(Bernier) Alors sans plus tarder, je cède la parole à Bill Readings
Bonjour Tout le monde. J'espère que vous allez m'excuser
si je passe à ma langue maternelle
what we have today is something that was
originally planned as an
intimate little group discussion it's
taken on some rather huge dimensions
which i think is a remarkable
testimony both to
the quality of the people that were
invited into the
organizational skills that the people
the people at the museum
who took care of things what I'd like to
try and do
in order to frame the three papers
you're about to hear
is say something in general
about what the new art history is and at
the same time in so dipping
to sort have tried to evoke the ghostly
voice or
John Tagg now
more or less the term new art history
seems to have arisen as the title at the
conference
organized by the editors of block
magazine Middlesex Polytechnic
now Middlesex University in 1982
at that time they put a question mark
after
the phrase the new art history nowadays
I think
and this is something about the
differences of historical perspective
one of those bits of Nachträglichkeit about
which Hal Foster spoke
yesterday I think we'd be inclined to
poor light
term to speak of New art histories but I
think it's worth invoking the particular
and site-specific
origin of the New art history because it
is a particularly British term
any groups a number of shifts in the
practice
writing about art. I think what's most
interesting finally
about the new art history more than new
art histories
is ultimately the sheer blank fact that it
or they should come to be named as such
some exercise of baptism should have taken
place
now the name the new art history is
specific to Britain
in North America debate around such
questions as tended to be carried
on under the designation of
postmodernism
now to say that is to make some very
broad generalizations
but in each case I think couple a facts a
very salient
first that both the New art histories
and postmodernism arise but moments when
the existing institution about history
is in its own terms functioning
extremely well
that's to say at a time when programs in
art history
in both Britain and North America had
achieved a remarkable degree
of institutional stability. Second,
that the new art history appears to
something more than the simple
importation of new
methodologies
new objects into an existing
disciplinary field that is
new art history is not simply the
application
all importation marxist feminist or
psychoanalytic theory
nor is it merely the consideration
arrange about
fact that it had hitherto been excluded from my
culture it is these things
but that effort renaming implies
something more
John Tagg couldn't be here but
a question that he asked seem to me very
indicative
what's at stake in the new art history
indicated
both for its directness and for the
potential that it gives
being misunderstood in reference to his
book
burden representation which it argues
but there is not
one history of photography as a formal
representation
but rather there are multiple histories
the uses to which photography has been
put it poses the following question to
the
art object we should not ask he says
what does it express
but rather what uses does it serve. Now on
one level
that could seem to be the founding
question the discipline rather like
social history Iraq a kind of art
history a new positivism
taking as its starting point Benjamin's account to the decay of aura
which then proceeds to look through art
objects
to the social function that is to say
new art history if it were understood as
a kind of
simple social history about would
problematise
are what seems to me to count about the
new art history is the way it also
problematises
history that is to say if modernism
had allowed us to ask the question what
is art
the post-modernism the new art history
is the day
asks forces to ask at the same time what
is history.
So that if it's to mean something
the new art history
will have been more than a matter of new
methodologies a new objects
it would have been more fundamentally a
disciplinary question
one as it were that puts the "deep art"
back
in the title Depart-ment of art history
now in framing the papers you're about
to hear
I'm gonna bubble underlined the
disciplinary question that underlies
their discursive address the question of
whether the New art histories
belong to departments or Art history
in a simple or uncomplicated sense
so to whom then does the new art history
belong
or how does it approached the question
its disciplinary belonging
this is not just a question of what
cultural were art objects do
or of how new methodologies allow us to
see them doing it
it's also the question of what it is
that our history does
what the New art histories do not do
I think
is reconstitute the history of a given
or expanded Realm of objects
New art history is indeed both a new
history and history of a new art
but it's also the bringing into crisis
the possibility about history
as a stable disciplinary failed not
the renewal about history that's why I
underlined the fact that the that the
traditional history was not
internally in crisis at the moment to
the emergence of the new art history
new art history was not simply a
response to a professional
need I think it's worthwhile noting the
traditional art history
in Britain is slightly differently
culturally situated than in North America
in Britain you have christie's and
Sotheby's
occupying the space between North
America is reserved for institutions
such as the Mary Boone gallery
that's to say the commercial interface
about history in Britain
and you know perhaps this is appropriate
in the Twilight to the waning Empire
is the auction block rather than the
gallery
catalog so in explaining to people why
they should buy paintings
which I take to be the commercial
function about the street some point
in Britain condescension archival
research in Aiken logical
analysis dust directed primarily to
questions about
authenticity she's the major questioning
auction houses rather than to the
phenomenology a static experience
I E what it's like to look at paintings
so hence the question at the
disciplinarian institutional function in
writing about out gets posed in Britain
to the art historian rather than to the
art critic
I think that's a very interesting
difference to think about
and that's why I think we get a new art
history rather than post-modernism has
the locus
such investigations nice how foster
showed us
last night the central question if the
the central question here is the
institutional
status of art and that appears as a kind of
self-consciousness
about some things we might use the term
"perspective"
now everything that matters in the new
art history
is at stake in the attempt to make the
questioning of perspective something
other the narcissism and I think if we
are to avoid
the problems that how foster in his
opening address laid out
then the question perspective has to be
more than a matter of navel-gazing
or the search for an ethnographic alibi
it has to ask both
what it means to look and what it means
to take a historical perspective on art
what the place of looking is in the
practice about history
first what does it mean to look wanted
the vectors a power that phone lines of
sight
now the new of history's it seemed to me
depart from
the department at the social
history of art
insofar as this question is not just a
question how can we see power
work how can we grasp the ideological
work
of construction and placement that
masquerades under the presumed
naturalness of
representation rather I think this
matters
the new art history ask how is vision
itself grasped within the network
relations power this phrasing it's just
much more open to the possibility of the
aesthetic
as a question the newest former fashion
the intersection of power in looking is
not just a matter of seeing through
missus
not just a matter of replacing the
representation of the real with the
representation of ideology
because if looking itself gets caught up
with power
then we move the beyond the binary
opposition
that offers us traditional affirmations
aesthetic autonomy
or a general history of cultural
representation
it looking itself is caught up in power
perhaps even
in the power the sublime this can lead
us to think about is something his
relation to its cultural context
is not adequately registered in a strict
choice between
autonomous value and mere mystification
think think of it as something whose cultural
effect is not limited to its social
meaning
as cultural representation that's the
framework in which
I want to hear peter bowlers paper
second question I asked was the question
what it meant to take a historical
perspective on Oct
the question that I hear troubling both
Thomas Crow and Stephen Bann
in their papers and hear a man say
something about this problem I keep
having about the tendency to PLO relies
to refer to the New art histories where
the social history about might imply
as disciplinary authority a single
history in which the question is one
merely love calibrating the relative
proportions of marxism feminism in
psychoanalysis to go to make Molotov
cocktail
that we will then throw at the art
historical institution
it seems to me that what goes on under
the title at the new art histories in
Stephen Banns papers exemplary here
tends to open the question of how it is
that various histories of art get
constructed
this is but the obvious question from
what perspective such histories get
written
and the more complex issue how a notion
of perspective
that is itself implicated in artistic
representation
underpinned our awareness of what it is
to write history
now theory is one name that one might
give to the acknowledgement to the
proposition that
interpretation is primordial that it
structures the possibility of
apprehension in a way that any
responsible criticism
must take into account more than new art
histories tell us
is that history provides no alibis for
interpretation
in this sense the new histories of art are
not just gazes
cost back from the perspective I will
point to the present
rather than modes prolongation a
heterogeneous series about checks
modes a prolongation to force the art
historian to relinquish both the promise
of immediacy
the phenomenology of perception that so
often structures art criticism
and the comfort critical distance
the alibi of historical objectivity that so
often structures
art history. The art history is arise
from this recognition
us more than merely storage syste
they cannot but recognize the relativising force the interpreted frames
within which shot
objects or prime are apprehended but
neither can they invoke history
or some kind of a gaily an alibi for the
cultural work that such
interpretation performs no alibi
that will excuse in advance the way in
which anyone history necessarily
cuts out and blocks other histories
think that cut out block has something
to do with my macintosh I don't know
back if this conclusion sounds familiar
it's perhaps because it allows us to
grasp the extent to which
the new our histories in their refusal
to simply be the disciplinary project of
a renewed art history
have opened a disciplinarity about
history to something like
its postmodernity a placing at the
question about
within heterogeneous income insurable
disciplinary field
and if I can perhaps find in myself this
morning to be a bit more encouraging
that how foster last night about what's
going on in art history and elsewhere
thank God also elsewhere than in art
history
in the wake of new art histories
it's because I feel that this postmodern
moment of Art history
is one that holds open the full red how
active the question
how it is things open to interpretation
at all
that produces a multiple discontinuous
field site-specific art histories
that nonetheless have a strong
contemporary relevance
it's that paradoxical combination of the
recognition of historical
discontinuity and concern for contemporary
relevance
that finally ties together the three
papers you're about to hear
now, since we have two try and hurry
along I'll stop there
to be glad to hear an actual egghead
people who came to hear
First of all professor Thomas Crow
D'origine américaine, Thomas Crow est maintenant résident de Grande Bretagne et professeur
d'histoire de l'art
Sussex a Brighton
specialiste du 18e siècle mais aussi du 19e et de l'art contemporain
- c,est quand même une belle tranche, non?
Il est l'auteur de Painters and public
life in 18th eighteenth-century
and of nineteenth-century art and
critical history
Les textes de Thomas Crow ont été traduit dans plusieurs langues
dans la revue Parachute et dans les cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne
pour les versions francophones
il a publié des essais
dans les revues Art Forum et October et dans des collectifs
a new history of French literature et
discussions in contemporary culture
firigé par Hal foster
son prochain livre qui paraîtra cet automne
s'intitule emulations: making artists
for
revolutionary France Thomas Crow
