BOOKS: The art historian in the age of mechanical Benjamin worship
Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline edited by Elizabeth Mansfield
If you can get past the weird alien language, the pompous title and a few essays which would be pretty funny if they were meant as parodies but which are probably all too real, Art History and Its Institutions is by no means a bad book. Actually if you spend any time reading art books then you can probably tell what sort of book this is just from that title – nineteen essays by nineteen academics, most of them American, held together by little more than a tribal knack for kitting out the obvious in trans-Atlantic academese, a slightly put-on horror of ‘capitalism’ and a shared schoolgirl crush on a dead German named Walter Benjamin. But if we accept that such things have to happen – I’m told that American academics have to publish something somewhere in order to keep their jobs – then we should probably also accept that there are better and worse versions of such books. At best, they give us a cheap package tour d’horizon through the somewhat wonky gaze of academic art historians; at worse, they remind us why we are glad we never spent much time studying art at university. But that’s beside the point. As I said a minute ago, Art History and Its Institutions is by no means a bad book.
Its ostensible topic is the relationship between institutions and the narratives and categories which govern our thinking about ‘art’. As for ‘institution’, the definition is left modishly – or maybe strategically – broad. Dr Mansfield paraphrases Benjamin when she says that the practice art history ‘means finding the discipline’s abandoned campsites as well as its fortified settlements like museums or academies’. But in practice virtually all the institutions discussed – the Louvre, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Burlington Magazine, the Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. – might as well have been fortified by Vauban. On the other hand, a few of the essays just ignore the whole subject. I guess they have an approach that implies that institutions have some sort of complicated relationship with art history, or that doesn’t contradict this in too obvious a way. None of which is really very surprising, really, since it isn’t really a very new or surprising premise.
The best essays in Art History and Its Institutions – which is to say, the ones that didn’t give me a headache and which seemed to make an actual and non-obvious point of some sort – succeeded because they were written in real English and had some sort of narrative thrust behind them. These included the pretty unpromisingly-titled ‘Hearing the Unsaid: Art history, museology, and the composition of the self’ by Donald Preziosi, which, despite the Lacan epigraph and the gush about Benjamin at the beginning, turned out to be sane, sympathetic account of the historicist thinking behind Sir John Soane’s Museum and the 1851 Great Exhibition – with some telling insights about the function and nature of style, too. It took a semi-familiar topic and told me plenty of things I didn’t know about it. Andrew McClellan’s ‘From Boulée to Bilbao: The museum as utopian space’ was incredibly interesting, both because it taught me a lot about why public art galleries look the way they do – in Paris recently I was able to show off quite a lot on the basis of having read this essay – and because it helps to explain why, when a new museum opens, these days we tend to hear more about the architect and the building than we do about the stuff that’s inside.
The best introductory paragraph in the book is surely the one that fronts Christopher B. Steiner’s ‘The Taste of Angels in the Art of Darkness: Fashioning the canon of African art’ – were they having some sort of competition for the most frivolous title? – since an amusing story about a doctor with no short-term memory has got to be better than a buffet of re-heated critical theory. The essay itself, which is largely concerned with the pivotal role of the collector and with the often unconscious values that collectors project, lives up to the beginning, always making sure that the theoretical is balanced with a healthy amount of factual content and basic common sense. I don’t think I’ll ever view African art – where it comes from, how it is defined, how people like me look at it – in quite the same way again. But David Carrier’s ‘Deep Innovation and Mere Eccentricity: Six case studies of innovation in art history’ was probably my favourite of the lot of them. It’s short, sharp, and often quite amusing. It tries to explain why some art criticism comes across as mad while other art criticism is ‘fresh’ and ‘mould-breaking’ and ‘important’ and in doing so says a lot about the conventions that govern art history. Dr Carrier, the essay notes, has a book coming out soon and I’m already looking forward to it.
Other essays didn’t quite hit the mark for me. Helen Rees Leahy’s ‘“For Connoisseurs”: The Burlington Magazine 1903-11’ is pure narrative. It’s interesting in the way that listening to a long, rambling story told by an old person about long-dead colleagues might be interesting – but the conventions of scholarly essays are such that when the expected generalising summation never turned up, I felt a bit cheated. In Philip Hotchkiss Walsh’s ‘Viollet-le-Duc and Taine at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: On the first professorship of art history in France’ the truly interesting facts were buried under an unappealing sludge of theory-words like ‘legitimacy’ , ‘hegemony’ and ‘capitalism’. It would have been better without the sludge. Finally, in Elizabeth Mansfield’s own ‘Art History and Modernism’, the language is so mannered and wilfully impenetrable that some may decide, purely out of principle, to give up and hence miss the perfectly good points the author makes about the distinctive between positivism and idealism. But as Dr Carrier might argue – he doesn’t, as it happens, but it seems the sort of thing he might say – this language serves a purpose in making us thing the sort of stuff it conveys must be very sophisticated and profound.
Not that this should really be taken of a criticism of the collection itself. Art History and its Institutions gives us a complex and, I think, pretty realistic picture of academic art history as it stands at the moment – the aspects that make me want to thump someone as well as the ones that make me wish I could do this sort of thing all day myself.
And this, in turn, makes a couple of things stand out. One is the bland, general assumption, present in most of these essays, that capitalism both (a) exists and (b) is quite a bad thing. For my part, I am never really sure about ‘capitalism’ as a conceptual category. Couldn’t it just be another one of those nineteenth century theoretical super-structures, like race for instance, that were once used to connect all sorts of disparate phenomena but now look ineffectual and a bit silly, when you come to think of it? But it is so basic a building-block in academic art-historical discourse that if you took it out, some of these people might not be able to talk about anything ever again, because they’d have to address the disparate phenomena rather than simply manipulating one little nuanced word. But this is just a symptom of something else, which is the near-ubiquitous adoption of marxism as a style, almost a tone of voice, even when people aren’t consciously adopting it as a methodological or theoretical system. It is a bit like some sort of court protocol that you have to know how to do before you can contribute to books like this one. This limitation of language confers a sort of kinship on all the contributors, no matter how much their contributions might differ in organisation, argument or basic seriousness. Of course this is limiting, but for many readers it is probably sort of reassuring, too.
Which brings me to a final point. What’s the deal with this Walter Benjamin worship? Quite a few of these essays quote Benjamin as if they are quoting sacred writ – as if anything with the Benjamin brand-name on it must by definition be true, significant and deeply impressive, too. Now, there’s obviously something to be said for Benjamin. Because his politics were so ambiguous and unstable, he can be made to look subtle, undogmatic and much more attractive than most of his marxist brethren. He was, despite Adorno's revisionist efforts, one of the least convincing materialists who ever lived. He wrote so much, much of it readable and much of it also pretty vague, that it is both pleasant and easy to find a relevant Benjamin quote for any occasion. If it’s the sort of thing that impresses you, and if you are willing to stretch a point, you can claim that he was killed by the Nazis, which is a rhetorical point in anyone’s favour. And to be fair, some of his key concepts do fit pretty well with the world we inhabit, and it would be harder to describe that world without them – ‘spectacle’, for instance, or ‘aura’, or the ‘profane illumination’ brought to us not by a clash of the numinous with the mundane but rather by two unrelated mundane phenomena, creating the ‘dialectical image’. So what jars, really, is less the points the contributors to this volume are making via their beloved Benjamin than the strangely uncritical, star-struck tone in which they make them. Benjamin, clearly, had become a bit of a subcultural sacred cow. If there is anything I missed in this useful and occasionally excellent collection, it's a tough investigation of this particular institution.
Elizabeth Mansfield (ed), Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, Routledge, London & New York, 2002.
Compson Blunt is a freelance curator who has spent much of the past nine years writing a play based on the death of Nicolas de Staël.
, September 10, 2002 10:52 AM