Personal Blogs

A844 - Preparatory Reading

Book:

Elkins, J & Naef, M. (Eds.) (2011) What Is an Image? Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University Press.

CAVEAT & ENABLER (perhaps)

I was rather shocked by this book that was liked and hated in equal measure by its contributing authors, as Peri hints (205), and presumably all other unseen and unknown readers.

 I think we have to see how and why it differs from your expectations of what a book does and how it does it to get the point here and forewarned might be forearmed with tools and strategies to make the best of this book one can.

 It is not just that it is ‘dialogic’ as Peri mentions but that it is reflexively multi-dialogic and multi-directional in its form. How can this be described more clearly:

The core of the book is an edited transcribed discussion between mainly philosophers and art historians about the question ‘What is an Image?’ introduced by art-historian James Elkins (12) as an ‘encounter’ or ‘collaborative conversation’. He warns us here that such a conversation will not lead to concord but to a series of ‘dissonances’ that never get resolved focused on positive or negative responses to the requirement of an image’s conceptualization of other disciplines or discourses: politics, theology, rationality, irrationality or linguistics.

 And that is what we find – a lot of dissonance and failure to follow through an argument or point before it is disputed, sometimes amicably but sometimes not. I began to be able to read this section of the book (called ‘The Seminars’) when I read them as dramas in which the readable character and their situation within the conversation (in terms of power, gender, discipline, frustration) of the speaker was  seen as an enjoyable aspect of reading. This section is followed by one named ‘Assessments’ written by people (only some of whom were present at the Seminars) who were responding to reading the transcripts we read and who variously characterise them: ‘meanderings (Baumeister 131), as unrepresentative and exclusive voices – especially excluding scientific disciplines (Kesner 193ff. – a wonderful contribution which discusses the use of fMRI scanned imagery). Describing it as just plainly ‘annoying’, Singh (143ff.) pictures a place ‘where ideas are invoked but never fully developed … this theater (sic.) of dominant and submissive voices.’   It seems too that these Assessments were also read by the contributors of other assessments making the whole process doubly reflexive. Finally it is capped off by an Afterword that is really only comprehensible to a Wittgenstein scholar and really offers no more sense of a coherent debate.

 S, is it worth reading? I think it is providing you have strategies to stop you being merely ‘annoyed’ like Singh or overwhelmed. Even Stjernfelt who says it is evidence that ‘image theory is a mess’ finds an ‘astonishing amount of good ideas and observations’ (209). These powerful academics throw ideas around like water but some issues make that water look very like ‘light’ shed on the topic of what it is we must work with as learners of art history and the different ways that working material can be conceptualised. But don’t make it the first book in your preparatory reading. Otherwise you end up like Vigneron saying that maybe all we need is a ‘working understanding’ of what an image is (doxa rather than episteme he calls it) which means really that the book is a waste of time since completing art history postgraduates still ‘make wonderfully original uses of what remains mostly untheorized’ (119).

How does it reflect on A843 themes?

Of course the answer is ‘a lot’. 

However, the most pertinent link is to the discussion of the 'pictorial turn' or 'iconic turn' in Section 3. The underlying theme is whether 'literary' approaches to the image and its meaning - in iconology  or elsewhere - are appropriate to understanding visual phenomena or whether images communicate in their own terms - whether images have 'meaning' without their translation or reference to the linguistic world of descriptions, narratives or analytic discourses. (I've just added this paragraph - 23/06/18 - because I just neglected to say it earlier - typical of me!

Lichtenstein (as others) helps you to see the importance of ideas of the materiality of paint and the body in her rather unpopular contributions to the seminars (85). Nevertheless these help make sense of the invocation of phenomenological approaches in Block 3 and their antipathy to a more cognitive Panofskian iconology (84ff.). Other issues illuminated might be: the notion of ‘presence’ in the pre-Renaissance image (93), the meaning of ‘close looking’ in reading an image (80f.), political contextual as against aesthetic formal issues (71f.), similarly with ‘history’ (40),  phenomenology and anthropological replacements of Panofsky (72-4), relativism of imagery (Moxey 124). I liked the treatment of whether art was a ‘public’ or ‘private’ experience (71, and loved Holly’s piece about the place where we find the ‘image:’ first sentences of his piece on p. 114).

How do I predict that it might foreshadow A844 themes?

I think this is difficult. It could be used to characterise the state of discourses of research in art history, especially in relation to the contribution from multi-disciplinary domains. Strangely enough, most contributors of Assessments that I liked were rather scathing about how successfully art historians can, on their own, invoke multi-disciplinary thinking even in areas they are used to ‘occupying’, like philosophy. For me Manghani’s assessment rather subtly makes it clear that most of the discussion of Wittgenstein is based on a mistranslation of the latter, especially translating vorstellung as ‘image’ rather than ‘imagining’ (126).

Likewise Egenhofer (186ff.) makes me believe that much of the theorising about ‘ontology’ (and I would say ‘epistemology too) is rather built an unnecessary confusion about what the discipline of ontology (knowing that something exists and has being) in philosophy is and how it differs from ‘epistemology’ (knowing things about something) and a kind of odd distaste (and ignorance) about what metaphysics might be.

But the point is even greater when we realise that the art historians, many who talk about images in scientific discourse) did not really invite enough scientists, or even psychologists (soft scientists) or other discipline gurus. Kesner makes the point about exclusion (193ff.) as well as being brilliant on why multi-disciplinarity needs to be realisable even if difficult (instancing the import of neuro-imaging).  More surprising is the lack of any decent consultation of cognitive science and computer modelling and its contribution to the idea of imaging in the mind, in networks or elsewhere (Krois on brains and seeing 199), Alloa on the role of categorization in image storage (149f.) and the meaning of ‘perceptual inference’ in the mental reconstruction of imagery and even Gibson’s influential though about vision and its ‘affordances’ (178).

I expect it to be used in Block 2 especially – the ‘image & its publics’ and perhaps Block 3 on ‘inhabiting space’. Is space an image or a non-image, for instance?

What are the books key themes and narratives?

This is impossible to answer for reasons I’ve suggested (at least for me). I think the best bet is to stick with the useful characterisation of the whole from Elkins’ introduction (at the end – 12). I summarise that above as: ‘‘dissonances’ that never get resolved focused on positive or negative responses to the requirement of an image’s conceptualization of other disciplines or discourses: politics, theology, rationality, irrationality or linguistics.’ However, how the course will employ this I can’t guess – although it certainly has a lot to say about the role of ‘theory’ in art history – its limitations as well as strengths.

How does the book relate to the analysis of art and architecture?

Of course, as some contributors and assessors say, the panel is dominated by art historians. As Kesner says, he came to the event, ‘expecting that non-art images would feature prominently … our talks seldom strayed from the territory of artistic, religious and media images.’ (193). There are only two ‘images’ (if we assume for a moment that we know what these are) reproduced in this book – neither of which are discussed and this speaks volumes of about a discipline that uses a lot of words to talk about wordless images. Lichtenstein talks a lot about Cezanne (85) as read by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology without really referring to anything specific. Elkins tells her this is the usual kind of art historian’s reduction of art to something ‘inside the horizon given us by phenomenology’ (87).

Any other points!

Our name is legion, says the devils in the possessed, and so are the themes in this book. Some of us may love it, all of us will hate it a bit. Most will hate it a LOT! (Another prediction).