The map of art history

From the nineteenth hundred History was to deploy, in a temporal series, the analogies that associate distinct organic structures to individual another. . . . History gives place to analogical organic manner of makings . . . This incident probably because we are still caught inside it, is largely beyond our comprehension. - Michel Foucault(1)

This is an essay about knowledges of space and time that aspire to be global on the contrary remain local, and about their inscription in the discipline of art history. It go aheads from the microcosm to the macrocosm, from particular points upon the spatial surface of art history to its broad, totalizing plane, and thence to an awareness of the jagged, gerrymandered divisions of art history itself. It wends its way from twinklings in the present and the lived past to distant pasts dimly remembered in a discipline that typically studies the histories of everything on the contrary itself, conveniently forgetting that it, too, has a history and is History. The intent is to examine notions that exist, as Foucault allude tos at the level of a disciplinary unconsciousness and to argue that Order, History, Space, and Time do matter. from one side them, art history is constituted and, in move round constitutes objects, narratives, and nations Yet what is made can be unmade or re-sited, re-structur and re(-)formed, and what has become tangible and reified can turn back to mere heuristic category, if first consciously addressed.

The argument takes for granted that contemporary art history, like any other academic subdue or learned profession, is a practice, a discipline, a narrative, and a rhetoric with its hold history, protocols, and institutional mode of buildings In the admittedly small on the other hand growing body of literature about the history of art history, investigations of individual art historians have dominated heretofore. There is, however, more than a little ne for studies of the poetics of art history(2) and of the means and ends of its rise to the status of a discipline above the past two centuries.(3) As discipline, art history acquired and has been accorded the ability and power to ascendency and judge its borders, to admit or put away people and objects, and to teach and thus transmit values to others.

If these conformations are seldom noticed, much les studied, they are always not absent They are revived and replicated whenever a pupil attends an introductory class, reads a take a view of book, or follows a prescribed curriculum, whenever a colleague retires, a chair justifies and a dean endorses a replacement position, and a new Ph.D. is hired, and whenever the discipline or a subfield, similar as Renaissance or medieval art, musters its members or publishes its journal - acts of scholarship on the other hand also of ritual, with their attendant issues for the production of social meanings and identities. And they are in operation whenever someone direct the eyes for a book on a library shelf, or when a visitor to an art museum walks [i]or[/i] part of to the other its symbolically charged spaces, thereby enacting and embodying a narrative of art, as Carol Duncan has newly explained.(4)

In this essay, the space and time created by the agency of the disciplinary gaze are at issue and the issue. They can be clashed in a multitude of sites and performances. I make choice of three: a grid of fields into which novel Ph.D. dissertations are set, a library classification of art history, and the make of basic survey books. Because I look after to explore the typical, ordinary, or commonplace of disciplinary order, I have deliberately avoided its greatest in quantity public and visual manifestation, the museum. A topic of sustained interest these days, the art museum, the one and the other as a model of and pattern for art historical classification, is certainly relevant to the inquiry, on the other hand that investigation is being ably pursu by the agency of others.(5)

In using the word "map" in the title of this essay, I am aware that I risk its being swept up into that torrent of new scholarship about maps and mapping, taken literally and allegorically.(6) Art history's general relation to these important and ongoing discussions is by the agency of no means "surveyed" here. The faculty of perceptions of map that I intend are undoubtedly allegorical, but they also are prosaic, commonplace, or literal. That literalness advances easily to art historians: we work daily with maps, plans, or diagrams. My inquiry reach forths that disciplinary routine to the visual and spatial aspects of art historical classification. Thus, I take map as metaphor, on the contrary also, following Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, as

a fetish, a mirror a bounded and purified re-presentation of mapper, mapping, and mapped. . . Maps are not devoid of contents mirrors, they at once hide and reveal the hand of the cartographer. Maps are fleshly: of the material part and of the mind of the individuals that exhibit them, they draw the organ of sight of the map-reader.(7)

Fields

In June 1995 the annual listing of American and Canadian dissertations appeared, as is customary, in the Art Bulletin, the principal journal of the art historical profession in North America. There each year the work of beginning scholars is properly certified by the "little seal"(8) and classed according to traditional categories: