Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1973.
Typescript (photocopy). Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1981. 21 cm. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on ...print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-239).
Flexible time Shiff, Richard
The Art bulletin (New York, N.Y.),
12/1994, Letnik:
76, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Writing is seen as a materialized, embodied practice operating much like vision. The discursive practices known as art, criticism and history correspond to three different attitudes and modes of ...understanding: art as belief or commitment, criticism as doubt or irony and history as detached observation or dispassionate judgment.
Bradford Collins has assembled here a collection of twelve essays that demonstrates, through the interpretation of a single work of art, the abundance and complexity of methodological approaches now ...available to art historians. Focusing on Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, each contributor applies to it a different methodology, ranging from the more traditional to the newer, including feminism, Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and semiotics. By demonstrating the ways that individual practitioners actually apply the various methodological insights that inform their research, Twelve Views of Manet's "Bar" serves as an excellent introduction to critical methodology as well as a provocative overview for those already familiar with the current discourse of art history. In the process of gaining new insight into Manet's work, and into the discourse of methodology, one discovers that it is not only the individual painting but art history itself that is under investigation. An introduction by Richard Shiff sets the background with a brief history of Manet scholarship and suggestions as to why today's accounts have taken certain distinct directions. The contributors, selected to provide a broad and balanced range of methodological approaches, include: Carol Armstrong, Albert Boime, David Carrier, Kermit Champa, Bradford R. Collins, Michael Paul Driskel, Jack Flam, Tag Gronberg, James D. Herbert, John House, Steven Z. Levine, and Griselda Pollock.
When patterns of commerce between cultures acquire regulation, noncommercial effects often follow, since exchanges of this sort involve identities as well as goods and money. A case in point is the ...Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, passed into law November 29, 1990. It specifies what can be represented as "United States Indian products," as distinguished from all works resembling or imitating them, which might otherwise be sold on the same market. Why did the Indian art market, far removed from what is usually considered "big business," merit its own regulation and protection? Sales of Indian artifacts have actually grown so great that significant commercial interests are at stake; although Native Americans control only a portion of this market, a large number make their living as producers of Indian arts and crafts.
Constructing Physicality Shiff, Richard
Art journal (New York. 1960),
04/1991, Letnik:
50, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Key to the history of the objectification of painting, the brushstroke has served as both the agent of color change-the traditional purveyor of illusion-and the means of affirming painting's ...physicality. Collage techniques have likewise served this dual function. Shiff here examines some of the qualities of "touch," which he locates in subjective response as well as in objective fact, in particular works by Cézanne, Picasso, and Johns, within the general dynamics of surface, image, picture plane and process, depth and flatness, that have proved antecedent to the development of constructed painting.-C. B.
Doubt Shiff, Richard
Doubt,
2008, 2007
Book Chapter
We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have ... Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
Seminar Shiff, Richard
Doubt,
2008, 2007
Book Chapter
James Elkins
Your talk reminded me of a debate that Panofsky had with George Boas, about what Panofsky called atomization. Boas wanted to insist on the particularity of every artwork, a position that ...would result in a collapse of historical categories and judgments; against that Panofsky posited an equally unhelpful extreme, which can be called monism: the doctrine that art is a single enterprise. I think in philosophy Panofsky's atoms are called perfect particulars or abstract particulars. They entail the idea, which is inimical to historical writing, that "properties are just as much ... particulars as the things that have them."
1
You were talking in different ways about these same unattractive options, and so I am led to wonder how far your four categories prophecy, projection, doubt, paranoia might coalesce into one, or multiply into more, and what internal principles might regulate those possibilities.
Richard Shiff
The danger would be that my four attitudes might slide into particularity-
JE
so that instead of four categories you would end up with a humoralism gone berserk, with dozens of humors, or on the other hand with a kind of monism, although it would presumably not be a collapsing of historical periods but of attitudes.
RS
The four I was thinking about for these lectures, and have been thinking about for several years, are genuinely arbitrary: They produced each other. If I wasn't able to get the four down to three, or up to five, it's only because it didn't work out that way. I wasn't aiming for any particular number. Four is plenty; ten might have been unwieldy. I didn't do this systematically and don't have a memory of what came from what. I know that one of them, probably projection, came after the others; prophecy may have been the first because I have long been fascinated by some sentences out of Walter Benjamin. So it's interpretation all the way, not a code or a logic. In the work of many of my postmodernist colleagues, I see overgeneralization that's masquerading as theory; I see unacknowledged absolutism and utopianism, invocations of internal logics and inherent demands-all this, even when the topic is subjectivity or cultural difference. I don't think things can be so certain, so I often seek out particularities and failure points within the general systems. It's a corrective, perhaps a moderating gesture on my part.
JE
In the faculty reading groups leading up to your visits, we spent quite a long while on your distinction among the artistic, the critical, and the historical, as they are made at the end of the essay "Flexible Time."
2
The artistic perspective entails, for example, that "the evolution of classical art proceeds from an original indexical moment," "the spontaneous discovery of representation in the tracing of a shadow," for example, up to the "initiation of a tradition of imitative skill," exemplified by apprenticeship: "as skill gradually increases, authentic expression decreases." The critical perspective is self-doubting: Such writers "focus on the play of artistic means, those specific techniques that modernists devise to bring art back into contact with indexical 'reality,' with the phenomenological immediacy of the subject's engagement with objects. A critical concentration on techniques and procedures often leads to recognition of representational distance even where unexpected and unwanted." The third perspective, the historical, is described in part this way: "Whenever modernists see their art as having a determinate history, modernist indexicality loses its privilege and becomes a representational practice like any other; the indexical ceases to appear as indisputable physical evidence of self-expression and begins to operate more as a linguistic sign"-those "indicating certain interests."
So among the things we were discussing is that there is a certain way of understanding painting whose self-description would correspond with the artistic perspective. The critical perspective, especially when you describe it in terms of irony, the study of indexicality, and a rethinking of history, corresponds very well with what art historians do-
RS
in our age anyway-
JE
including several of us. This makes the historical perspective especially interesting and problematic.
RS
It is almost empty.
JE
Exactly. If an historian believes that the objects of study are linguistic signs, then the objects are not taken at their value, and that, it seems to me, is a very rare condition. Your example in "Flexible Time" is John O'Brian in his capacity as editor of Greenberg's papers; my example, in another context, is Caroline Jones, who sometimes writes from a tremendous historical distance from her subject, which is also Greenberg.
3
RS
The artist-critic-historian distinction is a way of getting around saying who is a modernist and who isn't, or who is political and who is formal (isn't everyone some of each?). A shift in methodological perspective can shake us out of methodological habits and absolutism. Historians who specialize in periods other than modern might ask, "What are you doing? Is this criticism? It isn't history. You went and visited the artist and asked some questions, so where's the history?" So I thought it was important to try to define an attitude that would correspond with what people would accept as history, whether or not this is what historians are actually doing; and I think in our time there aren't very many historians. Academic historians don't do history in the strict sense. They do criticism, they do interpretation; they aren't chroniclers, and they don't allow themselves to be as objective as they could be. This happens because we put so much value on interpretation, subjectivity, and attitude. I have no problem with this convergence of history and criticism. But when we nevertheless pretend to criticize our contemporaries objectively, we end up using the critical perspective as a sledgehammer. I think this is dishonest, because either we aren't operating in the open, critical spirit we profess or we're adopting the same degree of inflexible denial of subjectivity that we're attributing to others.
JE
It seemed to us that the third perspective, the historical, is not only rare but fascinating, and so it presents itself as the final term in a dialectic-although I appreciate the fact that you present all three modes as coexisting possibilities. It seemed to us that they are actually a logical progression and that a person who wrote from the third perspective might not ever go back or ever want to.
RS
I don't think that the historical attitude represents the end of the line. Even though the history category is nearly empty, it's there because there are people like myself who are acknowledged to be historians. We still have the profession, and therefore we have the category, and we may as well see what goes in it, except maybe nothing properly goes in it.
JE
It seems that almost nothing of our own work goes in it-
RS
Well, certain aspects of our work probably belong in that category, even if not the whole. There are times when I am being very dry about what I am doing, but in the end I'm not dry: I feel I can't get away with just presenting the facts, let's say. To present them may be regarded by my profession as having done very little. Maybe a pure historian could write a dictionary, although it's surprising what you find in dictionaries, which are so deeply interpretive.
One of the things that made me think of the three perspectives was seeing academics having arguments with one another, and one accusing the other of being some kind of positivist, when there are no positivists. It's ridiculous, and you shouldn't have to defend yourself against that charge, because people today are so unlikely to be guilty. There ought to be more genuine sources of disagreement. Almost by definition-you couldn't have gotten an academic job if you were a positivist-
JE
at least not in a humanities department-
RS
certainly not. There is a sentence in "Flexible Time" that refers to the historical perspective as one you can fake: You can assume that pose, although you don't believe in it. You can use it to defend yourself: If someone objects to your claims, you can say, "Look, I went to this archive, and that archive, and that's the way it was." You can then make it look as if you had done no interpretation at all. In this case, against the grain, you end up using positivism as a kind of defence, not a crime.
This reminds me of a wonderful five pages or so in Kleist about how we form thoughts while speaking: It concerns things you say because you're not yet at the end of a coherent thought, and you need more time to think, so you introduce some stuff that is meaningless. Your interlocutor has to wait a little, while you continue talking.
4
Research sometimes amounts to this kind of holding position. Once it's in the record, meaningless research assumes its default position, which is to be meaningful if only because it's now in the record, like the delaying filler within a thought.
JE
This is one of my definitions of the talk that goes on in studio art critiques, often because the speakers are trying to be as complex as possible.
5
Margaret MacNamidhe
I wanted to ask a question that relates to your attempt to wrest art historians from their superior position. As you say in "Flexible Time," the jury is in that the subject is embodied, yet art historians pay lip service to the notion: not least because of art historians' certainty that, as you put it in "Realism of Low Resolution," all is "cultural construction"-our "current prejudice, our doxa."
6
For example, you mentioned Judd's use of the release of a new variation on space, and the way it was immediately understood as part of a metacritical narrative, as Krauss's modernist visuality.
So I am wondering about the nature of the changes we need to make as art historians in regard to concepts you're introducing, in keeping with mo
