assignment - the map of art history
Payal Kapoor
" The map of art history" by Robert .s. nelson
The author speaks about the art history being vis-a-vis the concept of space and time. Seeing the art history wholly there are some areas, which are given more importance than the others. As a matter of fact he says that art historians who are individuals write art history. So it as also infuses their viewpoints.
The author further elaborates on three things to explain the issue of time and space.
- The system of divisions for the PhD dissertations
- Library classification of art history
- Structure of basic survey books
These divisions or classifications or the structure are sometimes
1. geographically based
2. politically based
3. related to culture
4. related to the soceity structure
5. by impact of nationalism ....***
all of the above mentioned points have a time factor related to them ?
so in which time the author of the book and the reader are located becomes important ?
for e.g at what time which class or state is prevalent ? this also has a influence on the classification of the art work or what kind of work is being produced ?
In western europe or america , classifications are related to the cultures. More priority is given to european history, christianity ,western philosphy, and capitalist economies. Same way in the soviet classification , marxism-leninism is the lead category.
Author explains the durkheim-mauss theory in which classification invovles the formation of groups and their arrangement is done hierarchally . reasons for choosing western category according to theory are social, cultural, religious, political, etc
The following lines from the essay make it clear :
This order of fine arts in the LC classification is both perspectival and hierarchical.(38) Like nothing so much as that famous Saul Steinberg drawing,(39) the LC gaze proceeds as if looking across the United States from somewhere in New England, first south, then west. Outside the national borders, the classificatory gaze turns north to Canada and then south. Appearing next in view is Europe, where the exceptions to alphabetical order are telling. Listed first is Great Britain, with which the United States has that "special relationship." Subdivisions within the United Kingdom are also not alphabetical, and certain European countries are relegated to secondary lists. Next, the LC gaze turns toward Asia, but this is Asia seen from Europe, not America, and therefore ordered from east to west. Hence, the first region listed is the "Near East," followed by central, southern, and eastern Asia. Asia might just as logically have been observed from the Pacific coast of the United States, or west to east, yielding a different series: the Pacific Islands, east Asia (ordered as Japan, Korea, and China), Australia, and Africa. Inserting Africa between Asia and Australia, the LC system effectively divorces Australia and the Pacific Islands from Asia.
According to Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, "when created, systems mirror structures of their time and place, but once formed, they have the capacity to interact with the present, by classifying and interpreting phenomena and thereby fostering or hindering social change"
Now the older systems of classifications have their pros and cons. If we consider ourselves a part of modern time where there is progression in every aspect. Better methods of library classifications are coming like the computerization and rapidly evolving information retrieval systems.
Now as we are headed towards the modern times the author says that it shouldn't be that present is merely digitised into the future. So only the techniques shouldn't be modern but the way classifications are done should also change.
Even when adopting the benefits of a modern system, there can be problems as the author states, ' replicating the LC system electronically and thus extending its universal classification to new objects and subjects, or texts and people, will not constitute progress. On the other hand, replacing subject headings by mere word searches will impose its own order on books. Then, the current popularity of metaphorical titles, like mine, will presumably have to give way to prosaic versions, and thus to metonyms, parts of wholes, bytes that can be accessed more readily within vast computer databases.'
The author has following issues regarding the library systems being digitized into the cyberspace world-
Will new classifications simulate aspects of the spatial character of the present system? Or will spatiality utterly dissolve in the void of cyberspace?
The third point that author picks up for explainig the isuue of time and space are the survey books.a Book called History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day. Authored by H. W. Janson with his wife, Dora Jane Janson was first published in 1962.according to the author most important structural problem while considering a survey book is the plotting of time and space.
Considering the book above with its further editions the name of the chapter changes. The first chapter of the book, " Magic and Ritual - The Art of Prehistoric Man." continues through the third edition but becomes "Prehistoric and Ethnographic Art" in the fourth edition of 1991. According to janson the ethnographic or primitive societies show no sign of growth or progress. So they are beyond the case of history.
Nelson states, "The conceptualization of these societies by the Jansons belongs to an older mode of scholarship, a truly primitive inquiry into the "primitive" that has no place in the ethnographies being written by anthropologists at the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps for this reason, the latest edition of 1995 omits the entire discussion of "Ethnographic Art," yielding a chapter that is now devoted solely to the art of the Old and New Stone Ages. But once again, removing offending sections does not fundamentally alter the structure of the argument. Nor does it mask the basic structural problem of how to plot time and space if, as it was once declared, "our interest in the past" is motivated by "a desire to understand the present."
Words like 'ours', 'present', 'past' , and the narrative in which they are used have a shift in their meaning with time.
For the history of art or anything else it following points becomes important –
1. space of the author
2. perspective of the author regarding the subjects being discussed
3. spatial arrangement which the author gives to what is being narrated.
4. who speaks for whom, the location of culture itself, and how or whether it is possible to write history in a global age, to evoke recent studies
Every human being is an observer and also the historian . he writes what he thinks of the art history . according to nelson' "art history engages not in one but many spaces - aesthetic, architectural, urban, social, religious, political, and so on - and thus bears within itself diverse examples of spatial narratives. In effect, churches, theaters, gardens, libraries, museums, colonies, government buildings, as well as objets d'art, manuscripts, and paintings, , are the heterotopias that Foucault wishes to privilege - the actual spaces of daily life that are also symbolic condensations of other spaces and social relations, as well as concrete entities that can be contrasted with the utopias of historical or nationalistic imagination ." .....***
Issues drawn upon by author -
The map of art history is drawn by the modern, the national, and the Euro-American and by their culturally derived senses of order, classification, and system.
Will all mutate or dissolve when the World Wide Web replaces the World Wide Map?
Or will the latter merely remake the former in its and our own image? Time will tell. But also space, society, economy, or order. And, it is hoped, art history.
*** - didn understand
The geopolitics of art historical books as a genre and a classification bears further scrutiny than is possible here, for the connection of art bibliography with nationalism and the constitution of national identity through cultural patrimony, while promising, is complex……….***
While Janson recognizes that the arts of these cultures are "important in their own right," these traditions, nonetheless, do not tell us how we got "to where we are now." In this last quotation, both shifters are important, the "we" that would be instantly questioned today (another shifter) as well as the "now." Janson correctly understands himself to have written a narrative that leads to and culminates in the present, a type of history to which I will return and a philosophical problem for which the linguistic shifter is hardly an adequate accounting…..***
The presence or absence of history (which is, of course, what is being written, but which is said to exist prior to the actual history being read) is one criterion for placement in these narratives. Thus, for a civilization to be without history, when in fact it is only "without Europe," to quote recent articles,(62) becomes adequate justification for marginalization or total exclusion, as in the case of Hegel's dismissal of Africa from his universal history.(63) In a linear narrative, marginalization is accomplished by shifting a civilization out of direct chronological sequence. These temporal anomalies, these deliberate denials of coevalness, these devices for manipulating time and societies are what Johannes Fabian calls allochronism and are important clues to the larger intentions of a narrative.(64)…..***
Born in "liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange or the culture of humanity. . . . cultural diversity is also the representation of a radical rhetoric of the separation of totalized cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity."(95)….***
shiva...@hotmail.com
THE MAP OF ART HISTORY
THIS ESSAY IS ABOUT ART HISTORY BEING CONSTITUTED THROUGH ORDER ,
HISTORY , SPACE AND TIME , AND IN RETURN CONSTITUTING VARIOUS
OBJECTS , NARRATIVES AND PEOPLES. IT CAN BE UNDERSTOOD THROUGH
VARIOUS CLASSIFICATIONS ...... THE THREE WHICH ARE MENTIONED IN THIS
ESSAY ARE :-
A GRID OF FIELDS OF ART HISTORY
A LIBRARY CLASSIFICATION OF ART HISTORY
THE PLOTTING OF TIME AND SPACE IN ART HISTORY SURVEY BOOKS
LIBRARY CLASSIFICATION HAS ORDER BOTH INDIVIDUALLY ( IN A SINGLE ITS
THE WRITTEN DISCOURSE WHICH MATTERS) AND COLLECTIVELY ( ITS THE
BIBLIOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION OF A GROUP OF BOOKS WHICH MATTERS MORE
THAN THE ENTIRE TEXT) - THUS MEETING THE HUMAN NEEDS AND BEING
CONVENIENT FOR THEM TO USE . OPEN STACK POLICIES , LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CLASSIFICATION, COMPUTERIZATION AND RAPIDLY EVOLVING INFORMATION
RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS ARE ALL METHODS WHICH INCULCATES THE BASIC STRUCTURE
OF KNOWLEDGE AND HELPS TO RETRIEVE INFORMATION MORE EFFICIENTLY.
CLASSIFICATION CAN ALSO BE DERIVED FROM VALUES OF DIFFERENT SOCIETIES
AND THEREFORE IT IS DIFFERENT FROM DIFFERENT CULTURES.
HOWEVER FOR SOME , CLASSIFICATION IS ALL ABOUT THE FORMATION OF GROUPS
AND ARRANGEMENT OF THESE HIERARCHICALLY. IT NEED NOT HAVE A
FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN LOGIC BEHIND IT BUT IT SHOULD HAVE CONCEPTS OF THE
PRESENT LIKE SOCIAL , CULTURAL , POLITICAL , RELIGIOUS INORDER TO
CHOOSE TO CLASSIFY.
CLASSIFICATION IS ALSO BASED ON GEOGRAPHICAL ORDERING , DONE BY SUB-
DIVISONS AND INDIVIDUAL STATES THEN ARRANGING THEMSELVES
ALPHABETICALLY .
CLASSIFICATION CAN ALSO BE CONNECTION OF ART BIBLIOGRAPHY WITH
NATIONALISM AND THE CONSTITUTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY THOUGH CULTURAL
PATRIMONY. EG. ENGLISH GOTHIC, ENGLISH RENAISSANCE, ETC. THUS
CLASSIFICATION CRAETES A LINEAR HISTORY FOR THE STATE .
WITH THE COMING UP OF THE ELECTRONIC LIBRARAY NEW CATEGORIES AND
VARIOUS INTERRELATIONS WILL BE POSSIBLE BUT THIS WILL ONLY HAPPEN IF
WE DO NOT MERELY DIGITISE OUR PRESENT INTO OUR FUTURE.
HOWEVER IN CASE OF SURVEY BOOKS , THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE
"CHRONOLOGICAL ANOMALIES" ARE NOT DONE ARIBITARILY NOR IS IT
UNPRECEDENTED BUT IT FOLLOWS A DISCIPLINARY TRADITION. BASICALLY WHAT
HAPPENS IN THE CASE OF THESE ARRANGEMENTS THERE IS A NARRATION THAT
LEADS TO AND CULMINATES IN THE PRESENT AND HELPS IN UNDERSTANDING IT.
HOWEVER AT TIMES THERE IS AN ADJUSTMENT MADE TO TIME AND SPACE OF THAT
STRUCTURE WHICH LEADS TO APPEARANCE OR DISAPPEARNCE OR MOVEMENT OF
CERTAIN CIVILIZATIONS . THIS IS CALLED A LINEAR NARRATIVE , WHERE
MARGINALISATION IS ACCOMPLISHED BY SHIFTING A CIVILISATION OUT OF THE
DIRECT CHRONOLOGICAL SEQUENCE.
SPACE IS ALSO ANOTHER DEVICE IN NARRATION . THERE IS A SPACE OF THE
AUTHOR, THE SUBJECT DICUSSES THE POINT OF VIEW AND A SPATIAL
ARRANGEMENT WHICH THE AUTHOR GIVES TO WHAT HE IS NARRATING. HOWEVER IN
THIS CASE THE AUTHOR MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT GIVE OUT A DIRECT RELATION OF
HIMSELF WITH HIS TEXTS , THERE MIGHT JUST BE CLUES , OR HE MIGHT AT
TIMES WANT TO BRIEF THE READER ABOUT HIS NARRATION.
THUS HISTORY BECOMES A PLATFORM FOR THE OBSERVER TO IMPART TO THE
ACTIONS HE HAS OBSERVED AND RELATE HIMSELF WITH THAT VERY OBJECT.
THEREFORE WE KNOW THAT HISTORY ITSELF STAGES EVENTS AND FORMS PLOTS
AND THE HISTORIAN IS JUST A SPECTATOR LIKE ANYBODY ELSE .
CLASSIFICATION AND MAPPING DEVICES ARE USED FOR DESCRIBING HIERARCHY
AND DIFFERENCES AND THEY EXIST THROUGH ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT TIME AND ITS
NARRATIVE, HISTORY. THEY CLASSIFY EVERYTHING FROM OBJECTS, TEXTS, TO
SCHOLARS OR VIEWERS AND ALL THESE ARE ACCORDING TO THEIR PRINCIPLES.
IN THIS ESSAY THE AUTHOR HAS QUESTIONED WHETHER ANY DIFFERENCE OCCURS
IN ART HISTORY WHEN WE ABANDON A LINEAR HISTORICAL TIME FROM IT OR
WHICH AND WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE TIME THAT SHOULD BE FOLLOWED.
SIMILARLY IF WE ARE REFERING TO THE PAST THEN WHO IS THE ONE WE HAVE
TO REFER TO ? IS IMITATION OF ANOTHER CULTURE A RESPONSE TO
CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTULIZATION . THUS HE CONCLUDES BY SAYING THAT SPACE
TENDS TO BE MORE RIGID, DEAD AND UNDIALECTICAL THAN TIME WHICH HAS
ITS OWN RICHNESS, LIFE AND DIALECTIC.
THUS WE CAN SAY ART HISTORY ENGAGES MANY SPACES SUCH AS AESHTETIC ,
ARCHITECTURAL , URBAN , SOCIAL , RELIGIOUS , POLITICAL EACH HAVING A
DIFFERENT SPATIAL NARRATION. IT IS BASED ON FORM , FUNCTION ,
MEANING , SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT AS WELL AS TIME AND SPACE.
THUS MAP OF ART HISTORY IS DRAWN BY THE MODERN, THE NATIONAL AND THE
EURO-AMERICAN AND BY THEIR CULTURALLY DERIVED SENSES OF ORDER ,
CLASSIFICATION, AND SYSTEM . BUT THE QUESTION LIES WHICH WILL
OVERPOWER - "WORLD WIDE WEB" OR THE "WORLD WIDE MAP" OR WILL THE
"WWM" JUST REMAKE THE "WWW" IN ITS OWN IMAGE ?
TIME, SPACE , SOCIETY , ECONOMY AND ORDER AS WELL AS ART HISTORY -
ANSWER