What was the New Art History
Timothy J. Clark: What was New Art History? Well, I mean, it was many things. It certainly came out of the 1960’s. Perhaps the guiding thread was an absolute impatience with a notion of art that had artist an internal activity, self-generating activity; and wished to have art be understood as a human activity, a social activity, an activity in which circumstances mattered. That there was no such thing as an art activity per se. That art activity took many many different forms, and to make art contingent, various, variable. And, you know, part of social struggle, too. So that art didn’t always go on telling the same universal story, the story of human values. Human values clash. Maybe are no fundamental continuing human values or, anyway, that certainly the modern proposal.
What we can call New Art History is not very new, I mean, in many parts of the world is so established that you could just call it Art History. There are paradoxes here. One is that the Old Art History hasn’t disappeared, you know, and in many places, in the US and in Britain, for instance, the two cultures I know; I would say that there was a completely two tear, two stream Art History. A New Art History and an Old Art History. And the Old Art History is doing very well, thank you. Still completely involved with attribution and traditional museum structure and the cult of the artist and so on. And it is not in the slightest bit interested in the ambitions of the New Art History, and it goes on quietly flourishing, with enormous cultural and financial resources behind it. It’s on the side of the market after all. Here we are, in this world in which the market rules so, of course, the Old Art History, which is the servant of the art market and the museum structure, does very well. So, I mean, that can be depressing, and the New Art History, which is there, as part of the academy, to some extent a part of the museum world, in certain museums, but only certain museums. But they don't really talk to one another. They coexist.
The more interesting side is New Art History has become extraordinary diverse. There are many many sides to it and ambitions to it. And so there've been extraordinary challenges from those who were interested in colonial and global Art History, and a notion that we really have to kind of rethink our whole methods, our whole notion of the object of Art History.
So I’m not saying that my own turn is something that I foretold in advance. It's something that happened. But I think I make sense of it like this, that we’re in a world in which it is more and more claim that we’re in a world of the image as opposed to the text. We’re entering a kind of visual universe, in which we’re surrounded, bombarded, by image thinking. The world is made available to us through a kind of whole battery of image machines. So it seems to me necessary and politically pointed, politically necessary maybe, to look again at what images are, what are they like, what are they capable of.
One of the problems I have with the New Art History is that it shared too much with the Old Art History, a reverence for textual materials. It thought that the way to an understanding of the visual art object was to put it within some kind of textual and contextual frame. It became, for me, more and more urgent to ask the question: what is it that images do? How do they frame our experience? How do they put us in a world and organise us into the world around us, in ways that text can't, in ways that human language is incapable of? Well, this is, of course it’s a concern of art history, it’s always been a concern of art history. But art history is often very, very, happy. You can sense its tremendous relief when it thinks it's discovered a text, or a context, which encloses the artwork and makes sense of it. Renders the work of art transparent to the textual work.
Trying to take seriously the notion that, right at the centre of the making of a modern art, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, lay this cantankerous figure, Gustave Courbet and the notion that one could make and maybe one had to make painting out of revolutionary circumstance, that you actually fully involved your artwork in the process of politics, you exposed art making to political confusion and contingency. And that might be a recipe for disaster but it might be a recipe for triumph.
Well, it’s hard to think back actually to that moment in which it really was taboo to speak in favour of modernism. That, of course, is a slight exaggeration but, you know, in many many of the advanced artistic and intellectual circles, modernism, for a decade or more, was just the bad word.
That’s how I understand Pollock, for instance. It’s I think quite largely how I understand cubism. Cubism is an active preserving the idea of a kind of intimate touchable possessible nearby ruled space in which things still have substance for us. And think of that all going on. It's a deliberate paradoxical statement I make in the new book and it will get me into all kinds of trouble but I see cubism as, not really a forward looking art form, although it was of course usable for all kinds of purposes afterwards, but in some kind of way I think it's profoundly nostalgic. It's the last of the great 19th century revivalisms. I hope to preserve a certain notion of the bourgeois interior. That’s its deepest ambition, as far as I’m concerned. That’s of course what I argue and I should get into all kinds of trouble for arguing that but I believe it very deeply.
You see, if you believe, as I do, that Picasso is cubism, you know, the great style of the early 20th century, without a doubt, the matrix of so much that happened later. But if you believe, as I do, that it was premised on a deep belief that the only space I can really believe in and really make, as a painter, is the space of the room; then, Guernica, of course, becomes a more and more improbable and counterintuitive achievement. Because it really does speak to the collapse of all that intimate world, the world of the room, the world of dependable contained space. It's about the shattering of all that world. The book ends with Guernica because I sort of want to try to think so what was involved for Picasso in reconstructing his whole sense of spatial reality and social reality in such a way.
In the last years, particularly since 2001, I’ve become more, after a long time of not writing about politics and not being tremendously involved in politics, I think like many of us, are sort of thrown back into politics by just the catastrophe of the last decade, from September 11th onwards, from the invasion of Iraq, and particularly onwards. So it's almost a kind matter of... you just couldn’t avoid it, you just had to respond to it in some kind of way.
You’ve got to understand that in the United States, in the cultural world, everything is political. But in politics, of course, nothing is political. You know the words, politics, there’s nothing at stake in politics. It’s just purely a power game. There’s an ideological displacement in which the field of culture becomes politicized. Tremendous, ferocious debates between post-colonialists, defenders of the cannon, feminists... Culture world is saturated with political meaning, but the political in quotation marks, because it is not a real politics after all. So a little bit in reaction against that, I must say, in my own work, has divided into: 'ok, if I'm going to participate politically, I write about politics'. I'm a writer, essentially, so I write about politics.
