Real Spaces DAVID SUMMERS World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism
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Real Spaces DAVID SUMMERS World Art History and the Rise of Western modernism You know that poiesis is more than a single thing. For of anything whatever that passes from not being into being the whole cause is composing or poetry; so that the productions of all arts are kinds of poetry, and their craftsmen are all poets ... But ... they are not called poets: they have other names, while a single section disparted from the whole of poetry - merely the business of music and metres - is entitled with the name of the whole. Plato, Symposium, 205B-C I. POST-FORMALIST ART HISTORY CONTENTS: However the discipline of the history of art may have changed over the last few PREFACE AND decades of theoretical and critical examination, it has continued to be an archival ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS field, concerned with setting its objects in spatial and temporal order, and with INTRODUCTION relating them to appropriate documents and archaeological evidence. Much of I FACTURE this work has been accomplished; there are more or less firmlyestablished bodies 2 PLACES of works in most fields,and it is to be expected that professional attention might turn elsewhere. To be sure, connoisseurship and documentation have continued } THE APPROPRIATION OF THE CENTRE to authenticate artifacts in order to establish their market value, that is, for more than simply historical purposes; but the same archival and archaeological work 4 IMAGES also remains fundamental to the discipline of art history as a kind of history, and 5 PLANARITY the 'provenances' of artifacts for sale do in fact place them in groups and series. 6 VIRTUALITY If that is so, what implications are to be drawn from the fact that artifacts lend 7 THE CONDITIONS OF themselves to such spatiotemporal arrangement? What is the significanceof the MODERNISM certainty with which a vessel from Teotihuacan found in a Maya burial may be EPILOGUE at once identified as an import rather than the independent invention of some NOTES eccentric Maya potter? When human artifacts were assumed to be essentially GLOSSARY form, the answer to this question was fairly simple. Artifacts belonged to styles, INDEX continuities characteristic of the imaginations of individuals and groups, from the expressions of which certain conclusions might be drawn about individuals ILLUSTRATION CREDITS and groups themselves. With the decline of formalism in art history, professional interest in such issues has passed from theoretical to practical in the sense that, while artifacts continue to be sorted, grouped and seriated, the interpretative dimensions of these basic activities have been set aside in favour of methodologies from other fields. Art has long been prone to reduction to problems in the psychology of visual perception, which is an obvious extension of the Western assumption that art taken altogether is about visual perception. The theories underlying more recent approaches to the interpretation of art, as I shall discuss presently, derive in one way or another from structural linguistics, and their emphasis is synchronic to the exclusion of the diachronic. The chapters of this book, however, proceed from a different starting point. What if historians of PHAIDON Contents PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS II INTRODUCTION I Post-formalist Art History . I 5 2 Form, Pictorial Imagination and Formalism . 28 3 Real Spaces, Conditions and Cardinality. .. .. .. .. .. .. 3 6 4 The 'Visual Arts' and the Spatial Arts . 41 5 Real Space and Virtual Space. 43 6 An Image in Real Space: the Aztec Coatlicue . 4 5 7 Virtual Space and the Primacy of Real Space . 50 8 Given Nature and Second Nature . 5 3 9 Real Space and Art-Historical Interpretation. 5 5 10 Art History and Aesthetics . 5 8 CHAPTER I FACTURE 1.1 Conditions of Presentation. 61 1.2 Configuration: Functions and Purposes . 62 I. 3 Arbitrariness . .. .. .. 6 3 I .4 The Principle of Definitionand Series .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 64 1. 5 Authority and Series . .. .. .. .. 6 5 1.6 Technology, Medium, Technique and Style. .. 66 1.7 Diachronic and Synchronic . .. .. 72 1.8 Facture.................................................. 74 1.9 Facture and Materials...................................... 77 1.10 Facture and Value.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 84 I.II Refinement and Distinction................................. 86 1.12 Ornament I . 98 1.13 Play.................................................... 101 1.14 Notionality............................................... 107 1.15 Models .................................................. 114 CHAPTER 2 PLACES 2.1 Introduction .............................................. 117 2.2 Place, Relation and Hierarchy............................... 123 2.3 The Navajo Hogan........................................ 125 2.4 Real Space, Gender and Ritual .............................. I 27 2.5 Centres .................................................. 130 2.6 A Traditional African Social Space ........................... 13 7 2.7 Shrines ................................................. 13 9 2.8 Jerusalem ............................................... 140 2.9 Boundaries and Precincts .................................. 152 2.10Paths ................................................... 157 2.11 Elevation ................................................ 159 2.12 Difficulty of Approach ..................................... 16 3 2.13 Centres and Verticality .................................... 16 6 2.14 Ascent .................................................. 178 2.15 Alignment and Orientation............................. ... 180 2.16 North, South, East, West ................................... 18 4 2.17 Tumuli and Domes ....................................... 186 2.18 Peripheries .............................................. 194 2.19 Land and Division ........................................ 197 CHAPTER 3 THE APPROPRIATION OF THE CENTRE 3.1 Orientation, Kingship and Empire ........................... 201 3.2 The Sumerians ........................................... 203 3.3 Temple and Palace........................................ 204 3.4 Kingship in Egypt ......................................... 205 3.5 The Pyramids at Giza ...................................... 214 3.6 The Lord of the Four Quarters .............................. 220 3.7 Augustus ................................................ 224 3.8 Angkor ................................................. 228 3.9 Chinese Imperial Cities .................................... 231 3.10 Beijing .......................................·........... 237 3.11 Versailles ................................................ 24 1 3.12 Revolution ............................................... · 245 CHAPTER 4 IMAGES 4.1 The Origins of Images ..................................... 2 5 1 4.2 Realities of Images ........................................ 2 5 2 4.3 Images and Cultural Difference ............................. 2 5 4 4.4 Traces, Images of Traces, Sight and Abstraction ................ 2 5 5 4.5 Real Metaphor ........................................... 2 5 7 4.6 Real Metaphor and Recognition ............................ 2 5 9 4.7 Contour and Comprehension .............................. 260 4.8 Lepinski Vir ............................................. 26 3 4.9 Shiva ................................................... 26 4 4.ro Upright Stones and Aniconic Images ......................... 266 4.rr Maya Stelae: 18 Rabbit at Copan ............................. 271 4.12 Manipulation ........................................... 274 4.13 Votive Images ........................................... 279 4.14 Icons ................................................... 284 4.15 MagnifiedAnthropomorphism .............................. 287 4.16 Effigies and Images with the Value of Effigies............ .. .... 288 4.17 Effigies and Size .......................................... 294 4.18 Icons and Iconoclasm ..................................... 294 4.19 Masks ................................................. 300 4.20 Greek Drama ............................................ 307 4.21 Theatre and Politics ....................................... 309 4.22 Character and Comedy .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 310 4.23 Fooling the Gods: On the Beginnings of Metric and Optical Naturalism.................................... 312 4.24 Abstraction, Vision and Drawing ............................ 316 4.25 Mental Images ........................................... 319 4.26 Icons and Imagination ..................................... 326 4.27 Automata ............................................... 326 4.28 Some Italian Renaissance Portraits ........................... 329 4.29 Images on Surfaces: Effigy, Surface and 'Field of Vision' ........ 331 4.30 Surficialityand Planarity ................................... 336 4.31 Sur-face ................................................. 337 4.32 Double Distance .......................................... 338 4.33 Surfaces, Recognition and Relation .......................... 339 4.34 Virtuality, Completion and Double Metaphor ................. 339 4.35 Succession, Narrative and Fiction ............................ 34 1 CHAPTER 5 PLANARITY Introduction ............................................. 34 3 5.2 Palaeolithic Women ...................................... 34 6 5.3 Ex-planation ............................................. 34 9 5.4 Planes and Places . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 350 5.5 Independence and Dependence .............................. 35 0 5. 6 Images and Places as Vertical and Horizontal