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The future of art history and the undoing of the survey
Art Journal, Fall, 1995 by Mark Miller Graham
Today the word survey can scarcely be understood apart from the writings of Michel Foucault, apart from his linkage of the overarching gaze and power, and apart from institutions and discourses that create subjects through their exercise of power.(1) The discipline of art history has defined the survey in practice as a chronological introduction to the art of the West, centered on the great narratives of high cultures, and typically spaced over an academic year.(2)
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Nearly everything about art history that is projected by the still-standard survey texts (Janson, Gardner, and Hartt) - the sense of a neat package of knowledge with inherent order and the fiction of an adequate representation of each component period or tradition or movement - is in outright contradiction to advanced practices of art history today.(3) We should perhaps begin by asking about the conditions of possibility of the art history survey. What paradigms drive survey lectures day after day across America? If these paradigms should be found wanting, can the survey be reformed? Or, failing that, what can we envision in its place? I want to address these questions through a critique of four notions common to the structure of the survey and thus to the structure of art history: canonicity, chronology, closure, and subjectivity.
Canonicity
Canonicity can be defined as the state or attitude of dependence on a belief that ultimately there is a consensual body of work (sacred texts, literary texts, works of art and music) that is both more deserving and rewarding of attention. A corollary is that these are the cultural products whose study is not negotiable: their study defines the field and its issues and makes its authorities.(4)
There are models and degrees of canonicity. In genealogical models both works and their authors are imagined as more or less close to the line of direct descent from a valorizing parent. In center and periphery models certain places or cultures may be held to be at or closer to a valorizing core and thus thought more canonical than others.(5) In ancient America, for example, Aztec art is held to be more canonical than Tarascan or Huastec art. More familiarly, Italian Renaissance sculpture is more canonical than German sculpture of the period.
The survey's traditional concentration on the art of the West now derives mostly from a set of rigid assumptions about what must be understood, in the end, as a claim for a natural canon of Western artistic and moral superiority. I don't think that there is now any justification for confining the introductory courses in art history to the art of the West, and it seems to me increasingly vital in an era of the politically driven fragmentation of American society that intellectuals try to fashion some semblance not of the chimera of a common culture, but of a common cultural problematic. By that I mean a new intellectual vision of our culture in which the West and its Others would all be fairly inherited, and this can only happen if the survey experience is opened up to cultural and artistic traditions beyond those of the West.(6) As presently conceived, the art history survey itself is a bar to efforts to formulate a common problematic of culture.
In the end I think we need to recognize that the canon is not a yardstick for determining enduring timeless masterpieces, but an agent of power, the power to decide whose culture and whose views will set agendas for the rest of us.(7) Any efforts to reshape or replace the art history survey will have to accept, eventually, that any canon is contingent and constructed. Moreover, we need to make canonicity and its power implications a part of the course, kept not behind the scenes, but out in the open, in both curriculum committees and lecture halls.
Chronology
Writing history as if it were a linear sequence, points marking a line, is a convention, an easy way to take events with time and space coordinates and to arrange and teach them in such a way that the horizontal x-axis of space is subordinated to the vertical y-axis of time. Thus, we understand it as a historical sequence when events are ordered primarily according to their temporal positions; when the spatial axis is thus subordinated, the sense of history as a line seems natural. That this is so probably explains why survey texts favor time lines. Archaeological texts, on the other hand, favor regional and areal chronological charts where the x-axis is segmented into spatial units corresponding to area, region, zone, or site.
One consequence of art history's adherence to the linear sequencing mode of history writing is that it tends to remain nearly oblivious to spatially sensitive constructs such as the cultural interaction sphere or the world system.(8) These models for arranging and accounting for things in space and time have obvious implications for art history, yet they have little affected the mentalite of the art history survey. Synchronic units can provide more meaningfully articulated histories than can our fixation on linear sequences, but the linear sequence remains the crucial construct that makes the teleological narrative of style seem "natural," "the way history is."
