A Rant on Aesthetics and History

The concept of changing art history to visual studies or visual culture is a necessary one. In today’s world I would hope that we have become aware enough to realize that there is no one concept of what art is and as a result it is necessary to study any images or objects that might be considered to be within the realm of art (even those objects whose maker does not see as being art). After all, any object has the capacity to inflict an idea or to be a result of a concept or idea relevant to a time and place. This is why I agree that the study of history cannot always be extricated from the study of an object. In fact, I don’t think it ever can – even formalism has a history. Although, Holly ends with the question about the problem of losing the wonder an object can invoke when one writes about it, and this seems a valid reason not to discuss the history of an object. This “conversation” reminded me of when a friend asked me what I could be writing so much about as an art history student. She asked, “I mean, what can you possibly have to say about art besides whether you like it or not?” This question is hilarious to me, but at the same time relates to what Holly is saying when she writes, “I sense that some of contemporary visual studies so willingly seems...to have sacrificed a sense of awe at the power of an overwhelming visual experience...in favor of the ‘political’ connections that lie beneath the surface of this or that representation.” I agree that something is lost in the act of searching for the stuff that lies beneath the aesthetic. Yet, this is one of the things that I love about art history (or visual culture): it isn’t aesthetic history. It is art history, and art history has almost always taken other things into consideration besides the art object itself...things that are dependent on their time of production as well as their time of study. At the very end Holly asks, “Does the act of writing in either art history or visual studies yearn towards a recreation of visual ‘aesthetic’ experience, even if there is little or none there to be found? Is the desire to write about a subject the first ‘aesthetic’ choice? Or does it, rather, lie in our histories?” I think it is both. But, I do think that sometimes too much desire is placed on the histories rather than on the aesthetics (I hope I am understanding her correctly here). But, what can really be done about that? The historian is doomed to think about the history no matter what – they desire to think about the history in terms of phenomenology, sociology, or whatever.

I am also drawn to Moxey’s question: “’What is to be done?’ Are there any principles according to which history is to be told, or should we recognize once and for all that history must depend on the nature of the interpreting subject? If this is indeed the case, then what is to identify history as a genre that would distinguish it from, say, fiction?” This reminded me of an essay by Hayden White called “The Fictions of Factual Representation.” He argues that discoursed of historians and “imaginative” writers overlap so that the reader cannot tell the two apart without knowing their context and the KINDS of truth they deal with. I think that this idea that there are different types of truth is along the lines of what Moxey is asking. If we were to recognize fully that history depends on the interpreting subject where does that leave us? Even if we relied on a very basic retelling of factual events – the events that are chosen become the ones that have relevance and the ones that aren’t chosen get left in the dust. So, what do we have to rely on? Would that leave us to base our truths on only what we perceive to be morality based on religion? That can be dangerous as well. Every object or historical account has to be open to be looked at and interpreted in any way that the viewer/ reader should decide. Having no ideology becomes our ideology. Yet, I don’t think this is happening. We obviously have our (individual) ideologies and our methods of interpretation based on histories and moralities. And these are all valid and we can understand where one another is “coming from.” This is where I think I agree with Moxey. He says, “The value of these [artistic] developments...lies not in replacing one type of history with another, but to complicate and relativize what we once regarded as ‘the’ story.”