4 3 < S a 2 rl oo a ey o £ 8 5 es = » 3 3 a & ILLiad TN: Borrower: IRU Printed: 2/24/2015 12:17:35 Trans. #: 923043, Lending String: CUT,MNU,NOC,NOC,*PAU Patron: Journal Title: Papers presented to the Marxism, and art history session of the College Art Association meeting Volume: 1976 Issue: MonthiYear: 1976 Pages: 3- G Article Author: Clark, Timothy J Article Title: Preliminary Arguments: Work of Art and Ideology Imprint: Los Angeles, Calif: Distrbuted by the ILL Number: 143528170 CANT Departmentals: Please fax or email reason if not available. Fax : 215-898-1474 Email: interlib@pobox.upenn.edu Not on shelf Inuse Condition HX521 .M278 LIBRA __R26M19S06T10 : 31198057787306 Charge Maxcost: 20.001FM Billing Category: IFM Shipping Address: New Mexico State University Zuhl Library - ILL, Dept. 3475 1305 Frenger Mall, MSC 3475 Las Cruces, NM 88003 Ariol: 128.123.193.167 Fax: 905-646-4335 Email: ili@lib.nmsu.edu Odyssey: 128.123.44.152T.J. Clark University of California, Los Angeles (now Leeds University, England) PRELIMINARY ARGUMENTS: WORK OF ART AND IDEOLOGY Can we agree on the following working definition of ideology? (Probably not, but let's proceed.) Ideologies are those systems of beliefs, images, values and techniques of representation by which particular social classes, in conflict with each other, attempt to 'naturalise' their own special place in history. Every ideology tries to give a quality of inevitability to what is in fact a quite specific and disputable relation to the means of production ~ it pictures the present as 'natural', coherent, eternal. It takes as its material the real substance, the constraints and contradictions, of a given historical situation - it is bound to refer to them somehow or other, bound to use them, otherwise what content would it have, what (distorted) information would it convey, what would it be for? But it generalises the repressions, it imagines the contradictions solved. Ir So part of the task of a Marxist art history ought to be to reveal the work of art as ideology. You mean to say: Look! This work of art is ideological! No, not exactly. I mean to say: Look! This work of art is ideological, and to say that - to see that - is to see it differently, to see it more completely. See it as a real object, produced by real people in real historical circumstances, produced to do a certain job, to validate a particular order of things; or sometimes, more interestingly, Produced to paper over the cracks between two different orders, two liturgies, two concepts of nobility, two classes, two ideologies. See it as a real object, meaning, secondly, see it: get a grasp of its order, and the particular job this order, this arrangement of things had to do. rrr Three art historians (they could all call themselves Marxist) are discussing the Bayeux tapestry.One says: It's a great work of art! A complete expression of the world~ view of one class. A vision of feudal order in which war, worship, conquest, kingship are made part of each other, part of a seamless web. Another says: Bloody feudal ideology! when pressed, he adds: A lot of Norman propagand: A third says: It's an attempt to plead a certain, contested, unstable view of the creation of Norman kingship, and the role of one man, Bishop Odo, within it. It's an attempt to patch up the contradictions within an ideology, to insist > with its vivid, strained, self-conscious narrative detail - on how much of reality its view of things will include and articulate. Which statement strikes you as materialist? I.e. which wants an account of the concrete, historical circumstances in which a work was made, by someone, for someone, its meanings defined by this and other real processes of work? And which statement could possibly lead to looking, to seeing more of the object, more ways in which its visual form colluded in particular, complex tasks? wv In the previous discussion, maybe my stress on seeing, looking, getting a grasp, will seem vague to some, even Utopian. As stated, I suppose it is. But it's an ideal we can hardly do without. Marx had it, I reckon, when he talked of the difference between a "merely speculative, merely theoretical" thought, and that other kind of enquiry which is in the end an "appropriation of the world," “a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought," "a rich totality of many determinations and relations." (Grundrisse, English translation, Penguin/NLB, p. 100-01). If we cannot sustain that notion, then we should all give up art history double quick. It then really does become either revolution or art history. And, pace David Kunzle's "three veteran Marxists,” one distinctive feature of Marx's approach to revolutionary politics was his continuing confidence in the place of theoretical work. An uneasy confidence, a confidence that was fought for and sometimes lost; but a confidence nonetheless. At certain moments - in the later eighteen-fifties certainly - all those years of patient, irascible labour with the Blue Books, the mercantilist tracts, the forgotten tomes of Proudhon, Hegel and Ricardo must have seemed eccentric and futile. And yet in 1864 Marx emerged as the only man capable of putting the first effective international association of workers into shape, the only man who could give it a working programe, a basis for unity, a coherent view of capital and labour. This is made to sound a bit too magical ~ out of the Reading Room and on to the barricade! - but it is closer to the truth than the stock image of Marx the Militant.In our own case - let's come back to earth, to the narrow round of art history - this means that there need not be a contradiction between art-historical work and work on ~ against ~ art history as it exists, in real terms, in the form of institutions like graduate school, the board of Art Bulletin, Civilization, the CAA. They ought to be part and parcel of each other. And the balance between them will be constantly changing, according to an analysis of possibilities, necessities. The better the ‘art history’ they produce, the more unavoidable will be the moves against the establishment - the less easy it will be to shrug them off as ‘mili- tancy' or 'Marxism." The more we can expose the vacuity of bourgeois art history's highest, most trumpeted achievement - its much vaunted ‘contact with the object," its spermatorrhoeic love-affair with ‘creativity’ and 'genius' - the easier the institutional struggle will be. vr Lenin once defined a revolutionary situation as one in which those giving the orders no longer believe in them, and those receiving the orders no longer obey them. That, he implied, is a dialectical process. viz All this would be grounds, David Kunzle, for me to have to say that while you were right to bow to the priorities of someone else's struggle, a struggle at a different level of intensity from ours, you would be wrong to pour too much scorn on your own "rambling defences." Not defences of Barks, but defences of the actual contradictions within any process of production, ideological or other- wise, artistic or not. And yes, as stated, you were right to "stress the impor- tance of showing that a production process in art was subject to the same kind of exploitation as any other kind of production, and that it is possible to resist from within that process itself. virr A parting shot. Our task is made the easier, I reckon, by one current fashion in the history of art. All the books, I mean - even as good a one as Michael Baxandall's - Which have Art and Experience in their titles. ‘Experience’ being the code word for a kind of art history which feels the need to refer to those historical real- ities with which artist and patron are constantly in contact, but which dares not name those structures which mediate and determine the nature of that contact - ideology, class, the conflict of classes, the contradictions within any ideo- logical view of the world.So that "Quattrocento man" floats safely somewhere above the "churchgoing business man, with a taste for dancing" - the actual mover, who is referred to only to be conjured away. And several levels below, a whole host of Greeks (merchants, patricians, freeman, slaves?) medieval men and 19th century Americans waits in the wings, ready to act out its part in a painless and absurd "social history of art." Surely that soap opera cannot last long - at least, not for those who take the question of ‘experience’ seriously. After experience, ideology? Perhaps - but even that, remember, is a concept which could be recuperated, on its own.