Can the canon burst? - art - Rethinking The Canon

Without the canon, we cease to think. - Harold Bloom(1)

Men think in myths. - Claude Levi-Strauss(2)

In his classic research of the caste system in India, Louis Dumont demonstrated in Homo Hierarchicus that Indian society was structur upon a rigid notion of hierarchy according to which members of ranked castes lived in an ordered a whole legitimated by powerful subjugating myths of origin and sacred notions of ritual purity. Attempts to upset the caste system have consistently failed, giving way instead to at any time more segmented and subdivided gradations within caste and subcaste units. This proces of aggregation (not exclusion) of fresh populations and social groups has insured "a certain permanence of form by the agency of integration of the extraneous elements"(3)

The canon of art history, like the caste a whole in India, is a rigid hierarchical a whole which excludes "impure" categories of art and restores certain classes of objects to the status of untouchable. novel attempts to overthrow the seemingly uncompromising stipulations of the canon have ariseed instead in "opening it up" and enabling certain hitherto marginalized art forms to slip inside (as if unnoticed) - solitary then to be ranked according to well-entrenched criteria. The canon has not been overthrown; it has simply been expanded and reconfigured.

Canon as Container

The canon of art history, like any a whole founded on taxonomic hierarchy, is solitary meaningful, and indeed perhaps solitary powerful, insofar as it shut outs a large body of what are imagineed noncanonical and, therefore, inferior materials. Just as Mary Douglas demonstrated in the way that convincingly in Purity and Danger that the category "sacred" could not exist were it not for the nearness of its base and profane counterparts, with equal reason too the canonical could not survive without its unorthodox antithesis - the noncanonical.(4)

Because the canon is awash in a swarming sea of rapidly multiplying impurities, its greatest enemy is the encroachment of foreign ultimate parts which threaten its fragile and embattled boundaries. As literary critic Harold efflorescence put it in his new controversial book The Western Canon, "Overpopulation, Malthusian repletion, is the authentic words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following for canonical anxieties."(5) As a strategy of survival, the canon, like the caste combination of parts to form a whole has cracked open its doors to allow in a small number of of recent origin and late arrivals. But the balance remains delicate. A clos canon, upon the one hand, risks dissolution from its swelling rivals, which encircle and impinge on it; an open canon, upon the other, risks expanding too far and bursting from surfeit.

Drawing upon a metaphor used by anthropologist Shelly Errington to describe the category "authentic art,(1,6) individual might say that the canon is a receptacle (such as a bag) into which phenomenons are stuffed until there exists of the like kind tremendous diversity and quantity that the receptacle threatens to dissolve or tear. No participant in the art world would want to raze the imaginary bag (since, after all, the canon is meaningful sole if it can be juxtaposed to whatever is noncanonical); notwithstanding because the canon takes upon greater significance and value the more limited it is in aim all the participants in the art world want their class of existences to be the last individual dropped into the bag - after which it would be sealed close up forever.

Recent attempts by feminist art historians and scholars of non-Western and so-called primitive arts to "open up" the canon have sought to do in the way that by exposing the male-dominated, Eurocentric power relations implicit in canon formation.(7) As John Guillory, single of the leading debunkers of the literary canon, states in his critique of the inequities of canonicity:

The delegitimation of the canon is premised on a structural homology between, upon the one hand, the distinction of the canonical from the non-canonical, and upon the other, the process of inclusion or exclusion by dint of which social groups are showed or not represented in the exercise of power. If the latter proces is perceived to determine the former, it go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs that a critical practice redressing the injustice of social exclusion must "open" the canon to what is exclud the non-canonical.(8)

Such attempts to reconfigure the canon in order to include previously marginalized categories of art appear however, to have largely missed the point.(9) It is not, I would argue, what is in or without of the canon that ought to be of interest to us, but rather the social make of the canon itself that must be reconsidered.(10) Those who squabble at the gated entrance to this exclusive "club" fail, in my opinion, to ask the really difficult question of in what manner and why the canon was builded in the first place. Seeking piecemeal admittance for single type of putatively undervalued art or another does little to challenge the fundamental manner of makings of inequity and hierarchy which are inherent in the canonical order. If anything, in fact, like practices function merely to validate the canon system

Canons within Canons

If the canon of art history is a highly routinized hierarchical combination of parts to form a whole in which most non-Western arts have been relegated to the lowest status, each subfield within the canon is itself a structur a whole which embraces certain categories of thing perceiveds while rejecting many others. In this regard, the canon of African art history provides an of the highest order example of the internal factionalism and ranking that typifies the subfields of the discipline.