Pulverized Regions of Time

The central drama of Western art history has, quietly or loudly, been form’s confrontation with the human. This is a relational pursuit, one variously exploited since Pliny, spun out in the wake of the First Commandment. Today, global sickness and political incompetence have devastated communities everywhere. Less significantly, the pandemic has rendered much physical art inaccessible, or differently accessible. Museums and classrooms are shuttered, performances cancelled, lectures migrated online. It is wearisome to remind us of this. The discipline’s conventional dancings around dusty objects seem even more frivolous and escapist than before. And one of Enlightenment art history’s preferred epistemological models – distancing – has become nothing less than a bodily mandate, a condition of estrangement. It is as if Brecht has come home to roost. But in some sense, the pandemic has unexpectedly defamiliarised – indeed verfremdet – art history from both its sites and its purported authority over form. Confronted with actual distance, art-thinkings of certain traditional stripes, say, connoisseurship (always a personal knowledge), have been made strange. They are forced to question the cool certainties they offered about past objects, once their cherished examinees are really locked away, sequestered here in the present: half-visible, unsocial, furloughed. But ‘theory’ is hardly immune: would-be scholars are withstanding a different kind of closeness. Trained as custodians of alterity, art historians now find themselves, mask on, facing an invisibility they cannot scrutinise from afar.

Aesthetics · Art · Drama · Dystopia · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Invisibility · Literature · Nothing · Psychoanalysis · Undoing · Architecture and Art History Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Visual Culture and Art Theory