Visual Studies: Re-thinking Art History within an Expanded Field

Keith Moxey’s opening statement characterizes history and aesthetics as the “Scylla and Charybdis” of the historiography of art history. They were 2 sea monsters that threatened Ulysses and his sailors on opposite sides of a narrow sea channel. One would swallow the sea in a treacherous whirlpool, the other had 6 mouths with which to grab and devour whatever came within its reach. Escaping from one meant an encounter with the other. Ulysses was literally between a rock and a hard place. So in art history the pendulum has swung between the extremes of embracing aesthetics at the expense of context and vice versa. We’ve covered this terrain over the course of the semester as it has been reiterated throughout the history of art history whether we label the proponents Aristotle and Plato, Hegel and Kant, Panofsky and Wolfflin, Baxandall and Greenberg, T.J. Clark and Michael Fried.

I agree with Michael Ann Holly who calls herself a historiographer and phenomenologist. She believes that it is in the confrontation between the two that something novel arises. Rethinking the relationship between aesthetics and history, their place in art history and what art history means in our current world has resulted in an expanded field, here labeled visual studies, that encompasses and tames them both.
Within this expanded field the traditional Western grand narrative of art history can no longer assume its superior position. Just as Freud and the patriarchal world he represents was encompassed by Cixous’ “bisexuality” that made it an equal to the female principle, the Western art historical canon becomes just another aesthetic community among many with its own terms of value that are intrinsic to itself but cannot be applied universally to all other aesthetic communities. I agree with Moxey that modernism set up artificial boundaries to keep its own idea of art pure. Now those boundaries have fallen and we see the power relations that guaranteed the dominance of a Western grand narrative. With this knowledge we are freed to redefine basic terms such as aesthetics and history. Holly gives the historian agency (she calls it responsibility) to define and redefine what have been identified as core concepts.

I don’t agree with Holly that research has to strip the object/artwork of its awe. I am not a part of the community of writers within contemporary visual studies to whom she refers. I can only speak from my own experience. In my four short years of researching and writing about the works of Willie Cole I’ve found each new bit of research has only increased my appreciation of his work. Every time I see Household Find hanging on the wall, I am still struck by its sheer physicality. Only now I have more than my initial visceral reaction to rely on. I can describe its formal properties, the context within which it was made, the historical, political, social and economic implications of its creation and am open to the meaning it might have for its viewers whether they ascribe to the traditional Western art historical canon or are part of another geographically and culturally distinct aesthetic community. Each layer of complexity adds immeasureably to the richness of the whole.