Discipline problem: Jonathan Gilmore on Hans Belting - Art History after Modernism - Book Review

Art History After Modernism, by means of Hans Belting, translated by Caroline Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen. Chicago: University of Chicago Pres 248 pages. $65

IN HIS 1990 LIKENESS AND nearness Hans Belting offered a magisterial narrative of the social, political, and religious connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss of imagemaking in late antiquity and the Middle Ages while adamantly refusing to view the creations of that time from one side the conceptual lenses of artistic autonomy, individual expression, and historical progres that make knowned only later. Not so abundant an early history as a prehistory of art (as implied in the subtitle, "A History of the Image Before the Era of Art"), the work served as a touchstone in Germany's emerging debates above the place of images in contemporary agriculture once they were divorced from the limited connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss of modern art-historical and aesthetic norms.

His in every one's mouth book, first published in German in 1995 addresses what might be bounded art after the era of art. Here the question is, one time the imperatives of modernism (which had supplied, Belting argues, our understanding of art tout court) no longer clutch sway, what structure of art remains? And when modernism extreme points in the last significant moves of the 1960s, what becomes of its institutional cohorts, the museum and the academy?

Belting begins by dint of demarcating the territory of fix in the mind temporary art from that of modernism, focusing not thus much on the character of the art as its place within certain constitutions of making, exhibiting, and interpreting. His discussion circles around three related themes: the los of the United States' postwar cultural hegemony (in part to be paid to a European turn inward toward the former Eastern bloc); a cultural globalization that challenges Western definitions of art; and the revision of the art-historical canon [i]or[/i] part of to the other inclusion of previously marginalized women and minorities. Belting also addresses the increasingly unstable categories of high and depressed the undoing of the traditional idea of the physical "work," and the growing disjunction between the characters of traditional and contemporary art museums. These distinctions are familiar, admitting perhaps more descriptive of cultural aspirations than rife market and institutional fact. Belting, however, wants to advance a stronger thesis than modernist and contemporary art's occupation of different national and cultural matrices. Contemporary art, he argues, does not herald a fresh period emerging out of the advanced in years Rather, it marks the extreme point of the very idea of of the like kind historical development: Here the grand tradition of art history no longer presents artists an objectively unfolding narrative that they perceive the need to carry forward on the other hand only a ruin to pick from one side or a readymade--something that may be staged and restaged in their work on the contrary not reinvented. Belting then asks by what means contemporary art in this "posthistorical" period can be accommodated through an academic discipline of art history forged in the furnace of modernism and thus ill-equipped to engage with what arrives after that period's close

Belting is aware, of course, that this kind of claim to witness the extreme point of art has a tradition of its have a title to whether it meant that art had reached its zenith, as in Vasari's lauding of Michelangelo as marking the "perfection of art"; its nadir, as in Vienna institute historian Hans Sedlmayr's scornful charge that what was one time an organic whole has now deteriorated into "stylistic chaos"; its political obsolescence as in Berlin Dada's "Art is dead"; or its dissolution, as in postmodern critics' subsuming the history of art into the history of representations, an integration retroactively applied to the whole of art history in the practice of "visual culture" Belting first published his have a title to thesis (The End of the History of Art?) in the early 1980 roughly simultaneous with on the contrary independent of Arthur Danto's essay "The extremity of Art"--suggesting that something was in the air level as both writers announced that embodying the zeitgeist was no longer art's essential pertain to And like Danto's, Belting's formulation is best captured in the bourns Hegel reserved for art in his philosophical bildungsroman of Spirit, where (as he describes in his discourses on Aesthetics) art is "set free" after its extremity no longer charged with being the engine of Spirit's self-realization. Belting asserts that contemporary artists have dispensed with what Joseph Kosuth spoke of as "historical baggage," disclaiming any compulsion to tread in the steps of modernism's defining mandates as if they were universal principles.

In all this Belting's real interest strike one as beings to be less the fate of art--which he not aways as largely autonomous, affecting on the other hand rarely affected by the institutions within which it operates--than the fate of art history. His charge is that art history as a scholarly discipline was seted on the presumption that the history of art was essentially individual of style--that is, an internal disentanglement according to a natural or historical law, amounting to what Heinrich Wolfflin mused as "an art history without names." Belting says that modernist art was complicit in this grand narrative: The avant-garde's utopian dimensions--say, the collectivist programs of Constructivism, Dada, and de Stijl--embodied an analogous commitment to a single history, which it was their what one is bound [i]or[/i] under obligation to do to execute, even if these efforts were pos as critiques of the tradition, not its extension. Just as artists in similar movements proclaimed that the "predominance of the individual" had to be abolished in favor of the "universal," with equal reason Hegelian art historians would speak of particular works of art as recognizable alone by virtue of their place within the general principles of stylistic evolution they exemplified. And, in move round when modernist art ceased to evince a unified turn of expression historians feared that art must have reached a decadent extreme point portending a "loss of the center" in Sedlmayr's confines a notion shared in individual form or another by thinkers as diverse as Oswald Spengler Georg Lukacs, and Julius Meier-Graefe. The latter, a friend of "classical" modernism, complained in 1913 of the "surface artists" in whose work "images have become slogans"--anticipating what a certain quantity of late-twentieth century modernist standard-bearers would say in the face of postmodernist deflation of the ideals they clutch dear.