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A844 - Preparatory Reading

Book:

Moxey, K. (2013) Visual Time: The Image in History Durham & London, Duke University Press. (actually read by me during 2017 in preparation for a TMA)

How does it reflect on A843 themes?

It really helped last year in understanding the role of history in contemporary art-history since it starts by attacking some effects of Wölflinn’s historiography:  not ‘fitting artist into pre-established historical and geographical plot.’ (27f.). Insisting that contemporary art-history starts with the work rather than a stereotypical and perhaps teleological historical framework (31), it also no longer insists on looking for or finding ‘stylistic unity’ in pictures (40). It can glory in the fact that a picture is an ‘anachronism’ because chronology is no longer definitive (in any geographical place). The painting no longer looks to recreate a Panofskian past in which the meaning of iconography can be sought and iconologically synthesised. It has ‘presence’ (Belting) in wherever or whenever it is seen. When we place in language or discourse, it is language that describes ‘thinking about a picture’ in Baxandall’s terms. The characterisation of Panofsky’s elitist focus on knowledge about the past as if it were the only access to the present meaning of painting is described, 154f. He illustrates this by reading Breughel in ‘period’ and dialectically (90).

How do I predict that it might foreshadow A844 themes?

It will help in Block 1 in identify the use of national pasts to instantiate and objectify national and international ‘heritage’ in art works and in challenging the role of ekphrasis in the display of pictures (95). This will blend over to Block 2, especially in relation to images and ideology, since Panofsky, for instance is read (rightly I think) as pre-eminently an ideological ‘liberal-humanist’ (90). In this section too the fate of images in time-frames can be understood, especially in terms of ‘heterochronicity’ (that time is experienced primarily through cultural mediation and that this makes otiose some cross-cultural & cross-national comparisons of relative modernity (42). Moxey writes one of the ‘Assessments’ in Elkins & Naef (2011) and we will find lots of stuff here about the nature of the image – what it is and what it is not (see 95). An image is not confined within a picture frame but can be co-created by ekphrasis (95). Moreover linguistic paradigms can shape our conceptualisation of imagery if we are an artist (Cranach 129).

What are the books key themes and narratives? & How does the book relate to the analysis of art and architecture?

Essentially it is a book about paradigms that are and should be guiding art-history. Some such paradigms in-build postcolonial comparisons that, without overt marginalisation, characterise the ‘other’ as inferior and / or chronologically backward or lacking in terms of a Western conception of modernity (15). We can believe that we make objective comparisons of Western and non-western art that are in fact ignorant of the drivers appropriate to heterochronicity of artistic productions across the world. This was also focused upon in Geographies & Institutions’ in A843.  Like Elkins and Naef, and sometimes using the thinkers from those seminars, it queries what is meant by the “iconic” or “pictorial” turn in Art-history (77). Its issues do not cover architecture much of course

Any other points!

The use of cross-temporal contrasts is of course one of the triumphs of the book and could be helpful – especially when comparing genres across time and media (the contrast between Holbein and Thomas Demand’s photographs is very interesting (108f.).