Art historical topologies

Art History from a Distance

Art history as a subject has always been somewhat embarrassed by its objects. The meter and measure of historical narrative are interrupted by the obdurately artifactual. Art objects are, after all, in some ways fundamentally ex-historical, or, we might say, existorical, in their resistance to a placid, or placed, pastness. The only sites where the interference patterns between the historical and the artifactual disappear are at the vanishing points of distanced views. The art-historical subject--by now, let us say, a still spry centenarian, still possessed of most faculties--has over that time carried out many searches and re-searches for those kinds of optimal viewpoint: the place from which the slide projection can be fully comprehended; the location where the Neo-Impressionist dots coalesce into seamless perception; the monocular point behind the Albertian window or screen where the sheaf of light rays converge; the modernist's spot of knowing comprehension that still permits ironic disengagement; in short, the position from which it all makes sense. Many of us are, professionally speaking, view finders.

The image of art history as a viewed picture of the past is disciplinarily congenial and seductive. It should be a large perspectival painting--needless to say, a kind of history painting--with each of its figures and objects clearly placed and spaced by time, all the way back to a vanishing point at a cave, or cave painting. The field of this picture would need to be very broad and extensive (ultimately, of course, so expansive that it would circle back

upon itself, like an encompassing screen or globe). It would enfold even those arts most distant in time and space, and the art-history picture would reach its maximum depth of field and optimal focus at such points as ancient China. In the firmament of art history's painting should be Kubler's distant stars, transmitting signals across the vastness.

A perspectival distance is already collapsed onto a picture surface, however, and nowadays even illusions of distance are in states of compression and collapse. Instead of intimations of the end of art history, terminating like a story, we have an oversupply of historical product, under which we are liable to be buried as in the rubble of a seismic collapse. Rather than ending or running out, art history is more likely to consume itself, or to implode under its own weight. In the mode of anthropology, history itself is collapsed into the span of memory, representation into mimicry. And the benign distances of survey are collapsed into an uncomfortable intimacy: remote stars into dwarf furnaces of radiation. Transmission, whether of signals or substance, is as likely to convey viral contamination, cybernetic or biological, as transparent information. Objects are likely to be assayed as contaminants, or as foreign object irritants that provoke a protective response. In such a condition, where light itself seems to have a half-life, distanced vision may hold out the hope of a protective in-oculation.

An inoculation is, however, a kind of penetration, and painful in the way of many kinds of reception and perception. If the subject of art history is under assault, it has been from within as well as without. From a cultural distance, art history appears as a target body of contingent Europraxis. Art history has also suffered self-inflicted wounds in a kind of disciplinary hysteria, retreating under accusation from the chauvinist his-story-cal and the scopophilic his-stare-cal. The art-historical subject is also the consumer of last resort for art history production, and subject to the diseases of overindulgence. Those who are ignorant of history may or may not be condemned to repeat it, but it is more certainly the case that it is the historically learned who reiterate it. More than other disciplines, art history has been fundamentally and promiscuously reproductive, in ways mostly unbarriered by the diaphragms of iris or camera. Reproduction dissolves the subject-object boundary just as vision crosses it through an invasion that might be paralleled in a transformation from screen to scrim to semipermeable membrane.

Screens, Projections, and Networks

Among many kinds of reproduction, art history has had an especially strong investment in projections on screens, as pedagogical technology and in ideological terms. We most often treat screens as transparencies, to be looked through, but they are also, of course, concealing barriers and filters, and like pictures in that doubleness. Screens are also tabulae rasae, discomforting vacancies to be filled up or projected onto. Projections onto screens can be a kind of mapping, a re-placement into altered configurations; they are also replacements for emptinesses, which seem to penetrate and thereby cancel the concealments of screens. Like psychological projections, screen projections are cast onto a seemingly objective surface out there, away from the subject to a distanced site. Screen projections are also kinds of ex-plane-ations, which, despite their illusions of plasticity and penetration, end up as planar surfaces, with accompanying auras of legibility and explanatory effect.