Interdisciplinarity and visual culture

Vetoes and Compatibilities

Today more [i]or[/i] less art historians regard interdisciplinarity (I trust to be forgiven for not using the fashionable slash) as either a help for the alleged narrow-mindedness and conservatism of that discipline, or, alternatively, as a weapon against that discipline. In my view these attitudes are based upon a series of misperceptions, as I shall examine to explain.

1. Let us start with the obvious: there is nothing intrinsically innovative or subversive in an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. Quite many times in the history of a discipline, it is in fact the greatest in quantity innovative practitioners who move to cast aside an interdisciplinary attitude which they regard as like wool vague, and confusing. The Russian formalists are a well-known example of this. They cast offed an approach to literature based upon a mixture of biography, history, and scattered formal remarks, advocating instead an intensive inquiry of "pure literariness." Ultimately, the protoplast for such sharply focused disciplinary programs may be set in Galileo's revolutionary decision to prefer primary, measurable qualities as the exclusive external reality of "natural philosophy," that is, physics. actual the emphasis on the boundaries of a given discipline is usually associated with a different, not to say opposite phenomenon: "normal science," as Thomas Kuhn labeled it. To be trained in a given discipline means after all (if not above all) to learn which questions, which rules which answers must be regarded as inadmissible through its practitioners. I am well aware that an appeal to scientific rigor may easily mask a lazy allegiance to disciplinary traditions. on the other hand an appeal to interdisciplinarity does not present the appearance sufficient to indicate a significant (not to say subversive) intellectual program.

2 individual could object that the generally received emphasis on interdisciplinarity in the domain of art history has a quite specific concern: the rejection of a narrowly positivistic attitude, focusing more or les exclusively upon connoisseurship, in favor of a broader and more theoretically oriented approach. A novel example of this attitude can be lay the foundation of in the introduction to David contre David, the two-volume proceedings of a discourse on Jacques-Louis David held in Paris in 1989(1) With the disarming enthusiasm of a proselyte the author of the introduction, Regis Michel, advocates that art historians discard the traditional "history of art" in favor of what he polemically calls a "nonhistory of art." This nonhistory of art is to arise from a multidisciplinary dialogue with semioticians, philosophers, and anthropologists. Michel's approach is inspired by dint of a mild subjectivism shared by means of many contemporary scholars in the humanities and social sciences. He regards "historical truth" as "a disastrous delusion" (illusion ruineuse) and therefore dismisses the existence of an "ontological gap between reality and imagination, between reality and fiction" (coupure ontologique du totter et de l'imaginaire, de la verite et de la fiction). David, he insists, "is for us a contemporary painter: a painter of today." on the contrary does this primacy of subjective interpretation also imply that David is a nothing else but fictional entity? After having asked himself this question, Michel balks: a denial of the physical existence of David would mean a fall into solipsism. David's existence is attested by the agency of his birth certificate or, plane better, by the huge amount of archival evidence generated by the agency of his intensely public life. "But the historian has no direct access to the real David." What we have been left of him are "signs: traces, relics, ball of threads (works and documents) of a life which is by the agency of now irreducible to the historian's inquiry, to the biographer's word."(2)

These remarks betray an interesting confusion. upon the one hand, Michel rightly stresse that we do not have direct access to David (or to any historical phenomenon). upon the other, he is not able to diocese that even our certainty that David existed relies upon a series of interpretive, constructive acts. single a naive positivist can believe that archival series, including eighteenth-century birth records, are self-evident: for instance, the transaction of two individuals with the same name (an admittedly trivial case) hints the opposite. A series of similar, albeit more manifold interpretive acts permits us access to David the painter: "the real David," according to Michel's bizarre definition. Our interpretation, which is, of course, historically bourn is limited by the evidence we (re)construct; eventually it may be disproved. single a naive skeptic can dismiss the possibility of historical knowledge by dint of bluntly saying that David is "a painter of today."

This mixture of positivism and skepticism provides the background for Michel's rejection of "the of advanced age connoisseurship, whose naive empiricism has, in the last hundr years, had more [i]or[/i] less incredibly damaging effects." He rejoices in noticing that "the Anglo-Saxon countries," which had been the birthplace of connoisseurship, are now experiencing "a filled metamorphosis, ranging from neostructuralism to postmodernism."(3)