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Beyond the Mirror Susanne von Falkenhausen Beyond the Mirror Image | Volume 182 Two foundations have helped to finance my sabbaticals for the research on this book: The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Fritz-Thyssen- Stiftung (Opus-Magnum-Programm). The Clark Art Research Center in William- stown, Massachussetts let me stay for five months of peaceful work in a beautiful location, with Michael Ann Holly being an extraordinary host. Over the years many students took part in the discussions around the topic of this book, and, in order of appearance, Bettina Uppenkamp, Valeria Schulte-Fische- dick, Ildikó Szántó, Margret Lüters-Bach have been patient and rigorous readers of the German manuscript. Hanne Loreck and Birgit Pelzer have helped to deal with Lacanian implications. With his translation Nicholas Grindell lifted my kind of idiom to a higher level of exactitude. Marcia Pointon undertook the heroic task of going through the English manuscript with me. I cannot but repeat my thanks to them all. Any incoherences and errors are of course my responsibility. Susanne von Falkenhausen is professor emerita of modern and contemporary art history at Humboldt University Berlin. Susanne von Falkenhausen Beyond the Mirror Seeing in Art History and Visual Culture Studies Translated by Nicholas Grindell The publication was subsidized by the Open-Access-Publikationsfond of Hum- boldt-Universität zu Berlin. The translation was subsidized by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on behalf of the Exzellenzinitiative von Bund und Ländern. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (BY) license, which means that the text may be be remixed, transformed and built upon and be copied and redistributed in any medium or format even commercially, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. First published as Jenseits des Spiegels. Das Sehen in Kunstgeschichte und Visual Culture Studies by Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Paderborn 2015. English edition, slightly revised, published in 2020 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld. © Susanne von Falkenhausen Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Man Ray, »Gräfin Casati«, 1929, © Man Ray 2015 Trust/VG Bild- Kunst, Bonn 2020 Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5352-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5352-0 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839453520 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper. Contents Introduction ........................................................................ 7 Seeing and the concept of visuality.................................................. 11 Trains of thought – readings.........................................................12 Art history and seeing...............................................................14 Seeing in the visual field: visual culture studies ......................................19 Seeing as an ethical question ...................................................... 22 Part One: How do Art Historians See? 1. Interpreting Forms of Representation........................................ 27 Visual order as concretized worldview – Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form ...................................................... 27 Seeing as an approach to reality – Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion ................. 33 2. ExperienceandtheVisual ................................................... 43 The “Period Eye” – Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience ...................... 43 Between presence and representation – Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing ........ 51 3. ThroughtheEyesoftheSpectator........................................... 65 Seeing the Other – Otto Pächt’s The Practice of Art History: Reflections on Method .... 65 Focus on reception - Wolfgang Kemp’s Der Anteil des Betrachters .................... 74 Part Two: Visual Culture Studies – Looking at the Visual 4. Visual Culture Studies – Concepts and Agendas.............................. 93 Culture, the political, and visual culture............................................. 93 Identity as a cultural and political concept.......................................... 97 Political visuality: visibility as a contested resource................................ 102 The academic discourse of visuality ............................................... 105 One-point perspective as a metaphor for rationalist cultures of power.............. 106 5. Visual Culture Studies’ Foundational Concept ................................ 113 The model of the gaze.............................................................. 113 The threatened subject – Norman Bryson .......................................... 122 The evil eye and a counter-model – Margaret Olin .................................. 133 6. Visual Culture Studies’ Operational Concept ................................ 139 What is visual culture? W.J.T. Mitchell.............................................. 140 Visuality as event – Nicholas Mirzoeff.............................................. 145 Seeing is reading – Mieke Bal ...................................................... 150 7. Seeing as a Political Resource in Visual Culture Studies .....................157 The stigmatizing gaze – ‘Integration and positive revaluation’ – Norman Bryson ..... 159 The discriminating and the oppositional gaze – bell hooks.......................... 164 An attempt at integration from art history – Lisa Bloom ............................ 169 Evidence ..........................................................................172 Evidence of the non-visible – Martin A. Berger ......................................174 The utopian gaze and its failure – Nicholas Mirzoeff................................. 181 Part Three: Towards an Ethics for the Act of Seeing 8. QuestionsofEthics ......................................................... 201 Historical unfamiliarity in art historical seeing ..................................... 203 Cultural unfamiliarity – the “Other” in the gaze of visual culture studies............. 206 The narcissistic circle – a critique ................................................. 207 Attention and recognition ..........................................................210 Visual spaces of the subject: Narration and observation ............................ 211 “Self-identity is a bad visual system. Fusion is a bad strategy of positioning.”....... 213 Seeing the Other ................................................................... 217 Outlook: The digital world and its consequences ................................... 218 Bibliography...................................................................... 227 Index............................................................................ 243 Introduction In the early 1990s, the political battles of the 1970s seemed to be over, with class struggle as a driving force supposedly rendered obsolete by the end of the Cold War. Certain aspects of these battles had shifted into the universities, mainly thanks to teachers who themselves had participated in the political movements of the 1970s. I was one of those teachers. As an art historian I found myself within a discipline that I wanted to teach, but that in many ways did not satisfy me. The 1980s had brought feminism into academia, reshaping it into gender studies, a transformation I had tried to be part of. And in Britain and the United States, not only women asserted themselves as new subjects in academic discourse, but also those groups of individuals who were fighting for visibility and a voice as the Other of dominant ethnic, cultural and sexual categories. Visibility became a currency of social recognition, and a political issue. From the late 1980s, it also became an academic issue. And from the early 1990s in Britain and the United States it brought forth a new discipline, visual culture studies, which in turn brought forth a new concept: visuality. This book is about a particular intellectual struggle that originated in the1970s and continues today. Two disciplinary fields will be in play in my analysis: art history and visual culture studies. A hotly contested debate in the early 1990s unfolded between art history and visual culture studies over the interpretation of contemporary visual cul- ture, a dispute whose impact can still be felt today. Visual culture studies declared art history incapable of responding to the specific problems result- ing from global migration flows, identity politics in the conflict between the global and the local, new media technologies and the media cultures emerg- ing from them. In the view of visual culture studies, art history represented elitist western traditions that manifested themselves in a hierarchical con- cept of “high” art versus “low” popular culture, in a colonializing view of the art of other cultures, in the mythologization of the (male) artist, in the per- 8 BeyondtheMirror petuation of a history of styles associated with national traditions, and
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