Handwerker Gallery Newsletter

Spring 1999 – Volume 1, Number 1

What Does the Art Historian Do?

On February 4 the gallery welcomed Michael Ann Holly as the second speaker in the Handwerker Gallery Critical Forum. Holly is chair of the Department of Art and Art History and professor of art history/visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. Her critical reading of the historiography of art history within a broader field of European modernist intellectual history exposes the inherent inconsistencies of art historical writing and in the process shifts the boundaries of the discipline. In her lecture "Art History as Melancholy" — traditionally, art historical writing reserves the figure of melancholy for the artist — Holly argued that art historical writing in its traumatic confrontation with the object of its inquiry is always bound to remain a melancholic enterprise. Following the lecture, the gallery spoke with Holly.

HG: Why is it so important to approach critically the study of historiography and intellectual history today?

MAH: Historiography is the best route I know for unsettling the certainties of traditional protocols, for as the "history of the history of art" it can dramatically demonstrate that matters have not always been what they now are. Studying the variety of ways and the multiplicity of perspectives from which history can be written is energizing, and provokes practitioners of the discipline of art history to be receptive to new ideas, new arguments, new objects. Current critical theories—such as queer theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, even the "new" formalism—encourage us not only to see old objects from new perspectives, but also to construe traditional philosophies of art historical writing in new ways. "Newness," I suppose, I am equating with "critical approaches."

HG: If the modernist model of art historical writing absorbs itself within the figure of mourning and melancholy, what figure would you consider appropriate for the poststructuralist model?

MAH: Actually, I think I would claim that melancholy is forever destined to be part of the art historical unconscious, whether the art historical narratives are written from a modernist or postmodernist point of view. The gaps between present and past, word and image, presence and absence, material and context, etc., confirm the impossibility of rediscovery or re-creation that I am claiming lies at the heart of melancholic writing. On a conscious level, however, most modernist art historians had confidence in their ability to keep objects and subjects distinct, and I’m fairly certain that the concentration on subject positions and partial perspectives in poststructuralist art history has undermined those modernist convictions.

HG: How would you characterize the difference between poststructuralist art historical writing and visual culture studies?

MAH: A hard question to answer because I genuinely believe that poststructuralist art history writing and visual and cultural studies have much to do with each other. I would even argue that the historiography of art is appropriately a visual and cultural study. The kinds of questioning that have animated poststructuralist art history writing—such as who speaks for whom, what’s left out of the archive, how objects and subjects or past and present are part of an ongoing dialogue, the connections between high and low arts and attitudes—are all issues that are shared by those who study mass media and popular arts, even if they come from different traditions (e.g., British social science). The concentration on the mechanisms and motives of visual representation and image making, of course, links both areas of inquiry. Personally, I like to think that my own brand of art history writing remains faithful to the past in its own terms, but I recognize the futility of making that claim at the same time as I labor to put it into effect. I welcome the paradox. Poststructuralist art historians are very self-conscious about the historical and aesthetic frames inside of which they write. I’m not certain that that could be said about some studies of popular culture, but that’s stretching the point a bit.