Theory as a place - art theory - Rethinking The Canon

Theory and History

Some years ago I wrote for a collection entitled The of recent origin Art History (1986), edited by the agency of Al Rees and Frances Borzello.(1) I'm not positive quite what turned out to be the critical fate of this attempt to establish more [i]or[/i] less parameters for a supposed discipline in the making, whether it is widely read or has vanished from consideration. My have essay, "Art's Histories," although in a certain number of ways typically concerned with historiography, and shut enough to some of the other contributions, was fairly pessimistic about the control It proposed that the "new art history" exhibited a conceptual policing of the potentially fruitful results of interdisciplinary disintegrations, as well as a neutralizing into a novel disciplinary canon of the politics, feminist or anticolonialist for example, that had driven and determined its development

The essay was useful in its application of a Derridean notion of framing to the thing perceived of art history's inquiries - that is, to "art," as a problematic signified. still it was clearly inadequate in its exemplification of what its propositions might imply for the positive construction of an alternative art history, ending up with a warning against uncritical belief in theory's capacity either to exhaust or to demystify art's meanings. If I get back to it here as my starting point, this is because, in relocating it and myself within it, I want to think from one side something of the conditions of theory's making. I would rather do this than engage myself in a statement of its magical powers and efficacities.

Since then I have avoided attempts to define or level suggest a theoretical condition for the history of art, preferring to write in a way which supposes the necessity of mixed reflection and reflexivity in turning any archive into narrative, where that archive is the two something that comes out of dusty boxe and is also a history of all kinds of theories. This I clutch to be a reasonable issue of my essay, and resolutely old-fashioned as a way of working. After all, it is a management modeled on the expositionary techniques of chapter 14 of Marx's Capital or passages from Claude Levi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques or Le vial le cuit, that writers as disparate as Jacques Derrida and Tzvetan Todorov have derided for their totalizing philosophical ambitions. And, as we shall diocese I want the play of discourse to render free of access out so as to reveal theory's limitations, to precipitate a challenge to its reason that we might think of as sublime in Kantian terms

But this way of writing also tend hitherwards from less than canonical literary imagery and narrative forms, of the like kind as the series of science fictions that make up Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos or Samuel Delany's Tales of Neveryon As far as conceptualizing historical time and representation is bear uponed these novels offer as abundant material for consideration as Fernand Braudel or Jean Baudrillard have at any time brought to the marketplace. They also happen to be real good on gender and sexuality, figuring the kind of complexity of identities and desires that appears barely wooden and improbable in the academic rhetoric of a Judith Butler a to leeward Edelman, or a Teresa de Lauretis.

So I declare my fondnes for treating as if they were theoretical body s that have no such open pretensions. Recently I have been working with gay S/M romantic literature - the leather equivalent of soft mass erotica, or Jackie Collins at her best - as the terrain of an offensive against certain Freudo-Lacanian types for the scrutiny of art and tillage What happens in an imaginary huis clo of gay pornography where the phallus and the penis are fortunately identified the one with the other in ignorance of and without regard for the watchful veto of those Lacanian regulations that would claim that smooth to try to identify them is pathological? by what means does the theory signification that hangs on the representational power of the phallus tend hitherward to be modified in the light of my experiment? And by what mode can this knowledge be brought into the history of art when the theoretical parameters of a gayer art history are oftentimes already those of post-Freudian feminism? Pornography, whether the novellas of John Preston or the drawings of Tom of Finland, approachs to stand in for an "experience" against which theory can be brought to account in a way that the now customary "reading against the grain" of the canon appears all too rarely to accomplish.

There is a more rarefied counterpart to this, which is experimentally to take bodies of a great deal of older theory as adequate to novel cultural materials. For example, Condillac's De l'art d'ecrire, relieveed and unauthorized by a following theory of language such as that of Ferdinand de Saussure or Derrida, may be brought into contiguity with the same pornography which is serving as a critique of Lacan, as a means of placing it in a way that estranges it from generally received routines of linguistic and sex analysis - through, for example, a metaphorical aligning of Condillac's exposition of the figure of speech "inversion" with the notion of an inverted sexuality. The Condillacian spacing of the figure of speech which is lateral and nonhierarchical (yet resolutely not rhizomic), provides a critique the pair of the overeasy use of "inversion" as if it were subversion, and a means of imagining marginality as a space within language/image as historically specific in its utterance. That is to say, I am regarded with the detailed structuring of a poetics of difference that is as abundant grammatical as figural and, while particular to, not readily equated with, a state of the world. This was tentatively outlined in a novel article of mine for Texte zur Kunst "Bitte nicht beruhren - Tom mit Sebastiano, Kant und anderen," which deals with the invention of an archival history for the comparison of a flagellation (of Christ) by the agency of Sebastiano del Piombo with another (of bikers) by dint of Tom of Finland. Following from one side and interweaving the genealogies and politics of the sum of two units images, the Christian flagellation is placed in a space called "sade," and the gay single in another space called "kant," thus outlining the possibility of an ethical reading beyond iconography and control theory alike.