THEORY: History and Art History

On the face of it, it is peculiar that art history has its own separate history to history as such. You would think that art history should be included in history anyway. Yet, more than other versions of historical interest, like the history of transportation or the history of beekeeping, art history is specially designated and has its own territory, academically defined, with its own distinct historiographies. The reasons for this seem to be due to the special importance of art in our culture, the unique difficulties in understanding the art object and its role in history, and perhaps the notion that it requires a certain refinement of character to appreciate and understand good art.

However, it must be the case that when studying ‘history in general’, the historian would not be able to avoid coming across works of art in any case, and would have to consider at least the apparent specialness of the work of art. This, because often the access to the past must be via surviving works of art, whether visual, textual, architectural, or designed objects. Because it is often works of art that survive the test of time precisely because they were considered special, and therefore attempts were made to both give to them longevity in the first place, by the artists and their professional activity, and to preserve them over the ensuing years, for instance, perhaps by curatorial practices in museums, location in hallowed religious places, or just by the care people gave to these objects.

The most obvious works of art, which are also exceptionally valuable to our history, or prehistory, is the cave painting. But regarding the latter, whenever I have seen accounts of these works by archaeologists, I have been disappointed that no artists or art historians or art theorists or critics have been consulted about them, their analysis seems to have been left to the forensics of archaeology or palaeontology, as if a sense of artistic value is worthless here. This does not surprise me at all. The disciplines police themselves and keep themselves separate, and for an archaeologist to go outside of these boundaries would probably raise some important eyebrows. Besides archaeologists must know something about art and that should be sufficient, no?

But this all leads inexorably to a narrative and context bound conception of the artwork, as if it were a simple case of understanding art as the sum of all its empirical inputs, which is no doubt important, but tends to leave out one of the most important factors in making a genuinely good work of art special, its quality, its quality being what often leads to its survival through time, giving it its provenance. This is something that Walter Benjamin was aware of and emphasized.

This is why I regard the historiography of the French 1^st Annales School to be so radical, as well as the few historical analyses that Marx provided us with, where art is mixed into the historical melee in ways that do not destroy its subtlety.

Locating the artwork in social history, properly, requires understanding it not just as passive objects, as the mere sum of their contextual inputs, but also as agencies that do something special and are understood to be designed to do this special thing.

I have always found it peculiar, though, that even art historians find it difficult to regard art, for instance, made by professional artists, to have an intended social agency, and if they do so, it is usually only as a narrative content, while the form of the work of art and the artists expertise in producing this form is invariably left out of the account.

I think what has happened here is the art historian has been also influenced by the restrictive practices of the typical mainstream historian for whom art in this sense does not exist. Yet the discipline of art history also has this important potential method to offer to the discipline of history as such. Nevertheless, a gap remains, and the approaches that the new history put forward, which included sensibility, psychology, feelings and alienation as important factors alongside class and social and economic forces, has been greatly resisted, and even in art history, which you might think is its ‘natural home’ because it is where aesthetic sensual considerations should be paramount.

Even in the apparently ‘Marxist’ historical materialisms there has generally been a sticking only to class as the new interpretive category, usually along with the constant reference to materialism as if it was a badge, one that allowed the wearer to avoid doing anything truly materialist in their practice, but so that, any question of psychology, pathology, sensibility, feelings, alienation, and the agency of sensible forms in art, is avoided or discounted. I see this rejection as also a sneaky way to go back to idealism, with the reign of ideas being re-ignited while the sensuality of materiality is diminished.