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Letters - Letter to the Editor
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2002
Lewis's second point, concerning the lowered resolution of images currently used in teaching, seems to be a different question but turns on a similar problem. Lewis and Elkins ask why it does not seem to matter that students learn from reproductions that have less detail than reproductions had before digital and 35mm photography. The old answer, from the generation of Bernard Berenson, is that it matters terribly: art is the sensual encounter with the aesthetic and cannot be simplified or put wholly into words. A newer answer sounds callous but is closer to the historical conditions of seeing: past a certain point, detail just does not matter in any consistent way. The theory of the gaze; the construction of the viewer; questions of ideology, patronage, gender, and narrative: the historically available meanings of painting are all present in digital images of average resolution. Once again Elkins's and Lewis's concern is not a pressing one for art history; unlike Berenson, we have learned to understand the hi story of our interest in the allegedly nonverbal properties of images: we have learned to understand our interest as history.
Lewis's final point concerns Elkins's book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? (7) Elkins notes that contemporary art historians write a tremendous amount more on individual works than they had in the past, and he asks why paintings were perceived to be less in need of explanation in previous centuries. He claims that in the 20th century pictures began being construed as intellectual puzzles, requiring long and intellectually intricate solutions (that is, art historical texts). It may appear that this is, at last, an issue of concern to art history, because Elkins proposes that psycho analysis and Surrealism are part of the reason paintings have come to seem so complex, but he prefers a more philosophical solution, proposing that paintings have become the objects of intellectual puzzling because modern viewers have become increasingly aware of their nonverbal qualities. The book implies that we can therefore begin to understand art history's position in a longer history that includes periods in which pictures were not considered puzzles.
This radically underestimates the conditioning power of the historical moment. We live in a period in which discursive formations work to present us with images as puzzles. Questions about the history of that condition are therefore at best unanswerable, and at worst falsely put: no wider history is accessible to us as history. The iconographic puzzles of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini wedding portrait, the puzzles of reception history posed by the revaluation of Artemisia Gentileschi, the philosophical and critical conundrums raised by the work of Sherrie Levine, the intricate mixture of text and image that constitutes veracity in Gericault's Raft of the Medusa: these are the very conditions of sense, the ways that pictures constitute themselves for us. The issue for the discipline is not how the meanings that have been given to artworks have altered over time but how, in the discursive fields in which we find both theta and ourselves, the artworks are actually constituted.
