History, Art History and Art Museums: A Three-Way Conversation

“Historia, Historia del Arte y Museos. ¿Una Conversación a Tres Bandas?” En la Encrucijada de la Cienzia Histórica Hoy el Auge de la Historia Cultural, ed. V. Vázquez de Prada, et al., Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1998, pp. 99-109

History, Art History and Art Museums: A Three-Way Conversation?*

Ivan Gaskell

In this chapter I wish to discuss intersecting interests in a huge field of material: interests that sometimes conflict, but which more often than not simply pass each other by. That is, the interests of historians, art historians and art museum scholars in what I have termed visual material.[1] Visual material comprehends what we now think of as art, as well as other visually apprehended humanmade objects of interest, and may be the common concern of both historians and other scholars concerned with art. However, historians on the one hand, and other scholars (who include art historians, art museum scholars and philosophical aestheticians) will address that material in quite distinct ways which differ from one another in respect of fundamental assumptions.

The historical understanding of the human condition, with which historians are obviously principally concerned, differs in kind from the understanding available to us by means of visual art, attended to in its own right. Of the three parties whom I wish to consider on this occasion, historians will always put historical understanding—in all its rich variety—first; art museum scholars will always put the direct, bewildering encounter between people and visual material first; and art historians will primarily seek ways to mediate that encounter by means of textual interposition.

There are those who would minimize the distinctions among the three domains by seeing art history as a specialized form of historical enquiry, and art museum scholarship as a specialized form of art history. This perception has a certain amount to recommend it. The entire cultural-historical project founded by Aby Warburg, for instance, embeds visual material—including art—within a structure of cultural memory that is to be historically researched, defined and understood. For Warburg and his many distinguished followers (from Fritz Saxl to Svetlana Alpers) the visually apprehended artifact is as much a bearer of historically definable meaning as is a textual primary source. Indeed, Warburg held that forms and ideas have their longest cultural life in the realm of the visual in the form of symbols. His great library (at the institute in London that bears his name) is constituted with the symbolic at its base, representing cultural long duration, upon which successively are overlaid art, language and literature, and lastly social life.[2]

Philosophical aesthetics was integral to Warburg's project, of course, as Edgar Wind made clear in his statement that cogent investigation of art “fuses into an indissoluble triad the critical study of individual works of art, aesthetic theory, and the reconstruction of historical situations: any weakness in one of these enterprises is inevitably passed on to the others.”[3] This means that just as the past could not be understood historically without recourse to visual material, when appropriate, so visual material might never be understood without taking historical circumstance under account. The latter contention is integral to much art-historical scholarship: that is, art history—whether viewed as seamlessly part of a continuum with history or not—is treated by those who think in this way as a matter of the retrieval of original or subsequent meanings defined by contingent contexts. In this respect, those who see art museum scholarship as a form of art history—the art-historical study and presentation of actual visual material within institutions dedicated to that purpose—suppose that historically uninformed relationships between viewers and objects must always be subordinate to, or ideally be superseded by, historically informed relationships. There are, I believe, many historians and art historians who would hold this contention to be self-evident. I have argued recently that this is far from necessarily the case and shall briefly do so again here.[4]

I have argued that while writing texts is inevitable for art historians, this is not necessarily the case for art museum scholars. The latter are engaged in a critical practice, putting critical judgments into predominantly physical, rather than written, form. Making the extreme case, I argued that there are times when art history, in whatever form, is irrelevant to art museum scholarship and, if its terms are introduced on such occasions, can actually be obfuscatory. I asserted that “museums can legitimately treat objects of visual interest as having no pasts, and as occupying no field other than the immediate circumstances of those museums themselves.”[5]

This notion derives from a practical critical engagement with newly-made art. The interpretation of such art is evidently not dependent on the understanding of a moment in the past to be apprehended historically, for it concerns solely our own moment in time. Furthermore, for theoretical reasons that are, perhaps, contingent upon our historical moment, the maker’s intention is not necessarily even an issue of interest to involved art museum scholars, or viewers, including critics. Rather, the art museum scholar involved in the exhibition of newly-made art as an exhibition organizer can be counted as much an active agent as the artist. Projects are often collaborations between them. In some instances the artist's inventiveness is even subordinated to that of the organizer and this state of affairs is recognized by critics.[6] Some artists may resent their lack of autonomy, but we may wonder whether any artist who partakes in social life through his or her art has ever seriously enjoyed autonomy.

The position of newly-made art in art museums is not unique. Older art can readily assume a similar history-free status. An object’s redefinition upon entering an art museum can expunge its former status when considered within that institution. Each museum object is reinscribed afresh upon entry by being framed by the museum that contains it. There it is deployed in a discourse of pure contrivance that is to an extent self-contained. Therefore the object bears a relationship to its pre-museum use that is like that of fiction to fact, and art museum scholars can pay as much attention to the former as to the latter. In doing so they can emulate the presentation of newly-made art by ensuring that meaning is generated purely visually, by the choice and arrangement of objects alone without recourse to text in any form. While the relationships thus generated can be art-historical, they might also be wholly non-art-historical, concerned with, say, purely formal characteristics regardless of the cultural or chronological origin of the items of visual interest concerned. Thus the relationships between objects, between persons and objects, and among people mediated by objects, irrespective of historical considerations, become a proper field of enquiry for art museum scholars.

At issue here is the interesting observation defined by Thomas De Quincey in the following terms:

I am struck with the truth that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes.[7]

The likelihood of De Quincey's reliance on Leibnitz need not detain us here. The notion of involutes, thus defined—however we may conceive of apprehending them—can profitably inform art museum scholarship. Their manifestation as “perplexed combinations of concrete objects”—whether newly created, or age-old, or a combination of the two—within the art museum can justifiably displace any historical or art historical concerns within such an institution. The core intellectual responsibility of art museum scholars is to work with such visual material itself. This would be the case even if such scholars were the only viewers of what they contrive, for it is a condition implicit in the very nature of their scholarship.

Let us, then, take a closer look at the purpose of art museums. I would suggest that the matter before us is not what is the purpose of art museums sociologically (that is, the purpose in spite of any stated purposes), or historically, in terms of their pasts, but rather, what is their purpose intentionally?

Intentional purposes differ from museum to museum, from type of museum to type of museum, from culture to culture, but all imply the preservation of objects deemed worthy of attention over time, according to the application of some or other point on the Horatian scale, defined in the Ars Poetica, by edification at one end and delight at the other. That is, we are dealing with a mixture of imputed inherent qualities of objects and various anticipated effects upon observers.

That scale compassed by edification on the one hand, and delight on the other, is frequently articulated in ethical terms. Thus I quote from the “Director's Message” in a recent Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Preview magazine where Malcolm Rogers writes, “The Museum’s mission is to make people’s lives ‘deeper, richer, finer’ through the medium of fine art, and to preserve and elucidate our great collections.” In justifying art museums I have regularly heard directors articulate some variant of the notion that viewing art will make the viewer a better person. This notion, almost of necessity, remains vague and is hardly going to convince skeptical listeners. Rather than placing faith in notions of the supposed improvement of the individual's quality of life, or sensibility, whether moral or aesthetic, I believe we have to address the matter of social responsibility. I shall, however, return to the question of effect upon the individual a little later.

Art museums are important, indeed vital, to social well-being because they alone preserve, deploy, revivify, and ensure the availability of visual forms, artifacts and ideas concerning them that constitute alternatives to dominant modes within a culture. Given that it is often stated that art museums represent and sanction dominant modes, the assumption behind this assertion may seem topsy-turvy. However, I do not believe this to be the case. If we take a baleful look our extended iconosphere (to use the late Jan Białostocki’s term for the full range of visual representation available within a culture at any given time), the contents of art museums, other than in often ironically mutated forms, are marginal. Many people in this culture may recognize certain individual icons (the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel Creation of Adam), or styles, whether of a movement (Impressionism) or an individual (Rembrandt, Van Gogh). Yet even these forms of familiarity function in terms of product recognition, a mode proper to capitalist production and consumption, and thus within, rather than beyond, the terms of the dominant modes governing the greater part of the contemporary iconosphere.

I strongly believe that it is the duty of art museums to present viable alternatives to dominant visual modes. The paintings of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the bronzes of Benin cannot be recreated ex nihilo any more than can Plato’s Symposium, or the United States Constitution. If we are deprived of these artifacts for defining and ordering our ideals, we are all the more likely to be subject to tyranny. If art museums are unable to articulate alternatives to what is visually normative beyond their bounds—whether using historical or art-historical criteria or not—society is literally deprived of instruments of ethical, social, and political criticism.

Art museums, maintained by active visual scholarship, are the necessary means of sustenance of creative criticism in the visual sphere. Art museums allow us to say of what we see in the humanmade world, “It does not have to be thus.” Further, they provide the material that might inspire concrete proposals for how it might otherwise be. This is why I believe that exhibitions which simply and uncritically make available in a museum context visual material that is already readily to hand not only miss the point of art museums, but actually undermine museums' proper purposes and turn them into sites of kitsch. And, as Milan Kundera has argued, kitsch is a condition of tyranny.[8]

Can we, then, define what constitutes art museum scholarship? It may overlap with art history—perhaps in instances so as to be indistinguishable—but is not art history. Neither, of course, is it history. Art museum scholars must deal with art in non-historical and non-art-historical ways, for art for them is a matter of present urgency, not indeterminate abstraction. Furthermore, art is the medium of art museum scholars as well as their subject. They articulate ideas by means of art itself in displays, rather than solely treating it as the subject of a detached commentary. The conditions of scholarship in art museums are thus substantially different from those in, say, universities.

I often hear it said that what distinguishes art museum scholarship from university art history is that where the latter may properly be concerned with theory, social issues, and other concerns that take the scholar away from the object, the art museum scholar—still thought of as an art historian—is properly concerned with material issues, connoisseurship, and with testing ideas against the object itself, narrowly defined. While I believe that art museum scholars can quite properly be concerned with these matters, they can also do much else. That “much else” includes working with objects as tools, exploring human relationships to the “thingness” of the world, and to each other mediated by such “things.” Much of that work must be conducted visually. This reminds us that the urgency of the art museum scholar’s confrontation with art is as much, if not more, a matter of philosophy as it is of art history or history.

Furthermore, enquiry can properly take art museum scholars on intellectual excursions well away from art objects. I offer one example from my own experience. At its president’s initiative Harvard runs five inter-faculty research projects, one of which is called “Mind/Brain/Behavior.” Scholars from all parts of the university are collaborating to explore the workings of the human brain in relation to neuroscience at one end of the spectrum, and social behavior at the other. The initiative is made up of work groups which explore specific problems. I take part in the work group named “Experience of Illness.” Our members are drawn from the Medical School, the School of Public Health, the Business School, the Kennedy School of Government, the Law School, the Divinity School, the English Department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the American Repertory Theater, and myself from the Art Museums. Our particular concern is with chronic pain and suffering, often associated with terminal illness. Our aim is to expand the terms within which such medical conditions can profitably be discussed prior to proposing and implementing revised undergraduate and professional medical education. Our project is now in its third year.

Your first question may well be the same as mine was: What is an art museum curator doing in company such as this? What does an art museum scholar have to offer? Nothing art-historical. We work with patients by means of videotaped interviews. For me the most challenging concerned a terminally ill cancer patient's desire to visit art museums. She took great pains to see every possible temporary exhibition locally, and traveled to various cities to see great art museums, because what was within them to her constituted among the greatest achievements of humankind. A successful museum visit brought her great relief of suffering. This was not only a question of seeing the art, but rather of an entire process of planning and execution with the encounter with the art as the climax. The whole process, including the encounter, was therapeutic. This brings me back to those imprecise terms, “deeper, richer, finer” of the Museum of Fine Art's mission statement, and the assumption of improvement or enrichment of the individual that I mentioned, yet set aside in favor of social responsibilities.

My work with the Harvard “Experience of Illness” work group and “Mind/Brain/Behavior” has opened the door for me to consider and research art museums as therapeutic sites as a matter of both philosophy (related to the therapeutic philosophical concerns of Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum) and practice in ways that were previously unavailable to me. This concern prompts me to explore an analogy between art museums and hospitals. If the education of a curator in a museum is the acquisition of an art, much like the education of a physician or a surgeon in a hospital, so too the character of art museums as sites of refuge, as places of supervised beneficent security, and of therapeutic encounter bears comparison with hospitals. In both cases this is obviously a conceit, not to be pressed further than reason allows, yet my work in this field constitutes art museum scholarship that takes me far from art objects, yet may have ramifications for museum practice (my own at least). It also vindicates the notion that art museum scholarship should not necessarily be confined to immediate museum matters, but has a collaborative part to play in projects of far wider concern, such as medical education and practice. The interdependence of such social and socially constitutive institutions as museums, hospitals and universities is a museum scholar’s proper concern.

While art museum scholars can and should range far from the material object in non-art-historical ways, they can and should turn their attention firmly towards such objects, also in non-art-historical as well as art-historical ways. I have found that art historian colleagues admit that they form an interpretation of a work purely critically, and then seek art-historical justification for their critical insights. When successful this serves to fulfill Michael Baxandall's critical condition of legitimacy, which together with coherence and parsimony, in his opinion discipline art-historical interpretation. Thereby the art historian avoids anachronism and caprice. I have every sympathy with this strategy. However, discipline of interpretation can be philosophically as well as art-historically or historically constituted. Philosophical interpretation has the advantage of being wholly contemporary, addressing the object as currently existing, and currently potent, rather than principally as a subject for the retrieval of earlier meanings. That very currency is to my mind wholly consonant with the urgent and present actuality of objects in art museums as experienced by museum scholar and visitor alike. That urgent and present actuality is the art museum scholar's principal concern.

But where does this all leave historians in relation to art museums? I have purposefully confined discussion to art museums alone, rather than including historical museums, because it strikes me that distinctive considerations apply in the case of the former that admixture with the latter would obscure. That is, there seems, among other things, little point in going over the issues raised by the Enola Gay controversy yet again.[9] Something that historians might bring to art museums, it seems to me, would be a mutually profitable discussion of distinct uses of concepts in both fields. How, for instance, do historians’ conceptions of authenticity in relation to objects differ from those of art museum scholars? Can authenticity in the art museum sense be justifiably overridden by the contrivance of re-creation and even performance by costumed interpreters (such as one finds at, say, Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth, Massachusetts) to achieve a sense of historical evocation? Is the history of art objects for historians invariably a matter of the history of craft practices? Can history be a matter of involutes (as De Quincey defined them) as well as of abstractions? I believe that a profitable conversation between art museum scholars (and let us remember, they include conservators and scientists, as well as curators) and social, economic and even political historians has yet to begin.

In this context the huge question remains of what properly constitute objects of visual interest legitimately considered within art museums. If historians are to propose such objects they must do so in the knowledge that their choices must be consonant—even by means of sustainable irony—with existing contents as customarily defined. This means working within—or at least in demonstrable relation to—conventions that respect criteria to do with human inventiveness, uniqueness (or at least existing within an agreed tolerance of serialization), and quality evaluation. Suffice it to say for now that I believe that choices can be almost infinite, but their justification in each instance must be rigorously established within these and other terms. The multivalency of objects of complex visual interest includes an historical component. It is for historians to discover it by working in collaboration with art museum scholars, always bearing in mind that no such object can reveal all of itself at any one time, either outside an art museum or within one. Let the conversation begin!