Hans Belting the Meaning of Art History in Todays Culture

IN HIS 1990 LIKENESS AND PRESENCE, Hans Belting offered a magisterial narrative of the social, political, and religious contexts of imagemaking in late antiquity and the Middle Ages while adamantly refusing to view the creations of that fourth dimension through the conceptual lenses of artistic autonomy, private expression, and historical progress that developed only after. Not so much an early history every bit a prehistory of art (every bit implied in the subtitle, "A History of the Image Before the Era of Fine art"), the book served as a touchstone in Germany's emerging debates over the place of images in contemporary culture once they were divorced from the express contexts of modern fine art-historical and aesthetic norms.

His current book, outset published in High german in 1995, addresses what might be termed art afterward the era of art. Hither the question is, Once the imperatives of modernism (which had supplied, Belting argues, our understanding of art tout court) no longer agree sway, what structure of art remains? And when modernism ends in the last pregnant movements of the 1960s, what becomes of its institutional cohorts, the museum and the university?

Belting begins by demarcating the territory of contemporary art from that of modernism, focusing not and then much on the character of the art as its place within certain structures of making, exhibiting, and interpreting. His discussion circles around three related themes: the loss of the The states' postwar cultural hegemony (in office due to a European turn inward toward the former Eastern bloc); a cultural globalization that challenges Western definitions of art; and the revision of the art-historical canon through inclusion of previously marginalized women and minorities. Belting also addresses the increasingly unstable categories of high and low, the undoing of the traditional idea of the physical "work," and the growing disjunction between the roles of traditional and contemporary art museums. These distinctions are familiar, though perchance more descriptive of cultural aspirations than current market and institutional fact. Belting, however, wants to advance a stronger thesis than modernist and contemporary art'south occupation of different national and cultural matrices. Contemporary art, he argues, does not herald a new period emerging out of the old. Rather, it marks the end of the very thought of such historical evolution: Hither the grand tradition of art history no longer offers artists an objectively unfolding narrative that they feel the demand to comport frontwards but simply a ruin to choice through, or a readymade—something that may be staged and restaged in their work but not reinvented. Belting so asks how contemporary art in this "posthistorical" period can exist accommodated by an academic subject of art history forged in the furnace of modernism and thus sick-equipped to engage with what arrives after that menstruum's close.

Belting is enlightened, of course, that this kind of claim to witness the terminate of art has a tradition of its own, whether it meant that art had reached its zenith, every bit in Vasari's lauding of Michelangelo as marker the "perfection of art"; its nadir, equally in Vienna School historian Hans Sedlmayr'south scornful charge that what was once an organic whole has at present deteriorated into "stylistic chaos"; its political obsolescence, every bit in Berlin Dada's "Art is dead"; or its dissolution, every bit in postmodern critics' subsuming the history of art into the history of representations, an integration retroactively applied to the whole of art history in the practise of "visual culture." Belting first published his own thesis (The End of the History of Art?) in the early 1980s, roughly simultaneous with merely independent of Arthur Danto'due south essay "The Finish of Fine art"—suggesting that something was in the air fifty-fifty as both writers announced that embodying the zeitgeist was no longer art'south essential concern. And like Danto's, Belting'south formulation is best captured in the terms Hegel reserved for art in his philosophical bildungsroman of Spirit, where (every bit he describes in his Lectures on Aesthetics) art is "set free" after its end, no longer charged with beingness the engine of Spirit'southward cocky-realization. Belting asserts that contemporary artists have dispensed with what Joseph Kosuth spoke of equally "historical luggage," disclaiming any compulsion to follow modernism's defining mandates as if they were universal principles.

In all this Belting's real interest seems to be less the fate of art—which he presents as largely autonomous, affecting but rarely affected by the institutions within which it operates—than the fate of art history. His accuse is that art history every bit a scholarly subject field was founded on the presumption that the history of art was essentially i of style—that is, an internal development co-ordinate to a natural or historical law, amounting to what Heinrich Wölfflin mused as "an art history without names." Belting says that modernist art was complicit in this grand narrative: The avant-garde's utopian dimensions—say, the collectivist programs of Constructivism, Dada, and de Stijl—embodied an analogous commitment to a single history, which it was their duty to execute, even if these efforts were posed equally critiques of the tradition, non its extension. Just equally artists in such movements proclaimed that the "predominance of the individual"
had to be abolished in favor of the "universal," so Hegelian art historians would speak of item works of art as recognizable only by virtue of their place within the full general principles of stylistic evolution they exemplified. And, in turn, when modernist art ceased to evince a unified style, historians feared that art must have reached a decadent end, portending a "loss of the center," in Sedlmayr'south terms, a notion shared in 1 form or another by thinkers every bit diverse as Oswald Spengler, Georg Lukács, and Julius Meier-Graefe. The latter, a friend of "classical" modernism, complained in 1913 of the "surface artists" in whose work "images have become slogans"—anticipating what some late-twentieth-century modernist standard-bearers would say in the face up of postmodernist deflation of the ideals they hold dear.

That the ideas of internal evolution and stylistic autonomy were shared by both modernist fine art and the art history of earlier periods such equally the Renaissance is an of import thesis, merely Belting simply alludes to what explanatory forces connect the two: Did modernist artists influence historians of Renaissance art, or was their coordination a product of something similar a shared conceptual scheme? Belting also offers an overly narrow account of the way in which early fine art historians attempted to capture the changes of art in the organic development of styles. For one of the foundational questions of art history was precisely how to explain the manner that fine art, in its internal development, was related externally—every bit epiphenomenon, embodiment, reflection, or epitome—to the societies from which it emerged. Answering this question was, for case, Alois Riegl'south aim in his theory of a period- or culture-specific Kunstwollen, and it was what Wölfflin hoped to explicate in positing the 2 roots—tradition and social context—of artistic style.

Belting says that fine art history now has the fragmented character of the production of art itself, with a plurality of methods and theories and no clear way to adjudicate among them. Indeed, fine art history today must exist defined so disjunctively that it frequently isn't clear whether there is anything on which feminists, poststructuralists, social historians of art, queer theorists, iconographers, connoisseurs, and then on might agree such that their disagreements could offer a productive exchange. But Belting overstates the contrasting monolithic quality of traditional art history, since one can detect a level of alterity even in the writings of the old guard—Aby Warburg, on the Pueblo Indians, say, or Riegl, in positing a history of ornament against the materialist assumption that it must, every bit ornamentation, be a universal answer to a timeless human need.

In whatsoever case, Belting charges that art historians have not yet fully recognized the posthistorical state of art, and thus when faced with non-Western art that doesn't fit in the traditional narrative, they seek to expand the canon (through such devices every bit "global art") rather than historicize the very idea of the canon as something inextricable from a local and limited tradition, now closed. The problem, he argues, is that even a renovated canon in which every function of the world is represented would invariably, in its universalistic pretensions, assimilate such various artistic expression into a simultaneously unifying and corrupting European frame, leaving local folk traditions equally a kind of exotic "reserve." He finds a prefiguration of this thought in André Malraux's "museum without walls," which could formalistically join the artistic expression of an African bronze miniature to a Romanesque relief past presenting both in identically sized photographs on the page.

Belting sees recent technologies of Western art equally posing other kinds of problems for academic fine art history. His comments on video, for example, stress its novel temporal structure, a non-narrative "irksome art" (in Nam June Paik'due south words) whose superficial similarity to mass media serves its critical ends: Requiring slow, meditative contemplation, video asks for participation rather than consumption. While his discussion of such piece of work is subtle and ingenious, information technology doesn't finally explain why video'due south novel temporal phenomenology should pose more of a claiming to art history than did, say, the unusual eschatological temporal structure of quattrocento Christian art or the innovative experiential operations of Minimalism.

In the end, although Belting's diagnosis of fine art history is informed by a considerable erudition and range, he doesn't depict what an alternative art-historical do might wait like, save for a nod here and there to media studies. And he is largely silent on what is lost by art when it reaches the posthistorical moment he proclaims. Art is set complimentary, as Hegel proposed, to practise whatever it wants—but at the risk, one might suggest, of no longer being of urgent social concern. Consider a fate familiar to artists of the former Eastern bloc, where, as Ilya Kabakov writes, art was once "a necessity of life, not a professional activity" but has at present lost its "place in life," to the extent it has gained the autonomy promised by the Westward. If Belting had the posthistorical backbone of his Hegelian convictions, he might accept considered whether the discipline of fine art history, "in its highest vocation," is likewise a thing of the past, experiencing immense liberty just at the risk of no longer occupying a fundamental cultural part. Yet just as postmodern fine art implicitly continued modernism by taking its terms, admitting negatively and critically, as its own, then Belting's business relationship of academic art history is curiously still occupied with deconstructing traditional "principles of art history." Contemporary art, by contrast, seems different—not anxious, oppositional, or nostalgic in its relation to the past. 1 wonders what an analogous art history, "set gratis" from the grip of its own tradition, would turn out to be.

Jonathan Gilmore is a Cotsen Fellow in Princeton Academy's Guild of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.

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Hans Belting, Art History After Modernism, translated past Caroline Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen. Chicago: Academy of Chicago Press, 248 pages.

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/200308/hans-belting-5475