Why art historians should learn to paint the case for studio experience

Why Art Historians Should Learn to Paint:The Case for Studio Experience James Elkinsjelkins@artic.edu Abstract: This is a speculative lecture on the links between the making of art, in s

Why Art Historians Should Learn to Paint:

The Case for Studio Experience

James Elkinsjelkins@artic.edu

Abstract: This is a speculative lecture on the links between the making of art, in studio art classes, and the study of art, in art history I address several subjects, including theories of materiality, “somatic criticism,” studio-art PhDs, and parallels between studio art instruction and music instruction But the main focus is the distance and misunderstandings between studio instruction and art historical study Without a good account

of the relation between studio art and art history, there is nothing to prevent studio art departments from becoming marginal in university life

My principal example is a class I have taught in Chicago in which students copy Old Master paintings and speculate on connections between their experiences and the evidence of art history I have also led drawing sessions for non-art historians In Vienna in May 26, 2006, for example, a

roomful of curators and art historians from the Kunsthistorisches Museum

spent a couple of hours copying drawings The notion wasn’t to create masterpieces after only an hour of work: it was to generate conversation about bridging the gap between studio experience and scholarly understanding

And for readers in a hurry, the crucial conclusion is marked by underlining

on pp 9 and 12 I wouldn’t ordinarily underline things in the middle of texts, but in this case I think there is only one crucially important test of the relation, or lack of it, between studio art and art history— at least it’s the best I have been able to come up with

I think that the most difficult and important questions about medium and subject

in art are to be found in the intersection between two fields 1

The first field is the historical and philosophic conceptualization of art, including such topics as the history and nature of media, the place of subjectivity, the structure of expression, and the various understandings of substances — including, in short, the range

of problems that are posed in philosophic and historical settings concerning the experience of making and interpreting art The second field is the practice and pedagogy

of studio art, by which I mean the talk, the actions, and the gestures that accompany the making of specific objects in institutional settings, broadly understood — anything from first-year art school life drawing classes to professional studios

I will call the two “studio art” and “art history” for short There is an 2asymmetrical overlap between them, because even though studio art rarely impinges on art history (you don’t usually make things in art history classes), all sorts of philosophic and historical talk happen in studio settings and classrooms Phenomenological, hermeneutic, semiotic, psychoanalytic, and archival discourses are all part of studio instruction — but they are outsiders, and it’s a cardinal error of academic art history and philosophy of art to assume that they are sufficient to account for what happens in studios It’s common to hear art historians, art theorists, and philosophers talk about the processes and practices of artmaking as if they could be adequately covered by poststructural discourse, or themes adapted from the Frankfurt School, or adopted from Merleau-Ponty “Studio talk” — the sorts of conversations that happen in art schools and

in studio visits — is different in kind from philosophic discourse, and it isn’t cogent to think of studio talk as a vernacular version of ideas better articulated in theory The same goes for art history: historians assume that by using terminology carefully (adopting technical terms from the time and place of the artist, taking care not to be anachronistic) they can represent the studio as a version of public discourse and reception But the studio, at least in Europe since the Renaissance, has not generally been a public place, and it hasn’t spoken the confident languages of advertisement and interpretation

My claim, then, is that the most challenging problem for conceptualizing medium and subjectivity, and also for understanding art history and its relation to its objects, or

understanding studio art and its relation to art history, is to be found in the gap between studio art and art history For me this is an ongoing problematic, and I will not be solving

it today What we decide about it determines not only the way that questions of mediality, subjectivity, substance, expression, denotation, “work,” and “creation” can be answered, but it also whether it can make sense to offer studio art instruction in universities, how it might be possible to understand the “application” or “use” of theory in production, and what limits there might be to the explanations of art that we will be discussing in this conference — explanations that come, in the end, from philosophic, aesthetic, or art-theoretical perspectives, and therefore from the first of the two discourses rather than the second

So I won’t solve the problem, but I will propose an optimal way to ask about it in the case of a traditional medium, painting The question I’m going to set out at the end of this talk cannot be improved, I think, if the purpose is to ask whether art history is linked

to studio art And if the two aren’t linked, then institutions that offer both might rethink that decision, and explanations of art that hope to be sufficient without employing the knowledge of the studio might find themselves at an impasse

I have organized this lecture into three parts First, I’ll consider ways in which the conceptualization of materiality and artists’ experiences of materiality in “art history” are limited, rather than empowered, by art history’s traditional concerns such as phenomenology, kinematics, somatic criticism, and theories of empathy (This is all much more developed in an essay called “Limits of Materiality in Art History.”) Second, I’ll say something about creative-art PhD degrees, which are places where studio-art pedagogy and art history can meet at a high level (That is all much more developed in s

book called Artists with PhDs, excerpted here, here, and here.) Third, I’ll propose the optimal question that I have in mind, which I ask in a class I have designed that brings art history students into the museum in Chicago, the Art Institute, where they copy paintings

1 The non-existence of the problem

An initial problem with this subject, the relation between studio art and art history, is that it is not recognized as a problem Discussion rarely gets started, because

“studio art” (in my synecdoche) is understood to be adequately theorized, ab initio, by

“art history.” I will give two examples of this pre-theoretical problem

1 First a few words on a book called Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of

Graphic Expression. The author, Patrick Maynard, wants to theorize and systematize the possibilities of drawing, and to do that he begins with Anglo-American philosophic accounts of representation: Nelson Goodman, E.H Gombrich, J.J Gibson, Kendall Walton, Richard Gregory, and Richard Wollheim He adds references to art historical accounts from the 1960s through the 1980s, including John White and Sam Edgerton (His bibliography is limited to English-language art historians concerned explicitly with theories of naturalism, so he does not cite writers such as Hubert Damisch, Georges Didi-Huberman, Daniel Arasse, Göran Sonesson, Wolfgang Kemp, or Willibald Sauerländer, all of whom have written, in different ways, on the specifics of mark-making.) At any rate, Maynard applies the theories of representation to studio-oriented books, especially

Philip Rawson’s Seeing Through Drawing, and Joseph Meder’s Die Handzeichnung

(written in 1919, translated into English in 1978)

Maynard’s Drawing Distinctions is a large book, which considers many aspects of

drawing one after another: chiaroscuro, outlines, fields, shade and shadow, perspective, lines, relations between planes, blobs, “bubbles, facets, and ovoids” (p 157) It is intended

as a comprehensive theorization of drawing’s “own devices,” its “resources” (pp 137, 184)

What I want to ask about a book like this is: how is the production of drawing, as

it happens in studio art, involved in the analysis? At the end of the book, Maynard says,

“with our theoretical basis it should be easier to investigate the richness of unique cases” (p 230) But there is very little in the book about specific choices made in the course of creating individual drawings (There’s nothing particularly “rich” and little attention to whatever counts as “unique.”) Drawings are used as examples of conceptual

and perceptual categories, whether they are aesthetic, epistemological, kinetic, or

psychological The assumptions are (a) that drawing pedagogy and practice have called for this particular theorization, and (b) that such a theorization will allow further research

to go forward To me Maynard’s project appears as an analytic and perceptual

justification of some twentieth-century systematizing pedagogy, not as a bridge to the ways people talk about or teach the production of individual drawings.

2 Even though art history is taught together with information on historical advances in technique, there is a tendency to assume first-hand experience of techniques

is optional for working art historians In North America, graduate programs in art history often include classes on methods and materials, but those classes do not involve hands-on work: instead they are connoisseurial, and are intended to help students gain awareness of different media

A clear example of the lack of first-hand experience is an article by Marc Gotlieb

on the concept of “artists’ secrets” in the Art Bulletin Marc is an excellent scholar (he is currently editor of the Art Bulletin) and in the course of the essay he manages to review

much of the history of the idea that artists had secret techniques I say “the idea that they

had secrets” since he is not interested in the possible existence of actual secrets: he is after a history of reception, a Rezeptionsgeschichte He wants to determine the repercussions the idea of artists’ secrets had on printmakers who were interested in

illustrating artists’ studios I’d like to suggest there is another discourse, one that is at once apparently irrelevant and ultimately indispensable, that would treat the history of

ideas about the actual secrets In the Foucauldian frame of Marc’s argument, the actual

secrets are irrelevant: but ultimately, a full analysis of the subject would have to include them

Those are my two opening examples They could of course be multiplied In ways like that — subtly, in ways that are entirely in keeping with the concerns of scholarship, the meanings of the studio are left behind and traditional links between seeing, knowing, and making are weakened Ultimately, ignorance of the studio in the case of traditional media tends to produce a kind of art history that is in some cases measurably dissociated from the kind of talk about the objects that occurs in studios and classrooms An absence

of knowledge of the studio has specifiable and historically relevant effects on the art historical discourse that is putatively independent of such knowledge

I may seem that the two fields, art history and studio art, have made significant progress in understanding their relation to one another, thanks to two developments in the last decade: the new philosophic accounts of subjectivity and representation, and

contemporary theorizing about new forms of art criticism that respond to “time-based” arts I will consider the two very briefly.

1 Regarding philosophic accounts of subjectivity and representation: phenomenology, theories of empathy, semiotics, psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity, and other methods have been brought to bear in understanding the conditions of materiality In this context I cannot do justice to the issues that these practices raise Let

me simply telegraph, in a series of points, some particular limitations I have observed

(i) In relation to Merleau-Ponty: it continues to seem to me to be an important limitation that phenomenological accounts inspired by Merleau-Ponty are based on a

limited number of really quite general concepts, such as horizon, body, sight, and world

The specificities of art practices remain beyond the reach of such language

(ii) It also concerns me that Merleau-Ponty is often understood to be an optimal theoretician, which is to say that his concepts are taken more or less outside their original historical contexts, in the same way that any number of psychoanalytic terms including the Oedipus complex are taken to comprise our “interpretive horizon” or our “age,” as Derrida said.3

(iii) I wonder, too, if theories of materiality in philosophy, from Heidegger’s critique of the object, through Bachelard’s investment in elements, to the poststructuralist revival of Bataille’s hypostasis, are not all best understood as twentieth-century concerns and therefore historically inappropriate for most practices

2 The second area in which it seems progress is being made in theorizing relations between studio art and art history is in some new theories of art criticism, in which criticism itself is rethought in response to time-based media, ephemeral performance practices, and above all in response to collaborations between curators, artists, critics, and historians

Again I can’t go into this in detail; I am thinking of theorists such as Peggy

Phelan and Irit Rogoff, and books like After Criticism, edited by Gavin Butt The 4assumption in some of the new work is that the changed epistemological and social conditions of art calls for a new writing In other work, principally Rogoff’s, the idea is that a critic should work continuously to undermine her own assumptions, in order to reach a point of aporia that is consonant with the work — which can then be encountered,

as opposed to perhaps just catalogued or registered, resulting in a new configuration of practices and finally a new theorization What matters is process, possibilities, and openings to the future, not finished works or one-way acts of understanding between critic or historian and artist.

I am unconvinced by these projects for several reasons

(i) It is be definition impossible to theorize the particular state of conceptuality that is required Attempts have been made along these lines, especially by

non-Rosalind Krauss in The Optical Unconscious, using Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of

the “matrix”; the resulting theory can only be dependent on pre-existing notions of rationality — it can never be purely non-rational; nor can it prescribe routes to unforeseeable configurations of doubt or aporia.5

(ii) There is no connection between the new temporal and social forms of the work, and any specific narratological decisions that might be considered appropriate responses

(iii) There is little — perhaps no — space for consideration of media per se In

fact, notoriously, the artwork appears as conceptualization.

So, in sum, in the welter of theoretical agendas that art history currently debates, the issue of the studio seems the least tractable of all: it is harder to think about studio problems than it is to work in phenomenological or other hermeneutic issues bounded by philosophic concerns This is the most serious challenge to an art history that finds itself increasingly distracted by texts and methodological imperatives

2 Creative-art PhDsThese degrees, in which a student makes artwork and also writes a dissertation, are increasingly common in Australia and the U.K It is estimated that there will soon be ten to twelve institutions in Australia that grant such degrees—either DCAs, “doctorate of creative arts,” DFAs, or PhDs In England it is estimated that there are 2,000 students enrolled in programs that can lead to the PhD For the past four years there have been sessions at the annual meetings of the art historians’ and studio artists’ associations in North America, and now there are two books on the subject Boris Groys, who teaches at 6ZKM Karlsruhe, informs me there have been several panel discussions on this subject in

Germany, at which the principal concern was the creation of professional inequalities between those who have traditional degrees, and those with the new PhDs.

These new programs raise difficult questions about the relation between studio and scholarly practice There is enough there to take up my whole time in this lecture; I just want to point out two things

(i) There is a growing body of theoretical literature claiming that creative work is also “research” that leads to “new knowledge.” These claims are necessary in the U.K (and Australian) systems because the structure of university funding requires that doctorate-level work be “research” that produces “new knowledge.” I find much of the reasoning unconvincing A fair percentage of it comes from an idea that I would trace through Bachelard and Lévi-Strauss to Hubert Damisch and phenomenologically-based art criticism (as well as Mark Johnson etc.), namely that media have their own inherent

logic Stephen Melville has written some good pages on this problem in the book As

Painting.7 The theorists that are adduced in the current discussion include Christopher Frayling (a distinction between “into,” “through,” and “for” research), Paul Hirst (the idea that knowledge in studio is “knowledge-of-the-object”), and Colin Painter (that anything that produces new knowledge can be called “research”) I find all these 8arguments gloss over the fact that in the sciences “research” and “new knowledge” have different meanings, and that their extension to studio is metaphoric In addition it seems clear from a non-U.K vantage that the underlying reason for kind of argument is to produce a university-wide bureaucratic consensus on the place of the new degrees

(ii) The studio arts have long been marginal and endangered in university curricula We should therefore be suspicious of theorizing that purports to solve the problem of studio’s incommensurability Whatever answers there are they must be more difficult than the ones that have been proposed The new degrees should be treated, I think, as hybrids, not as ordinary interdisciplinary degrees

3 The class in the Art InstituteNow I’ll turn to the optimal question I mentioned, which comes up in a course I teach, in which students copy paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago They choose one

painting, and copy it for fifteen weeks, spending between six and twenty hours per week

in the museum

It’s a course that requires a certain bravery because the students are often surrounded by visitors who try to critique them The course is also psychologically demanding because students obsess and even dream about their paintings There is usually a sequence from enthusiasm to boredom to exasperation to fascination — an arc

of responses that is not replicated elsewhere in academia as far as I know, because it depends on the unusually protracted amount of time that the students are compelled to spend in front of a single image

When this class works well, it provides the best evidence I know that art history and studio art are connected The students have three assignments:

1 Make a strict copy of one painting, in the fifteen-week time period

2 Research the art historical literature on the painting, from primary sources to the object files (which include conservation reports, X-Rays, etc.), and including as much

of the twentieth-century literature as possible

3 (a) For the art students in the class: produce a “free copy,” which is intended to

be halfway between the student’s ordinary practice (no matter what that is — video, performance, etc.) and their strict copy The idea there is to decide whether the experience

of the class has any living connection to their ordinary work, and if it does, to determine what counts as halfway to the Old Masters

3 (b) The art history students have to write a report, answering the following question: What would the art historians have written differently if they had had the

experience of copying the painting before they wrote about it?

It has long seemed to me that this is an unimprovably good question to ask about the relation between studio practice and art history, and it is tremendously difficult to answer I will begin by reviewing three attempts to answer the question (The pages that follow aren’t illustrated: for that see the full account in the book Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing.)

1 Late El Greco paintings are made by a continuous process of overlapping, in which a dark contour will strengthen a passage of continuous tones, only to be blurred by

a color area and restrengthened His outlines shift like flames, or like “flaming ice,” as a

contemporary put it, and it is possible to argue that the flickering contrapposto is to be imagined as a Manichaean conflict of light and dark, good and evil For this reason there

is a great difference in El Greco between putting a light into a dark and darkening something that is already light: the former is a metaphor of creation, and the light

“knows” and “resists” the dark; and the latter is a figure of destruction or death, because the dark suffuses the light and threatens to extinguish it When darkness forms inside light, “but knows it not,” the working of the paint is a repetition of Christian prayer, and when light is surrounded and swept away by darkness, the painter’s gestures can narrate a loss of faith, or even a moment of Gnostic pessimism

Copying is a way of re–enacting this, and it unfurls a drama that is not accessible

to those who see only the completed struggle A dialectic of dark and light is frozen into the paintings, but in the process it is a living exchange, a prayer, a story, a dialogue or the silent exposition of an inner agon Every inch of the painting, and each moment of copying, plays out a part of that nameless drama Copying such passages, a painter has to struggle to keep the silvery white from melting into the ultramarine darkness That drama

is largely lost to someone who only looks at the finished work, though there are enough clues to give a sense of it All that is clearly visible is the last moments of the agon: El Greco painted sharp comets of light over fields of darkness, and comets of darkness over the highlights

2 Titian’s late paintings are different but no less eloquent witnesses to the relation between process, mark, and meaning As a rule Titian softens the narrow strips on either side of his outlines, melting figure into ground, fusing the two into a single shade The candent highlights between the contours hold the strongest colors, and they fade in intensity and value as they approach the blurred outlines In this way Titian’s technique

mirrors the (sometimes overstated) Venetian concern with colorito and relative unconcern with disegno; but a first–hand knowledge of the technique reveals something other than the static polarity of theory In Titian, disegno is something that is given, in the sense that

it is present at the beginning of the painting process, and he effaces contours with repeated low-chroma glazes of dusky blues, siennas and umbers—that is, the contours are dissolved in an act that has no strong connection to either term of the theoretical polarity The erasure and softening of contours does not require effort, and is more like a laying-

down of force, and a way of increasing the distance from outline, light and color

Colorito, on the other hand, is an active struggle, something that must be strengthened by force Color areas are built up slowly, sometimes with the ribbed gloss that comes from rubbing with the fingers (fingerprints provide the characteristic gloss), and the boundaries

of color areas are occasionally hard–edged and at variance with the blurry directions of

the contours that they would be expected to echo The energy spent on colorito can also

appear as bright glazing over a highlighted area, or sharp wet highlights within a field of color, but it is always strenuous work Color is drawn, and even sculpted, and so it does

not oppose Florentine disegno, which is often allowed to collapse into weak pools of

indifferent shadow And again the act of doing is the only way to make these claims clear, and to articulate the way the theoretical dynamic is rethought in the studio

3 In fifteenth-century Italian painting, the act of copying sometimes reveals an unexpected delight in passages such as patterned fabrics that would be, to a modern painter, inexpressible tedium It is not so much the painter’s attention to unique objects (such as chalices, crowns, thrones, and jewels) that seems difficult to fathom as their relish in repeated forms (brocades, baskets of identical flowers or fruit, finicky architectural ornaments) Often it is said that such details were given to assistants, but we may mistake our reaction for theirs by implying that the assistants would therefore have been given a kind of drudgery Certainly the artists and patrons alike delighted in the fastidious labor of repeated ornament Would we want to say that Carlo Crivelli, an especially fastidious painter of detail, thought of brocaded drapery as a kind of work, something requiring patience? And does it make sense to say that he enjoyed the bizarre touches that have contributed to his fame (the little flies, glistening pearls, and wrinkled fruit) more than the passagework that links them?

The experience of copying Crivelli shows that what we see in his works is not so much inattention provoked by drudgery and meliorated by moments of freer invention, as two species of attention, with complementary virtues One is an utterly unhurried meditation, a uniform myopia, much as in some medieval illumination The copyist’s body is not cramped, but also not relaxed—it has the kind of working tension that happens in any repetitive task Like actual weaving or mending, the brocades in Crivelli’s paintings are the objects of steady, patient attention The other kind of attention, the one

given to the odd details, is an occasion for special concentration The body hunches up, the fingers cramp, the eyes squint and the face wrinkles It is unpleasant but also exhilarating, and it punctuates the longer periods required for more measured work.

The two species might be retrieved for art history by making a parallel with two aspects of religious devotion: Crivelli’s endless brick walls and patterned fabrics may be visual rosaries, species of prayer Roberto Longhi saw signs of a declining art in the

“decorative exuberance” of vines and flowers in Crivelli’s Madonna della Candeletta, but

they may also signify a measured, ritualized devotion—one counts the pears and oranges

as one counts beads in a rosary The second kind of attention is not unlike homilies, the sacrament, and other moments of articulation of the Catholic mass A few cherries and

pearls punctuate the Madonna della Candeletta as the sacrament punctuates the mass:

they belong to the same fabric, but they command a different kind of meaning or reverence

It may well be that this is over-conceptualizing two kinds of uncognized habits of the arm and eye But such meanings could be brought into art history more readily than the local, “meaningless” dramas of light and dark in El Greco, because each orange and each pearl might be given a meaning (they might be the visual equivalents of a rosary bead or a sacrament) They are visible in the completed paintings, rather than half–erased traces of something that happened before But again this is not evidence that art historians should draw before they write about works, since it would be unnecessary for an art historian to re–experience these ostensive acts of reverence: if the reading seems to make sense, it can be cited and added to any essay on Crivelli.9

Now I do not mean to imply that the Crivelli is getting closer to a solution to the question The reason I do not consider these full answers to the question posed in the class is that art history could readily assimilate such findings In the case of El Greco, an art historian could develop accounts of Manichaean contrapposto, and publish them in art historical journals After that there would be no reason for another art historian to go into

a studio in order to test or replicate these observations: if the observations seemed plausible, they could in principle become part of art history, and accessible as propositions adequately expressed in texts