C106
article
The
State of Irish Art History
The teaching
of Art History in Ireland: what's it like, and what should
it be like? Here James Elkins gives his take on the matter.
Despite its many self-doubts
(articulated in these pages over the last few years),
it can be argued that Irish art criticism is thriving.
It is well supported by a vigorous art scene and a growing
number of internationalist art galleries. The Lewis Glucksman
Gallery at the University College Cork is just the latest
in a number of initiatives that give Irish art a global
presence.
The ailments of art criticism
are, I think, universal. As a field it suffers from lack
of direction, an absence of exemplary writers, a narrow
historical scope, low prestige, and most recently an aversion
to judgment itself. A sociological survey conducted at
Columbia University has quantified the ills of American
newspaper art criticism, demonstrating that it is low
on the priorities of editors and readers, and showing
that its practitioners make relatively little money (less
than $25,000 on average). The survey also demonstrates
that newspaper and magazine art critics draw on one another
as much as on philosophic or historical sources - not
a good sign for the health of the field.1 Partly
because it is perceived to be without foundation or system,
art criticism is excluded from university curricula except
as an historical subject. None of these ills are specifically
Irish: they are true of art criticism in many countries.
It's also the case that the limited number of art critics
in Ireland ensures that criticism is likely to be read:
it is less apt to fall into the vacuum in which even the
best-known American newspaper critics are compelled to
write.
To an outsider observer - I count
myself as one, although I will soon be a participant -
Irish art history presents a very different face. It can
be argued that unlike art criticism, art history is not
yet a global enterprise. Both art history and art criticism
have their international events, although art history
has nothing like the 'biennale culture' that animates
art criticism. (Art history's international organization,
the CIHA, is less influential and far from global.) With
a few exceptions art-history journals are read only in
the countries that produce them; there is nothing quite
like Artforum or Flash Art which are read
throughout the world. As a result art history has developed
regional and national strains that are measurably different
from one another.
For example, the subjects and
interpretive methods of art history vary widely between
different countries. There is a qualitative difference
between art history as practiced in a few major institutions
- most of them in the United States, Canada, the U.K.,
France, Germany, Denmark, and Japan - and art history
as it is known elsewhere. The central concerns in the
field, including theories of multiculturalism, representations
of gender, forays outside the canon, and explorations
of new interpretive methods, tend to be confined to the
larger universities in the United States, England, France,
and Scandinavia. In such institutions art history is a
rapidly changing field: it is beleaguered by the rise
of separate departments of Film and Media Studies, besieged
by the outlandish proliferation of new media (from CD
games to video phones), and harried by exotic varieties
of visual theory (from reception theory to machine vision).
Even in countries such as Italy, Germany, and Ireland,
discussions of those subjects are often lacking, relegated
to special seminars, or left to neighboring departments
such as Women's Studies.
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James
Elkins: cover of his latest book, published by Routledge,
2003
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The differences
I am describing pertain to North America and Western Europe;
outside those regions art history can be even less attuned
to innovation and experiment. It's as if physicists in
some countries were working with old textbooks that do
not include the last few decades' worth of scientific
discoveries. In Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia,
for example, what takes place under the rubric of 'art
history' is what a North American or Western European
scholar would recognize as curatorial studies or art criticism.
The most influential art historians in India and China
tend to be artists, critics, and curators, who are unfamiliar
with or uninterested in the constitution of art history
as an academic discipline.
These regional
and national differences in what counts as art history
are not theorized or even widely discussed in North America
or Western Europe, where 'art history' continues to be
the name of an enterprise that is taken to be effectively
or potentially global. In Ireland and in Eastern European
countries (including for example the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Romania, and Hungary) art history is taught at a professional
level - it is distinct from art criticism and curatorial
work - but in the natural course of things the historians
concentrate principally on their country's own heritage.
Budget problems and traditional patterns of teaching conspire
to narrow the focus of art-historical research to the
country itself, along with the essential European centers,
typically Italy, France, Spain, Germany and England. The
historical span is typically the middle ages to high modernism,
and the media that are studied are normally painting,
sculpture, and architecture.
The nearly
inevitable settling and retrenchment of art history in
smaller countries such as Ireland makes it unlikely that
art historians engage new interpretive methods or multicultural
concerns; and it means that each country's art historical
scholarship is poorly known outside its borders. (How
many Romanian art historians read Irish art history, even
when both are writing about the Italian Renaissance?)
In my experience, most smaller first-world countries such
as Ireland practice a kind of art history that is in general
- and these can only be general comments, with many brilliant
exceptions - methodologically, chronologically, and geographically
unadventurous. Art history naturally settles into a small
arc of concerns, and there is nothing like art criticism's
strong internationalism to bring it out and help make
contact with other practices.
These conditions
are hard truths only if it seems necessary to claim that
Irish art history is continuous with art history in, say,
UCLA or Norwich. The quiescent and regionally specific
practices of art history in smaller first-world countries
is natural and largely appropriate - and it is a potential
strength, as I will argue.
Given the
disparity between an essentially conservative and regionally
focused art history and an energetic but often incoherent
art world, what can university-based art history contribute
to Irish education? Many developments in contemporary
visual art are better handled in art schools where the
art world is so close and its influence so irresistible
and unpredictable. I think that the very conditions of
art history in Ireland - the relative purity of its practices,
the relatively small size of its offerings - harbor tremendous
opportunities for rapid and radical change. In particular
Irish art history can do at least these six things:
1. Its lecturers
can introduce students to the most recent writing in the
field. In Renaissance studies, for example, new paradigms
and standards are being developed by scholars such as
Alexander Nagel, Christopher Wood, Lyle Massey, and William
MacGregor. In modern studies, the highest-level discourse
is found in scholars such as Thomas Crow, Michael Fried,
T.J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, and Georges Didi-Huberman.
Concerted study of writers like these will ensure that
the students' quiver of methodologies will be well stocked.
The norm for modernist art history in much of the world
(including smaller universities and colleges in the United
States) remains a kind of social art history bent on tracing
the effects of political events and ideas on artworks.
Crow's trenchant and pessimistic critique, T.J. Clark's
troubled ideas about straightforward social art history,
and Karl Werckmeister's aggressive attack on political
passivity, can readily be brought into the taught M.A.
where they would quickly transform postgraduate art history.
2. Irish art
art history departments can also provide systematic, step-by-step
instruction in the principal visual theories, including
psychoanalysis, structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction.
Iconography still has its place (it is arguably the default
method for the discipline as a whole, worldwide), but
the strength of university-based art history is that it
can teach a subject such as poststructuralism very thoroughly,
moving slowly and carefully from its primary sources in
philosophy to its problematic applications in visual art.
(Art schools tend to be less able to provide such graduated
support, and as a result their students normally have
to be content with more scattered encounters with visual
theory.) The methods of art history are subjects in their
own right, with ascending levels of competence and difficulty.
The university's formal structure is the ideal scaffold
for that kind of knowledge.
3. The university
is also the optimal place to augment the traditional sense
of art history as a subject that can be inculcated, in
the way that science or engineering can, with the conviction
that art history is a discipline where ideas must be argued.
As elsewhere in the humanities, some of the best work
is methodologically driven, and it requires that positions
be taken and defended. Such work can turn art history
away from its traditional brief (documenting and preserving
knowledge of cultural monuments) and toward the active
reinterpretation and contestation of visual culture. In
that way the art history department can become a place
where both art and its history are rethought, as they
must be in any living tradition.
4. Irish art
history is strong on architecture, painting, and sculpture,
and it has a wholly necessary emphasis on the various
traditions of Irish art and Irish modernism. But one of
the traits of a vigorous art-historical practice is its
engagement with world art. Some of the most important
and difficult questions facing art history today arise
precisely where the boundaries of the provincial and regional
are broken. There is challenging scholarship being written
on the subjects of multiculturalism and postcolonial theory,
and on art from Precolumbian bas-reliefs to Chinese Taoist
sculpture. Any university can participate in such conversations,
and in so doing it will create links with other arts departments
from anthropology to sociology. It is not necessary to
have a large faculty in order to have the 'luxury' of
hiring an Asianist, nor is it necessary to have students
from that part of the world: in fact the sudden appearance
of such a specialist can have a much more powerful and
unsettling effect than it would in a large university
where the Asianist is one among many specialists.
5. By the
same reasoning, a department that admits the study of
all visual practices, and not just fine art, can forge
links beyond the arts to the sciences, medicine, geography,
and engineering, all of which have their own image-making
practices. In that way a university-based art history
department can become the place where visual practices
throughout the university are studied and discussed. Irish
universities are well placed for that kind of expansion
because their departments are not weighed down by the
many 'programs', 'sequences', and other ad hoc initiatives
that tend to guide interdisciplinary conversations in
large universities in America and England. In a stroke
the art history department - reimagined as a department
of visual studies in general - could become the focus
of visual research across the arts, science, and medicine.
Even conversations on painting would be be transformed
from talk about patronage, symbolism, and quality, to
talk about literature, semiotics, and science.
6. One of
the best opportunities that Irish universities have is
the proximity of a healthy art community. By letting art
criticism and the art market into art history, departments
of art history can effectively leap over the various hybrid
configurations that have been adopted in comparable countries.
(In Denmark, for example, some universities offer mixed
programs of cultural studies, film, aesthetics, art history,
and art practice, which can muffle the potentially explosive
encounter between art history and art criticism.) In my
experience systematic instruction in art criticism is
virtually nonexistent throughout the world, even in art
colleges. Irish universities are in the position to take
art criticism on board all at once and as a whole, including
its history, its theories, its ailments, and its problematic
relation to the art market. An art history department
that offered progressively graded modules in art criticism
could have a immediate impact on the level of discourse
in criticism - and it might well attract new kinds of
students to art history.
In the common
course of events, art history departments respond to the
growth of media studies, world art, and women's studies
either by retrenching and concentrating on the Western
canon, or else by hiring feminist scholars, non-Western
specialists, and lecturers interested in new media. In
that way art history departments move incrementally toward
the heterogeneous globalism that obtains in large universities
such as Berkeley, the University of East Anglia, or Princeton.
For universities in smaller first-world countries such
as Ireland, that process will have to stop at some point,
if only because the expansion of the art history departments
will be stalled by fiscal limitations. That does not mean
Irish art history departments need to reconcile themselves
to peripheral or regional roles in the discipline as a
whole; nor does it mean the best course is to retrench
and play to existing strengths in post-classical Western
sculpture, painting, and architecture. The answer, I think,
is to radically remake the art history curriculum from
the bottom up, starting with the assumption that the department's
proper purview is nothing less than visual practices across
the entire university and out into the art market. Irish
universities are ideally situated for that move because
their departments of art history aren't encumbered by
the entrenched multiculturalism and obligatory diversity
that can stifle genuinely radical growth in larger universities.
The opportunity is enormous, and there for the taking.
James
Elkins will be Chair of the Department of Art History,
University of Cork, beginning January 2004; see www.imagehistory.org.
