1.
The writing of history has a history. And, likewise, the writing of art history has a history. The study of the history of art history is recursive, several stages removed from the primary object. An art work is made by someone. An art historian or critic interprets the meaning of the art work within its social and time. Then, a historian of history construes these conceptual constructs as to the work’s meaning within a succession of works or as part of a style governing similar objects or a sign of the economic and social matrix in which the art object was produced. This hall of mirrors is, sometimes, baffling. Reading Christopher Wood’s A History of Art History (2019, Princeton) can be confusing – categories shift underfoot: a sentence may describe an artwork and, then, suddenly shift to a description of a description ending in historical theory about the structure of such descriptions of descriptions. As a result Wood’s book is a collection of declarations made by previous scholars as to how art objects should be interpreted as evidence of esthetic intent or the development of significant form or ruling ideology. Wood, then, attempts to craft these citations into a coherent historical framework. He isn’t particularly successful. The book is a primitive annal – the opinions that he collects, mostly from learned Germans, are arranged in chronological order. The book marches through the history of art criticism at a brisk pace that, of course, slows toward the end as sources accumulate in number and variety – time winnows the voices in the more remote past to a select few but the present is cacophonous. Wood’s best and most productive analysis involves his ideas as to current status of art history, a revelation that he calls the Novissima, and I will focus on that aspect of his book.
First, however, I observe that the book has a puzzling omission. Wood doesn’t address Arthur Danto’s thesis that art has a history but that this history has now ended. Danto was a professional philosopher and art critic who died in 2013. (It may be that Danto is a figure too contemporary for Wood to interpret. A History of Art History concludes with discussion of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing published in1972 and Wood’s chronology, although extending beyond that date in general terms, doesn’t consider writers who worked after that date.) In the early sixties, Danto was an admirer of Andy Warhol and wrote persuasively about his work. In that context, Danto developed the notion that art was the embodiment of ideas, many of them philosophical in nature – this is the hermeneutics one would expect from the professor of philosophy. Danto also was instrumental in proposing the thesis that modern art is institutional – something becomes a art work when it is collected as art or displayed in a museum. This notion dates to Duchamp and the display of the urinal signed R. Mutt in the 1917 Grand Central Society of Artist’s Show. (In fact, “Fountain, as the work was called was admitted to the show because Duchamp had paid the required fee, but not publicly shown.) But Danto’s analysis of the institutional aspects of art was precise, carefully argued, and influential.
Then, around 1999, Danto proclaimed that the history of art had ended. This assertions seems historically related to Francis Fukuyama’s provocative and much-misunderstood claim that history, itself, considered philosophically, was at its end – this claim was made in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Both Danto and Fukuyama made these surprising declarations on the basis of their understanding of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel’s concept was that history was the development of freedom involving the evolution of the world-spirit toward a condition of purified self-contemplation – approximately stated, history was the vehicle by which the spirit gradually freed itself from material constraints following an idealist logic that could only end with spirit enraptured by its own freedom. This highly speculative concept seems untethered in reality. But, in fact, Hegelian thought has materialist aspects and can be applied to the history of political ideas – hence, the dependence of Marxist theory on his ideas. Fukuyama turned this notion on its head, asserting that the dialectic had delivered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism, thus signifying the end of History as such – that is, history as the development of human freedom from theocracy through monarchy to liberal democracy. Liberal democracies were the pinnacle (and end-stage) of this evolution and Fukuyama thought that the triumph of this world order meant that, although ongoing occurrences would still require that (mere) histories of events be written, the great struggles between competing world-views had ended – and, therefore, History, in its ideal sense, had ended as well. (Of course, evolution can proceed in reverse and, as events have shown, the triumph of liberal democracy no longer seems assured – but the fact that a process can proceed in reverse doesn’t necessarily refute the idea that the process exists and has a logical terminus.) What is questionable in Fukuyama’s thesis is more plausible in Danto’s much more modest application of Hegel to art history. Danto thought that Western art evolved toward greater and greater degrees of verisimilitude in its representation of reality. Once the Impressionists had conquered the representation of light, photography made further development of figurative art superfluous. Art became increasingly abstract, advancing through analytical cubism toward completely non-figurative art. This natural development ended with the heroic phase of abstract expressionism, that is, paintings with no apparent subject. Abstract expressionist painting, in turn, lead to Pop Art, which is about images as commodities, and, in another direction, led toward Minimalism. Minimalist art questions the notion of the work of art and denies that beauty or, even, significant form are prerequisites to an art work. In the end, art became conceptual – that is, an exploration of the question of what type of thing might constitute an art work. Thus, art ends up contemplating its own image. This process looks like the Hegelian development of spirit out of matter into spirit’s utterly free contemplation of itself. In consideration of this philosophical dynamic, Danto declared that Warhol’s soup cans were, in effect, meditations on the conditions required for something to be considered art. Thus, Warhol’s work and the conceptualist non-objects that it spawned represent the end of Art as a historical development. Like Fukuyama, Danto is mostly misunderstood. He doesn’t deny that art will continue as an important part of human life after its historical ending or that great art works will not be created in the future –he simply denies that this art will necessarily be governed by an internal evolutionary logic that begins with Giotto and ends with Yoko Ono sitting passively in a gallery as people use a scissors to cut away fragments of her clothing. Danto thought that his surmise was liberating – the end of history frees artists to paint or create in all possible styles and genres; no form is off-limits and all structures of meaning are equally accessible. In the late fifties, a painter who worked to make figurative art was thought to be eccentric and willfully perverse, that is “ahistorical.” (When Philip Guston stopped painting glowing voids of color and began filling canvases with hooded Ku Klux Klan figures, gorgeously rendered, but obviously signifying something beyond the formal qualities of a flat canvas covered in sticky pigment, critics were scandalized and his work derided – of course, it now seems to us that he was prescient in his sudden swerve from abstraction into garishly figurative and, even, politically inflected paintings.)
In the visionary final chapter of his history of art history, Wood implies that contemporary art has reached a similar ending – although whether current art represents a liberating climax or a deadly impasse seems uncertain. Indeed, Wood, educated as a conventional art historian, denies that he is qualified to imagine the future. To be an effective critic of contemporary art, Wood argues that one must be enmeshed in that art and, indeed, so entangled in its codes and institutional meanings that only cognoscenti can reliably comment on the subject. He write: “it is only possible to say something insightful about contemporary art from well within the magic circle” (379). In effect, Wood ends his book with the puzzling rhetorical effect of denying his own authority to effectively comment on contemporary art. He reasons that modern art has made programmatic its own decisive rupture with the art of the past. Therefore, only practitioners of modern art can intelligently and reliably criticize such art – those mired in the suddenly irrelevant past, that is, art historians in particular, are outside of the “magic circle” as he says in which such art can be reliably considered. The Novissima is a Latin translation of Eschaton, the Greek word used, most often, in theology to mean the last things – that is, death and apocalypse. However, the Latin phrase is important to Wood because it also literally signifies that which is most new, most current, the most recent development – the word doesn’t mean the “end” but, rather, art that “eschews all norms” with “perspectives (that) multiply”, that is, everything “opening up” (387). This Novissima construed as the most recent, the latest, the “newest” bears a strong resemblance to the liberation of art from history that Danto proclaimed – nothing is prohibited, all things are possible. (Wood will proclaim this liberation only to, then, take it away as we shall see below.)
Before exploring Wood’s ideas about the Novissima, honesty compels me to raise issues about the way in which his book is written. Wood’s prose is not felicitous. He has been a member of various German faculties in this country and his text sometimes seems as if poorly translated from that foreign language. (His doctoral thesis and first book is about the Duerer contemporary, Albrecht Altdorfer, an inventor of landscape painting.) Wood is clearly an admirer of the Berlin critical theorist,Walter Benjamin, and this influence adversely affects his writing. Benjamin himself was a remarkably brilliant and innovative thinker but his German is obscure, indeed, often impenetrable. Much of luster surrounding Benjamin’s brilliant ideas fades when the reader confronts his ideas in their native state, that is, embedded in ponderous, difficult, and jargon-laden prose. Benjamin is best approached by paraphrase, but the reader must beware – there are lots of aspects of Benjamin’s writing that are enigmatic: it’s never clear exactly what he is saying and the reader is always left with the impression that there is more to his ideas than meets the eye, that the context of his insights, in other words, is significant but exceedingly hard to explicate. Wood isn’t nearly as brilliant and, to his credit, he is not as obscure as his hero, but, much of his book on the history of art history is hard to penetrate and the author has an unerring tendency to represent writers on which he is commenting by quotations that are well-nigh impossible to understand. It appears that studying German art historians in depth is not a pursuit that improves one’s literary style. In 2010, Wood published a highly regarded book with a fellow academic, Alexander Nagel – the book is called Anachronic Renaissance. Like many poor writers, Wood’s obscure style defamiliarizes his subject – he makes things difficult that would otherwise be obvious. I got half-way through the book, a treatise on how15th and 16th century artists were interested in recapitulating (with significant revision) the works of ancient artists, mostly Hellenist sculptures and architecture. The unclear prose caused me to see the writer’s ideas as if through a fog. Then, suddenly, it occurred to me that much of what was being described as “anachronic” is implicit in the word “renaissance”, that is, “renascence.” These bristling forests of jargon were deployed in support of the assertion that the artists in the “renaissance” were expressing variations of themes in ancient art, that is, giving a “second birth” to them, a notion, of course, that is nothing more than what an educated reader has known all along.
Wood initiates the last chapter of his book by remarking that it is no surprise that writers interested in contemporary art are not grounded in the study of the past. Diagnostic of modern art is the project of making a clear, and radical, break with past traditions. Therefore, those who study contemporary art aren’t interested in the work of previous masters – indeed, such writers tend to have a contempt for earlier work, regarding it as uninformed and rooted in reactionary habits of mind. Because the study of contemporary art is implicated in the market or the consideration of such art as a commodity, writers who focus on this subject are “evaluative”, that is, they attempt to parse the good (or successful) art works from those that are neither as good nor successful. By contrast, the academic study of pre-modern art is non-evaluative, but rather relativistic – art objects are compared with the schools and assumptions on which they are founded. It’s not a question of whether a pre-modern painting is any good, but rather a question of how the picture is to be interpreted and where the image lies within the history of representations of that sort.
The triumph of academic art history was its non-judgmental and relativistic approach to its studies. One doesn’t ask if El Greco, for instance, is any good or useful to modern viewers; instead, the question is what the painting once meant and how it may be measured against other art within its tradition. Paintings from the past are now viewed literally as “museum-pieces”, generally of only limited interest to modern gallery-goers encountering those works in museum settings. Throughout the history of art history, Wood maintains, that writers on this subject followed one of three approaches. The first and oldest approach was that of the annal-writer – the critic identifies the sequence of artists in time and traces who influenced whom, systems of influence often made manifest by teacher-pupil relationships. In the annals of art history, great artists are identified as those who developed significant innovations in the technology of representation – for instance, mastering perspective or inventing new types of pigment or engraving techniques. The second approach to art history is “relativistic” – we have glanced at this concept briefly in preceding paragraph. No trained art historian would judge a Byzantine mosaic by criteria applicable to African fetish-carving. African fetishes must be compared to other African fetishes. Rembrandt’s paintings are neither better nor worse than Picasso’s canvases. Art objects must be judged relativistically, that is, in accord with standards applicable to other works of their era and genre. (Wood admits that “relativism,” long the foundational principle in academic art history is now under attack and, probably, even discredited.) The third approach to historical art criticism is evaluation on the basis of good form versus bad form. Forms and their evolution can be studied and grouped. For instance, Baroque paintings exploiting spiral compositions might be compared with the gyres carved into lintel stones in neolithic graves (for instance, at Newgrange) and may also be analyzed in terms of Kandinsky’s abstract vortices, Arshile Gorky’s twisting whirlpools of pigment, and certain kinds of Op Art. What matters in “significant form” criticism is isolating in paintings formal elements and, then, comparing the pictorial effects of these motifs with those in other art objects. Wood discusses a fourth paradigm for art history that involves the invention of parables, false equivalences, mythology and legends to explain art – this sort of gnostic interpretation of art objects appeals to the author, but he is unable to really explain how this form of criticism would work. Furthermore, Wood seems to regard this parable-form of art history as reliant upon “fictions”, that is, “made-up” utopias and dystopias in which different art objects might suffer wildly different fates. This latter type of art criticism imputes “irreal” qualities to art objects – such art posits an alternative para-reality beside the real things that we ordinarily for granted.
In Novissima, the concluding chapter in The History of Art History, Wood eliminates several of these past modes in which art history studies were once prosecuted. First, and most importantly, the “relativistic” study of art has been eliminated – students are no longer interested in the conventions and milieu from which past masterpieces emerged. Pre-modern history and, even, most of modern history is fatally tainted with racism, sexism, and other forms of bias no longer tolerated. Therefore, the art objects produced under those ancien regimes is similarly suspect as being politically incorrect. Contemporary people hold certain truths to be self-evident and deride those less enlightened. Wood describes a gifted student enrolled in a humanities survey class telling him that she respected the premises of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” because it was a relevant “modern “ work – in other words, she could relate to that poem because she wasn’t compelled to “correct for its” bad ideology. On the basis of his own pedagogy, Wood argues that “relativism” is essentially dead. This is because, if taken to its logical extremes, a relativist would not be able to condemn slavery. Why? Because the relativist should feel constrained to accept slavery as being rooted in a pre-modern morality and economic system that was adequate for its own time, but, of course, no longer accepted today. It would be disastrous for an academic today to conclude that there were once articulable and rational justifications for institutions like slavery or the patriarchy or systems of oppression afflicting women or sexual minorities. Hence, relativism, the reigning paradigm in art history, requiring that like works be compared with like, is, now, effectively dead – and, probably, so dead that it might be perilous to one’s academic tenure to even tread lightly into relativistic justifications for modes of thought now considered pernicious.
The objection to “form history” is even more readily expressed: form is pretty to look at, and, probably, pleasant to compare between its different manifestations, but it is a distraction obstructing our vision of systems of oppression that analysis of form conceals. In this regard, John Berger’s Marxist critique expressed in his very clearly written and persuasive Ways of Seeing (1972) has been decisive. Berger unmasked the great art of the past as merely justifying “forms of authority, that art makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling.” This is direct citation from Berger whose radical work was the subject of a BBC series accompanied by a “reader-friendly book.” The theory of significant form is a way of “mystifying” the art of the past “to invent a history by which one can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes.” Thus, the rather mandarin study of “significant form” in its permutations in art is a screen concealing loathsome and oppressive ideologies. A beautifully painted nude by Rubens, no less than a Hustler centerfold, is an image that is conceived as a form of pornographic oppression, specifically, the domination of men over women. Beautiful form is, therefore, suspect as a seductive and highly effective tool of oppression.
By a process of elimination, art history is left with annals – that is, history that simply indexes the sequence in which influential works of contemporary art have been created. In this regard, Wood cites Gregory Kubler’s study of Mayan pottery, the important short treatise The Shape of Time, Remarks on the History of Things (1962). Kubler argues that the history of things must be written in terms of sequences in which craftsmen (or artists) replicate a so-called “prime object.” This “prime object” is a work of idiosyncratic genius that springs full-blown, as it were, from the head of Zeus, a solution to some technical or emotional or esthetic problem in the system of material things in which human beings are entangled. The “prime object” has such power that it is replicated over and over again. These subsequent imitations arise in sequences in which the object slowly evolves to meet changing conditions or, perhaps, steadily devolves into disutility and irrelevance. Things that people make must, therefore, be understood in terms of sequences defined by an inaugurating “prime object” and, then, slowly deviating away from that precursor. (This concept differs from classical art history that often regards a culminating masterpiece as the climax or end of a series – not as its inception.) I’ve read Kubler’s book in the context of my studies of archaeology and agree that it is a wonderful treatise, poetically written, and highly persuasive. But the book’s thesis depends upon the integral notion of the “prime object” and I must confess that this idea seems to me more mythological and, even, gnostic than objectively real. If there are “prime objects” who has ever seen one? It would seem to me that each successful iteration of a solution to a technological, esthetic, or emotional problem is grounded in ancestral material culture. So Kubler’s idea, I think, swerves into “theory”, defined by Wood as something occult, expressed in cryptic and rebarbative language, a kind of cult. Wood is sympathetic to this form of theory but remarks that it is “fallen” – that is, ultimately an evasion that ascribes to art characteristics that really have nothing to do with art. That is, “fallen” criticism deflects attention away from form or relativistic inquiry into the meaning of the art for those for whom it was made. When criticism swerves from the art object itself, it becomes a vehicle for something else – that is, a study of the technology by which art is produced or, as with Ernst Gombrich, an analysis of how perception interacts with artistic representation (that is, the study of art as an illusion created by our perceptual apparatus). These “fallen” approaches to art are really about something other than art – therefore, analysis postured in these forms somehow doesn’t count as art history. Wood’s assertions in this respect are like some of the aphorisms articulated by Walter Benjamin – the words sound great and seem to have meaning but I’m not sure why Gombrich’s studies of the history of perception or Kubler’s sequences of replicas aren’t valid forms of art history. If Wood knows the answer to this question, he doesn’t explain it with any clarity.
Similarly, Wood is unclear as to why characteristics of contemporary art that he regards as diagnostic count as “artistic.” Contemporary art, Wood avers is defined by parrhesia, a rhetorical term appropriated from the ancient Greek by no less than Michel Foucault. In Foucault’s understanding, parrhesia is the rhetorical posture of speaking truth openly, directly, and in one’s own name. That is, the artist is a witness who testifies in favor of the truth. The truth must be “stabilized around true value, call it justice or human rights, or else we are lost. These values are nonrelativisible.” (This quotation from Wood at page 391 is a fair sample of his prose style – it isn’t clear to me what he means by “stabilized around true value” and the word “nonrelativisible” isn’t English at all; we can tell approximately what he means but must lament the manner in which this concept is communicated.) An important feature of this definition for contemporary art is that it turns away from what Wood calls the “relativist generosity of the nineteenth century” that “recognized the right to existence of every style” (389). Art can no longer make excuses for slavery or racism or sexism or other forms of bigotry. Styles that condoned those injustices are illegitimate and must be condemned parrhesically – that is, openly and on the authority of the writer who is criticizing such work. In other words, the statues of the oppressors, not matter how beautifully executed, must be torn down. If this leaves us with smashed empty plinths, then, this is the price of our liberation. Art must participate in the “maieutic project, “the hatching of the just society of the future out of the critical art of the present” (407). “Maieutic” means the Socratic principle of proving a point by reference to latent ideas embedded in a person’s consciousness. Again Wood seems to not know the meaning of the fancy Greek expression. Adding maieutic as an adjective to the “project” simply obscures his point and, further, raises other troubling questions – what makes Wood so confident that we possess latent ideas of justice and equity? This proposition surely may be true – it’s the burden of Plato’s Meno dialogue for instance – but, Socrates is a believer in reincarnation and explains his “maieutic” argumentation in that light. Does Wood believe in reincarnation? Are “maieutic” propositions, that is, latent ideas repressed, suppressed, or merely awaiting exposure by the proper application of the dialectic? Wood’s fancy word just causes confusion – there is nothing wrong with simply saying that contemporary art has as its “project” the formation of a just society, and leaving it at that.
Wood seems to endorse, at least partly, the notion that contemporary art breaks with the past by being honest about its objectives, by speaking in the name (and identity) of the artist as witness, and that such art implicitly denounces previous works that were produced under conditions of social injustice now unacceptable to us. He seems to provisionally agree with John Berger that “paintings in the museums, once they are exposed as insidious baubles masking society’s real visage, are no longer of any use except as shameful documents of European history” (401). He tells us that art “now resembles activism or protest pure and simple” (382). Furthermore, he says that contemporary art, by eschewing amoral relativism, “resacralizes” ethics (390) – in other words the morality of justice and equity has been reborn as a sacred collective obligation. There is an eerie totalitarian flavor to these formulations. Anti-racist and anti-sexist thought is regarded as an absolute, indeed, a religious (“sacral”) obligation. The relativists’ “plurality of values” is exposed as “profane,” an example of the fact that the artists of the past, even those accounted as great, were “simply mistaken about life, really mistaken, and not just by our modern lights” (388).
Of course, Wood, as a academically trained scholar, is deeply troubled by the conclusions that he articulates at the end of his book. He suggests that the “presentism” of contemporary art, it’s non-relativistic contempt for pre-modern art, must be “voluntary,” and achieved “as it was for Nietzsche and Foucault in their tragic critical modes, and not merely a consequence of temporal provincialism” – that is, willful ignorance of the past. His deployment of fancy academic jargon such as “maieutic” and “parrhesic” discloses elitist tendencies at war with the contemporary art that he seems to endorse. And, when, discussing the gnostic theory that the “material world is a fallen world, made by an ignorant demons whose gaze is bent earthward,” he uses the pronoun “we” to establish that he has joined the party of the “gnostics”, that is, the “parabolic thinkers who are talking about art (in their abstruse theory) even when they are not” (403). On this subject, Wood even asserts the heretical claim that the theorist makes art in his or her theoretical discourse developing a language “adequate to art’s combinatory, topological dream-like nature...a discourse that comes close to naming or rhyming with art.” In other words, Wood says that the gnostic theorist fashioning a speculative theory about art that is “parabolic” to the subject, that is, inscribing an elegant orbit or trajectory around the material object, is himself or herself a kind of artist (403).
Wood’s ideas about contemporary art explain some aspects of our present situation. For instance, there is an exhibit of ancient art presently on display in Hamburg that has engendered reviews consistent with Wood’s explanations. The show features replicas of well-known Greek statues “corrected” by being colored in accord with pigment originally applied to these objects. Every generation, it seems, “discovers” that ancient Greek statuary was richly, even, luridly polychromatic. (Egon Friedel devotes several long paragraphs to this subject in his Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit written between 1927 and 1931.) Publicity for the Hamburg show emphasizes that the statues were never white when first produced and that it is, probably, evidence of racism that we continue to imagine these objects as pale and marmoreal. This seems patently absurd to me – would the curators of the show prefer that the statues be presented as black or brown in accord with concerns that “whitewashing” these sculptures evidences color-bigotry? (People arguing that appreciation of these sculptures emphasizing their ideal form made manifest by their eroded, pale present condition need to be cautious about inadvertently slipping into homophobia. After all, our current formal appreciation of these idealized figures derives from the German art historian, Winckelmann, who was gay.) The phenomenon of “punishing” the equestrian statutes of our forefathers by yanking them from their plinths and, then, dragging them unceremoniously across malls and yards seems similarly oriented toward the “maieutic project of hatching a just society.” Anyone who has seen You-Tube videos of these events will understand Wood’s idea that absolutist morality has been “resacralized.” Clearly, these equestrian figures or standing figures representing prominent imperialists and colonialists are invested with some sort of malign totemic power by the mobs tearing them down. The idea is not merely to divest our public spaces of embarrassing images glorifying powerful men now considered infamous, but, further, to disgrace the statues and humiliate them in some way. In images that I have seen of American Indians yanking down a statue of Christopher Columbus, the leader of the mob calls the fallen bronze a “dead body” and, consistent with that understanding, it is desecrated.
2.
So – to what extent is the Novissima actually underway?
In a comfortable and prosperous neighborhood in Des Moines, Iowa, art is displayed in a building comprised of three wings, each designed by prominent, internationally renowned architects. The complex has some of the redolence of art museums in the South in which sedate galleries adorn gardens shady with stately trees and bright with roses. The facility extends along a hilltop, above flowering shrubbery. Visitors park below the hill at the entrance to the rose gardens or in a small lot facing the old building, an impressive fortress-like structure designed by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen built between 1945 and 1948. Saarinen’s museum has a facade of rusticated brick, heaped up to form a high, windowless wall rising over the structure’s entrance – inside there are warm colors, mostly wood-tones defining three large rooms in which paintings are hung. A den-like entrance leads visitors into the wing designed by Richard Meier, the most recent part of the art center, completed in 1985. Meier’s building is white, with a truncated tower and curving science-fiction galleries that look like exercise gymnasia in a rotating space-ship. This part of the complex is lit by large but unobtrusive clerestory windows. The rooms are spacious but somewhat arid, particularly when compared with the natural brick and wood elements in the Saarinen structure. (Meier was accused of sexual harassment in 2017 by, at least, five women – it’s not feasible to “cancel” an architect by razing his buildings and, so, the structure will remain as a monument, I suppose, to his iniquity.) The industrial-looking Meier facility tracks back into the most successful part of the Art Center – this is a wing built by I. M. Pei, the man who designed, of course, the glass pyramid at the Louvre. This part of the compound consists of several large rounded structures, a bit like abstract Iowa granaries, that are divided into two large stone-walled galleries, one of them overlooking a reflecting pool cobbled with tile shaped like river stone. This building is impressive, well-lit, with fine views across unobstructed galleries and down, through tall windows, onto the big stylized lagoon. The rather brutalist forms, fluted and textured concrete bulging out from the facade don’t collide aggressively with the Saarinen wing – unlike the bleached Meier turret and factory-style structures that seem, I think, a bit out of place. I.M. Pei’s part of the complex was completed in 1968.
The Art Center is ideally sized. The museum can be toured in about two hours, attending, at least, for a minute or two to each major work of art. Clearly, the collection is far larger than the works on display – I recall seeing an excellent Philip Guston painting in the museum that was not on display when I visited. Almost all of the art is “contemporary” or modern – Iowa couldn’t afford “old masters” and, so, there are no paintings in the galleries preceding the 20th century with one notable exception. The museum doesn’t have the large, bland collections of 19th century landscapes that are shown in most American art institutes – there are no pictures of the prairie in flower or rivers flowing through a verdant landscape. Similarly, I didn’t see any portraits with the exception of a work by John Singer Sargent and the museum’s one signature “old master” painting – a larger-than-life-size canvas showing a Spanish grandee Don Manuel Garcia de la Prado, a colorful and effective painting by Goya, and a work that justifies a small ancillary display of graphics by the artist, including some pictures from “the Disasters of War” sequence, a bull-fighting etching, and some eerie images from the “Caprichos.” The museum’s curators seem a little ashamed of the picture and, more or less, apologize for its presence in the gallery using scare-quotes around the phrase “old master”. When I was at the gallery, the art work was returning from a three-year absence required for conservation and the exhibit was a sort of triumphal restoration of the picture to a place of pride in the museum. But, exactly, how this large and beautifully executed portrait is typically displayed is unclear to me. Certainly, the picture is completely unlike the rest of the art on show in the complex.
The curators of the Art Center, no doubt working with relatively small endowments, seem to have shown exquisite taste in acquiring modern and contemporary art for the museum. Many of the pictures or works on display are excellent, reflecting the efforts of painters just as good, or better, than the highly bankable and famous artists whose works were bid-up to astronomical values during the last fifty years. Just about everything on display is high quality and worth inspecting.
Since almost everything in the galleries was made after 1900, it all qualifies, at least, as modern art. And most of the things on display were acquired after 1970 – therefore, half the works are “contemporary,” objects made after Andy Warhol’s soup cans (in Arthur Danto’s view) signified the end of art history. Consistent with Danto’s analysis, the art on display varies dramatically from painting to painting – each work seems to operate according to its own paradigms. For this reason, the Des Moines Art Center is an ideal place to study contemporary art and assess whether Wood’s description of the Novissima is correct. Does this work preach social and economic justice? Is it largely didactic and declarative (that is operating according to the rhetoric of Parrhesia)? Is the subject matter more important than “form”? Indeed, are formal considerations minimized so as not to impede our understanding of the work’s political content?
My assessment of these questions starts with the name of the facility – the compound of distinquished buildings is called an “art center.” Paradoxically, the use of descriptive term “center” signifies a decentralized understanding of art. Presumably, art-making occurs in many different place and communities within the city (and State) and, therefore, this complex is merely a place where people can gather to express their artistic endeavors. Everyone is potentially an artist. Hierarchies are suspect – the center is not necessarily dominant over other forums in which art is made. Furthermore, the enjoyment or appreciation of art is not passive. In a museum, we look at art displayed for our edification. In an art center, we interact with art and apply our own criteria for appreciation to things shown to us. In general, an “art center” signifies more participation by the viewers, more active engagement with the art, and a non-hierarchical vision of what making art means. A “center” is different from a “gallery” or an “art institute (as in Minneapolis and Chicago) or museum – centers are like market places, zones where transactions occur.
A census is revealing. By my count, about 180 art works were on display. Probably about eighty of those were made after 1990. About 30 of those post-1990 artworks are overtly apolitical – largely because these works are abstract or whimsical explorations of various media. About twenty of these contemporary art objects are arguably political or didactic, but not in an unmistakable manner – in other words, an “innocent eye,” if such a thing exists, might well enjoy those works, or find them interesting, without necessarily being aware of political content. Probably about half of the work post-1990 is didactically and aggressively political, that is, espouses ethnic, racial, or gender identity politics.
Here are some examples:
Kiki Smith’s “Bandage Girl” (2002) is a bronze figurine showing an abject, wounded figure swathed in bandages – it has something to do with the oppression of women. “Iago’s Mirror” by Fred Wilson is a baroque ebony mirror framed with complex rounded rococo forms – the 2009 work is said to portray Othello’s blackness in the relationship with Iago. (Curiously, there is an almost identical work by Lauren Fenster Stock called “Scrying” – this 2009 glass bas relief also is comprised of an elaborately framed black mirror and has a similarly rococo style; glass is blown in all sorts of heraldic, tongue-like forms around the central reflecting panel. “Scrying” refers to the practice of divination in which the seer peers into a black mirror – traditionally, scrying is done by witches and, so, there is, probably, a feminist meaning to the work by Fenster Stock.) Cara Romero’s 2019 “Chemenhuevi” is a work figuring identity politics – the Native American photographer has created a collage showing Indian boys running, each of them wearing goggles, while a field of wind turbines looms in the desert background. The collage proclaims the persistence and importance of Native American culture in the context of modern technology. Ana Mendieta, an interesting artist not previously known to me, creates vulva-shaped forms in the desert, fills them with gunpowder and, then, blasts out their interior. Photographs (made around 1979) show the effects of this work on the landscape that Mendieta calls “Siluetas”. I ascribe feminist implications to this art. Titus Kapker is represented by a canvas showing a stately black gentleman, either an aristocrat or a tuxedoed servant, standing next to a flurry of white brush strokes that seem to erase a similar figure with the stylized form of an antic Caucasian – the 2005 work is called “Whitewash.” Jenny Holzer is represented by a metal plaque on the wall reciting a patriotic slogan next to a bas relief of the torch held by Lady Liberty – this 2003 work is obviously ironic and political. Michalene Thomas’ “Left Behind Again” shows a voluptuous nude Black woman with a huge Afro collaged against an interior – the 2014 is feminist and an African-American comment on similar works of Pop Art mostly produced in the sixties. Roger Shimamura’s 2007 “American Guardian” is a painting that combines an ominous image of a Marine wielding a machine gun over an interment camp where Nisei Americans were confined during World War Two. On display are many other works of this general kind – that is, images that must be interpreted as displaying oppression or ethnic pride or both at the same time. “White #8", painted in 2008 , is a compilation of revolutionary quotations stenciled on a canvas and, then, mostly rendered illegible by smears of black paint – the words cited are by Mary Shelley, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, and Ralph Ellison. Jordan Weber’s 2019 “Chapel Series” is also overtly political, although the viewer understands this primarily on the basis of an explanatory label. Weber has collected soil from locations of “historic trauma”, arranged clear plastic pouches of the these samples within a box-shaped assembly that invokes marble payment that has been violently ripped open to show the specimens neatly fitted together under the surface of the stone. One of the soil samples come from the grounds of the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston where a White shooter massacred African-Americans during Bible study.
Several works would not be considered political except for the names given to them by the artist. These works are opportunistic – in other words, they seem to have been apolitically intended but have the cachet of fashionable didactic meaning by virtue of the label ascribed to them by the artist. A couple of examples will suffice as to this category of works. For instance, consider the very colorful and appealing installation by Ebony G. Patterson, a Jamaican artist who devised the work in 2018. Displayed against a wall is an elaborate, brilliantly colored assemblage of beads, silk lace, and brocade work. At an upper corner, on a little shelf, there is a small white china bust with the feathery bright lace and brocade lapping up against it. Many-colored glass beads pour like cascades from the colorful fabric adhering to the wall. The work seems primarily abstract and I couldn’t detect any overt political message in the installation. But the name of this art is “Among the Blades – Between the flowers – While Hare watches, for all those who bear/Bare witness.” Clearly, the artist ascribes to her work feminist meanings relating to both suffering and child birth – and the label describing the installation says that it “bears witness” to the “trauma of colonization” and “the violence of racism.” If you say so, I will accept this interpretation, consistent, it seems, with the artist’s intentions, although if the work were labeled “Festive Celebration” that name would seem equally descriptive and true to the object. (In fact, when I was perusing the installation against the wall, a woman peering at the thing said that it reminded her “of Mardi gras.”) A similar example of an artist attaching a fashionable political meaning to her work is Joyce J. Scott’s figurine “Mistaken Identity.” The object is small, rather deformed-looking, bundle of bright scaly surfaces, twisted in a sort of perverse contrapposto and bearing in one hand a little red clump of spiny-looking flames. The little creature seems to have horns and has a sinister aspect. The title that Scott has given to her work, however, links the figure to police shootings of people of color – “mistaken identity”, a label tells us, refers to the cops killing Black people as a result of callous mistakes. The title seems to bear almost no relationship to the art object, but calling the thing “Mistaken Identity” gives the figure a fashionably relevant meaning and link to current events in the Black Live Matter movement. Similar is Basquiat’s very effective, small canvas showing a gnome-like figure of no recognizable race and gender. The canvas is “Untitled”, painted in 1984, but the words “sugar” emblazoned on the panel relate to the trade in sugar which engendered a corresponding trade in slaves – hence, by words incorporated in the canvas we are asked to interpret the image as a critique of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, at least, as per a statement of the artist’s intent helpfully supplied by the label written by Art Center staff.
An interesting feature of the Des Moines Art Center is a consistent attempt to politicize older art through the use of tendentious labels. (Art Center staff, I presume, would say that they are “recontextualizing” art works to make them relevant to post-modern eyes.) There are several notewothy examples of this effort to impute political or social justice meaning to works that may seem rather remote from these concerns. For instance, an Impressionist and decorative painting by Elizabeth Spahawk-Jones, “In the Spring” (1905), an image of women in a department store is said to carry feminist implications. Isabel Bishop’s 1965 painting of women walking along a sidewalk is accompanied by a label that tells us that the artist “doesn’t sexualize” the women and shows them as individuals – this is a misreading of the picture which presents the figures as a hieratic frieze in which the figures are generalized, although most of them are painted perched on high heels. Edward Hopper’s melancholy 1922 “Automat”, probably one of the most famous pictures in the collection, is said to be about the “single woman” in the modern city. The oppression of children is encoded in John Singer Sargeant’s spectacular “Portraits de M.E.P et. le Mille J. P.”. There are several egregiously stupid labels that impute post-modern identity politics to works. An African artist named Mutu has created a figure called “Waterwoman”, a sculpture of a dark-colored mermaid with a long serpentine tail. The label says that the “charcoal” color of the statue is “unlike Western iconography”. (The label ignores the potentially offensive subject matter of the salacious, naked mermaid.) Mermaids that I have seen in Albert Lea and Copenhagen, of course, are bronze and have a dark greenish patina. The color of the mermaid, in my view, is pretty much incidental to the medium in which the image has been produced and doesn’t have much to do with skin color. In one gallery, there’s an imposing life-size figure by Rodin, a cast of one of his “Burgers of Calais” – the patina on that bronze figure is blackish. So is Rodin commenting on skin-color and implying that the Burghers of Calais, at least to the extent that they seem to have dark skin, are “people of color.” And there’s a very skinny, rather harrowing, Giacometti bronze in the museum as well – that figure is also weathered to to rich brownish black. Was Giacometti intending the viewer to think of people of color and, perhaps, the feminist issue of eating disorders when he made this sculpture. The Art Center owns a modest canvas by Pablo Picasso, “Tete de Femme” (1943). The painting is a monochrome image of a face disfigured after the manner of Picasso in that period, chin and profile shown from two different angles, with hooded mismatched eyes. The label turns out to be all about Dora Maar, said to be one “whose innovative political work greatly inspired many artists in (her) time.” I assume that this is perfectly true, but it is completely irrelevant to Picasso’s painting. Similar, Leonor Fini, the painter of a small but impressive surrealist canvas, is said to have “rejected conventional gender and sexuality.” (Should the Art Center’s painting by Courbet, a pretty landscape, be labeled as the work of an artist “who affirmed conventional gender and sex roles”?) Even more egregious is the label pasted next to an interesting painting by Louis Fratino, his 2020 canvas “Swift and Mosquito”. The picture shows a big bird with wings splayed out across the canvas, apparently, pursuing a tiny, delicately painted mosquito at the extreme right of the canvas. The label tells us Fratino is “gay.” Why? How does his sexual orientation affect our appreciation for his painting? It seems like superfluous information – is the voracious swift attacking the tiny mosquito a symbol of homosexuality or the plight of the homosexual in our society? I don’t think so.
In fairness, the earnest, hectoring labels next to the art works, reminds us that all art is political or gender/identity-sensitive when viewed from that perspective. And this is not merely a phenomenon of the last fifty years. Manet’s “Olympia” created a scandal in 1865 when it was first displayed on the basis of its presumed sexual politics. However, we have the tendency to forget this past causes celebre. It’s not eminently clear what counts as political art. Like about every museum in the United States, the Des Moines Art Center owns a huge and majestic painting by Anselm Kiefer, a wall-size excoriated surface with scorch marks, drizzled lead, and a couple of impasto railroad tracks leading to the seared horizon. These images by the German artist are generally construed to refer to World War Two and the trains used to transport the victims of Nazi tyranny to Concentration Camps. The Center owns a nice Mapplethorpe photograph showing two apparently naked men dancing. One of them wears a tiara. A blackboard covered with drawings and words used to illustrate a lecture by Joseph Beuys is on display. And there’s an impressive image of the justices of the Supreme Court who decided Brown v. Board of Education – this stylized group portrait is by Ben Shahn and it’s a highlight of the collection as well. All of these works, and many others, could certainly be construed as political and, even, in some cases (for instance the Shahn painting) as agit-prop. Similarly, I would suppose that Rodin’s huge, gangly nude Burgher with his immense hands and feet was considered aggressively political in its day. I just don’t know off the top of my head what the political implications of the work once were. (Furthermore, art works can become politicized by fortuity – one of the casts from the Burghers of Calais was located in the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. After the towers collapsed, the damaged bronze figure was found a mile away and, as now displayed, has become a kind of minor symbol for the suffering caused by the attack and the indomitable spirit of the survivors.)
On the basis of my tour of the Des Moines Art Center, I conclude that Christopher Woods’ account of the Novissima is, at least, partly correct, although the rupture between past art and the present is, perhaps, less dramatic than the writer proposes.
3.
So what should we make of identity politics and other advocacy that seems integral to much contemporary art?
Woods’ concept seems to be that contemporary art is made at the convergence of progressive (even radical) political ideology and the advent of historical developments – for instance, the rise of conceptual art – that privilege overt statements of intent. Ambiguity and nuance are no longer necessarily virtues in the making of art. In fact, clarity of meaning (parrhesia) is valued. Looking at art should be an experience that encourages the gallery-goer to think about what a just and equitable society might be. As we have seen, in large part, contemporary artists collected by museums (I am relying on my visits to the Walker Art Center and Institute of Art in Minneapolis as well) adheres to this program.
Therefore, one might consider much of contemporary art in the context of either “information” or advertising. (Wood acknowledges the former category but is too refined to acknowledge the latter concept.) “Information,” Wood describes, as a “disabling of the matter-spirit dichotomy...a third term, neither matter nor spirit.” This Hegelian diction is obscure. In more prosaic terms, contemporary art discloses structures of oppression, provides evidence of their ubiquity and powerful influence, and suggests strategies to subvert them. This is information. neither wholly material nor abstract, but rather a vector of action – that is, “actionable information” to use quasi-military terms sometimes invoked on the nightly news. Joseph Beuys clearly expresses this tendency – the traces of his thought, embodied in a chalkboard covered with diagrams and words from one of his lectures, are on display in the Des Moines museum, certainly evidence of art as “information.” It’s hard to distinguish between “information” and advertising. I presume the difference relates to the intent of the person or institution presenting the information. Advertising articulates propositions that are claimed as beneficial to their recipients on the basis of commercial or mercantile intentions. “Informational” art articulates propositions unmasking systems of oppression, protesting against them, and showing the way to a more just future. But, of course, we are all familiar with the so-called “PSA” – that is, “public service announcement.” In the PSA, an entity devises an advertisement for some service or value that is thought to be in the public interest. To what extent, then, should we consider successful contemporary art, defined as that which curators at publicly accessible galleries collect and display, as really just glorified ads – justice and equity sold the same way that McDonald’s might advertise an Egg McMuffin? Hasn’t contemporary art, once purged of notions of formal beauty, simply become a species of publicity, PR advocating for the just society?
Consider the propositions advanced by some of the politically inflected art in Des Moines: society wounds girls and, then, puts them in bandages not to heal but to bind (“Bandage Girl”); Caucasian society sees itself in the mirror of Black experience and doesn’t like what it sees (“Iago’s Mirror); Native American culture is resilient and playful, its heirs advancing boldly into a wind-turbine-powered future (“Chemenhuevi”); the power of women is explosive, a vulva filled with gunpowder (Mendietas “Siluteas” series); Whiteness seeks to erase Black accomplishment (“Whitewash” and “White #8"); even though they are beautiful and accomplished, Black women are always left behind (“Left Behind”); the marble foundations of America conceal ground impregnated with the blood of people of color (“Chapel series”). These declarations of principle can be readily extracted from some of the art on display in Des Moines. And, yet, the works embodying these ideas exceed the formulation of propositions that we can construe from this art. The fact is that art objects are always excessive to the verbal and political meanings we can perceive in them. Their presence or “aura” exceeds the meanings that they embody. The grotesquely ornate armature around the dark reflecting surface in “Iago’s Mirror” vastly exceeds the object’s political program. The massive entangled, organic form of the mirror’s frame excites our interest and, then, our imagination. We consider the work’s title and, perhaps, interpret the ornate adornment around the mirror as a reflection on Shakespeare’s Elizabethan diction – we consider Othello and wonder whether the object represents the character Iago, or is a figure for Othello, the way that he conceives himself in the mirror shown to him by the play’s villain. We interpret the lavish, scrolled and vegetal forms surrounding the mirror as an image for the intricate and overwhelming forces of tropical nature, abundance and variety but also monotony in that the entire object is shadowy, an ebony blacker than black. Since art works are necessarily “material”, the matter resists, proliferating other meanings that complicate or may even contradict the simple political proposition that the object projects. Art is “wild” advertising – that is, advertising in which subsidiary meanings that might subvert the message are allowed to persist, and, even, encouraged. It’s as if a fast food chain selling sandwiches as a healthy and fresh alternative to other fast foods were to choose to be represented by a purveyor of child pornography – what does this say about the fetish of health and freshness? (This scenario, of course, happened with respect to Subway ads featuring Jared Fogle; of course, Subway immediately withdrew the advertisements and prevented them from being aired once the news of its spokesman’s misconduct became generally known. Contemporary art, I suggest, would be conspicuously slower to withdraw the message and might, even, regard the turbulent substrata to the PSA as desirable.)
Some of the art in Des Moines just wants to remain art under old definitions – that is, charismatic and entrancing forms presented for the delectation of the viewer. The pressure to comply with contemporary art’s political agenda induces a sort of opportunism when it comes time for the artist to name his or her work. Certainly, several of the objects on display seem to have been primarily made to delight or intrigue the eye and, then, post hoc, conscripted to political purposes – noteworthy examples were Ebony Pattern’s exuberant installation of feathers, beads, and silk lace, “Among the Blades, Between the Flowers...” and similarly Joyce Scott’s “Mistaken Identity”. In these cases, it seems that the artist wishes to hitch a ride on the “politically correct” band wagon. Curiously, the best evidence for Woods’ theories about the Novissima are not intrinsic to the art itself, but part of the ensemble of effects involving the display of the work. Throughout the Des Moines Art Center, the curatorial labels for the works are designed to reevaluate past art in light of current political issues. This is by far the most radical agenda advanced through the Art Center’s collection. In many cases, the labels providing information as to the art seemed contrived to make the viewer uncomfortable – that is, the labels actively oppose the viewers’ naive pleasure in looking at something interesting, meaningful, or beautiful. In the past, art museums and their curators were too dignified to admonish gallery-goers with intrusive information. Perhaps, the concept was that if you had come to an art museum, you were a connoisseur or educated in “art appreciation” and, therefore, didn’t need expansive information displayed on the wall next to the painting or sculpture. But, of course, that assumption is elitist and, probably, carries racist implications as well. Therefore, the museum curator now conceives that art must be labeled and, even, interpreted in some sense – refined taste or higher education can no longer be regarded a prerequisite for art appreciation and, in fact, to the extent that such things imply elitism, may, in fact, be obstacles to properly understanding the objects on display. We live in an “information” age, as acknowledged by Professor Wood, and the curator feels that it is his or her prerogative to supply some interpretative information about the art shown in the Center. But as Wood remarks, the past is a history of racist, elitist, and sexist ideology – therefore, labels must be used to “correct” the reactionary attitudes underlying most of the art of the past.
Consideration of these issues leads me to an understanding that most art that we are likely to encounter has political undercurrents. Woods’ error, it seems to me, is defaulting to a view that the art in the past was not intrinsically political. In this respect, he sometimes displays a curious sort of blindness. At one point, he writes:
Much art today is coordinated with long-term eschatological or emancipatory projects, with project as such. Art aims at synchrony, participation, inclusion, and sympathy, concepts hard to reconcile with the once-prized, exclusive qualities of art.
This formulation may allow a distinction between a contemporary artist such as the racial provocateur like Kara Walker (as an example) and Corot or Cezanne. But Wood begins his book with consideration of an altarpiece in a church in Mecklenburg, Germany. Obviously, Christian art of the past is “coordinated with long-term eschatological or emancipatory projects” – that is, the salvation of the persons viewing the art and their liberation from earthly suffering. (I have no idea what the verbal hiccup “with project as such” is supposed to mean – in fact, it means nothing.) The altar piece certainly aims “at synchrony” (that is, synchronizing the time of the viewer with “sacred time”), as well as “participation, inclusion, and sympathy”. Indeed, I think concepts articulated by Wood are, probably, generally applicable to the “project” of almost all art and, on analysis, the distinction that he urges is unpersuasive.
Consider a famous work in the so-called Romantic school – Gericault’s magnum opus “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819). The huge painting depicts sailors abandoned at sea on a tiny raft. The figures are bathed in a gloomy light, a bit like something we might see in Caravaggio and they embody all possibly reactions to their grisly fate, death by starvation and exposure on the open sea. Some of the men are resolute; others are despondent to the point that they seem comatose; some show hope, others utter despair. The picture might be interpreted as an account of the absurdity of the human condition in the face of an indifferent universe. But when the colossal canvas was first exhibited at the Louvre in 1819 in the Salon de Paris, critics saw the painting as a savage critique of the Bourbon restoration. Some thought the painting was a comment on the Napoleonic wars. Others saw the image as overtly anti-monarchical. Many thought the picture was a brutal plea for the abolition of slavery. In other words, “The Raft of the Medusa” was largely viewed as a painting emmeshed in the politics of the day. Gericault seemed to be suggesting that Napoleon’s ambitions as well as the restoration of the Bourbons had produced this “heap of corpses” (as some contemporary critics said) shown in the painting. Over time, these meanings have been mostly forgotten – at least, by casual gallery-goers.
I’ve seen reproductions of the painting all my life. Usually, the canvas is considered as an outstanding example of a sort of gruesome romanticism directly reacting against the neo-classical aspirations of the preceding period. This analysis doesn’t take into account of the picture’s enormous size and sheer impact. When I saw the painting in the Louvre, I was astonished at how large it was. Standing in front of the picture, it was hard for me to interpret the painting as anything other than what it was – the canvas was an entire world complete and sufficient to itself.
