By Anna Heineman 

Public art is in need of a shot in the arm.  Large and obtrusive works are often plopped down in city squares and on college campuses, and seem to have no connection to either the space or the community.  Because of this lack of connection, and perhaps the lack of critical discourse discussed about the work placed in the public as well, artwork outside of galleries and museums often fall flat.  To remedy this, public art needs not only to be discussed in journals and public forums, it also could benefit from a new philosophy from the artists themselves.  One artist who works in the public sector, Buster Simpson, provides some answers for how to enliven art in public spaces.

To give you a brief background about Simpson, he has been working as an artist in the public realm for over forty years.  He began his career creating public works for the infamous Woodstock performance in New York, assisted with the very first collaborative public art project with Seattle Arts Commission creating work for the Viewland/Hoffmann substation, and has exhibited art in reputable museums and public places around the planet.  In 2009, he was awarded the Public Art Award at the American for the Arts convention, which “honored innovative contributions to and exemplary commitment and leadership in public art.” 1

Therefore, his ideas and philosophies about art in public places carry clout.  Simpson believes that we—we as in scholars, teachers, administrators, and others who work in the arts—should refer to the field as “art in public,” and not “public art.” 2

In response to being called a “public artist,” Simpson responded curtly: “I PERSONALLY DO NOT LIKE TO BE SINGLED OUT AS A PUBLIC ARTIST. I AM AN ARTIST.” 3  Even though most of Simpson’s works focus on the community, he does not call himself a public artist, for he believes that the term is too limiting.  Instead, he says, “I just like to be called an artist; that keeps it kind of vague.  That’s the best.” 4 He also questions the existence of “public art.”  He claims “there’s art being put in public, but there’s not public artists.  When you work in the public, it requires different skills, but you still have to be an artist.” 5 To work well in this field, the artist needs to be quipped with good listening and collaboration skills.  The artist is not “making something that will go on somebody’s wall,” as Simpson notes. 6 Rather because the patron consists of a neighborhood or a city, the artist must meet different demands.

These demands, he claims, are different for those who work in public spaces.  Artist who work outdoors have a challenge of a multi-dimensional context.  The environment, community, and history all surround the work.  Moreover, graffiti, decay and time do not benefit art outside the sterile.  Again, he explains:

WE ARE NOT HANGING ON WHITE WALLS IN

HERMETICALLY SEALED SPACES, BUT IN THE LAND OF

STREET SMARTS AND ABRASIVE EROSION; THE

CRITERIA NEED TO ACCOMMODATE THE CONTEXT. 7

His key point is to make the work relevant for the space. A Minimalist sculpture depends on the clean, perfect line of the work, looks tacky once graffiti appear the metal.  Thus, Simpson’s point is for the artist to make-work appropriate for context of the place.  He encourages artists to take this challenge, but also ask administrators and public art officials to “deaccession art in public when it does withstand the criteria it was made to represent.” 8  As he claims, there are many artists who “patronize the public and make cliché infected, feel-good art.”

To remedy this, he encourages artist, who have the tools to adapt, to read the landscape and communicate with community in order to create work appropriate for the space. 9  Simpson has done this throughout many of his public projects.  For example, he created a whimsical cistern on a street in Seattle in order to promote rainwater recycling.  A particular neighborhood, that Simpson once lived in, had turned a derelict lot into a garden.  Bouncing ideas off of each other, they wanted to turn the street into a water recycler, meaning all the rain runoff would be collected for their garden’s use. Image 1

Receiving a city grant, Simpson was chosen as the resident designer, and created a cistern that not only was eye-catching and creative, it was also functional. 10 It captured the rain from the nearby building, collected it in the cistern, and funneled it down the street through a runnel, ending in the community garden.  Working with the space and the community, he was able to create a functional work of art that appeased the city and the residents of the neighborhood.

Simpson’s key to creating successful art is communication.  Because there are panels of people involved with every decision, he claims, “As a provocateur, trickster, and healer, the artist can stimulate thinking as well as present a visually legible image with a disarming, poignant viewpoint.  Artists working in the public must be cognizant of the responsibilities and obligations inherent in shared space.” 11

If the artist either creates work for his or her own agenda, or patronizes the public with elementary work, the art in the public space is disconnected to the community.  However, if the artist chooses to recognize the fact that they share a space with the community in the world’s design, they have the ability to create thought-provoking and successful work.Simpson also believes that publically sited art needs better constructive reviews and critiques.

There needs to be “more effort and responsibility on the part of conferences to educate the greater public about art in public.”  He claims that it is up to us as the educators to in turn educate the public about “art as idea, art as process, and that failure can also be a process of art.” 12 Of course, art as idea and art as process are nothing new.  However, art novices perhaps have not learned how to look, to metaphorically pay the price of admission, to involve themselves with looking so that they can fully comprehend the work at hand.  Simpson’s work is highly educational in that regard; for he incorporates these concepts that are normally see only in museums.  He does this by including signage, plaques, or other references for the viewer.  For instance, his Host Analog in Portland, Oregon, is at first glance, a segmented log with trees growing from the decaying wood. Images 2, Image 3

It does not look like a typical public work of art, except for the  signage included around it.  If a viewer takes the time, they can read about many different elements relating to this idea.  Simpson took this naturally felled log from a nearby forest, brought it to the city center (outside of the city’s Convention Center), to juxtapose the time it takes to cut down a tree to the time it takes to grow a forest.  He included images of his daughter growing up over the years next to the tree, along with pictures of ancient Greek ruins that mirror the falling of a great column to the falling of a great tree, and images of loggers that eat from a great log table in a forest.  In this seemingly simple design, Simpson incorporates art as idea and art as process for the viewer.  He is able to entice both the art aficionado who revels in artistic complexity and the art novice who perhaps though contemporary art was only paint splattered on canvas.

Similar to how signs explain art, we too, need to explain the importance and complexity of public art to the larger community.  Simpson suggests that conferences could provide panels to discuss how to create outreach to public schools. 13 He believes an educated public, as the patrons of our public art, will make intelligent decisions about “the environment around them, be it urban design, music or art.” 14 If we educate the public, by way of conferences or community meetings, or through classes in public schools or higher education, we can raise the bar of what is expected for art in public.

Conclusion

In conclusion, how do we as teachers and administrators educate about artistic complexity in public spaces?  Signage, for one, is a simple answer.  Explain the work that is out on the street. Curators add signs for museum exhibitions: why should not art in the public come with an explanation or analysis as well?

Also, Simpson encourages us to be more discerning about what is put in these places.  His motto is to place “work that works, in the public realm.” 15 To make art “work,” Simpson, personally, focuses on creating a visual message.  He does not aim to place an aesthetic object in the public domain.  Instead, he creates work that connects with the people and the place.  By making the work, Simpson’s public art is often well received by the commissioning bodies and the communities who live with it.  Thus, if we encourage other public artists to follow suit, perhaps a higher quality of work will end up in public spaces.

By having more public reviews or critiques of artists’ work before the design ends up in the public realm is also a proactive way of attaining high quality art.  Having a mix of people–and not just art history scholars—evaluate public work will also benefit the community.  Moreover, choosing an artist who is willing to work with the community and the space is also key.  It is important to choose a person who will put their artistic ego aside and incorporate what the community is looking for to enliven their space.

A work in public can educate, inspire, and provoke; however, a work in public can also sit there passively.  It is up to us to encourage our art students, our art administrators, and public art choosing panels to challenge our public, and not just pacify them.  By following Simpson’s suggestions, I believe we can aspire to commission public art with a capital A.

______________________________________________________________________________________

1 I was present at the 2009 Americans in the Arts Conference in Seattle and witnessed him receives the award.  The quote is from the conference pamphlet.

2 Buster Simpson, Letter to Author, August 22, 2010.

3 Ibid.

4 Robin Updike, “Expanding the Canvas for Public Art—Agitator Buster Simpson’s Works are Of the People, and For the People,” Seattle Times, January 18, 1998, E5.

5 Personal interview with Buster Simpson, June 26, 2009.

6 Ibid.

7 Buster Simpson, Letter to Author, August 22, 2010.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Carlyn Geise, “Denny Regrade to Belltown,” in Belltown Paradise, eds. By Brett Bloom, Ava Bromberg, and Anthony Elms (Chicago: White Walls, 2004), 32.

11 Buster Simpson, “Portland South Waterfront Greenway: Conceptual Schematic Design Phase,” artist statement, August 2004, 2. Found online at

http://www.bustersimpson.net/portlandgreenway/portlandgreenway.08.23.04.pdf

12 Buster Simpson, Letter to Author, August 22, 2010.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Sue Spaid, Ecoventions: Current Art to Transform Ecologies (Cincinnati, OU: Contemporary Arts Center, 2002) 89.

Bibliography

_____________________

Geise, Carolyn. “Denny Regrade to Belltown.” In Belltown Paradise, eds. By Brett Bloom, Ava Bromberg, and Anthony Elms. Chicago: White Walls, 2004.

Simpson, Buster. “Portland South Waterfront Greenway: Conceptual Schematic Design Phase,” artist statement, August 2004, 2.

Spaid, Sue. Ecoventions: Current Art to Transform Ecologies. Cincinnati, OH: Contemporary Arts Center, 2002.

Updike, Robin. “Expanding the Canvas for Public Art—Agitator Buster Simpson’s Works are Of the People, and For the People.” Seattle Times, January 18, 1998, E5.

DR. JEANNE S. M. WILLETTE

Otis College of Art and Design

Presentation to the College Art Association

Saturday, February 12, 2011  New York, New York

A hundred and forty years ago, the art world in Paris faced a self-imposed crisis—or to be more precise—refused to face the crisis.  Like most crises, this one had been brewing for years—symptoms had been noted—but had been misdiagnosed as problems to be solved.  [1] At issue was the centuries-old system [2] of training artists—-judging and evaluating their efforts—exhibiting their art.  [3] It was impossible to imagine that such a venerated process could possibly go wrong. After all, the quality of the French education was superb; the quality of the art from the Academy was unsurpassed. The French Academy was envied and emulated throughout the Western world.  The academic system had produced eminent artists and the art was justly celebrated.  [4]

Given all this quality work, it was hard to imagine how anyone could be dissatisfied with continuing excellence.  [5] Even the most vocal critics demanded to be included.  Even the most unlikely candidates were given a fair hearing.  [6] The jury system gave all comers and opportunity to be accepted and to shine, achieve fame, acquire wealth. [7] What could possibly be wrong? [8]

To those outside the system of quality, [9] the Academy, its elaborate apparatus of rules built level by level over hundreds of years, for the sole purpose of preserving the classical ideal and the methodologies of the Renaissance, in order to maintain the power of those in charge—-to the outsiders—to those not in the IN crowd, [10] the Academy was training students to uphold an outdated status quo, all in the service of a repressive government, intent on controlling the visual culture of France.  These outsiders—-mostly a motley crew of indifferently trained painters—-confronted—not a jury of their peers—but a group of old men, who were hostile to interlopers. From the standpoint of the outsiders, [11] the judgment of the aging academicians, long past their prime, seemed implausible, inexplicable, implacable, improbable, unrelentingly ruthless and capricious.

The Academy and the exhibitions it controlled, the Salons, was, in fact, a bastion of unassailable power that ran a rigged game, [12] designed to generate losers, [13] not winners, created to guarantee, not quality, [14] as was claimed, but a great prize, [15] available only to a very small number of aspirants, who obediently [16] responded appropriately to all the prerequisites—-genuflection to authority, [17] acceptance of submission to tradition, [18] willingness to forego rebellion against the paternal figures.

By making the prizes so difficult to achieve, the number of winners so small, the Academy made the ultimate rewards—such as they were—-seem intensely desirable worthy of being won. [19] Many were called but only a few succeeded.   Perversely, the young artists, instead of recognizing that the roulette wheel was tilted, that the system was structured for failure, [20] only increased their desire and intensified their efforts to succeed against the odds—not understanding that the ruthless winnowing indicated, not that their art was less worthy, but that the system [21]simply could not handle the growing number of supplicants.

For hundreds of years, the Salon system had built a mindset of acceptance of the rules of this game—a victim mentality that was as unassailable as the castle of the Academy itself.  Some artists, it seems, did recognize that the Academy was in crisis—was ossified and inflexible—that the Salon was eating its young—and that the selection system was unfair. [22] These artists refused to play the game, refused to resign themselves to rejection by the Salon juries.

Instead they formed their own alternative [23] to the massive salon exhibitions and the willful and antiquated whims of the jurors.  [24] These painters—acting as independent entrepreneurs—as enterprising business people—started their own self-generated alternative art exhibitions. Rather than challenging the paradigm of the Salon, they simply created another paradigm—exhibit your own art, in your own way, on your own terms.

We are speaking, of course, of the Impressionists. [25]

True, there had been earlier attempts by previous artists to free themselves of the constraints of the Salon—David, Courbet, Manet, [26] Whistler [27]—but the psychological grip of the Academic system was so powerful that, rather than being impressed by the efforts of those artists, the art audience was mostly bemused and puzzled. These independent exhibitions were significant cracks in the fortress wall, but the most famous alarm bell had to be the famous Salon des Refusés (1863), [28] ten years before the Impressionists’ first exhibition in 1874. [29]

The anger of rejected artists [30] against an unusually punitive jury signaled a genuine crisis: there were too many artists for too few places [31] to satisfy the demand for inclusion. [32] Indeed, one mollifying exhibition would not suffice to ease the growing tension between the guardians of the watchtower and the armies of talented young people [33] assembling at the portcullis—battering at the gates. [34]

It is important to pause and consider the courage of the Impressionists. They would be laughed at—they knew that—the establishment would feel threatened, if it noticed the artists at all, the critics who accepted the system would be unkind, and call them names, established artists invested in academia would reject them—the Impressionists knew all that—-and all of these indignities came to pass. [35] True, the Impressionists yearned [36] for validation and acceptance in the Salon but the painters headed for open territory, [37] the unguarded terrain of the independent exhibition, building upon the nascent artist-dealer system.  [38] The Impressionists initiated today’s art world.

Although the myth of the Impressionists posits them as the shock troops of the avant-garde of the Third Republic, the painters were reacting to real financial needs.  [39] The Salon system acted as a barrier to economic success.  [40] The gatekeepers prevented an entire class of creative thinkers from earning an honest living at the trade [41] of their choice and the casualties were not just the renegade rebels. Academic artists suffered as well.  [42] The system of enforced failure [43] guaranteed that they too must be sacrificed. They too must fail.  Undoubtedly, the defenders of the Salon system had their explanations, their reasons for ensuring failure—-those who were rejected by the juries were simply bad artists who deserved to fail.  Really? Paul Cézanne—a bad artist?

The upholders of the status quo [44] would argue that their system was responsible for artistic leaders, such as, Jean-Léon Gérome. [45] But, in reality, the system had no room for new ideas, could not accommodate artistic innovation, and could not tolerate artistic freedom or new innovations. [46] If the Impressionists had not found their way around the artificial barriers and created new opportunities [47] for themselves, then it would not have been possible for artists in the twentieth century to exist—-even thrive—and find success—entirely outside [48] the Salon system. [49] Pablo Picasso could have been the failed son of an obscure Spanish artist.

Impossible you say?  Everyone knows that talent will always be discovered; true art will shine through. Really? The eventual success of long dead avant-garde artists rested upon fragile foundations of arbitrary chance.  Vincent van Gogh had a brother, Théo, who was an art dealer, and Théo’s widow was inclined to preserve the paintings of her unstable brother-in-law who had sold one painting in his lifetime.  [50] Other people simply threw his art in the dustbin.  [51]

To say that the Impressionists challenge [52] to the bulwark that was the Salon system made it possible for the art of some of the most valued artists of the modern avant-garde to be recognized [53] is to state the obvious but sometimes emphasizing the already known is necessary.  Even in the year of our Lord 2011, or especially in our own time, it is necessary to recall the revolution of the Impressionists, for we are facing a similar crisis in art history. Like the crisis of the nineteenth century avant-garde, [54] our crisis is demographic also, an expansion of an aspiring educated middle class exemplified by an increasing number of freshly minted PhDs who are pumped out of graduate programs—but for what future? Reeling from yet another economic downturn, our own academia is downsizing, and to add to this perfect storm of too few jobs and too many job hunters, the entire publishing industry is shrinking. [55]

Are those who are outside the magic circle of the privileged and the published less intelligent, less gifted, less capable, do they have less to offer?  Surely the academic system of producing art historians works, doesn’t it?  The academic stars are not lucky stars, well situated in the northeast corridor, enjoying unrecognized advantages in publication. [56] These people are truly deserving of their success, no argument. Just as it would be wrong to insist that Bouguereau was technically deficient, or that Gérome lacked imagination, [57] there can be no argument that the academic stars have not earned their rewards, their books, their articles, and their reputation for excellence. Therefore, I am not concerned with them.  I am concerned about everyone else—those art historians who are intelligent and capable, who have a lot to offer, but have no outlets for publication, that all-important stepping stone to a job, to tenure.  [58]

The chances of getting published today are less that of wining on a slot machine in Vegas.  [59] There are those who would argue that the current system of publication works perfectly well. [60] But we cannot argue today in good faith that our process of publishing is allowing talent to be developed for the same reason as those who in the nineteenth century could not—in good faith—maintain that the Salon system of exhibiting art was efficient. [61] Likewise, we cannot state that our system allows the cream to come to the top, that only the worthy are rewarded and that those who never rise deserved to fail. [62]

Just as it was illegitimate to make those claims in the nineteenth century, we cannot make them today, because we simply don’t know if we are correct. There is no way of knowing.  There is no way of measuring the loss, the lack, the silence of new voices never heard, new words never written, new insights never illuminated, years of training never coming to fruition, scholarship wasted, careers never realized…all because there are not enough outlets for publication.  Surely the loss of art historical talent must outweigh any gains.  [63] Such a limited field for publication is not efficient.  Any system that wastes its best and brightest, allows them to disappear, and fail to thrive, consigned to invisibility, is a system that values status quo over change, supports vested interests over innovation. [64]

Let us imagine—if the Impressionists had never tried—and remember that many of these artists died long before Impressionism was accepted.  Imagine—if their courage had faltered—there would be no Claude Monet, no Pierre Renoir, no Mary Cassatt, no Vincent van Gogh, no Paul Gauguin,  no Georges Seurat.  These artists would have lived, painted futilely, and died in obscurity. [65] Instead the impressionists changed the avant-garde, from the presence of a few outliers to   a genuine movement, inspiring large venues for Independent art shows, the Salon des Indépendants—-jury-less, the Salon d’Automne—radical—jumpstarting a new way for artists to sell their art outside the Salon system.  [66]

Challenge and change are equally difficult but out of crisis comes—-not opportunity—but the willed creation of opportunity. [67] Today the will exists, the technology is available, allowing art professionals, art historians, art critics, theorists to take their careers in their own hands—like the Impressionists—to make themselves heard and read and seen. [68] It is possible to open a new field [69] of cultural production, [70] to run a new game, played by new rules, to establish a new paradigm, to build an alternative system that allows the players to win. [71] And all that is necessary is to forego voluntary psychological handicaps, to give up a constricting mindset [72] and take advantage of the first real game change [73] in the art world since the establishment of the artist-dealer-gallery system for artists.

Today the Art Historians of Southern California propose to open a closed field [74] with our own petit revue—-Shockwrite—a hybrid e-journal, open and inclusive, democratic, professional, and dedicated  [75]to the intellectual growth and development of our art colleagues [76] who have a great deal to say and no place to publish it.  Welcome—there are no gatekeepers at Shockwrite, only an audience of your peers.

You deserve to be heard.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press) 1993

The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: University of California Press) 1995

Chadwick, Whitney, Women, Art and Society (London: Thames and Hudson) 1990

Cown, Tyler, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) 2000

Denis, Rafael Carsoso, Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester University Press) 2000

Dewhurst, Wynford, Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development (G. Newnes, Limited) 1904

Herbert, Robert, “Impressionism, Originality, and Laissez-faire,” from Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology by Mark Tompkins Lewis (University of California Press) 2007

Kendell, Richard, et al. Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) 1998

King, Ross, The Judgment of Paris. The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism (New York: Walker and Company) 2006

McDonald, Christie and Gary Wihl, editors, Transformations in Personhood After Theory.  The Languages of History, Aesthetics, and Ethics (Pennsylvania State University Press) 1994

Moscovici, Claudia, Romanticism and Post-Romanticism (Lexington Books) 2007

Nord, Philip G., Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge) 2000

Schneider, Andrea Kupfer, Creating the Musée d’Orsay: The Politics of Culture in France (Pennsylvania State University Press) 1998

Swinth, Kristen, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern America (University of North Carolina Press) 2007

Michele McFaull

Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles

Board Member of Art Historians of Southern California

INTRODUCTION

Jens Hoffman, Director of CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in SanFrancisco quotes Daniel Buren in this month’s Artforum. Buren stated “ an artobject only fully becomes an art work when it is exhibited and can create arelationship with the public. ” Taking some literary license, I suggest his quote is analogous to publishing an e-journal. An e-journal only fully becomes an e-journal, when once launched, it creates a relationship with its audience. This paper speaks to creating an audience beyond the realm of art history.

This relationship to a widened readership is based in Shockwrite’s mission to provide a forum with few filters for art writers,  while providing a venue that preserves literary and scholarly standards and develops a distinctive voice for the writers.

Shockwrite is a hybrid, with the web-based connectivity functioning as a metaphor for its reader and writer outreach. Our vision is part art journal, part cultural affairs with a mix of contemporary art-scene. We have an avid interest in technology and how digital media plays a crucial role in advancing the arts within museums programs, gallery exhibitions, auction sales and educational curriculums. These old-fashioned disciplines  of the traditional arts embrace new and expansionary technology in specific ways that I will outline.

In launching an e-journal, we at the Art Historians of Southern California have to be risk-takers. It’s my hope to illustrate some target areas of interest and how this relates back to how we wantto publish. Our site intends to be collaborative—allowing dialogue and creating discourse, facilitate access—quick publication and instant access, while offering peer review—the community of the art world.  Shockwrite will take its form with your participation in the publishing house of the future.

First, I want to give a brief overview of some risky ventures in new technology taken recently by art institutions. These illustrate both the risk and reward components.

• The Bravo series with the help of judges Jerry Saltz, Art Critic for New York Magazine, sometime lecturer at Yale, kicked off it’s fine–art inspired reality competition titled: Work of Art: The Next Great Artist and offered fourteen aspiring artists a chance to win $100,000, a solo exhibit at Brooklyn Museum of Art, and national recognition.   Work of Art was a risk on multiple levels, not the least of which was the reputation of Saltz and the Brooklyn Museum.

• One of MOMA’s challenging exhibitions was the work of filmmaker Tim Burton but the unacknowledged artists are the fabricators employed toreinvent his haunting but perverse celluloid characters to life size imagery, an exhibition that took 13 days to install. Youtube videos offer interviews with Milo Mottola and his team who successfully transformed Burton’s sketches into a surreal world within MOMA’s galleries. Unless you take the time to view these, you might think Burton’s images were off the Hollywood back lot.

• In the area of theater, Director Julie Taymor’s artistry focused on the nimble yet exotic art of puppetry setting box-office records and advanced ticket sales and drawing crowds back to the theater.  Her original production of Spiderman, now on Broadway, weaves sensually textured backdrops framed by a cast of suspended and swinging “fiends” above your head headlining weekly controversy.

• When the success of one of the biggest box office draws in Los Angeles history is the Los Angeles Opera’s Ring Cycle by Wagner was owed in no small part to the daring costumes and visionary stage set designs by artist Achim Freyer, making his directorial debut from Berlin.

• The Guggenheim Museum launches a partnership with YouTube in aproject inviting unknown video artists – to upload their videos – with the promise that their work will be judged by museum film curators in addition to a possible debut at one of four Guggenheim locations.

• Los Angeles is the birth place of many of the most influential art movements of the second half of the 20th century, yet much is not well known about the role this city played in the development of Twentieth Century art. Through a partnership between the Getty Foundation and Getty Institute that will tell this story in an unprecedented collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California. Pacific Rim will attempt a complete re-telling of L. A. art from Oct. 2011 to March 2012.

David Hockney has announced he is putting brushes and palette aside to draw digital imaged portraits on his iPad – it draws our attention to the Age of Digital. It begs the question, what are other arts institutions doing to stay ahead of the curve in this digital age? The first responders are embracing the power and challenges of technology. Why? Because technology is guiding them in ways to meet the goals of maintaining their constituency, if not increase their audience,viewership, readership, and attendance.

The Demographic We All Seek

Shockwrite is particularly interested in these digital advances and state of the art technology. Gallery spaces, the hallowed halls of the museums, and Smartclassrooms on your college campus are embracing technology. We might inquire how has the digital age changed the way you are interacting as artists, ascurators, as collectors, as consultants, as students?

Freshman in college today were born in the early 90’s when the worldwide web was launched. In 1992, there were 50 sites on WWW, a year later 150 and so it grew. This is the social network generation. Our students grew up with cellphones, ipods and Macs. They are the first to embrace the Kindle, the iPad and the social networking sites of Facebook and Twitter. Embracing social networking, the students of today rely on cell phones as their watch, their calendars, their address book and phone number. Museums, galleries, and films, art fairs and et al want to reach this younger demographic.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

The controversy last spring at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is a case in point. Nancy Spector and Andy Berndt, video curators, threw their hat into the ring, June 2010 and announced The First Biennial of Creative Video in a partnership with YouTube. The director, of the museum, Richard Armstrong stated, “Creative online video is one of the most compelling and innovative opportunities for personal expression today ‘YouTube Play’ demonstrates this is within the reach of anyone who uses a computer and has access to the Internet.” Reuters

In a taped video by the curators, artists were invited and prompted about the do’s and don’ts (everything from plagiarizing to the format) and “how to’s” of participating in their newly launched project: You Tube Play. As Carol Vogel of The New York Times sited “anyone with access to a videocamera and computer will have an opportunity to catch the eye of a Guggenheim curator and vie for a place in a video art exhibition at all of the foundations’ museums in New York, Berlin, Spain and Venice.”

Conceived as a biennial event it is intended to discover inventive work from unexpected sources. Spector stated “we are looking for things we have not seen before.” She added that their process of selection looked for “incredibly creative, self-conscious work ….and that artists should always challenge the status quo.”

In their on-line promo Spector and Berndt emphasize that “It’s about access, communication, creativity, openness for the selection, 20 – 25 videos will be presented – you nominate yourself.” In the Digital Media experiment artists needed no means, no education, and no budget. In other words, they lowered the barriers in order to widen the net and avail themselves of the raw talent that the internet afforded them.

A distinguished jury of 10 experts included: Laurie Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Doug Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter, Takashi Murakami and Shirin Neshat. This innovative approach by the Guggenheim recalls what university admissions refer to as blind admissions, designed to offer a fair field of play to all interested in submitting applications. Theoretically it sounded democratic; the challenges were many not the least was screening the 23,000 videos received. The winners’ work was streamed live from the museum in October 2010, in a ceremonious tribute to the digital camera.

The critics were harsh and to the point. Leading the charge was Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art and former curator of Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, attacked the Guggenheim’s project in a New York Times article, stating that “It’s time to stop kidding ourselves. The museum as revolving door for new talent is the enemy ofart and of talent, not their friend – and the enemy of the public as well.”  The New York Times, July, 2010

An additional concern about new mediums is what Niels Van Tomme termed “the fetishization of  technology,” warning “that it often conceals the artist personality”.  We welcome this debate and as an online  journal we also will be tested as towhat to publish and not to publish, what to invite, how are we testing the boundaries? Our intent is to be as elastic as possible – and see what happens. I use this example as a comparison of risk-taking, not to compare an emerging ejournal with an established art institution but to make the point of our intent in staying true to our word that we will publish your work.

The Guggenheim led their curatorial colleagues in franchising their museums around the world—again striking out in new territory. Where might these innovation lead? Inviting artists and sculptors to share their work on line? Conversations with emerging artists in their studios while working?  Circumventing the traditional curatorial, gallery, and white cube experience for a direct hit at the Biennial of Your Choice?

Education Curriculum

We at Shockwrite are interested in course curriculums in the field of art history that bridge other disciplines. One case in point is a course I developed last year in apartnership with the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles. This program is the very definition of hybrid – a cross between an art history course and an Integrated Learning experience for seniors at Otis College of Art and Design. The course was originally conceived as a one-semester course and soon grew to be a four semester-two year project. As fellow travelers you may have noticed the mounting art exhibits in airports both domestically and internationally. It has burgeoned into a competitive field where cities use terminal spaces to transmit their cities identity through art exhibits.

The title of the course is “LAX: Public Policy and the Arts” and the students are given an insight to the role of government in the arts. We look back at the history of government agencies supporting art  particularly in the United States (Depression and New Deal Era) and, from a contemporary perspective, the long plight of artists fighting for financial support from national associations (NEA), local government, through government-sponsored grants.

Students are assigned four projects per semester. They must successfully respond to these assignments by building their own criteria as to what defines public art.The course is a collaboration on many levels between the government arm of the arts (CAD), an educational institution of the arts (Otis), and the private airport (LAWA) management located at Los Angeles Airport.

The course structure needs to meet Integrated Learning (IL) criteria as well as Art History. The Il mandates inter-disciplinary teams of students to conceptualize, analyze and define issues shared with them by the partner. It is up to the student to find creative solutions. To give some background on the Integrated Learning program. The IL established partnerships with community based nonprofits and industries within the community of Los Angeles. The program seeks to find real-life experience for Otis students working with the institution/company/or non-profit organization. The focus is learning collaborative skills and successful problem solving with students from other disciplines while maintaining a platform whereby students realize the challenges of the work place.

In the course, the  students negotiate a diverse public sphere of national and localpublic works. The final project examines a specific space at the airport that they redesign. The Cultural Affairs Department manages over twelve art centerscounty wide, including three airports, and Watts Towers, and Barnsdale Center, which is a part of Hollyhock House built by Frank Lloyd Wright in Hollywood. The Department has vast resources, a permanent collection of art that is not properly archived and a small support staff to handle the grants, fellowships and exhibits citywide that they curate, plus artists in residency programs.

During the process of writing the curricula for this class,  the Mayor of Los Angeles cut the city workforce by 15%. Luckily, the Director of Public Art within the Cultural Affairs Department kept her position and went on to play a crucial role in continuing her interest in our partnership. We are in the second semester this spring. In a 15-week semester we have three field trips to the airport. The manager of LAWA hosts students in their boardroom, gives them a history of the program, outlining the dynamics – the exciting and the pragmatic- to let them see first hand the challenges they face.

Within class students are treated to guest lectures, staff reports and behind the scenes tours of exhibits; they bring cameras and notebooks to judge what should be exhibited versus the present exhibitions. I also ask two speakers per semester to bring their expertise in the field of Public Art to the students. These speakers vary from artists who participate in public artor directors/curators of public art projects. (https://blogs.otis.edu/laxarts/)

Christie’s and the Internet

Auction houses have some strange items that sell transforming their interior sales rooms into masterful stage sets. One example is Roy Rodgers’ taxidermied horse, Trigger, who sold for more than a quarter of a million dollars. What really happens behind the scenes here? How is technology changing Christie’s Auction House?  2010 was the best financial year in the history of Christie’s Auction House. They sold 5 billion dollars worth of art, antique and artifacts. The difference from last year’s sales is that 27% of those worldwide sales were from on-line buyers. In a sign that fine art collectors are growing ever more comfortable with bidding online, Christie’s International reported the sale of an ancient wine vessel and cover, the Fangyi from late Shang dynasty, Anyang, from 12-13th century B.C. sold to an online bidder for $3.3 million setting a new house record for the most expensive item sold online. The sale price smashed the previous Christie’s online sales of $1.27 million, set in April 2008 for a Stradavari violin purchased using Christie’s LIVE™, the company’s proprietary online bidding platform.

Christie’s stepped up to the plate and developed their own proprietary technology to increase their audience before their competition. They are changing the paradigm of auction bidding—a win-win for their customers.

Galleries and the VIP Option

Galleries are forming alliances, collaborating on openings, and looking strategically to position their physical spaces within an arts community to survive in this economy. Access is everything. When you talk to gallery owners, as I have over the last few months, you learn that they are concerned with lack of foot traffic, and that they are not sure which direction to go to increase revenues. The owners realize their customers can often view the works they seek through gallery websites and that a new sales strategy needs to be created.

In Los Angeles we have vibrant arts communities from Silver Lake to Culver City, from downtown Los Angeles and NoHo to Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. Bergamot alone hosts 600,000 visitors a year showcasing forty one galleries that physically surround the Santa Monica Museum, a small boutique non-profit museum. It offers parking, a restaurant and gallery openings that are collaborative ventures. On Saturday evenings it’s an active art walk. The dealers formed a close alliance to support each other’s business. Dealers are not only forming alliances in their community, they are forming alliances in cyberspace.

The answer to what direction to turn was answered by one such group who called their endeavor The VIP Fair. It was launched for one week and started in January 22, 2011. It provided a virtual tour of 138 galleries represented by 30 countries who their featured artists and works along with the technology to sit down and interview the director on a particular work and negotiate prices. They range from established shops like London’s White Cube and New York’s David Zwirner to relative newcomers such as i8 in Reykjavik.

The VIP fair was created by James and Jane Cohan, from New York, both art dealers who teamed up with two internet entrepreneurs three years ago when the art world was about to be hit by recession. As you might imagine their site is provoking some angst among the other dealers who did not join. We might ask does  the world really need another international art fair?  With ARCO Madrid in February, Tefaf in March, Art Basel in June, Frieze in October, Miami in December and a dozen fringe fairs in between. There is a mini-travel business built around the travel schedule of art and antique dealers and the annual costlycircuit they chase. The VIP Fair offers access, collaboration to top galleries for a fraction of the cost of attending the conventional fairs.

Gallery owners chose between three sizes of virtual booths for their wares, for about one-fifth of the charge of the traditional art fair. Mere browsing is free, although visitors must pay for access to an instant-messaging system, price lists and dealers’ private rooms. VIP ran for one week and the success of it is still being determined. The most expensive work purchased was for $336,000. According to critics the model is not perfected as yet. Between wait times to upload images and the non-invited guest—called Spam—the site experienced some glitches. Some viewers found it difficult to negotiate. However, the vision is set and we will follow the endeavors of such attempts to integrate the arts and the web at Shockwrite.

SUMMATION

Shockwrite is here to be a catalyst, the catalyst of transparency. What do we wish to be transparent? The art world we inhabit. Not only the academic but the happenings in and around the art world. Our daily lives. Our gallery, museum, theater and classroom experiences. But just as rarefied air turns stale and inbreeding becomes toxic – we owe it to our generation and future ones to talk with our fellow travelers on an equal playing field to make our discipline stronger.

We invite the non-art historian to address and present the art world they see, they hear and they experience. We invite the untold narratives from the back scenes, the behind-the-scene activity – that takes place in the white cube, at the drop of a gavel at auctions worldwide, and within the hollowed structures of museums.

The conventional research paper is always welcomed but we stand as more than a journal – we are the new world of happenings within art research, art critique, art premieres, art collecting, art foundations, that normally go unacknowledged. We welcome the narratives you experience in your work place and play, as well as in your library.

We aim to lower barriers while maintaining a distinctive presence. Although we welcome the scholarly papers and essays published monthly and quarterly in mainstream art journals such as (October, Frieze, Art Forum, Art Papers) our schema is not to solely publish art history research and methodological essays but glean from your interests and your writing.

We offer you a stage to highlight your area of expertise and link to others via video, hyperlinks and alternative media. If you value other communities input this is your site. For those artists, art historians who create, install, experience, moderate, argue, critique, obey, or disobey the rules please join us in our new venture.

You Deserve to be Heard.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Niels Van Tomme in aconversation with Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk, published in Art Papers, Jan/Feb, 2011, “From Readymade to Ready bought: An Ongoing History of Computer Art” (JODI).

ART HISTORY LOOKS AT CLIFFORD GEERTZ

By Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette

“Art, Clifford Geertz once remarked, “is notoriously hard to talk about.” [1] However, Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist, gives art historians a way to talk about art through material culture.  Art history is, definitionally, history, and the goal of the art historian is to discover the meaning of a material object by reconstructing the context in which the object was created.  An anthropologist usually works in the present with the material culture of the present, but the two professions share a common goal—the comprehension of the meaning of the artifact.  In anthoropology, “material culture” refers to the construction of a “thick description” of a local (contemporary) culture by a detached observer, usually an anthropologist or sociologist.  The methodology of building a thick description, layer by layer was by the renowned anthroplogist, Clifford Geertz (1926-2006).

Thick description does not imply a literal description which would not generate meaning.  Because the goal of the observer is to retrieve meaning, the methods employed are semiotic, with objects constitututing a form of language and of cultural communication. A material analysis of a culture encompasses that culture’s actions, ceremonies, rituals, and artifacts for the purpose of semiotically reading a particular event or a certain object at a singular point in time.  The semiotic reading [2] cannot be accomplished without the creation of a “thick” or multilayered, “description” of the conditions that make possible, not just the production of meaning, but also meaning itself.  In other words, in any cultural context there are only a certain range of possibles that exist and these possibles are linguistic as well as social.

The ultimate outcome of a “Thick Description,” [3] of a slice of a culture, goes beyond a semiotic reading [4] and seeks to understand the way a society thinks.  If this brief description of thick description  sounds familiar to an art historian—it should, because there are intersections between Clifford Geertz and art history, but, perhaps, not the ones that seem most immediately apparent.  As the result of what could be called a “thick description” of Medieval culture, Erwin Panofsky, in his famous book, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, linked architecture and medieval intellectualism to a common condition or range of possibilities he termed “a mental habit.”  Panofsky’s “thickness” can also be seen in his well-known iconographical methodology in which he layered the study of art into greater levels of thickness: from the symbol (icon) to the meaning of the symbol (iconography) to the meaning of the symbol in culture (iconology).

In the best Foucauldrian fashion, one must explain what material culture is not.  First, as is indicated by the word “material,” material culture is not a form of idealism and is not a theory (idea)  of culture. Material culture has to be a study of objects located in a particular place at a particular point in time. Second, while material culture is certainly a form of philosophical “materialism,” Geertz’s theory is not connected in any way with Marxism.  In fact, Marxism is never mentioned in the discourse of material culture, except to note in passing that Marxists object to Geertz’s lack of attention to issues of class and power.

Marxism, whether vulgar, reflexive, neo, or what have you, is a theory, which analyzes a social system from the perspective of that determining engine, economics in general and capitalism in particular. [5] Marxism also operates in terms of the dialectic: thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis, critiquing the teleological movement, the dynamic movement, of historical forces over time.  Marxism is a critique of wealth, power, and class oppression.  An anthropologist never critiques or judges a culture, nor does s/he have a political agenda—ideally—that is.

Material culture, in contrast, is not a theory.  [6]Geertz never worked out or revealed a theory; rather material culture is a method—-[7]of study, observation, and elucidation.  Finally, the Geertzian method must be synchronic [8] and can never be diachronic—caught up in time. [9] Next, since material culture is a method, not a theory,  [10] the procedure stands apart from both modernist and postmodernist theories, while at the same time making use of those insights.  The young anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, began his career by omnivorously consuming, appropriating, and employing a whole array of new ideas tumbling out of that 1960s, a merging of philosophy and literary theory.  Postmodernism comes out of this disciplinary mash-up, but Geertz, unlike the postmodern scholars and philosophers of the sixties, did not look forward, but looked backward in order to build his semiotic foundation.

It is at the intersection of anthropology and semiotics that the intellectual paths of Clifford Geertz and art historians begin converge.  Long before the term “blurring the boundaries” of disciplines sunk to genuflected jargon in art history, Geertz found inspiration from Ludwig Wittgenstein, [11] Fernand de Saussure, [12] and Michel Foucault.  Geertz built a stratified, or thick description, of an object in culture in order to interpret it semiotically in a fixed fashion, but Geertz turned to Ludwig Wittgenstein who unfroze meaning by declaring, in Philosophical Investigations, “Meaning is in the use.”  [13] In other words, Geertz understood that meaning was embedded within a specific culture at a certain time, and, that although meaning is constantly in flux, always changing, the thick description was a study of semiotics through use in the acutal or material culture. As he stated,

Behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behavior–or, more precisely, social action–that cultural forms find articulation. They find it as well of course, in various sorts of artifacts, and various states of consciousness; but these draw their meaning from the role they play (Wittgenstein would say their “use”) in an ongoing pattern of life, not from any intrinsic relationships they bear to one another. It is what Cohen, the sheikh, and “Captain Dumari” were doing when they tripped over one another’s purposes–pursuing trade, defending honor, establishing dominance–that created our pastoral drama, and that is what the drama is, therefore, “about.” Whatever, or wherever, symbol systems “in their own terms” may be, we gain empirical access to them by inspecting events, not by arranging abstracted entities into unified patterns.

By objecting to “abstraction” and to “unification,” Geertz made the point that, although meaning changed over time, the linguistic content of any object is also necessarily time-bound to one temporal point.  The flexiblility of meaning, caught up in the “ongoing patters of life,” therefore, precludes any fixed or frozen model or theory.  Although Geertz, because of his connection to cultural linguistics, is sometimes lumped together with Barthes and Derrida, [14] his project is not to read texts but to write texts. What Geertz shares with those philosophers is that he embraces the postmodern notion that academic and scientific writing is a form of literature or écriture, and he writes deliberately in a metaphorical style, [15] embracing the Lyotardian concept of the “figure” in the “discourse.”  It not that Geertz reads Derrida, it is that one can do a Derridan reading of a Geertzian text. [16] Certainly, there is a degree of Kristvian intertextuality [17] in Geertz, but, for a field ethnographer, a word far more suitable than “intertextuality,” [18]would be “connections” or what Dilthy called “connectedness” or “context” (Zusammenhand) [19] or Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances” among cultural elements.

In the beginning of Thick Description:Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, Geertz stated,

The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical.

 

Geertz accepts the postmodern concept of a consciousness that is socially and linguistically constructed, but he does so via Kant by way of Ernst Cassirer [20] with a drive-by for Foucault.  For Geertz, the individual, or Foucault’s fictive “Man,” is never the object of study.  Like Foucault, Geertz rejected the abstraction of Man, instead he posits an agent within culture. A person is an actor situated within a thick cultural matrix, acting and reacting, with limited agency, out of pre-existing cognitive structures, a priori producing culture. [21] Therefore, the consciousness of the human subject can never transcend the fact that language constructs the mind.  But, as would be typical of anthropolotists and scientists of his time, Geertz tended to assume a designated cultural agent, who seemed to be a privileged male.  Marxists, feminists, post-colonial critics have, rightly, criticized Geertz for not including the voices of the dispossessed.  The voices of women, for example, cannot be retroactively added to field research for each thick description is bound up in a synchronic moment in time.  Once silent voices can be included only in a later thick description that would undoubtedly recreate a culture that was entirely different from that of the alpha males.

Having spent half my time briefly noting what Geertz does not do, for example, his method is not a Barthesian linguistic “activity,” it is time to ask what does Geertz do and where does his method intersect with art history?  At the Warburg Library. [22] Impacted by the neo-Kantian revival in the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) [23] created diachronic analyses of cultural symbols from the perspectives of psychology and semiotics respectively.  It is their colleague at the Library, Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), who is closer to Geertz, because Panofsky’s art historical approach is synchronic [24] and, inspired by Saussure, semiotic.  As Michael Ann Holly pointed out a quarter of a century ago, Panofsky’s method has been drained of what we might call its  “thickness” by his followers who thought in terms of decoding symbols rather than interpreting a culture. [25]

Few art historians followed Panofsky past iconography into iconology, [26] except for Michael Baxendall,  who is Geertz’s guide to understanding art through his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy.  [27] Just as Panofsky attempted to recover the medieval mindset or “mental habits and controlling principles” in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Baxendall recreated the particular Renaissance worldview through Piero della Francesca’s paintings. [28] Baxendall developed a concept called, “the period eye,” or a manner of thinking and seeing and making.  “The period eye” explains why different artifacts emerge with different purposes and with a distinct appearance that allows us to “date” them.  As  Alan Langdale explained in Adrian Rifkin’s book,  About Michael Baxendall,

Geertz’s aforementioned “Art as a Cultural System,” took Baxendall’s concept of the Period Eye as paradigmatic of a rigorous and deep anthropological anaysis of a society’s visual culture.  For Geertz, Painting and Experience represented an advance in the analysis of visual culure’s embeddedness in the myriad activitiesof a society.  Geertz saw the book as a work which, more than many other studies attempting to link the sytle of the works of art with society or culture, meticulously articulated the mediating elements out of which such transfromations were made…[29]

In “Art as a Cultural System,” Geertz stated,

This realization, that to study an art form is to explore a sensibility, that such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation, and that the foundations of such a formation are as wide as social existence and as deep, leads away not only from the view that aesthetic power is a grandiloquence for the pleasures of craft. It leads away also from the so-called functionalist view that has most often been opposed to it: that is, that works of art are elaborate mechanisms for defining social relationships, sustaining social rules, and strengthening social values. Nothing very measurable would happen to Yoruba society if carvers no longer concerned themselves with the fineness of line, or, I dare say, even with carving. Certainly, it would not fall apart. Just some, things that were felt could not be said — and perhaps, after awhile, might no longer even be felt — and life would be the greyer for it. Anything may, of course, play a role in helping society work, painting and sculpting included; just as anything may help it tear itself apart. But the central connection between art and collective life does not lie on such an instrumental plane, it lies on a semiotic one. Matisse’s color jottings (the word is his own) and the Yoruba’s line arrangements don’t, save glancingly, celebrate social structure or forward useful doctrines. They materialize a way of experiencing; bring a particular cast of mind out into the world of objects, where men can look at it. [30]

Geertz discussed “conceptual structures” that are revealed through the act of building a thick description in this fashion,

Such a view of how theory functions in an interpretive science suggests that the distinction, relative in any case, that appears in the experimental or observational sciences between “description” and “explanation” appears here as one, even more relative, between “inscription” (“thick description”) and “specification” (“diagnosis”)–between setting down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found and, beyond that, about social life as such. Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts, the “said” of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior. In ethnography, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself–that is, about the role of culture in human life–can be expressed. [31]

For the art historian, the connections among intellectuals who examine culture, its habits and practices and artifacts are intriguing.  We can make direct connections between Geertz and Panofsky and between Geertz and Baxendall and between Baxendall and Pierre Bourdieu. [32] Panofsky investigated “mental habits,” Geertz conceived of a “thick description,” Baxendall discussed the “period eye,” and Bourdieu coined the term “habitas.” [33] All of these writers are reading each other and all of their coined terms are connected to the desire to explain how cultural meaning takes on a particular shape.

What Panofsky called “mental process of a synthetic and subjective character,” which engender meaning is that which ultimately interests Geertz, but we must not think in terms of a diachronic zeitgeist.  Geertz created a thick description of a limited number of acts and actors, who, while speaking thought a culture, can speak only out of themselves and within their own time. [34] The thick description of a local culture [35] at a specific point in time can be compared—and Geertz does—-to early Foucault’s notion of the épistèmé, but with caution.  Certainly thick description sounds like the Foucauldrian archive, but although Foucault rejects a seamless diachronic view of cultural progress, he still examines cultures over time, albeit with time disrupted and ruptured.  Nevertheless, Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge suggested that gaps and lacunae in knowledge need to be expected and accepted, making the inevitable “thinness” of “thick description” understandable.

Any art historian laboring in historical archives is aware that the most careful collection of primary sources can produce only a product that looks like a sponge—more of less thick and full of holes, like Swiss cheese.  While Geertzian method is obviously consequential to a historian working within a Panofsky-esque framework, several questions come up.  First, art historians could be more precisely classified by working method.  Anyone attempting to recreate an archive of a dead culture is traveling in a foreign country—the past—as David Lowenthal [36] expressed it, and is thus working as an anthropologist.  Whether or not one wants to boldly go where Baxendall goes, that researcher is more precisely a cultural historian, working though Panofsky to Geertz, recreating a thick, ultimately semiotic, description.  [37]

The combination of history and semiotics has attracted the attention of the New Historicists to Geertz, but what of the oxymoronic contemporary art historians?  The Geertzian method removes the false dichotomy between fine and popular art—that much is obvious—but his method also breaks the confines of visual culture and transforms the historian into a cultural observer, into an anthropological watcher, who investigates and records and describes—like Balzac. [38] As with any good researcher, all preconceived ideas, all assumptions, all theories, all hoped-for outcomes must be abandoned at the entrance of the project.  For example, a study of contemporary museum practices is not Geertzian, when those practices are critiqued.  A simple, careful, and methaphorically rich thick description should suffice.  Clifford Geertz does not do systems analyses, for he is seeking a culture’s épistèmé of which the system is merely a symptom [39] of a particular mode of thinking.  However, Geertz has always used the time-honored Warburgian method of compare and contrast [40] in order to thicken and bring his description to life and to account for the change of meaning through use over time.

Geertzian culture is always local, that is limited, and the scope of his research is always narrow and modest.  An art historian or cultural historian has the luxury the cultural observer does not.  For the cultural historian, time stands still, and the selected slice can be thickened over years of archival research. [41] For the cultural observer of—say the art scene—-the moment is fleeting and  Pierre Bourdieu’s “field of cultural production” must be seized in the immediacy of its “habitas.” [42]For both kinds of art historians, [43]interpretation is the goal, but the overriding question is when to stop  this interpretation.  When Panofsky heard an over-interpretation of Arnolfini’s  supposed identity, he reported,

I was dumbstruck, my hair stood on end, and my voice stuck to my mouth. …There is, however, admittedly, some danger that iconology will behave not like ethnology as opposed to ethnography, but like astrology as opposed to astronomy.  There is, I am afraid, no other answer to this problem other than the use of historical methods tempered, if possible, by common sense.

[1] Clifford Geertz, “Art  as a Cultural System,” in Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology(New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 94.  He also complained about the “craft approach,”  or formalism, in art.

[2] For a thorough discussion of semiotics and context, see Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” in Art Bulletin, Volume 73, No. 2, June, 1991, pp. 174-208.

[3] Stephen Greenblatt described Geertz’s indebtedness to Gilbert Ryle for the term “thick description.”   Greenblatt defined Ryles’ thick description as “ an account of intentions, expectations, circumstances, settings, and purposes that give actions meanings.”

Stephen Greenblatt, “The Touch of the Real,” in The Fate of Culture. Geertz and Beyond, edited by Sherry B. Ortner, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 16.

[4] Geertz established his semiotic position:

The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate is essentially a semiotic one.  Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.  It is explication I am after, constructing social expressions on their surface enigmatical.

Later he said, “Culture, this acted document, is public.”

Clifford Geertz, Chapter 1, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, (Basic Books, 1973), p. 5  and 10.

[5] Geertz commented in Local Knowledge that

…purist dogmas…of the material determination of consciousness on the social science side may have their uses…but…they head us off precisely in the wrong direction—toward an isolation of the meaning-form aspects of the matter from the practical contexts that give them life…

Clifford Geertz, L.K., p. 48.

[6] Geertz stated,

Theoretical formulations hover so low over the interpretations they govern that they don’t make much sense or hold much interest apart from them. This is so, not because they are not general (if they are not general, they are not theoretical), but because stated independently of their applications, they seem either commonplace or vacant.

Geertz, “Thick Description,” op cit., p. 25.

[7] See Fred Inglis, Chapter 5 “Portrait of a Method,” in Clifford Geertz Culture,Custom and Ethics, (Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000), pp.107-132.

[8] According to William Sewell,

…adequately realized synchrony is more important to good historical analysis than adequately realized diachrony.  In the eyes of professionals, it is more important for a historian to know how to suspend time than to know how to recount its passage.

William H. Sewell, Jr., “Geertz, Cultural Systems, and History: From Synchrony to Transformation,” in The Fate of Culture.  Geertz and Beyond, edited by Sherry B. Ortner, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 41.

[9] Fred Inglis recounted that

Geertz’s immediate example of How to Do Cultural Studies on these terms is Paul Fussell’s classic The Great War and Modern Memory.  Fussell shows how writing about the war by those who fought it (writing which takes in diaries, postcards, letters, journalism, historiography, as well as the great poems and autobiographies) had to match the factual iconography of trench warfare with that traditional imagery of Romantic Englishness most of the Anglophone side brought to it.

Inglis, op cit., p. 131.

[10] Silverman states

Through his hermeneutic and culturological orientations, Geertz assails structuralism and other theories which account for culture through reductionistic explanations, purported prime movers and supposed bottom-line realities.  Geertz’s relativism typically materializes in an attack on Lévi-Sraussian structuralism.

Silverman, op cit., p. 127.

[11] Geertz attributed his position to

…that posthumous and mind-clearing insurrectionist, “The Later Wittgenstein.”  The appearance in 1953, two years after his death, of Philosophical Investigations, and the transformation of what had been but rumors out of Oxbridge into an apparently endlessly generative text, had an enormous impact upon my sense of what I was about and what I hoped to accomplish…I am more than happy to acknowledge Wittgenstein as my master.

Clifford Geertz, “Preface” in Available Light.  Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. xi.

[12] Ferndinand de Saussure studied language in terms of langue and parole, that is, the system of representations that makes meaningful speech possible within a culture at a particular time and place.

[13] In his essay, “Thick Description,” Geertz noted that

…cultural forms find articulation…in various sorts of artifacts and various states of consciousness; but these draw their meaning from the role they play (Wittgenstein would say their “use”) in an ongoing pattern of life, not from any intrinsic relationships they bear to one another.

Geertz, “Thick Description,” op cit., p. 17.

[14] “Thick Description” is a “depth model” compared to Derrida’s mode of analysis, which stresses the surface of texts and places the reader inside, rather than outside, the field of study.

[15] Eric Kline Silverman noted that

He was the first American anthropologist to employ a textual metaphor for understanding culture.  In Geertz’s writings, however, we do not find a single, clearly articulated elaborate theory of the text….His textual metaphor emeres from a series of conceptual themes—it is not one notion of several orientations.

Geertz approaches cultural meaning through a symbolic or semiotic framework.  The was particularly influenced by Susan Langer…Geertz defines cultural symbols as medels of and models for social reality.

Eric Kline Silverman, “Clifford Geertz: Towards a More ‘Thick’ Understanding?”  in Reading Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilly (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990) p.121. 125

[16] According to Stephen Greenblatt, Gilbert Ryle’s

….thick description is manifestly a quality of the explication rather than of the action or text that is explicated; it is not the object that is thick or thin but only the description of it.  A thick description thus could be exceedintly straightforward or, alternatively, exceedingly complex, depending on the length of the chain of parasitical intentions and circumstantial detachments…..Thickness is not the object; it is in the narrative surroundings, the add-ons, nested frames….Thickness is no longer seems extrinsic to the object, a function solely of the way it is framed.

Stephen Greenblatt, op cit, pp. 16-17.

[17] In his book, Intertextuality, Graham Allen explained that while both Saussure and Bakhtin used concepts of intertextuality, it was Julia Kristeva who acutally coined the term. Graham Alan, Intertextuality (London:Routledge, 2000), p. 11.

It should also be noted that Kristeva introduced the term in La Révolution du langage poétique as “the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new articulation of the enunciative and denotative position.

[18] According to Silverman, Geertz is wary of intertextuality, except in the instance of thinking of parts in terms of the whole or the whole in germs of the parts.

Silverman, op cit., p. 137.

[19] Dilthy commented,

It is a relationship of whole to parts…Meaning and meaningfulness…are contextual.  One would have to await life’s end and could not survey the whole on the basis of which the relations between the parts can be determined until the hour of death.  One would have to await the end of history in order to possess the complete material for the determination of its meaning.  On the other hand, the whole exists for us insofar as it becomes understandable on the basis of the parts.  Understanding always hovers between these two approaches.

Cited in Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundation of Art History (Ithaca: Corrnell University Press, 984). p 40.

[20] Ernst Cassirer,  Language and Myth, translated by Suzanne Langer, (New York) Dover Publications, 1946, and Symbol, Myth, and Culture.  Essays and lectures of Ernst Casirer, 1935 – 1945, edited by Donald Phillip Verene, (New Haven)Yale University Press, 1979.  Langer is another connection between Geertz and Cassirer as Geertz was very much influenced by Langer.

[21] Geertz thinks in terms of “cultural texts” or public texts that are representational and durable.  In Local Knowledge he stated,

The key to the transition from text to text analogue, from wirting as discourse to action as discourse, is, as Paul Ricour has pointed out, the concept of ‘inscription:’ the fixation of meaning.

Clifford Geertz , Local Knowledge, p. 31.

This “fixation” of meaning refers to  what Silverman describes as

….an enduring aspect of culture which expands meaning of the text proper but to which the text semantically points.

Silverman, op cit., 132

[22] For a discussion of the connections among these three figures see Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky,+ Warburg, translated by Richard Pierce(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)

[23] Byron Good and Mary-Jo  DelVecchio Good commented that Geertz’s anthropological  works are

grounded in the work of Ernst Cassirer and his viosion of “symbolic forms” as mediating between Kant’s a priori categories of mind and the perceived world, actively constituting “image worlds” (in Cassirer’s terms) of language and myth, religion, art, history, and science.  But all of this becomes an ethnographic theory of subjectivity when made local…

Byron Good and Mary-Jo  DelVecchio Good, “On the ‘Subject’ of Culture. Subjectivity and Cultural phenomenology in the Work of Clifford Geertz,” in Clifford Geertz and His Colleagues (Chicago) University of Chicago, 2005, p. 100.

[24] Panofsky stated

Every historical concpt is obviously based on the categories of space and time…The cosmos of culture, like the cosmos of nature is a spatio-temporal structure…the succession of steps by which the material is organized into a natural or cultural cosmos is analogous, and the same is true of the methodological problems implied by this process.  The first step is, as has already been mentioned, the observation of natural phenomena and the examination of human records.  Then the records have to be “decoded” and interpreted, as must the “messages from nature” received by the observer.  Finally the results have to be classified and coordinated into a coherent system that “makes sense.”

Erwin Panofsky,  Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1955) p. 7.

[25] To support her point, Holly adds the testimony of Giulio Carlo Argan, who called Panofsky “the Saussure of art history.”

[26] See Erwin Panofsky, “Introduction,” in Studies in Iconology.  Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, (New York) Dover Publications, 1972.

[27] Geertz maintained he relied upon Baxendall who “takes precisely the approach I here advocating.  Baxandall is concerned with defining what he calls the “period eye.”  Geertz continued, “The famous solidity of Renaisance painting had at least in part its origins in something else than the inherent properties of planar representation, mathematical law, and binocular vision.”  Baxendall, he noted connected “the moralism of religious preaching, the pageantry of social dancing, the shrewdness of commercial gauging, and the grandeur of Latin oratory.  Geertz described “the painter’s true medium” as “The capacity of his audience to see meanings in pictures.”

Geertz, L.K., op cit., p. 108.

[28] In a later and related work, Baxendall attempted to reconstruct the intention of the artist in Patterns of Intention. On the Historical Explanation  of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

[29] Alan Langdale, “Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye,” in Adrian Rifkin, editor, About Michael Baxendall Wiley-Blackwell, 1999,  page 18

[30] Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York: Basic Books, 1983, available on the web, no page.

[31] Geertz, “Thick Description,” op cit

[32] See Omar Lizardo, “Pierre Bourdieu as a Post-Cultural Theoriet,” Cultural Socioogy, 2010, available on line.

[33] See Pierre Bourdieu’s chapter “The Social Genesis of the Eye,” in his book The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field: Stanford University Press, 1996.

[34] Geertz asserted

The chief problem presented by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force, in whatever form and in result of whatever skill it may come, is how to place it within the other modes of social activity, how to incorporate it into the texture of a particular pattern of life.  And such placing, the giving to art objects a cultural significance, is always a local matter…

Geertz, L.K., p. 97.

[35] Geertz said that

To be of effective use in the study of art, semiotics must move beyond the consideration of signs as means of communication, code to be deciphered, to a consideration of them as modes of thought, idiom to be interpreted…a new diagnostics, a science that can determine the meaning of things for the life that surrounds them…

Geertz, L.K., p. 120.

[36] David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

[37] Geertz described thick description as “microscopic.”

Geertz, “Thick Description,” op cit., p. 21.

[38] Geertz said,

Thick description…(aims) to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics.

Geertz, “Thick Description,” op cit., p. 28.

[39] In Studies in Iconology, Panofsky refers to Cassirer’s conflation of cultural symbols and symptoms.  He warns that the historian must make sure the intrinsic meaning of the work be checked by relating it to other like works.

[40] Silverman comments that Geertz

…rejects two common constructions of history—the period approach and the developmental approach…Both views employ linear concepts of temporarlity, the dominant historical fiction in western intellectual discourse…After having rejected those two approaches to history…Geertz uses comparative material written about both past and present…

Silverman, op cit., 143.

[41] Geertzian methodology suggests that art historians need to research further afield, outside of the presumed arena of art history, if s/he wants do produce a “thick description.”   A “thick description” replaces formalism, connoisseurship, and all other narrow viewpoints, with a broad cultural perspective re-created out of Wittgensteinian “bundles of family resemblances.”

[42] Pierre Bourdieu actually devised his notion of “habitas” after studying Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scolasticism (1951). See Bourdieu’s “Post to Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism” in The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory, by Bruce W. Holsinger.

[43] Geertz remarked

that the conjoining of History and Anthropology is not a matter of fusing two academic fields into a new Something-or-Other, but of redefining them in terms of one another by managing their relations within the bounds of a particular study: textual tactics.

From “The State of the Art,” from Available Light, p. 127.

Bibliography

[1]  Clifford Geertz, “Art  as a Cultural System,” in Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 94.  He also complained about the “craft approach,” or formalism, in art.

[1]  For a thorough discussion of semiotics and context, see Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” in Art Bulletin, Volume 73, No. 2, June, 1991, pp. 174-208.

[1]  Stephen Greenblatt described Geertz’s indebtedness to Gilbert Ryle for the term “thick description.”   Greenblatt defined Ryles’ thick description as “ an account of intentions, expectations, circumstances, settings, and purposes that give actions meanings.”

Stephen Greenblatt, “The Touch of the Real,” in The Fate of Culture. Geertz and Beyond, edited by Sherry B. Ortner, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 16.

[1]  Geertz established his semiotic position:

The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate is essentially a semiotic one.  Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.  It is explication I am after, constructing social expressions on their surface enigmatical.

Later he said, “Culture, this acted document, is public.”

Clifford Geertz, Chapter 1, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, (Basic Books, 1973), p. 5 and 10.

[1] Geertz commented in Local Knowledge that

…purist dogmas…of the material determination of consciousness on the social science side may have their uses…but…they head us off precisely in the wrong direction—toward an isolation of the meaning-form aspects of the matter from the practical contexts that give them life…

Clifford Geertz, L.K., p. 48.

[1] Geertz stated,

Theoretical formulations hover so low over the interpretations they govern that they don’t make much sense or hold much interest apart from them. This is so, not because they are not general (if they are not general, they are not theoretical), but because stated independently of their applications, they seem either commonplace or vacant.

Geertz, “Thick Description,” op cit., p. 25.

[1]  See Fred Inglis, Chapter 5 “Portrait of a Method,” in Clifford Geertz Culture,Custom and Ethics, (Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000), pp.107-132.

[1] According to William Sewell,

…adequately realized synchrony is more important to good historical analysis than adequately realized diachrony.  In the eyes of professionals, it is more important for a historian to know how to suspend time than to know how to recount its passage.

William H. Sewell, Jr., “Geertz, Cultural Systems, and History: From Synchrony to Transformation,” in The Fate of Culture.  Geertz and Beyond, edited by Sherry B. Ortner, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 41.

[1] Fred Inglis recounted that

Geertz’s immediate example of How to Do Cultural Studies on these terms is Paul Fussell’s classic The Great War and Modern Memory.  Fussell shows how writing about the war by those who fought it (writing which takes in diaries, postcards, letters, journalism, historiography, as well as the great poems and autobiographies) had to match the factual iconography of trench warfare with that traditional imagery of Romantic Englishness most of the Anglophone side brought to it.

Inglis, op cit., p. 131.

[1] Silverman states

Through his hermeneutic and culturological orientations, Geertz assails structuralism and other theories, which account for culture through reductionistic explanations, purported prime movers and supposed bottom-line realities.  Geertz’s relativism typically materializes in an attack on Lévi-Sraussian structuralism.

Eric Kline Silverman, “Clifford Geertz: Towards a More ‘Thick’ Understanding?”  in Reading Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilly (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990) Eric Kline Silverman, “Clifford Geertz: Towards a More ‘Thick’ Understanding?”  in Reading Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilly (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 127.

[1] Geertz attributed his position to

…that posthumous and mind-clearing insurrectionist, “The Later Wittgenstein.”  The appearance in 1953, two years after his death, of Philosophical Investigations, and the transformation of what had been but rumors out of Oxbridge into an apparently endlessly generative text, had an enormous impact upon my sense of what I was about and what I hoped to accomplish…I am more than happy to acknowledge Wittgenstein as my master.

Clifford Geertz, “Preface” in Available Light.  Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. xi.

[1]  Ferdinand de Saussure studied language in terms of langue and parole, that is, the system of representations that makes meaningful speech possible within a culture at a particular time and place.

[1]

[1]  In his essay, “Thick Description,” Geertz noted that

…cultural forms find articulation…in various sorts of artifacts and various states of consciousness; but these draw their meaning from the role they play (Wittgenstein would say their “use”) in an ongoing pattern of life, not from any intrinsic relationships they bear to one another.  The quotation by Wittgenstein comes from his Philosophical Investigations, United Kingdom: Part 1, Section 43, Basil Blackwell, 1953.

Geertz, “Thick Description,” op cit., p. 17.

[1] “Thick Description” is a “depth model” compared to Derrida’s mode of analysis, which stresses the surface of texts and places the reader inside, rather than outside, the field of study.

[1] Eric Kline Silverman noted that

He was the first American anthropologist to employ a textual metaphor for understanding culture.  In Geertz’s writings, however, we do not find a single, clearly articulated elaborate theory of the text….His textual metaphor emerges from a series of conceptual themes—it is not one notion of several orientations.

Geertz approaches cultural meaning through a symbolic or semiotic framework.  He was particularly influenced by Susan Langer…Geertz defines cultural symbols as medels of and models for social reality.

Eric Kline Silverman, “Clifford Geertz: Towards a More ‘Thick’ Understanding?”  in Reading Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilly (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990) p.121. 125

[1] According to Stephen Greenblatt, Gilbert Ryle’s

….thick description is manifestly a quality of the explication rather than of the action or text that is explicated; it is not the object that is thick or thin but only the description of it.  A thick description thus could be exceedingly straightforward or, alternatively, exceedingly complex, depending on the length of the chain of parasitical intentions and circumstantial detachments…..Thickness is not the object; it is in the narrative surroundings, the add-ons, nested frames….Thickness is no longer seems extrinsic to the object, a function solely of the way it is framed.

Stephen Greenblatt, op cit, pp. 16-17.

[1]  According to Silverman, Geertz is wary of intertextuality, except in the instance of thinking of parts in terms of the whole or the whole in germs of the parts.

Silverman, op cit., p. 137.

[1]  Dilthy commented,

It is a relationship of whole to parts…Meaning and meaningfulness…are contextual.  One would have to await life’s end and could not survey the whole on the basis of which the relations between the parts can be determined until the hour of death.  One would have to await the end of history in order to possess the complete material for the determination of its meaning.  On the other hand, the whole exists for us insofar as it becomes understandable on the basis of the parts.  Understanding always hovers between these two approaches.

Cited in Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundation of Art History (Ithaca: Corrnell University Press, 1984). p 40.

[1] Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, translated by Suzanne Langer, (New York) Dover Publications, 1946, and Symbol, Myth, and Culture.  Essays and lectures of Ernst Casirer, 1935 – 1945, edited by Donald Phillip Verene, (New Haven) Yale University Press, 1979.  Langer is another connection between Geertz and Cassirer as Geertz was very much influenced by Langer.

[1] Geertz thinks in terms of “cultural texts” or public texts that are representational and durable.  In Local Knowledge he stated,

The key to the transition from text to text analogue, from wirting as discourse to action as discourse, is, as Paul Ricour has pointed out, the concept of ‘inscription:’ the fixation of meaning.

Clifford Geertz , Local Knowledge, p. 31.

This “fixation” of meaning refers to what Silverman describes as

….an enduring aspect of culture which expands meaning of the text proper but to which the text semantically points.

Silverman, op cit., 132

[1]  For a discussion of the connections among these three figures see Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky,+ Warburg, translated by Richard Pierce(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)

[1]  Byron Good and Mary-Jo  DelVecchio Good commented that Geertz’s anthropological  works are

grounded in the work of Ernst Cassirer and his viosion of “symbolic forms” as mediating between Kant’s a priori categories of mind and the perceived world, actively constituting “image worlds” (in Cassirer’s terms) of language and myth, religion, art, history, and science.  But all of this becomes an ethnographic theory of subjectivity when made local…

Byron Good and Mary-Jo  DelVecchio Good, “On the ‘Subject’ of Culture. Subjectivity and Cultural phenomenology in the Work of Clifford Geertz,” in Clifford Geertz and His Colleagues (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), p. 100.

[1] Panofsky stated

Every historical concept is obviously based on the categories of space and time…The cosmos of culture, like the cosmos of nature is a spatio-temporal structure…the succession of steps by which the material is organized into a natural or cultural cosmos is analogous, and the same is true of the methodological problems implied by this process.  The first step is, as has already been mentioned, the observation of natural phenomena and the examination of human records.  Then the records have to be “decoded” and interpreted, as must the “messages from nature” received by the observer.  Finally the results have to be classified and coordinated into a coherent system that “makes sense.”

Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1955) p. 7.

[1]  To support her point, Holly adds the testimony of Giulio Carlo Argan, who called Panofsky “the Saussure of art history.”

[1] See Erwin Panofsky, “Introduction,” in Studies in Iconology.  Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, (New York) Dover Publications, 1972.

[1]  Geertz maintained he relied upon Baxendall who “takes precisely the approach I here advocating.  Baxandall is concerned with defining what he calls the “period eye.”  Geertz continued, “The famous solidity of Renaisance painting had at least in part its origins in something else than the inherent properties of planar representation, mathematical law, and binocular vision.”  Baxendall, he noted connected “the moralism of religious preaching, the pageantry of social dancing, the shrewdness of commercial gauging, and the grandeur of Latin oratory.  Geertz described “the painter’s true medium” as “The capacity of his audience to see meanings in pictures.”

Geertz, L.K., op cit., p. 108.

[1] In a later and related work, Baxendall attempted to reconstruct the intention of the artist in Patterns of Intention. On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

[1]  Geertz asserted

The chief problem presented by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force, in whatever form and in result of whatever skill it may come, is how to place it within the other modes of social activity, how to incorporate it into the texture of a particular pattern of life.  And such placing, the giving to art objects a cultural significance, is always a local matter…

Geertz, L.K., p. 97.

[1] Geertz said that

To be of effective use in the study of art, semiotics must move beyond the consideration of signs as means of communication, code to be deciphered, to a consideration of them as modes of thought, idiom to be interpreted…a new diagnostics, a science that can determine the meaning of things for the life that surrounds them…

Geertz, L.K., p. 120.

[1]  David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

[1]  Geertz described thick description as “microscopic.”

Geertz, “Thick Description,” op cit., p. 21.

[1]  Geertz said,

Thick description…(aims) to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics.

Geertz, “Thick Description,” op cit., p. 28.

[1] In Studies in Iconology, Panofsky refers to Cassirer’s conflation of cultural symbols and symptoms.  He warns that the historian must make sure the intrinsic meaning of the work be checked by relating it to other like works.

[1]  Silverman comments that Geertz

…rejects two common constructions of history—the period approach and the developmental approach…Both views employ linear concepts of temporarlity, the dominant historical fiction in western intellectual discourse…After having rejected those two approaches to history…Geertz uses comparative material written about both past and present…

Silverman, op cit., 143.

[1]  Geertzian methodology suggests that art historians need to research further afield, outside of the presumed arena of art history, if s/he wants do produce a “thick description.”   A “thick description” replaces formalism, connoisseurship, and all other narrow viewpoints, with a broad cultural perspective re-created out of Wittgensteinian “bundles of family resemblances.”

[1]  Geertz remarked that

…the conjoining of History and Anthropology is not a matter of fusing two academic fields into a new Something-or-Other, but of redefining them in terms of one another by managing their relations within the bounds of a particular study: textual tactics.

From “The State of the Art,” from Available Light, p. 127.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bal, Mieke and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” in Art Bulletin, Volume 73, No. 2, June, 1991

Baxendall, Stephen, Patterns of Intention. On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

Cassirer, Ernst, Language and Myth, translated by Suzanne Langer, (New York) Dover Publications, 1946, and Symbol, Myth, and Culture.  Essays and lectures of Ernst Casirer, 1935 – 1945, edited by Donald Phillip Verene, (New Haven) Yale University Press, 1979

Ferretti, Silvia, Cassirer, Panofsky,+ Warburg, translated by Richard Pierce(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)

Geertz, Clifford, “Art as a Cultural System,” in Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983)

Chapter 1, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, (Basic Books, 1973)

Preface” in Available Light.  Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)

Good, Byron and Mary-Jo  DelVecchio Good, “On the ‘Subject’ of Culture. Subjectivity and Cultural phenomenology in the Work of Clifford Geertz,” in Clifford Geertz and His Colleagues (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005)

Greenblatt, Stephen, “The Touch of the Real,” in The Fate of Culture. Geertz and Beyond, edited by Sherry B. Ortner, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999

Holly, Michael Ann, Panofsky and the Foundation of Art History (Ithaca: Corrnell University Press, 1984)

Inglis, Fred, Chapter 5 “Portrait of a Method,” in Clifford Geertz Culture, Custom and Ethics, (Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000)

Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Panofsky, Erwin, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1955)

Sewell, Jr., William H.,  “Geertz, Cultural Systems, and History: From Synchrony to Transformation,” in The Fate of Culture.  Geertz and Beyond, edited by Sherry B. Ortner, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999)

Silverman, Eric Kline, “Clifford Geertz: Towards a More ‘Thick’ Understanding?”  in Reading Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilly (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990)