Art of Illusion
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Kunstgeschichten der Gegenwart 4 Art of Illusion The Representation of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond Second Printing von Dan Karlholm 1. Auflage Art of Illusion – Karlholm schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG Peter Lang Bern 2006 Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 958 6 Inhaltsverzeichnis: Art of Illusion – Karlholm Introduction Historiography (that is, “history” and “writing”) bears within its own name the paradox – almost an oxymoron – of a relation established between two antinomic terms, between the real and discourse. Its task is one of connecting them and, at the point where this link cannot be imagined, of working as if the two were being joined. Michel de Certeau Just as “our apprehension of the world is always mediated by repre- sentation,”1 so the cultural world of art in the name of art history is mediated for us through various representational strategies. The fact that art history, in this formulation, is mediated and represented, however, must not be understood naively: such ‘mediation’ is part of the construction that art history is, part of the intrinsic ‘as if’ of art history.2 The following interconnected essays are devoted to some of the multifaceted forms of representation that art history is and pro- duces, with examples from its inception in the nineteenth century till today. From this perspective, art history is both a discursive practice, still seemingly doomed to representation, and a discursive product of 1 Kaja Silverman, referring to Lacan, in her The Threshold of the Visual World, New York & London, 1996, p. 155. 2 This is well put by Donald Preziosi: “The modern practices of museology – no less than those of the museum’s auxiliary discursive practice, art history (let us call this here museography) – are firmly rooted in an ideology of representational adequacy, wherein exhibition is presumed to ‘represent’ more or less faithfully some set of extra-museological affairs; some ‘real’ history which, it is imagined, pre-exists its portrayal; its re-presenta- tion, in exhibitionary space.” “The Art of Art History,” in Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford & New York, 1998, p. 507. Cf.: “…we arrive at that paradox which governs the entire pertinence of historical discourse (in relation to other types of discourse): fact never has any but a linguistic existence (as the term dis- course), yet everything happens as if this linguistic existence were merely a pure and simple ‘copy’ of another existence, situated in an extra-structural field, the ‘real’.” Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” in Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, New York, 1986, p. 138. 11 such semiotic work. The constant conceptual slippage between the site of representation and its outcome is symbolically signified by the shared name. The term art history, of course, refers to a threefold phenomenon: a collective producer (the community, institution or discipline of art history) produces representations (art history texts, picture compendia, etc.) of what is allegedly an actual history of art (or art history) that exists beyond these discursive phenomena.3 Throughout these chapters, I will focus on art history in its most general, world-historical form, which is a most specific historical for- mation. General art history [allgemeine Kunstgeschichte], most of- ten spelled without the prefix, has been so successfully naturalized and disseminated within the discipline as to be almost imperceptible as such. When explicit reference is made to this peculiar form of art- historical meta-narrative, it is often labeled historicist, evolutionary, modernist or Hegelian, and is typically considered to be superseded by more advanced contemporary practices. Such assumptions, how- ever, may serve to veil the extent to which this most literally basic (basically literary) form of art-historical representation continues to pervade the bastions of academic art history today. All four chapters are based on empirical material emanating from the historical and intellectual milieu in Germany from around the time of Hegel’s death (1831) to the period of Nietzsche’s early work (1874), when art history was first constructed as a unified (general) field of knowledge. It is in this period, which has been characterized as an “unphilosophical ceasura” in German Wissenschaftsgeschichte,4 specifically in Prussia, that the academic discipline of art history is 3 In German, these levels may be distinguished by three different terms. Art history in the first sense (Kunstwissenschaft) works with art history in the second sense (Kunsthistorie) to make sense of art history in the third sense (Kunstgeschichte), and is thus involved in a rather complicated game of representation. It is certainly not coincidental that the most problematic and evasive third sense of “art history” in what may be regarded as the mother tongue of the discipline is designated by the most frequently used alternative. 4 Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker. Zweiter Band. Von Passavant bis Justi, Leipzig, 1921, p. 119. The perception appears to derive from Max Lenz (Geschichte der königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Halle, 1910), who terms the cul- tural epoch after Hegel “the unphilosophic age” (“das unphilosophische Zeitalter”). Cit. from Timothy Bathi, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel, Baltimore & London, 1992, p. 66. 12 eventually institutionalized. This time-frame overlaps in part with what Hayden White has identified as the “golden-age” of history: “the period between 1800 and 1850.”5 The reference is certainly not to imply that the formative phase of German art history amounts to something like a golden age, deserving of either resuscitation or nos- talgic commemoration. What I do imply is that these decades, par- ticularly the 1840s and 1850s, merit as much critical attention as has been granted the more well-known phases of disciplinary activity from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.6 Finally, represen- tations of art history from the first part of the nineteenth century may be aligned with the rhetorical category of “realist historicism”7 with which White associates history. The label would only be mis- leading if we forgot that this category is simultaneously idealist throughout and has a much longer applicability. Reflecting upon some hitherto underevaluated, and undertheorized, examples of the disciplinary past of art history, I will systematically relate my argument to present practices, discussions and concerns. While some parts focus on the textual practices of art history and others on the more visual culture of art history, all chapters consider these formations in relation to the general historical reflection or “his- tory culture”8 of their time, as it may be perceived today. Instead of 5 Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” in his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore & London, 1978, p. 48. 6 In fact, the formation of a general art history, which takes place in Germany in the 1840s, is the practical and theoretical precondition for the more well-known theorizing activities towards the end of the century and beyond (Burckhardt, Riegl, Dvorák, Warburg, Wölfflin, Panofsky). No matter how radical and revisionist a historiography of the field purports to be, if the historical and aesthetic circumstances of the constitu- tion of the field of (general) art history itself are not acknowledged, analyzed and inter- preted, this critique is likely to reinforce rather than question the bases/basics of tradi- tional art history. 7 White, 1978, p. 49. See also White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nine- teenth-Century Europe, Baltimore & London, 1973, esp. part two. 8 This term is borrowed from Wolfgang Hardtwig, Geschichtskultur und Wissenschaft, Munich, 1990, pp. 8–9. See also Jörn Rüsen, “Was ist Geschichtskultur? Überlegungen zu einer neuen Art, über Geschichte nachzudenken,” in Klaus Füssmann, Heinrich Theodor Grütter and Jörn Rüsen, eds., Historische Faszination. Geschichtskultur heute, Cologne, Weimar & Vienna, 1994, pp. 3–26. 13 tracking origins or seeking sources of visual influence for my empiri- cal samples,9 I have opted for the opposite tactic: to seek out certain traces of effect, repetition, repression and reproduction. My primary reason for studying this historical material is that it is in a sense still here, still quietly provoking action and reaction. And thus, compara- tively contemporary artistic analogies, from Andy Warhol to Anselm Kiefer, turn out to be relevant material. What first brought these ‘modern artists’ into my argument was their proximity to both the issues and/or actual images of the ancient regime. Subsequently, their main role became to concretize and dramatize the historical distance, despite certain apparent effects of continuity, between our own times and those of mid-nineteenth-century Germany. My methodological approach is to take as little as possible for granted in processing the material, especially with respect to com- mon knowledge. Employing a strategic naïveté and a certain con- trolled anachronism, in order to illuminate an estranged past and effaced contemporary practice, I persistently read the varied ‘monu- ments’ as I receive them today, as they speak to me and direct my eyes. Instead of conventionally registering my material as ‘documents’ of what produced them, I am interested in what is (and