Book Reviews HANS BELTING developed a "historical anthropology" that their nightmares. Every German art historian, finds and structural in me- it would in has been Bild-Anthropologie:Entwiirfe fur eine symbolic patterns seem, every subfield, dieval or early modern societies. American compelled to deal with the concept of media, Bildwissenschaft historians like Robert Darnton, Natalie Ze- one way or another, over the last ten years. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001. 280 pp.; mon Davis, and Caroline Bynum have con- Perhaps this has something to do with the 180 b/w ills. 25.20 Euros tributed to this paradigm. Points of conver- pressure to justify scholarship in the arts gence with art history are rare. Exceptions are within a state-controlled university system. Hans Belting's recent collection of essays on usually in the medieval field, where the work Perhaps scholars have been convinced that effigies, masks, mummies, ancestor portraits, of anthropologically minded historians like Medienwissenschaftis the last hope for the hu- cult statues, tattoos, anatomical models, pho- Bynum or Jean-Claude Schmitt can closely manities to connect with the weightier issues tography, film, video art, and digital art is also resemble work done by guild art historians. of technology, communication, and globaliza- a manifesto, a set of "drafts for a science The complex scholarly project of Aby War- tion. In the German-speaking world, modern- [Wissenschaft] of the image," as the subtitle burg must also be mentioned here. Warburg, ists are not alone in worrying about apparatus has it. The revisionist rhetoric is sharp a contemporary of the pioneering anthropol- theory, digitality, and cybernetics. Medieval- throughout the book. Belting is dismissive of ogists, sought much as Belting does to pry a ists have adapted their material to the new "the current discourse" (p. 30), "art history" transhistorical constant out of the grip of the mesh of terminology.4 Media-consciousness (p. 26), "today's theories" (p. 87), and "to- art historians, in his case, the representation now permeates the programs and publica- day's debates" (p. 90). The book is Belting's of gesture. The often-cited book by David tions of major museums.5 The bibliography at response to the question he himself posed in Freedberg, The Power of Images (1989), must the back of Belting's volume lists dozens of 1983, namely: What happens when the history also be mentioned. Freedberg, without espe- recent titles containing the words Medium or of art comes to an end?1 By that he meant: cially engaging anthropological theory, sur- Medien, few of them known to American art Whither art once it no longer believes in the veyed a vast range of mostly nonartistic cul- historians.6 narratives that have sustained it since the Re- tural uses of pictures and statues, flattening The new constellation of media studies in naissance? He also meant: What will the aca- the historical landscape in favor of a universal Europe, I think, cannot easily be mapped demic discipline of art history do now that the model of almost instinctual "response" to the onto the discourse on "medium" and "media" final pages of art's once-suspenseful plot have image. within American art history. Continental art been written? The answers are condensed Art historians might have even more to historians, for example, are no longer so trou- into this book's title. The idea of art, accord- learn from the German paradigm of "literary bled by the theoretical problem of medium ing to Belting, must give way to the concept of anthropology," as invoked in the subtitle of specificity within modernism, as Americans Bild (best translated, for the time being, as Wolfgang Iser's book The Fictive and the Imag- still are.7 In this country, meanwhile, scholars "image"), and history writing must give way to inary: Charting Literary Anthropology (1993).2 in the humanities are more likely to hear in an anthropological approach. By this term Iser means not the empirical the discourse of media an echo of commer- What does Belting mean by "anthropol- study of the bookmaking and bookselling in- cial and governmental techno-optimism. At a ogy"? In the English-speaking world, anthro- dustries or structural analysis of the ritualized recent academic conference on the medium pology is an exceptionally self-sufficient, one behavior of literary subcultures, but some- and media in art history, the New Media the- might even say self-absorbed, academic disci- thing like speculative analysis of the deep orist Lev Manovich was invited to speak along- pline that deals with symbolic behavior, clas- psychological and social functions of storytell- side a group of well-known art historians, sification systems, and power sharing within ing and listening, writing and reading in hu- mostly specialists in the modern fields. I had the framework of social life-an aggregation man life. Literary anthropology tries to ac- the sense-perhaps I was mistaken-that of structures and practices described as "cul- count for the historical indispensability of Manovich was looked on by the art historians ture." Early anthropologists conducted re- textual fictions, not only in their rudimentary as at best an eccentric outsider and at worst a search almost exclusively among "incom- or "precivilized" forms but also in their most naive and dangerous spokesman for invisible pletely" civilized peoples, and later ones have complex and aestheticized forms. Belting's forces of globalization and rationalization. spent a great deal of energy extricating their title opens up the wide prospect of a compa- Manovich's references to random access, in- field from the conceptual trouble such a rable inquiry into the social and psychological teractivity, and software and his polite but project invited. That discipline's monopoly meaning of the pictorial arts. profoundly disrespectful observations on the on the word anthropology,which simply means The foregoing only begins to describe the discipline of art history and its obsolete mod- "study of man," is widely accepted. It has be- original context and, as it were, illocutionary els of representation and meaning were as come difficult in the English-speaking world force of this book in Germany. Bild-Anthro- unintelligible as the strange speech of the to use the term anthropologywithout rousing pologie is presented as a program statement Trojan priestess Cassandra in the house of the household gods of the academic disci- for an interdisciplinary research project that Atreus-mere birdlike twitterings to the ears pline that bears it as a name. Art history's Belting, along with nine colleagues, initiated of the doomed. openings onto anthropology are limited in the fall of 2000 at the Hochschule fur The "existing discourse" that exasperates mostly to the so-called non-Western fields. Gestaltung at Karlsruhe.3 He says in the pref- both Manovich and Belting, it would seem, is In Europe, the words Anthropologie, anthro- ace that one of his aims is "to win for native not simply the old empiricist art history, an pologie, antropologia, and so on, are still avail- disciplines of the image [Bildwissenschaften] easy target, but precisely the "new" art history able for general use, in much the same way like art history and archaeology more of a that has internalized critical theory (ideology that psychologyor logic are for English speak- profile within the discourse on media" (p. 9). critique, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis) ers. That is, they are terms that denote orga- Media studies has become a dominant para- over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. Belt- nized academic fields and yet at the same digm within the German-speaking academic ing's argument, were he to spell it out, might time are easily detachable from those con- cosmos to an extent that American art histo- run something like this: critical theory is cer- texts. European historians, for example, have rians can hardly imagine, except perhaps in tainly all about mediation. But it has become BOOK REVIEWS 371 a mere rhetoricof mediation, a set of analytic ended research program. The chapters of this temporal themes like death, body,and time" (p. routines designed to disrupt any possible ex- book open onto a whole new galaxy of re- 23). change of meaning. Critical theory, he might search topics. An example is Belting's entirely The boldest idea of the book, developed say, has become a negative theology that has original genealogy of the 15th-century Neth- over several chapters, is that the true vanish- made an idol of absence itself; it is a self- erlandish panel portrait, already developed in ing point of every picture is the death image, contained and tautological scholasticism in- earlier publications. Belting describes por- the Todesbild.The tomb effigy, the memorial creasingly closed to the perspectives of the traits by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der portrait, and the death mask approach a con- physical sciences, to any true interdisciplinar- Weyden as intensified versions of coats of dition of perfect substitutability for the irre- ity, to the realities of politics, to experience arms painted on shieldlike wooden panels, vocably absent object, the once-living body. itself. Accordingly, Belting is unwilling to sub- which were themselves in turn something like The dead person exchanges his body for an mit the image to any such radical theory of social placeholders for the body of the noble- image; that image holds a place for him mediation (p. 31). Bild-Anthropologiemay in man. The comparison discloses a whole di- among the living (p. 29 and chap. 6). Belting truth be pointing to a new intellectual self- mension of the historical meaning and power describes this exchange, enacted in ancient satisfaction and nonporousness of the disci- of these paintings that modernity had lost cults of the dead, as the archetype of the image- pline of art history in the English-speaking sight of.