Field Notes on the Visual Arts

Description

What is the relation of art and history? What is art today? Why does art affect us? In Field Notes on the Visual Arts, 75 scholars, curators and artists traverse chronology and geography to reveal the meanings and dilemmas of art. The eight topic headings – Anthropomorphism, Appropriation, Contingency, Detail, Materiality, Mimesis, Time and Tradition – are written by historians of art, literature, culture and science, archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, curators and artists, and consider an astonishing range of artefacts. Poised somewhere between Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects and an academic volume of essays on art, Field Notes brings together voices generally separated inside and outside the academy. Its open approach to knowledge is commensurate with the work of art, aiming to make clear that the work of art is both meaningful and resistant to meaning.

Introduction

Anthropomorphism

Elizabeth King, J. M. Bernstein,Carolyn Dean, Caroline van Eck, Finbarr B. Flood, 

Dario Gamboni, Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, James Meyer, Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit



Appropriation

Georg Baselitz, Kirk Ambrose, Elizabeth Edwards, Ursula Frohne, Cordula Grewe, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ian McLean, Saloni Mathur, Iain Boyd Whyte



Contingency

Linda Connor, Giovanna Borradori, Marcia Brennan, Mary Ann Doane, Angus Fletcher, Peter Geimer, Mark Ledbury, Chris Spring



Detail

Susan Hiller, Spike Bucklow, Johannes Endres, Carlo Ginzburg, Joan Kee, Spyros Papapetros, Joanna Roche, Nina Rowe, Alain Schnapp, Blake Stimson



Materiality

Martha Rosler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Natasha Eaton, Michael Ann Holly, Michael Kelly, Robin Kelsey, Alisa LaGamma, Monika Wagner, Oliver Watson, Tristan Weddigen 



Mimesis

Dexter Dalwood, Daniela Bohde, Helen C. Evans, Sarah E. Fraser, Thomas Habinek, Tom Huhn, Jeanette Kohl, Niklaus Largier, Peter Mack, Alex Potts



Time

Eric Fischl, Jan Assmann, Malcolm Bull, Darby English, Ludmilla Jordanova, Ajay Sinha, Gloria Sutton, Gerrit Walczak, David E. Wellbery



Tradition

Obiora Udechukwu, John Brewer, Jay A. Clarke, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Hans Hayden, Gregg M. Horowitz, Susanne Küchler, Maria Loh, Ruth B. Phillips, Regine Prange

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• Man Ray
• Time
• ART
• Tradition
• Jackson Pollock
• Mimesis
• Georg Baselitz
• Contingency
• History
• Xu Bing
• General
• Dépossession
• Design
• General officer
• Appropriation
• Detail
• College Art Association
• Materiality
• Contingency (philosophy)
• History of art
• Anthropomorphism
• Elizabeth King

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789380170
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Elizabeth King, Bartlett’s Hands, 2005, installation: Sculpture and stop-frame animation, LCD screen, hidden computer, dedicated lighting, overall 72 x 24 x 60 in. Collection of Karen and Robert Duncan, Lincoln (artwork © Elisabeth King; photograph © Lynton Gardiner). Printed with permission of the artist.
Layout Design: Aleksandra Szumlas
Production manager: Mareike Wehner
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN paperback: 978-1-78320-996-5
Print ISBN hardback: 978-1-78938-155-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-018-7
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78938-017-0
Printed and bound by Gomer, UK
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) Licence. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ANTHROPOMORPHISM
Elizabeth King Inhale, Exhale, Pause: Breath and the Open Mouth in Sculpture
J. M. Bernstein, Art as Soul-Making from Chauvet to Cinema
Carolyn Dean, Rocks Like Us
Caroline van Eck, Anthropomorphism as Hermeneutic Mode
Finbarr B. Flood, Reflections on Anthropomorphism
Dario Gamboni, “Morphosis” as Cognition
Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, The Transformative Image
James Meyer, The Bodily and the Anthropomorphic
Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit, Anthropomorphic Beauty: Photography, the Empress, and Modern Japan
APPROPRIATION
Georg Baselitz, Back Then, In Between, and Today
Kirk Ambrose, Appropriation and Influence
Elizabeth Edwards, Photographs Can Never Be Still
Ursula Frohne, Revenants: Gestures of Repetition in Contemporary Art
Cordula Grewe, Appropriation and Epigonality: A Romantic Narrative
Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Poet and the Bandits
Ian McLean, An Ethics of Appropriation
Saloni Mathur, The Dialectics of Appropriation: Reflections on a Changing World
Iain Boyd Whyte, On Appropriation
CONTINGENCY
Linda Connor, A Shot in the Dark
Giovanna Borradori, Photographs Hold a Redemptive Power
Marcia Brennan, Give Me a Kiss and Stay Connected: Reflections on Contingency in the Medical Humanities
Mary Ann Doane, The Paradox of Contingency
Angus Fletcher, En blanc et noir
Peter Geimer, Images and the Unforeseen
Mark Ledbury, Eternal Contingencies
Chris Spring, Out of the Blue: Two African Textile Contingencies
DETAIL
Susan Hiller, Dream Art
Spike Bucklow, Material Details—Artists’ Pigments
Johannes Endres, Goethe on Myron’s Cow: A Detail
Carlo Ginzburg, On Detail
Joan Kee, Why Chinese Paintings Are So Large
Spyros Papapetros, Hairy Details
Joanna Roche, Moving In and Stepping Back
Nina Rowe, The Detail as Fragment of a Social Past
Alain Schnapp, Antiquarians in the Field
Blake Stimson, The Feminine and Vegetable Principle of Life
MATERIALITY
Martha Rosler, Materiality and Objecthood: Questions of Sedimented Labor
Caroline Walker Bynum, Medieval Materiality
Natasha Eaton, Materiality of Color: South Asia
Michael Ann Holly, Materiality Matters
Michael Kelly, Material and Sacred Artistic Agency
Robin Kelsey, Materiality Is Somewhere Else
Alisa LaGamma, A Lexicon of Meaningful Artistic Media
Monika Wagner, Dust: Recomposing the Decomposed
Oliver Watson, Awkward Objects
Tristan Weddigen, On the Textility of Spatial Construction
MIMESIS
Dexter Dalwood, The Vertiginous Image
Daniela Bohde, Visual Hermeneutics: Art History and Physiognomics
Helen C. Evans, Byzantine Innovative Mimesis
Sarah E. Fraser, Ethnographic Mimesis: A Collaboration between Zhang Daqian and Tibetan Painters, 1941–43
Thomas Habinek, Classical Mimesis as Embodied Imitation
Tom Huhn, The Mimetic Pulse of Primal Unity
Jeanette Kohl, Blood Heads: Index and Presence
Niklaus Largier, The Figural Shape of Perception
Peter Mack, Mimesis for Artists, Writers, and Audiences
Alex Potts, Mimesis and the Anti-Mimetic
TIME
Eric Fischl, Time Is of the Essence
Jan Assmann, Time in Ancient Egypt
Malcolm Bull, Stop–Start
Darby English, Notes from a Field
Ludmilla Jordanova, Time, Death, and History
Ajay Sinha, Painting Time
Gloria Sutton, The Texture of Time: Durational Conditions of Contemporary Art
Gerrit Walczak, What Father Time Has Left Behind
David E. Wellbery, The Origin of Time
TRADITION
Obiora Udechukwu, Art, Tradition, and the Dancing Masquerade(r)
John Brewer, Tradition: History and Reification
Jay A. Clarke, Etching, Tradition, and the German Imagination
Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Field Notes on the Contemporaneity of Tradition
Hans Hayden, Tradition and Critical Historiography
Gregg M. Horowitz, Tradition as Treason
Susanne Küchler, Material Translation and Its Challenges
Maria Loh, Tradition Is an Exquisite Corpse
Ruth B. Phillips, Recovering (from) Tradition: Jeffrey Thomas, Kent Monkman, and the Modern “Indian” Imaginary
Regine Prange, The Tradition of the New: Alois Riegl’s Late Antiquity
Contributors
Short Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Field Notes on the Visual Arts is the outcome of many hands. My own extend in gratitude first of all to the book’s 75 authors for their richly insightful essays. The artists not only contributed essays, they granted permission to reproduce their artwork—I give them my warmest thanks. I would like to acknowledge the US College Art Association for allowing me the freedom, as Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin , to create and develop this project in its initial form and to mention Joe Hannan and Lory Frankel especially. I am grateful to two anonymous peer reviewers for suggestions which greatly improved the book. Field Notes on the Visual Arts would not have appeared without the devotion of editorial assistants Kayoko Ishikawa and Carlo Avilio. Carlo Avilio also produced the index. Their meticulous work not only turned an unwieldy project into a reality, it made the process a pleasure. Mareike Wehner carefully guided the book through production while making room for my own ideas—my warmest thanks to her and to the entire team at Intellect Books. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to those who contributed toward the cost of colour illustrations. Tom Huhn, Chair of Visual & Critical Studies and Art History, School of Visual Arts, New York, and Dia Holz provided generous subsidy funds for which I remain hugely grateful.
Karen Lang
Introduction
In 2011, as editor of The Art Bulletin , the leading journal of international art history, I introduced a feature entitled “Notes from the Field.” The success of this initiative was tremendous, and produced an extraordinary collection of short polemical texts that are brought together in this volume as Field Notes on the Visual Arts. The essays appeared in consecutive issues of the journal under eight major headings: anthropomorphism, appropriation, contingency, detail, materiality, mimesis, time, and tradition. 1 No all-embracing theory guided the selection of these headings. My motivation was more prosaic: topics the author would have encountered during the course of their working lives. I commissioned the author to write on a specific topic but gave only basic instruction: a 1000-word essay; expository rather than scholarly (an encouragement to jettison footnoting or at least the heavy footnoting of academic writing). Otherwise, the author could approach the topic however they liked.
Rather than a “state of the field,” “critical terms,” or “keywords” approach, in which topics function as guideposts or bannisters, I envisioned the topics as touchstones. I was interested to discover what voices generally separated—inside and outside the humanities, the university, the museum, and so on—would make of a topic in a short essay. The format’s open and generous approach to knowledge encouraged speculation and innovation, and the authors made the most of it. For all their brevity, the essays are fruitfully varied in form. They delight and instruct in equal measure.
The feature was a leap of faith, especially for The Art Bulletin , a field-defining scholarly journal set to celebrate its centenary when the essays appeared. But the time seemed right to open up the airways of the journal, and the consideration of aesthetic and material objects more generally. Still, I hoped for more: where tradition held that art historians, curators, and artists spoke in different languages about the visual arts, with the art historian reputedly the most scholarly of the bunch, I thought that perception derived from a certain, academic point of view that did not hold in principle. All in all, I wanted to mix it up by bringing thinkers, makers, discoverers, and menders together: to see how they worked with materials and ideas by giving them a task in common. Their essays would enable the reader to glimpse how a topic takes shape and is transformed in the telling. Precisely because each topic would take shape through what the authors made of it, the specificity and particularity of objects, contexts, and interpretations would be stressed over received ideas and universalisms. In any case, that was the hope. Received ideas and universalisms were bound to come through the back door anyway, since we are all guided by tacit knowledge of all kinds. Still, the back door seemed better than the front.
The aim to