Rethinking the Canon Author(s): Michael Camille, Zeynep elik, John Onians, Adrian Rifkin, Christopher B.

Steiner Reviewed work(s): Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Jun., 1996), pp. 198-217 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3046172 . Accessed: 20/01/2012 10:35
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A RAN GE O F C RITI CAL PE RS PE CTIVES

Rethinking

the

Canon

Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters

MachaelCamalle
I used to be almost embarrassed to admit to friends and colleagues the place where I spent so many hours with things medieval. It was constructed to be, and can still be be construed as, celebrating those aspects of art history that I had despised-triumphant nationalism, a purely stylistic taxonomy of objects, and a rigidly chronological system of their classification. The place was not even medieval, but a modern museum, and to make matters worse, none of the canonical works exhibited there was real. The pantheon of simulacraI am talking about is the collection of plaster casts More recently I came at the Musee des Monuments franJcais. across some old photographs showing how the rnoulages there were arranged before 1937, when the collection, opened by Viollet le Duc in 1883, filled a wing of the old Trocadero Palace. It was then called the Musee de Sculpture Comparee. These photographs show how the canon of French medieval sculpture was then displayed, not along stylistic and chronological lines as it is today. As its title suggests, the museum's purpose was to allow the visitor to compare, as in a museum of natural history, one species of carving to another-the ltomanesque to the Gothic leaf, for example. One photograph shows the juxtaposition of the statue of Isaiah from Souillac, which would today be considered key in any canon of medieval sculpture, hanging next to a work which would not have so central a place today-part of the damaged, late thirteenth-century sculpture added to the south porch of Chartrescathedral and representing four of the mechanical arts (Fig. 1). On my last visit these two casts were still on show, one in the Romanesque Room and the other farther along, in the EarlyGothic Room. Now I am less inclined to downplay my desire to behold plaster of Paris in Paris than I used to be. This is partly because the history of how objects were collected and reproduced-how canons were created-has become a major focus for art-historical research. This museum is now itself a monument (along with another favorite, the two vast Cast Courts at the Victoriaand Albert Museum in London) to the nineteenth-century interest in mechanical copies made for pedagogical purposes. l But on another level these ghosts of stones have surely gained from the current fashion for phantasmaticsimulation and our culture'spreference for the ironic copy over the dead original. As a medievalist, however, I tend to view these plaster casts more like contact relics, made from molds taken, like Veronica'sveil, from the surface of the divine prototype, thus giving them their own peculiar kind of authenticity. Floating free of their architectural

anchors, they are often more visible and certainlybetter lit by natural light than the fragments of real Romanesque and Gothic stone sculpture that also drift unmoored, marginalized and spotlit, in the recently renovated sculpture galleries of the Louvre. Nor have the sites and statues from which molds were made and then these replicas cast fared much better. The casts remain important records, especially where pollution and destruction have, in the intervening years, obliterated details on the originals that can still be discerned in their delicately crafted imprints. In fact, when you travel all the way to Souillac you will find the actual Isaiah relief, of exactly the same dimensions as its twin-6 feet 63/4 inches high-isolated, already moved from its original twelfthcentury locus. It is a fragment stuck on the right side of the door on the dim interior west wall of the abbey church, impossible to see properlywithout a flashlight, which anyway flattens the stone surface, making the actual object far more distorted and theatrical than the version in the museum. have The images in the Musee des Monuments franJcais been arranged to tell a story. For those of us trying to teach or learn about medieval art, even though we might see a totally different story than the one narrated by their official order and placement, these casts are powerful tools, precisely because they are not "fixed in stone." Their plaster permeability presents a canon but also a means for disrupting canonicity, adding to it and filling it with unnatural others. In this respect I would argue that a canon is not made up of the actual objects but only of representations of those objects. As FrankKermode has suggested in his discussion of the origins of the term, the canon originally referred to the sacred authority of eternally reinterpretable scripture.2Arthistorical canons, as constituted by a set of predetermined, isolated images of "greatworks"reproduced in books or in a series of more complex institutional replicas such as the plaster casts at the Musee des Monuments franSais,are thus, like writing, supplemental and secondary.Whether their bias be nationalist, formalist,or iconographic, canons are created not so much out of a series of worthy objects as out of the possibilities of their reproduction. For example, the paintings that were most enjoyed in the eighteenth century were those that could be most easily engraved and made available to a new collecting audience, just as, in the nineteenth century, the taste for Gothic ornament was directly stimulated by plaster reproductions. The advent of photography meant that the ideal Museum Without Walls could expand even further. In terms of the history of medieval sculpture, it was exactly those fragmentary Brancusi-like bits of stone, devoid of their original polychromy, which looked so good when dramatically lit in black-and-white photographs, that were "canonized." Henri Focillon helped place the Souillac Isaiah in the canon through analyzing its drapery, just as

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Meyer Schapiro aided its ascent in his famous study of its social context. Contemporary students might focus on the figure's textuality (the scroll) or his sexuality (the way his thighs are scooped out of the stone), seeing sculpture not as sign but as body. The plaster Isaiah in Paris is, in this sense, part of the history of the reception of a sculptural fragment that remains in the abbey church at Souillac and constitutes part of the process of its canonization. Very consciously I have been discussing the canon not only at one remove (in the plaster cast at the Musee des Monuments francaais) also at two removes (as this copy appears but in an old photograph). This is because, like so many art historians of my generation, I am anxious about my relationship with the object. I have to admit that, during the three or four times I have seen it, the stone prophet at Souillac held me enthralled, even in the half-dark. He seems to be struggling to read and show something to his audience, to communicate about his vision to me, as he lunges forward, pointing insistently to the unfurling scroll that is his speech, gesticulatingjust as animatedly as I sometimes do in front of the slides that I project of him. There exist many medieval things, not only sculptures, but also all kinds of objects that can, like this prophet, withstand the repeated peeling-off of their surfaces, the milking of their visibilityby an almost parasitic technology of reproduction in two- and three-dimensional copies. Rather than draining them, this constant replication serves only to make them even more dynamically communicative and capable of taking on new meaning and significance. Even though being a medievalist puts me in a different relation to notions of canonicity than, say, being a modernist, I agree with T. J. Clark's observation in a recent discussion of Cezanne that certain works of art show us what it is to "represent at a certain historical moment they show us the powers and limits of a practice of knowledge."3 I suppose that one day the Isaiah might be removed from the canon as displayed in the Paris cast museum. A new director might want to highlight a different fragment of twelfth-century sculpture from this region of the Dordogne, which produced many hundreds of other examples. But this is unlikely, because the piece has a place in the history, not just of sculpture, but of the body and prophecy, despite, or perhaps because of, its having lost its original place in the abbey church. Canonical works are usually described as those that have been stripped of their contingency, their particularplace in space and time, and that now stand alone as "worksof art." It seems to me that precisely the opposite is the case: the truly exceptional work is one which registers, reacts to, and even redefines its particular historical circumstances, as I think the Souillac sculpture does and as Schapiro described it in his still resonant essay of 1939.4 The prophet continues to communicate across the centuries in different ways to different generations of beholders because of his presence in that particularplace. A medieval art historian is far more likely to
1. This aspect of the history of taste as it has affected notions of canonicity is discussed by Ivan Gaskell, "History of Images," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Peter Burke, London, 1991, 178-82. ed. 2. FrankKermode, Forms Attention, of Chicago, 1985, 76-79.

1 Castsof the ProphetIsaiahfrom Souillacand part of the South Porchof ChartresCathedral.Paris,Museedes MonumentsfranSais, before 1937 (photo:Archives Photographiques d'Artet d'Histoire) want to construct a canon, not of objects, but of places, sites of pilgrimage, and performance to which one returns again and again. Liminal works, that is, works which are both spatially marginal and which cross or come between two distinct periods, often fail to achieve canonical status. A piece of medieval sculpture, which is molded in my own mental museum of monuments but which is not cast at the Musee des Monuments franSais,appears as part of the west portal of Senlis Cathedral. It is a superbly ambiguous thing, less than a foot long, part reptile, part bird, and all stone, that crouches alongside its twin on the inner edge of the left socle, alongside the Labors of the Months (Fig. 2). The reasons why this thing at Senlis is not part of the canon of medieval sculpture are not hard to fathom. Not only is its snout weathered, but also, and more important, it is temporally as well as spatially marginal, out of place, so to speak, in its place. It is a vestige of the haunted tanglewood of "Ro3. T. J. Clark, "Freud's Cezannne," Representations, 52, Fall 1995, no. 115-16. 4. Meyer Schapiro, "The Sculpturesof Souillac"( 1939), in Romanesque Art, SelectedPapers,l,NewYork, 1977, 102-30.

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of the 2Monsterat the edge of the inner face of the left socle Portalof Senlis Cathedral,ca. 1170 West bestiality perching on one of the key examples of manesque" that is an"Early Gothic" portal. The sculpture from Senlis gets reproduced in most studies of part the canon, and that of medieval sculpture, is the DeathandAssumption the Virgin of perhaps carved by the same indiinthe tympanum above, latter's vidual who made the monster. Rather than the pressing issues would be who controls canonicalstatus, more accessto it and its rapid physical deterioration, its eventual disappearance. In planning a graduate course, "Monstrosityin Medieval the I Art," have begun to create a canon of monsters in which lists of Senlisbeast has assumed an important place. Making example the slimy, feathery, and scaly, and comparing this I find that it turns out to be more a dragon withmany others, goes than a basilisk, as I first thought; its complex ancestry Jacques backhundreds of years and crosses three continents. Derrida has recently described how "as soon as one perceives which a monster in a monster, one begins to domesticate it," its sources and is exactly what I am doing in my search for meaning.5 Nineteenth-century canons of medieval sculpture of were constructed according to a Linnean taxonomy more on the nature. Modernist canons, though focused Our figurative, tended ironically toward disembodiment. to monsters and own age, I would suggest, looks more hybrids as paradigms, precisely because recent technological into displacements and prosthetic possibilities have called are. In her essay question the very notion of what bodies Donna "The Promises of Monsters," historian of science transformations creHaraway examines how technological and ated "out of what is not quite a plethora of human altered our categories and inhuman actors" have radically seem to canons.6 Her concept of the monster would actually way of thinking about me to be a far more promising of the classifying medieval art than the traditional notion obvious. Whereas the canon is a canon. The advantages are the transcendent, uncreated text, like the Bible or the Torah, a creation. Whereas the canon monster is a material creature, is constructed out of the always already known, prejudged

expected, the monster, being unstable, crosses boundand between human and nonhuman, mingling the appropriaries itself in constantly novel and ate the inappropriate, showing unexpected ways. Stripped of contingency, the canoniand object is supposed to transcend space and time and stand cal lurking By autonomous. contrast the monster is always warning guarding the threshold as at Senlis, or somewhere, to the evil offthe eye. The canonical object is usually reduced visual level and, in its superficialvisibility,has none of purely has somatic richness that C. Nadia Seremetakis argues the what she calls the "the inundating lost been in modernity of experience sensory flooding, shock and multiplicity."7 monstrous, on the other hand, is all sensation, at one The soft and slimy, at another sharp and spiky. It now point imperative to analyze the relations between the monseems parts of a thing rather than analyze them as discrete strous at andseparate entities. In this sense, the stone prophet a magnificent chimera, a hybrid combitoo Souillac becomes nationof different traditions of corporeality, Ottonian, even classical, crisscrossed and constantly transByzantine,
. 8 . . . . . .

ormlng

art The prophet shows us his scroll, teaching, as the things out. But we now live in a does, by pointing historian visualculture in which people behold the future through actual clickingon icons rather than through pointing at myths of the computer revolution is things.One of the major images, that it will collapse the canon by democratizing be reduced to a screen available makingeverything that can a wider to everyone. There is much talk about including and providing new visual range of "others" in museums venuesof display to minorities and previously marginalized to artisticproducers. The new technology, however, seems Will it really liberate us be more Berenson than Baudrillard. images from the tyranny of the canon by providing multiple objects worldwide, things of hundreds of thousands of other to which we can combine and redeploy ourselves in order with the past? Or will it teach and explore, play and perform by endlessly publicize only those canonical things owned will insure that these powerful institutions? Copyright laws to images will be sacrosanct anyway, even more inviolable originals. Once facsimianalysisand redeployment than their les are available, of course, the things themselves disappear see a into the vaults.8 I suppose it is better that students page, or the screen verslon o a palntlng, a manuscrlpt seem Souillac Isaiah than the murky xeroxes that now Yet I would disagree ubiquitous in undergraduate teaching. new with researchers in medieval art who have embraced the means of historical computer technology as an empowering reality vision, allowing them to take their classes on virtual for example. In trips inside and around Chartres Cathedral, this they are not only following Viollet le Duc's misplaced mapositivist logic, which saw the cathedrals as wonderful experience of the chines, but are also further reducing their when past to a single, simulated register. At the very moment to artbody and performance have become fundamental focus historical concerns, our visual technology is fixing our The canon and the firmly within the screen/picture frame. but idea of a canonical object then will not be eroded, of mass actually reinforced by market-driven technologies
. . . .

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vlslblllty.

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communication. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings have recently suggested that "the art object no longer appears as object but rather as a constellation of processes, offering and offered to a series of reading heads."9 While this might be true of contemporary visual products, it seems to me that we cannot treat works from the past in this way, as things only to be read in our heads. Our images are notjust about networks but about textures. They are not read on screen but felt on flesh, and pushed out of matter even to the level of pain. In recent years the linguistic model, which for at least two decades has been so influential in our field, has gradually been replaced by one rooted less in language and more in corporeality. Emphasis upon the body will surely have an effect upon how canons are shaped in the future, and I welcome the work of those art historianswho are returning to the relationship between bodies and objects both canonical and noncanonical. I did not say "return to the object" a strange Proustian phrase one hears a lot nowadays in our field, as if anyone could return, or was ever really there the (at object, or in the object) in the first place. But the danger we face as art historians is distance, losing the sensations that tie us to the material world of objects, constructing canons that would deny not only the nervous system, but also the decay of all things. I am afraid I have ended up sounding very medieval. Ultimately medieval paintings and sculptures, like all objects from the past, have to be understood as encrypted, as intimately linked with death. I havejust finished a monstrous but I hope not morbid book about a single Parisianillumina-

tor, in an effort to remember an ordinary life and death in images. I was very conscious of not wanting to place this man called Pierre Remiet within a canon of great medieval French illuminators.10I came to know him too well simply to put him on that distant pedestal. It was because Remiet's repetitive and sometimes rushed illuminations have not become part of the "canon" of great works that I decided to write a whole book about his extraordinary struggle to make rather ordinary images. Although his art brilliantly evokes the late fourteenth-centuryfascination with rotting corpses, it exemplifies and embodies rather than breaking out of the mold to become truly monstrous. Nonetheless, I think it is important to study and value this less-exalted kind of image making, to examine the whole range of more mundane visual performances that the dead have depicted for us. In Paris, when I revisit the cast museum or open one of Remiet's manuscripts at the Bibliotheque Nationale, it is not in order to worship at the shrine of actual art or to read in the inscribed traces of the historical past. It is to feel my flesh crawl and to be haunted.

MichaelCamille,the authorof Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (1992) and The Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator (1996), is at present working monsters, body, science medieval on the and in art [Department University Chicago, ofArt, of 5540 South Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, 606377. Ill.

5. "Facedwith a monster, one may become awareof what the norm is and when this norm has a history any appearance of monstrosityin this domain allows an analysis of the history of the norms.... The monster is also that which appears for the first time and, consequently, is not yet recognized. A monster is a species for which we do not have a name, which does not mean that the species is abnormal, namely the composition or hybridization of alreadyknown species. Simply, it showsitself [elle se montre] that is what the word monster means it shows itself in something that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure"; Jacques Derrida, Points. . . Interviews, 1974-1994, Stanford, 1995, 386. 6. Donna Haraway,"The Promise of Monsters:A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others," CulturalStudies,ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P.A. Treichler, New York/London, 1992, 295-337.

7. C. Nadia Seremetakis, "Implications,"in TheSensesStill:Perception and Memory MaterialCulturein Modernity C. Nadia Serematakis, Boulder, as ed. Colo./San Francisco/Oxford, 1994, 123. 8. For the problem of access to rare materials, increasingly denied to students of medieval manuscripts for example, see G. Thomas Tanselle, "Books, Canons and the Nature of Dispute," Common Knowledge, 1992, VI, 87-188; and Michael Camille, "The Tres Riches Heures: An Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," CriticalInquiry,XVII, 1991, 72-108. 9. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds., Vision Textuality, and Durham, N.C. 1995, 16. 10. Michael Camille, Master of Death: The LifelessArt of Pierre Remiet, IlluminatorLondon/New Haven, 1996.

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Colonialism, Orientalism, and the Canon

Zeynep Selik
The recent inquiry in art and architectural history that centers on "rethinking the canon" is closely linked with the current focus on socioculturalintersections of the "Western" and "non-Western"worlds. This is clearly manifested, for example, in the growing inclusion of non-Western art and architecturein surveycourses.1Considering art and architecture within the broadened parameters of intricate power relations has resulted in a reframing of the canon and new readings of it. On the whole, this does not mean that the traditional perspective has been replaced, but that additional ways of seeing and understanding works of art and architecture have been introduced. Although at times the repositioning seems to render the conventional interpretations obsolete, in its essence it only exposes meanings hitherto excluded from the discourse. Perhaps this process can best be explained by a technical term borrowed from engineering and adapted by sociology as a research tool: triangulation.Triangulation, used in land surveyingto determine a position, offers the possibility of multiple readings in history. InJanet Abu-Lughod'swords, triangulation is based on the understanding that "there is no archimedian point outside system from which to view historic reality."2 the Undoubtedly, Edward Said's Orientalism (1979) marked a turning point in the awareness we have of viewing cultural products through a lens that highlights the underlining politics of domination. Art and architectural history have responded to Said's challenge, albeit on a more subdued scale than some other academic fields. Not surprisingly, much of this recent scholarshipfollows the model established by Orientalism engages in a series of analyses focusing on and works of art and architecturethat contribute to the construction of an "Orient."As Said himself stated, Orientalism a was study of the "West"alone. It was not intended as a crosscultural examination and did not claim to give voice to the "other" side-an issue Said addressed in his later writings.3 Art historians have followed him and offered innovative and critical readings of Orientalism, but always focusing on the "West."4 To introduce new viewing positions on the map by listening to historically repressed voices complicates any neat framing of the canon, engages it in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable dialogue, and resituates it. Yet the fruits are worth the effort. Here are two case studies: an 1830s urban design intervention in a colonial setting, the city of Algiers; and the thematic repertory of a turn-of-the-century"Orientalist" Ottoman artist, Osman Hamdi. Colonialism and

Orientalism are newcomers to the discourse. While their inclusion displays the broadening in the definition of the canon, "rethinkingthe canon" is also about breaking through conventional interpretations. Algiers was the capital of France's most important and most problematic territorial possession outre-mer. The colonial city par excellence, its "modernization"was particularly charged with political overtones. The first episode of French planning that followed the conquest of Algeria in 1830 germinated the conflicts that would surface sporadicallyuntil the end of French rule in 1962. The French began their urban renewal of the city by opening an immense area, a Place Royale or Place d'Armes (later, Place du Gouvernement) in the heart of the city and easily accessible from the harbor-in order to assemble the troops. The initial clearing was random and resulted in an irregular plaza with haphazard boundaries, soon deemed unworthy of representing the glory of France. A series of projects in the 1830s and 1840s that attempted to regularize this space into a neat geometric form, surrounded by buildings of uniform height with classical details and arcades on the ground level, responded to the call by the French administratorsfor an appropriate monumentality. The resulting Place du Gouvernement, with its grand image and efficiency, was accompanied by the enlargement of three existing streets, all converging on the new square:rue Bab el-Oued, rue Bab Azzoun, and rue de la Marine, now lined with "French-style"buildings with uniform arcades (Fig. 1). These designs carried the premise that the "styleof the conqueror"would carve the image of France onto the Algerian scene, and, with its aesthetic and scalar difference (which formed a dramatic contrast to the urban and architectural forms of precolonial Algiers), establish a visual order that symbolized colonial power relations.5 Historians have commonly presented the French interventions in al-Jaza'ir (as the city is called in Arabic) solely as examples of military and practical planning that imprinted the French victory onto the city's form and image.6 Criticsof colonial urbanism, too, have emphasized the militaryprowess behind the interventions, while pointing, albeit very briefly, to the "protests of indigenous populations,"7 or blaming the schemes for their "expression of an imperialist colonization, [withits] contempt and ignorance of the subservient culture."8 The few scholars who have discussed the scale and content of the demolition undertaken in Algiers during the early years of the occupation have approached the topic again from the French side only, alluding to the insensitivityof the colonizer to the culture of the colonized.9 The cumulative discourse has thus reduced Algerians to an ultimate status of inertia, even when it took a critical look at colonial policies. Demolition was a particularlysensitive issue in the dense

I would like to thank Diane Favro, Eve Sinaiko, and PerryWinston for their comments and suggestions. 1. Surveytextbooks also reflect this trend. A remarkableexample is Spiro Kostof,A Historwof Architect?ere, New York/Oxford, 198S, which goes beyond mere "inclusion"and pulls the non-Western material into the heart of the argument. Kostof pairs, for example, Cairowith Florence in the late Middle Ages and Venice with Istanbulin the 16th century. 2. Janet Abu-Lughod, "On the Remaking of History:How to Reinvent the Past," in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, eds., Remsking Historw, Seattle,

989,112.
3. Among his numerous writings dealing with this issue, see, e.g., Edward Said, "Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World," Salmagandi,nos 70-71, Spring-Summer 1986, 44-64; idem, "ThirdWorld Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture," Raritan, IX, no. 3, 1990, 27-50; and idem, Calture and Imperialism, New York, 1993. 4. For the first article to deal with the significance of Said's work in the interpretation of l9th-century painting, see Linda Nochlin, "The Imaginary Orient,"Art in America, LXXI, no. 5, 1983, 118-31, 187-91.

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importance weretorndown. In the colonyit wasacceptable 10 to practice what was not allowed at home. The abrupt violence of the first interventionsmade the city and its architecture contestedterrains the confrontation in between the colonizer and the colonized, as revealed in the oral literaturefrom the time of the conquest. Consider the following songthatlamentedthe invasion appropriation and of the city and highlightedthe violationof its most revered
icons:

1 Old Algiers,partialairview (fromChantiers, March1935). Above,the Casbah;bottom center, the Placedu Gouvernement, with surroundingarea restructured the in 1830s to 1850s

O regretsforAlgiers,for its houses Andfor its so well-kept apartments! O regretsfor the townof cleanliness Whosemarbleand porphyry dazzledthe eyes! The Christians inhabitthem,theirstatehaschanged! They have degraded everything,spoiled all, the impureones! They have broken down the walls of the janissaries' barracks, They havetakenawaythe marble,the balustrades and the benches; Andthe irongrillswhichadornedthe windows Havebeen tornawayto addinsultto ourmisfortunes.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

fabric of al-Jaza'ir, and its practice clearly distinguished French planning in the colony from French planning at home. In terms of regularization of the urban fabric and the creation of monumental squares and streets, the operations in Algiers do not appear at first sight different from the practices in French towns since the seventeenth century. Yet, from Henri IV's great squares in Paris to the Place de la Concorde, and to Nancy's spectacular system of squares (Place Royale, Place de la Carriere, and the Hemicycle), demolition in French townswas minimal and the new designs were applied to vacant sites. If the compulsory acquisition law of the Napoleonic Code facilitated expropriation and demolition, it was not applied on a large scale in France until the rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. The construction of the rue de Rivoli itself under Napoleon I had called for the demolition of some structures, but no monuments, and certainly no religious or sociocultural icons, were destroyed. The situation was different in Algiers. French interventions were not only formally oppositional to the architecture and urbanism in place, but they diced and sliced the city, appropriating and demolishing indiscriminately.In addition to a large number of commercial and residential structures, public and religious buildings of varying sizes and degrees of

Al-Qaisariya been namedPlaza had And to think that holy books were sold and bound there. They have rummagedthrough the tombs of our fathers, Andtheyhavescattered theirbones To allowtheirwagonsto go overthem. O believers, worldhas seenwithits owneyes. the Theirhorsestied in ourmosques.l 1 The demarcation the Frenchfrom the Algerianin the of city played a centralrole in the creationof the notion of espace contre, or "counter space," a term coined by the Algerian sociologist Djaffar Lesbetto indicatethe antagonisticnatureof the twoareas. The residents the Casbah, 12 of the heightsof al-Jaza'ir untouchedby the colonizers,spoke left back by turning in upon themselves,consolidatingtheir unity, tighteningand redefiningtheir own mechanisms of maintenance controloverthe publicand privatespaces and of theirneighborhoods. interpreted Frantz As by Fanon,the diametrically opposed stances of the Casbahand French Algiersabolishedany possibility overallharmony:"The of two zones are opposed, but not in the serviceof a higher unity.Obedientto the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they bothfollowthe principle reciprocal of exclusivity. conciliNo
of Algiers prior to the French conquest has been done by Andre Raymond, "Le Centre d'Alger en 1830," Revuede l'occident musulman de la Mediterraet nee, XXXI, no. 1, 1981, 73-81. 10. For example, the 18th-century mosque of al-Sayyida, qualified by Raymond as "one of the most elegant religious monuments of Algiers,"was demolished to make room for the Place du Gouvernement. 11. Quoted in A. A. Heggoy, The French Conquestof Algiers, 1830: An AlgerianOralTradition, Athens, Ohio, 1986, 22-23. 12. DjaffarLesbet, La Casbah d'Alger, Algiers, [ca. 1985], 3948.

5. I analyze French interventions in the urban fabric of Algiers in detail in my forthcoming book, UrbanFormsand ColonialConfrontations: Algiersunder French Rule (Universityof CaliforniaPress, Berkeley). 6. Among more recent literature, see, e.g., FranSois Beguin, Arabisances, Paris, 1983, 103; and Xavier Malvert, "Alger: Mediterranee, soleil et modernite," inArchitecturefranfaise outre-mer, Liege, 1992, 3 1. 7. Rene Lespes, Alger,Paris, 1930, 201. 8. J.-J. Deluz, L'Urbanisme l'architecture et d'Alger, Algiers / Liege, 1988, 11. 9. See Lespes (as in n. 7), passim. An excellent reconstructionof the center

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tion.

ca. 1906. Front of the Mosque, Hamdi,Discussioninand Sculpture(photo:author) 2 Osman Museumof Painting Istanbul, to the end of This opposition persisted symbol, but is possible.''l3 ation Casbah not only the rule and made the French of resistance. nineteenththe alsoactual locus the history of presented within as an example of Whether or, more critically, of French planning century the urban fabric interventions in side. practice, only from one oppressive viewed conventionally actor on the scene, have Algiers been as the main the Yet the highlighting colonizer By reiterate his empowerment. each helped to discourse the and confronted colonized existed and colonizer the web, in which each a complex interactive some form of resiswithin other by was counteracted of the of exercise power and the balance redefined the shape of the equation into the that tance part Bringing the latter both the colonizer's relationship. frozen status of disrupts the powerlessness of the discourse power and the disquietening unilateral were often colonized. and North Africa of the Near East Cities by nineteenth-century imaginary "Orient" the collapsedinto an discourse; nevertheless, and artistic was very differEuropean literary setting of Istanbul and sociocultural centurywas the time political Algiers. The nineteenth Ottoman Empire. ent from that of reforms in the by of intensive westernizing were not imposed and norms, however, and implemented European forms they were initiated external colonization; elite, with imported expertise from ruling from within by the

ranged from experiments, which site prime of new culturalproducthe was all aspects of reorganizationto governmental artist, was born (1842-1910), a prominentthe Grand Vezir Hamdi Osman Hamdi, The son of Ethem Osman scene. into this to cultural issues, committed particularly was which included who education, a enjoyed privileged was drawn to the atelier of Hamdi he in years Paris. There, several to that of Jean-Leon and possibly also Boulanger technical and Gustave matured under the Nevertheand his own work Gerome, Orientalistschool. influence of the French provide acute and persisthematic the Orient" "scenes paintings. They less, hisfrom mainstream Orientalist derives from the of critiques tent whose power a resistant voice, as well as his represent as an Ottoman intellectual, framework, position painter's the school's mental men and acquaintance with intimate Osman Hamdi's and conventions. the Orientalist techniques, garments in dressed in colorful women settings are thinking, and placed in "authentic" who display none of fashion beings and acting human by Euroquestioning, attibuted to them and passivity submissiveness the of Orientalist painters. pean the major themes Hamdi addressed within the Osman stance as an insider from his critical that encouraged painters as a religion He presented Islam even doubt (Fig. 2). outside. discussion, debate, and curiosity, intellectual of religion, reading painting, his men after posture as an painting In maintain their upright background of books, discussing against a of their human dignity, details.14 Osman Hamexpression articulatedarchitectural to the myriad meticulously a striking alternative homescenes form bath by French di's views of harem and and familiar titillating works depict a couple in a tranquil Several of his served coffee painters. seated man being environment, the family structure is domestic While the hierarchical the omnipotent, the by woman.l5 is not the man of the house enjoyunquestioned, representations, European sensual tyrant of at his mercy and amoral, over scores of women his that redefines the ing dominion a dialogue is offered Instead, pleasure. Orientalist paintings. he relationships of gender more acute when point becomes even Orientalism's Osman Hamdi's His response to on a single woman. Reading (ca. 1893; focuses is Girl reclining odalisques out on innumerable young woman stretched casual shows a and 3). Fig. The painting in a book. Her relaxed sofa, totally immersed not reading a religious text, but a she is the poseimplies that composition has of literature. The behind perhapsa work details, but the shelves collage of Orientalist that reading familiar statement books, making the is hence herare filled with of her life. The "girl" an important part life, which had occupies mind and intellectual givenback her thinking painters. and been erased by Orientalist work in Paris salons exhibitions of his to correct the Despite several Osman Hamdi's attempts reat the world's fairs, of Orientalistrepresentations

epistemologicalstatus Franceand were not incorporated in untilveryrecently. mained overlooked on discourse Orientalism intoarthistory's

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3 Osman Hamdi, Girl Reading, ca. 1893. Izmir, private collection (from M. Cezar, Sanatta BatzyaAfili} ve OsmanHamdi, Istanbul, 1971)

Yet this episode of repressed historywas not an isolated case, but part of a broader debate among Ottoman intellectuals at the time. Ahmed Mithad, an Ottoman writer, described sarcasticallythe formulaic odalisque of European fantasy in his 1889Avrupa'daBir Cevelan(A tour in Europe):l6 [This] lovable person lies negligently on a sofa. One of her slippers, embroidered with pearls, is on the floor, while the other is on the tip of her toes. Since her garments are intended to ornament rather than to conceal, her legs dangling from the sofa are half-naked and her belly and breasts are covered by fabrics as thin and transparent as a dream.... In her mouth is the black end of the pipe of a narghile, curving like a snake.... A black servant fans her. l7 Like Osman Hamdi, Ahmed Mithad offered a corrective to the falsification: This is the Eastern woman that Europe depicted until now.... It is assumed that this body is not the mistress of her house, the wife of her husband, and the mother of her children, but only a servant to the pleasures of the man who owns the house. What a misconception!18

While the limitations of this type of response, with its drive to substitute one received truth or representation for another, must be acknowledged, its entry into the repertory of art history expands the worldliness of the canon. The voice of certain alterities, kept silent by the valorized culture, begins to enter the dialogue, thereby complicating the meanings and contextual fabrics of the art objects and disrupting inherited historiographic legacies. This, in turn, helps to contest the familiarreductiveformulasthat explicate sociopolitical relationships and reestablish them in their social density.19Furthermore, as GayatriSpivakobserves, when the "hegemonic discourse" repositions itself so that it can "occupy the position of the other," it, too, becomes subject to a major transformation,to its own decolonization.20

Zeynep Celikteaches architectural history theNewJersey at Institute of Technology. is the authorof The Remaking of Istanbul She (Washington, 1986; California, 1993) and Displaying the Orient (California,1992) and the co-editor Streets: Critical of Perspectives on Public Space (California, 1994) [400 Riverside Drive,New York, N.Y. 10025].

13. Frantz Fanon,The Wretched the Earth, trans.Constance of Farrington, NewYork,1968,38-39. 14.Discussion Frontof theMosque(Fig.2), e. g., depictsthree"teachers," in one readingaloud (commenting on?) a book,whilethe otherslistenwith greatattention, holdingonto theirownbooks.The Theologist (1901,private collection, Istanbul) focuseson one man,readingin a mosque; the floor on andon a shelfbehindhimareotherbooks.Foran astuteanalysis Osman of Hamdi's paintings,see IpekAksugur Duben,"Osman Hamdive Orientalism,"Tarihve Toplum,no. 41, May1987,283-90. 15. Forexample,TheCoffee Corner(1879,private collection, Istanbul) and

AftertheIftar ( 1886, Turkiye Ias BankaslGallery). 16. For the tendency to "correct"misrepresentations, see Zeynep (elik and Leila Kinney, "Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles,"Assemblage, 13, Dec. 1990, 40-41. no. 17. Ahmed Mithad, Avrupa'daBir Cevelan, Istanbul, 1890, 164-65. My translation. 18. Ibid. 19. EdwardSaid, TheWorld, Text,theCritic, the Cambridge, Mass., 1983, 23. 20. GayatriChakravortySpivak, The Post-Colonial Critic,New York /London, 1989, 121.

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Art World Studiesand the Need for New a NaturalHistoryof Art

Onians John
observation window of a man A looks in through the glass and blows a puS of He dolphinarium. is smoking a cigarette he sees a young female into smoke the air. Through the glass take a suck of milk. She swim dolphin oS to her mother and it, making a white returns to the window and releases then story of emulation with in cloud the water.l Compare this Apelles and Protogenes of that the competition between History(31. 81-83). by preserved Pliny the Elder in Natural finding him absent, goes Apelles to visit Protogenes and, line painted on a panel. as leaves a visiting card a very fine by one even comes home, sees it, and divides it Protogenes divides it once again. and Soon finer. Apelles himself returns is admits himself beaten. The latter story this At Protogenes it is practiced today. as of part the canon of the history of art natural might take a similar place in a new former The developed at the being of history artistic activitysuch as that broad East Anglia as one element in a new of University WorldArt Studies. discipline, the transformation of The power that has brought about that of a theory existing art history department is neither the expediency, but from another area nor of political imported given to the university in of that the objects in the collection Housed in an 1975by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury. Norman Foster, single space designed by Sir extraordinary globe and from all works of art from all regions of the these traditional aphave compelled a reassessment of periods was given less to help to proaches their study. The collection awareness, and its teaching than to stimulate sensual with of both staff and impacton the central nervous systems a redefinition proved so profound as to encourage students 1992 it had changed its ofthe department's activities. By the established and begun a radical expansion beyond name anthropology, archaeof concerns its specialistsin art history, frameworkoffers immeology,and cultural studies. The new the established canon of diateadvantages. It accommodates and research in the field approachesassociated with teaching strengthens them of art in Western universities and indeed and competing strengths. bythrowinginto relief their distinct have led to their recent It also favors the experiments which in one area are applied extension, as when methods familiar of anthropology to to topics popular in another, those or of cultural studies to Europe, of connoisseurship to Africa, the greatest single China or Latin America. But perhaps Art Studies is that, since advantage of the concept of World can contribute to its no one knows what it is, everyone fundamental quesdefinition. The change of name raises the study of art, requirtions about future developments in and the formulation ing the mapping of new areas of inquiry of new ways of exploring them. total potential field. A necessary first step is a review of the

seriouslyinadequate There is, for example, at present a worldwide production matchbetweenthe patternof artistic interestingmaterial Mostof the visually and the literature. recordedand generatedby Homo sapiens is poorly culture

about by local discussed. Some art is known and talked little becoming acceswithout their knowledge ever populations thus to establish the to Western scholars. A first task is sible and and to improve and range quantity of art in the world involves taking the to accessknowledge of it. This process It also involves view broadest of what is visually interesting. on different the acknowledging variation of concentration cultures. It is as across of forms art through time and why many Europeans disregard to important understand why many Chinese disrethat arts they consider decorative, why many other painting that is not by literati, and gard not functional disregard that which is old and so peoples study the materials that their within social order, as it is to desirable for neglect. In a related area, it is highly they and teachers to and European North American scholars do not necessarily set that realize their academic interests of the There is much to learn from the activities standards. with the study emerging departments concerned numerous Latin America. Many of art of in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and put the whole of art divide the discipline in wayswhich these may be seen as evenly a into new perspective. In India art stretches from China to over distributed the landmass which recipient, and with India as a central keystone, Europe, Asia and Japan the of source many influences. In Southeast "Eastern"and "Western" of territory art may be divided into of Europeans and North Just categories. as the confidence on their own has Americans led to an excessive concentration countries in some Asian so culture, the absence of such pride which provides a model promoted an evenhandedness has non-Western institution a for truly World Art view. Each have something important to offer with art may concerned Their diversity also others,including those in the West. institutions often present us reminds that, although Western in an international themselvesas a solid group engaged strongly affected by local interests. they are in fact discipline, have long adopted a Departments in the United States become increasview than those in Europe, but have broader Those in Europe often claim inglysubject to social pressures. in reality reflect largely to deal with art in general, yet may the study of popular nationalpriorities. In Eastern Europe Communism, is now threatened art,which developed under rapidly exposes the withextinction. A worldwideperspective within what we underlying disunities and incompatibilities art history. consider the single discipline of Western the full spectrum both of The benefits of reappraising approaches are nowhere available material and of available of European art. Instead more dramatic than in the context understood that it is predictof seeming so familiarand well boring, as it is usually able in its development and even it reveals itself as unknown and presented in the literature, a continent every bit as puzzling. Europe becomes in effect light to this situation the "dark"as Africa. In order to bring material culture has to complete range of visuallyinteresting to the present, from be studied, from the Palaeolithic crafts to palace decoraPortugal to the Ukraine, from folk to consumer videos. Only tion, and from artists'sketchbooks art is recognized is it when the multiformvarietyof European unique properties of the possible to analyze and explain the running from ancient currently canonical artistic tradition

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Greece, through Italy, to Northern Europe and North America. Categories within it, such as the life-size bronze statue, the stone building, and the painted portrait, which are often thought of as somehow normal human expressions, begin to stand out as remarkablenotjust in a global, but even in a European context. The wealth of knowledge already collected in relation to such objects can then be employed in a deeper investigation. The practice adopted by some Europeans of representing the faces of individuals on boards and canvases, using such media as egg or oil, and then fastening them to the inner walls of houses is just as intriguing and strange as the making and ritual destruction of a New Guinea mask composed of grass, blood, and feathers. If we admit to this, we can treat the painted portrait as the curious and exceptional artifactthat it is. The nature of European culture is thrown further into question when the masks with which portraits are compared are those from villages not in the Sepik headwaters, but in the Swiss Alps. If the supposed canon of European art is richly documented but poorly understood, the art that lies outside the canon is hardly even known. Similar reassessments need to be made of the art of the rest of the world, where equally successful yet narrow approaches prevail. The assumptions of Egyptologists about the art of the Nile Valley or of anthropologists about that of Oceania are, like those of European art historians, the product of the histories of particulardisciplines. The principal challenge is the need to create a new and larger disciplinaryframe that reflects less the accidental constraints of institutional formation and more the essential complexity of art as a worldwidephenomenon. This will make it easier to confront a number of new issues which, although they are best addressed through the study of art, are of interest to all who want to understand the human species. One of these issues is the nature of the human relation to the material itself. All art involves some modification of material substances. The character of the material and the nature of the modification varies with time and place, asjust noted in the case of Europe, where, in the field of painting, the binding elements may consist of egg or oil or synthetic products, and pigments, too, may be animal, vegetable, or mineral. The reasons why the combinations vary are far from simple, including both cultural and natural factors. The same is true of the instrument with which a medium may be applied, as in the case of ink drawing and writing. While Europeans have for the last two thousand years always preferred a hard reed, quill, or metal pen, the Chinese have typically used only soft brushes. Since similar oppositions exist in tablewareand medical instruments, with the organic Chinese chopstick contrastingwith the European metal knife and the probing needle of the Beijing acupuncturistcontrasting with the more invasive scalpel of the Paris surgeon, it is clear that the roots of the difference in drawing techniques are to be found not in the history of art but in generically different physical engagements with a similar range of substances. These engagements might be analyzed by some-

one concerned with the study of medicine or of cookery. This, though, is unlikely to happen. Art is the only field where the study of the human preoccupation with moditring physical substances is the core of a historical discipline. It is thus above all through a study of art that a broader account of our relation to the material might be constructed. The same is true of the study of our use of the sense of sight. There are no fields of human activity in which sight does not play a role. However, in most it is treated as marginal, whether it is so or not. This is at least partly because of the preeminence accorded to language, something which happens, surprisingly,even in the context of the visual arts. There is a convention that, whether we are discussing the sculpture of the Parthenon or a Nigerian masquerade, we are dealing with manifestations whose complexity is largely the result of the richness of their verbal context. Only in the case of European art since the Renaissance has the role of the eye been taken seriously and even then only in relation to particular theories of optics, to particular psychologies of perception, and to particular psychoanalytic ideas on the gaze. The period is short, the geographical area concerned is narrow, and the theories applied are limited. Many of the assumptions involved in such studies are not relevant to the rest of European art, still less to the art of the rest of the world. Since we now know that mental formation plays a major role in the operation of vision and that both what we see and the way we see it is affected by our culturaland natural environment, we need to write a history of art which is also a history of seeing. This should exploit both the records of visuallybased thought and action preserved in art objects and the data on visual response preserved in what we know of their use and in oral and literary testimonies relating to them. Such a history of seeing would apply to all categories of art. It would also apply to all other activities in which a visual engagement is central. It would even provide a much-needed fresh approach to the study of vision itself, allowing art historians to repay their debts to psychologists of perception, neurologists, and others on whose experimental observations they depend.2 By documenting the visual choices and responses of our predecessors, the history of art can tell us, as experiments with modern men and women can never do, about the history of visual experience. World Art Studies does not provide the only setting for an analysis of the human engagement with the material and with the visual, but it may provide the best. It is also likely to be the best setting for an approach to an understanding of the hand, the only organ which rivals the mouth in its capacity for articulation and in its expressive and communicative powers. As with the sense of sight, the history of art preserves an extraordinary record of human manual activity.From the first tools made by holding a stone in one hand and striking it judiciously with a stone held in the other, the history of making is the history of the hand. The appearance of more refined and complex tools and the first representations of animals and humans around 30,000

1. C. K. Taylor and G. S. Saayman, "ImitativeBehaviour by Indian Ocean Bottle Nose Dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in Captivity,"Behaviour, XLIV, 1973, 28S98.

2. This processis already workin R. L. Gregory E. H. Gombrich, at and eds.,Illusion in Nature and Art, London,1973.

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of a much greater manual are B.C. only possible because around 13,000 B.C., By control. the Magdalenian period, regular of the hand itself have become a representations on the hand is of paintings on cave walls. From then feature subtle tasks, reaching to usedaccomplish more and more lacquerwork,Italian pitches of manipulative skill in Han new etchdrawings, and Dutch seventeenth-century Renaissance learned from a master, the ings, necessary movements being perfected by practice. from as a dancing-teacher, and then rules from development of the hand follows different The by individual experience, of thatthe eye, the latter formed workings of both former by imitative exercise, but the the history of art. of rules are well revealed in the sets operations of eye and we Once are studying the separate the material, we are dealing and hand their interaction with lies behind the the essential circle which everywhere with to asking some of the reasons of makingart and we are close activity of Homosapiens. its for very existence as a worldwide art making, the way that it is cultural context of The political, economic, reliby influenced educational, social, is comparphilosophical, technical, and other factors, gious, Its basis in human physiology and well atively understood. to the natural environand psychology the human relation of artisticactivityand is mentnot. The reasons for the origins throughout a wide reasons for its abiding importance the to be sought. A history of of variety times and places have still be less a cultural which explores such issues will inevitably art a thannatural history. begin with the artlike One such natural history could well For our human of activities animals such as the dolphin. long must have been involved in such activities ancestors The origin of art they became socially controlled. before lie in the chance in making humans must, as with dolphins, which links eye and of results the operation of the circuit of matesystem through the brain in a modification motor behind a spontaneJust rial. such a circuit lies, for example, which involves ousbehavior noted in female chimpanzees, and then fondling it as moss into babylikebundles gathering chimpanzee behavior is if it was a real child. Studying sugappropriate since recent scientific findings particularly sprang from comgestboth that humans and chimpanzees years ago and that we monancestors as recently as six million the code which determines stillshare 99 percent of our DNA, of studying chimour biological makeup.3 The importance out by studies of a subgroup, panzees is particularlybrought that these remarkable the bonobos. Recent work shows physiologically capable of relatives,although not themselves and can communicate, speech, have the ability to follow it ideograms which require capacities using sign languages and syntax once thought for symbolization and the use of observations suggest exclusively human.4 These and other speech depends, though that most of the abilities on which primates.5This has a not speech itself, are present in other that humans are general importance, since it indicates less decisively than was separated from other animals much

an additional special even thought ten years ago. It has since it shows that the for significance the history of art, involve between eye, brain, and hand autonomously linkages once thought to be of the many complex neural connections of language. associated with the development exclusively intelligence is shared of what we think of as human Much apes, and must be other primates, especially the great with with the particular set of not associated with language but to their particuthrough which they accommodated behaviors and our bodies are essenecologicalniche. Our brains lar who for at least fifteen those tially of a family of animals because of a unique biology. This years million have thrived separable polychrome binocular vision and soft-tipped links capable both of storing much visually through a brain fingers and individual information about foods, predators learned enemies, and of facilitating the develfriends, and relatives, each. Tool making, art of opment behaviors appropriate to all begun as spin-offs and making, speech are likely to have other behaviors. Probwith associated the development of making and speech have only ably the propensities for tool genetically selected for such offered clear advantages as to be like that for art Homo sapiens. That for art making in which significantly useis likely to be a marginal adaptation environments and behavior only in particularphysical affects much pathological as contexts. Even then it may be as social many forms of adaptive. Within a natural history the socially as behaviors interestmaking and art use can be studied art which need to be underin ing their own right, behaviors before ever they are in stood terms of their causes and effects or political, moral, in discussed terms of their social function aesthetic values. and art may disturb some The idea of such a natural history of the name nor the idea is historians. It should not. Neither art known in Europe is new.The very first history of art of his NaturalHistory,a by presented Pliny the Elder as part that many human which for him brings out the fact title of natural materials. His require the processing activities contains much informaof account painting and sculpture from Greek sources, information tionon the history of art of any field of resembles that relating to the history which rehearsed since. culture and which has been endlessly Greek concern. What interests Thisis not, however, Pliny's main of animal, himis man's exploitation of such transformations earlier. those discussed vegetable,and mineral substances as in its thus anticipates that proposed here HisNaturalHistory the material. with concentrationon the human engagement eye and acknowledgment of the roles of the It may lack an discussed by his hand is the hand, but the training of the of Quintilian in his Institutions Oratory younger contemporary the place of mental ( 1. 1.27) and the role of the eye, including already discussed only a formation in visual perception, is in his Life of hundred years later by Flavius Philostratus of present shortcomings Apollonius of Tyana (2.22). The by the way in which they histories of art are well illustrated Empire is associated with a never hint that the high Roman

Oxford, Originsof Intelligence, Ape:Evolutiona7y 3. R. Byrne, The Thinking 1995, 14-26. Kanzi: TheApe at the Brink of the 4. S. Savage-Rumbaughand R. Lewin,

HumanMind,New York, 1994. and Apes,ed. S. T. Parkerand K in and 5. "Language" Intelligence Monkeys 1990. Gibson, Cambridge,

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peak in the understanding of the mechanisms underlying artistic activity. Better known are the later writings on the same field by Leonardo and Ernst Gombrich. If World Art Studies, besides its many other advantages, also provides the context for writing a new natural history of art, it will only be continuing what should be a canonical tradition. Where it will be new will be in allowing a female dolphin to paint alongside Apelles.

Theory as a Place
Adrian RiJkin Theoryand History Someyearsago I wrotefor a collectionentitledTheNew Art History (1986),editedby A1Rees and FrancesBorzello.lI'm not sure quitewhatturnedout to be the criticalfate of this attemptto establishsome parameters a supposeddiscifor plinein the making, whetherit is widelyreador hasvanished from consideration.My own essay, "Art'sHistories,"although in some waystypically concernedwith historiography, and close enough to some of the other contributions, wasfairlypessimistic aboutthe subject.It proposedthat the "newart history" representeda conceptualpolicingof the potentiallyfruitful effects of interdisciplinary disintegrations, as well as a neutralizing a newdisciplinary into canon of the politics,feministor anticolonialist example,that for haddrivenand determined development. its The essay was useful in its applicationof a Derridean notion of framingto the objectof art history's inquiriesthat is, to "art," a problematic as signified.Yet it wasclearly inadequatein its exemplification what its propositions of mightimplyforthe positiveconstruction an alternative of art history,endingup witha warningagainstuncritical beliefin theory'scapacityeither to exhaust or to demystifyart's meanings.If I returnto it here as my startingpoint, this is because,in relocating and myselfwithinit, I wantto think it throughsomethingof the conditionsof theory'smaking.I wouldratherdo this thanengagemyselfin a statement its of magicalpowersand efficacities. Since then I have avoided attempts to define or even suggesta theoretical conditionfor the historyof art, preferring to write in a mode which supposes the necessityof complexreflection reflexivity turninganyarchive and in into narrative, where that archiveis both somethingthat comes out of dustyboxesandis alsoa history all kindsof theories. of This I hold to be a reasonableoutcome of my essay, and resolutely old-fashioned a wayof working. as Afterall, it is a procedure modeled on the expositionarytechniques of chapter 14 of Marx's Capital or passages from Claude Levi-Strauss Tristes tropiquesor Le Cru et le cuit, thatwriters in as disparateas JacquesDerridaand TzvetanTodorovhave deridedfor theirtotalizingphilosophical ambitions. And,as we shallsee, I wantthe playof discourse open out so as to to revealtheory'slimitations,to precipitatea challengeto its reasonthatwe mightthinkof as sublimein Kantian terms. Butthiswayof writingalsocomesfromless thancanonical literaryimageryand narrative forms, such as the series of sciencefictionsthatmakeup DorisLessing's Canopus inArgos or SamuelDelany's Tales of Neveryon. As faras conceptualizing historicaltime and representation concerned,these is novelsofferas much materialfor consideration Fernand as Braudel or Jean Baudrillardhave ever brought to the marketplace. They also happen to be very good on gender

John Onians'spublicationsinclude Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age (1979) and Bearers of Meaning:The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1988). He was alsofoundereditorof Art History (1978-88). At presenthe is writingA Natural History of Art [Schoolof World Art Studiesand Museology,Universityof East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ,England7.

1. For materials relevant to this discussion, see the list of sources given at the end.

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of identities sexuality,figuring the kind of complexity and improbable in and desires and that appears merely wooden a of aJudith Butler, a Lee Edelman, or rhetoric academic the de Lauretis. Teresa as if they were I So declare my fondness for treating pretensions. Reovert texts theoretical that have no such workingwith gay S/M romanticliteratureI have cently been orJackie Collins at her leatherequivalent of pulp erotica, the against certain Freudoas best the terrain of an offensive culture. What models for the scrutiny of art and Lacanian gay pornography where in an happens imaginaryhuis closof identified the one phallus and the penis are successfully the without regard for the the with other in ignorance of and that would claim veto watchful of those Lacanianregulations pathological? How does even that to try to identify them is the representational theory signification that depends on the to be modified in the light of my of powerthe phallus come be brought into And experiment? how can this knowledge of a gayer history of art when the theoretical parameters the post-Freudian femihistory are often already those of art ofJohn Preston or Pornography,whether the novellas nism? to stand in for an drawings of Tom of Finland, comes the to account against which theory can be brought "experience" "reading against the grain" a inway that the now customary accomplish. the of canon seems all too rarelyto counterpart to this, which is There is a more rarefied much older theory as to experimentally take bodies of For example, Condilto adequate modern culturalmaterials. and unauthorized by a unburdened De lac's l'art d'e'crire, Ferdinand de theory of language such as that of subsequent into contiguity with the or Saussure Derrida, may be brought as a critique of Lacan, as pornography which is serving same it from current means of placing it in a way that estranges a analysis through, for of routines linguistic and gender of Condillac's exposition a example, metaphorical aligning the notion of an inverted ofthe trope "inversion" with which is The Condillacian spacing of the trope, sexuality. resolutely not rhizomic), lateraland nonhierarchical (yet use of "inversion"as a provides critique both of the overeasy of imagining marginality it if were subversion, and a means historicallyspecific in its a as space within language/image as with the detailed utterance.That is to say, I am concerned that is as much gramof structuring a poetics of difference to, not readily as figural and, while particular matical This was tentatively equated with, a state of the world. for Textezur Kunst,"Bitte outlinedin a recent article of mine Kant und anderen," nicht beruhren Tom mit Sebastiano, archival history for the whichdeals with the invention of an by Sebastiano del comparison of a flagellation (of Christ) Tom of Finland. FollowPiombo with another (of bikers) by and politics of ing through and interweavingthe genealogies is placed in a space the two images, the Christianflagellation in another space called called "sade," and the gay one of an ethical reading "kant," thus outlining the possibility theory alike. beyond iconography and subject picky process of At the same time I don't see this rather from some of my other redoing bits of gay theory as distinct ideolorecent work on Revolutionaryand post-Revolutionary been criticismin France,where I have gies of drawingand art

of the to map out the rhetorical preconditions concerned complex parameters of of productionmeaning against I am conconjuncture. In all of these instances historical circumstancesof the and with cerned different forms, orders, and realizations of tropes, and hence with concepts duration it is being written. That in duration historical narrativeas of of framing, I have stuck with the Derridean notion say, is to of the archive rather am but Iworking with it as a condition of some infinite openas thanthe tautological legislation This endedness. is theory as pragmatics. this is not simply a the On whole I feel sure, and hope, that it all too obviously flight midlife into eclecticism. In part, of writing and the a reflectsrelation between a genre is to say that the of conditions its production. Which management, pedaof demands contemporary academic make it all but imposand gogy, going to conferences may jouissancethat it is to to siblegive in to that oh-so-fulfilling during the day, before in luxuriatethe real, dusty archive in the evening. Things down settling to some Hegel or Zizek usually on the run, and put get together, often on demand, of the institution. in always response to some movement in quite such an would there be a question of theory Indeed, able to fly rapidly from form acute as it is today were we not large numbers, ever location to another, and in quite one theatersof disciplinfrequentlyelaboratingfor ourselves more conference like the difference? Even thirty years ago a ary contre David," bicentennial "do"at the Louvre, "David 1789 very materiality it is this have would been unthinkable. And that seems to have supported the rise our of mass production of generations and theory's status in an intensified play of
. .

posltlons.

is, on the one hand, The paradoxical effect of this situation only possible starting hypostasisof theory: it becomes the the for one's discipline as for point work and common habitus into it. On the other as well a means of bringing strangers of philosophical theory is neglected as a practice hand, it for the purpose of for inquiry, one is inclined to tailor where more definitive or preliminary polemical markers, question or alwaysput are demonstrations anywayout of the Derridean mode is until tomorrow. In other words, the off already a pragwell adapted to real life, always and oddly matic. of writing I most like For me, even more oddly, the ragbag the least rational or comesto be that which is theoretically Citadel Culture, the most essayistic. O. K. Werckmeister's claire, Luce Irigaray'sLe Sexe RolandBarthes's La Chambre Krauss of The Optical quin'en est pas un, or the Rosalind of Michael in the first category; the best bits unconsciQus chapter on Chardin, Baxandall'sPatternsof Intention the critical feminist essayism say-or the wonderfully achieved, Yet if I were to opt for of a Judith Williamsonin the second. in its relation to the an origin for modern cultural studies "Lectureon Serpent historyof art, it would be AbyWarburg's no comfort at all to Ritual,"which, by the same token, offers renderings of his scholarthe pretensions of some latter-day on the contrary, ship. For neo-Warburgian iconography,

It rarelyseems to be holds little or nothing to tempt me. maimed much more than a pale shade, a philosophically more texts for ever parody of its original, accumulating

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images and images for texts in the hope of a new stage of truth, and bent on a manipulative and factitious hermeneutic within the regular canon of art-historicalteleologies. I write this, however, as one who became an art historian because of the miraculous texture of Edgar Wind'sdiscourse in his very last series of seminars at Oxford. Something I recall as an intellectual volupte', incitement to pleasure in an imagination both inimical to the binary of empirical scholarship/theory and strangely close to a Baudelairean poetic of the image. What Warburg's essay had made unnervingly obvious was that theory may become the privileged site for the exercise of historical and political imagination. The feat of memory that is embodied in the "Lecture"is sustained not by the desire to be right,but rather by that compulsive drive to an identification with alterity that is the undoing of Western knowledge, yet possible only because of its attainments. There is a sense in which the power of Warburg's argument comes not from the sustaining of his scholarship but from its suspension in aporia. It comes from a play between knowledge and speculation that neither loses its grounding in the scrupulous recording of material difference the ethnographic descriptions nor disguises the specificity of outlook that is the effect of his formation, in a maudlin and voluntaristicempathy with the Other. In recent years I can think of two essays that might be compared to this, both by Gayatry Spivak: "The Rani of Sirmur" and "Imperialism and Sexual Difference." In both of these essays, as with Warburg,the significance of the work emerges at a point of radical interference between systems of belief and constellations of difference where the status of the text or image is undermined; where a Western canon becomes conscious of the utter relativity of its values. If in "The Rani of Sirmur"it is the historical episteme of the West that is unsettled through revealing the very effacement of that which it subjects, with "Imperialism and Sexual Difference" the Baudelairean model of modernity crumbles in the unpicking of its overdeterminations. This is to argue that the value of theory is here to renounce control over the refiguring of the canon, and to accomplish this through a politics and an ethics of a radical displacement rather than to assert the supremacy of theory-as-such. As both of these models, Warburgand Spivak, pose a theoretical problem of knowing rather than of naming, to adopt or deploy them is, then, to pose the question of whether the historyof art, as such, needs its own kind of theory; and if the venturing of it anywayrisks its undoing as a discipline. The foundation of the Journal of the Warburg [and Courtauld] Institute[s], its early days, posed in precisely this theoretical question as an effect of its innovatory practices.

History and Theory Round about 1967 I fell under the incongruous spells of Tel Queland the pedagogy of Helen Rosenau. If the horizons of the former have still to be systematically explored in the anglophone history of art (unless it has been in the work of Stephen Bann, whose essay in The New Art History [1986] remains most sympathetic to my own), the latter was probably the closing of an epoch. Once, I recall, when Rosenau was working through some architectural books Ledoux,

Lequeu, and others she remarked that the only thing in architecture and urban form for which she could find no Marxistexplanation was the metaphysicalstatus of the circle. I attributed this aside to an irritated and partiallyunfulfilled atheism. I paid little or no attention to what it meant for me to carry this curious baggage of theories and emotions into the pragmatics of professional life. As things would have it, from 1970 theoretical perplexity gave way to syllabus formation. The glorious particularityof that moment in British education, the foundation of the polytechnics, now defunct, was this: that a large cross-section of classic, 1968ish academics were rapidly drawn into a new situation in which the rules had to be made up as we went along. Historical, sociological, and literary studies came into an unprecedented, close contact with each other as well as with the practices and histories of art. There followed, unevenly and in different institutions, the high years of semiotic film and cultural studies, of new, usually Gramscian perspectives in Marxism and historical studies, of feminism in all its guises from LauraMulveyto Sheila Rowbotham,and art history in amongst them. It found a short-lived but important forum in the "Artand Society"offshoot of History Workshop,where I think that many of the new art historians first met en masse outside art history. And where the scission between empirical history and historical theory was staged as a wider framing for the history of art. Again, this held some odd implications for the development of cultural and art-historical theory that have been largely overlooked. On the one hand, theory was instrumentalized in the construction of interdisciplinary teaching programs, and on the other hand, and as a result, began to be taught in a reified and formulaic mode through glosses and readers on this or that element of formalism or deconstruction or whatever. For me and for colleagues in historical studies, a concept of intertextuality enabled the overlapping of art history and history "proper" so that the former was rescued from its illustrational status and the latter enlarged its field of documentation and its modes of reading. If this meant that, for us, art historybegan to disappear even as it was becoming "new,"ironicallyit made it all too easy for me to overlook the significance of such important publications as Tim Clark's first two books. In adding them to our reading lists, relieved to have sornething since Frederick Antal, Meyer Schapiro, or Arnold Hauser with which to supplement Linda Nochlin, we were fascinated by his use of archive in the dusty sense. But I certainly missed out on the theoretical density with which he transformed the object of study in art history, in terms both of materials and of methods: another match or mismatch of theory and pragmatics,but one that helped to produce a new pedagogy which was to supply some of the first students for the Leeds M.A. in the social history of art, and quite a surprising number of a younger generation of art historians. It is important to note, then, that this development of a habitus for the emergence of a new art history and its theorizing was deeply and thoroughly provincial. As I have just suggested, the current significance of theory represents the cosmopolitan stage of the self-conscious professionalism of this "new."

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The point at which this did become clear was later, when, under the brutal transformations of education in the early 1980s, our finely tuned programs of study rapidly collapsed. They were simply too expensive to be allowed to run. It was now that, left to its own devices, cut off from a daily practice of difference, myart history found the need for reflection on itself, its origins, its processes, and its destiny. One site for this, a channel for communication, was "theory,"now looking redemptive rather than the rationale for an educational pragmatics.One space was the magazine called Block,a place where sometimes quirky and unedited thinking could flourish without the responsibilityof legislation, though of course that did happen. Another was Les Revoltes logiques, that wonderful Parisian exit from Althusserian rigidity to a ravishing vein of reflexivity, and Jacques Rancieres's radical rereadings of Kant. My memorywas Tel Quel,Wind, Rosenau, and the others revisited through over a decade of teaching and the exponential growth of culturaltheory as an academic
. .

specla

lsm.

Now, another ten years on, brooding on Rosenau's problematic circle, I feel that her dilemma really manifested a desire to leave something in reserve, over the boundary of explanation. I hope that my gay flagellation is just such an enigma, drawnin its space called "kant"for which theory has no adequate description. The circle was, in the end, a Kantianimaginaryspace. And, in all probability,the centrality of the inexplicable and the mystery at the heart of the high Warburgian tradition itself represented a desire to confront knowledge with its limitations. This is where I would like to let the matter of theory rest. Theory understood as the key to nothing, as a utopian figure for the possiblity of noninstrumental thought, as a means of renouncing control, and escape from the ambitions of our episteme as from our professional vanity; if eclectic, then it's because of this condition as a refuge for experience, whether unresolved or limpid in its certainty.

Republic, French and Courbet theSecond Gustave . TheImageofthePeople: 1848-1851. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. Wives.New York, 1984. Jackie. Hollywood Collins, d'e'tudes Abbe Etienne Bonnot de. "De l'art d'ecrire."Pt.3 of Cours Condillac, du pourl'instruction Princede Parme,1775. New York:Bantam, 1979. Delany,Samuel R. TalesofNeveryon. Paris:Minuit, 1969. Jacques. De la grammatologie. Derrida, en . La Verite peinture.Paris:Flammarion, 1978. New and in Essays GayLiterary CulturalTheory. Edelman,Lee. Homographesis: York:Routledge, 1994. of Hauser,Arnold. TheSocialHistory Art.London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. Luce. CeSexequin'enpas un. Paris:Seuil, 1978. Irigaray, Kant,Immanuel. Analyticof the Beautiful,trans. W. Cerf. New York: BobbsMerrill, 1963. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, Krauss, Rosalind. The Optical Unconscious. 1993. Film,and Fiction. on Essays Theory, of de Lauretis,Teresa. Technologies Gender: London: Macmillan, 1987. and Planet 5; Shikasta;Personal,Psychological Lessing, Doris. Re: Colonised Emissary Sherban); Relatingto the VisitofJohor (George Documents Historical (Grade9); 87th of the Periodof the LastDays. Canopus on Argos: Archives series. New York:Grafton, 1981-. Paris:Plon, 1955. Tropiques. Claude. Tristes Levi-Strauss, . Le Cruet le cuit. Paris:Plon, 1964. Marx,Karl.Capital,trans. B. Fowle. Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1976. Nochlin, Linda. Realism.Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1971. Acts.New York: and Preston, John. My Lifeas a Pornographer OtherIndecent RichardKasak, 1993. . Mr. Benson.New York:Badboy, 1992. et Ranciere,Jacques. LePhilosophe sespaurres.Paris:Fayard, 1983. Rifkin, A. "Art'sHistories." In The New Art History,ed. A. L. Rees and F. Borzello, 157-63. London: Camden, 1986. . "The Words of Art, the Artist'sStatus:Technique and Affectivityin xrv, France, 1789-98." OxfordArtJournal, no. 2, 1991, 73-82. . "Bitte nicht beruhren Tom mit Sebastiano, Kant und anderen." TextezurKunst,v,no. 17,Feb. 1995, 13747. Paris and LondonCompared, Rosenau, Helen. Social Purposein Architecture: 1 760-1800. London: Studio Vista, 1970. Schapiro, Meyer. ModernArt: Nineteenthand TwentiethCenturies.Selected Papers, ll. London: Chatto and Windus, 1978. xxrv, and "The Rani of Sirmur."History Theory, Spivak,GayatryChakravorty. no. 3, 1985, 22540. Review,Vlll, . "Imperialism and Sexual Difference." OxfordLiterary nos. 1-2, 1986,22540. Institute, Warburg,Aby. "ALectureon Serpent Ritual."Journalofthe Warburg 1,no.2, 1938, 277-92. Chicago:Chicago UniversityPress, l991. Culture. Werskmeister,O. K. Citadel Williamson, Judith. ConsumingPassions: The Dynamicsof Popular Culture. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. London: Faber, 1958. in Wind, Edgar. PaganMysteries theRenaissance.

Sources Books and Articles

Antal, Frederick. FlorentinePainting and Its Social Background.London: Routledge, 1949. Bann, Stephen. "How RevolutionaryIs the New Art History?"In TheNewArt ed. History, A. L. Rees and F. Borzello, 19-3 1. London: Camden, 1986. Paris:Gallimard/ claire:Notesur la photographie. Barthes, Roland. La Chambre Seuil, 1980. Baxandall, Michael. Patternsof Intention:On the HistoricalExplanationof New Haven:Yale UniversityPress, 1985. Pictures. " of Limits "Sex. New York: Butler,Judith. BodiesThatMatter:On theDiscursive Routledge, 1993. Artistsand Politicsin France,1848-1851. Bourgeois: Clark, T. J. TheAbsolute London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.

Journals
TelQuel, 1967-1973 1975-1985 logiquesn LesRe'voltes 1980-1990 Blockn

of offine art at the University Leedsand AdrianRiAin is professor the author of Street Noises, Parisian Pleasure, 1900-1940 engagedon a Press,1993). He is currently University (Manchester of volume of essays, Gay Poetics, and the completion a book, Staging the Artist: Ingres between Then and Now [DepartLS2 9JT,England]. Leeds of mentof FineArt, University Leeds,

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Can the CanonBurst?

B. Christopher Steiner
Without the canon, we cease to think.-Harold Bloom Men think in myths.-Claude Levi-Strauss2 In his classic study of the caste system in India, Louis Dumont demonstrated in Homo Hierarchicusthat Indian society was structured on a rigid notion of hierarchy according to which members of ranked castes lived in an ordered system legitimated by powerfil subjugating myths of origin and sacred notions of ritual purity. Attempts to overthrow the caste system have consistently failed, giving way instead to ever more segmented and subdivided gradations within caste and subcaste units. This process of aggregation (not exclusion) of new populations and social groups has insured "a certain permanence of form by integration of the extraneous elements."3 The canon of art history, like the caste system in India, is a rigid hierarchicalsystemwhich excludes "impure"categories of art and reduces certain classes of objects to the status of untouchable. Recent attempts to overthrow the seemingly uncompromising stipulations of the canon have resulted instead in "opening it up" and enabling certain hitherto marginalized art forms to slip inside (as if unnoticed)nly then to be ranked according to well-entrenched criteria.The canon has not been overthrown;it has simply been expanded and reconfigured. Canon as Container The canon of art history, like any system founded on taxonomic hierarchy, is only meaningful, and indeed perhaps only powerful, insofar as it excludes a large body of what are deemed noncanonical and, therefore, inferior materials. Just as Mary Douglas demonstrated so convincingly in Purityand Danger that the category "sacred"could not exist were it not for the presence of its base and profane counterparts, so too the canonical could not survivewithout its unorthodox antithesis-the noncanonical.4 Because the canon is awash in a swarming sea of rapidly multiplying impurities, its greatest enemy is the encroachment of foreign elements which threaten its fragile and embattled boundaries. As literary critic Harold Bloom put it Canon, "Overin his recent, controversial book The Western

repletion,is the authenticcontext population,Malthusian the of As anxieties."5 a strategy survival, canon, forcanonical open its doorsto allowin a like the castesystem,has cracked small number of new and late arrivals.But the balance remainsdelicate.A closed canon, on the one hand, risks dissolutionfrom its swellingrivals,which encircleand impingeupon it; an open canon,on the other,risksexpanding fromsurfeit. too farandbursting Drawingon a metaphorused by anthropologistShelly Erringtonto describe the category "authenticart,"6one mightsaythat the canonis a receptacle(suchas a bag) into whichobjectsare stuffeduntil thereexistssuchtremendous and quantitythat the receptaclethreatensto disdiversity in solveor tear. No participant the artworldwouldwantto destroy the imaginarybag (since, after all, the canon is meaningfil only if it can be juxtaposed to whateveris noncanonical);yet because the canon takes on greater and significance valuethe morelimitedit is in scope,all the in participants the artworldwanttheirclassof objectsto be the last one droppedinto the bag afterwhichit wouldbe sealedshutforever. of and Recentattemptsby feministart historians scholars and non-Western so-calledprimitivearts to "openup" the canon have sought to do so by exposing the malepower relationsimplicitin canon dominated,Eurocentric one As formation.7 John Guillory, of the leadingdebunkers of of canon,statesin his critique the inequities of the literary
. .

canonlclty:

The delegitimationof the canon is premised upon a structuralhomology between, on the one hand, the and of distinction the canonicalfromthe non-canonical, on the other, the process of inclusionor exclusionby in or whichsocialgroupsarerepresented not represented the exerciseof power.If the latterprocessis perceivedto determinethe former,it followsthat a criticalpractice redressingthe injusticeof socialexclusionmust "open" the canonto whatis excluded,the non-canonical.8 the to Suchattempts reconfigure canonin orderto include categoriesof art seem, however,to marginalized previously havelargelymissedthe point.9It is not, I wouldargue,what is in or out of the canonthatoughtto be of concernto us, but of ratherthe social structure the canon itself that must be to at 10 reconsidered. Thosewhosquabble the gatedentrance this exclusive"club"fail, in my opinion, to ask the really
9. For examples of feminist arguments to open up the canon, see Linda Art, Nochlin, "WhyHave There Been No Great Women Artists?"in Women, and Powerand OtherEssays,New York, 1988; Griselda Pollock et al., "Firing Artists News,Spring-Summer 1990, 2-6; and Karen-Edis the Canon," Women Barzman,"Beyondthe Canon: Feminists,Postmodernism,and the Historyof and Art Criticism,Lll, no. 3, 1994, 327-39. For Art,"Journal of Aesthetics examples of arguments to include non-Western arts in the canon, see of Douglas Newton, Masterpieces PrimitiveArt, New York, 1978; Arnold Krupat, "Native American Literature and the Canon," CriticalInquiry,x, African New Art, Twentieth Century 1983,145-71; SusanVogel, AfricaExplores: York/Munich, 1991; and GaryVan Wyk,"Convulsionsin the Canon,"African Arts,XXVII, no.4, 1994,54-67, 95-96. 10. See George E. Marcus,"ABroad(er)sideto the Canon: Being a Partial Account of a Year of Travel among Textual Communities in the Realm of Humanities Centers, and Including a Collection of ArtificialCuriosities,"in Durham, N.C., 1992, Cultural Anthropology, George E. Marcus,ed., Rereading 103-23.

My thanks to Nancy Troy for providing the opportunity to indulge myself in such a challenging and demanding topic. I am further indebted to my wife, Rebecca, for her direction and patience in my canonical hours. and Schoolof theAges,New Canon:TheBooks 1. Harold Bloom, The Western York, 1994, 41. New York, 1975, 12. 2. Claude Levi-Strauss,TheRawand theCooked, and The 3. Louis Dumont, HomoHierarchicus: CasteSystem Its Implications, Chicago, 1970, 193. of 4. Mary Douglas, Purityand Danger:An Analysisof the Concepts Pollution and Taboo,London, 1966. 5. Bloom (as in n. 1), 15. into Art,"unpublished manuscript,n.d., 1. 6. Shelly Errington, "Artifacts 7. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production:Essays on Art and trans. RandalJohnson, NewYork, 1993, 272. Literature, 8. John Guillory, "Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate," ELH (Johns Hopkins University Press), LIV, no. 3, 1987, 483.

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Art, NewYork at the Museumof Modern and DecorativeArts" Textiles "African view of the exhibition Canon 1 Shaker:Installation of ModernArt) (photo: 1972 Museum Furniture and Arts" and "African Textiles and Decorative Sieber, whose doctoral dissertaconstructed Objects,''ll Roy Africa and why the canon was Household of question of how oeuvre Sculpture Black for one type difficult subsequent canonical United piecemeal admittance and tion in the to first in theplace. Seeking field of African art another does little largely defined the had undervalued art or "opened up" the canon hierarputatively and of ofthe 1960s,l2 structuresof inequity for the items (Fig. States decade the challengefundamental canonical order. If anything, in of adornment and household neglected objects in the include to been canon which chy are inherent traditional forms has merely to validate the "The one of the 1). study of these such practices function the introduction to fact, West," Sieber wrote in focused the by attention has been system. catalogues, "where exhibition of Africa.''l3 on to hitherto primarilythe sculpture within Canons Canons exhibitions drew attention potential routinized hierarchical AlthoughSieber's history is a highly art study and new the If canon of art arts have been relegated domains of African untapped still placed on in which most non-Western is itself a system display, emphasis was the canon of each subfield within areascollecting and Excluded from of the to lowest status, or customary arts. certain categories so-called traditional the "tourist"arts, system which embraces the canon structured were any examples of studio many others. In this regard, version of the canon this the while forms of contemporary objects rejecting excellent example of arts, hybrid and developing we must begin history provides an African art of this logic of exclusion, that typifies the subfields To canonical arts.l4 understand factionalism and ranking internal criterion used to define noting that the key of culturalor by the and collectof discipline. been based on a standard art African art scholarship outside African has always Burgeoning interest in that is untainted by century concentwentieth purity that is, an object ethnic the early years of the from during ing masks and figural sculpture Neinfluence. representing primarilyon wooden Africa. trated export trade or those Works made for the defined region of sub-Saharan of been rejected out of parts have very narrowly a arrayof arts from other influence and inspiration acknowlforeign were not only a huge glected art forms. In short, any of aesthetic objects as hand impure or corrupt but also a whole range Africans might coexist stools, thecontinent, Africa and region itself including edgmentthat "authentic" been frowned fromwithin the delimited musical instruments, jewelry, twentieth century has the West in the with pottery, baskets, calabashes, exhibitions entitled "African In two landmark and textiles. and artArt, New the Museum of Modern held, respectively, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 11. Exhibitions 31, 1973; and at York, Oct. 11, 1972-Jan. of 25, 1980. Ph.D diss., State University Apr.9-May "AfricanTribal Sculpture," ThePaul TishmanCollection, 12. Roy Sieber, of at the Sculpture BlackAfrica: Iowa, 1957; and idem, Suzanne Preston Blier, "AfricanArt Studies of the State See Art Los Angeles, 1968. African Studies:The Perspective,"in Crossroads:An American 1990, 92. 10. Washington, D.C., Arts, New York, 1972, Discipline, and Decorative Roy Sieber, African Textiles conjunction with the other exhibition; 13. Ind., is made in New York/Bloomington, A similar argument Objects, Furnitureand Household see African 1980, 15.

of anthropological open up the canon forms, see Nelson H. 14. For arguments to arts and hybridaesthetic from the Fourth scholarshipto tourist historical Arts:CulturalExpressions and Tourist TheMessagesofTouristArt:An H. Graburn, ed., Ethnic B. Berkeley, 1976; BennettaJules-Rosette, New York, 1984; Ruth World, Perspective, American in System Comparative Silences in Native AfricanSemiotic Imperial Tourist Art? Significant ed., AfterColonialism: Phillips, "Why Not and in Gyan Prakash, NJ., 1995, 98-128; Museum Representation," Princeton, Art Culture: and HistoriesandPostcolonialDisplacements, eds., Unpacking Christopher B. Steiner, Ruth B. Phillips and forthcoming. Worlds, and in Colonial Postcolonial des sculpturesafricaines/The AuthenCommodity Henri Kamer,"De l'authenticite Noire,XII, 1974, 19. 15. Artsd'Afrique ticityof AfricanSculptures,"

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upon as a challenge to the canonicity of genuine African art. Furthermore, canonical art in Africa is possible only when it is made without regard for potential markets and, as one critic put it, "withoutany thought of profit, in the same spirit that an inhabitant of the Cyclades executed an idol in marble 5,000 years ago.''l5 In the field of African art (and to be sure in many other fields of art as well), the canonicity of the object can only be achieved by the death of the producer/ subject. For, death genuine or imagined limits the supply and competition within the canon and thus restricts admittance.16 Canons and Catapults In AfricanArt in TransitI attempted to demonstrate that the expansion of the canon of African art history is closely linked to economic forces of supply and demand, where new art forms may be added to the repertoire of canonicity as old art forms become increasingly scarce.l7 This process of canon formation in the realms of African art scholarship and collecting becomes evident when we look, for example, at the "life history" of the wooden catapult, or slingshot, in the transnationalAfrican art market. Slingshots are used in rural areas by boys and young men to hunt bats and small rodents, as well as to chase awaybirds from fields under cultivation. Most working slingshots are simple, nonfigural, and unadorned, though occasionally less functional ones were made which were more embellished. Sometime in the mid- 1980s, Giovanni Franco Scanzi, an Italian entrepreneur based in Ivory Coast, began to collect some of the fancier anthropomorphic and zoomorphic slingshots from the African middlemen who sell art in the marketplaces of Abidjan (Fig. 2). Commenting on Scanzi's aesthetic sensibility and good taste, his friend and colleague Jean Paul Delcourt noted in an interview that "Scanzi's genius stems from the fact that he collected a utilitarian object. He discovered the object's intrinsic beauty and thus propelled it to the category of'noble art' a domain previously reserved mostly for masks and statues.''18 Scanzi's demand for carved wooden slingshots spawned a small industry entirely devoted to producing figural slingshots for his consumption (Fig. 3). After a few years of collecting, and after having acquired several thousand examples, Scanzi (with the assistance of Delcourt) published an elegant coffee-table book entitled PotomoWaka("slingshot" in the Baule language), which featured over one hundred glossy color photographs of carved representational slingshots from his private collection. 19A market was born. Demand from African art collectors and tourists who had read PotomoWakafueled the market for slingshots, thereby
16. See Joseph Alsop, The RareArt Traditions: Historyof Art Collecting The and Its Linked Phenomena, Princeton, NJ., 1982, 21-22. 17. Christopher B. Steiner,African in Transit,Cambridge, 1994. Art 18."Portrait d'un collectionneur: Giovanni Franco Scanzi," Le Guido (Abidjan),Dec. 1987, 81. My translation from the French. It is interesting to note that those who "open up" the canon of African art history to include other types of objects often refer to the fact that prior to their farsighted intervention the canon had been reserved solely for "masks and statues." Clearly,by the mid-1980s this almost mythical canon of"masks and statues" had alreadybeen expanded to include a whole range of other objects. 19. Jean Paul Delcourt and Giovanni Franco Scanzi, Potomo Waka, Milan, 1987.

2 CanonMaker: Giovanni Franco Scanzi holdingone of the prizedslingshots iom hiscollection (photo: Guido, Le Abidjan) enabling a hitherto unknown and, for that matter, largely nonexistent art form slowly to edge its way into the canon of Ivoirian (cum African) art history. Whether or not slingshots are truly "canonical"yet is difficult to answer, but the process and mechanisms of canon formation are well under way and clearly revealed. Canon as Commodity A number of years ago, Harvard urbanologist Edward C. Banfield made the following observation about the relationship between commodity value and aesthetic appreciation: It would not be unduly cynical to say that many of the thousands who stood in line for a ten-second look at Aristotle Contemplating the Bust o+Homer [Fig. 4], after the Metropolitan Museum paid $6 million to acquire it, would as willingly have stood in line to see the $6 million in
cash.20

His point is a deceptively simple one: what, if any, is the relationship between the aesthetic value of a work of art and
20. EdwardC. Banfield, "Artversus Collectibles:Why Museum$Should Be Filled with Fakes,"Harpers, Aug. 1982, 34. ActuallyAristotle sold to the was Metropolitan Museum at the Parke-Bernetauction of the Ericksoncollection on Nov. 15, 1961, for the sum of $2,300,000 not $6,000,000. The sale price, which exceeded the auction record of $875,000 set the same evening by Fragonard'sLa Liseuseto the National Gallery of Art, was, at the time, the highest amount paid at auction for a single work of art. Although Banfield's figures are incorrect, his point regarding the reverence for monetary value remains unaltered. For more information on the sale of the Erickson collection, see Karl E. Meyer, The Art Museum:Power, Money,Ethics,New York, 1979, 174.

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exists as an island unto itself free from moral assumprealm more and tions monetary eonsumptions, but perhaps even of the his interestingly statement is remarkable because casual and unconscious connection he drawsbetween almost reliand economics religion. Both marketplace value and value are given equal weight in his argument as gious detractors from pure aesthetic evaluation and potential Given the ecclesiastical etymology of the word response. on this it "canon," may be fruitful to follow through a bit value. between economic value and religious connection as Canon Creed used to one If were to analyze the language that is often the words which people an describe aesthetic experience, to choose express themselves could often be interchangeable those used to describe a religious or spiritual episode. with for Listen, example, to Clive Bell as he describes an aesthetic in experience his well-knownbookArt: To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing no from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, Art transports us from the familiaritywith its emotions. world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. our For a moment we are shut off from human interests; are arrested; we are lifted anticipations and memories above the stream of life.25 compare Bell'swordswith those used by Emile Durkheim Now Formsof the Religious Life to recount the in The Elementary birth of the religious experience among the Australian Aborigines: is When they are once come together, a sort of electricity quickly transports them formed by their collecting which so to an extraordinary degree of exaltation.... They are conditions of life . . . that far removed from their ordinary their they must set themselves outside of and above determined moment they are ordinary morals.... At a from transported into a special world, entirely different live, and into an environthe one where they ordinarily ment filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of them and metamorphose them.26 The parallels between these two passages are sufficiently even striking to suggest that Bell (published in 1914) might of Durkheim (published in have turned to a careful reading of what 1912) in order to inform his thinking on the nature to art and to develop a proper constitutes a pure response lexicon of aesthetic catharsis and ecstasy. Writing in the early modern period, Bell could announce an age in 1914 that "Art may satisfy the religious need of dogmatic religion."27By the end of the grown too acute for York twentieth century, his position was confirmed by New for example, when he observed art dealer Andre Emmerich, art has recently that "in a post-religious age in the West, the aspects religion once had. It's a good assumed some of thing to expose your children to it."28 tells The elevation of (some) art to the category of religion age us far less about the decline of the Church in a skeptical in than it does about the construction of false consciousness

3Canon Faker:Artistcarvinga figuralslingshotfor the market(photo: ChristopherB. Steiner) "collectible"

new

one ever itseconomic value? Or, put slightly differently, can worth without taking into hopeto assess an object's aesthetic such a accountits economic worth? Is there, in other words, "a ofJudgment pure TheCritique thing as what Kant called in price, aesthetic value"? Or is beauty simply a function of function of beauty? ratherthan price being a of the These questions are significant for any reassessment the decisions about ranking canonicanon of art history, for where cal art objects are often mediated by market forces, reinforces aesthetic evaluation.21Cynrising economic value the ics, of course, like Thorstein Veblen, would say that aesthetic value and economic value is correlation between immediate and inextricable. "We find things beautiful," "somewhat in Class, of Veblen wrote in TheTheory theLeisure are costly."22But art dealers and philosoproportion as they phers (a pair not often discussed in the same sentence) assure us together that the relationship between aesthetic value and economic value is entirely arbitrary. Aesthetician James O. Urmson, for example, has stated object's emphatically that the criterion we use to assess an analysis, as aesthetic value can be treated, for the sake of the something entirely free from any consideration of either signifiobject's price in the marketplace or its religious writes: cance.23 Summarizing his perspective, David Novitz economic, "Forjust as there are distinctive and irreducible and moral, intellectual and religious values, so there are aesthetic values: must be wholly discrete and irreducible values, values that cannot be explained in terms of any other to works of art."24 and in terms of which we properly respond of its Urmson's position is extraordinary not only because that the aesthetic wrongheaded anthropological assumption

RETHINKING

THE CANON

217

4 Canon Gazers:CrowdsviewingRembrandt's Aristotle the at MetropolitanMuseumof Art, New York,followingits purchase by the museumfor a record $2,300,000 in 1961 (photo: UPI/ Bettmann)

the pseudo-sacral foundations of canonicity. One of the ways the canon of art history removes itself from the objective conditions of social life is by elevation above the "stream of life" and, in this heightened state of suspended animation, thereby achieving a certain detachment from historical processes and the fields of social production. The canon system draws from religious discourse an attitude of sacredness which realizes its own redemption through the abomination of the noncanonical or heretic and, to return for a moment to India, the fetishism of sacred cows. Canon as Fetish: Myth and Misrecognition Canon formation is premised on the mistaken belief that aesthetic judgments and distinctions of taste can be made under objective conditions free from moral, political, economic, and social influences. Canonical art, like divinity itself, is said to exist in a realm of its own where "the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of this world."29Those who support the canon, and all of its implications of culture- and genderbased discrimination, argue that its existence is predicated on disinterested values that transcend the partisan concerns of individuals or institutions.30 The canon exists, Harold Bloom tells us, "in order to impose limits, to set a standard of measurement that is anything political or moral.''31 but

Any assault on the canon must therefore begin by unmasking this fetishized image of cultural sanctity and the fictitious creed of immaculate classification. The true power of the canon stems not from its various hierarchicaldiscriminations and orderings, but rather from its mythical status through which it draws symbolic strength. What is subjectively constructed in the ideological world of culture is made to appear in its canonical formations as a "natural"and objective entity in which mythical structures lead collective practice to unquestioning belief. In his discussion of the myth system and its relationship to the division of labor and power, Pierre Bourdieu concludes in a famous passage from Outlineof a Theory Practicethat of "Everyestablished order tends to produce . . . the naturalization of its own arbitrariness."32 other words, Bourdieu In goes on to say, the world of cultural tradition (of which canons are surely a part) is "experienced as a 'naturalworld' and taken for granted."33 Those whose understanding or appreciation of art is structured by canonic principles whether in academia, in museums, or in popular representations of the art world profoundly misrecognize the ontological basis of the canon's existence. The canon is not, in Bourdieu's language, a "structuredstructure"into which art and artists must simply be made to fit; rather, it is a structuring structurewhich is in a continuous process of reproducing itself, mediating its identity through market forces, and negating the social conditions of its production by covering the tracks of its arbitrary and subjective formations. In the end, then, both those who support the canon and those who seek to "open it up" should worry less about whether or not the delicate membrane of the canon structure will rupture from the inclusion of yet one more new artist or unorthodox art form. They should concern themselves, rather, with how much longer the misrecognition of the canon system can persist before its bubble bursts, and in its evanescence occasion the dissolution of a particularform of art-historical mythmaking and the deliverance of this discipline from the enchantment of canonic thought.

Christopher Steiner, currentlya Getty Scholar at the Getty B. Center the Historyof Art and the Humanities,is the authorof for African Art in Transit (1994) and is completinga book on authenticity visual redundancy the representation nonand in of Europeans Europeanillustrated in accountsof discovery [Scholars and SeminarsProgram,The GettyCenter,401 WilshireBoulevard,Suite 700, SantaMonica,Calif:90401-14557.

21. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Genese historique d'une esthetique pure," Les Cahiers Muse'e du nationald'artmoderne, 1989, 95-106. 27, 22. Thorstein Veblen, TheTheory theLeisureClass,Boston, 1973, 108. of 23.J. O. Urmson, "What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?" in Francis J. Coleman, ed., Contemporary Studiesin Aesthetics, New York, 1968, 356-69. Firstpublished in Proceedings theAristotelian of Society, supp. vol. XXXI, 1957. 24. David Novitz, "The Integrity of Aesthetics,"JournalofAesthetics Art and Criticism, XLVIII, no. 1, 1990, 9. 25. Clive Bell,Art, London, 1914. Quoted in Novitz (as in n. 24), 1990, 15. 26. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph WardSwain, New York, 1965, 249. Firstpublished in French in 1912.

27. Bell (as in n. 25), 184. 28. Andre Emmerich, "WeAll Inhabit a Time-Frame in Which Tastes Are Shared,"Art International, XII, 1 990, 33. 29. Bell (as in n. 25), 37. 30. See Peter Shaw, "The Assaulton the Canon,"Sewanee Review, LII, no. 2, 1994, 270. 31. Bloom (as in n. 13,35. Emphasis added. 32. Pierre Bourdieu, Outlineof a Theoryof Practice,trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge, 1977, 164. 33. Ibid., 164.