AH 510 | Historiography of the Visual Arts, 1750 to 1960Prof. Blake Stimson | Fall 2013 | Mondays 6-9 | HH 303 | CRN 10246

Quentin Matsys, The Moneylender and his Wife, 1514

MEANING IN THE VISUAL ARTSThis seminar will take its start by turning away from what Theodor Adorno called the “abominable resignation of methodology.” We will consider the question of meaning in the visual arts in German philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno) and German art history (Winckelmann, Wölfflin, Riegl, Panofsky) in order to evaluate what an unabominable, unresigned form of aesthetic understanding might be. For a provisional syllabus see: http://tigger.uic.edu/~stimson/.

Introduction

There is no “surer way to kill a piece of research,” Roland Barthes once wrote, “and send it to join the great waste of abandoned projects than Method.” Similarly, Theodor Adorno routinely decried what he called the “abominable resignation of methodology.” This seminar will adopt the skepticism of Adorno and Barthes as its governing method of methods and use it to raise the question of the value of art history and critical inquiry more broadly. The class, thus, is not designed to provide a menu of methods to choose from as if they were academic brand names or club identities, nor is it meant to be a primer in one or several of such choices, nor is it meant to be merely a history of art history. In other words, what it offers is decidedly not some form of vocational training. Instead, we will consider the question of method more simply as a means for problem-solving.

Your task for this seminar, thus, will not be to learn new methods or bone up on old ones but instead to evaluate what the problem is, who it besets and what solution is being proposed; that is, you will need to raise the questions of method and aim together, as if they were inseparable. Since aim does not reduce well to methodological categories (what, after all, would one want, need, or demand as an art historian qua art historian or cultural critic qua cultural critic much less as, say, a formalist qua formalist or semiotician qua semiotician?) we will thus be forced to consider method according to larger criteria: What is the value of our undertaking for our public? Or, to state the same question differently: What is the service that we provide?

To that end, we might take these cautionary words by Guy Debord as our starting point:

But theories are only made to die in the war of time. Like military units, they must be sent into battle at the right moment; and whatever their merits or insufficiencies, they can only be used if they are on hand when they're needed. They have to be replaced because they are constantly being rendered obsolete—by their decisive victories even more than by their partial defeats. Moreover, no vital eras were ever engendered by a theory; they began with a game, or a conflict, or a journey.

Our central task thus will be to take up the question of the fundamental inadequacy of “method” and “theory” both for any effort to make Art History’s disciplinary aim equal to the humanism that founded it.

Books ordered

Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600, ISBN 0801852358 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, ISBN 0631163026 Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, ISBN 0300087365 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ISBN 0521348927 GWF Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, ISBN 0198245971 Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, ISBN 0300032404 Karl Marx, Marx: Selected Writings, ISBN 0872202186 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ISBN 0521779138 Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ISBN 0393314030

Other readings are linked to in the syllabus and on reserve at Daley Library. Feel free to use other versions of any reading for the course.

Requirements

The primary work of this seminar will be reading and discussion of the readings. Towards that end, you have two primary writing tasks.

The first is to choose one of the readings and prepare a 4-5 page critical analysis to present in class that draws on at least two additional sources by the same author and two secondary sources but takes the assigned reading itself as the primary object of analysis. You can sign up for any of the readings but we do not want to have more than two presentations for any one class.

The second assignment is a 20pp term paper on a topic of your choice related to the class. Your approach should be historiographical rather than art-historical in character—that is, you should be studying the work of a writer rather than an artist.

Here is one set of criteria developed by a funding body that you might use to assess your own writerly engagement with the texts we’ll be reading as a well as that of the authors studied. (http://www.artswriters.org/guidelines.php) Their goal, the funders say, is to “honor and encourage writing about art…”

• that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent, and precise;• in which a keen engagement with the present is infused with an appreciation of the historical;• that is neither afraid to take a stand, nor content to deliver authoritative pronouncements, but serves rather to pose questions and to generate new possibilities for thinking about, seeing, and making art;• that is sensitive to both the importance and difficulty of situating aesthetic objects within their broader social and political contexts;• that does not dilute or sidestep complex ideas but renders accessible their meaning and value;• that creatively challenges the limits of existing conventions, without valorizing novelty as an end in itself.

Finally, you might also think of the writing assignment as an opportunity to make some headway working through this experience described by Andrew Ross: “It took me many, many years to find my own voice, which I think is the most difficult thing for people to do with a standard academic training.” One is taught to “work with the voice of the disciplinary consensus or to ape some master thinker who has been influential in the discipline, and that's not unrelated to your choice of research topics.” Put differently, your task is one that is often more challenging than it would seem—to think for yourself.

Reading schedule

1. REVIEW: Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (http://members.efn.org/~acd/vite/VasariLives.html)READ: Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600

2. LABOR DAY

3. READ: David Hume, Four Dissertations (http://archive.org/details/fourdissertatio00humegoog) READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapters 1 and 2

4. REVIEW: Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art (http://archive.org/details/historyancienta01lodggoog)

READ: Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

5. READ: Critique of the Power of Judgment. Review the introduction, the analytic of the beautiful and the analytic of the sublime and focus your attention for seminar discussion purposes on sections 5, 8, 10, 19-22, 55-60, preface, introduction, particularly the chart at the end, and the concluding sections on “Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis,” “Representation of the Antinomies of Taste,” “Beauty as the Symbol of Morality” and “The Methodology of Taste.” Pay special attention to the rose example on p. 100. READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 3

6. READ: Phenomenology of Spirit. Read the preface and review the sections on consciousness and self-consciousness (pp. 1-138). For discussion purposes, focus on the preface. Be sure to keep in mind the section headings for the preface which are only listed on the contents page. Also try to make sense of the preface title "on scientific cognition” and try to make sense of what he means by the "notion" rather than other forms of cognition. READ: Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, chapters II-IV.READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 5.

7. READ: Marx: Selected Writings. Read pp. 27-101, 157-186, 209-212, 214-243. For discussion purposes focus on the concept of alienated labor (e.g., 58-67, 230-244).READ: Marx, Capital, on co-operation (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch13.htm) READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 8.

8. MA SYMPOSIUM

9. READ: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 9.

10. READ: The Freud Reader. Read pp. 545-660, 685-771, 783-795. For discussion purposes focus on the question of collective psychology.READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 10.

11. READ: Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (http://archive.org/details/princarth00wlff)READ: Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, chapters VI-VII.

12. READ: Alois Riegl, “Leading Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen” (RESERVE)READ: Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, chapter V.

13. READ: Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” (RESERVE)READ: Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, chapters IX-X.

14. READ: Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (RESERVE)READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 11.

15. READ: Theodor Adorno, “Draft Introduction” and “Art, Society, Aesthetics” in Aesthetic Theory (RESERVE)READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 13.