Week 2. January 31. What is art, art history, visual culture, visuality? The canon of Mesopotamian art history, and its critiques.
- For this Thursday's discussion, I would first like to focus on Craig Owens and David Summers and discuss the current disciplinary dynamics in art history, from the point of view of poststructuralism (Owens) and postformalism (Summers), and where the study of ancient art stands in these debates, the status of art historical knowledge production. Owens offers a discussion of art history as a little bit of a defensive discipline and the troubles in dealing with art historical literature produced by people like Foucault. Who owns the discipline? Summers on the other hand brings to the table a proposal for a wholesale reconsideration of art historical methodologies. It would be great to discuss how those two pieces speak to each other. In the second half of the class, I would be excited to focus on the case of Near Eastern art as discussed by Bahrani and Winter. Groenewegen-Frankfort's work represents a good core example of a 1950s formalist and colonial reading of Mesopotamian art. I'd like you all to pay attention how she uses concepts such as style, space, iconography etc, but also how she evaluates continuity in the Mesopotamian imagemaking tradition. In what ways do you think Bahrani and Winters critiques apply to this work? (Omur)
- I'd like to hear people's thoughts on the methods of visual analysis used in Groenewegen-Frankfort's work, including the exercises of visual description, ekphrasis, formal analysis, comparisons with other cultures, direct engagement with the work of art and appreciation of its individual qualities etc. What are the very powerful and weak aspects of her methodology? (Omur)
- Bahrani challenges the idea that the study of Near Eastern art and history is considered "an esoteric antiquarian field unrelated to the workings of power through knowledge and only a marginal area in canonical art history" How do you think Near East gets incorporated into the Hegelian aesthetic discourse and allocated in fact a privileged place in the developmental paradigms of European art and civilization? (Bahrani 2003: 15) (Omur)
- In thinking about conceptual vs. perceptual, and about whether or not there is a single timeline for the art of all cultures (I think certainly there is not--this would be akin to older theories in anthropology which we now consider archaic), I am reminded of a book by Heinrich Schafer about the representational modes of Egyptian art. Schafer outlines the ways in which each kind of object is represented: flat things, human bodies, etc. His thesis is that Egyptian art is of course conceptual, but he uses modern children's drawings as a familiar example of what happens when images disregard perspective. In a way this is helpful, but also insulting to the ancient Egyptian system: that the best example we have is of drawings made by westerners who "haven't yet learned" the "value" of perspective. So my questions are: Does ANE art have a similar book on artistic conventions? If so, how has it been received by archaeologists? And why are perspective/perceptual forms seem still to be elevated to this high ground in art history? (Jen)
