Compelling
Visuality: The Work of Art in and out
of History
by Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg,
Editors
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
2003
280 pp., illus. 34 b/w. Trade, $74.95;
paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4115-3; ISBN: 0-8166-4116-1.
Reviewed by Wilfred Niels Arnold
warnold@kumc.edu
Traditional writings about the visual
artsthe objects and their creators
include elements of joy, admiration, explanation,
analysis, and criticism, as well as the
facts and numbers of history. Various
art historians use different blends and
their products meet different audiences.
However, in more recent times, artists
with household names have attracted such
a mass of unorganized commentary that
this habit has spawned a new genre, namely
an analysis of the commentators. It is
an art history once or twice removed,
in which the writers (not their subjects)
are embraced without much regard for accuracy
or contribution.
Such an example is to be found in the
essay by Michael Ann Holly, one of nine
contributors to Compelling Visuality,
wherein the competitive interpretations
by Martin Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro
of the van Gogh painting, A pair of
shoes, are revisited for the umpteenth
time. The objects on the canvas were Vincent's
own footwear according to Schapiro (he
took the time to read The Complete
Letters of Vincent van Gogh) and not
a peasant woman's shoes as imagined by
Heidegger, who went on in sublime ignorance
to wax poetic about the woman's "slow
trudge through the far-spreading and ever
uniform furrows of the field swept by
a raw wind." Dr. Holly has the temerity
to call the Heidegger bit "one of
the most famous passages in contemporary
critical theory." This nonsense was only
rivaled by Jacques Derrida who dreamed
up a correspondence between Heidegger
and Schapiro in 1977. And appeal to authority
takes over where organized skepticism
screams for attention. I'm afraid that
my eye for the rest of the book was jaundiced
by this early chance encounter, occasioned
by spotting the van Gogh reproduction.
The editors emphasize that they wish to
raise different kinds of questions beyond
the traditional approaches of art history.
They suggest that because the contributors
came from different disciplines and from
various countries with different intellectual
traditions, a new "art history after aesthetics"
was achieved. The first four chapter titles
indicate the flavor: Ecstatic aesthetics:
metaphoring Bernini, Before the
image, before time: the sovereignty of
anachronism, Aesthetics before art: Leonardo
through the looking glass, Touching the
face: the ethics of visuality between
Levinas and a Rembrandt self-portrait.
This volume is modestly produced
in 9" x 6" format, lightly illustrated
with black and white reproductions, and
relatively expensive. Notes and references
are given at the end of each chapter.
There is no index and no list of illustrations.
Claire Farago is a professor of fine arts
at the University of Colorado. She has
published on Leonardo da Vinci. Co-editor
Professor Robert Zwijnenberg, is at the
University of Maastricht, The Netherlands,
where he is concerned about art history
in relation to development of science
and technology.