Topic 1

Introduction
Approaches to visual culture:
Read the debates about it (drawback: the debates
assume knowledge of the literature)

Read the introductory textbooks (drawback:

some of them represent particular viewpoints and
don’t begin with an overall survey of the field)

Read selected essays, journals, or anthologies

(drawback: the picture that emerges is haphazard)

Consider your own visual world as a starting

place. Which theorists, artists, artworks, and visual
practices interest you?

Note: this material was originally posted on www.jameselkins.com, under “Syllabi.” Send all comments to jelkins@artic.edu
 Models for the shape of the visual world:
A. Outline models
1. Erwin Panofsky’s model
(Panofsky: a mid-twentieth century German art historian)

Classical
Medieval
Renaissance
Baroque
Modern
Postmodern

Note that:

A. This doesn’t include any popular art, although Panofsky was

one of the first to write about film

B. This doesn’t include methods or theories, because for Panofsky

the purpose of the classification was to order history
Concepts, names, and works:

Periods
Panofsky, Erwin
Periodization
2. Erwin Panofsky’s model, with subheadings

CLASSICAL
Mycenean
Hellenistic
MEDIEVAL
Carolingian
Gothic
RENAISSANCE
Early Renaissance
High Renaissance
MODERN

Notes:

A. The capitalized entries are megaperiods: the largest conceivable

divisions of history, beyond which history is a unified whole

B. Panofsky doesn’t put Postmodernism in his chart, but it could

go under the Renaissance, as a development of the Renaissance

Concepts, names, and works:

Megaperiods
3. Erwin Panofsky’s debate with Franz Boas

Boas was a mid-century anthropologist; Panofsky mentions an exchange

he had with Boas over the periodization of history.

Boas thought that all artworks and artists are different, so that there is no
sense in lumping them together.

Panofsky called this “atomism,” and noted that it destroys the possibility
of history.

The opposite tendency, which would also collapse history, would be to say
that all art is one thing, a single enterprise (e.g., “creativity”), and so there
is no sense in subdividing it.

Panofsky pointed out that all of us periodize and arrange automatically, so

neither option is realistic.

Concepts, names, and works:

Monism
Atomism
An example of It may seem easy
to overcome this
inadvertent Western prejudice,
periodization but the literature
on Chinese art is
full of terms like
This Chinese
“Classical,”
bronze object
“Baroque,” and
looks “baroque”
“rococo.”
The “cloud Periodization is
pattern” forms automatic,
remind Western whether it is
viewers of rococo Western or not.
ornaments and
18th c. Chinoiserie

Chinese incense burner, Han Dynasty, 113 BC

4. The concept of the expanded Renaissance

In this schema, the Renaissance was the turning point in (Western) art
history:

ANCIENT
CLASSICAL
MEDIEVAL
RENAISSANCE
Baroque
Neoclassical
Modern
Postmodern

Concepts, names, and works:

Expanded Renaissance
Inadvertent periodization
5. An alternate to the expanded Renaissance: expanded modernism
PREMODERN
Ancient
Medieval
Renaissance
Baroque
Romanticism
Realism

MODERN
Postimpressionism
Cubism
Abstraction
Surrealism
Abstract Expressionism
Postmodernism

Concepts, names, and works:

Expanded modernism
6. An example of non-Western megaperiods
(Something an Africanist might imagine.)

AFRICAN ART
Saharan rock art
Egyptian
Nok
Djenné
Ife and Benin
Colonial
Postcolonial

EUROPEAN ART
ASIAN ART
AMERICAN ART
7. An art-world version of the same:

NON–WESTERN ART
WESTERN ART
Pre-modern art
Modern art
INTERNATIONAL POSTMODERN ART

Questions about this outline:

A. Is there such a thing as “international postmodern art”?

“Global art”?

B. Is “international postmodern art” of equal importance to non-

Western art, or equally important as a division of history?

Concepts, names, and works:

International postmodern
art
Globalism
8. Postmodern appropriation

In some postmodernism, objects and images from all cultures are equally
available. When artists take at will from different periods of history, the
strategy is called appropriation.
It leads to something like the following sense of history:

PREMODERN = HISTORY
(no divisions)
THE PRESENT

This is close to monism, but with no theory about the unity of history.

An advantage of this approach is that it removes the anxiety that history

causes: there is no need to worry about past achievements, or what
directions history points us in...

Concepts, names, and works:

Appropriation
9. Oscillating history

This is associated with the German art historian Heinrich Wöllflin (early
20th c.)

He identified two movements in history, a classical or classicizing

moment, and a subsequent baroque or elaborative moment:

Classical
Medieval (=Baroque)
Renaissance (= Classical)
Baroque
Modern (= Classical)
Postmodern (= Baroque)
Ultimately, this reduces to an oscillation:
Classical
Baroque
Classical
Baroque
Classical
Baroque

In order to reduce history in this fashion, Wölfflin looked only at stylistic

characteristics of works (color, space, line, motion, clarity) and not at
social and political meanings.

The kind of art history he promoted is now called style analysis. It is a

good candidate for an opposite to visual studies because it is narrowly
formal.
Concepts, names, and works:

Heinrich Wölfflin
Oscillating history
Style analysis
formal analysis
10. Life history

An ancient Roman way of ordering history is by making an analogy to a

human life:

infantia, adulescentia, maturitas, senectus =

infancy, adolescence, maturity, old age

The idea would be that every culture goes through this naturally—every
civilization “dies.”

The life-history model is associated with two art historians:

Giorgio Vasari (16th c.), the first to write an art history in the West

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (18th c.)

Concepts, names, and works:

Winckelmann
Vasari
Infancy, adolescence,
maturity, old age
 Examples, from Winckelmann (for Greek art) and Vasari (for Italian art):

1. Infancy: Archaic Greek art (600-480 BCE); 14th c. Italian painting from Giotto onward.

2. Adolescence: Greek Early Classical period (480-450 BCE); Italian 15th c. painting.

3. Maturity: Athenian art of the 5th and 4th c. BCE.; the High Renaissance (beginning of the
16th c.).

4. Old age: the century before Alexander the Great, through Hellenistic art, to the rise of Rome in
the 1st c. BCE. ; Italian mannerism and academic art in the later 16th c., and on into the 17th or
18th centuries.

Drawbacks:

A. How can you explain what happens when the culture keeps going?
B. Is it logical to assume cultures grow and decline like people?
11. Paradoxical history

The idea here is that our own lives influence what we see and think of
the past, so really all time lines have to run backward.

This has been theorized by several recent writers, who are on our list of
names:
Jacques Derrida (contemporary French-Algerian philosopher)
in a text called The Post Card
Mieke Bal (contemporary Dutch theorist)
in a text called Quoting Caravaggio: Preposterous History
A time line might look like this:

POSTMODERNISM
Modernism
Renaissance
Middle Ages
Classical Greece
Prehistory Concepts, names, and works:

Mieke Bal
preposterous history
Jacques Derrida
The Post Card
12. Models of postmodernism

A particular problem is posed by postmodernism. How important is it?

And what kind of period (or megaperiod) is it?

One model, partly following the philosopher Arthur Danto, would have it
that history itself ended with Warhol or with the inception of what is
normally called postmodernism:

BEFORE ART
Prehistory
Classical Greece and Rome
Middle Ages
ART
Renaissance
Baroque
Modernism

AFTER ART
Postmodernism
Another way of looking at it is that postmodernism isn’t a period at all,
but a condition, something that need not be succeeded by anything that we
would recognize as a period.

It is like the endgame in some chess games: a condition in which both

players might make moves indefinitely, and neither could ever win. There
are no new moves left to discover, and nothing interesting remains in the
game.

Endgame theory was discussed in the 1980s and is associated, for

example, with Sherrie Levine.

NORMAL PERIODS
Classical
Medieval
Renaissance
Baroque
Modern Concepts, names, and works:

Condition
ABNORMAL PERIODS
Postmodernism of postmodernism
… Endgame theory
Arthur Danto
Sherrie Levine
 Models for the shape of the visual world:
B. Pictorial models

You can be more free in imagining the shape of history if you leave the outline
model (or time-line model) and let history take whatever shape you want.

For example:
The standard story of Western art history, but arranged on a map.

Concepts, names, and works:

(be able to name the 8 steps)

The usual narrative of modernism (top) and the art historian Robert Rosenblum’s alternate:

Concepts, names, and works:

Rosenblum; and be able to reproduce the two maps.
A map done Little Prince-fashion,
by an SAIC student:
Another map done by an SAIC student, using the metaphor of standing at
the shore of the ocean:
 Workshop:
Making your map of history
Points to keep in mind:

Be thorough: think of your entire visual world, in all cultures. Don’t leave
out TV, etc., and if you think of writers, philosophers, teachers, etc., put
them in.

Don’t forget to put yourself in, but maybe not at the center, or not in just
one place.

Be completely honest: put things the way they seem to you, not the way
you think they might “really” be.