What Painting Is & The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing & Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing & On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them & How to Use Your Eyes. . - book review

JAMES ELKINS

What Painting Is

fresh York: Routledge, 1998. 246 pp; 25 color and b/w ills. $3149

The phenomenon Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing

novel York: Harcourt Brace, 1997. 272 pp; 87 b/w ills. $1400 paper

Our Beautiful, dried and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing, 2d ed

fresh York: Routledge, 2000. 321 pp; 39 b/w ills. $2099

upon Pictures and the Words That Fail Them

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1998 346 pp; 54 b/w ills. $6995

by what mode to Use Your Eyes

novel York: Routledge, 2000. 258 pp; 64 color and b/w ills. $2549

In the past seven years, beginning in 1994 James Elkins has published ten volumes They range in subject matter from archaeology to contemporary art, and from China to Mesoamerica. This rapidly growing material part of work poses several vexed questions First, is it innovative? Does it tender new research or important revisions of previous scholarship? next to the first is it a coherent throw out or a series of different works on different subjects? Some prolific authors write the same work over and over, and others write works so different that their work fails to add up to a single whole. Third, are Elkins's volumes relevant? Does his work matter to art history? I find the work the two highly innovative and coherent, on the contrary I think it is ofttimes too far removed from art history to be relevant to the of recent origin directions of the discipline.

It is helpful to divide Elkins's volumes reviews, and essays into five categories. First are a cluster of texts on art historical methodology. They include Our Beautiful, free from moisture and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing; on what account Are Our Pictures Puzzles? upon the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (1999): a work on the historiography of Chinese landscape painting; (1) and upon Pictures and the Words That Fail Them.

next to the first are writings that generally focus upon vision and the gaze. They include Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (1999); The thing perceived Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing; and the greatest in quantity recent book, How to Use Your Eyes

A third category comprises of individual book, What Painting Is, which is about oil painting as it is seen from a painter's point of view. (2) Fourth are writings (consisting of a number of articles) upon 20th-century art, mostly on novel and postmodern painting. (3) The fifth category is writings upon images that are not fine art, similar as graphs and maps; volumes on those subjects include Elkins's first work The Poetics of Perspective (1994) and the 1999 work The Domain of Images. Elkins's greatest in quantity recent writing is about physics and mathematics. (4)

These five areas strike one as being to be unified by sum of two units concerns: an interest in images of all kinds and a fascination with the ways that scholars in art history and other fields have written about images in the past. There is the outline here of a large cast to extend art history, relating it to visual studies, anthropology, philosophy, archaeology, and linguistics. Elkins is not alone in that interest. Other scholars, including Barbara Stafford, Whitney Davis, Johanna Drucker Horst Bredekamp, WJT Mitchell, anti Martin Jay, have contributed interdisciplinary works to art history, and the tradition of expanding the discipline goe back to Alois Riegl.

notwithstanding despite Elkins's surprising range of make subordinates his scholarship is far from encyclopedic. He has written almost nothing upon social art history, feminism, ideology, or politics. (5) He has discussed a wide range of art historians and visual theorists, on the other hand he has hardly mentioned of the like kind seminal figures as Michel Foucault, Aby Warburg, and Walter Benjamin. (6) He concentrates almost exclusively upon two-dimensional images at the cost of architecture, sculpture, and of recent origin media such as film, video, and performance. Those omissions are especially serious in a scholar who has of that kind global ambitions. They are uniteed I believe, to a deeper problem: Elkins's faculty of perception of the visual is private, nonsocial, and nearly solipsistic. I will go [i]or[/i] come back to that issue at the extremity of the review.

A profitable place to begin is the volume called Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (originally published in 1997) This is a large, complicated volume intended for seminars on methodology and historiography. Elkins professe himself "dissatisfied with the usual way of learning the discipline" of art history, wherein scholars are taught a number of methodologies of that kind as psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and postcolonial theory. Elkins does not criticize any of the theories directly, and he uses them in other writings. on the other hand in this book he surprises how "it is possible to enumerate which theories are appropriate, and to know by what mode and when they should be applied" (p xix). Art History as Writing is a meditation upon the ordinary practice of interpreting artworks. The volume is a kind of metatheoretical text: Elkins declines to talk about any individual theories, asking instead in what way art historians become confident about using and applying them. His position is that art historical writing (and, by means of extension, wri ting in other humanistic disciplines) is partly beyond the historian's mastery or understanding. Art History as Writing is filled of metaphors for the partial dominion government that art historians have above their work: "half-consciousness," reverie, dream, meandering, sleepwalking. For Elkins, those properties are not faults to be corrected on the contrary signs that art history, like other disciplines, is fundamentally a kind of writing. Just as a fiction writer does not aspire to superintendence every element of her work, in like manner a scholar should recognize that art history has ideas and manners that cannot be fully grasped.