Chapter 4

A Manifesto, of Sorts

In order to pay full attention to writing, and let it find its voice as the grounding condition of meaning, it is necessary to suspend the habit of reading art history (and related disciplines) as if it is only about the art. The self-imposed protocols of art history extend beyond the ones I listed in chapter 1, because they depend on deeper interests: art history is a form of historical writing, so the writing must appear as history; and it is a branch of the humanities, so the writing must appear as nonfiction. But writing, in its general sense, does not observe those distinctions, so I think it is possible to be open to the possibility that the writing might place both history and the construction of facts in jeopardy. Otherwise any experiment in "interesting writing" on art will still be limited by these deeper assumptions about writing, history, and nonfiction in the humanities.

I would like to see what writing looks like, how it acts and feels, what it can do, when it begins from disciplines like art history, visual studies, art theory, and other practices, and then tries, more or less systematically, to disregard the protocols of of those practices. I am not especially concerned with writing that is polemical about these points, but rather in writing that is careless about them: writing that is free to disregard them, to not notice them—to not feel the pull of academic proprieties.

These are the four kinds of unforced acts of abandonment I would like to explore. The first two are the subject of this project:

1. Relinquish or suspend disciplinary constraints about writing in art history, as in the four points in chapter 1.

2. Relinquish or suspend an interest in writing texts that present themselves as art history or visual studies.

What remains, for me, is the idea of writing on images and, in the end, perhaps not even on images, but alongside images, with images. That is the most general condition of art history, visual studies, art theory, and art criticism, but it is also a wider subject because it includes fiction that uses images, and images that aren't art. The second two, which follow (I hope) from the first, are the subject of the following project, Writing with Images:

3. Relinquish the interest in writing nonfiction.

4. Relinquish the disciplinary interest in writing about art.

What is Interesting Writing in Art History? was born from a dissatisfaction with some existing forms of writing, so it is partly polemical in intent. Still, it's more a personal position than a prescriptive one. It's a matter of attending to the general conditions of what we do—subject of the larger project that comes after, or rather surrounds, this one. Similarly writing that might be fiction or some mixed form is the general condition that gives meaning and focus to writing that understands itself as nonfiction.

What I have in mind is an openness to writing, and what I want to avoid are habits and expectations that present themselves as ways to write optimal art history, theory, or criticism, but are in effect ways of keeping the danger and potential of writing at bay.

Chapter 5

The Idea of Exemplary Writing in Art History

It would be delightful to begin with a canonical text, one that everyone agrees is exemplary of the best of writing in art history. But that isn't possible. At some point in the late 1950s in North America, Erwin Panofsky's English-language style seems to have been taken as optimal, and I have heard the same said about E.H. Gombrich in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the name that came up most in connection with good or admirable writing in art history was probably Michael Baxandall's. (That's him in the photograph—it's almost the only modest-looking photo of any of these historians on the internet.) Even today, Baxandall may be one of the least often criticized of art historians; I only know one mild critique of his work. But his style—a mixture of English academic prose and public-school conversational cadences—is hardly typical of the discipline. It is a significant style, in the sense that his narrative manner allows him the subtleties and intentional ambiguities that are integral to his argument. But his manner wouldn't be a productive starting point.

Another candidate, a half-generation older, is Leo Steinberg, and I contemplated opening this account with him. He is a model for what any of us might achieve if we pay a certain kind of attention to writing: but it is not the kind that most of art historians want to pay. (His writing is the subject of chapter 10.) I also could have started with Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, or other art historians who experimented with personal authorial voices, in the wake of both feminism and deconstruction; but those texts now seem more of their time, and writing influenced by feminisms—including Pollock's—has moved in different directions. (See also chapter 18.)

When I posted a draft of this chapter on social media in 2013, I got many more suggestions: Sydney Freedberg, Anthony Blunt, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, E.H. Gombrich, Daniel Arasse, Clement Greenberg, John Berger, Svetlana Alpers, Georges Didi-Huberman, Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, Thierry de Duve, David Summers, Lucy Lippard, Hal Foster, George Kubler, and Frederic Schwartz. For me they conjure disparate ideas of the discipline, and some seem parts of art history's past. Clark, for example, would sigh at the mention of Freedberg and Blunt, and people who admire Didi-Huberman might scratch their heads over the idea that Kaufmann is a writer in that sense. The discussion reminded me that there is another version of this question, which I would put in the past tense: what has counted as good writing in art history? That question belongs to historiography. My interest here is not only in what counts, now and for the next generation, as plausible models of good writing, but also what is actually emulated. Few of the people on this list are being studied by young art historians as models, and that is why I haven't focused on their work.

In short, there were many choices. My decision to open with a text of Rosalind Krauss is partly an attempt to side-step the problem of finding, or needing to characterize, what "good writing" might be, or has been, in art history. I have the feeling that Krauss's writing is as often criticized as it is emulated, and that it is seldom simply praised. But the writing she and others did remains deeply influential—"deeply" in the sense that many art historians trained in North America and Europe practice modes of writing that are indebted, sometimes indirectly and often unintentionally, to the model provided by the first decade of the journal October. (This is a principal subject in The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing.) This oblique, always qualified, frequently unconscious influence is pervasive in art history. I want to open with texts that are within the discipline's sense of itself, and by that criterion, Krauss is arguably as central as several others.


Speaking about writing in art history…

Before I begin, it may be prudent to say what it means to read for the writing when the writing is done in the name of a discipline like art history, visual studies, or the philosophy of at. There is precious little writing in philosophy on what writing styles mean, and what they do to the philosophy. I like the novel Wittgenstein's Mistress as a way to think about what it means that Wittgenstein's philosophy once existed as notes, even though Wittgenstein scholars write in complete essays. And I learned things about how writing isn't spoken about in philosophy from John Lysaker's Philosophy, Writing, and The Character of Thought. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe showed me something about what it means that Heidegger's prose is so calm, so stentorian. A short but interesting bibliography could be compiled of such books, but nothing of the kind has happened in art history, theory, or criticism, and even in philosophy, those few texts are shouted down by the discipline as a whole.

So the first thing that needs to be said about what it means to talk about writing in art history (or the other fields where writing's purpose is to say something about art) is that the talk is treason. Or more charitably, it's mainly irrelevant. Good writing, in for writers who want to say something about art and also have their work read as art history, theory, or criticism, is simply clear writing. At Williams College in 2011, I got to know Paul Park, a genre novelist in the English Department who was teaching a mandatory course on writing for art history graduate students. His mandate, and his interest, was clear writing: concise, parsimonious, logical prose that said what the students needed to say in the simplest and most forceful manner. In a sense Park was teaching Ciceronian plain style. There's the idea in art history—and in the humanities more broadly—that good writing is fairly unornamented, and then there's the idea that truly good writing is an unexpected bonus, a delightful ornament on scholarship, which can make reading more of a pleasure and help the author convince her readers.

Part of talking about writing in art history, theory, and criticism is therefore indulgence: (1) writing is what people think about when they can, when they have leisure time, but it's not a required subject. Another part of talking about writing is (2) the plain style and its companions in classical rhetoric: direct speech, reasonably free of jargon, which pays attention to its argument. Both of these operate in university seminars, sometimes in succession, sometimes in opposition.

I have in mind both those ways of thinking about art historical writing, and two others. There is also (3) a way of critiquing writing that pays attention the way one pays attention to a novel, a poem, or any other work of serious literature. This is close reading: attending to voice, pace, style, manner, word choice. Being patient and demanding about how the writing becomes expressive, how its message finds its form. Here I would want to apply the full arsenal of literary criticism from Empson to De Man, from Derrida to Perloff. This is an inherently unfair thing to do to writing that hasn't been made for that kind of reading, but my criterion will always be that whatever is said about style, manner, and voice has to be connected to what the scholar meant to communicate. In other words: no carping about writing unless the writer's choices have a nameable effect on what is being argued. In that way close reading, no matter how unusual it is in art history, is pertinent.

And finally there is a sort of reading that is radical, and I will not be doing much of it, but it is presupposed in each of these three strategies. This is (4) reading nonfiction as if it is fiction. It is probably not yet possible to do that with Krauss's texts: they are still close to us in time, and their themes and dramatis personae are still largely our own. But a time will come, as it does for all writers, when Krauss's concerns are more about her than about Picasso or Duchamp, and then her writing will exist as fiction, as expressive memoir. Perhaps it is time to begin thinking about that possibility.


… and the use value of these readings

And so it is also important to say that only some of these readings might be of use to students or practitioners of art history. If you're an art historian, and you feel your writing might be too full of jargon, then you might find it helpful to think about the plain style, and about clarity. Or if you're an art historian interested in what counts, in the discipline, as good writing, then you could possibly find pointers, or directions to avoid, in the writing of Alex Nemerov and others.

The questions for such a reading are: what can art history do to make contact with twenty-first century writing? How, by what means, does disciplinary art history continue to sequester and control writing? What is omitted when art history pays only nominal attention to its own medium?

Most of what I have to say in these pages won't be helpful for any particular future art history, because it is aimed in a different direction. Looking at even the most adventurous art historical writing is like looking back in time. Art history—and, of course, academia in general—isn't the place where writing is finding new voices. And looking at writing means looking past content: in short, it means not caring what might be true about artworks, and that probably isn't a promising starting point for new scholarship.

If this project does have a use for the discipline, I hope it is something more general: art history—and, I mean to say, humanities and social sciences in general—can only become more interesting, more challenging to itself and to its readers, if its own medium becomes an object of full attention.


The potential danger of reading too much of this project

Having taught this material for several years now, I find that it produces an uncanny effect on my ordinary reading. It's not an especially pleasant effect, and it has actually begun to hamper my capacity to take art history as seriously as I once did. It is this: if you read a text, any text, with full attention to the way it is written, you will find yourself thinking about the author's or narrator's voice, tone, and mood. The author of In Search of Lost Time, as he is implied in the narrative, is supernaturally patient—he manages things over the span of 3,600 pages—calm, rational, almost pathologically reflective, and suffused with nostalgia that makes most of our memories simpleminded by comparison. And so on: the mood, the tone, of the writing is one of the things we grow to love in good fiction, even if we know we cannot read through the novel to the novelist, even if reading a biography of the novelist doesn't help, even if the difference between the author and her narrator is impossible to disentangle. These are commonplaces.

But if you read art history, theory, or criticism in this way, what do you find? What I discover is that the author's voice is often unpleasant. What he or she really cares about, what makes the author or narrator passionate, is the desire to demonstrate how knowledgeable she is, and if she has a passion it is to own her subject in such a way that no other author can have interpretive power over her. This isn't true of all art historical writing, and a love of the artworks and artists does sometimes drive the prose. But much more often the writing expresses the author's or narrator's intense concentration on professional prestige.

The feeling of art historical texts is often this sort of ambition, mixed with fear or anxiety about embarrassment or mistakes. Scholars have remarked on Panofsky's calm, Olympian tone, at least in his English-language writings, and it has been said that tone served to project cultural mastery, and that such a style is no longer appropriate or persuasive. Yet contemporary art historians have their own versions: for example the cool hyper-accuracy of writing in the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, The Burlington Magazine, or The Art Bulletin, or the projection of mastery of theory in some essays in October, Nonsite, Grey Room, or Texte zur Kunst. 

In this way much of art history has been poisoned for me. When I pick up the latest issue of a journal, or leaf through the latest offerings from Yale or California, I am initially interested by the subjects the authors describe, but soon I find myself put off by the unremitting narrowness, the thin emotional range, the frantic construction of complexity, the abject dependence and simultaneous anxiety about authority, and the author's perfect obliviousness to such questions of feeling, tone, voice, mood, and expression--all the things Nietzsche diagnosed in scholars almost 150 years ago. The principal thing that is expressed in most contemporary art historical writing from Yale, California, Princeton, and the other major presses, is anxiety about colleagues and superiors. These are effectively narratives about authority and control. They're white-knuckled and nervous. I can hardly read contemporary art history these days, because so much of it is actually about these tightrope acts of assertion and defense, even though the authors and their readers agree to read only for what's said about the art.

In the end, when writing is in question, this is what is wrong with art history and other humanities: they produce bad writing, written by people who do not realize that what they write expresses their own lives.

Drafted 2013, revised 2024

Chapter 6

 

Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious

Beginning in the late 1970s, two traits of Rosalind Krauss's writing (and the writing of others around her, including some who were included in the opening years of October) were repeatedly noted by historians and critics: the apparently unprecedented density of different arguments within a single text, and the unexpected appearances of a number of theoretical and methodological sources presented in succession. Those two traits came to be noticed differently in the 1990s and afterward, and that has led to differing ways of reading her texts, and to divergent senses of what counts as writing, voice, narrative, and argument in her works—and by extension, in the ongoing influence of the writing associated with October in the years on either side of 1980.

I'll open with some thoughts on the ways that reading habits may have changed, and then turn to chapter 5 of The Optical Unconscious.



The density of different arguments: methodological sources in Krauss's earlier writing

In an event in Chicago in 2010, which became the book Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, Hal Foster reviewed several texts from his 1980 book The Anti-Aesthetic. He led a seminar in which we read Krauss along with Craig Owens's "The Allegorical Impulse." During the conversation a question arose about how closely such texts could be read. They seemed "jumpy," moving without warning from one topic, one methodology, to another. Here is an excerpt:

James Elkins: What struck me reading was the question of his awareness of those jumps. The margins of my copy are annotated “illegitimate conclusion” (when he asserts that “the paradigm for the allegorical work is thus the palimpsest”), “unnecessary move” (the idea that “allegory becomes the model for all commentary”), “wildly unconnected” (the move from allegory as appropriation to appropriations in contemporary art). Some of these discontinuities are willed or hypothetical. Others, it seems to me, are not proposed as such, and I can’t distinguish the two. On page 71, for example, Owens says that the impermanence of site-specific work “suggests” photography has “allegorical potential.” That “suggestion” excludes the reader and so at that moment the essay declares either a logic that readers won’t be sharing, or an obliviousness to justification that is itself baffling. 

Hal Foster: Those texts that concern Owens came to him, came to most of us, without context and simultaneously. They were put in play together, not processed, and connected to artistic practices, which were often also various. Sometimes it made for a killer punch, sometimes for a witches’ brew. But it did get lots of people—artists, critics, curators, students—thinking. This is a typical early October essay in the sense that it moves less by argumentation than by juxtaposition. In a way it performs its object: it is an allegorical text, too. From start to finish the text is read through other texts.… You also have to remember how young these people were. Craig was twenty-nine when he wrote this amazing text, as a sometime graduate student but also as a public critic.

Given what Foster notes, it's interesting that essays like "The Allegorical Impulse," and others in Foster's collection The Anti-Aesthetic and in the first years of October, are read carefully and slowly in graduate seminars, with a close interest in what is taken to be their methods and references. The seminar in 2010, which was attended by about thirty scholars, didn't want to read that way, and instead we ended up talking about the political moment, the youthfulness of the writers, and their sense of discovery and exhilaration. That seems sensible to me, in that it was more true to the historical context of the 1980s. But it was at odds with the kinds of pedagogy that have made writing by Krauss and others so influential in the academy in the twenty-first century: texts like Owens's are taken to be dense and challenging, and not at all the unmanaged products of accumulated insights collaged from different discourses or the performative allegories of their own subjects. It's the close reading of Krauss, and not the wider cultural reading that Foster recalled in the Chicago seminar, that matters for the discipline in the 21st century, and that sort of reading helps articulate the current worldwide dissemination of echoes and emulations of October, which in turn supports and articulates a certain practice of art history.

The protocol of reading, from a twenty-first century student's point of view, would be something like this: mark and interpret unexpected turns, carefully note exact terms, pursue and emulate the theory sources and their rapid succession. From this perspective an unacceptable text would be one that chooses a single theorist, someone already well known, and applies its ideas systematically (rather than, for example, by "juxaposition"). Or a scholar who builds a linear argument, in the manner I was taught when I first arrived in graduate school: first describe your artwork, then say what's known about it, and then apply your own reading. Formal analysis, iconography, social context: any list of strategies could be seen as inadequate, just by virtue of being a list. The current privileging of subtlety, complexity, and what Leo Steinberg called ambilogies (managed tiers of ambiguity) depends on an anachronistic application of close reading to texts that were assembled and read differently.

What Krauss, Owens, Crimp, Foster, and others were doing around 1980—the moment of the Anti-Aesthetic, and four years into the publication of October—was more experimental, fragmentary, provisional. Their writing also drew on an unexpected range of theoretical references, and so what counted as authority shifted from the sure deployment of well-known methods to the unpredictable allusion to relatively unknown theoretical models.


Complexity of styles and methodological sources in The Optical Unconscious

The fifth chapter of The Optical Unconscious echoes these early strategies and interests, but it was written almost twenty years after the inception of October, and well into the dissemination of Krauss's style throughout North American and Anglophone art history. Her way of writing had become experimental in different senses. Some of the early unpredictability had condensed into a personal manner or method. In the fifth chapter of The Optical Unconscious elements of the kaleidoscopic show of theories remain, for instance midway through the text when three pages take us from Hélène Parmelin's meditations on painting and the weather to a modernist critique of linear perspective, then to a resumé of Husserl's ideas of consciousness, to Derrida's critique of them, and on to Max Ernst (pp. 212-5). The chapter also registers some of the 1980's interest in undiscovered theorists and theories, especially the appearance of Jean-François Lyotard, who was known to Anglophone readers for his essays on the sublime, but not for his theories of the unconscious "matrix," which were in the book Discours, figure (1971). 

(Discours, figure was undertaken by the translator Mary Lydon but not published until 2010. It was a kind of "secret source" to Francophone art historians like Norman Bryson throughout the 1980s. Its belated translation has had, I think, a minimal effect: it came twenty years too late. I don't know any younger scholars who have read it as a source in the way Krauss and Bryson did. Lydon told me at one point she'd been working on the translation for twenty-five years, and considered it fundamentally untranslatable. The matrix and pulse continued to serve Krauss as her best and deepest model for the non-rational alternates to rationalist modernisms. More on this subject in the book On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them.)

The kaleidoscopic early style is also on display in the chapter's elaborately convoluted opening, which is about 1960's "intellectuals in Paris" watching wrestling on television. This opening page systematically inverts her argument, beginning with the last things, and deferring the first, requiring readers to do the re-assembling.

Here for reference is the logical sequence, which is almost the opposite of the order in which the ideas are set out:

(1) Who needs permission (who is his own authority) for watching something as "vulgar" as wrestling on television?
(2) Barthes might have been the permission the "intellectuals in Paris" needed,
(3) or he might might not have been
(4) Barthes had said wrestling was not vulgar, and so
(5) he may have influenced the intellectuals, and
(6) caused them to try watching wrestling on television,
(7) and may have thought of Scapin while they watched, and
(8) this is significant because Picasso watched too

Note there is no claim that Picasso knew anything of Barthes or the "intellectuals in Paris." What kind of work does such an elaborate opening do? Does it concentrate Krauss's authority in a way that a more linear exposition might not? Or is it more a matter of preparing the reader for the kinds of hypothetical and theoretical associations that she will permit herself later in the chapter?

The chapter as a whole is clearly a product of the early 1990s, partly because it has a simple large-scale structure: it alternates passages in roman font and in italics in order to represent strands of modernism (personified by the late Picasso) and postmodernism (personified by its progenitors, Ernst and Duchamp).

The key conceptualization in the chapter is provided by Lyotard's concept of the matrix—which Krauss develops in other chapters into the concept of the pulse, and which she repeated in the book Formless: A User's Guide; the matrix and pulse are both ways of naming irregular or failed repetitions or structures. Because of this it makes sense that the ABAB... structure should break down: otherwise the chapter would be proposing itself as a modernist form, even though the theoretical content, from Lyotard, is paradigmatically postmodern. The ABAB... alternation does in fact break down in the argument that Picasso's use of sketch books as flip books is a form of "opening" onto whatever is "behind the picture" (pp. 229-30). In this way the chapter enacts its theme, and form fits content.

Or seems to: there are other things happening in the text that break up what I take to be Krauss's intention to have content interact with, or speak alongside, form. Those other things have to do with the way the chapter works as writing: how the author's voice is developed, how fiction writing is represented in the chapter, and how the illustrations are arranged. I will consider each in turn.


The authorial voice 

First there's the device of quoting Picasso scholars as a single anonymous authority. The phrase she uses is "the art historian," as in "the art historian discusses the sketches" (p. 226). The endnotes reveal she is citing a half-dozen different art historians, but readers are meant to think that's not significant, because there are no endnote numbers in the text. This form of citation produces a distance between her book and the discipline of art history, and it is not easy to know how to understand that distance.

An implication is that all art historians, and also the discipline of art history as a whole, are modernist: that's the conclusion that I think has to be drawn from the contexts in which she cites "the art historian." But because these passages characterize a discipline, and not a person, they also produce her own text as a discipline comprised of one book. This is not the kind of conclusion I can imagine Krauss wanting her readers to draw, but it is written into the forms of her reference. It makes The Optical Unconscious into something other than a single-authored book, but it leaves unsaid how its author achieved her distance from what "the art historian" writes, or what the nature of that distance is, other than a sum of specific references to Barthes, Lyotard, Husserl, and Derrida—which it cannot be, since they are only summoned to explain phenomena the author locates in the images and texts of the period.

The narrator's disciplinary distance is also made problematic by the unsurpassable degree of self-awareness she assigns to her own voice. I prefer to read this without considering affect: I am uninterested, in this context, in how omniscient she appears, or how that works for students. A fully self-aware narrator is unusual in fiction writing because it can alienate the reader. (Usually the narrator's knowledge is "focalized," as Gérard Genette said, on a person or group.)

Claims of self-awareness come out in several ways: the obliviousness and orthodoxy of Picasso's friends, contrasted with the canniness of Lyotard reading Freud or Derrida reading Husserl; the repeated themes of superior awareness (the "Parisian intellectuals" and Barthes; Lyotard's insight into Freud; Derrida's insight into Husserl); and in artistically significant self-awareness on the part of people like Ernst. At one point, writing about an anaglyphic illusion of the sort Ernst admired, Krauss implies seven levels of awareness:

1. The illusion itself, which the audience found thrilling (they were absorbed, unaware)
2. The anaglyphic mechanism that produced that effect
3. The illustration showing it in the popular science magazine
4. That journal's awareness of its audience and their appreciation for understanding such things
5. Ernst's awareness of the journal's awareness
6. Krauss's awareness of Ernst's awareness of the journal's awareness, and
7. Krauss's and Ernst's awareness of the relation between the anaglyphic device and desire (p. 209)

These half-hidden narratives about awareness produce an authorial voice whose authority comes from awareness. In writer's terms, it's a difficult bridge to cross: we are asked to find our way from the position of a plausible reader, who doesn't know most of this material, to a narrator who knows all of it. This isn't only a move that increases authority, as it is likely to be experienced by a reader who is an art historian: it's a move that sequesters narrative itself, because it prohibits the kinds of imaginative relationships between writer and reader that inform most writing. The references to "the art historian" place her outside disciplines (she also proposes herself as being outside philosophy, but I will not demonstrate that here); and the thematic of lack of awareness and hyper-awareness of self place her outside of history—history is, after all, the very medium of incomplete self-awareness.

How fiction writing is represented

Second, the chapter has a number of written passages, by which I mean prose that is intended to conjure places, moods, and states of mind, and which is incompletely anchored to verifiable facts. At times Krauss's writing is close to historical novels in its tone and its distance from historical fact. Such passages are clearly intended to be experienced as writerly, but it is difficult to pin down what sort of writing is being mimicked or emulated.

Occasionally she is successfully poetic—there is Picasso in his enormous house, "surrounded by a wild mulch of objects" (p. 198). But often the prose is workable or unobjectionable, more like an inventory of things that could possibly be verified (some of which are mentioned in the endnotes). And sometimes her writing is poor, like a student's—"the grand pneumatic tumescence of an invented classicism" could work in a hyperbolic context, but it is stranded at the end of a classicizing paragraph (p. 198). There are places where the writing is apparently emulating mid-twentieth century fiction, especially Hemingway. In one place Parmelin is made to think "Under the flaming sun the sea is molten, a bucking sheet of metal, its surface radiating waves of heat" (p. 210). In other places the writing seems to be a parody of Irving Stone—another plausible "vulgar" mid-twentieth century source.

This is the genre of the historical novel: we are inside the witness's mind, reading details that are not in the historical record. It's a treacherous genre, traditionally outside proper scholarship. (There's a spectacular review by E.H. Gombrich of Simon Schama's book on Rembrandt, in which Gombrich shows just how much, and how histrionically, Schama invented. It's the historian's prerogative to make that kind of critique in the name of the facts.) What is Krauss attempting here? Is she trying for adequately descriptive passages that can conjure Parmelin's unconscious modernism? Is she attempting, intermittently, to parody the kinds of mid-20th c. modernist fiction that were the approximate counterparts of Picasso's life?

Questions like these can arise only when an author shows a lack of awareness or interest in opportunities to become more fully a writer, the kind who could develop voices and motivations and control the production and parody of different styles. Some capacities of fiction writing are harnessed and made to serve the argument about modernism and postmodernism; others seem to be invisible to the author, for reasons that aren't clear.

Bringing unscholarly, "irrelevant," unquantifiable facts and images into the narrative is a traditional move in some historical writing, especially the often populist genre of historical novels; "the art historian" might say such writing is licensed provided it ultimately serves a legitimate historical purpose. But this is from an art historical point of view: considered as writing, the elaborated and imagined passages on Parmelin and Ernst feel uneven and unsure of their tone.

What counts in this text as writing? I think it is mostly a matter of structure rather than style. The collage-style juxtaposition of voices and theoretical sources derives not only from Barthes (and his well-known critiques of Michelet, Balzac, Hugo, and others), but from the "new novel" and writers like Robbe-Grillet. In other words "writing" is nonlinear narrative, metanarrative (which fits the themes of accelerating self-awareness), unexpected transitions (what Robbe-Grillet called "chafing"), structural fragmentation and realignment, and anti-bourgeois narrative forms.

(As partial proof of this I'd take the repeated descriptions of Clement Greenberg in chapter 6 of The Optical Unconscious: one is repeated several times with minor changes. But those changes are not expressive, as a fiction writer might want them to be, and they don't seem to be rule-bound, as they would be in an Oulipo text or a conceptual piece of "inexpressive writing" à la Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith. The changes in the description of Greenberg from one passage to the next seem desultory or nearly random, and therefore often ineffective, as if Krauss thought of developing different descriptions and then changed her mind. What matters seems to be the form, and perhaps partly the small annoyance of noticing the many uninteresting word substitutions from one repetition to the next.)

Writing is a theme in chapter 5, but only parts of writing: the full possibilities of writing—developing, inventing, and projecting modes, manners, and styles—is absent. Their lack is unaccountable because the authorial voice, which posits and praises full self-awareness, should encompass modernist and postmodernist writing as well. Writing, in a fuller sense, is oddly truncated, abbreviated, or confined.

Reading a draft of this analysis, which I posed online, the art historian Benjamin Lima suggested that Krauss's book has "an implicit narrative" of "the heroic critic" who vanquishes "ignorance," and that it works in parallel with another narrative, of "the heroic artist" who "can conquer ignorance with radical or advanced work." Lima concluded that "readers need stories, and stories need heroes. Krauss provides both, but many of her followers don't grasp this and are bored." If I read Lima's point simply, apart from the affective force of the personifications, it helps bring the ideally omniscient author's voice together with the occlusions of what counts as writing. The aspects of the text that I think remain unaccountable could be partly explained by the force of one theme (the unapproachably self-aware authorial voice) on the other (the sense of writing, which is compressed and truncated to make room for that voice). In terms of the discipline, Lima is right: Krauss's books—and especially this one, which is unusually experimental in regard to writing—are vehicles for moving her mode of oppositional thinking into territories of writing that are usually uninhabited by narrative ("stories") and identifiable voices ("heroes"). But the result is, from the point of view of fiction, deformed or abbreviated in its sense both of voice and writing.

How the illustrations are arranged

The illustrations produce an effect that disrupts the narrative in ways the author and narrator seem not to notice. The pictures come in pairs, on pages without text but with large-font captions that are quotations from the text. (I am reproducing two sets of pairs here.) Krauss may have gotten the idea for that format from Barthes's Camera Lucida; it produces an unscholarly, associative effect, because the appearance of an illustration asks the reader to stop reading, consider the quotation-caption, and then, if the reader has the interest or patience, flip to the page that's indicated and see the original context.

Sometimes the quotation / captions are to text on previous pages, and then the reader's task is to consider the relation between the caption and the illustration, and then the relation between that caption and illustration and the ones it's paired with. Reading attentively and thoroughly becomes a matter of periodically interrupting linear reading for sometimes unrewarding, often fairly random, tours back and forth through the pages surrounding the paired illustrations.

My own experience is that these tours demonstrate Krauss did not always plan or control the position of her illustrations, so I find myself wondering why it seemed sufficient to pair a very carefully staged text with a less carefully staged layout. At first I thought that the matrix or the pulse was being rehearsed in the semi-randomness of the placement of the pictures, but then I decided the inconsistent control of placement was an uninteresting form of randomness, and I stopped caring about it or reading the captions so assiduously. The placement and captioning of the images is much less careful than the ordering of the text, and that difference is hard to understand.

Reading a draft of this material online, the artist Tom McGlynn offered this insight: Krauss's "optical unconscious," he wrote, "may have felt the images as too competitive with her own figurative language, which seems to have a conflicted relationship (maybe repressed) with its own allusive powers. This is a confusion I often feel with her writing. Informe as mask." It's always possible: I'm not sure in this case, where the arrangement might have been a more passive, less inflected kind of carelessness.

Summary

The Optical Unconscious was daring as art theory, criticism, and history. The stark contrast between roman and italic fonts dramatizes and enacts the chapter's theme, and even breaks down, toward the end, in accord with Lyotard (the principal theorist's) claims.

But the chapter has an uneasy relation to writing in a wider sense. Krauss gives herself, by implication, an authorial voice outside of disciplines and history, which forecloses many narrative possibilities; she plays with writing in a poststructural manner, but the text does not understand writing as a theme in itself; and the formatting of her illustrations reveals a strange lack of care about a theme that should be central.

The book is an interesting example of how writing in the broad sense, theorized by Barthes and others—whose conceptualizations were admired, in several texts, by Krauss—had to be truncated in order to continue serving the verist ambitions of historical writing, and how that truncation itself had to remain untheorized.

2014, revised 2016, 2024

Chapter 7

 

T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death

The first thing to be said about this book is that it can't possibly be adequate to read it as an investigation of the way a painting changes through time. The book's just too intelligent, and does too many things, for that to be simply true. It is what Clark announces as his theme, and critics have taken him at his word, but the book also has other purposes and leads in other directions. The subtitle is the better guide here. "Writing," in a capacious and political sense, is what's at stake here. 

The narrator's voice

Voice, in this book, is several worlds away from what happens in Krauss's book, but there is a thread of similarity. Here, again, readers are kept at a certain distance. I don't think this is at all purposeful on Clark's part—really, it's the opposite. But it happens nevertheless. Right at the outset, we're introduced to a reluctant author, who hadn't imagined his project as a book, who hasn't studied Poussin in any systematic way. That same potentially sympathetic figure then happens to remember "his favorite line" of Poussin's in the original French (p. 3).

For me the end of the book's opening gambit that readers might see along with its narrator is a passage on p. 30, in which Clark says, parenthetically, "(Remember Chantelou's room with the Sacraments, each behind its separate curtain.)" I am an art historian, and I do have an unsteady memory of a graduate seminar at the University of Chicago in which we considered Chantelou's collection. I bet most art historians don't have that memory, and clearly no one outside art history will. Only graduate art historians who specialize in the 17th century will be sure to have such a memory, and Clark's gesture here closes off the possibility that he is writing with us: in fact, as the book develops and the politics becomes explicit, it's clear he is writing in "reactive," mode, mainly against us, at least in so far as we embody the desperate state of image culture that characterizes the present.

I confess that I came late to this book, because I had been teaching and reading Clark's Farewell to an Idea for years (I have two copies, both with margins entirely filled), and when The Sight of Death appeared, Poussin seemed to be just the wrong subject to raise questions about politics and current culture. Poussin: one of the canonical dead white males, subject of august, now unread monographs by scholars like Anthony Blunt, and rum interventions by writers like David Carrier. And Poussin, the carrier of some of Clark's less sympathetic ruminations, in Farewell to an Idea, about aristocracy and the intellectual life. Clark's style in Farewell to an Idea was untrammeled by editorial corrections, and even after a number of re-readings I had difficulty with some choices of image and diction that seemed plummy or precious. ("Fruity," as someone I know said: that was rude, but somehow not inaccurate.) So when I opened this book and saw poems with lines like "People like him have stepped into the same river twice" (a coy, intellectualizing allusion to Heraclitus), I thought I might wait.

Clark raises this sort of question once in The Sight of Death, when he exclaims impatiently about readers who might think his book, and his choice of artwork, is "elitist" (p. 122). I wouldn't call an interest in Poussin nostalgic or elitist, but I would call it infelicitous. The very people Clark needs to confront about their culture of "image clarity, image flow, image depth, and image density," and the image's supposed hegemony (which goes hand in glove with the thinness of the "cladding" of the visual on the verbal, p. 176)—those very people are the ones who will not read a book on Poussin. Clark really does miss the shape of the cultural distance involved: perhaps he needs to spend more time in minor educational institutions or away from the London Review of Books.

I mention this because it goes to the question of the book's voice. It's intimate—I can hear him mumbling to himself in the Getty, just as he hears Philippe de Champaigne's "quiet voice in the shut-down rooms" in Chantelou's chateau (p. 73). But it is also distant and reserved in ways that are not entirely justified by the book's content and purpose. Reading this book in seminar, some students wondered why he didn't say more about the circumstances of his seeing. Weather gets a look in, and there are many mentions of the lights in the museum. But the Getty—I was there the winter Clark was writing this—is a peculiar place, and Clark was living two minutes' walk from the museum. Surely other things that happened on those days, even if they were only moods or stray comments by "Anne" (his wife, who is mentioned in the text but not the index), could have been just as germane to the narrative. There were self-imposed rules in the making of this diary, or book, and that is natural: but those rules are not easy to guess. It's an authorial voice that keeps its privacy, which is also entirely appropriate and understandable: but what counts as private, and what public, is not at all clear, and that creates another obstacle to understanding both the voice and the project. My best guess about why some things are omitted is that Clark was feeling the residue of disciplinary expectations. I hope that isn't true, but if it isn't then the book itself offers no further explanation, and that itself is a flaw—especially in an author who says that he wanted even his books on the 19th c. to be read as "historical allegories" about the present (p. 185).

A word about his poems. The first, "Landscape with a Calm," strikes an intentionally informal, almost desultory tone. The poems are inheritors of Larkin, Kavanagh, Lowell, and others (with bits of O'Hara), so they present themselves as both spontaneous and carefully composed—in general emulation, I take it, of the Poussin paintings. Because Clark says at one point that he thinks that ideally, poems are better at addressing visual art than prose (poetry "would be the highest form of criticism," p. 53), it is necessary to ask what qualities, however muted by the poems' admitted shortcomings, might pertain to them as poetry that would give them the edge over prose. For me at least that answer is terribly unclear, and its unclarity undermines my allegiance to Clark's serious purpose. Could poems contribute a different sense of imagined voices? Synesthesic images? Sentence fragments? If Clark had said more about this, I would have been more likely to follow him further into the more speculative passages in his diaries.

The book, considered as a book

By which I mean the book as an object: its trim size, its layout, the way a reader goes from text to images and back. It is clear that Clark had some interaction with a design person at Yale University Press, but it's also fairly clear there were limits both to what the press could accommodate, and to what Clark may have been interested in pursuing. 

The book is full of helpful repetitions of details of the paintings. Sometimes the registration of reference to image is perfect: when you turn the page from 19 to 20, the phrase "similar cluster of buildings" greets your eye in the form of a detail. Other times it seems Clark decided to show one detail ("ten grazing goats," on p. 28) over some other ("look at the drawing," which isn't visible, also on p. 28). Often details aren't in the right places, or don't show the right bits. There are indications that he did not want readers to think of this book as a designed, formatted object in its own right: it's meant to be a sufficient window on his mediations, not an object whose formatting leads to new meanings. From my point of view—thinking of the history of writing with images, and given that this entire book is about specific encounters with images, which took place under specific lighting conditions—that is unfortunate more than it is inevitable.

One sign that the book is not presented to us as an object in its own right, whose successes and failures of layout are to the point of its argument, is a mention on p. 15 of "light on the rump of the horse drinking from the washhouse trough." The illustration on the opposite page does have that rump, but exactly at the edge of the frame. That is expeditious but also funny, and the humor of it isn't mentioned or repeated: it's just a small sign that formatting is not in itself taken to be capable of generating new meanings. Similarly the first detail that cannot be checked in an illustration is Clark's assertion that there are seventeen figures in Landscape with a Calm (p. 17). In an ordinary art historical text, that would be a hint to the reader that it's time to go consult the original artwork; here, the tally is stranded among the many call-outs that can be checked against the reproductions.

The call-outs seem to be only the ones Clark felt he really needed. Most images are uselessly, and pedantically, captioned "Detail of Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake" and so forth. I can well imagine the habits of the university press, and the supposedly incontrovertible rules of the copyright holders, that made these captions possible. Mainly, and at heart, the book is a continuous narrative that flows around uncaptioned images—my informal definition for the project of which this text is a part.

What is ekphrasis here?

Much of this book is ekphrastic, inch by inch description and pointing, and pondering that activity is one of the book's preoccupations and also, it turns out, one of its motivations—possibly even a stronger one than seeing how meanings develop through time. This is idiosyncratic ekphrasis, to say the least of it.

One oddity is that it continuously risks veering into endless inventory. Ekphrastic descriptions reach the point where phrases like "the goat confronting the goatherd's dog, or the general randomness or variousness of the other goats" make a reader think that eventually there will be a passage dissecting that "general randomness" into something much more articulate. (And in a way there is: "goats," meaning roughly things that aren't theories, are one thing he finds missing in Louis Marin's account of the painting.)

And before I go on, it may be worth pondering what the smallest features are that can capture Clark's attention, or—to turn the question somewhat—how long he is willing to work at explaining something small. That goes to the elements, as it were, of his ekphrases: what composes the painting, in the end? There are clues. First are the details so small Clark announces them as end-points of seeing. A line of ripples can be seen "bisecting" the reflections of the legs of the sheep," for example (p. 63). At one point he wonders why the reflection of the rightmost tower of the citadel seems slanted. "Somehow," he says, the tower "seems tilted" (p. 34). He doesn't return to that, or solve it. And it is a mighty small problem. I think it can be solved: it has to do with the relative shortness of the reflection, which deprives the tower of its vertical sides. But it is good to know there are limits, both of patience and atomization: they set the terms for what counts as description, and what the painting is built out of.

The ekphrases question themselves at every turn. That is because one of Clark's main concerns is to show that writing can't put images into words—that "writing on art is almost never convincing," rarely finds an optimal tone or the right words—but that it does have specifiable responsibilities along those lines (p. 36). It needs to show its inadequacy, and then propose that inadequacy as politics. It needs, first, to be "light as a feather, fast as free association, exact and heavy as a fingerprint" (p. 52). An initial move is to say explicitly that pictures are not logical propositions (pp. 19, 27) or theories (p. 84). More positive is the assertion that ekphrases, or written accounts in general, should "mimic the kind of movement involved" in constructing a painting, for example "the hovering and going to and fro" p. 84).

(At this moment Clark is close to Michael Fried, in his claim about "the structure of beholding" in Courbet's Burial at Ornans—that claim being that good art history should replicate the forms, the "structures," or beholding. There's more on that in Our Beautiful Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing.)

Ekphrasis is embattled in this book most fundamentally because all descriptions must be at least slightly off, slightly infelicitous, and that failure is exactly what needs to be demonstrated. Indeed, the paintings "are the argument" (p. 49), and "the pictures are the beliefs" rather than illustrations, concocted at unreliable removes, of "Poussin's idea of landscape," "his Stoicism, and so forth" (p. 30). This inbuilt, unavoidable, difficult difference between building images and building words is at the heart both of the book's politics and of its limitation as an act of imaginative seeing: more on that in the last section.

What, or where, is art history?

Clark admits at one point that he doesn't read much art history. "I read so little and give up on so much," he says, in part because he tends to demand that the writing change his ideas about the art (p. 53). There is plenty of art history in this book, including careful looks at Félibien, Denis Mahon, and some others, but the charge he lays against himself is often said about him. Farewell to an Idea was criticized for being made in a world of its author's own, apart from the recent scholarship.

This kind of distance makes it interesting to ask what counts as art history, and also how this book might count for, or to, art history. It is in several ways outside the discipline, facing away. For instance in the several preambles that get the book started, there are a surprising number of mentions of "meaningless" details. That is reasonable both given the book's diaristic structure—he's just getting started seeing the paintings—and also its theme of how images find words. So these mentions of "meaningless" passages of painting are justified by their unique context, but for that reason not useful for art history. They are supported by their unreproducible context.

Here's another thought on Clark's relation to art history. It's a stray thought, because it responds only to a few passages in the book. I wonder what might plausibly be said about the relation between this book and art criticism. I ask that because in all the 250 pages of indefatigable rumination, there is almost no criticism. When it occurs it really stands out: on pp. 57, Clark mentions some small details in the treatment of trees and bushes in the foreground of Landscape with a Calm that are not "successful," but other than that he is out to learn from Poussin and from his own efforts at seeing and writing about it. But doesn't that kind of emulation, which takes the art as exemplary, go at odds with the book's political agenda? I can't answer this because there isn't enough evidence, but I'd be surprised if it turned out Clark didn't have well elaborated thoughts on the ways the Poussin paintings fail (in their context, in their frames, as representations, as political theories, in detail, as sequences). I don't doubt that he could write another book with a trenchant critique of Poussin's project both in the 17th century and for our own century. He's omitted all of that in favor of a patient search for what the painting can still say and do. But why wouldn't a deeper doubt, a more critical pose, have strengthened the book's politics, not least by demonstrating an even more patient kind of seeing, one that has to overcome even more doubts? It's the nearly total absence of concerted criticism of Poussin that brings this book closest to art history, and furthest from criticism—and I would like to say also from politics.

Making paintings

Here I need to be cranky. This book approaches the feeling and experience of making a painting like Poussin's—by which I mean a Western, post-Renaissance, pre-modern painting, one with a deliberately and incrementally constructed form—more closely than almost any other book in art history. Clark's attempts to write what he perceives as Poussin's methods and his habits into his prose, into his themes, is really exemplary. But for a person who has painted anything resembling Poussin's paintings, and to anyone with an interest in the ways that art history fails to build the bridges that could connect scholarship to making, The Sight of Death is repeatedly incrementally frustrating.

I haven't made a special project of making paintings like Poussin's, whatever that would mean. But a number of years ago, I immersed myself in Poussin, and I painted two landscapes—small ones, on panels—that came out of the swim of my experiences with his work. I don't think they exist anymore, but if they did, they would be embarrassing: not because of a lack of technique, I think, but because they would appear to someone who knows Poussin as pastiches, with every passage—every tree and cloud, each sapling rivulet and field—deriving in an obvious manner from some specific passage in Poussin. That is how my two paintings assembled themselves in my mind as I worked. I have exact memories of each form in the two paintings, and my memories of those quotations and collages continue to influence my experience of Poussin: that is because making paintings is an experience whose detail and intensity cannot be matched by any writing. I learned an enormous amount about my seeing, and about Poussin, from those two paintings.

Over the years I have kept my interest in the lack of relation between making and the field of art history. There is an unpublished paper called "Why Art Historians Should Learn to Paint." When I taught a semester at Berkeley, I got the museum rules changed so I could bring students into a basement room and let them try copying paintings. I was disappointed, then, that Tim Clark wasn't interested in visiting our class, even though we were copying Hans Hofmann paintings and he was writing and lecturing about Hofmann at the time for Farewell to an Idea.

All that needs mentioning because of what I want to say about what Clark does in this book when he comes to mention Poussin's method. Sometimes he just asserts Poussin's "surprise" and "delight" at "the sorts of equivalent a brush moving in pigment can throw up," and there I have no objection (p. 30). It's unproblematic to say that the citadel and far shore in Landscape with a Calm "are a wonderful miniaturized version of a kind of world-making—a deliberately multipartite, almost modular building of spaces" (p. 32).

But in other passages he gets something wrong about the tone or purpose or meaning of what he conjectures Poussin did in paint. It doesn't sound right to say the washhouse in Landscape with a Calm is an example of Poussin's "deliberate puzzles" (p. 34) or that it is "gaming with the very idea of clarity" (p. 56). It seems reasonable that the washhouse's ambiguities and spatial irresolutions are results of attempts to soften the impression of the building, which had probably been constructed, perhaps not entirely logically but in "modular" fashion, from invented and remembered parts. Nor does it sound accurate to say that the far meadow in Landscape with a Calm shows us Poussin "wants to show us" two kinds of seeing, "what both kinds are, and how the truth emerges from the to and fro between them" (p. 60). I just can't square my experience, or my sense of painting's processes, with the idea that the artist was trying to demonstrate something as logical as that—or for that matter that "demonstrate" or even "show" are the right words in a context like this.

Puzzles are something of an addiction among art historians, even for Clark whose sensitivity to that sort of intellectual challenge is as high as they come. (This is my argument in Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity. And Clark does say he wants language on art to be like "thickenings… of a thought process, not reversals or paradoxes," p. 54.)

A painter, or someone who has pertinent experience, would not be likely to agree with Clark when he says "I seem almost to be setting myself the task of recapitulating in words every move in Poussin's process of manufacture" (p. 42). Hardly, a painter might say, and the approximation should be striking. Similarly when Clark presents himself as being in danger of working like the painter, or a painter, his imaginary viewer (the "painter-beholder," as Michael Fried would call him) can be distant from what a painter might think. "Time and again," he writes, in a passage that continues the one I just quoted, "I imagine a viewer asking what Poussin could have thought was the point of this degree of barely perceptible detail" (p. 43). But surely only art historians would ask, or think of asking, a question like that, and Clark's polemic here—imagining such a viewer "especially now, in our current state of image production"—is weak because he himself asks versions of this question throughout the book.

These sorts of descriptions, in which Poussin is imagined as posing problems, puzzles, or deliberate ambiguities, sound to me as misdescriptions: the effect of careful adjustments, with the mind firmly fixed on the painting's construction, can be passages that appear as puzzles. The difference between those two moments, of making and matching as Gombrich said, is crucial in an account that cares about the mismatch.

Clark's account sounds to me as if it misses the pleasures of these various accomplishments in a way that painters, and I think Poussin, wouldn't have. Speaking of the screen of trees at the left of Landscape with a Calm, Clark writes that "in these conditions one sees that the leaves are a complex membrane, sometimes opaque and sometimes semi-transparent, sometimes absorbent and sometimes reflective, through which light pushes irresistibly" (p. 89). There can be a real pleasure in painting passages like this, over partly completed backgrounds that are full of light, where light varies precisely with the form of the screen. I wonder what an articulation of such a pleasure might have contributed to Clark's account. The big mid-distance screen of trees in Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake is another case, equally variegated, and so are the birch trees that take up so much space at the right of Landscape with a Calm. Perhaps one way toward this experience would be to imagine the construction of the painting more exactly (mechanically): the entire sky wasn't painted when those trees he mentions went in, but some was, and the unseen portions of the sky were effectively created by the act of screening them: something a non-painter can certainly study, and something that certainly helps link the reception with the making. 


PS. To Tim Clark, if he ever finds this

Tim, I assume this post is safely hidden away from you, deep in the world of "image clarity, image flow, image depth, and image density." But if you happen to be sent it, please take it as a sort of diary entry: it exists on the internet, where even drafts too malformed for diaries—not to mentioned edited diaries—can work, hopefully, differently than texts in books. 

2013, revised 2024

Chapter 8

Alexander Nemerov, "The Flight of Form"

In the 2011 Chicago event "Farewell to Visual Studies," Keith Moxey set a text by Alexander Nemerov, "The Flight of Form: Bruegel, Auden, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 1940s," published in 2005. Moxey's purpose was to provide a different model of political activism for the discussions we had been having about visual studies and its relation to politics. In his reading, Nemerov's essay proposes a kind of indirect politics, in which the scholar's work is not an incentive to immediate political action.  In the context of the event "Farewell to Visual Studies" Moxey's seminar provided a counter-balance to our discussions of Nicholas Mirzoeff and others, for whom visual studies is pre-eminently political in its purpose. Our discussion, which is transcribed in the book Farewell to Visual Studies (forthcoming, 2015), includes both the politics of Nemerov's essay and also its writing style. Here is an excerpt:

Keith Moxey: The essay asks, on the first page, “What do artists and poets and critics do in the face of catastrophe? How do they register it in their work, or should they even try to do so?”  Nemerov points out that even if Auden refused to infuse his poetry with the leftist politics he subscribed to in the years leading up to the Second World War, his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” offers us what might be described as an apolitical political position. Writing about Bruegel’s sixteenth-century painting “The Fall of Icarus” in the Brussels museum, Auden exploits the “dissonance” in the work’s facture, the occlusion of its narrative subject, so as to make the poem a political allegory. Just as Icarus’s fall goes unnoticed by the other figures in the picture, so the injustices of war, man’s inhumanity to man (which Auden had experienced at first-hand during the Japanese invasion of China), go unpunished.… This formal dissonance, this political obliqueness, constitutes a political statement that differs radically from straightforward ideology critique.

…

Michael Holly: It’s not for nothing that Alexander Nemerov is the son of the poet, Howard Nemerov. The writing here is so luxurious, so—in an old-fashioned way—aesthetically pleasing, so graceful, so resonant, that it raises other observations, such as how writing about some visual matters solicits a certain poetry not available to others. 

Keith Moxey: I think that is quite clearly something he cares about. He is Auden, in a way: he is obliquely reading the great poet’s work, reminding us that his apparently apolitical writing, a poem on a painting by Bruegel, has its politics.   

The discussion continued from there on both points, writing and politics. I'll quote more at the end, but I want to try to develop a way of talking more precisely about the writing in Nemerov's essay, in order to be more exact about what kind of reading both Keith Moxey and Michael Holly are implying here.

Nemerov's practice of art history

Beginning sometime around 2007 or so, and continuing to the present, Nemerov's style of art historical writing has often been taken as exemplary. In my own experience, he has been cited by graduate students in a half-dozen or so institutions, mainly in North America, as one of the discipline's optimal models, and professionally he has often been the subject of conversations about the discipline's state and its future. Those conversations tend to turn on four related qualities that are attributed to his work. 

First, his writing doesn't obey what are taken as the standard conventions of cause and effect; instead it brings together apparently disparate moments and objects in culture and weaves them together, creating an unexpectedly richer and broader sense of art practices. Second, it is interdisciplinary in salutary ways, bringing an unaccustomed variety of political, social, literary, and economic considerations together with the visual art that is its subject. Third, the writing itself, as Michael Holly says, is understood as beautiful, and its beauty is taken as necessary for the persuasiveness of the connections Nemerov wants to make. And fourth, Nemerov himself is often described as crucial to the effect of his writing: his speaking style, both in public and in conversation, is described as charismatic, and he sometimes speaks without notes.

The third and fourth of these might seem optional or debatable, and it's funny to be reporting on them given that I've never met Nemerov. But rhetoric is exactly what is at stake here. In print, most of what has been written about Nemerov concentrates on the first and second points, but in seminars and elsewhere, the rhetoric and the beauty of the writing are part of the way his enterprise is described.

In reading "The Flight of Form" for its writing, I want to try to produce a set of guidelines that can sharpen claims like the first and second ones. Afterward I'll say something more about the third point.

Elements of style

"The Flight of Form" is structured as a series of unexpected transitions from Bruegel or Auden to other artists, writers, places, and events. Its persuasiveness, as history, depends on its coherence. Let me call those surprising changes of subject leaps of faith. The first one happens a couple of pages into the essay, when Nemerov is talking about a book that Auden and Isherwood had just finished on the subject of the Sino-Japanese War. Nemerov reproduces some images from that book,  including one of children captioned "With legs" and "Without legs," and comments, "Bruegel's Icarus, with legs, must have conjured these scenes to the person who had witnessed them so recently" (p. 784).

A few pages earlier he had reproduced Bruegel's painting (in black and white, and turned on its side in the original Critical Inquiry version).

This assertion—that Auden must have been thinking of the photos of boys, and of his experiences in China, when he looked at the Bruegel—is not supported in the usual way, which would be some diary or other record in which Auden says what he was thinking. The leap of faith (sorry for the italics: I think it's helpful to underscore the elements of the writing) stands, for the moment, on its own, and that is part of how it functions: the reader has to be left thinking on her own for a while before the justifications are presented.

There follows a passage from the book on the Sino-Japanese war, in which Auden and Isherwood watch an aerial battle, squinting into the sun to try to see the planes. They can only see planes when the sun flashes "on their turning wings." Nemerov remarks: "Icarus, the boy falling from the sky of whom Auden wrote eight months after the air battle, precisely figures these other aviators, the sun flashing 'on their turning wings' (pp. 784-5).

Here the expression "precisely figures" is a rhetorical figure because the passage he has quotes does not "precisely figure" anything like the Bruegel painting. It's an imprecise parallel, in need of explanation. Let me call this the rhetoric of attachment, by which I mean expressions that tie together passages that might otherwise seem loosely connected or unrelated. Calling the connection "precise" is an auxesis, a figure of classical rhetoric and a kind of hyperbole: it's an intentional overstatement, intended become plausible in context.

In some places Nemerov introduces a leap of faith at the same time as he demonstrates the rhetoric of attachment. Another photograph from the book on the Sino-Japanese war shows soldiers looking up to the sky.

For Nemerov, this emphasizes "Auden's attention that year to minute and almost indiscernible life-and-death dramas taking place in the heavens" (p. 785). The leap of faith is the notion that this photograph is evidence that Auden was thinking of looking at distant objects in the air "that year," and the auxesis, the rhetoric of attachment, is Nemerov's helper verb: the photo "shows" the soldier, but "emphasizes" (rather than just supports) Auden's interest "that year" in these sorts of phenomena. "Emphasizes" (the original uses the gerundive) overstates the connection, implying it is already made and only needs underscoring.

Another rhetorical device might be called the poetry of attachment. This would be when Nemerov wants to continue knitting disparate passages together, and writes in such a way that the style and images themselves do the arguing. Later in this same passage he writes:

Only when the sunlight ignites, flaring and glittering at a particular point, do individual tragedies become visible, though then only fleetingly and on a minuscule scale. (p. 785)

This doesn't add evidence, but images. It's a well-structured sentence, with alliteration ("particular point"), isocolon (repetition of structures in three successive phrases), and assonance ("flaring and glittering"). The sentence has four phrases, three short and the last one long; if this were a line of poetry, it would be a tetrasyllable, and even more technically a quartus paeon—three short syllables and a long one. It's a good sentence, but it isn't logically necessary: it's a sort of poetry of attachment, increasing our sense that the book on the Sino-Japanese war is connected to the poem on Bruegel.

I think leaps of faith tend to come after poetic passages in Nemerov's writing, but I haven't made a thorough study. In this case, two leaps follow in quick succession: that the painting is "not just an allegory of 1938 but something somehow made in 1938," and that Borges's "Pierre Menard" is pertinent initially because it was written in 1938. (And just before he turns to those claims, Nemerov repeats the assertion that experiences of the war, "fresh in Auden's mind," must have given the painting "a contemporary resonance" (p. 785). That sort of repetition of a claim, without adding anything new, is, in the language of rhetoric, is a commoratio. Repetition also serves the purpose of instilling assent.)

It is possible to add several more devices to this list. I'll use the expression rescue rhetoric for passages where Nemerov adds additional links to a connection that may seem to be not yet entirely plausible. This happens for example when he wants to say the John Singer Sargent painting Crashed Aeroplane is an echo of Bruegel's painting.

He identifies some similarities, and then (unexpectedly, at least for me) goes on to add three more (p. 790). These are distant parallels, all of them arguable—for example that the distant hill echoes the "darkened mass of distant sea" in Bruegel's painting—but together they make such a large group that I think a reader might have difficulty keeping them all in mind at once. They correspond to one of William Empson's higher types of ambiguity: they exist, for a reader, as a cloud of ideas rather than a clear list.

One final device: the deliberate overstep might be a way of naming a technique that I think is also used, deliberately, by Michael Fried: it's a claim that cannot be taken seriously on its own. This apparently paradoxical strategy can be quite effective: when a reader comes across such an assertion, she may think, Well, I can't possibly accept that—but then by contrast the rest of the argument comes to seem more plausible, partly because the decision of what not to accept was the reader's, and by making it she has drawn a line of her own instead of relying on the authors'. (I wrote about this in relation to Fried's essay on the Burial at Ornans in Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts.) In Nemerov's essay an example could be the claim that the "traces of an ongoing dogfight" in Paul Nash's painting The Battle of Britain "resemble the billowing curvature of the sheets of Bruegel's ship" (p. 791). I don't think too many readers will find that convincing, but it's possible a certain number will have my reaction, which is that this is a step too far, but that by contrast some of the other claims might be more plausible. It's as if the reader thinks, I'll throw out that one, but maybe I'll keep most of the others.

The deliberate overstep, rescue rhetoric, the poetry of attachment, and the rhetoric of attachment are my overly formal names for rhetorical figures in the text. I've been calling then "devices" and "strategies," but it is not clear to me that Nemerov imagines them that way—as if he was a Cicero or a Quintilian, analyzing as he goes. It is enough that attentive readers will, I think, notice these figures as they read. I imagine readers might even spend as much time pondering these devices, and adjusting their own doubt or assent, as they will absorbing the argument.

Rhetorical performance is part of what Nemerov is doing here, and writing is openly what creates the history. When he goes too far, or adds too many extra comparisons—for me this happens leading up to p. 800, where he tells us that Ovid, too, liked to put "resonances" in his narratives, as a way of justifying visual echoes in Bruegel, as a way of justifying the link between the plowman and the world he ignores—then the explicitness of the role of writing, and the reader's self-conscious attention to the writing, becomes that much more unavoidable.


A note on how these issues are discussed in art history

For a previous generation Nemerov's way of writing art history, which takes disparate ideas, works, and moments and brings them together, would have been understood as an invocation of the Zeitgeist. A more recent precedent, which is strangely almost ignored in the reviews and conversations praising Nemerov, is New Historicism, which has long practiced these kinds of unexpected and even distant connections between historical moments and ideas. Writers like Stephen Greenblatt might be closer parallels than some literary figures. And as distant cousins, inventive historians from Burckhardt to Pater and Longhi: in other words, scholars, rather than writers. All of those scholars provoked discussions about the limits of truth in art historical narration.

So far I don't think there have been such historiographically wide-ranging discussions of Nemerov's work. What counts as truth and history in his writing has been considered more narrowly, in relation to individual essays. In an exchange in The Art Bulletin in March 2006, Nemerov answered several critics by developing accounts of how he uses metaphor (a concept that Nemerov explores in relation to a painting by N.C. Wyeth; in the exchange, metaphor comes to be used in the ways I have been using "allegory," "comparison," and "parallel") and "estrangement" (Nemerov's word for the unexpected nature of some of the parallels). The exchange centers on what counts as historical writing, and what might drift into unwarranted, unhistorical interpretation. At the end of his response Nemerov comes to the idea of affect:

The acknowledgment, free and easily given, ubiquitous even, as a bit of conventional academic wisdom, that we are all fated to tell stories about the past in unavoidably personal ways matters little. The expectation is that historical inquiry should, and can, proceed with minimal or nonexistent interference from the historian's subjective opinions. Perhaps it is okay for us to write from a set of political beliefs—many people in this field, including me, avowedly do so… But what is less okay is for the historian to pay attention to a more subterranean and idiosyncratic type of response, something like intuition, that tends to unfold, unbidden and odd, in confrontation with the works of art themselves. In short, what is less okay is a critic's attitude, one responsive to the affect of works of art, and to the demands they place on us art historians. (p. 67)

He then cites Jane Gallop (on psychoanalytic criticism), Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Michael Fried, David Lubin, and Bryan Wolf as historians who "build interpretation out of intuition."

This passage is somewhat entangled if not confused: it appeals to "something like intuition," psychoanalysis, affect, "a critic's attitude," and "idiosyncratic" responses. Several of these—especially the mentions of Camera Lucida, psychoanalysis and "subterranean" responses, and affect—are similar to starting points of this project, and point, I think, away from history and toward writing in general, including criticism and fiction. Other concepts can be more plausibly harnessed to the purpose Nemerov has, of writing art history.

Even though I can't be sure how to read this passage—it seems to want several mutually incompatible forms of untraditional writing—at least it is more promising than debates about the veracity of Nemerov's "metaphors" and arguments. I mention all this here just as a sign of how delimited art historical discussions have been. Perhaps more attention to the writing itself could provide footholds for more open discussions.


Politics and self-reflection

The essay's point is the retreat of intellectuals from political activism in the years leading up to the Second World War. That is Auden's theme in taking up Bruegel, and it is Nemerov's purpose to show how widely it resonated.

That theme leaves a large question unasked: what is Nemerov's position in all this? Would he advocate the "apolitical" in contemporary art, or in scholarship? Why write this essay, why ruminate on these themes, in 2005? And why did Tom Mitchell publish it in Critical Inquiry? I'm not asking here for gossip or incidental contexts, but for a sense of why the essay seemed important or pressing in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and what Nemerov's stake in the "apolitical" (Auden's coinage, apparently) really was.

Moxey's purpose in bringing Nemerov's essay to the Chicago seminar was to suggest a model for current practice. So it is interesting that Nemerov's essay remains absolutely silent on the question of its author's politics. The absence of a page or two on Nemerov's own position in relation to the political in art and scholarship is especially difficult to understand given the essay's continuously surprising openness to questions of history's function, and scholars' and artists' places in politics.

I can imagine Nemerov might say that this is, after all, an essay on the late 1930s, but I think the very structures and awarenesses of the writing open the way for the author's voice, and an articulation of his own interest. A style as self-aware, dialogic, and resourceful, as Nemerov's, put to a subject that is exactly about self-awareness, makes it impossible to understand why the practice of art history appears, in the implicit logic of the essay, to require the exclusion of part of the author's voice—exactly the part that could tell us about the essay's urgency and pertinence in 2006.

At one point Nemerov reads Bruegel's painting directly, without Renaissance sources or twentieth-century witnesses, in order to spell out "Bruegel's aesthetic lesson to other artists of the late 1930s and early 1940s about the incorporation of social content" (p. 804). But if an author can read a Renaissance painting in order to correct the apprehension of some of that painting's viewers who lived in the mid-20th century, then surely that author has not only an opportunity but an obligation to say, even if only in a few words, why he is interested, and what his investments may be. (As Clark does at several points in The Sight of Death, without compromising what matters as art history in that book.) Is, or is not, a contemporary scholar who remains "apolitical" in the best position to "quietly disrupt the world"? (p. 810)

I'm anxious not to be misread here: there are many ways that scholarship can be political without being explicitly so, and Nemerov's work already points to a politics: or perhaps I could say that any body of historical work is by its nature a politics. What I mean to draw out is a puzzle in the structure and logic of the writing itself: unlike a lot of other art historical writing, Nemerov's work is replete with doubt and reflection, even on the subject of writing itself, and so the structure of the work itself includes an open space for the inclusion of something like the author's commitment. It's a structural, narrative, writerly question I am after, not a biographical one.

And I'll add one last note under this heading: I also do not mean to say politics is positions, as it so often is. With Nemerov, politics would also have to mean philosophic engagement. Nemerov's closing comments at the end of his spring 2011 survey course are recorded in an article on the Vermont Quarterly. They are apposite here:

I remember sophomore year for English 82, reading James Joyce’s story “The Dead” in my dorm room. I remember coming to the end where Joyce describes the snowflakes falling on, as he says, “the mutinous Shannon waves,” the waves off the coast of Ireland [sic, incidentally: Joyce is talking about the river, and contrasting it with the Bog of Allen, source of the Boyne: that is, two of Ireland's principal rivers, one flowing east and the other west], and I just remember sitting up—and even now I have goosebumps—sitting up and feeling that the world had been changed for me at that moment. I ask myself now, “Why was that?” The best answer I can come up with is that at that moment I was discovering not who I was, who I am, and not what the world is. I was discovering the otherness of the world. And I was making that otherness a part of myself, all that which I cannot see, cannot know, and yet which becomes as of that moment a part of me. And so, thinking about us now, I say that the purpose of studying art or making art is not about individual fulfillment, it’s not about learning who you are, it’s not about learning what the world is, it’s about accepting and making a part of oneself the otherness of the world. And so may it be for all of you.

This is also a declaration, not of the apolitical, exactly or directly, but of something that could accommodate the apolitical: it's a declaration of philosophic allegiance. There is room in "The Flight of Form," I'd say, even for this.

What kind of writing is it?

Here is another excerpt from the discussion in Farewell to Visual Studies. This exchange followed immediately on Michael Holly's quote that I ended with up above:

James Elkins: This is a great opportunity to discuss writing in visual studies, and more generally in art history and beyond. We have Benjamin’s “Author as Producer” on the table, and so writing is an pertinent question in relation to politics. But Michael, I am sorry, I have to disagree. For me there is an enormous difference between Nemerov’s writing and the Auden he quotes, and it works to his detriment throughout. I would agree with the words you use to describe Nemerov’s writing, but to me they are all pejorative: it’s continuous, flowing, seductive, belletristic—all the things that someone like Martin Amis, or Nabokov, or even George Saunders or Lydia Davis or William Vollmann would run from. 

Michael Holly: Alex’s writing is a continuation of the work he is talking about.

James Elkins: Well, the fact that we can see this so differently shows how much visual studies and art history need to begin talking about writing. I have not spent time with the Bruegel painting, but for me it is entirely different, even in its imputed oblique politics, from Nemerov’s prose. Bruegel is awkward, wayward, surprising, static, and “dissonant.” Nemerov is placid, warm, weakly beautiful, flowing, never sharp, always mildly hypnotic, unpleasantly tranquil. If authors are producers in Benjamin’s sense, and if their writing produces a politics, as Keith is suggesting, then this is just the kind of escapism that you described as the state of affairs in the old art history.

I was annoyed, at the time, because I'd had several conversations with students who had been praising Nemerov's style without being able to say why, or where the style came from, except by mentioning his literary family. I should perhaps have answered Michael Holly differently. A better response might have been: it's true that this essay could be understood as adopting a writing style consonant with the subjects of the essay. But that would only be a defense if Nemerov altered his style to fit different subjects, and I don't think that's the case.

If I temporarily, and, I entirely admit, artificially, bracket out questions of art history or art criticism, and think of Nemerov only as a writer (in a full sense, meaning as compared to fiction writers) then the style is old-fashioned. It belongs to a lineage from Pater through Woolf, say, but especially on to the generation of the mid-twentieth century English and American writers and poets. The writing itself, in this particular and artificially delimited sense, is not interesting. Within art history, it is very interesting, and that contrast is exactly what concerns me.