REGARDING ART AND ART HISTORY

Author(s): Rebecca Zorach

Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 94, No. 4 (December 2012), pp. 487-489
Published by: CAA
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43188773
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REGARDING ART AND ART HISTORY

Rebecca Zorach

The present moment makes claims on me, but the scale of drawn by the quiet. A conversation began about Diego Ri-
events and that of print publication are hopelessly mis-vera. When was the last time you had a seminar with strangers
in front of Diego Rivera? The shouting - loud, annoying
matched. Any discussion of "Occupy," for instance, will be
also created the break in routine that made the opening that
outdated by the time my words come to print. What language
for a slow occupation?1 How do we occupy what we already allowed a conversation to occur.4
occupy? What language, what praxis, is adequate to our oc-
cupations, our preoccupations? Dumb Pathos
Let's hear Robert Motherwell now:
Autonomy
For some time I have been feeling a certain pressure within But I think that the art that is called "art for art's sake" has
the discipline of (early modern) art history: pressure to re- social implications. These might be summarized under the
embrace the autonomy of the artwork, to step back, as T. J. general notion of protest - of protest of what goes on, of
Clark memorably put it in The Sight of Death, from the preci- protest against the suppression of feeling, above all protest
pice of "the parody notion we have come to live with of [art's]
to the falsifications of personal concrete experience. In
belonging in the world, its incorporation into it, its being 'fully
many respects a negative position to be sure, but not
part' of a certain image regime. Being 'fully part' means, it without its pathos or a dumb, obstinate rebellion at how
turns out in practice, being at any tawdry ideology's service."2 the world is presently organized.5
We want (I think) art that opens an alternative to the instru-
mentalizing of all forms of activity, the sense that everything In the juxtaposition of "pathos" and "a dumb, obstinate
in life must be quantified, turned to profit, made to serve
rebellion," the conjunction "or" could suggest equivalence or
some goal. opposition. The terms sit awkwardly together. The pathos
In The Sight of Death Clark suggests that "to show the kinds seems to speak of the terrible futility of the gesture, while the
of critical thinking that images can make possible" is a polit- dumb, obstinate rebellion seems to find force in that very
ical act, one "addressed more specifically [than the work of futility. Pathos dwells, supremely subjective, in an embarrass-
his other books] to the politics of the present." Through ing sincerity of emotion; dumb rebellion is object, mute,
Nicolas Poussin he finds "the local, exploratory, material lifewithout thought - only existence. But when dumb rebellion
of procedure - of praxis - . . . uniquely intense."3 Should it has run its course, what is left but the pathos of describing
make us a little uncomfortable that Theodor Adorno 's idea
(political) desires?
that the best and only way for art to be political is to be
apolitical seems to chime so well, in our present, with Thethe
An-aesthetic
merely apolitical? Last November Facebook users, Tumblr makers, and others
watched John Pike, the pepper-spraying cop of UC Davis,
The Political Apolitical
saunter through art history with his spray can. What was it
I have thought about the dissertation that became my first
that made art such an appealing target for this meme? Was it
book, Blood, Milk , Ink, Gold, not only as a story about the
a twisted homology between that spray can and the spray can
intertwining of gender, value, and politics in sixteen th-cen-
of the graffiti artist? That fuzzy blotch of orange stuff is not
tury France but also as part of a genealogy of ideas about
paint. No, it's a screamingly unpleasant substance that blinds
wealth and the natural world, about surfeit and sufficiency,
as it chokes and burns all mucous membranes in its path. In
that could still touch us today. The idea that Renaissance art
art, it's a desecration. And yet the sitting, reclining, dead,
could be politically relevant changed for me sometime after
dying, even declaiming figures of art history appear always
September 11, 2001. I needed to separate my art history and
already blinded by the cop's casual violence, as if they were
my politics in order to save both. To avoid making my art
just waiting for his arrival to complete their story. Why did
history do my politics for me, I joined activist groups; I went
this meme spread so far, so fast? Why was art such a willing
to protests.
victim? The rapid-fire scenes of casual violence perhaps sug-
Before that, I had occupied politics only with uncertainty,
gest our desensitization to violence itself: the weapon wielded
feeling uncomfortable at protests with how they oversimpli-
so casually, the cop insensible to the pain he is causing,
fied issues and gave vent to narcissism. After 2001, for me the
sadism and masochism intertwined: What is it that art history
act of protest was not so much a hope of being heard as a way
feels like?
of taking bodily responsibility for my convictions; a salve for
a sense of isolation and alienation from American culture at
The Renaissance
large; and a way to shout loudly at it, and with abandon.
"I like the Renaissance part of you also," says a colleag
Occupy Museums whose investments are in contemporary artists of color. Ca
The shouting cleared the room. It was too loud, too annoy-
the study of the Renaissance still help students make sense
ing. But then the shouting stopped. People trickledvital
back,questions today, or does it rather allow them to esc

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488 ART bulletin December 2012 volume xciv number 4

Discussion of an Occupy Museums group in front of a work by Diego Rivera, the Museum of Modern Art, New Yor
2012 (photograph © Noah Fischer)

vested;
them? I think of alterity and intellectual challenge; the workthe abuse of contingent faculty (who constitute the
majority of college teachers and not only are poorly paid and
of defamiliarizing the present and making it not so inevitable;
the cultivation of sensibility, of empathy. precarious but also have no guarantee of intellectual free-
But within what frame? Are we teaching students dom) what ; the
notwarping of research agendas by funders; the shifts
to care about, what not to think about? The literary critic from faculty toward ever-expanding adminis-
in governance
Louis Kampf wrote, in a 1968 essay about college education,
trative ranks; the outsourcing of housekeeping to contractors
"As for the nagging reality of a world desperately inwhose needlabor
of practices are appalling; and, perhaps most dis-
social change, the ordinary liberal education pretendsturbing eitherof all, the fact that our entire way of life is subsidized
that the need does not exist, or that it can be taken care of by increasingly unsustainable student debt. Our hands are
painlessly, as a matter of ordinary academic routine."6 Does not clean.

Renaissance art teach insensibility to the world outside the Not many hands are, and we cannot do more than we can
university walls? do. One thing we might begin to question is how intellectual
When we refine and polish our attentiveness to beauty, and barriers get thrown up to understanding our location in a
especially when we learn to locate it specifically in art objects, particular place, our implication in social relations. What
to think of them as both self-contained and containing our does it mean to think with a sense of embeddedness and not
experience - when we do not acknowledge the effort re- exclusion? To actually occupy the places where we live, un-
quired to screen out the chaos of existence in order to focus derstand their economic and spatial logics, their histories, to
on a perception, but rather let the self-organization of the ask uncomfortable questions?
aesthetic object do it for us, are we avoiding the real issues?
Can we adapt our understanding to comprehend confu- Desire

sions - the presence of beauty in ugliness, and ugliness in
beauty?
Occupy Where We Are
While the 99 percent versus the 1 percent has been a power-
ful and useful rhetoric, it also hides some fissures within the
99 percent. Not all of the 99 percent are equal. Let's be clear.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is raising issues from
which college and university teachers of art history are not
immune: think of the way university endowments are in-
Pepper spray blinds: no dumb protest, no pathos, just scream-
ing pain. "What do they want?" Purposiveness without a pur-
pose. The word Occupy derives from ob (an intensifier or
indication of motion toward an object) and capere , to take.
Through an etymological peculiarity, the vowel "a" becomes
"u," which hints at another Latin root, cupere, to desire. It
makes sense: taking usually intersects desire. But what desires
are marked by the "Occupy" movement? To articulate them is
to have to live in that other pathos, the pathos of risking
failure, of articulating some alternative.

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I never feel more like an art historian than when, after a
student has done her share of exhaustive research, has tried
to interpret an artwork in light of all the readings I have
assigned, I ask her to set that all aside. "Just look," I say. I ask
her to base her observations on the way the artwork resists the
context we can mobilize around it. Given what we know, what
is different here from what we might expect?
Can we hold conflicting things together in our minds and
fight out some kind of modus vivendi for them? Can we see
art as a realm of conflict, turmoil, effort, and struggle? How
could I feel so strongly the need to separate politics and art
history, yet resist just as strongly the separation of politics and
art? If I find my work as an art historian and I find my politics,
can I then start confusing them again?
Rebecca Zorach teaches in the Department of Art History at the
University of Chicago. Her publications include Blood, Milk, Ink,
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Regarding Art and Art History 489
Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance
(2005); The Passionate Triangle (2011); and " Art àf Sou
Experimental Friendship between the Street and a Museum , "
Journal (2011) [Department of Art History, University of Chi
5540 South Greenwood , Chicago , IÜ. 60631 ' rezorach@uchicago
Notes
1. My discussion of slowness, and slow politics in particular, is informed by
my participation in the group Feel Tank Chicago.
2. T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006),
122.
3. Ibid., 30.
4. I am indebted to Brian Holmes's description of events at Occupy
MoMA.
5. Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell , ed. Stepha-
nie Terenzio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 78.
6. Louis Kampf, "The Humanities and Inhumanities," in The American Expe-
rience: A Radical Reader, ed. Harold Jaffe and John Tytell (New York:
Harper and Row, 1970), 143-52, at 146.