rich4/z18-arbu/z18-arbu/z1800113/z182205d13g phillipa S⫽4 11/15/12 9:39 Art: z18-2205 Input-mek

REGARDING ART AND ART HISTORY

There is more than one way of writing about what you can nineteenth and twentieth centuries provided Aberdeen with
and cannot see: an art gallery and a fine collection to fill it, including things
that I have no memory of ever having not seen. To reinforce
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the the point made by Hal Foster (among many others) about
vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the the ways in which a digital environment has shifted the
secrets of the grave and has been a diver in deep seas, and goalposts,5 I lazily choose not to reproduce here three pic-
keeps their fallen day about her. . . .1 tures from that collection, since a few mouse clicks will allow
any interested reader to circumvent The Art Bulletin’s “strict
Porcelain dish with rounded sides, barbed rim and flat
policy on images and permissions.”6 (I do begin to wonder if,
base, set on a low wedge-shaped foot-ring. The dish is
as art historians, our ever greater strictness toward ourselves
painted in underglaze blue, the rim decorated with two
has as much to do with a nostalgic desire for a circulation of
types of alternating floral bands moulded in low relief and
images that was more professional and less promiscuous as it
reserved in blue on a white ground.2
does with a scrupulous regard for the intellectual property
In first-year undergraduate classes on the theme of “Descrip- rights of, say, Aberdeen District Council and the estates of
tion,” I have in recent years used these admittedly rather artists.) Fifty years ago, these were paintings regarded more
extreme examples of two different ekphrastic possibilities. or less only by those who visited the actual building where
Students will have previously read two useful but rather con- they hung; now they could be anywhere. All three pictures
trasting essays on the topic, Jules Prown’s classic “Mind in are memorable to me; none has anything to do with “China.”
Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and I find I have remembered Francis Bacon’s Pope I (Study after
Method” from 1982, and Jaś Elsner’s “Art History as Ekphra- Pope Innocent X by Diego Velazquez) (1951) all wrong. In my
sis,” published more recently in 2010.3 We always end up memory the pope is screaming (as Bacon’s popes often do),
talking, as we are meant to, about whether objective knowl- but in fact this one is not, and the spectral presence, jammed
edge is possible through sufficiently rigorous and unhasty up against the right edge of the picture, has his mouth
procedures of object analysis (Prown), or whether the ten- closed; his beady eyes regard the viewer in a way I always
dentiousness built into description subverts any such ambi- found scary as a child.7 I found nothing scary about William
tion from the start (Elsner). The problem is not solved, but it Dyce, Titian Preparing to Make His First Essay in Colouring
is put on the table as a central issue of art historical study. (1856), in which the anecdote is illustrated by the young
One of the things students always get hold of is the way in genius gazing raptly at a figure of the Madonna, his hand
which any close analysis has to assume a kind of privileged clasping the flowers from which he will extract his first pig-
access to the object one is studying. If they try to carry out all ments.8 But a family anecdote made it my grandmother’s
the stages of “Description; Deduction; Speculation” that favorite painting (though she had a reproduction of Frans
Prown sets out in pursuit of a full account, they quickly see Hals’s Laughing Cavalier on the staircase, and one of a Cana-
that accurate measurement, for example, presupposes the letto in the sitting room), so any visit to the Art Gallery
ability to handle the object of study, as does, to an extent, required that it be noticed, at the least. The picture that I
“sensory engagement.” And they begin to understand that we could not, cannot, regard without fascination is a grande
can see, we can regard, what is presented to us to see, and in machine of Edwin Henry Landseer, entitled Flood in the High-
the ways that are presented to us to see it. lands.9 Whatever it meant to me as a child, Flood in the
As an art historian who has worked on the art of China, I Highlands is a picture about looking, or at the very least a
would by now be quite wealthy if I had £5 for every time I picture about eyes. No one in it regards dispassionately: all
have been asked, “How did you first get interested in China?” stare and gaze in wide-eyed terror, except the blind patriarch
(I chose to study the Chinese language at university, at a time of the Scottish peasant family, stranded on the roof of their
when the country was less accessible to foreign visitors than it humble home as the swirling waters of the river rise about
has since become.) Perhaps curiously, no one has ever asked them. I used to be horrified as a child by the desperate staring
me, “How did you first get interested in art?” which by con- eyes of the drowning cow in the bottom left. Now I find more
trast does not seem to require any sort of explanation, for it compelling the closed eyes of the old man.
is taken rather as a “natural” interest. This may be due to the We can regard what is presented to us to see, and in the
fact that (it is correctly assumed) “art” was present to me as I ways that are presented to us to see it. Thinking about three
was growing up in Scotland, in the city of Aberdeen, whereas images that are all about looking, I might say that in my own
China was far away. Even the proudest Aberdonian would case it is not just “visuality” that is a social fact, but the more
accept that the city has not been central to narratives of the physiological fact of vision, too. Had I been born at a differ-
Western canon (though Seaman Second Class Paul Gauguin ent time or in a different place, then a high degree of
mooched around the docks there for twelve days from July myopia, cataracts, and a detached retina might have im-
25, 1870).4 However, as happened with most British cities pacted on my ability to regard anything, quite differently from
above a certain size, the civic pride of local elites in the the outcome happily secured for me by the United King-
 rich4/z18-arbu/z18-arbu/z1800113/z182205d13g phillipa S⫽4 11/15/12 9:39 Art: z18-2205 Input-mek
REGARDING ART AND ART HISTORY 9

dom’s National Health Service (health care paid for out of Notes
taxation and free at the point of delivery), part of the same
1. Walter Pater, “Leonardo da Vinci” (1869), in The Renaissance: Studies in
now-threatened dispensation as put the pictures there for me Art and Poetry (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 101–27, at 124.
to look at in the first place. The Chinese paintings on which 2. Eskenazi, Yuan and Early Ming Blue and White Porcelain (London: Eske-
I currently work are massively more visible now, to anyone nazi, 1994), 18.
sitting in Aberdeen as elsewhere, than they were when I first 3. Jules Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture
Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 1–19;
read Michael Sullivan’s A Short History of Chinese Art, with its and Jaś Elsner, “Art History as Ekphrasis,” Art History 33 (2010): 10 –27.
seventy-two illustrations, only one of which was in color in the 4. Jennifer Melville, Aberdeen Art Gallery: A History (Aberdeen: Aberdeen
first edition.10 But then I hear anecdotally that the Palace City Council, 2010), 4.
Museum in Beijing has announced that no paintings can be 5. Hal Foster, “Archives of Modern Art,” in Design and Crime (London:
Verso Books, 2003), 65– 82, at 78.
shown to students at any level, who must content themselves
6. Since Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums is a participant in the “Your
with the high-quality digital images now available. Much de- Paintings” project, the collection is easily accessible at http://www.bbc-
scription of Chinese painting (including occasionally by my- .co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/ (accessed June 16, 2012).
self) deals with works never regarded by the author in per- 7. Francis Bacon, Pope I, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/
paintings/pope-i-106598 (accessed June 16, 2012). This is the only one
son—a less than ideal practice, but one that at least has the of the three pictures not also archived on ARTstor http://library.
virtue of forcing to the forefront of consciousness the fact artstor.org/library/welcome.html (accessed June 18, 2012), which,
however, fails to indicate where they actually are housed. It is by con-
that who gets to see what, and how, still has a politics to it, and trast the only one archived on Bridgeman Education, http://www
that ekphrasis, description, regard only very rarely take place .bridgemaneducation.com/ImageView.aspx?result⫽0&balid⫽363131
under ideal conditions of absolute privilege.11 (accessed June 18, 2012).
8. William Dyce, Titian Preparing to Make His First Essay in Colouring, at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/titian-preparing-to-
make-his-first-essay-in-colouring-106871 (accessed June 16, 2012).
9. Edwin Henry Landseer, Flood in the Highlands, at http://www.bbc
Craig Clunas is Professor of the History of Art at the University of .co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/flood-in-the-highlands-107230 (ac-
cessed June 16, 2012).
Oxford. In 2012 he delivered “Chinese Painting and Its Audiences”
10. Michael Sullivan, A Short History of Chinese Art (London: Faber and
for the A. W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Faber, 1967).
Washington, D.C. [History of Art Department, Littlegate House, St. 11. T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven:
Ebbe’s, Oxford, OX1 1PT, U.K., [email protected]]. Yale University Press, 2006), 242.