The University of Nottingham Art History After Deconstruction: Is There Any Future For a Deconstructive Attention to Art Historical Discourse? By Paul Gladston, BA, MA, Cert. Ed. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, January 2004 i Contents Page i - Contents Page ii - Abstract Page iii - Some Notes On the Use of the Term ‘Disciplinary Art History’ Page iv - Acknowledgements Page 1 - Introduction: Art History Before and After Deconstruction Page 21 - Part I: Crossing Over the Boundaries of a ‘De(con)structionist’ Art History Page 21 - Chapter I: The Early Development and Dissemination of the Theory and Practice of Deconstruction Page 28 - Chapter II: The Emergence of a Deconstructive Attention to Art Historical Discourse Page 33 - Chapter III: Dissenting Voices Page 39 - Chapter IV: Towards a Continuing Deconstructive Attention to Art Historical Discourse Page 52 - Part II: A Brief Genealogy of Art Historical Discourse Page 54 - Chapter I: Art Historical Writing From Antiquity to the Mid-Fourteenth Century Page 58 - Chapter II: Art History From the Mid-Fourteenth Century to the Early Nineteenth Century Page 89 - Chapter III: Art History From the Early Nineteenth Century to the Late Twentieth Century Page 105 - Chapter IV: The New Art History Page 123 - Chapter V: Beyond The New Art History Page 143 - Part III: A Partial Genealogy of the Duchampian Art Work Page 145 - Chapter I: Jacques Derrida: From “Différance” to Specters of Marx Page 157 - Chapter II: Marcel Duchamp: Man In a ‘Mutt’ Case Page 178 - Chapter III: Joseph Beuys: We Can’t Do It Without (R)Roses(élavy) Page 190 - Chapter IV: Anselm Kiefer: A Mutating Varus Page 200 - Conclusion Page 209 – Bibliography ii Abstract Art History After Deconstruction: Is There Any Future For a Deconstructive Attention to Art Historical Discourse? Over the past two decades institutionally dominant art history has been strongly influenced by the theory and practice of deconstruction. While many art historians have embraced deconstruction as a productive means of unsettling and remotivating standard forms of art historical discourse, others have raised concerns over what they see as a widespread departure from the most basic tenets of art historical discourse; that is to say, not only the belief that there is a circumscribed category of aesthetic experience (art), but also that it is possible to arrive at a truthful representation of the relationship between works of art and the circumstances of their production and intial reception (history). Moreover, many of those same commentators have railed against the way in which this departure can be understood to have suspended any sense of a stable, structural connection between a historical is and a present ought; in other words, the notion that a truthful understanding of past events has the potential to inform ethico-political activity in the here and now. Our intention here is to problematize this apparent schism by demonstrating that art historical discourse has drawn the very possibility of its continuing conceptuality since Antiquity from a chronic and, for the most part, unconscious deconstructive interaction between the signifying ‘texts’ of art history and what might be seen as the various material, social and intellectual forces pertaining to the wider historical ‘contexts’ of their production and reception. Thus, we will have attempted to show that deconstruction is indivisible from continuing discursive attempts to arrive at a ‘truthful’ understanding of the past. In addition to this we will also attempt to show - with reference both to the writings of Jacques Derrida and a Duchampian inheritance in the visual arts - that it is possible to develop deconstructive forms of historical narrative through which we might engage critically with questions of ‘ethico-political’ value. iii Some Notes on the Use of the Term ‘Disciplinary Art History’ In this dissertation the term ‘disciplinary art history’ is used to denote the academic practices associated with the development of our understanding of the history of the visual arts and architecture as they have developed within the Western academic tradition. Its frame of reference therefore relates largely to writings emerging from within Western or Westernized cultural contexts. Indeed, while this dissertation cites texts first written in a variety of languages other than English under the collective title of ‘disciplinary art history’ its principal focus is in practice limited still further to a consideration of art history as it has developed in relation to an anglophone academic milieu. Consequently, while the term ‘disciplinary art history’ is used here without any consistent form of qualification it should be read throughout as referring to a somewhat limited, though not impermeable, set of cultural/linguistic circumstances. This dissertation’s field of vision is then, despite the wide-ranging nature of its contents, a fragmentary one whose associated conclusions are far from being claimed as definitive. Nevertheless it is, one hopes, a considered attempt to imagine an art historical discourse chronically enmeshed with the profoundly challenging dynamics of deconstructive play. iv Acknowledgments The writing of this dissertation would have been impossible without the support and understanding of my wife, Lynne and my daughter, Alicia. One can only guess at the level of frustration that they have endured over the past few years. I also owe a significant debt of gratitude to my supervisor Professor Richard Cardwell and others within the department of Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham who have supported a highly unorthodox pupil with patience and good humour. I should also like to thank my employers, North Warwickshire and Hinckley College, for their financial contribution to my studies. I would also like to acknowledge John Robert’s contibution to the development of this dissertation. He has provided, through the example of his writings and his conversation, a constant provocation that has forced me to think more deeply about what is at stake in relation to contemporary art historical discourse. v ‘Past’ The Dying Language The names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other, because at the bottom of both the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void. The Wreck of Former Boundaries The Strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art. In order to read the rocks we must become conscious of geologic time, and of layers of prehistoric material that is entombed in the earth’s crust. When one scans the ruined sites of prehistory one sees a heap of wrecked maps that upsets our present art historical limits. A rubble of logic confronts the viewer as he looks into the levels of the sedimentations. The abstract grids containing the raw matter are observed as something incomplete broken and shattered. - Robert Smithson1 1 From “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” by Robert Smithson, first published in Artforum, New York, September 1968, reprinted in N. Holt ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York, 1979, pp. 82-91. vi ‘Present’ Working from life is working from memory: the artist can only put down what remains in his head after looking. And the time between the instant when he looks at the model and the instant later when he looks at the paper or canvas or clay to copy what he has just seen might as well be an eternity. The model can go on standing still for ever, but the work will none the less be the product of an accumulation of memories none of which is quite the same as any other, because each of them is affected by what has gone before, by the continually changing relation between all that has already been put down and the next glance at the model. And it is not merely because of the necessity to look away from the model to look at the paper, canvas, clay that, as soon as we try to copy what is seen, it was seen: it is also because our mind has to get outside the sensation before we can copy it, our very awareness of having a sensation pushes it into the past, for we cannot think about our present thought, it slips away as we try and grasp. The artist can never get there, whether he works from nature and builds up an accumulation of memories modifying and contradicting one another, or whether he works from memory and constructs a synthesis of what he remembers having seen. Giacometti’s work lays naked the despair known to every artist who has tried to copy what he sees. At the time it is an affirmation that there is a hard core which remains from all that has been seen and that this can be stabilised, this can be saved, this can be rendered as if indestructible. - David Sylvester2 2 From Looking at Giacometti by David Sylvester, Chatto and Windus, London, 1994. This extract reprinted in “The Sunday Review” of The Independent newspaper, London, 9th October 1994, p.18. vii ‘Future’ The Pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely. - Jackson Pollock3 I think that great work…is chameleon. That it’s chameleon for whatever cultures come after it. If its going to sustain itself or be beneficial to people, it has to be able to adapt somehow and have meaning for them.