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A843 1.3.5 Griselda Pollock on Van Gogh

 How does Pollock’s critique of art history take its cue from what she identifies as a Marxist literature? Take particular note of her use of the word ‘ideology’ and consider its meanings.

·        Pollock deconstructs the means by which art history produces a discourse of art history focussed upon the individual artist or ‘subjective genius’. The latter becomes in that discourse the unitary guarantor of the meanings of an oeuvre and limits those meanings to the ideological reflection of the specialised ‘subjective genius’ – the artist. In the term ‘subjective genius’ we understand that what the artist realises is something specific and special to their own subjectivity, rendering their art into ‘visionary scenes’ (that appears without awareness of the work that goes into building a scene).

At the same time the ‘subject’ is rarefied from its social constituents, which may be multiple and contradictory rather than unified and coherent, and rendered magically apparent rather than ‘made up’ from work on discourses, which may also be visual discourses or image repertoires. The stress on self-transcendence in vision is what links ‘subjective genius’ to the notion of asocial madness and the ‘romance life’ produced by allowing VG to appear as a subject in his own subjective visions in the film Lust for Life– such that self and vision are removed from the ‘everyday’ and the processes constructing the everyday (social configurations of both time & space in the constitution of ‘work’ for instance).

For Pollock the reflection of social philosophy in Carlyle is needed to understand in part the origin of VG’s motifs, as is also an awareness of how his work with images mediates relationships of class, gender and so on between him and his art. The source of all the disguises which mask work on and in multiple discourses (both validation and otherwise of the given social order in which VG is ‘thrown’) is ideology.

·        Ideology in Pollock’s use is a means of rendering a social practice in ways that ignore its origins in social relations, including power relations) and the ongoing history of changes in modes of production (in ‘art’ as in other commodities). Hence we can create an ‘ideological ‘pure’ space’ for art (57). Art history is then a social practice that not only disguises its object – art as made in history – but its own practices as ideology by precisely seeing itself as non-ideological. Commodities like the monograph and catalogue raisonné embody the ideas of art and artistic genius as shown above but are, like art itself, materially produced out of a set of (hidden) power relations. The practices productive of such commodities, which declare themselves as non-ideological (note Marx on Robinsonades in Grundrisse) are ‘temporal and causal narratives’ and ‘biography’, in which the latter is the primary agent in the former.

The agency of institutions and dynamic social processes is missing from ‘art history’ which makes it, in effect, not ‘history’ but a narrative of transcendent realisation of a special individual’s whole body of art  work. This is illustrated in the role of the publisher in Pollock’s own work on VG (67).