On the Book "Landscape Theory" (German)

Translated by Jean-Marie Clarke and Richard Schindler, in Points of View: Landschaft verstehen, Geographie und Ästhetik, Energie und Technik, edited by Richard Schindler (Freiburg i. Br., Modo Verlag Freiburg, 2008), 45–54.

A report on the book "Landscape Theory," co-edited with Rachael DeLue, with contributions by Rachael DeLue, Yvonne Scott, Minna Törmä, Denis Cosgrove, Rebecca Solnit, Anne Whiston Spirn, David Hays, Michael Gaudio, Jacob Wamberg, Michael Newman, Jessica Dubow, and others, vol. 6 of "The Art Seminar" (New York: Routledge, 2008).

This is an informal paper, based on a talk in Freiburg in 2007. I gathered together some of the deepest unresolved ideas about the representation of landscape that emerged during the course of the seminars transcribed in "Landscape Theory." The result is a list of critical impasses, ranging from landscape and ideology to the sublime, from the survival of romanticism to the relation between landscape and subjectivity.

On the Book "Landscape Theory" (English)

The English version is unpublished; the German version is also on this website.

A report on the book "Landscape Theory," co-edited with Rachael DeLue, with contributions by Rachael DeLue, Yvonne Scott, Minna Törmä, Denis Cosgrove, Rebecca Solnit, Anne Whiston Spirn, David Hays, Michael Gaudio, Jacob Wamberg, Michael Newman, Jessica Dubow, and others, vol. 6 of "The Art Seminar" (New York: Routledge, 2008).

Why Art Historians Should Learn to Paint: The Case for Studio Experience

Unpublished in English. In German as “Warum Kunsthistoriker malen lernen sollten—ein Plädoyer für Werkstatterfahrung,” in Subjekt und Medium in der Kunst der Moderne, edited by Michael Lüthy and Christoph Menke (Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2006), 87-114.

An earlier version is also in French, “Histoire de l’art et pratiques d’atelier,” translation of “Why Art Historians should Draw: The Case for Studio Experience,” Histoire de l’art 29–30 (1995): 103–112; an initial version of some of this material is in the book Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1997), paperback edition, with new preface (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2000).

This is a never-ending essay or book project, revised many times and still not in a satisfactory form. It concerns the relation between studio art (and studio art departments) and the history of art. It is a curious and significant fact that most art historians have never tried to make art: curious because a large number of people who teach literature and literary criticism have written fiction or poetry, and a large number of people who teach music theory or music history play an instrument; and significant because that means the experience of making is seldom part of what art historians consider historically significant.

Should art historians learn to draw and paint, even a little? On the one hand, the answer is obviously yes, because the experience might be of interest; but on the other hand, it can be tremendously difficult to say what part of the experience of making might be pertinent to historical inquiries.

This topic matters immensely when it comes to the philosophic, practical, and institutional distance between studio art and art history. Art history would be written differently if most of its practitioners were also practicing artists; and universities would be configured differently if the experiences of the studio were considered essential for the education of art historians.

But it is excruciatingly difficult to make the case. Hence the unfinished nature of this essay.

Why Nothing Can be Accomplished in Painting, and Why It Is Important to Keep Trying

Published in "Circa" 109 (2004): 38–41; revised version (not the one uploaded here) in the gallery book for the Fenton Gallery, Cork, Ireland, 2009

This is a paper invited for the Irish art magazine "Circa," which had a special issues on the state of painting in 2004. It argues that painting's supposed dead ends (the eternal return of the monochrome, the end of the medium and of medium-specificity) are tropes in the ongoing practice of painting.

I distinguish five kinds of writing about painting, in an attempt to step back from current critical impasses:

1. Writing that promotes or judges, as in exhibition catalogues.

2. Writing that classifies, for example some art historical accounts.

3. Writing whose primary purpose is to ask if painting is dead, or how it is dead, or how it lives on under different conditions; for example Tom Mitchell's essay about small communities of painters in Florida.

4. Writing that asks about painting's distance from modernism--for example Clark, Jones, Krauss, Melville, Shiff, and other  historians.

5. Writing that takes painting as an occasional subject, and is interested mainly in political contexts--for example Jameson, Bhabha, Canclini.

This is the first sketch for a chapter in the book "Project of Painting." The idea is to acknowledge the tremendous range of writing on painting by beginning at the greatest possible distance, and then focusing in on individual discourses.

What Photography Is (excerpt)

This is an excerpt from a work in progress, a book called What Photography Is. This excerpt appeared in History of Photography 31 no. 1 (2007): 22-30.

Art Criticism (dictionary essay)

This is a draft of the essay published in The Grove Dictionary of Art (New York, Grove Dictionaries, 1996), now the Grove Art Online / Oxford Art Online.

I was asked to write the entry on "Art Criticism" for the (then) Grove Dictionary of Art; the version I submitted contained the observation that, according to some notions of art criticism, all of art history is also a form of criticism. I noted that "by that definition, all thirty-seven volumes of this 'Grove Dictionary of Art,' which has involved over 7,600 scholars, is actually art criticism." The edited MS was returned with the sentence deleted; I complained to the editor of the dictionary, and I was told the sentence would be restored. It never was. (That's a little cautionary tale about the institutional differences between art history and art criticism.)

Aside from that, this essay is an attempt to gather and arrange the major theories of art criticism.

Art History and the Criticism of Computer-Generated Images (unillustrated version)

This was published (with color illustrations) in Leonardo 27 no. 4 (1994): 335–42 and color plate.

This unillustrated version is of limited use; ideally, it should be read with the illustrations. It is also dated--computer graphics has come a long way since 1994. However the basic argument remains pertinent: it is that art history can contribute to the understanding of computer graphics, because the software that makes computer graphics possible is influenced by the history of art. Palettes, blurring routines, perspective choices, sharpness settings, and many other components of image software come from the history of art, either explicitly (as in "mosaic filters") or at several removes (as in the perspectival decisions made in video game design). Even now, art historians are only just beginning to take the history of computer graphics on board as an integral part of the discipline.

From Copy to Original and Back Again

Published as  “From Copy to Forgery and Back Again,” in The British Journal of Aesthetics 33 no. 2 (1993): 113–20.

An essay on the theory of the difference between copies and originals.

Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Conversation

This conversation was held at Cork Caucus, Cork, Ireland, 2005, and published in Cork Caucus: On Art, Possibility, and Democracy ([Cork]: National Sculpture Factory and Revolver, 2006), 247–59.

The "Books" portion of this website contains 4 of the 6 chapters of the book called "Why Art Cannot be Taught" that is referred to here.

Essay on Eduardo Kac

Published as “Preface” to Eduardo Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, and Robots (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

Two Ends of the Emblem

Published in Emblematica; originally a plenary talk, International Society for Emblem Studies, Chicago, July 2005.

This essay also includes brief portions of an unpublished book MS, "What Heaven Looks Like," on a remarkable anonymous 18th c. book of emblematic watercolor paintings.

The Drunken Conversation of Chaos and Painting (unillustrated version)

Published in Meaning 12 (1992): 55–60.

An essay about the mutual misunderstandings between chaos theory, fractal dynamics, and painting in the 1990s. That was a "drunken conversation" because the artists usually misunderstood chaos theory, and the mathematicians (such as Mandelbrot and Peitgen) had very odd ideas about the place of their mathematics in art history.

The general theme, the mutual misunderstanding of art and science, remains true, and someone should write a non-polemical piece about it: the misunderstandings are productive, and so they are not like the mistakes that Sokol and Bricmont chronicle. The differences point to different discourses. A non-polemical analysis might go some distance to relieving the reductive pressure that the "Sokal affair" put on interdisciplinary conversations

What Do We Want Photography To Be? (unillustrated version)

Published in Critical Inquiry 31 no. 4 (2005): 938–56.

This is a response to an essay by Michael Fried on Roland Barthes. The argument is that Fried's reading of Camera Lucida does not illuminate photographs that are like Wall's, Struth's, Dijkstra's, Gursky's, or Ruff's any more than it illuminates photos of, say, atoms.

Reasons Not To Be Optimistic

Published in Frieze (2008).

The essay provides reasons not to be optimistic about the current state of art criticism, visual studies, and the art market.

I propose five theses:

1. Visual studies has stalled.

2. Political art is lost.

3. The art market is uninterpreted.

4. The art world is incoherent.

5. Art criticism is powerless.

And then I give five counter-arguments. The piece is a trick: the two sides do not balance one another, and in the end I don't find many reasons to be optimistic.

Essay on David Hockney's book "Secret Knowledge"

Published in "Circa" 99 (spring 2002): 38–39.

This is a brief review of the conference held at NYU. There is also a more extensive essay (a version of the paper I gave at that conference) online at http://webexhibits.org/hockneyoptics/post/elkins2.html, and a formal review of "Secret Knowledge" (New York: Viking, 2001), on the College Art Association review site, which is unfortunately (and, I think, misguidedly) password-protected.

(These three texts comprise all I have to say on the subject. Inquiries about perspective and painting may not be answered.)

Ten Reasons Why E.H. Gombrich Was Not an Art Historian

This was originally written to be put on an online College Art Association forum, in the year following Gombrich's death. The idea was to collect responses, and possibly publish them. The project was abandoned by the CAA, and the paper is unpublished.

This paper has been completely revised for publication in a volume by Jan Bakos, Relativism versus Universalism in the Age of Globalisation and Ernst Hans Gombrich: On the Occasion of the Hundredth Anniversary of E.H.Gombrich's Birth. I will send an updated version on request. (July 2009)

Review of "Iconoclash"

Published in "The Art Journal," 62 no. 3 (2003): 104-107.

"Iconoclash" was an exhibition in Karlsruhe; the book is the largest compendium of writing on and around iconoclasms, idolatries, etc.

Iconoclasm and the Sublime: Two Implicit Religious Discourses in Art History

To be published in "Idol Anxiety," edited by Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

Since "Iconoclash" (see the review above), iconoclasm and related terms have been taken as fundamental, general categories for the interpretation of pictures. This essay is part of a project to historicize that interest, which I think goes to a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century assumption about what pictures are.

On the Unrepresentable in Pictures (unillustrated version)

This English version is unpublished. Published in German as “Einige Gedanken über der Unbestimmtheit der Darstellung [On the Unrepresentable in Pictures],” in Das unendliche Kunstwerk: Von der Bestimmtheit des Unbestimmten in der ästhetischen Erfahrung, edited by Gerhard Gramm and Eva Schürmann (Berlin: Philo, 2006), 119-40.

This is an attempt to gather some ideas I have had about the unrepresentable, unpicturable, and inconceivable in "On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them," "Pictures of the Body," "Six Stories from the End of Representation," and elsewhere.

Interview with Matthew Nash

Online interview, posted January 24, 2006, also available at http://www.bigredandshiny.com/issues/issue35/pdf/7_QUESTIONS_WITH_8183555.pdf.

Interview with Cornelia Sollfrank

Published online at "The Thing Hamburg: Plattform für Kunst und Kritik," conducted at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Visual Research Centre, May 17th, 2008, posted at http://www.thing-hamburg.de/index.php?id=796.

Interview with Minna Törmä

Published as “Miten kirjoittaa taiteesta globaalissa maailmassa?” Taida 3 (2007): 16-18.

The Question of the Body in Mesoamerican Art (unillustrated version)

Published in Res  26 (1994): 113–24.

The paper argues that the indirect influence of Surrealism guided some scholarship on Mesoamerican art, and especially Mayan ritual, in the 1980s and 1990s.

Michelangelo and the Human Form (French version)

Published in l’Anatomie chez Michel–Ange: de la réalité à l’idéalité edited by Chiara Rabbi–Bernard (Paris: Hermann, 2003), 89–112

The original is  “Michelangelo and the Human Form: His Knowledge and Use of Anatomy,” Art History 7 (1984): 176–86. This version is unillustrated, and needs to be read with the original.

There is No Such Thing as Outsider Art

Published as “Naïfs, Faux-Naïfs, Faux Faux-Naïfs, Would-Be-Faux-Naïfs: There is No such Thing as Outsider Art,” in Inner Worlds Outside, exh. cat., edited by John Thompson (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 71–79.

The argument here is that "outsider art" and similar concepts ("naive art," "primitive art," etc.) are constructions of modernism, and only exist as ideals understood as contrasts to normative practice.

Aesthetics and the Two Cultures: Why Art and Science Should be Allowed to Go Their Separate Ways

Published in  Rediscovering Aesthetics, edited by Tony O’Connor, Frances Halsall, and Julia Jansen (New York: Columbia University Press).

This version has no footnotes.

Against the Sublime

This will appear in a volume on the sublime edited by Roald Hoffmann.

The essay argues that the sublime, and especially the postmodern sublime, is an intricate and unresolved concept, and that it is not often coherent or necessary to import it into discourse on contemporary art.

On the Impossibility of Close Reading (unillustrated version)

This appeared in German as  “Über die Unmöglichkeit des close reading,” in Was aus dem Bild fällt: figuren des Details in Kunst und Literatur, [Festschrift für] Friedrich Teja Bach zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Edith Futcher, Stefan Neuner, Wolfram Pichler, and Ralph Ubl (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 107–40.

The essay is a rewritten version of a critique of Alexander Marshack that appeared in Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1997); that essay was condensed from a longer paper, “On the Impossibility of Close Reading: The Case of Alexander Marshack,” Current Anthropology 37 no. 2 (1996): 185–226.
See the description of the German version, also on this website.

On the Impossibility of Close Reading (unillustrated version, in German)

Unpublished in English.

See the description of the English version, also on this website, for bibliographic information.
This essay was written for a Festschrift for Friedrich Teja Bach; it contains material on the analysis of details in art historical scholarship.

The Failed and the Inadvertent: Art History and the Concept of the Unconscious (unillustrated version)

Published in “The Failed and the Inadvertent: The Theory of the Unconscious in the History of Art” International Journal of Psycho–Analysis 75 part 1 (1994): 119–32.

See the "caveat emptor" note in the text.

Pontormo's Last Thoughts on Food, Drawing, and Criticism

This is an unpublished essay on the last years of the mannerist painter Pontormo, as they can, and can't, be seen through his very odd diary. The diary has an interesting history of reception, because it has been taken as an ultra-romantic document--romanticism avant la lettre--and as the largely uninteresting record of a reclusive businessman. Neither reading is just: the romantic reading over-interprets Pontormo's eccentricities, and the postmodern reading abolishes them. Pontormo was strange, and this is an attempt to get at that quality.

Emil Nolde's Search for Ruleless Color

This is an unpublished, unillustrated essay (read it with an internet connection, to see the images that are discussed). It concerns the German expressionist painter Emil Nolde, and his conceptualization of color. Nolde's color choices were not consistently anti-naturalistic, but neither were they symbolic or otherwise programmatic. The essay is an attempt to understand how he thought of color, using late nineteenth-century German realist painting and early twentieth-sentury German expressionist poetry as points of comparison.

How to Invite a Speaker

This essay was originally intended as an anonymous contribution to the "Chronicle of Higher Education," but it was rejected three times. Meanwhile I have gotten a number of requests for it, so it's uploaded here.

It is a guide for administrators and others who invite speakers, with information and suggestions about everything from the efficient use of email to bargaining over honoraria. I would be interested to hear from people with ideas about things to add to the paper.

How Close Can We Come to Admitting We're Really Writing Mostly About Ourselves?

This paper was given at a College Art Association conference in 2000, in a session on the state and future of social art history chaired by Marc Gotlieb. The session was one of the big ones that year--maybe 300 people in attendance--and it was, by several standards, a total disaster. The respondent, Tom Crow, was annoyed by most of the papers; the conversation afterward was more about the history of social art history, and who owned it, than about Marc's questions; and the speakers addressed Marc's concerns in such different ways that I think few people could have gotten much out of the session as a whole.

This paper asks perhaps the most annoying question that can be asked about an historian's work. There is no doubt that historical writing is specific to the time and place of the historian, and informed by the historian's way of conceptualizing the world: that has been described beautifully, and repeatedly, by writers from Walter Benjamin to Dominic LaCapra. But strangely, writing on the subject of historians' subjectivity has not helped historians think about their own writing.

One assertion in this paper has had an afterlife: it's the idea that art history, in particular, has a shelf life of about thirty years. After that, the texts are likely to be consulted mainly for stray facts, and otherwise to be considered as products of their age. No one reads Dvorak or Friedlaender any more for information about the seventeenth century; they are read (when they are read) as writers who exemplify cultural currents in the first half of the twentieth century. In other words, historical accounts gradually become accounts of the time in which the historian lived. I proposed that thirty years is the cutoff point, and that we should try to do better.

On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History

Originally published as “On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History,” 31: Das Magazin des Instituts für Theorie [Zürich] 12 (2008): 25–30. Special issue Taktilität: Sinneserfahrung als Grenzerfahrung, edited by Stefan Neuner and Julia Gelshorn. ISSN 1660-2609, ISBN 978-3-906489-10-0.

Recently art history and art theory have become interested in the materiality of the artwork: its substance, its matter, its bulk and presence, its tactility, its properties other than optical ones. This essay presents several reasons to be wary of those new interests.