Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought

by Ernst van Alphen

Overview

Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art in Mind, Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward.

Examining a broad range of works, van Alphen—a renowned art historian and cultural theorist—demonstrates how art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought. Employing work from artists as diverse as Picasso, Watteau, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, and Matthew Barney, he shows how art confronts its viewers with the "pain points" of cultural experience-genocide, sexuality, diaspora, and transcultural identity-and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is conceived. Van Alphen analyzes how art visually "thinks" about these difficult cultural issues, tapping into an understudied interpretation of art as the realm where ideas and values are actively created, given form, and mobilized. In this way, van Alphen's book is a work of art in itself as it educates us in a new mode of thought that will forge equally new approaches and responses to the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226015286
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	03/10/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ernst van Alphen is the Queen Beatrix Professor of Dutch Studies and professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as professor of literary studies at the University of Leiden. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Armando: Shaping Memory; Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory; and Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self.

Read an Excerpt

Art in Mind
How Contemporary Images Shape Thought

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By ERNST VAN ALPHEN
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-01528-6

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Chapter One
Thinking about Art in History

{ART AS THINKING}

In his treatise on painting (Codex urbinas latinus 1270), Leonardo da Vinci gives the following advice to painters:

Do not despise my opinion, when I remind you that it should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud, or like things, in which, if you consider them well, you will find really marvelous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things, such as devils and similar creations, which may bring you honour, because the mind is stimulated to new inventions by obscure things. (1956, 51)

It is remarkable that Leonardo places so much weight on the mind and ideas of the painter. The image we receive from his treatise on painting differs widely from the more romantic image of the artist that is still prevalent in the twentieth century. For Leonardo, painting is not an expressive, intuitive, sensuous, or emotional practice but, above all, an intellectual one. The painter thinks, discovers, and invents.

But the discoveries Leonardo talks about are not based on the recognition or identification of a perceived object or substance. On the contrary, because the forms of the observed "things" are "obscure," they do not constitute identifiable signifiers but rather nonsignifying patterns. The discoveries or inventions are the result of a process, or struggle, to make sense of something "obscure." This seems to be Leonardo's conception of a mode of thinking or understanding that is visual and not based on language.

The French philosopher and art historian Hubert Damisch has taken Leonardo's conception of art to heart. All of his writings are directed by the conviction that paintings and other cultural products perform, in one way or another, an intellectual or philosophical project. He never deals with paintings as mere passive manifestations of a culture or historical period or as the product of the artist's intention. Rather, the painter thinks, and she does that in her paintings. A painting is therefore for Damisch a reflection-not in the sense of the passive definition of the word, as a mirror image, but in the sense of the active definition, as an act of thought. For this reason, I devote this first chapter to an exposition of his ideas, as a way of substantiating the claim that it is a useful way of positioning art in the cultural environment at large to consider it as a form of thought.

It is an axiom in the discipline devoted to the study of art that the meaning of art can only be formulated historically. An artwork, therefore, is always an expression of the historical period or figure that produced it. The importance attributed to the historical approach to the meaning of works of art has been so great that it even reflects itself in the name of the discipline: whereas disciplines that study cultural products like theater, film, or literature are called theater, film, and literary studies, the discipline that studies art calls itself art history. Thus, many art historians are surprised by Damisch's conviction that works of art appear to full advantage only if we deal with them as ways of thinking. For, unlike art historical interest in the artist's intention, Damisch's focus on thought does not refer to individual intention but, rather, to what Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall in their book on Tiepolo (1994) would call "pictorial intelligence," a term that refers to the intellectual thrust of the image per se. The question that is therefore crucial to the definition of his approach is whether Damisch's work is ahistorical. In other words, is it art history after all, or does he locate himself, with his deviating approach and questions, outside the discipline of art history? And what does the answer to that question mean for the definition of art history?

It is obvious that Damisch is quite impatient with the way scholars claim history as the first and last word in the art historical tradition. In Théorie du /nuage/ he characterizes the role of historical analysis in the study of art as a form of terror or tyranny that makes it impossible to ask questions that address more transhistorical or abstract issues. "The problem for theory is how not to surrender to the tyranny of humanism which will only recognize the products and epochs of art in their singularity, their individuality; and which considers illegitimate, even inadmissible, any inquiry into the invariants, the historical and/or transhistorical constants from which the plastic fact lets itself be defined in its generality, its fundamental structure" (1972, 143). Damisch himself describes his works as "structuralist." But we should not take this label too narrowly. The structuralist approach as it flourished in the sixties in disciplines like anthropology, linguistics, and literary studies was often explicitly ahistorical. Systematic questions were central and questions about the meaning or function of texts or cultures were being treated as text-immanent problems on which history had no influence.

However, it is impossible to recognize such a radical bracketing of history in Damisch's moves. History-the historical context of a work of art-has always been an important function in his structuralist analyses of art. Damisch's writings stand out by his extraordinary knowledge of history. The place of history in his analyses is, however, surprisingly different from what we are used to in traditional historical disciplines. He never lets the moves of his thinking be dictated by scholarly convention. He will not allow "history" to decide which questions are meaningful or legitimate. Nevertheless, Damisch fully acknowledges that whatever systematic, theoretical, or transhistorical question he asks, it must be addressed within the parameters of specific historical contexts. This is one of the reasons why it is not correct to place his work outside of art history. It is also the reason why I address his work here as a foundation for the chapters to follow.

Damisch's relation to history can best be clarified by means of the question he poses in the opening pages of The Origin of Perspective: "If history there be, of what is it a history?" ([1987] 1994, xix). This question sounds simple, but it has far-reaching and disenchanting implications. Through his demand for specification-of what is it a history?-Damisch, in fact, rejects the absolute meaning of the term "history." In Western culture, but especially in art history, it is standard to talk about history without an object. I have in fact invoked the same discursive strategy here by asking questions such as, What is the role of history in Damisch's work? By doing this, "history" is treated as a reality. And as a reality it becomes an unquestioned principle, a dogma. But for Damisch, history exists only insofar as it is the history of something. By using the term "history" in an absolute way, "History" receives an almightiness that is only comparable with that of "God." As a result, it becomes possible to imagine history as an active force that produces works of art-just as it produces wars as "natural" disasters. From this perspective, it is indeed legitimate to assume that the meaning of art can only be understood "historically" without reflection on what that adverb entails, and how it performs.

But Damisch assigns history to a more moderate albeit no less important place by consistently refusing to let it have an abstract or absolute meaning. This is due to his fundamentally interdisciplinary position. Whereas the philosopher Damisch prefers to ask general or abstract questions, the historian Damisch allows only a concrete use of the term "history." For the study of art, his conception of history leads to the unexpected yet commonsense question: Of what is art a history?

This question compels us to realize that the full significance of works of art cannot be appreciated in terms of history as an absolute concept. "History" is, but also has, a subject. The subject of art engenders general, transhistorical, and philosophical questions. "Historical" are the parameters within which a specific artist works, the idioms that have been passed on to her, and the specific articulation of her answers to a more general problematic. This more general problematic cannot, however, be reduced to purely historical terms. It is at least also philosophical and, hence, transhistorical. It pertains to the world of thought that we are steeped in at all times.

The implications of Damisch's assumptions that the meaning of art can only effectively be addressed by considering it as a form of thinking are twofold. First, as beholder, one is invited to think "with" the work of art, which means that one is compelled to start a dialogue with it by articulating questions of a more general-for instance, philosophical, political, or social-nature. Only when the beholder of art poses these kinds of questions will the work of art release its ideas. Second, that which is historical about the work of art can only truly be understood when one allows the work to be a historical articulation of a general, more fundamental problem. Damisch formulates this within his structuralist framework as follows: "Painting is a distinct object of historical study and must be dealt with as such: which means paradoxically that one must adopt a deliberately structuralist point of view, which only throws the historical dimension of phenomena into greater relief" ([1987] 1994, 444). This statement characterizes the moves made by Damisch in all of his writings. The historical approach is not placed in opposition to a more theoretical or, in his own words, structuralist approach. Rather, he redefines the role of history in art history by showing again and again that only a theoretical perspective enables us to see works of art as a history of something. In the case studies I am presenting here, this is the principle frame from which I start.

Damisch's notion of art as a mode of thinking leads to an art historical practice that fundamentally differs from the narrower premises of art history. Although his work is usually not associated with the interdisciplinary endeavor of cultural studies, the two have a lot in common. The fact alone that he articulates works of art, or other cultural objects, in relation to issues and ideas that transgress the restricted genealogies that define the discipline of art history shows the affinity between his and the broader inquiry of cultural studies.

The more specific parameters of this affinity are predicated on the kind of general questions or issues with which Damisch confronts works of art. Diverse as his work may be, it all ultimately leads to the question, Why do we look at art? What pictorial qualities attract us, as viewers, to art? Or, in more sensuous terms, what attracts us to art? It is, of course, not possible to give a singular answer to these questions. Works of art can evoke fascination and claim the attention of the viewer for different reasons, based on a great variety of pictorial qualities. In each of his main writings Damisch focuses on a different pictorial element to demonstrate how that element in the history of Western or sometimes Eastern art has been developed to captivate the beholder in the most literal sense.

This interaction between philosophical questions and historically inflected answers can only be shown at work in Damisch's concrete elaborations of each. I will therefore describe these interactions in Theory of the /Cloud/,The Origin of Perspective, and The Judgment of Paris. To anticipate my conclusions, Damisch, unlike his art historical colleagues, indeed sets out in his three main texts to develop an epistemology of the unknowable, a visual theory of subjectivity, and finally, to do what Freud himself did not venture to do, which is to produce a psychoanalysis of the aesthetic.

{AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE UNKNOWABLE}

In Theory of the /Cloud/ Damisch develops a history of Renaissance and baroque painting on the basis of a signifier that, again and again throughout the ages, occupies a modest, inconspicuous but at the same time crucial place in that history, namely, the /cloud/. He conceives of a period style like the Renaissance as a pictorial system or language with its own rules of grammar and semantics. Renaissance paintings thus suppress the pictorial surface in the material sense in order to open up an illusion of depth. In Byzantine and medieval art, in contrast, the materiality of the picture surface plays an important role. The definition of a nonillusionistic heaven produced by the physicality of the gold leaf pressed onto the wooden support in Byzantine painting is a good illustration of this principle.

Damisch puts the signifier /cloud/ between slashes to indicate that he deals with clouds as signs that have different meanings in different pictorial contexts rather than clouds as realistic elements. Again and again the /cloud/ occupies an uncomfortable place within such pictorial systems. It never has an immanent function or meaning but receives one only in the relations of opposition and substitution that the /cloud/ maintains with the other elements of the pictorial system. The /cloud/ always opens up another dimension than the one at first revealed by the pictorial system of which it is part. Thus the /cloud/ always functions as a kind of hinge-as a hinge "in the relation between earth and heaven, between here and there, between a world that is obedient to its own laws and a divine space that cannot be known by any science" (146). The /cloud/ thus has a value that is more than just decorative or picturesque.

The /cloud/ performs this special role first of all symbolically-that is, iconographically and thematically. A column or spiral of clouds can refer to the presence of Yahweh who guides his people through the desert from Egypt to the land of Israel. But in Francisco de Zurbarán's painting Vision of the Blessed Alonso Rodriguez, the clouds that surround Christ, Maria, and the angels in the upper part of the painting indicate that this image should be read as a representation of the vision of Alonso Rodriguez, who is depicted in the lower part of the painting. In a symbolic way the /cloud/ in this painting provides access to another dimension than the one pictorially evoked at first sight. In Andrea Mantegna's painting The Resurrection of Christ, the clouds indicate the miraculous event of the resurrection, whereas the clouds in Giotto di Bondone's fresco in the basilica of Assisi show that the Holy Fransiscus has been represented in divine rapture.

In the famous book Iconologia (Rome, 1593) by Cesare Ripa, the character of the allegory of beauty presents clouds in a totally different manner. In this case they are not divine or miraculous. Instead, they address the problem of what precisely is representable. Ripa's book provides allegorical figures for a great variety of ideas and phenomena. In a certain sense, the possibilities of allegorical representation are endless because an allegory does not have to be motivated by its subject. An allegorical code is arbitrary and artificial. However, when Ripa tries to convey the notion of beauty in the form of an allegory, the possibilities of allegory fail. We see a naked woman whose head disappears into clouds (fig. 1). For nothing is more difficult to know than Beauty. "She" is divine, and that explains why it is impossible to represent her in the language of mortal beings. Hence, in Ripa the /cloud/ has a theoretical function and indicates the limits of representation and the representable.

The function of clouds in Mantegna's ceiling painting in the palace of the duke in Mantua, or in Antonio Allegri da Correggio's dome painting The Vision of the Holy John of Patmos in Parma, does not fall under the domain of the symbolic or theoretical but must instead be seen as pictorial. Both ceiling paintings provide views of heaven: an endless space that is filled by clouds. The illusion of endlessness has been established here by means of a dal sotto in sù perspective, from bottom to upper edge without the depiction of a horizon. We look straight up into the air. How is it possible that clouds that block the view to open sky are able to evoke the illusion of endlessness?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Art in Mind by ERNST VAN ALPHEN Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Thinking about Art in History
Part 1: Exposing History
2 The Portrait's Dispersal
3 Shooting Images, Throwing Shadows
4 The Representation of Space and the Space of Representation
Part 2: Rewriting History
5 The Homosocial Gaze
6 Men without Balls
7 Facing Defacement
Part 3: Working Through History
8 Caught by Images
9 Playing the Holocaust
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This book advances a strong and original claim: that art, in this case contemporary art, thinks. And in this study, thought is always visual. The style is clear, animated, and free of jargon. Anyone interested in contemporary art or philosophy will find this book informative, thought-provoking, and rewarding."

Norman Bryson

"A highly original interdisciplinary study about the functions of the image in contemporary art and literature. Van Alphen brilliantly demonstrates how a theory of images developed from art and literature can contribute to a rethinking of traditional forms of human identity. Clearly and lucidly written, Art in Mind is a work of true significance."

Matthew Biro