Elsner writes that ‘the desire to attain’ the ‘fundamental grounds of meaning in art’ is crucial for art history, even if this goal is unreachable. This focus on desire might be the most accurate answer to Peters Corbett’s question, asking why canonical art requires specialised attention, though Elsner does not probe this desire’s origins. Preziosi sees this desire as ideologically motivated, viewing history as ‘a mode of writing addressed to the present… to the fabrication and maintenance of modernity’, which could be viewed as having negative or positive implications.
Agnes Martin’s grid paintings have strongly provoked this desire (that itself deserves more research), resulting in many scholarly articles. The absence of iconographic content and emphasis on material, composition and line in Martin’s work directs towards approaches that link specific formal details to social, intellectual or autonomously artistic narratives through mediating theories ranging from semiotics to psychoanalysis. Interestingly, an ethical dimension – with similarities and differences to Norton’s explicit conflation of the aesthetic and ethical, cultural values of a work of art, discussed in Preziosi, 1992 – still has a strong presence in many articles on Martin’s grids. For example, Rosalind Krauss, 1992, appears to locate Bataille’s politically and ethically charged informe within Martin’s grids; much has been written on the status of abstraction as a withdrawal from political engagement; also, Martin’s paintings have been discussed by Yve-Alain Bois, 1986, as non-provocative enough to be part of the Cartier collection, which (in research done by the activist artist Hans Haacke) arguably contains no art that poses ethical or curatorial problems, creating a ‘greasy screen’ of cultural cachet to cover up corporate corruption. The history of this ethical strand, and the status of art objects as evidence or ‘carriers of value-systems’, is worth exploring in greater detail as problematic leaps are often made to link formalist works with their culture of origin.
My own desire towards art history comes from an art practice, involving making material, visual responses to modernist painting amongst other artefacts. An important issue, touched upon from at least two angles in the course readings, regards the ways in which art practice itself opens up interpretive frameworks. Firstly, Preziosi outlines Norton’s Ruskinian principle that technical training, for example in watercolour and drawing, is foundational to an understanding of art. My background in contemporary practice, rather than focusing on formalist connoisseurship (criticised by Preziosi), reinforces the point that even a strictly formal work of art is made by a person with a mind, a body, friends, interests and conflicting motives, opening up social, philosophical and psychological interpretations. This also privileges the question of each methodology’s implications for continuing contemporary practice, reflecting back to Peters Corbett’s and Preziosi’s interest in the motivations behind the study of art history, including the construction of the present, which for feminist practitioners writing on Martin (e.g. Pollock) is a key goal.
Secondly, while Norton’s cross-referenced archive, organised to coerce visual connections between objects, is rightly criticised by Preziosi, modern and contemporary art has developed after and within this tradition of artists consciously, visually and conceptually, drawing upon, extending and questioning previous art. Rather than tracking a deterministic evolution of styles, a critical examination of the extension and critique of Martin’s practice by artists such as Hesse, Darboven and Laskey, might be a method to gain insights into Martin’s work, viewing Martin’s grids as living participants in visual discourse rather than as questionable documentary evidence.
Useful Articles
Bois, Y., ‘The Antidote’, October, 39 (Winter, 1986), 126-44.
Chandler, J., Davidson, A., and Harootunian, H., ‘Editors’ introduction: questions of evidence’, Critical Inquiry, 18: 2 (Winter, 1992), 297-99.
Elsner, J., ‘From empirical evidence to the big picture: some reflections on Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen’, Critical Inquiry, 32: 4 (2006), 741-766.
Krauss, R., Bachelors (Cambridge, 2000).
Peters Corbett, D., ‘Visual culture and the history of art’, in Caroline van Eck and Edward Winters, eds., Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Culture (Burlington, VT, 2004), 17-36.
Preziosi, D., ‘The question of art history’, Critical Inquiry, 18 no. 2 (Winter, 1992), 363-86.
This piece was written for a seminar on my current MA History of Art course.
IMAGE CREDIT: Cardboard grid outdoor photograph, Becky Hunter (to see more of my work please have a look at my art page).
