Patterns in Shadows

7/27/2019 Patterns in Shadows

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/patterns-in-shadows 1/13

http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/portfolio/patterns-in-the-shadows/

Page 1 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

Michael A. Holly

Writing about the distant past. Recycling images from a time long gone, putting them “on display” yetagain. Why do art historians do it? What kinds of intellectual and psychic needs does it satisfy? Incomparing history to science, Erwin Panofsky once poignantly remarked: “The humanities . . . are not

faced by the task of arresting what otherwise would slip away, but of enlivening what would otherwiseremain dead. Instead of dealing with temporal phenomena, and causing time to stop, they penetrateinto a region where time has stopped of its own accord, and try to reactivate it;” a sentiment1reminiscent of Walter Benjamin who claimed that “an appreciation of the transience of things, and theconcern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses of allegory.” By this reckoning,2history-writing is an allegorical art of the first order. Often invoked as the trope that defines modernity,the concept is also appropriate for characterizing the postmodernist historian’s dilemma: why do thoseof us who write about the past still cling to the hope that historical meaning can be discovered, even aswe recognize the absolute futility of finding out where? To quote Julia Kristeva in Black Sun, historical

interpretation is merely the “flaring-up of dead meaning [within] a surplus of [new] meaning.”3

I take it as axiomatic that all written histories are narratives of desire, full of both manifest and latentneeds that exceed the professional mandate to find out what happened and when. And, surely, giventhat the focus of our historical labors is always towards recovering what is lost, one of these primaldesires must be labeled melancholic. There is a vast body of psychoanalytic literature, of course,devoted to the causes and attributes of this pathological state. Theorists from Freud to Karl Abraham toMelanie Klein to D. W. Winnicott, among many others more recently, have written extensively onmourning and the melancholic disposition. For right now, I want to extract three fundamental

interpretive commitments that those who conceptualize the past with this metapsychological discourseall share, although each, of course, is inflected differently in different writers.

The first is that there is “good” and “bad” mourning, normal or pathological. Freud early ondistinguished between simple mourning and melancholia, for the “crushed state” of the latter, heclaims, refuses to relinquish the lost world, leaves the past unresolved, maintains a relationship to whathas come before that continues to fester “like an open wound.” Of course, in reality the two terms are4often synonymous, and pure forms of either mode of grieving are unusual, even in Freud; it makesmore sense to speak of a “continuum or layering.” In this essay I want to maintain the distinction, if 5only tropologically, in order to characterize certain kinds of art history writings. Secondly, despite this

pathology, as Aristotle recognized and Dürer visually allegorized, the “black bile” that infects thephysiology of its saturnine victim can be clarified and liquified into a fountain of creative inspiration. To6quote Benjamin again, who saw in this engraving an anticipation of the world-weariness of the Baroquesensibility: “the utensils of active life are lying around unused on the floor, as objects of contemplation.. . . Pensiveness is characteristic above all of the mournful.” The melancholic personality, though7often in solitary retreat from the world, can also evince a manic, creative side, a symptomatology thatinvests the state of melancholia with redemptive possibilities. ”Loss, bereavement, and absence,”8according to Kristeva, “trigger the work of the imagination and nourish it permanently as much as theythreaten it and spoil it.” And in doing so, they invoke the third, principle which Melanie Klein has called9

the activity of “reparation” : the absence of the past is most effectively–and poignantly–compensated10for through the presence of objects, which is to say that the work of mourning is often expended andworked through material things. For several decades, varying perspectives on object-loss andobject-recovery, in fact, have constituted the primary way of conceptualizing and differentiating theprocesses of mourning in psychoanalytic theory. “It is typical of the patient in established pathological


http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/portfolio/patterns-in-the-shadows/#fn-1013-1
























Page 2 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

mourning” [what Freud called melancholia], “that the significance of the ‘stranded object’ [in Eric11Santner's evocative phrase ]does not fade as it does in uncomplicated mourning. Rather, it12increasingly commands his attention with its aura of mystery, fascination, and terror.”13

All three of these traits have implications for the historiographic episode that I am about to relate, but itis the last that has the greatest resonance for art historical scholarship in general, engaged as thediscipline always has been in the elegiac paradox of writing about an absent past through the enduringmaterial presence of works of art. Recovering their meaning is our mission. What are all these

remnants of the past, these fragments of time doing here? From whence comes this mania for collecting–altarpieces, masks, papyri, garden sculptures, etc.? As Adorno once remarked, “the Germanword [museumlike] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer nomuseal

longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying.” Across the ages, these14fragments of the past, as Benjamin allegorized, amass into a heap of often-unrecyclable ruins thatgrows skyward under the melancholic eyes of , the angel of history who is pushed Angelus Novus

backwards by the winds of change through time. In the aftermath of actual loss, the very materiality of objects (objects lost, but continuously refound) presents art historians with a profound challenge for ever seeing the past as over and gone.

I want to think about the ways in which art historical writing as a genre is derived from, or evenempowered by, a melancholic connection to the past through the historical objects of art it appropriatesas its own. Yet, to see how the past haunts the present in the historiographic record, I need to makethe topic manageable by selecting a specific example. Michael Baxandall’s collected writing providesan apt melancholic allegory.

A bit of a biographical aside. Nearly a quarter of a century ago I entered my first year of graduatetraining in art history, sure of what I hoped to find. I wanted to read canonical Renaissance monuments

as documents, as visual embodiments of certain cultural and social attitudes, and to do so I sought aneducation in the word and image studies of the Warburg school. That first semester brought severalshocks to the secure investigative paradigm I had devised: encountering a text by Derrida in a latemedieval literature course; being assigned the task of writing all that I could possibly “see” in the detailsof a seventeenth-century allegorical painting; and hearing Michael Baxandall (straight from theWarburg Institute, no less) present a startling lecture on why the engineering ingenuity that led to theconstruction of the Firth of Forth bridge might have implications for writing the history of art.

Disparate as these challenges may have seemed at the time, in retrospect it is easy to regard them ashistorically intertwined. It was a disciplinary moment pregnant with the possibilities of what was tocome, a time in which both the published essays and the public musings of Michael Baxandall werepoised to play a crucial role. The treachery of language, the unsettlement (for good or ill) of deconstruction, the anguish over objectivity in historical writing, all were issues that would clearlymotivate his many and varied writings. The perplexing irony that confronts the historiographer of thisrecent disciplinary past, however, is Baxandall’s reluctance, even principled refusal, to situate hiswork–at least overtly–inside this larger field of debate. It is as though poststructuralist thought hadpassed him by even though he was in the midst of its unsettlement. Consequently, one of the intriguingissues about his corpus of writing for me is the question of why sustained attention to problems inhistorical explanation always appears grounded in the conviction that one can seek clarity only byremaining in the shadows, in the reflected light of contemporary theory. His muteness is mostsuggestive, not only for understanding his particular evolution as a historian and critic of the visual arts,but also for considering how his work could itself be read as an allegory of the desires and














Page 3 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

insufficiencies of a poststructuralist history of art. Ironically, Baxandall has earned thiscommendation–with which he might not be so comfortable–in the process of arguing how the disciplineis destined to remain forever “sub-theoretical.”15

Rather than pedantically try to locate some of the many sites in his texts upon which I can trace theghostly footprints of an engagement with critical initiatives from speech act to discourse theory (of which I know he was well aware), I would prefer to consider Baxandall’s collected essays as a powerfulexercise in the art of writing history melancholically, an exercise in the art of renunciation. All of his16

work is grounded in an acknowledgment of loss, in the recognition of time’s passing. And criticaltheory, he seems to suggest, only serves to distance us further from the “superior” objects–thoseevocative material ruins–that seduce our imaginations into eternally unconsummated encounters.17Among many other things, Baxandall’s scholarly career has been a sustained reflection on theimpossibility of closing the gap opened up between words and images in the practice of art history thathe inherited, the discipline that supposedly exists in order to bring the two realms of experience intosome sort of congruency. In this awareness, I would argue, he has been as sensitive as Derrida to18the incapacity of language to make contact with its referent, although this position has not inhibited himfrom trying. The sage conscience of the discipline of art history, the intelligent voice that has for a long

time tempered critical excess, put interpretive issues into historical perspective, and reminded us all of how we should and should not proceed when it comes to the historical explanation of works of art, isnevertheless philosophically committed to an act of renunciation, to the futility of ever actually beingable to write the history of art. In this sentiment, I would reiterate, Baxandall’s is a fundamentallypostmodernist point of view. The elegiac motives of his historical narratives are as transparent as hishistorical insights.

On the other hand, Baxandall really does believe that art history, as a humanistic discipline, standsapart from other fields of contemporary inquiry. His defense of its distinctiveness–grounded in the

fundamental distinction between words and images–is evident in everything he has ever written. The19visual arts demand different modes of attention (a key concept in every text) than other historical20artifacts. Part of the explanation for this conviction lies in his awareness of the paradox that althoughvisual objects created in the past continue to exist in the present, their original meanings have beenalmost forever lost to time. The result of this kind of condition, as Giorgio Agamben has phrased it inreference to the poetry of mourning, is a “loss without a lost object. . . . in melancholia the object isneither appropriated nor lost, but both possessed and lost at the same time.” The recognition of near 21defeat, however, is what initiates the process of consolation, aimed towards the achievement of whatrecent object-relations theorists might call “elegiac reparations.” The implications of this state of 22

affairs for delving into the historiographic unconscious of the word and image studies of the Warburgtradition are obvious. The only way to “recover” the meanings of the objects that always already exist,even in part, is through linguistic endeavors. “The humanities”–I remind you of the earlier passage fromPanofsky–”are not faced by the task of arresting what would otherwise slip away, but enlivening whatwould otherwise remain dead.”23

The intellectual tradition out of which Baxandall comes can thus be identified as playing a crucial role inboth how and what he writes, but with a twist. It is the inexorability–indeed the paradox–of earlymodern works of art both being here and not being here simultaneously that has generated not only

the allegorical excitement of his writing, but also two generations of Warburg Institute scholars whopreceded him. And to a historian, not so surprisingly, they were iconographers of both the figure andtrope of melancholy. In Baxandall’s own reflections on the representational afterlife of theRenaissance, I want to argue, the subject matter of melancholy has become less significant than itstranslation into a historiographic point of view.
























Page 4 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

As far as predecessors go, the most demonstrative in his fascination in general with visual artifacts aspsychic repositories of time, and the astrological embodiment of the melancholic temperament inparticular, was, of course, Aby Warburg. In his desperate lifelong project of proving how the forces of enlightenment and reason should ultimately triumph over the forces of darkness and irrationality, hecharted the accomplishments of Luther, Ficino, and Dürer, each of whom was able to overcomesuperstitious speculation by transmuting the ancient demonic influences of Saturn into emblems of Renaissance creativity. The iconological enterprise that Warburg “invented” was devoted to tracing the

, or afterlife, of antique images as they reemerged in supposedly more domesticated guisesNachleben

in later ages. One could claim that the Warburg Institute itself was founded on the premise that thesurvival of images (however elusive) provides us with the only (indirect) access we (might possibly)have to the shadowy and potentially threatening legacy of the past. In his library’s project,Mnemosyne

Warburg compulsively arranged and rearranged assorted reproductions of visual artifacts, bothhistorical and contemporary, on large exhibition screens in the hopes of detecting underlyingconnections among them.

A similar fascination with both the presence and absence of cultural memory from the ancient to theearly modern world was perpetuated in Warburg’s successors’ more sober academic interests.

Refining the iconological “method” of monitoring the migration of a pictorial theme from one social andintellectual world to another, Fritz Saxl and Panofsky published their influential monograph on Dürer’sengraving of in 1923. Extending Warburg’s investigations into the fortunes of thisMelencolia

centuries-old astral personification, the two Institute collaborators were able to trace the iconographicroute through which the medieval conception of a saturnine and debilitating temperament hadmetamorphosed in the Renaissance into an allegory of the incapacity of genius to put its theories intopractice.24

Perhaps the thinker who can best map the psychic terrain upon which I wish to locate Baxandall’s

idiosyncratic brand of melancholic history writing, however, is Walter Benjamin, the perennial outsider.Try as he might to gain the recognition of the scholars of the Warburg Institute (Panofsky in particular),Benjamin was fated to pursue his inquiries into melancholia in isolation. ComposingThe Origin of

in the mid-twenties, he generously acknowledged Warburg, Panofsky, andGerman Tragic Drama25Saxl as sources. The intellectual home, however, that he had hoped to attain from these contemporaryallies, who, one commentator charges, might even have “averted his early death,” was not forthcoming.

But that is another, more sorrowful story. What makes the ideas of Benjamin so suggestive for a26late twentieth-century reading of the works of Michael Baxandall is not so much his lack of institutionalsupport from thinkers in early twentieth-century Germany with whom he shared a fascination with the

historical vicissitudes of the figure of Melancholy, as is his poignant understanding of the transhistoricalconnections between the “discarded” ruins of the past and their contemplation by melancholichistorians on the other side of time.

Ostensibly, Benjamin’s is about Baroque “mourning plays” (Origin of German Tragic Drama Trauerspiel

), convoluted productions in which martyrs are sacrificed to ancient values that they themselves aredoomed never to fulfill. A deeper reading quickly reveals, however, that the text (unrecognized exceptby a few for the first thirty years of its existence) comprises a “chain of reflections on the nature of aesthetic objects, on the metaphysical presumptions of allegory, on language in general, and on the

problem, obsessive to Benjamin, of the relations between a work of art and the descriptive-analyticdiscourse of which it is the target.” Today the work is heralded as one of the most significant texts in27twentieth-century literary criticism, principally because of its explorations into both the impossibility of














Page 5 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

achieving “objective” meaning on the part of the “subjective” interpreter, and, nevertheless, theabsolute necessity of doing so. The phenomenology of the ways in which sentiments become bound toobjects (or fail to) was, for Benjamin, a study in the dynamics of the melancholic disposition:

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption itembraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them. . . .The persistence which isexpressed in the intention of mourning, is born of its loyalty to the world of things. . . . The concept of the pathological state, in which the most simple object appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic

wisdom because it lacks any natural, creative relationship to us [had been memorably emblematizedfor him by Dürer's portrayal of , in which]. . . the utensils of active life are lying aroundMelencolia

unused on the floor, as objects of contemplation.28

While Benjamin’s own meditation on the ruins of the contemplative life has nothing directly to do withthinking about the connectedness of an archival art historian (Baxandall or otherwise) to the materialobjects that are the raison d’être of professional inquiry, its metaphorical suggestiveness for this mostprimal of disciplinary obsessions is undeniable. There is nothing self-evident about the compulsion towrite present words about past works of art. In Benjaminian terms, such activity could be construed as

an allegorical enterprise (saying one thing while attempting to grasp a very different other) of the firstorder. Words will unceasingly misrepresent images, and in their mismatch unlock the gates of aninterpretive hell through which the demons of ambiguity, indeterminancy, and meaninglessness cometumbling out. Images are inevitably lost to the forms of intelligibility with which the world of thehumanities has grown most epistemologically secure: that is the essential paradox of writing the historyof art.

Of this predicament, Michael Baxandall is acutely aware. A history that is rooted in written documentsis difficult enough to execute; a narrative written out of a “loyalty to the world of [visual] things” is an

assignment in exasperation. The very tactility of objects that have survived the ravages of time in order to exist in the present confounds the historian who must retroactively turn them back into past ideas,social constructs, documents of personality, or whatever a couple of generations of Warburg scholarshave traditionally been up to in the variety of their iconological quests. Ransacking the holdings of libraries and archives in order to provide context is an accepted disciplinary pursuit, but its legitimacymasks something of its basic absurdity. In their obdurate resistance to such an easy mediationbetween past and present, the still stilled works of art are capable of provoking a heuristic despair thatis difficult to overcome. The “contemplative paralysis” that arises from the recognition of an inability towrite definitive history (or, even more perhaps to act in it) is, for Benjamin, the essential trait of the

mournful sensibility.

Because of the futility of its efforts to make the impermanent permanent (which is to say the permanentmore permanent), to arrest the flux of time into images that both defy and glorify its passing, theallegorical understanding has been assured the status of the quintessential postmodernist art, anachievement that places this literary trope on a par with a variety of late twentieth-century art practicesdevoted to ruins, fragments, hybrids, and supplements. Such is the thesis of Craig Owens, who not solong ago elaborated an insightful and persuasive theory of postmodern art based on the return of the“allegorical impulse.” “From the will to preserve the traces of something that was dead, or about to die,”he claimed, “emerged allegory.” Drawing its “nourishment” from melancholy, the postmodern sensibilityof the late twentieth-century revels in the awareness of its own mortality: “the inevitable dissolution anddecay to which everything is subject.”29

Though profoundly melancholic, such an interpretive sentiment, as Benjamin had both hoped andanticipated, is not devoid of redemptive possibilities. “An appreciation of the transience of things, and










Page 6 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

the concern to rescue them for eternity,” which happens to be “one of the strongest impulses inallegory” can also yield its own scholarly consolations: “Pensiveness,” as he moralized, “ischaracteristic above all of the mournful.” Mourning does not necessarily obviate–in fact, it might be30responsible for–the ecstasy that can arise from a confrontation with the lost “other”. The melancholicattitude is not only responsible for acts of renunciation; it can also ultimately engender an historicalpractice that is founded on an ethical obligation to the past in all of its reality, however fragmentary andincomplete its afterlife in the library or museum may be. The opacity that is the hallmark of theallegorical sensibility is precisely what motivates the unceasing efforts to activate the past over andover again: “Allegory [is] the arbitrary rule in the realm of dead objects.” Past objects are “dead” only31until they are enlivened by present understanding; yet, on the other hand, it is always their presence inthe first place that provokes the contemporary historian into interpretive action. The relationship is oneof dialogue, “where the present is real but the past is also real.”32

The resonance of these sentiments for thinking about Michael Baxandall’s lifelong work seems to meto be patent. It is this allegiance to the thing itself, and not its discursive explanations in thephilosophical, historical, and theoretical words that have a tendency to envelop and thereby seal awaythe visual immediacy of a work, that might explain Baxandall’s reluctance to make any interpretive

move that does not take its cue from the representation itself. The inadequacy of language and theimpossibility of historical recovery are the two negatory premises from which his ultimately affirmingwork derives. “The basic absurdity of verbalizing about pictures,” has been a theme coursing33through all of his writing, but so too has been the clear commitment to the inexorability of doing so. It isthe tension between the two that has generated both melancholic resignation and methodologicalcaution as two sides of the same coin. His obviously represents the culmination of Patterns of Intention

this attitude, but, in one guise or another, it has been there from the start.

Ostensibly Baxandall’s Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the

of 1971 is, as the lengthy subtitle suggests, about theDiscovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450 rise (or recovery) of art criticism in the early Renaissance. A deeper reading quickly reveals,34however, that the text, like Benjamin’s, comprises a chain of reflections on the nature of language, theconcept of pictorial composition, the art of classification, and on the problem, obsessive to Baxandall,of the relations between a work of art and the critical discourse of which it is the target. Theproblematic is a straightforward one: “Any language, not only humanist Latin, is a conspiracy againstexperience in the sense of being a collective attempt to simplify and arrange experience intomanageable parcels.” Attending to paintings is the product of naming rather than looking. This is the35most primal, unavoidable, and irrevocable loss. What does not fall within the purview of established

schemes stays in remainder, always on the outside of the framing propensity of language. That36absence is then deepened by time’s distancing. Language makes vanish what it first sought topreserve: the compelling visuality of the work of art. As it struggles to signify what once was, therhetoric of the art historian represents, in the terms of deconstruction, “not the thing but the absence of the thing and so it is implicated in the loss.”37

Yet, surely that overstates the case. Despite late twentieth-century critical theory’s obsession with theemptiness and meaninglessness at the heart of language, Baxandall still carries something of the faithin its recuperative powers. To paraphrase Freud, an acknowledgement of loss initiates the authentic “

of mourning” the past. The salvation of historical discourse in both Benjamin and Baxandallwork depends on it. At the same time as it takes something away from the beholder of works of art,language offers the powerful consolation of “a system of concepts through which attention might befocused.” Embracing “dead objects in its contemplation in order to redeem them,” attention (in38Baxandall the concept nearly merits capitalization) serves as the temperate historian’s antidote to
























Page 7 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

melancholia, or “pharmakon” in Derrida’s terms: both the poison and the cure. What Baxandall had39found so admirable about the humanist enterprise was its ability to think “tightly” in words about visualmatters, a mission that eventuated in the giant historical leap forward in art criticism between 1300 and1500. “The difference, ” he says, was “measurable in categories and constructions lost and found.”40Finding something is better than losing it. It is just easier to talk about some things rather than others.

As his next book, , set out to demonstrate, one of Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy

those things was addressing Quattrocento paintings as a “deposit” of “a commercial relationship,” or as

“fossils of economic life.” Of course, one could read this popular empirical text as an elaborate41defense against the brooding contemplativeness of . There are no darkGiotto and the Orators

unknowables lurking here; only manifest pictorial codes derived from vernacular conventions, such astraditions of measurement, the economic worth of paints, and habits of gesture in sermons and dance.Perhaps that is what makes this text so accessible. Categories of experience are highlighted so as toenable the viewer to “attend” to Quattrocento works of art in “distinctly Quattrocento ways.”42Language here clarifies rather than obfuscates, and its careful use assures the student of theRenaissance that she or he can actually gain access to this “special intellectual world.” The idiom of 43this text always promises transparency. There actually once was a historical world out there, whose

visualizing activity became embodied in its works of art. Deciphering it is fundamentally a matter of recognizing the brightness of the signs.

It is the shadows, however, that I prefer to attend to in the work of Baxandall, no doubt taking my cuefrom his own fascination with the penumbral as most recently manifested in hisShadows and

of 1995. “How,” he asks there, “do shadows work, not just in the physical world, but inEnlightenment

our minds?” –an interesting question not only for perceptual psychologists but for historiographers as44well. In of 1980 there is a wonderfully descriptiveLimewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany

passage that provides some insight into Baxandall’s own capacity for paying attention to the

ephemerally perceived. Trying to capture in words the visual effect of a Tilman Riemenschneider wooden altarpiece in a dusky church interior, he sits in front of it for many hours in order “to let the sunrun its course.” From the shadows of early morning, to the “dead period in the middle of the day” thatcauses it to look “rather like its photographs” (a melancholic irony for those who can only look at it

to the crepuscular aura of late afternoon, he watches the changethrough reproductions) Last Supper

not only in illumination but also in significance. Given my predisposition to heed the pensive45melancholy in so many of Baxandall’s words, I cannot but read the description of his physicalexperience here as a metaphor for his own metaphysical preoccupations. The easy mediation betweenpresent and past in has metamorphosed in this text into a dimmer, morePainting and Experience

resigned affair, but one not without its compensatory satisfactions. Even though the analytic confidencein the retrieval capabilities of language is sustained in this stunning study of a neglected artistic genre,at the same time Baxandall demonstrates no reservations about delighting in what remainsunnamable:

There is no question of fully possessing oneself of another culture’s cognitive style, but the profit isreal: one tests and modifies one’s perception of the art, one enriches one’s general visual repertory,and one gets at least some intimation of another culture’s visual experience and disposition. Suchexcursions into alien sensibilities are a main pleasure of art.46

Melancholic joy, in other words, need not be an oxymoron. In Roland Barthes’ last book, thebittersweet , written at the same time as Baxandall’s , he invokesCamera Lucida Limewood Sculptors

what he calls the “punctum,” the unnamable something frequently present in old photographs and thatfor him was embodied in an ideal photograph of his dead mother. The punctum is what testifies to akind of “subtle –as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see.” A similar beyond 47
























Page 8 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

sentiment seems to underwrite all the varied topics and periods upon which Baxandall has turned hisown attention. It is as if he himself has scanned the artistic canon, seeking, like Barthes, for that insightor moment of contact that he already knows is forever foreclosed. “What I can name,” Barthesremarks, “cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name,” however, “is a good symptom of disturbance.” ”A good symptom of disturbance,” of course, is most likely either the cause or the48effect of melancholic yearning. It is the source of a similar “subtle beyond” in the works of Baxandallthat I have been struggling to name: the attitude or conviction that eludes definition but yet seems toshadow all the many things he has had to say. Fortunately, he has left a couple of clues lying around–itis tempting to picture them as the discarded objects in Dürer’s engraving of Melancholia–in his owncuriously “ruined” historiographic exercise of 1985.

In a remarkable essay, in an issue of on the assigned topic of “Art or Society: MustRepresentations

We Choose?”, Baxandall boldly drew attention to the shortcomings to which his particular brand of historiography was subject. Setting out to parallel Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth-century pictorialallegories of good and bad government in the Siennese town hall with political and social eventssurrounding their execution, he ended up writing a consciously fragmented allegory about good andbad art history writing. His original essay on art-in-context, he claimed, in short, could not be written.

Plagued by the sense that “there was something wrong about anything approaching a one-to-onerelation between pictorial thing and social thing,” he despairs of ever making matches between“analytical concepts from two different kinds of categorization of human experience,” which is,essentially, to return to the futility of explaining works of vision through verbal constructs. It all comes49back to the perfidy of language and the inevitable melancholy it trails in its wake. Short of descendinginto sheer inactivity–the psychic state of Dürer’s personification of Melancholia–there are only twosolutions: either write a poor and perfunctory social history of art or retreat to the basics and attempt tosort out the use of incongruous analytic concepts: “I hope. . . that we might do what we do rather better if we were clearer about what it is we are doing.” In this disingenuously simple statement, the50

hidden agenda for the apparently confident (published in the same year, 1985)Patterns of Intention

was laid down.

The book is a wonderfully provocative, but maddeningly cautious, meditation on trying yet again tomake words say something authentic about images. That it both masterfully succeeds andself-consciously falls short (after a formidable number of constraints are levied upon what can belegitimately claimed) is entirely consonant with Baxandall’s wry sense of what it means to try and writean art historical narrative:

The problem [as always] is the interposition of words and concepts between explanation and object of explanation. . . . [W]e explain pictures only in so far as we have considered them under some verbaldescription or specification.51

As Baxandall is chronically aware, what is left out of this habitual disciplinary praxis is the “authority of pictorial character, forms and colours,” and other such crucial aspects of visuality. The solution of “inferential criticism”–that which “entails the imaginative reconstruction of causes, particularly voluntarycauses or intentions within situations” –that he proposes is typically one born on the margins of 52pictorial intelligibility:

. . . their authority is primary, if we take the visual medium of pictures with any seriousness at all; they,not symbols, are the painter’s language. . . . It is possible to give a shadow-account of articulation bynot flouting it.53

Yet indirection is not the only course of action open to the savvy critic: concepts and objects “should


















Page 9 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

reciprocally sharpen each other” at every turn, with one revealing qualification. Whatever we infer 54historically about works of art–which is to say however much we reconstruct “briefs,” contexts,circumstances, and situations–in the end the narrative’s ostensive relation to the historical picture isitself mediated by the present:

We are interested in the intention of pictures and painters as a means to a sharper perception of thepictures, [my italics]. It is the picture as covered by a description [his italics] that wefor us in our terms

are attempting to explain.55

On this unacknowledged poststructuralist foundation of subjectivity, Baxandall’s interpretive edificestands.

What it refuses to sacrifice to the demands of self-reflexivity, however, is the conviction that the past,though lost, merits every one of its serious attempts at comprehension. While the gulf between pastand present, word and image, assures the historian of art that her or his enterprise will always be anincomplete, and hence melancholic, one, the quest for pictorial meaning is far from nugatory (and in

). While “thethis sense ends up being more mournful than melancholic in classic psychoanalytic terms

starting point” in any art historical narrative, as he claimed in Patterns of Intention, “is a sense thatthere is some sort of affinity between a kind of thought and a kind of painting,” when it comes to56some art (“only superior paintings will sustain explanation of the kind we are attempting: inferior paintings are impenetrable” [!] ), neither historical nor critical words of explanation are sufficient:57“Painting persist[s] against, or simply despite, the grain of theory.”58

Like Walter Benjamin, Baxandall finds himself “marooned” in a world of “stranded objects” that demandrecognition, and oftentimes that translates into “reading” them from a vantage point on the other side of time. Heeding the intellectual and social contexts that have enveloped works of art through history is59

one of the routes towards appreciating their primary intentions. But, and this must be emphasized,60such historical understanding will never quite take us there. The chasm between words and images,past and present, can never–unlike the Firth of Forth–be bridged by a dazzling act of interpretiveingenuity. In the midst (and mists) of loss, the perceptive historian must above all keenly attend to thepaintings themselves and focus on their distinctly pictorial constructions of meaning. In the process,she or he will put into effect a fair critical, though inevitably flawed, program:

What we have [for example, in Chardin's] [ A Lady Taking Tea in its own way a more domestic portrait

] is an enacted record of attention which weof saturnine melancholy or pensive solitude than Dürer's

ourselves, directed by distinctness and other things, summarily re-enact, and that narrative of attention

is heavily loaded: it has foci, privileged points of fixation, failures, characteristic modes of relaxation,awareness of contrasts, and curiosity about what it does not succeed in knowing.61

In the concluding paragraph to her essay on “Beauty” in her own book on melancholy, ,The Black Sun

Julia Kristeva memorably remarks that the imaginative capacity “of Western man” discovers itself anewthrough its “ability to transfer meaning to the very place where it was lost in death and/or nonmeaning.” A more eloquent evocation of the motives underlying Michael Baxandall’s rhetorics of loss62than that–however “irrational and wild” he would consider my historiographic sentiment to be–I63cannot imagine. Continuing curiosity about what the scholar will never be able completely to know

seems to me to be the most noble, though undeniably melancholic, critical endeavor of all.

This historiographic example of one notable art historian, I hope, can itself serve as an allegory of arthistorical writing in general, which is, I have been claiming, an essentially sentimental occupation. I amtempted to argue that the discipline of art history is eternally fated to be a melancholic one, primarily


























Page 10 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.8.9.10.

11.

12.13.14.

15.

because the objects it appropriates as its “own” always keep the wound open (the cut between presentand past, word and image)–resistant to interpretation, they nonetheless insistently provoke it. Of course, writing never heals. And yet, there are degrees of relationship to the past that range along thespectrum from melancholic to the mournful, from the productive to the incapacitating. The point is: Pastimages, material objects of art, are forever beyond the capacity of present words to capture.Melancholy– let us acknowledge it–must be the constant companion of the historian. An historical workwill always elude the traps of contemporary points of view. That recognition is as much a cause for celebration as it is consolation. There is, as Nietzsche forewarned us, “a right time to forget as well asa right time to remember.” If meaning is the ultimate loss, then new meanings must be made.64

© Journal of InVisible Culture, 1998

Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” Meaning in the Visual Arts

(Garden City: Doubleday, 1955), 24.Walter Benjamin, , trans. John Osborne (London: Verso,The Origin of German Tragic Drama

1925), 223.Julia Kristeva, , trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia

Columbia University Press, 1989), 102.Sigmund Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie” (“Mourning and Melancholia,” 1917), trans. James

Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

, vol. 19, 239-258.Works of Sigmund Freud

Eric Santner, (Ithaca:Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany

Cornell University Press, 1990), 3.For recent intellectual histories of the concept of melancholy (especially in the

pseudo-Aristotelian text of the ), see both Max Pensky,Problemata Melancholy Dialectics: Walter

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), andBenjamin and the Play of Mourning

Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious(London: Routledge, 1995).Psychology

Benjamin, 139-140.As seen, for example, in the writings of Walter Benjamin. See Pensky, passim.Kristeva, 9.Melanie Klein, , ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 1987).The Selected Melanie Klein

See, for example, Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalysis,

(Ann Arbor, 1992), 10. The authorsFeminism, and the Search for the “Good Enough” Mother

point out that Klein’s focus on reparations in her later writings leads directly to Winnicott’s focus

on external objects and the environment. See D. W. Winnicott, , ed.Psycho-analytic ExplorationsClaire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press, 1989).

Vamik Volkan, Linking Objects and Linking Phenomena: A Study of the Forms, Symptoms,

(New York: International UniversitiesMetapsychology, and Therapy of Complicated Mourning

Press, 1981), 101.The title of Santner’s book. See footnote 5.Volkan, 101.Quoted in James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the

(Bloomington, Indiana, 1990), 184; from Benjamin, “ValeryConsequences of InterpretationProust Museum,” in Theodor Adorno, , trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge,Prisms

Massachusetts,: MIT Press 1981), 175. (New Haven and London:Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures

Yale University Press, 1985), 13; later in this same text (35) he refers to his deliberately “very low








Page 11 of 13 Jul 29, 2013 11:17:45AM MDT

16.

17.18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.24.

25.

26.

and simple theoretical stance.” In an early review of this book, Adrian Rifkin remarks howBaxandall always manages to convey “a tone of boredom and disdain at the engagement withphilosophical difficulty . . . discharging his involvement as an unwelcome obligation. . . . but as heis anyway deeply implicated in a complex of debates, he may as well have been more openabout their terms of reference,” 9 (June 1986): 275. Art History

Freud, of course, in “Mourning and Melancholia” drew a very deliberate distinction betweenthe symptoms, causes, and effects of these two psychic states. I have chosen to elide them herein order to characterize a more generalized historiographic attitude, although there are timeswhen it is more analytically useful to consider the unconscious dimensions of melancholia.

, 120.Patterns of Intention

Svetlana Alpers was aware of this predicament from the start: “The most commandingdefinition of meaning in the visual arts in this century–iconography according to Panofsky–has atextual base. . . . But is there really no difference between an image and a text, such that one’sattention to it, and hence one’s account of it, would be different? Baxandall’s answer is, clearly,yes.” , July 14 – 21, 1986, 36.The New Republic

Here he forecasts W.J.T. Mitchell’s preoccupation with the same issues in his Iconology:

(Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1986).Image, Text, Ideology

In his recent , New Haven and London, 1995, 135-136,Shadows and Enlightenment

Baxandall uses the concept of attention to emblematize his general approach to the socialunderstanding of art:

A viable model for thinking about some aspects of art and culture is precisely as a market inattention itself, an exchange of attentions valuable to the other. We and the artist collude in asocially institutionalized assignation to barter our respective attentions. He values our attentionfor many reasons, and not only because it may be associated with whatever sort of materialreward the culture offers: his social identity and his sense of his own humanity are complexly

involved in the transaction. We, on the other hand, attend to the deposit or representation of hisattention to life and the world because we find it enjoyable or profitable, sometimes evenimproving. The transaction is not symmetrical: he values the attention we direct at him and his;we value the attention he directs at life and the world. He values us as representatives of ageneral humanity; we value him for a specialised faculty, even if perhaps articulating a generalhuman quality. But the pattern is still that of a market, with choice on both sides and reciprocalagency.

Giorgio Agamben, , trans. Ronald L.Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture

Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 20-21.Wendy Wheeler, “After Grief: What Kinds of Inhuman Selves?” 25 (1995):New Formations

90.Panofsky, 24.”Dürers ‘Melencolia I’: Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung,”Studien der

2, 1923.Bibliothek Warburg

, conceived in 1916, written in 1925, and published inUrsprung des deutschen Trauerspiels

1928, has been translated by John Osborne as .The Origin of German Tragic Drama

George Steiner, in his “Introduction” to , 19. For aThe Origin of German Tragic Drama

history of this “non-encounter” between Benjamin and the Warburg Institute, see the footnotes toMax Pensky’s account, 263-264, as well as Thomas Levin, “Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History,” 47 (Winter 1988), 77-83. For a study of Benjamin’s connections (or lack of)October

to both the Warburg Institute and the Vienna School of Art History, see Wolfgang Kemp, “Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft. Teil 1: Benjamins Beziehungen zur Wiener Schule,” and








49.50.51.52.53.54.55.56.57.58.

59.60.

61.62.63.

64.

”Art, Society, and the Bouguer Principle,” 12 (Fall 1985): 39-40.Representations

Ibid., 43. , v, 1.Patterns of Intention

The definition comes from his “The Language of Art History,” 463. , 132-133.Patterns of Intention

Ibid., 34.Ibid., 109. , 76-77.Patterns of Intention

Ibid., 120. , with Svetlana Alpers (New Haven and London: YaleTiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence

University Press, 1994), 2.The terms are Santner’s, 12.“Intention,” he asserts, “is referred to pictures rather more than to painters. . . . It is not a

reconstituted historical state of mind, then, but a relation between the object and itscircumstances,” Patterns of Intention, 42.

Ibid., 102.Kristeva, 103. , 135. These are the two characteristics of historical and critical analysisPatterns of Intention

that Baxandall manifestly shuns.Nietzsche, , 2d ed., trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: LiberalThe Use and Abuse of History

Arts Press, 1957), 8.



Documents

Patterns in Shadows