economics to be profit, rather
the same time not an "object"-in the sense that it is always
than commodities, so we should recognize the "product of
more, socially, discursively, and in terms of its affect, than a the signifying process to be ... identity rather than the art
bounded artifact-and obdurately an object in the sense that object or text.'17 This claim is rooted in psychoanalysis, but
it is not fully transparent to language and understanding."I If there is a parallel argument in the sociology of taste,
certain objects did not appear, for whatever reasons, reso-associated with Bourdieu,'8 to the effect that refined and
nant but silent or opaque to us, we should run out of things to discriminating discourse about a special category of valued
say and be done with them. If art history produces its objects objects ("art") simultaneously discriminates between catego(rather than simply discovering them), it never seems to do ries of (classed) consumer. An education in taste (an educaso to our final satisfaction. So we stay in business, sometimes tion in art history) is an investment in cultural capital. From
turning to new objects but mostly reworking what we have tothis perspective, otherwise divergent histories (formalist,
say about the old ones. We see this as a tribute to their semiotic, sociohistorical) share a common disregard for the
richness and complexity, but it's also a symptom of thecontribution of their object(s) to the production of subjectivinvestment we have in "art." Adrian Stokes said that art gives ity. And that includes our subjectivity, since there is certainly
us the sensation of having our cake and eating it ("without
destruction, surfeit, or waste-product").12 In talking about
a relation between art-historical objects-in the sense of

disciplinary categories and procedures-and professional
objects, we're talking about ourselves.
identities. Who you are, in the academy, is what you work on
The subject/object polarity so central to the Western and how you do it. The professional question is no longer a
epistemological tradition does not obtain in the same way in straight "What's your period?" There are classicists, medievalpsychoanalysis. Conventionally, an object is something pres- ists, and modernists, but also Islamicists and Africanists,
ent to the senses of an observing subject, something to which Marxists, feminists and deconstructionists. Most large and
action is directed, something external to consciousness. Inambitious departments, like zoos, aim to have one or two of
grammatical terms we can all be subjects or objects: subject to everything.
meaning (an object of reference) or the subject of meaning
Michael Baxandall once remarked that "there is a limited
(an active "I"). Psychoanalysis undermines commonsense but real case for sometimes writing history backwards."'9 Of
distinctions between object and subject and commonsense course, in a limited but real sense history is always written
identifications of objects with unitary "things". The Freudian backwards. All history, as Benedetto Croce put it, is a history
object is not opposed to subjective being, nor is it necessarily of the present. Historians have to a professional degree the
an "objective" object independent of the perceptions of the

viewing subject. Processes of identification, including those
urge to impose order on the past, and art historians a
tendency to do so by inferring causes from effects (where the
of projection and introjection, undermine any Cartesianobjects are the effects). Reasons are advanced as to why a
division between subject and other, ego and object. The work is as it is, as the consequence of a particular chain o
intellectual consequence of this is ultimately a parallel events. Once it has settled into an evolutionary narrative (still
undermining of any clear distinction between neutral, disin- the discipline's prevailing plot structure), it becomes difficult
terested, detached, and "objective" knowledge or truth on to conceive of the object or value it differently. Cezanne saw
the one hand and invested, idiosyncratic, empathetic, situ- the true path of art's evolution before the rest of us, and the
ated "subjectivity" on the other. "Object" doesn't appear inhistorian (slightly less prescient) secures that judgment in
the indices of art-history texts, even methodologically reflec- perpetuity. Hence Charles Harrison's caveat that it may be
tive ones, unless they are psychoanalytically oriented like,"salutary to conceive ofa possible world in which the grounds
say, The Crztical Wrztings ofAdrzan Stokes, which lists a variety ofjudgment never did change in Cezanne's favor, a history of
of compound forms including good-, bad-, internal-, mini- art in which he remained incompetent and unregarded" and
mum-, self-sufficient-, part-, and whole-object. Of course, a to consider another history, not of "triumphs of the will" bu
psychoanalytic approach can be used as reductively as any of"unredeemed incompetence" and "unpainted and unpaint-
able pictures," a history of "the wasted and the unauthenti- The overview-the totalizing God's eye view-combines
vision, distance, mastery, and the illusion of disembodiment
cated, the abandoned and the destroyed."20
It is not quite clear how we can have historical knowledge,at the cost of relegating other views to the margins (or the
dustbin). There are other forms of understanding that

except provisionally, by a kind of negotiated consensus on
plausible narratives. There is no one authoritative position ofinvolve embodiment, empathy, identification, and the capac
overview from which history is written or experienced. Theity to live comfortably with contingency and difference. A
Jane Gallop asks: "Might not one of the goals of what we so
best we can expect is a field of generous, intelligent, and
skeptical conversation about the past-which is to say, about ambiguously call 'women's studies' be to call into questio
representations from and of the past-adequate to itsthe oppressive effects of an epistemology based on the
principle of a clear and nonambiguous distinction between

objects, conducted in good faith, impelled-inevitably-by
subject and object of knowledge?"22 That doesn't have to
the investments of the present but not disabled by them.
"Good enough" history, as Winnicott might say.21
Obviously, a feminist art history will maintain a particular
mean that anything goes. It means entering into the conver
sation with what Michael Podro called (apropos of th
encounter with the historically foreign object) "a preparedinterest in the history of works by women, in the gendered
ness to learn," feeling our beliefs and imagination under

structuring of disciplinary categories, values, and proce-
pressure, exercising a sensitivity our own immediate culture

doesn't demand of us.23 It means aiming for interpretative
concern with sexuality and sexual difference. Beyond that we
adequacy with a principled and reflexive skepticism.24
need not go, at least by way of generalization. To specify a
distinctively feminist "object" (or objects, or purposes) would
be to risk closing down the conversation and letting everyone
else off the gendered hook. We might want both to insist on
Lisa Tzckner, professor of art history at Middlesex University, is th
dures, and in works held to display or disguise an insistent
women's claims to rationality and objectivity-to an equal

author of The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage
share in the Enlightenment project-and to point to theCampaign, 1907-1914 (1988) [Faculty of Art, Design and
advantages of "feminine" connectedness over "masculine"Performing Arts, Middlesex University, Cat Hill, Barnet, Herts
detachment.
EN4 8HT, England].
M. Cousins, "The Practice of Historical Investi10. M. Bal and N. Bryson, "Semiotics and 14.
Art
History," Art Bulletzn, LXXIII, 2, 1991, 177.
19. M. Baxandall, "The Language of Art History,"
gation," in Poststructuralzsm and the Questzon of His- New Lzterary Hzstory x, 1978-79, 464.
11. See N. Bryson, Art Bulletzn, LXXV, 2, 1993, tory,
337, ed. D. Attridge, G. Bennington, and R. Young,20. C. Harrison, "On the Surface of Painting,"
Cambridge, 1987, 126-36.
review of G. Didi-Huberman, Devant limage: QuesCrztzcal Inquzry, xv, 2, 1989, 299.
tzon posie aux fins de l'hzstoire de lart, Paris, 1990,15.
onS. Freud, "Negation" (1925), in Standard Edz- 21. Winnicott developed the concepts of goodthe claim that "the discipline's own mode of knowltzon of the Complete Psychologzcal Works of Szgmund enough mothering and the good-enough holding
edge (lucid, rational, explanatory) has historically
Freud, ed. James Strachey, London, 1961, xix, 235.environment in his work on the mother-child rela-
[and mistakenly] come to define the discipline's

16. A. Stokes, "The Invitation in Art" (1965), intion. See D. W. Winnicott, Collected Papers, London,
object oJ knowledge, art" (Bryson's emphasis).Critical
See
Wrztings (as in n. 11), III, 297-98.
1958, passim.
also G. Didi-Huberman, "The Art of Not Describ17. C. Pajaczkowska, "Structure and Pleasure," Block 22. J. Gallop, Readzng Lacan, Ithaca, N.Y., 1985,
Ing: Vermeer-the Detail and the Patch," Hzstory of ix, 1983, 13.
15-16.
the Human Sciences II, 2, 1989, 135-69.
18. P. Bourdieu, Dzstznctzon: A Soczal Critzque of the 23. M. Podro, The Crztzcal Historzans of Art, N
12. A. Stokes, "Michelangelo" (1955), in The Crztz- Judgement of Taste (Paris, 1979), London, 1984; and Haven, 1982, 3.
cal Wrztings ofAdrzan Stokes, III, London, 1978, 12.
idem, "The Aristocracy of Culture," Medza, Culture 24. Keith Jenkins argues for "a positive reflexive
13. A. Stokes, The Stones of Rimint (1934), New and Soczety, 11, 3, 1980, 225-54.
scepticism" in Rethznkzng Hzstory, London, 1991,
York, 1969, 110
57.
Art History Posthistoire

Anthony Vidler
The dilemma between a metaphysics of art and a history of that of aesthetics or the philosophy of knowledge. Thus
objects has been a continuing preoccupation of art history, a political history, the "history of human action," would be
discipline that pretends to insert "the work of art" (a spatial interpreted according to a purely historical mode, but art
object conceived, and often judged, ahistorically and aestheti- history, "in that its productions represent not the exprescally) into a temporal continuum (whether progressively or sions of subjects but the informing of materials, not the given
dialectically construed). Numerous intellectual strategies, events but the results," requires its own criteria. "A purely
from the Hegelian Zeitgeist to Riegl's Kunstwollen have been historical study," Panofsky concluded, "whether it proceeds
developed to overcome this division, one that Panofsky from the history of form or the history of content, never
characterized in his critical assessment of Riegl, as caught explains the work of art as a phenomenon except in terms of
between "art" and "history."I On the one hand, history, with other phenomena. Historical study does not draw on a
its emphasis on causes and effects, relations among different higher source of perception."2 An extreme case of this
kinds of knowledge, political and social as well as artistic, dilemma has traditionally been represented by architectural
explains the work of art by referring to external phenomena. history, with its spatially defined monuments resting uneasily
On the other hand, the art object, subject as art to internal on the shifting narrative ground of their temporal historicizaaesthetic criteria that establish it as unique, demands appre- tion.
ciation and criticism from an ahistorical standpoint, from
Such a version of "art history," of course, relies on a
408 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1994 VOLUME LXXVI NLMBER 3
predominately historicist model of history-one framedspecifically,

by
from the sense that if history has ended, w
Hegel, and only slightly reconfigured by the optical and
living through what a number of philosophers have
symbolic adjustments of Riegl and Panofsky-and with posthistozre,
the
or a posthistorical period. Vattimo use
concept in order to characterize what he calls the "e
demise of historicism, discredited by structuralist and poststructuralist theories of culture, it would seem that the
ence of 'the end of history.' "6 Here he takes his cue fro
problem might have been resolved. So much so that manyanthropologist Arnold Gehlen, who found the term use
critics have theorized the possibility of "the end of art sum up the mentality that followed postmodern disillu
history," as if the incursions of theory have made it impos- ment in the great nineteenth-century narratives of hist
sible, any more, to practice what from Vasari to Winckel-progress-the moment, as Gehlen says, when "prog
mann, Waagen to Wolfflin, Worringer to Warburg, Riegl to becomes routine."7 Vattimo sees such routinization in the
Panofsky was considered, in Panofsky's elegant definition, developments of technology and consumerism that wh
"art history as a humanistic discipline." By thus dissolvingcontinuously renewed, nevertheless stay the same:
history, it is thought, art history might attain a new status in
postmodernity as an interpretative, interdisciplinary, relativistic member of a group of domains all concerned with the
general question of "visual studies."
In positing "the end of the history of art" (the title of a

recent collection of essays by Hans Belting, The End of the
History ofArt?), art history is not alone.3 Indeed, there seems
There is a kind of profound "immobility" in the technolog
cal world which science fiction writers have often po
trayed as the reduction of every experience of reality to a
experience of images (no one ever really meets anyon
else; instead, everyone watches everything on a televisio
screen while alone at home). This same phenomenon c
already be sensed in the air-conditioned, muffled silence

in which computers work.8
to be a general mood of "ending" in this fin de siecle that

uncannily echoes that of the last century. Two examples,
selected at random, include The End of Modernity by the Flattened out, simultaneous, the world appears dehisto
Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo and a recent architec- cized. What made us "modern"-that is, the experience o
tural symposium in Vienna published under the title The End living every day in a narrative history of progress an
of Architecture?4 Now, admittedly, two of the publications development reinforced by the daily newspaper-now come
cited add a question mark after their disquieting titles, toto a halt. The "master" narrative, once a secularization of
soften the blow, so to speak; but overall a certain pessimism religious salvation, now fails, and multiple other possible
would appear to have overtaken the humanities in the latenarratives rise up. In this argument, Vattimo extends Gehlen
twentieth century. Thus Vattimo explores the connection he in order to "prove" postmodernism: "What legitimates
sees between nihilism and postmodernism that announces,post-modernist theories and makes them worthy of discusin his terms, the "dissolution of history"; the architects sion is the fact that their claim of a radical 'break' with
gathered in Vienna under the aegis of the radical group modernity does not seem unfounded as long as th
Coop Himmelblau proclaimed the "end of architecture" atobservations on the post-historical character of contem
least as we have known it since antiquity; and Belting (who, as rary existence are valid."'
This discussion of postmodernism and history would
an art historian, grudgingly admits that some form of art
history will inevitably continue) is convinced of the end "of entirely superfluous for us if it were not for the fact that
that conception of a universal and unified 'history of art'history is and always has been a discourse dependent on th
which has so long served . . both artist and art historian.'"" of history; from Vasari, through Winckelmann, to W61ffli
Now, while these recent varieties of the disease of ending and even Janson, art historians have modeled their narrat
do not, as we know, arrive without their own history in the forms and explanatory fictions on those of historians a
modern period-we think of the long tradition of endings philosophers of history. We would then expect, in a gener
from the 1830s including Hegel's own "end of art" and condition of posthistory, to find a state of post-art-histor
Nietzsche's "death of God"-they do gain their specificruling the academic roost.

character from what all their authors admit to be the
Such an expectation would, on the surface at least, not b

If there was once a defined, canonical mo
influence of postmodern or poststructural thought. disappointed.
Indeed,
art
Vattimo and Belting directly cite postmodernismfor
and
itshistory that we might call "traditional" (and, as w
shall desee, this is, in retrospect, not at all certain), such

theoretical cognates as implicated in the endings they
has long been rethought, deconstructed, overturned

scribe; or rather, they see the end of modernity andmodel
the end
criticized
out of existence, and banished to the realm of
of art history, respectively, as the immediate corollary
to, if
former paper tigers, useful fictions, and negative paradigms.
not the effect of, a postmodern condition.
histories, cultural histories, ethnohistories, gender
Obviously, the idea of the end of art history derivesSocial
directly
histories,
from the more general idea of the end of history, and,
morepostcolonial histories, microhistories of every kind
1 E. Panofsky, "The Concept of Artistic Volition,"3. H. Belting, The End of the Hzstory of Art?, trans.and Manifestos, ed. P Noever, Munich and Vienna,
1993.
trans. K.J. Northcott andJ Snyder, Crztzcal Inquiry,C. S. Wood, Chicago, 1987.
viii, 1, 1981, 18. (This essay was originally pub-4. G. Vattimo, The End of Modernity Nihilism and5. Belting (as in n. 3), ix.
lished as "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens," ZeztschrzftHermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. and intro. 6. Vattimo (as in n. 4), 4.
fur Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, xRv,J. R. Snyder, Baltimore, 1988; Coop Himmelblau, 7. A. Gehlen, cited by Vattimo (as in n. 4), 7
1920, 321-22.)
Z. Hadid, S. Holl, T. Mayne, E. O. Moss, C. Pin6s,
2. Ibid., 18.
and L. Woods, The End ofA rchitecture? Documents
history of art, providing a model for a history of things that

have replaced, self-consciously and triumphantly, tradistylistic or functional development, have becom
tional, universalizing "art histories." The grand story through
of
thought of as "perfected." Of course, the very notion o
artistic monuments, linked together by a story of the rise and
fall of civilizations, and guided by the moral judgement perfection
of
through development is central to historicism
the historian-what Vasari in the introduction to the second
and especially Hegelian historicism, and so we might imme-
part of his Lives called "history as the mirror of human diately see the "posthistoric" as a natural indeed, inevitable,
life"-has been dissolved and fragmented, apparently for outcome of historicist thought. At all events, it is possible t
reread art history as an academic discipline that has always
good.
Or so the postmodernists tell us. In fact, the story that I
have been telling from a reading of Vattimo and Belting is,
despite their apparently decisive arguments, a little more

complicated, and the results of the dissolution of history are,
I would submit, a little less final than many who espouse the
"end of history" thesis from Heidegger on are willing to

admit. On the one hand, as we shall see, the process of
(or at least since Burkhardt) been constructed under the sig
of posthzstozre; so much so that we might conclude that far
from ending as a result of posthistozre, art history bega

precisely as the (perhaps impossible) task of inserting th
posthistoire (the object of art) into history.
dissolution began a long time before the invention of
This is no doubt why contemporary art historians seeking

to rethink the discipline have found immense reservoirs of
apparently "posthistorical" practice in rereading the classi-
postmodernism; on the other, many of the fragmentary
cal texts of historicist art history. As early as 1970, in a
histories that populate the kaleidoscopic vision of posthzstozre

have, in different ways been anticipated by earlier fragmenta-
anthology of essays on structuralism, the art historian Shel
tions in the field, and many still bear the traces of their
former positions in "universal history." In other words, it is in
the nature of history as an academic discipline to carry
forward its traces, even in the face of what seem to be the

most radical of epistemological breaks.
In the first place, it is interesting to consider that the

supposedly radical break constituted by posthistoire, was in
fact premised on an idea launched in the 1850s, at the height
of historicism's own apparent dominance. As construed by

the mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot, the concept
was applied to the moment when a human creation (whether
an institution or an object) reached the stage when there was
no possibility of its further development, when all that could
be done was its endless perfectioning; one might think of the
example of the wheelbarrow or the bank note.10 As the

Belgian philosopher Hendrik de Man described it:
The term posthistorical seems adequate to describe what
happens when an institution or a cultural achievement
ceases to be historically active and productive of new
qualities, and becomes purely receptive or eclectically
imitative. Thus understood Cournot's notion of the posthistorical would ... fit the cultural phase that, following a
"fulfillment of sense," has become "devoid of sense." The
alternative then is, in biological terms, either death or
mutation.11
don Nodelman found correspondences between the critic

methods of Alois Riegl in turn-of-the-century Vienna an
those of structural anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss). Since
then a host of revisionist rereadings of Riegl, Warburg,
Panofsky, and others have found them fertile sources, not so

much for the castigation of the tradition, but rather for the
formation of a new kind of historical study of the visual-one
that not only takes its cue from contemporary theories, bu
also insists on reincorporating the history of thinking abou
the visual into the present elaboration of the discipline
Thus, a fruitful first step to absorbing into art history the new
questions raised by microhistories-of gender, ethnicity

psychoanalysis, subjectivity, the body, the postcolonial
might be to reread the founding texts of the disciplin
through these new lenses, opening up at the heart of th
discipline, so to speak, the questions that challenge its
present competence. From this perspective, they have been

found far less disciplinary, far less confident in their arguments, more open to its reformulation in new terms than we
have been led to think. Thus Hubert Damisch, with consider
able respect, has recast the questions raised by Panofsky
hitherto neglected, but now newly translated, essay "Perspective as Symbolic Form," in his Origin ofPerspectzve; MartinJa
has interrogated the French tradition of visual thought from
Henri Focillon and Andre Breton to Jacques Lacan an
Michel Foucault for its hidden antivisualism, in his recent
book Downcast Eyes. My own work on the influence of social
psychological, and psychoanalytical thought at the turn

the century on art historians such as Riegl, Worringer
Warburg, and Panofsky has noted that many so-called
concept thus already contained, in the 1850s, the potential historical theories of form are based on conceptions of
to destabilize and criticize from within the dominant historispatial and temporal phobia, on psychological description
of it
estrangement and the uncanny that directly connect t
cistic tendencies of the late nineteenth century. Indeed,
Regardless of the interesting posthistory of posthistozre (from

Cournot, through Hendrik de Man, and perhaps his nephew
Paul De Man to Arnold Gehlen and Gianni Vattimo), the
was a concept especially suited for the characterization ofcontemporary

the
concerns with gender, subjectivity, and anxiety
8. Ibid.
Soczalzst Critic of Marxism, Princeton, N.J., 1979,

European painters of the Trecento and Quattrocento
346. De Man even applies Cournot's concept to the
started where the sculptors of the thirteenthhistory of art. "In the same way, one can explain the
century cathedrals had stopped: as an expression
10. See, for example, A. A. Cournot, Tralte de
fact that definite arts, belonging to a given civilizaof the "world feeling" of the eighteenth century,
lenchainement des tdkes fondamentale5 danm le5 science5
tion, always seem to reach a stage of development
music took the place of baroque architecture as
et dans l'histore, Paris, 1861.
where they become unable to express more; thissoon as the latter had produced its archetypes"
11. H. de Man, "The Age of Doom" (1950), in P.
(ibid., 345-46).
can then be done only by another art. So the
9. Vattimo (as in n. 4), 11.
Dodge, ed , A Documentary Study of Hendrnk de Man,
410 ART BLLLETIN SEPTEMBER 1994 VOLLME LXXVI NUMBER 3
Not only is it a question of rereading what has "not beenwork for us today, when the prototypical art historian is not
read" before, and reestablishing its place in a broader history
necessarily assumed to hunt regularly at weekends; but
of ideas and practices; it is also a question of entirely
Panofsky concludes with a more evocative example:
reconceptualizing the artistic objects-their spatial and environmental conditions. This task is not simply "revisionist"; It has rightly been said that theory, if not received at the
history itself changes its shapes and forms under such door of an empirical discipline, comes into the chimney
scrutiny. In a recent essay in Critical Inquiry, Carlo Ginzburg like a ghost and upsets the furniture. But it is no less true
has ennunciated some of the characteristics of what he calls
that history, if not received at the door of a theoretical

"microhistory," the study of small instances in such depth discipline dealing with the same set of phenomena, creeps
into the cellar like
and breadth that they begin to break up the apparently
seamless and homogenous surface of historical commongroundwork.14
a horde of mice and undermines the
place and truism, and show us an admittedly more problem-
atic, rougher terrain beneath.'2 It is a terrain that the

What is striking in this image of the "house of art history"
contemporary art historian should regard with fascinationthat, whether it is built on theoretical or historical foundaand excitement; uncharted and full of fault lines, it is
tions, it is, according to Panofsky, fundamentally haunted
nevertheless both historical and there because of theory, not
and unstable. Such instability may have been disturbing to
in opposition to it. The historical task is not then to opposethe exiled humanist; but it should be less so to us, schooled a
we
theory with some mythical paradigm of an unthinking
are in the arts of critical destabilization and historical
history, but to use theory to the fullest extent in exploding

undermining.
preconceptions, reframing concepts, construing new problems. Here Panofsky, writing in 1940, was again prescient as
he compared the relation of the art historian with the art
theorist "to that between two neighbors who have the right Anthony
of
Vidler zs chair and professor of art history at the Unzve
of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is The Arch
shooting over the same district, while one of them owns the
gun and the other all the ammunition."'13 Both parties, he tural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (19
concluded, would be well advised to realize this condition of [Department ofArt History, University of California, Los Ang
Calif 90024].
their partnership. Perhaps this metaphor does not quite
12. C. Ginzburg,"Microhistory: Two or Three
Things that I Know about It," trans. J. and A. C.

Tedeschi, Critical Inquzry, xx, 1 (1993),10-35.
13. E. Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" (1940), in Meaning in the Visual Arts
(1955), Chicago, 1982, 22.
14. Ibid.

The Object of Art History

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The Object of Art History

A RANGE OF CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

The Object of Art History

appear under the rubric "A Range of Critical

Context, Visuality, and the Objects

images. But while the history of images has become a

legitimate domain, its relations with the history of art remain

that art historians have to offer that is different from the

effectiveness. The same applies to objects that were

individual domains hitherto supposed to be beyond the

THE OBJECT OF ART HISTORY 395

responses to the images and objects we do not call art. Th

said to have derives from their relations with those who

edge that the very figuredness of images distinguishesinstruct

Furthermore, it is because of nothing less than their

the relations between visuality and desire. To think of the

visuality, as Freud made clear, because they are things to be

arises from the compulsive status of the exchange between

they exercise their hold. By one form of projection or

when the image/object stands at some degree of remoteness

another they must be made to approximate to what we know

art). In the end, the importance of illusion lies not in the

or feel or have felt. All this applies as much, if differently, to

tricks of representation, but in the way in which it instructs us

moving images and to the whole class of reproductive images

as it does to unique objects. Those differences are to be

readily attribute to images. I do not doubt the formal value of

to be sentimentally inclined in favor of this form of education

such insulation; in skilled hands it can produce fine results,

through art. By always being mindful of the essential rela-

and it may even be consistent with research into what has

tions between visuality on the one hand and human intention-

ality, desire, and response on the other, art historians can

The art historian's advantage arises from the ability,

their effect. In places like museums the "interest" we have in

acquired both by training and engaged familiarity, to make

devotion and emotion. They are turned into objects which

from the fact that it is much easier to recognize the kinds

interest we have in works of art when we examine our

the transformations and fates of visual forms are the true

396 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1994 VOLLME LXXVI NUMBER 3

essential. They are by-products of the commercial fetishiza-

bypass their ostensible objects altogether, or have r

the lack of focus that arises from a neglectful blindnes

visual reality of the object itself. The art historian may

tion of certain kinds of high art and of the institutions

monographs and the skills of connoisseurship are rooted in

things-from the variety of moving pictures to the ful

reluctance to learn its techniques. But as little as other

David Freedberg zs professor of art hzstory at Columbza Unz

He has wrztten wzdely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-centur

authenticity of documents, so little need art historians shrink

comes to objects. In this respect, the object is to theSeventeeth

historian what the document is to the historian and the social

Passion, and The Power of Images [Department of Art

group to the anthropologist; once we accept this, we may

Different But Compatible Ends

human tendency to order and classify whatever is known.

indispensable tools for the classification of objects or

artifacts made by man and primarily perceived visually. sis

techniques are used for so many different sets of artifa

applicable to every thing made by man.

mills of the industrialized world and the contents of a