the era of post-historical art

Leonardo

The Era of Post-Historical ArtAuthor(s): David CarrierSource: Leonardo, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1987), pp. 269-272Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578172 .

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Theoretical Perspectives on the Arts, Sciences

and Technology

The Era of Post-Historical Art

David Carrier

Abstract-The painter Frank Stella has argued recently that the task of painting today is to maintain the tradition of great abstract art. The philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto has claimed that this is a post-historical era, a time in which it no longer makes sense to think in such terms. Comparing and contrasting these accounts offers a suggestive approach to much of the art discussed in Leonardo.

I. INTRODUCTION

One of the central questions any writer on contemporary art must face is the relation of art today to work of earlier times. If we focus on continuities, then perhaps we can demonstrate that current painting and sculpture develop out of art dating back to the Renaissance. If, rather, we believe that modern art involves essentially new issues, then that focus on continuity may blind us to what is original in art today. Stated in this general way, the problem may seem abstract; in practice, however, it is relevant to the writing of many critics and artists. Consider, for example, how artists writing in Leonardo who use radically new media often discuss the relation of their work to older artistic traditions.

The recent publication of books by two well-known artworld figures provides the welcome opportunity to debate this issue. Frank Stella's Working Space [1] is the first publication by this artist whose work has been widely exhibited and discussed since the early 1960s. An ambitious study of selected paintings from Caravaggio to the present, it is fascinating both for its vision of art history and for what it reveals about Stella's own art. Arthur Danto's The Philosophical Disenfranchise- ment of Art [2] is a collection of essays by a philosopher who has written extensively on such topics as Nietzsche, the philosophy of history and aesthetics. Since Danto is also art critic for The Nation and was once himself a practicing artist, he brings to these philosophical issues a working knowledge of art.

Stella and Danto offer diametrically opposed views about the relation of

Readers are invited to communicate with the section Editor at the Department of Philosophy, Carnegie- Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, U.S.A.

contemporary art to art of the past, and so contrasting their books provides a useful way of opening up a debate that, particularly if examined from Danto's point of view, should interest readers of Leonardo. In section II, I sketch Stella's view of the relation of abstract painting to baroque art, explaining why he thinks that it is essential to have an understanding of seventeenth-century art today. In Section III, I focus on Danto's claim that recently the history of art has ended. Section IV discusses one possible conciliatory argument-that both of these accounts could be right. Finally, Section V indicates how a portion of Danto's analysis is relevant to the art typically discussed in Leonardo.

II. STELLA'S VIEW OF ART HISTORY

Like many recent art critics, Stella believes that abstract painting is facing a crisis: "After Mondrian abstraction stands at peril. It needs to create for itself a new kind of pictoriality ..." [3]. He

proposes an original solution by pointing to a parallel situation in late sixteenth- century painting, when it was unclear how to develop the traditions of the then- concluded High Renaissance. Specifically, Stella argues, if our problem is that "today painterly abstraction has no real pictorial space, then we may learn from Caravaggio (1571-1610)" [4]. Standing before his The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (Fig. 1), we feel that the figures seem

capable of stepping out over the picture frame to join us in the audience .... [The painting is] self-contained .... Caravaggio ... was better at creating internal space, space among the figures constituting the action and subject of

his pictures, than anyone who came either before or after him .... He combined this gift with his ability to project a sense of palpable, moving space external to or extending from the action of his paintings ... [5].

Painting, Stella dramatically declares, "has always wanted to be alive", and where abstract artists such as Malevich and Morris Louis succeed is when they exhibit "an important, fragile aspect of that illusionism ... without which

painting cannot live" [6]. In his concluding chapter, Stella

describes his own coming of age as an artist in the summer of 1958. He was then 22.

I had a goal: to paint abstract paintings. By that I mean to make paintings which were faithful to the visual culture of the past, but which were still free from their dependence on conventional representational models [7].

If, as he goes on to suggest, abstract painting, including his own work, declined in the 1970s, that was because artists failed "to maintain the momentum of the sixties" [8]. But since "access to abstraction to anyone born after 1936 is direct and unencumbered" and abstraction is the modern mode of painting, now "abstraction faces no limits .... It is

innately well suited to growth" [9]. This is a dazzling analysis, as self-

confident as Stella's paintings; thus it is worth taking note of what he does not say about baroque art. His book says little about its content or its role as sacred art. Artists such as Caravaggio, he writes, "who gave us the great art of the seventeenth century are the ones who ... created their own space, literally and figuratively, at the expense of the space of the church" [10].

? 1987 ISAST Pergamon Journals Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X/87 $3.00+0.00

LEONARDO, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 269-272,1987



Fig. 1. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600, Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. (Photograph courtesy of Alinari/Art Resources, New York.)

Is it really possible to see The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew correctly in these terms? Art historian Howard Hibbard, noting that "martyrdoms were in vogue, and ... had meaning in the Catholic fight against Protestant heresy", remarks that in this painting Caravaggio's "sense of actuality derives from treating events of great importance as if they were genre scenes" [11]. And art historian Herwarth Rottgen writes of "the brutality of the event and the spontaneous action, the movement which agitates all the figures contrasting tragically with the 'telos' of the event" [12].

Hibbard and Rottgen argue that, in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, Cara- vaggio painted a scene intended to move the religious viewer; to treat the painting as an exercise in the creation of a realistic space is to avoid responding to its content. I grant that most modern viewers, whether religious or not, do this to some extent, trained as we are by art history to see a picture as a formal composition. But Stella's account gives a misleading view of continuity in painting. His Leblon II, like all of his works, is a composition of abstract elements. When he compares it in detail to Paulus Potter's The Young Bull (1647), he points to ways in which the pictures have similar spaces: for example, the white cow's face is echoed in "the Naples-yellow T in Leblon IF', the element running across the

picture's center [13]. Stella writes as if it were irrelevant that Potter depicts a bull, as if the bull standing before a tree were equivalent to a system of abstract geometric forms. But just as Caravaggio depicts a sacred scene, so Potter presents that bull in a landscape; and to analyze their non-abstract works as if they were only spatial compositions is to respond to only one dimension of their qualities as pictures.

Certainly it is useful to analyze representational works formally. But only if we assume that the content of such art is relevant to its artistic qualities can we conclude, with Stella, that he and Caravaggio are dealing with the same issues. The formalist critic Roger Fry, analyzing a painting he believed to be by Poussin, which tells a story from the life of Achilles, treated the story as only the pretext for the creation of a system of forms in space. As Fry acknowledged, Poussin would have found this approach deeply perplexing [14]. Stella's account poses similar problems. Only by leaving aside discussion of the content of the art of Caravaggio and Potter can he draw a parallel between his work as an abstract painter and theirs.

III. DANTO ON THE END OF ART

Danto's essay "The End of Art" provides a radically different perspective,

one amplified in other essays in his book. Drawing on a famous speculation of the philosopher Hegel, Danto argues that "it is ... possible to suppose that art itself has no future, though artworks may still be produced post-historically ... in the aftershock of a vanished vitality" [15]. This notion of the end of art is easily misunderstood. Danto is not saying that good artworks will no longer be made, but only that it may no longer be possible to treat these works as stages in an historical progression. In the past, "the progress in question was largely in terms of optical duplication ... the decreasing distance between actual and pictorial optical stimulation ... marks the progress in painting .. ." [16]. Giotto's images are more naturalistic than Cimabue's, and in this respect Caravaggio surpasses them both: progress consists in creating even better illusionistic representations.

Furthermore, we might look for other kinds of progress, such as progress in depicting moving things. Caravaggio shows Saint Matthew pushed down, so "there ... have been depictions of moving things without these being moving depictions, and from this distinction it is possible to appreciate what moving pictures ... attained to ..." [17]. When film superseded painting, providing more vivid ways of depicting motion, it was no accident that painters turned to alternative problems, such as concern with expression: "Thus De Kooning paints woman as the locus of slashes... Giacometti molds figures as impossibly emaciated ... because the artists re- spectively reveal feelings of aggressive- ness ... or compassion" [18]. What is novel about this concern, however, is that now "there simply is not the possibility of a developmental sequence with the concept of expression as there is with the concept of mimetic representation" [19]. There can be no history of the development of expression in the way that there is a history of more accurate representations; Giotto's expression is as moving and powerful as Caravaggio's.

Danto's own view of the implications of the end of the history of art is too complex to summarize here. As he accurately notes, to speak of the end of history today "carries ominous over- tones .... We hold it in our power to end everything .... Apocalypse has always been a possible vision, but has seldom seemed so close to actuality as it is today" [20].

Artworks of all kinds can continue to be made, for "when one direction is as good as another direction, there is no concept of direction any longer to apply" [21]. But since artists of the past often

Carrier, Theoretical Perspectives 270



were inspired by the belief that progress in artmaking is possible, the consequences of the general realization that the history of art has ended are hard to predict: "Our institutions-museums, galleries, collec- tors, art journals ...-exist against the assumption of a significant, even a brilliant future" [22].

IV. THE CONTRAST OF STELLA'S AND DANTO'S VIEWS

Clearly Danto's analysis, which he developed before Working Space was published, is directly opposed to Stella's account, since Stella both views abstract art as a direct heir to Caravaggio's representational work and predicts a brilliant future for abstract painting. But which account is correct? Because Stella focuses on the creation of space in painting, he believes that he and Caravaggio share important concerns. Because Danto is concerned with the history of representational illusionism, it is harder for him to link Stella's and Caravaggio's work in this way.

Another essay in Danto's book, "Deep Interpretation", is helpful here. Accord- ing to one fashionable view of interpretation, the art critic or historian may be as creative as the artist; multiple interpretations of an artwork are always possible. Art then is "an occasion for critical invention which knows no limit..." [23]. Danto rejects this view, arguing that "knowing the artist's interpretation is in effect identifying what he or she has made" [24]. To interpret The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew or Leblon II properly, we must know Caravaggio's and Stella's interpretations. But here Danto's argument yields a seeming paradox. Caravaggio was a painter of sacred scenes, and the limitation of Stella's analysis was its failure to take this point into account. But when Stella himself interprets his own art as continuing the tradition of Caravaggio, does that mean, given Danto's view of interpretation, that we must accept Stella's interpretation? Artists sometimes misinterpret their own work. But if we accept Stella's interpretation of his art, then what seemingly follows is that Danto's theory of the end of art is mistaken; Stella tells us he is continuing the tradition dating to Caravaggio. So Danto's account of interpretation seems inconsistent with his view of the end of art.

My own reflections are deeply indebted to the stimulus of Danto's work. In a book on recent art criticism and a sequence of articles on art history, I have

borrowed extensively from his analysis [25]. While arguing with him, I have used what I have learned from his work. In my analysis, Danto and Stella provide two alternative ways of understanding contemporary art; both of their accounts may be true.

Danto says, now the history of art has ended; Stella says, abstract painting continues to develop: and these state- ments seem to contradict one another. Just as a painting is either square or not square, so it must be that the history of painting has ended or it has not. Under pain of speaking nonsense, we cannot contradict ourselves. Understood in another way, however, Stella's and Danto's claims may not be contradictory. Consider a parallel.

Identifying the beginning of an historical period is notoriously tricky. Some historians think that the Re- naissance began in the early fifteenth century, others place it earlier [26]. Clearly, it would be absurd to argue that it necessarily began on the day in 1439 when Piero della Francesca arrived in Florence, for many equally good starting dates can be proposed. On the other hand, it would be equally absurd to assert that it really began in 1066, or 1600. When historians argue about this issue, they are arguing less about some matter of fact than about what date, within some reasonable range, is the most useful marker of a change in sensibility.

Perhaps this dispute between Danto and Stella can usefully be thought of in an analogous way. For Stella, the history of art continues; for Danto, it does not: but since they focus on different features of artworks, both of their accounts may be correct. It may be true both that Stella now uses space in ways akin to Caravaggio and that Stella's abstractions involve very different concerns from Caravaggio's sacred works. Saying this is not to argue that any interpretation of this art is possible. Some interpretations are untrue to the facts, and so false; others, though not necessarily untrue, are unrevealing, and so not worth discussion. But it is possible to have multiple interpretations of individual artworks, and so also multiple interpretations of the history of contemporary art.

A further example from analytic philosophy may make this last claim clearer. Danto teaches at Columbia University, and his colleagues have included the eminent art historians Rudolf Wittkower and Meyer Schapiro. Danto teaches at the same university where Wittkower and Schapiro taught; even though Wittkower is dead and Schapiro has retired, there is enough

continuity among the faculty for us to identify Columbia as the same university. Just as in the past few years Leonardo has changed editors and editorial office locations, while preserving an identity in its concerns, so a university preserves its identity despite changes in faculty. This identity is a matter of degree. If in another decade Leonardo is reorganized and then publishes articles only on perspective in Renaissance painting, then we might say legitimately that it is no longer the same journal as that one in which this article appears [27].

A similar analysis applies to the history of painting. In some ways, Caravaggio, Mondrian, Kandinsky and the other artists discussed by Stella share his concerns. Focusing on those common interests, we may think of Stella, like Caravaggio, as dealing with the problem of constructing pictorial space. On the other hand, as Stella himself allows, in many ways these artists have different concerns. If we emphasize those differences, then we may be more sympathetic with Danto's account. In short, whether we believe that the history of art has ended depends upon how we choose to narrate that history. There may be more than one good way to tell that story.

V. IMPLICATIONS FOR LEONARDO

This discussion obviously is not a conclusive account, but merely one way of provoking thought on these issues. When other readers respond to these two books, it will be easier to determine whether both Stella and Danto offer plausible visions of art history. What will interest readers of Leonardo especially are the implications of Danto's book for art based upon science and technology. As a number of writers in this journal have indicated, much of the art discussed here has little place in the current commercial artworld. But if we accept Danto's pluralistic vision of art history-"you can be an abstractionist in the morning, a photorealist in the afternoon, a minimal minimalist in the evening"--then art using science and technology has as much place in that artworld as Stella's abstractions [28].

Since the development of motion pictures, Danto argues, painting has turned away from a focus on representation, which has been taken up by "novel technologies of representation" that can "admit novel modes of expression: beyond question there are expressive possibilities in cinema that simply had no parallel in the kind of art cinema transformed" [29]. To take one example,




now holograms portray a more literal reality. "The images would have a virtual three-dimensional identity, and appear, like visions, full but impalpable, in our very midst" [30]. But instead of thinking of painting and these technological arts as involving inherently different histories and concerns, perhaps today we might rather see them as equally viable alternatives. Art based upon technology, as much as easel painting or carved sculpture, becomes one possible mode of art; once we give up the belief that the history of art is the story of progress in making better illusionistic images, then no one of these models can claim to have a special status.

Near the conclusion of Working Space, Stella argues that "abstraction became superior to representationalism ... after 1945. This is obvious on the level of physical and visual excitement, on the level of pictorial substance and vitality" [31]. This Danto denies. What is open to the artist today is to paint abstractly or representationally, to use oil paint or video equipment. But how art will develop in this post-historical era remains an as-yet-unanswered question.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

2. Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

3. Stella [1] p. 1. His claim on this page that the relation of contemporary art to pre- Renaissance painting has not been discussed is uninformed; see David Carrier, "Postmodernist Art Criticism", Leonardo 18, 108-113 (1985).

4. Stella [1] p. 12. 5. Stella [1] pp. 17-18. 6. Stella [1] p. 97. 7. Stella [1] p. 158. 8. Stella [1] p. 160. 9. Stella [l] p. 164.

10. Stella [1] p. 41. 11. Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio (New

York: Harper & Row, 1983) pp. 104,114. 12. Herwarth Rottgen, Il Caravaggio:

ricerche e interpretazioni (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), D. Carrier, trans., p. 234.

13. Stella [1] p. 145. 14. See the discussion in Anthony Blunt,

Nicolas Poussin (London: Phaidon, 1967) p. 4.

15. Danto [2] p. 83. An earlier, less sophisticated account, also drawing on Hegel, appears in Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (New York: Random House, 1969).

16. Danto [2] p. 86.

17. Danto [2] p. 87. 18. Danto [2] p. 102. 19. Danto [2] p. 103. 20. Danto [2] p. 111. This theme is developed

by a number of essayists in David A. Ross, ed., Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).

21. Danto [2] p. 115. 22. Danto [2] pp. 84-85. 23. Danto [2] p. 67. 24. Danto [2] p. 45. 25. See my Artwriting (Amherst: Univ. of

Massachusetts Press, 1987); "Manet and His Interpreters", Art History 8, 320-335 (1985); "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: Caravaggio and His Interpreters", Word & Image 3, 1, 41-73 (1987); "Gavin Hamilton's Oath of Brutus and David's Oath of the Horatii: The Revisionist Interpretations of Neo- Classical Art", The Monist (forth- coming).

26. See Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

27. See David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), and my "On Narratology", Philosophy andLiterature 8, 32-42 (1984).

28. Danto [2] p. 114. 29. Danto [2] p. 103. 30. Danto [2] p. 193. 31. Stella [1] p. 164.




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