Learning to see again: Giles Waterfield reviews a passionate polemic which argues that traditional ideas about art have destroyed our sense of visual wonder

Apollo, June, 2006 by Giles Waterfield

The Art of Wonder: A History of Seeing

Julian Spalding

Prestel, 24.99 [pounds sterling]/$39.95

ISBN 3 7913 3150 74

Since retiring from the directorship of Glasgow Museums and Art in 1998, Julian Spalding has been productive as a writer. His first book, The Poetic Museum, published in 2002, presented an individual and stimulating assessment of museums and of their apparent fear of collections, urging those involved with museums to rethink their attitude to their collections and to present them in a more imaginative and creative way. The present, rather unusual, book presents a vigorous argument.

Seeing, Spalding asserts, has come to be dominated by irrelevant ideas about interpretation and history so that we are no longer able to sec properly. Vision is a gift all of us possess, and our vision can apply to the most ancient forms of art so that we are able to understand the feelings of our ancestors and to sense, even if we cannot explain, the 'wonder' of the universe. His book 'tells the story of wonder--of how our wonder gave rise to our religious beliefs, to our arts and sciences and to many of our social structures.' It describes how we have 'lost our sense of wonder', and speculates whether this is something that we are just beginning to recover. The book, Spalding tells us, 'looks at the art of the world in a totally fresh way': it asserts that all of us can enjoy the visual culture of the past by forgetting modern ideas about art and history, and making an imaginative leap into the minds of our forebears.

Whereas many people today who find the visual arts 'elitist' seem to suggest that there is no solution to this issue, Spalding's passionate attachment to visual culture (evident from the innumerable little drawings of his own with which the book is illustrated) allows him to offer a more vigorous (if not perhaps entirely radical) opening for the revival of a general appreciation of the visual arts. He does not, however, discuss the shift in our contemporary culture in communication away from the word and towards the image.

Spalding offers a creative example of the current questioning of the traditional western art canon, with its numerous examples drawn (literally) from the art of the world. Successive chapters examine in turn major themes underlying the universe: the sun, for example, the moon, birth and death, that kind of thing. At Glasgow in the early 1990s Spalding was highly innovative in his arrangement of the fine art galleries at Glasgow Art Gallery at Kelvingrove. Abandoning the usual museum practice of at least two centuries, he arranged the galleries by theme, juxtaposing a wide range of media together in a non-hierarchical way, rather than using a chronological or national taxonomy and dividing media--some time before Tate Modern and Tate Britain, or indeed MOMA, experimented with a similar approach. This book follows an approach similar to the Kelvingrove one, as it sweeps from one archetype to another, emphasising all the while that if we will only look properly, we will see and understand.

Unfortunately Spalding tends to be undisciplined in his writing. It is not always easy to follow his argument since he moves so discursively and so unexpectedly around centuries and continents. Drawing on a wide range of interesting sources, but eschewing footnotes, he gives us a personal broad-brush history of world culture, drawing on a wide range of sources: thus (to choose an example almost at random) he tells us that 'Judaism and Islam remained adamant that it was not possible to make an image of God', while 'The histories of Christianity and Buddhism are marked by rising tides of image-making, followed by counter-reactions as the leaders of each religion tried to return it to its humble roots and sweep away anything that appeared to be distracting its followers from contemplating their religion's ineffable source'.

Hostility to 'modern art' in the 20th century is energetically explained in a way that tends to discount other points of view: Duchamp and conceptual art are not to Spalding's taste, and in museums of contemporary art 'curators have created quasi-sacred spaces that exist without a religious belief to sustain them which are a sitting target for mountebanks and pseudoshamans'. These brief histories are interspersed with the author's personal views (this is a man of strong opinions) on such subjects as the destruction of the countryside, sometimes relevant to the discussion and sometimes not, or at least not as far as this reader could see.

The book is written in an easy style resembling the spoken word and recalling the noble tradition of the Victorian popular lecture series, it is suffused by the persuasive and committed character of a writer who has dedicated much of his life to communicating to as many people as possible his own passion for the visual arts. It is, however, not easy to read in a sustained way, and one can only hope that, benevolent polemic as it is, it will achieve its objectives.