Methods and Theories of Art History: 1. Thinking About Theory p5

Methods and Theories of Art History
1. Thinking about theory p5

- What makes theory “theory”?
- Jargon
- Is theory pure, universal, and impartial?
- Positivism, or the theory of anti-theoretical positions
- Thinking through theory
- What’s the difference between theory and methodology?
- Conclusion
2. The analysis of form, symbol and sign p17

- theme:
- iconography: art historians developed it as a distinctive mode of inquiry
- iconology & semiotics: the meaning of works of art-what they mean and
how they produce those meanings (but semiotics is older as a philosophy of
meaning: its roots go back to ancient times)
- formalism: an approach to works of art that emphasises the viewer’s

engagement with their physical and visual characteristics, rather than contextual
analysis or the search for meaning
- word and image: knotty relationship between images and texts in art
historical practice.
- Formalism in art history

- Formalists: all issues of context or meaning must be set aside in favour
of a pure and direct engagement with the work of art.
- formal qualities are the focus: composition, material, shape, line,

colour
- not the focus: its representation of a figure, story, nature, or idea.
- 这种理理念与现在的艺术史相反，but the idea that works of art have a

unique presence, and impact on us, is hard to dismiss.
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- the long history of this idea: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
- argued for the special character of aesthetic experience
- the poet seeks “to go beyond the limits of experience

and to present them to sense with a completeness of which there is no example in
nature” for “as their proper office, [the arts] enliven the mind by opening out to it the
prospect into an illimitable field of kindred representations.”
- the Swiss scholar Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945): highly influential during the
first two-thirds of the twentieth century.
- proposed theories of form and style
- context: writing at a time when sciences and social sciences

were uncovering seemingly immutable laws of nature and human behaviour
- a similar unchanging principle governed artistic style: the

cyclical repetition of early, classic, and baroque phases.
- he likened the functioning of this “law” to a stone that,

in rolling down a mountainside, “can assume quite different motions according to
the gradient of the slope, the hardness or softness of the ground, etc., but all these
possibilities are subject to one and the same law of gravity.”
- the way to explore this dynamic was through rigorous formal

analysis based on pairs of opposing principles (e.g. linear vs. painterly, open vs.
closed form, planar vs. recessive form).
- primarily on Renaissance and Baroque art
- An English painter, critic, and curator, and part of the Bloomsbury Group of
artists and intellectuals Roger Fry (1866-1934)
- with the rise of modern art, formalism found another champion
- artworks have no real connection either to their creators or to

the cultures in which they’re produced. 艺术品和它们的创作者以及⽂文化没有直接
联系
- artwork is irreducible 不不可简化的 to context: the power of art

cannot be “explained away” by talking about iconography, or patronage, or the
artist’s biography艺术的⼒力力量量不不能指通过图像学、赞助⼈人或者艺术家的履履历解释清楚
- his personal and intellectual resistance to the growing field of

psychoanalysis: influenced his opposition to the discussion of content in art.
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- 1912 he organised an influential exhibition of Post-Impressionist
painting in England, and his catalogue essay explained his vision:
- “These artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a
pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite
reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to
find an equivalent for life… In fact, they aim not at illusions but at reality.”
- Henri Focillon (1881-1943), an art historian who worked in France and the
United States
- developed a widely debated theory of formalism: The Life of Forms in

Art (1934), 1992 reprint
- saw artistic forms as living entities that evolved and

changed over time according to the nature of their materials and their spatial
setting. Political, social, and economic conditions were largely irrelevant in
determining artistic form.
- emphasised the importance of the viewer’s physical

confrontation with the work of art.
- The Art of the West in the Middle Ages (1938)
- traced the development of Romanesque and Gothic style in

the sculpture and architecture, emphasising the primacy of technique in
determining artistic form.
- the key to understanding Gothic art was the rib vault, which
“proceeded, by a sequence of strictly logical steps, to call into existence the various
accessories and techniques which it required in order to generate its own
architecture and style. This evolution was as beautiful in its reasoning as the proof
of a theorem… from being a mere strengthening device, it became the progenitor of
an entire style.”
- Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), a prolific and controversial American art

critic who championed ⽀支持 Abstract Expressionism.
- “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), appeared in the Partisan Review, a

Trotskyist Marxist journal
- avant-garde art, unlike the kitschy popular art promoted by

Stalin’s regime, presented the only true road to revolutionary change.
- “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940)
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- the most important modernist painting had renounced
illusionism and no longer sought to replicate three-dimensional space. Each art
form had to develop, and be critiqued, according to criteria developed in response
to its particular internal forms.
- “Modernist Painting” (1961)
- the subject of art was art itself, the forms and processes
of art-making: modern art focused on “the effects exclusive to itself” and
“exhibit[ed] not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also
that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art.”
- Abstract Expressionist painting: focus on abstraction, the

picture plane, and the brush stroke, ideally suited to this perspective
- still declares that modernism was not a radical break from the
past but part of the continuous sweep of the history of art.
- Rosalind Krauss, associate of Greenberg’s, but she broke with him in the
early 1970s to develop her own very distinctive vision of modernism
- stresses formalist concerns, though through post-structuralist

semiotic and psychoanalytic perspectives
- “In the Name of Picasso”, first delivered as a lecture in 1980 at the

Museum of Modern Art
- argues against using biographical or contextual information to

interpret Picasso’s Cubist works, especially the collages, precisely because the
works themselves reject the task of representing the world (or mimesis)
- Picasso’s collages engage in “material philosophy,” that is,

through their form and materials they assert that representation is fundamentally
about the absence of actual presence.
- criticises “Autobiographical Picasso”: the practice of

interpreting artworks primarily in terms of artists’ biographies
- challenges the way that art history ignores “all that is

transpersonal in history-style, social and economic context, archive, structure” and
as an alternative emphasises the potential of semiotics as a concept of
representation. 她挑战了了“艺术史忽视语境”这⼀一想法，转⽽而强调符号学对表达的重要
性
- Iconography & iconology
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- iconography: “the study of images.”
- practice of iconography: identifying motifs and images in works of art
- example: a woman with a wheel in her hand represents St. Catherine
- iconographers: focus on a particular element within an image/focus on the

image as a whole
- the process of identification often requires extensive knowledge of a

culture and its processes of image-making.
- iconology象征⼿手法: picks up where iconography 图像学 leaves off. 图像学

⽤用来破解图像是谁（或什什么），象征⼿手法⽤用来解释为什什么选择这个图像，图像怎样被
选择的
- iconology takes the identifications achieved through

iconographic analysis and attempts to explain how and why such imagery was
chosen in terms of the broader cultural background of the image.
- aim: to explain why we can see these images as “symptomatic” or

characteristic of a particular time
- History: iconography and iconology were developed first by art historians

specifically for the analysis of art.
- iconography:
- the Roman scholar Pliny (AD 23-79), in Natural History
- discuss the subject matter of the images he was

discussing
- sixteenth century: more systematised when iconographic

handbooks that explained different themes and allegorical personifications were
published for the use of artists and connoisseurs.
- Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1615-1696), Lives of the Modern

Painter, Sculptors, and Architects (1672)
- combined elements of his predecessor Giorgio

Vasari’s influential biographical approach with iconographic analysis, as he tried to
explain the literary sources of images.
- Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768)
- laid the foundation for the modern, systematic

approach to iconography in his studies of subject matter in ancient art.
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- Panofsky’s iconography and iconology
- Austrian art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and his students
- developed modern iconographic theory, rejecting what they

saw as a purely formal approach to art in the work of scholars such as Wölfflin
拒绝纯形式主义
- a given period’s art was connected in numerous ways with

its religion, philosophy, literature, science, politics, and social life.⼀一段特定时期
的艺术与其语境脱离不不了了关系
- Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968)
- “In a work of art, ‘form’ cannot be divorced from ‘content’: the

distribution of colour and lines, light and shade, volumes and planes, however
delightful as a visual spectacle, must also be understood as carrying a more-than-
visual meaning.” 形式和内容不不能分离
- Iconography was the method that enabled scholars to

retrieve 检索 content embedded in works of art.
- Studies in Iconology (1939) and Meaning in the Visual Arts

(1955)
- defines three levels of iconographic/iconological

analysis, each with its own method and goal
- 1. Pre-iconographic analysis: the viewer works

with what can be recognised visually without reference to outside sources, a very
basic kind of formal analysis 直接能看懂的图像，不不需要查资料料
- 2. Iconographic analysis: the viewer identifies

the image as a known story or recognisable character 认出某个故事/⻆角⾊色
- 3. Iconological analysis: the viewer deciphers

the meaning of the image, taking into account the time and place the image was
made, the prevailing cultural style or style of the artist, wishes of the patron, etc. 破
解图像的意义
- respond: many art historians have challenged the notion of

the “innocent eye” necessary for pre-iconographic analysis: semiotics and
reception theory have emphasised that viewers come to art as individuals shaped
by their experiences, values, and historical and cultural knowledge.
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- iconography works to retrieve 检索 the symbolic and allegorical
meanings contained in works of art 图像研究是⽤用来检索符号和寓⾔言的意义的
- a symbol: representing an idea or entity
- example: a set of scales is a symbol for the idea of

Justice.
- an allegory: a narrative, using a set of symbols that is widely

recognised to represent an idea or entity
- maybe in the form of a personification (a human or

animal image)
- example: a woman holding a set of scales is an

allegorical figure of Justice.
- Symbols and allegories are culturally specific, and their

meanings are not always evident to every member of that culture, much less
outsiders. 符号和寓⾔言都是具有⽂文化特殊含义的，它们的意义并不不是在这个⽂文化中的
每个⼈人都知晓明⽩白，对外⼈人更更是如此了了
- poetry and other arts have many layers of meaning,

some of which are accessible only to those who are highly trained as artists.
- Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), his theory of significant form influenced

Panofsky’s theory of iconology, a German philosopher fled the Nazis
- images represent fundamental principles or ideas (symbolic

values) in a given culture, so that we can see works of art as “documents” of an
artist, religion, philosophy, or even an entire civilization. 我们可以把艺术品看做
⼀一个⽂文明的记录档案因为图像表达了了⼀一个⽂文化框架下的核⼼心思想
- different from the formalist idea:
- formalist: stripes away cultural meaning
- significant forms: loaded with cultural meaning
- the researcher’s own personal psychology, experience, and

philosophy will shape her interpretation-an interesting precursor to ideas of
reception and identity politics
- Iconography and iconology since Panofsky
- Leo Steinberg (b. 1920), an American art historian, The Sexuality of

Christ (1996)
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- a skilful and imaginative exercise in iconographic and
iconologic analysis
- first identifies Christ’s penis as an overlooked icon.
- demonstrates that in numerous Renaissance images, the

penis of Christ is not only visible but deliberately displayed: the Madonna may
reveal the infant Christ’s genitals to the Magi, or the dead Christ’s hand may fall over
his genitals with subtle emphasis.
- relates this iconography to the theological emphasis on

Christ’s humanisation, his Incarnation as a mortal-and sexual-human being who
unites God and Man.
- Polish art historian Jan Bialostocki (1921-1988)
- used the term “iconographic gravity” to describe the ways in

which images and motifs take on new meanings: concerning the changing meaning
of images over time 旧瓶装新酒，固定的场⾯面，根据时代转变被解读成不不同的意义
- iconographic gravity is particularly prevalent in what

Bialostocki called Rahmenthemen, or encompassing themes, which, like topoi in
literature, persist over time as important subjects in art. (the triumph of Virtue over
Vice, the hero, the ruler, sacrifice, mother with child, divine inspiration, and the
lamentation of the beloved dead)
- Aby Warburg: previously commented on the persistence of

themes and images in the transition from Classical to Christian art 关注图像含义的
传承
- example: the halo, which we typically interpret as a sign

of Christian holiness, was actually used in late Antiquity to indicate princely status.
- rise of the “new” art history in the late 1960s
- a productive critique of iconography developed by new art

historians, working at a time of dynamic intellectual and social movement
- engaged with emerging fields of critical theory, such as

post-structuralism and semiotics, and the history of art history
- began to question the assumptions, methods, and aims

of art history
- emphasised the role of the viewer and social context in

shaping works of art: the work of art wasn’t a neatly packaged message delivered
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by the artist to the viewer, but a complex text that could be read (or misread) in any
number of ways
- criticised iconographic analysis that was limited and

descriptive in nature.
- T. J. Clark dismissed Panofsky’s less skilful

followers as “theme chasers”
- Svetlana Alpers (b. 1936) challenged the

assumption that visual symbols inevitably have or express meaning.
- Alpers & other scholars: Panofsky’s method had been

developed for the analysis of Renaissance art, and argued that this was what it
was best suited to. Panofsky的图像分析法只适⽤用于⽂文艺复兴艺术
- applying this method indiscriminately was to suggest,

falsely, that Renaissance art-especially Italian Renaissance art-provided a universal
model of image-making. 不不加选择地使⽤用这种⽅方法是在错误地暗示⽂文艺复兴时期的艺
术，特别是意⼤大利利⽂文艺复兴时期的艺术，提供了了⼀一种形象塑造的普遍模式
- Debates heated: with respect to seventeenth-century

Netherlandish genre painting
- Netherlandish art historian Eddy de Jongh and others继

续传统图像分析法
- used an iconological approach to discuss such

depictions of everyday life and objects as allegories rich in symbolic meaning
- Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the

Seventeenth Century (1983)反对胡乱使⽤用这种分析法
- countered that Dutch art, unlike Italian art, was

not narrative and symbolic. Dutch painters participated in a distinctive visual
culture that led them to value detailed paintings of everyday life as a way of
knowing the world, not as a way of presenting disguised moralistic messages.
- connected painting to the production of maps,

lenses, and mirrors as expressions of a distinctive Dutch visual culture
- Other scholars 和事⽼老老: argued that both perspectives

on Dutch painting are right-Dutch artists deliberately created open-ended works
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which viewers could interpret symbolically, if they chose to, or experience as a fresh
and penetrating view of the world.
- Practicing iconography and iconology
- Durga defeating Mahisha, nineteenth century
- Semiotics
- Semiotics: the theory of signs
- sign: something that represents something else
- take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures, objects,

even ideas
- can only function as a sign if it is interpreted as a sign: signs

have to be recognised as signs in order for them to function as signs
- based both on cultural knowledge and personal signification
- how a sign has to be recognised as such in order to function

as a sign, and that signs can have multiple meanings
- Semiotics:
- provides a different-and some would say more precise-language and

framework for understanding the multifaceted connections between image and
society and image and viewer, and for understanding not only what works of art
means but how the artist, viewer, and culture at large go about creating those
meanings. 不不仅仅探讨艺术的意义，还探讨艺术家、观众、⽂文化是怎样将这些意义进
⾏行行再创造的
- The founding semioticians: Saussure and Peirce
- the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
- the sign is composed of two parts:
- signifier: the form that the sign takes 形式
- signified: the concept it represents 概念
- the relationship between the signifier and the signified is the

process of signification.
- the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
- the sign is made up of three parts:
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- Representamen: the form that the sign takes (not
necessarily material)
- Interpretant: the sense made of the sign
- Object: the thing to which the sign refers
- the process of interpreting signs tends to generate even

more signs 解读符号的过程会创造更更多的符号
- there’s no automatic or natural connection between the

two-the connection must be constructed. 没有必然存在或者天然存在的联系，联
系必须⼈人为创造
- developed a very elaborate taxonomy of signs (over 59,000

types!), but what’s most helpful to art historians is his identification of three basic
kinds of signs:
- Symbol: the signifier is purely arbitrary or conventional;

it does not resemble the signified. Examples: alphabetical letters, numbers, traffic
signs 单纯⽽而传统的符号，没有被指向的含义
- Icon: The signifier is perceived as resembling or

imitating the signified, or being similar to it in some of its qualities. Examples: a
portrait, a model airplane. 模仿真实含义创造出来的符号
- Index: the signifier is not arbitrary but is directly

connected in some way (physically or causally) to the signified in a way that can be
observed or inferred 推断. 多种不不同的表现但都直指⼀一种符号，⽐比如脚印-⾏行行⼈人，病理理
特征-疾病等
→ overlap between categories: a photographic portrait is both

an index and an icon, because it is a direct trace of the physical presence of the
person (via light) and because it resembles that person.
- Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in

America’ (1977)
- asserted that despite the diversity of seventies artistic

practice-the seemingly “willful eclecticism 折中主义” that encompassed everything
from video to performance to earthworks to abstract painting-these works were
united by their adherence to the terms of the index, rather than traditional
concepts of style or medium.
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- example: Dennis Oppenheim’s Identity Stretch (1975)
transferred his thumbprint, greatly magnified, onto a large field and fixed its traces
in lines of asphalt. → the work “focused on the pure installation of presence by
means of the index.”
- Systems and codes
- Saussure
- signs are not meaningful in isolation, but only when they are
interpreted in relation to each other: the code is the complex of signs circulating
in any given society.
- Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)
- emphasised that the production and interpretation of signs

depends on the existence of codes or conventions for communication.
‘Code’是’sign’的内在逻辑，⽐比如玩具树就属于visual code，代表了了现实中的树
- the meaning of a sign depends on the code within which it is

situated: codes provide a framework within which sings make sense.
Interpreting a text or image semiotically involves relating it to the relevant codes.
- semiotic theory of communication:
- the context: the message refer to the reality that

sender and receiver share.
- the process of a communication exchange: emission-

message-reception-reference-code.
- signs are about communication as a culturally

specific process. 但是这种交流并不不总是成功的
- Interpreting codes and signs
- Peirce: the sign is a process
- question: where does semiosis, the production of signs, stop?
- semiotic drift: If the process of interpreting a sign always

generates another sign (the representamen), then semiosis could potentially go on
for ever.
- Saussure: the sign is a structure
- The Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco (b. 1931)
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- an infinite number of readings is possible for any text (or sign)
is more hypothetical than real.
- building on the work of Peirce, Eco argues that the possible

meanings generated by a sign, although hypothetically unlimited, are in
actuality confined by social and cultural context. 符号的意义理理论上来说是⽆无限多
的，但是实际上会被社会和⽂文化框架所限制。
- example: we can’t interpret a figure of a mother with a

child as the Virgin and Christ Child unless we already, within our culture, know about
Christianity: our knowledge, or lack of knowledge, puts a limit on the range of
interpretations we can create.
- semiosis may also be limited by the (in)competence

of the interpreter (context isn’t a given, it’s produced.)
- the cultural reality that restricts semiosis is a creation of

the community: it may be an arbitrary, pseudo-reality, but its effect is none the
less powerful. 限制含义的⽂文化本身⼜又是社区的产物
-the French semiotician Julia Kristeva (b. 1941)
- one of a group of post-structuralist thinkers associated with

the radical journal Tel Quel in the sixties and seventies
- developed the concept of intertextuality to explore the ways

that texts (or signs) actually refer to each other.
- situates texts in terms of two axes: 1. the horizontal

axis connects the author and the reader of a text; 2. The vertical axis connects the
text to other texts. Shared codes unite these two axes. “every text is from the
outset under the jurisdiction 权⼒力力 of other discourses which impose a universe on
it.”
- signs signify both directly and indirectly, indicated by the terms

denotation and connotation:
- denotation: the meanings of a sign that are obvious or

generally recognised. 玫瑰花=🌹
- connotation: the meanings of the sign that are less obvious,

that are inferred → it’s the interpreter’s job to bring the relevant codes to the
process of interpreting the sign. 玫瑰=爱情；bring the “code” of a knowledge of
English history→roses connote the Wars of the Roses
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- The Russian linguist and semiotician Valentin Voloshinov (1895-1936)
- it is hard to separate denotation from connotation

completely because even the act of deciphering denotations requires
interpretive abilities-the process is, as he insisted, “molded by evaluation…
meaning is always permeated 渗透 with value judgement.”
- The French semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980), Elements of

Smiology (1964)
- although denotative meanings may seem to be the “basic”

or “natural” meanings of the sign, they are in fact themselves produced by the
sign’s connotations: “denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so;
under this illusion, it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the one
that seems both to establish and close the reading), the superior myth by which the
text pretends to return to the nature of language, to language as nature.” denotation
只是假装基础/⾃自然意义，但实际上就是connotation的⼀一部分。
- example: advertising and photography, a critique of the

notion of the innocent eye or pre-iconographic interpretation.
- Are works of art puzzles? Are art historians detectives?

- Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939), “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and
Scientific Method” (1980)
- Morelli and Freud, like the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes,
were masters of the overlooked detail, the small but telling clue that unravels the
mystery. (Ginzburg called this a “lower” empirical methodology and compares it
unfavourably 不不适宜地 to scientific method. Also this empirical approach runs
exactly counter to formalism, which would claim that there’s nothing to be
deciphered in looking at a painting, only something to be experienced.)
- Giovanni Morelli (1861-1891), an Italian doctor and art historian, developed

a method of attribution based on the theories of scientific classification he had
studied as a medical student.
- he believed that what truly set artists apart from each other was not
the dramatic, eye-catching features of their work, but minor things such as the
rendering of earlobes.
- James Elkins (b. 1955)
- because this deciphering mode has become such a basic art-

historical practice, art historians tend to focus on works of art that can be treated
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this way: “We are inescapably attracted to pictures that appear as puzzles, and
unaccountably uninterested in clear meanings and manifest solutions. The discipline
thrives on the pleasure of problems well solved, and it languishes in the face of the
good, the common, the merely true, the skilful, the private, and above all, the image
that refuses to present itself as a puzzle”.
- If art historians are detectives, it’s because we choose to be.
- Semiotics and art history
- Peircean & Saussurean semioticians 

- semiotics might be a very productive approach to the
interpretation of art
- Czech linguist Jan Mukarovsky (1891-1975), “Art as Semiological

Fact” (1934)
- “the work of art has the character of a sign.”
- apply Saussure’s method to the analysis of the visual arts,

although where Saussure distinguished between signifier and signified, Mukarovsky
distinguished between the “sensuously perceivable ‘work-thing’” and the
“aesthetic object” existing “in the consciousness of the whole collectivity.”
- French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Signs

(1960)
- applies a Saussurean model to the phenomenology of

perception (phenomenology is the study of experience)
- connected painting and language because paintings are

composed of signs, assembled according to a “syntax or logic” just like language.
- the American art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996), “On Some

Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Arts: Field, Artist, and Society”→provocative
but not a blueprint for art-historical semiotics.
- explored the idea of semiotic analysis in the visual arts.
- he links the formal analysis of works of art with the

examination of their social and cultural history.
- focuses on the relationship between a painted image and

the surface (ground) on which it is painted, and the issue of whether or not the
image is framed in any way. 绘画的图像与物质的表⾯面之间的关系；图像是怎样被框
住的
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- exploring how different devices of framing enable
artists to manipulate the signs of the image: to create meanings, figures can be
positioned in various ways, enlarged, elevated, lowered, etc. in relation to the
frame. 图像被以不不同的⽅方式放置——放⼤大，缩⼩小，升⾼高，降低等（根据框框的位置）
- The American scholar Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French

Painting of the Ancien Régime (1981)
- Bryson explores the language-like qualities of art, as well as

art’s relation to actual written language.
- the openness of the artwork: an image is not a closed sign,

but open, with multiple overlapping sign systems at work in the image and in
the cultural environment. 图像的符号是开放式的，有不不同体系的符号在运作
- semiotics opens up a vision of art as a dynamic force in

society, for he sees that sign systems “circulate” through image, viewer, and
culture.
- the French art historian Louis Marin (b. 1931)
- addressed the challenges inherent in using semiotic theory,

which had largely developed in language, to interpret the visual arts. 把符号理理论应
⽤用在艺术史中的潜在问题与挑战
- focused in part on the issue of deixis直示系统, the “direction”

of an utterance. Every utterance exists in space and time: it is produced by a
speaker (sender) and sent to a listener (receiver) in a particular context that brings
them together. The deictic traits of an utterance include things such as personal
pronouns, verbs, adverbs of time and place. So how do we translate this to
works of art-especially history paintings, like Poussin’s The Arcadian
Shepherds (c. 1630), which don’t seem to address anyone in particular?
- except for the physical existence of the painting, and the fact
that we’re looking at it, nothing within the image tells us about its situation of
emission and reception: it does not address the viewer (with, say, a figure who looks
out of the picture). 图像并不不会主动cue观众
- As viewers, we seem simply to catch sight of the figures in the

painting going about their business, as if they don’t need us in order to perform their
story: in this way, the painting conceals its enunciative 表明的 structure. 画作掩
盖了了清晰的框架 And yet, the concealment of enunciative structures (and their
reappearance as representation) is the painting’s very subject.
16
- example: a shepherd traces the words Et in Arcadia
ego on a tomb, words that address the shepherds but in an open-ended way, for
the verb is missing from the phrase—“I too in Arcadia” is the literal translation of the
Latin.
- reveals a Jackobsonian model of communication as the

subject matter of the painting, with the painter (or viewer) occupying the position
of the linguist who constructs a model. 画家/观众⽤用语⾔言框架来建构模型
- Marin’s essay is doubly important because it reminds us that

theory is not a one-way street: it’s not just that theory is applied to the
interpretation of art, but that the interpretation of art can alter our
understanding of theory. 理理论并不不是单⽅方向的：不不仅仅是理理论被⽤用来解释艺术，更更
是通过解释艺术我们对理理论的理理解会发⽣生改变
- Dutch scholar, a literary critic, Mieke Bal (b. 1946)
- the work of art is an event-one that takes place each time

an image is processed by a viewer. 艺术品是⼀一个事件——每当⼀一个图⽚片被观众看
到就造成了了艺术品事件的发声
- In this way the work of art is an agent, too, an active

producer of the viewer’s experience and ultimately, of the viewer’s subjectivity. 艺术
品积极地创造观者的观看经历和观者的主观性
- the established iconographic approach in art history

emphasises what is common to images-the history of types, for example-rather
than what is distinctive about a particular image and a particular viewer’s way of
approaching that image.图像分析法强调了了所有图⽚片的共通点⽽而不不是特殊点
- Although iconography may claim to have been developed

uniquely for visual images, it may, in fact, ignore their unique qualities. 图像分析法忽
视了了每个图⽚片的独特性
- Practicing semiotic art history
- The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux
- Do we “read” works of art?

- the idea of “reading” works of art comes from semiotic theory, which often
uses terminology based on language to discuss the process of interpretation
- in semiotics:
17
- language has become the model form of communication (visual
arts, gesture/movement/dance, and music are other forms)
- a text is an assemblage of signs constructed (and interpreted)

according to the rules or conventions of a particular medium or form of
communication.
- a novel is one kind of text, a poem another
- Thus a work of art can be referred to as a text, and the

systematic process of interpreting that work according to the rules governing that
kind of text can be referred to as “reading.”
- Mieke Bal, Louis Marin, Norman Bryson: have developed this idea of
reading as a very specific semiotic methodology for interpreting visual images
- aim: to engage more fully with the visual nature of the image.
- confronting a work of art requires more than just simple, direct

apprehension: it requires reading
- Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001)
- proposed the idea that pictures are “read,” because

pictures are not natural or self-evident, but created according to a “pictorial
language” that must be deciphered. 绘画有绘画语⾔言，所以图像可以被“阅读”
- believed in the art historian’s ability to fix the “real

meaning” of images. (unlike semioticians who maintain the openness of the
signifying process)
- Word and image

- What is the relationship between texts and images?
- long history: the Greek philosopher Aristotle discussed the parallels

between poetry and painting, and today we still quote the Roman poet Horace’s
elegant phrase ut pictura poesis- “as is painting so is poetry” (Ars Poetica).
- Mieke Bal
- “Words and images seem inevitably to become implicated in a

‘war of signs’ (what Leonardo called a paragone)… Each art, each type of sign or
medium, lays claim to certain things that it is best equipped to mediate, and each
grounds its claim in a certain characterisation of its ‘self’, its own proper essence.
Equally important, each art characterises itself in opposition to its ‘significant
other.’”
18
- images also give rise to texts (art historical texts)
- Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition

(1991) maps out the tensions between word and image in the practice of art
history.
- with the changes in the discipline that began in the late

sixties, “new” art historians accused more traditional art historians of neglecting
the word (or theory) in art history, while the traditionalists accused the new art
historians of neglecting the image. 新⼈人批评旧⼈人忽视了了⽂文字信息，旧⼈人批评新⼈人忽
视了了图像信息
- W.J.T Mitchell
- likens word and image to two countries that speak different

languages but have a long history of contact and exchange. The idea is neither to
dissolve these borders nor to reinforce them, but to keep the interaction going.
- Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986) and Picture Theory:

Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994)
- both visual and verbal representations have an

inescapable formal uniqueness as processes of representation, even though
they are often linked to each other through previous artistic practice and social or
political contexts.
- Some of these tensions were heightened because several of

the key practitioners of theoretically informed art history actually came over from
literature studies (Mitchell himself, Bryson, Bal)⼀一些重要的理理论⻆角⾊色是从⽂文学系转过
来的，所以这种tension升级了了
- the development seemed to some like “colonization by

literary imperialism” ⼀一些⼈人感觉艺术史被⽂文学殖⺠民了了
- unresolved problem: the discipline’s internal critique is

ongoing and because these questions lie at the very heart of the discipline.
- Michael Camille
- directly address these relationship in the works of art they

study (medieval illuminated manuscripts)
- James Elkins
- art history’s words are always doomed to failure on some

level, because there are aspects of images that are beyond explaining.
19
- Conclusion
- Where and how the meaning is to be found is hotly contested
- formalists: it lies only within the work
- iconographer and semioticians: within the work as it exists as part of,

and in dynamic interaction with, larger contexts.
3. Art’s contexts p46

- The history of ideas
- Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997)
- “The Pursuit of the Ideal”
- there are two factors have shaped human history in the

twentieth century: the development of the natural sciences and technology; the
Russian Revolution and its aftermath-totalitarian tyrannies of both right and left and
the explosions of nationalism, racism and, in places, religious bigotry 盲从.
- History of ideas: focus on philosophical concepts, scholarly debates,

political movements, or even popular ideas.
- Jerome Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (1972)
- relates Greek art to philosophy and cultural values
- sculptures such as the Charioteer of Delphi, in their style and

iconography, embody Greek ideals of restraint and responsibility
- “Not only does it celebrate, like the Pythian Odes, a victory won at
the festival games at Delphi, but the this which it conveys is a manifestation of
Pindaric aret… the ‘innate excellence’ of nobles natures which gives them
proficiency and pride in their human endeavours but humility before the gods.”
- Linda Henderson, Duchamp in Context (1998)
- examines how the scientific developments of the early twentieth

century, such as wave theory and the fourth dimension, affected Duchamp’s work.
- Marxist and materialist perspectives on art

- Karl Marx (1818-1883), economic theorist, philosopher, revolutionary
activist
- Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), collaborator of Karl Marx
20
- Critical Marxism (or Western Marxism): encourages the production of non-
dogmatic, open scholarship → the tradition of Marxist thought that has been most
productive for art history
- The critique of capitalism and historical materialism
- Das Kapital (publication begun in 1867)

• •

• • • •• • •• • •

• • • • •
- the fundamental condition of capitalist society is the
• • • • • • • • • • • •
exploitation of the worker’s labor by the capitalist 资本社会的本质就是资本家剥

削员⼯工
- the worker does not receive full value for his labor because
the free, unregulated labor market does not oblige the capitalist to pay the worker
full value for his labor.
- Result: class struggle
- Communist Manifesto, 1848
- “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of

class struggles.”
- two major classes under capitalism: the bourgeoisie (capitalist

class) & the proletariat (working class)
- capitalists: own the means of production (factories, mines,

financial institutions, etc.)
- proletariat: own only their ability to work and so have no

option but to work for the capitalists
- each class has a consciousness, a way of seeing the world

determined by its economic position
- vision of social structure: the economy is the base, and it

determines the superstructure, the forms of the state and society. 经济基础决
定上层建筑
- Ideology and cultural hegemony
- ideology: any coherent and systematic body of ideas 意识形态也就

是⼀一套系统观点的集合
- the ideology of an individual, a group, or a culture
21
- Marx: ideology is part of the superstructure of society. Art
is an “ideological form” that dominant classes may use to perpetuate 保持 class
relations that benefit them-or that revolutionaries may use to undermine the power
of the dominant class 艺术是⼀一种意识形态的表达⽅方式
- example: an impressive portrait of a factory owner, a

grand presidential palace, or a cartoon showing triumphant worker-revolutionaries
are all ideological artworks in this sense
- 1920s and 1930s the failure of the workers’ movements in

Europe and North America to overthrow capitalism: Why capitalism was able to
survive if it was so exploitative?
- Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Italian scholar, journalist, theorist, and

activist: Prison Notebooks
- theory of cultural hegemony: influence or authority gained

via cultural practices rather than by law or force-to explain how the bourgeoisie
continued to dominate society. 资本家通过⽂文化影响(建⽴立规则)来巩固、统治社会，所
以资本主义才继续下去
- dominant groups in society maintain their control by securing

the “spontaneous consent” of subordinate groups, who willingly participate in their
own oppression
- spontaneous consent: general direction imposed on social life

by the dominant fundamental group
- The dominant class asserts its cultural hegemony by

persuading subordinate classes to accept its moral, political, and cultural values,
convincing them that these values are right, true, or beneficial to them even though,
ultimately, these values benefit only the dominant classes. 资产阶级通过建⽴立对⾃自⼰己
有利利的价值观来说服⽆无产阶级听从⾃自⼰己
- The working class can achieve its own cultural hegemony,

but to do that it must build up a network of alliances with other disempowered
groups, because it doesn’t have the resources to achieve cultural hegemony on its
own. ⽆无产阶级只有形成团体⼒力力量量后才有可能建⽴立⽂文化霸权
- Louis Althusser (1918-1990), French Marxist theorist
- ideology was as important as the economy in determining

social forms 意识形态和经济同等重要
22
- capitalist society perpetuated itself by two means: direct
oppression and ideology
- distinction between the Repressive State Apparatus

(government, the military, the police, the courts, prisons) and the Ideological State
Apparatus (education, religion, the family, political parties, the media, and culture)
- Marxism and art
- The German Ideology (1845-1846)
- art is not something produced by great geniuses in ways

almost beyond understanding, but is simply another form of economic
production. (contrary to Kant & Hegel’s concept of distinctions between art and
labor)
- egalitarian idea: every human being has some artistic ability.
- acknowledged the complex relationship between art and

society: believed in the superiority of Greek art but also saw many failings, from a
socialist perspective, in Greek society.
- Georg Lukács (1885-1971): Hungarian scholar, revolutionary &

philosopher & literary critic, clashed frequently with the Comintern because of his
unorthodox views
- History and Class Consciousness (1923)
- developed Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism:

things can be understood in capitalist society only in terms of their exchange
value in money, commodities, or symbolic capital (e.g. prestige).
- commodity fetishism conceals every trace of its

fundamental nature: the relation between people
- Art is the only way to counter these process of

commodification and reification 物化, for art mediates between the individual
and totality because it inherently relates to both (united the exploration of a
perfectly observed exterior world and an inner truth)艺术能够化解商品化和消费
的影响，因为它作为中介连接了了个⼈人和集体
- example: a portrait depict a particular person &

also say something about the human condition
23
- Like the commodity, art relies social relationships,
but it does so in a way that enriches rather than estranges us. 艺术就像商品⼀一
样物化了了社会关系，但是它充实了了我们⽽而不不是让我们彼此疏远
- Theodor Adorno (1903-1969): influenced by Lukás, member of the

Frankfurt School
- theorised the ways in which art can be used to pacify and

co-opt the working classes and to spread the dominant ideology.
- The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (1944)

written with Max Horkheimer:
- capitalist society produces cheap, standardised art

that deadens people’s minds and makes them focus on fulfilling false needs, such
as the desire for consumer goods, rather than their true needs for freedom, social
equality, creative outlets, and the opportunity to fulfil their human potential. 资本社
会通过廉价产品麻⽊木⼯工⼈人阶级
- “They make common cause with the world

against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of
commodities, their own conversion into appendages 附件 of machinery, is for them
a mirage 幻象 of closeness.” 通过商品来填补空虚的⼼心灵以为⾃自⼰己内⼼心充盈了了
- Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), “The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)
- art cannot be separated from its environment, especially when

it comes to issues of technology or social class
- insightful analysis of photography and film as art forms,

tracing their effect on perception, and therefore, social relations.
- artworks once had an aura derived from the presence of the

original, but the potential for mass reproduction in photography and film eliminates
that aura.
- Removed from ritual, art becomes politics, but of a

particular kind: “The film makes the cult value raced into the background not only
by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the
movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-
minded one.” 观众是评论者，但是同时也是没脑⼦子的评论者，但评论内容不不会被引起
重视
24
- Fascism would play on this sense of alienation in its drive
to subjugate people, so that the working class would “experience its own
destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” 担忧法⻄西斯会利利⽤用这种疏离感
让被压迫者对⾃自⼰己的毁灭体会到审美的愉悦
- Guy Debord (1931-1994), The Society of the Spectacle (1967),

activist and artist, part of the Situationist International, a network of avant-garde
artists that took shape in 1957 and sought to break down the barriers between art
and life, engaging in aesthetic actions that would precipitate revolution.
- in contemporary capitalist society “The entire life of societies

in which modern conditions of production prevail announces itself as an immense
accumulation of spectacles.” 现代社会是巨⼤大的景观的堆积
- the dominant classes control spectacle, even as all other

expression and forms of representation are banned. 领导阶级控制了了景观，其他的表
达被禁⽌止
- in this context spectacle is inseparable from the

State, and it works to reproduce social divisions and class formations.
- he questions the extent to which art is complicit with

capitalist power structures or can work to undermine them.
- Materialist and Marxist art history
- the focus of materialist art history: art’s modes of production
- art is the product of complex social, political and economic

relationships, not something labeled “artistic genius.”
- mid-twentieth century: “the social history of art” movement
- focusing on the role of art in society rather than on

iconography or stylistic analysis
- Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, first published in

1951
- a survey of art from the “Stone Age” to the “Film Age”,

sweeping generalisations and broad scope, atypical of this school of art history but
an inspiration for later materialist art historians
- Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy

(1988)
25
- sees paintings as “fossils of economic life” instead of great
achievements of the Renaissance
- the monetary worth of paintings: contractual agreements

between patron and artist that dictated the use of precious materials such as gold
leaf or lapis lazuli. 作品的⾦金金钱价值，画作中⽤用到的宝⽯石与⾦金金箔等
- the ways in which artists drew on mathematical systems:

gauging 测量量, also used by merchants艺术家使⽤用的数学体系
- Art becomes not the mysterious manifestation of genius, but

an outgrowth of complex interactions between artists and patrons in the
context of a particular cultural environment.
- Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market

(1988)
- she disregards Rembrandt’s style, iconography, and the (often)

troubled attribution of his works
- focuses on the organisation of his studio as a business for

the production of paintings and the strategies he used to market those
paintings.
- Rembrandt was unique not only for his artistic skill but
also because he used his paintings as a way to pay his debts: the paintings
functioned essentially like currency.
- in keeping with the entrepreneurial spirit of Dutch

society at the time, even if it ran counter to the established system of artist-patron
relationships.
- respond of readers: many were shocked because they

expected Rembrandt to be treated as an artistic genius not as a marketing genius.
- T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848

Revolution (1973)
- pay attention to the relationship between art and ideology
- argues that the lack of visual clarity in works such as Burial at

Ornans (1848) represents Courbet’s rejection of the political order and his
involvement with socialist politics.
- visual reading & extensive analysis of texts written by

the artist and critics
26
- Michael Camille
- images are not only ideological in a secondary sense, as a

reflection of spoken or written texts.
- Images are directly ideological in themselves and actively

make meaning, for ideology is “a set of imaginary representations masking real
material conditions.”
- The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art

(1989): explores the ways in which Church authorities tried to suppress the
practice of idolatry 偶像崇拜 while simultaneously promoting their own
approved visual images.
- Allan Wallach & Carol Duncan
- examining the ideologies that shape the practices of

museums, galleries, academies, and other organisations
- analysed museums as places where social hierarchies are

played out and reinforced.
- Duncan: the museum becomes a ritual space: “it is the visitors

who enact the ritual. The museum’s sequenced spaces and arrangements of
objects, its lighting and architectural details provide both the stage set and the
script.”
- Annie E. Coombes
- examined the history of British museums as places where

intertwining ideologies of race, colonialism, and nationalism were articulated
for the general public.
- Stephen F. Eisenman & Thomas Crow
- edited a survey, Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History

(2002), focuses on the relationship between art and ideology
- discuss class, gender, race, and the relationship between

popular and elite culture in the visual arts.
- made materialist and Marxist art history available to a

broader audience. 下⾯面这个⼈人写的书也是，推⼴广了了⻢马克思艺术史和唯物主义思想
- Richard Brettell, Modern Art, 1851-1929: Capitalism and

Representation (2000)
27
- explores the works of modern artists such as Gauguin and
Picasso in relation to colonialism, nationalism, and economics.
- Practicing Marxist art history
- Jacques-Louis David, The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon

and the Coronation of Empress Josephine (December 2, 1804), 1806-1807.
- Judith Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Division of the Barrios/
Chavez Ravine, 1976-1983.
- Feminisms
- A brief history of the women’s movement
- late eighteenth century: the modern women’s movement
- Enlightenment philosophers argued for the equality of all

human beings.
- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

(1792)
- challenged the idea that women, as a group, were in

any way inferior to men
- if women were less capable than men, it was only

because they were poorly educated and had limited opportunities, not
because of any inherent or natural difference in ability.
- nineteenth century: focused primarily on the issue of suffrage, the

right to vote, for women
- early twentieth century: women won the right to vote in most

European countries and the United States (victory!!!)
- the Depression and Second World War: a lull 间歇 in feminist

politics and scholarship
- one exception: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own,

published in 1929, discusses the challenges facing women writers.
- 1950s: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953) & Betty

Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) began to spark debate about women’s
issues-“the problem that has no name”, at least among middle-class women
28
- Early 1960s: the liberation movements in African and Asian
colonies, the American Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement
reawakened (the Second Wave of the feminist movement).
- the growth of vibrantly feminist scholarly and artistic traditions

as well as political activism.
- Third feminists: young feminists who have grown up with feminism

as part of their world
- The beginnings of feminist art history
- feminist art history: focuses on women as artists, patrons, viewers,

and/or subjects.
- feminist study: must explicitly address the issue of female gender
- Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women

Artists?” (1971)
- answer 1: the surprise is not that there haven’t been great

women artists, but that there have been any women artists at all, given the
obstacles they have had to confront.
- example: women in Europe weren’t allowed to study

from the nude model-a process that was a fundamental part of artistic training from
the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries
- answer 2: maybe art historians haven’t been able to find

great women artists because the way art historians go about defining and
looking for greatness excludes women artists.
- “genius” is a historically and culturally determined

concept, and that art is not “a free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed
individual,” but “a process mediated and determined by specific and definable
social institutions.”
- men aren’t naturally better at art than women; they

have just had more opportunity to fulfil the culturally determined requirements for
artistic genius.
- conclusion: the point of feminist art history is not simply to

add in women artists but to challenge the paradigms, the ways of thinking,
that are at the heart of the discipline.
29
- Griselda Pollock, a leading feminist art historian, addressing
ideologies of gender in the representation of women and in women’s work and lives
as artists.
- with Rozsika Parker: Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and

Ideology (1981)
- presents a different way of doing art history, for the

authors acknowledge the contribution to their work of a feminist art history
collective in which they participated.
- ironic title: “old mistresses” doesn’t have quite the ring

of “old masters.”
- draw on theories of ideology developed in Marxism and

Cultural Studies to examine the attitudes toward women artists in art history
- consider how women artists such as Mary Cassatt

negotiated their own status as women and how they represented femininity.
- Current issues in feminist art history
- first feminist art historians: concerned with the recuperation 复原 of

women artists and with some fundamental revisions to art history’s paradigms
- feminist art historians today: expanding the goals of art history in

new ways
- Patricia Mathews, The Subjects of Art History (1998): three

representative practices of recent feminist art history, which are in continual flux and
continual interaction with each other.
- recuperating the experience of women and women artists
- critiquing and deconstructing authority, institutions, and

ideologies and/or examining resistances to them
- rethinking the cultural and psychological spaces traditionally

assigned to women and consequently re-envisioning the subject self, particularly
from psychoanalytic perspectives. 修正⼼心理理分析
- Alice Walker (b. 1944), “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”
- discovering the history of black women’s art requires

looking at forms we don’t usually consider as art-such as quilts, church singing,
and gardens-because black women historically were denied access to education
30
and training as artists ⿊黑⼈人⼥女女性会通过织毯⼦子、唱圣歌、整理理花园的⽅方式进⾏行行艺术表
达
- Describing a quilt made by an “anonymous” African-American

woman in Alabama, Walker writes poignantly 深刻地 of “an artist who left her mark
in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in society
allowed her to use.”
- Patricia Mainardi, Rozsika Parker, and Griselda Pollock: confronted

the gender nature of the division of art and craft (or high art and low art)
- the assumption: what women make is “craft” and what men

make is “art”
- a number of studies in both art history & anthropology:

discussed the artistic practice of women in such media as textiles and ceramics,
which were not formerly considered wothy of serious attention.
- Norma Broude and Mary Garrard: three volumes of essays
- introduction to the first volume: 1982
- emphasize feminist art history’s examination of the

ideologies that shape the production of art and of art history, working to exclude
women.
- introduction to the second collection: 1992
- notes the expansion of feminist art history through its

engagement with critical theory, and addresses newly defined areas of interest
such as the body, the gaze, and the social construction of femininity.
- the third collection: specifically on feminist artists of the 1970s
- provides a rich documentary history as well as art

criticism and history that takes the politics of this art fully into account
- Garrard’s own book: on Artemisia Gentileschi→a landmark

study in feminist art history, recuperated the work of this seventeenth-century
female artist through biographical and psychoanalytic readings
- Other focuses: how multiple and intertwining identities-races,

class, family, age, sexual orientation, etc. -help to shape both women’s artistic
production and the representation of women.
- engagement with theories of psychoanalysis
31
- with deconstruction
- with post-structuralism
- envision a more fragmented and multiple subject situated

within and shaped by not only history and culture but also by the psyche and
individual experience instead of a stable identity for artists
- investigate the “subject effect”, recognising that the subject

isn’t natural or whole but is produced through discourse, always gendered and
shaped by power relations in society.
- women of colour & lesbians:
- examining the ways in which race and/or sexual orientation

affect artistic production and reception
- the cultural critic bell hooks: demonstrating the

common cultural ground of a wide variety of visual images
- Freida High Tesfagiorgis: the “semi-invisible” status of

African-American women artists, marginalised simultaneously by feminist art
historians, who focus on the work of Euro-American women, and by African-
Americanist scholars, who focus on the work of African-American men. She calls
for a black feminist art history and art criticism that would not only work to uncover
the lives and work of African-American women artists, but would also challenge
the paradigms that allow them to remain invisible. ⾮非裔美国⼥女女性被忽视
- the interrogation of the female body as the object for the male gaze
and as a vehicle for expressing and reinforcing patriarchal values
- association of women with nature rather than the “higher”

sphere of culture
- Amelia Jones, study of early 1970s body art
- body art has a particular power to engage the viewer-

and that feminist body art, like the work of Hannah Wilke, is potentially deeply
political in the ways that it challenges the construction of women’s subjectivities.
- Johanna Frueh: study the aesthetics and erotics of older

women’s bodies, stemming from her own experience as a midlife body-builder and
professor
32
- “beauty is not natural to anyone, for people create or
negate their beauty” by various means, and asks why the culture at large so
consistently denies beauty to older women.
- Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A

Photographic History (2002)
- examines the ways in which photography extended

the Western fascination with black women’s bodies, as representations of the
exotic, the primitive, or the maternal, and in the context of scientific experimentation
and the development of race theory.
- examine the ways in which black women have

reclaimed 抗议 photography and the representation of their bodies (Josephine
Baker & Renée Cox)
- Essentialism and feminist art history
- Feminist philosopher Diana Fuss: defines essentialism as a “belief in

the real true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the
‘whatness’ of a given entity.” 认定有⼀一个“同”的东⻄西在引领所有事物
- essentialist arguments: can be used to support a variety of

positions
- the universality of the female condition, an essentialism that

forges a sense of connection across time and space→such essentialist connections
can be, in the moment, creatively productive, politically useful, or culturally fulfilling
- others: emphasise that a category or identity such as

“woman” is determined by cultural discourse, not by a “natural” or “essential”
existence, some going so far as to assert the impossibility of cross-cultural
understanding.
- retain a sense of historical and cultural specificity
- keep in mind that women artists may share as much or more

with male artist of their own culture than with women artists of other cultures and
times.
- be aware of aspects of women’s experience that are

continuous-similarities that are there not because of some “essential” or innate
characteristic, but because of the persistence of sexist institutions, beliefs, and
practices.
- Practicing feminist art history
33
- Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and her Maidservant Slaying
Holofernes, circa 1625
- Mask, Mend people, Sierra Leone, Early Twentieth century
- Sexualities, LGBTI studies and Queer Theory

- different terms:
- feminism: particularly concerned with the social construction of

women’s identity
- Gender Studies: concerned with the social construction of all gender

identities and experiences
- Gay and Lesbian Studies: developed in the 1970s as a response

both to feminism in the academy and to the lesbian and gay liberation movement
- itself sparked by the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, when a

multicultural crowd of drag queens, transsexuals, gay men, and working-class
lesbians fought back against a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in lower Manhattan
- provides a forum for recuperating the forgotten or concealed

histories of gay and lesbian people, cultures, and institutions
- this term is being supplanted by the terms Sexuality Studies

or LGBTI Studies, which are more inclusive
- Queer Theory: has a political & a scholarly tradition
- emerged from and in reaction to the Gay and Lesbian Studies

movement and the AIDS epidemic, calling for a radical reconfiguration of
scholarship and politics and an examination of all forms of gender oppression.
- gender performativity
- So what’s normal-or normative?
- Normative means not what is “normal” but what is considered

“normal.”
- There’s no such thing as “normal,” however much society would like

us to think that there is.
- LGBT studies
- is parallel to and intertwined with political feminisms and feminist

scholarship
34
- initial ambition: document specific gay and lesbian identities and
cultural practices→art history: researching artists who were gay and lesbian, and
exploring homoerotic themes and subjects in works of art.
- similarities with feminist:
- both retains strong connections with political activism-

especially around civil rights and the AIDS epidemic
- studies are largely produced by self-identified feminists/LGBT

groups
- Queer Theory
- queer means “weird” and has been used as derogatory slang for
lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender people, a word that some LGBTI people have
reclaimed, using it proudly instead of “gay” to subvert its stigma
- Queer theorist and literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedwick:
- defines queerness as: “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps,

overlaps, dissonances, and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the
constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t
be made) to signify monolithically.”
- Classic scholar and queer theorist David Halperin:
- “queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the

legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers.
It is an identity without an essence.”
- Foucus: tracing the power dynamics of what lesbian feminist poet

Adrienne Rich (b. 1929) calls “compulsory heterosexuality,” the way in which
heterosexuality is placed at the centre of society and other sexualities are
marginalized. 主要研究以异性恋为中⼼心的社会的权⼒力力架构
- homophobia is not just a byproduct of individual ignorance

and prejudice, but an essential aspect of social organisation and the distribution of
power. 恐同现象是社会组织重要的⼀一⾯面
- Gender identity and sexual orientation aren’t natural,

inevitable, or inherent, but created by society (the terms homosexual and
heterosexual were only coined in the late nineteenth century) 性别身份是被社会创造
出来的，不不是由基因决定的
35
- Queer Theory isn’t any more inevitable or natural then
anything else, but it is strategically useful: it makes sense to its practitioners as a
way of analysing the world.
- Teresa de Lauretis被认为是创造了了Queer Theory这个词条的⼈人

放弃了了这个词汇, arguing that it had been co-opted by the very mainstream forces it
was coined to resist.
- Michel Foucault
- enormously influential in the development of both LGBTI

Studies and Queer Theory
- multi-volume History of Sexuality (1978, 1984) argued that

“homosexuality” should be seen as a historically specific product of a
particular society. 同性恋是⼀一段特定历史时期的社会产物
- in the West, the homosexual person was called into being

by the legal, medical, and cultural discourses that created-and regulated-the
category “homosexual” in the mid-nineteenth century: “the sodomite had been
a temporary aberration 异常现象 ; the homosexual was now a species.”
- critique of Foucault’s work: lack of historically-specific

analysis and its failure to recognise human agency
- contribution of his work: in many ways set an agenda for the

study of sexuality as a cultural construct rather than as a biological given.
- Gender performativity, a key queer idea
- Judith Butler, a performative gender perspective
- Gender is performative-that is, a sense of gender identity for

an individual or group develops via actions such as wearing certain clothes (skirts
and dresses for women, ties and jackets for men), engaging in certain rituals (such
as marriage), taking certain jobs (women don’t typically work in construction), and
employing certain mannerisms (girls are quiet, boys are rowdy); there is no natural,
true, or innate essence to gender-or any other identity, for that matter.
- identity is “performatively constituted by the very

‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”
- this performance functions according to two basic

mechanisms: citation and iteration
36
- “femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the
forcible citation of a norm.” Citation is copying others, a performance
- Possibility of resistance: change happens-and that there’s

potential for resistance-because it’s impossible to copy or to repeat things exactly.
在重复的时候难免会出错/有意出错
-example: the game “telephone” or “Chinese whispers”-

- not only do artists themselves sometimes perform or
undermine mainstream (normative) gender identities and sexualities (male/female,
straight) in their own lives, but they also sometimes create images that can
perpetuate or challenge mainstream gender identities and sexualities.
- LGBT/Queer art history
- Jonathan Weinberg:
- among the humanities, art history has been relatively late to

address the interrelationship of art and sexual orientation
- “From its beginnings in the writings of Johann Winckelmann,

art history has been a closeted profession in which the erotic is hidden or
displaced.”
- there are still few full-length studies of these subjects, and

work on transgender, intersex, gender-blending, bisexuality, pansexuality and other
gender identities and sexualities has yet to emerge fully despite an increasing
number of essays on lesbian and gay artists and images
- Laura Cottingham:
- the near invisibility of lesbian artists and themes in art history
- challenge: to face to double whammy 晦⽓气 of homophobia

and sexism
- Some scholars: acknowledge that “Queering” works of art is

important, but they also emphasise that this approach should not completely
supplant the process of recovering LGBTI iconographies and historical
moments. 创作酷⼉儿艺术和从历史中重新发现酷⼉儿的图像等是两码事⼉儿
- Many art historians: combine LGBTI and Queer Theory approaches
- mining archives and museums for information about LGBTI

images, artists, communities, and institutions, while employing Queer
theoretical frameworks ⽤用LGBTI的图像信息和Queer的理理论框架
37
- reminder: “queer” and “straight” are not necessarily opposite
terms, especially in relation to other cultures and periods in which such
categorisations and identities do not exist.
- Whitney Davis, Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (1994),

first published as a special issue of The Journal of Homosexuality
- raise a number of critical questions, and provide

methodological models as they engage with specific images, from Boucher’s
paintings of women in bed together to Safer Sex posters.
- Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the

Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (1993)
- explores how Demuth and Hartley reconciled the

tensions between the creation of their self-consciously “American” art and the
representation of their own marginalised sexuality.
- reflects on the ethics of research, the process of

“outing” artists who felt compelled to conceal their identities and desires in
their lifetimes. 掩盖⾃自⼰己真实身份和欲望的艺术家们
- Natalie Kampen, introduction of an edited collection of essays

entitled Sexuality in Ancient Art
- Studying sexuality is not the same as studying the

erotic (that which attempts to arouse the viewer).
- The study of sexuality encompasses the

representation of the [clothed and nude] body, the ways in which sexual
identity and sexual conduct define social categories and individuals, and the
way that imagery allows human beings to find and measure themselves as
sexual.
- Practicing Queer/LGBT art history
- Charles Demuth, Two Sailors Urinating, 1930
- Cultural Studies and postcolonial theory

· Cultural Studies
- All people engage in culture, in the making of symbols and the

practices of representation (verbal, visual, gestural, musical, etc.).
38
- Wide-ranging: its practitioners may discuss novels, workers’ diaries,
concepts of race or gender, soap operas, or objects of daily life, from hand-
embroidered tablecloths to Ikea furniture.
- Strongly interdisciplinary: it derives its methods and issues from

anthropology, history, economics, sociology, literary criticism, and art history.
- art historians have been particularly involved in the branch of Cultural

Studies known as Visual Cultural Studies.
- Strongly influenced by: Marxist cultural analysis
- Concern with: ideology and power
- how human subjects are formed by the social and cultural forces
around them, and how they experience their lives in cultural and society.
- interest: in both “ordinary” people and in communities marginalised

by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
- Stuart Hall: people are simultaneous makers and consumers

of culture, participating in that culture according to their place in economic and
political structures. 每个⼈人都是⽂文化的建构者和消费者，根据他们⾃自身处在的经济政
治地位进⾏行行参与
- people, via processes of encoding and decoding,

shape culture, and that institutions such as the church, the state, etc. encode
certain ideas in mass media, which audiences then decode (this is an alternative
perspective to Adorno’s).
- we are sophisticated consumers of mass media: we

can respond to these representations with skepticism and make oppositional
readings (depending on our cultural backgrounds, individual experiences etc.)
· Postcolonial theory
- colonialism: has been a powerful cultural force across the globe, and has
manifested itself in several forms.
- postcolonial: refers not only to the shaping of new identities, and political
and cultural practices in former colonies, but also to a body of theory that supports
the study of the distinctive cultural, social, and political dynamics of both colonial
and postcolonial societies.
- critics: the “post” in postcolonial fails to recognise the exploitation

still present in neo-colonial relationships: despite political independence,
39
former colonies are often economically dependent on former colonizers, and
oppressive relations of power may develop within a former colony itself.
- Moreovers: studying cultures, regions, or nations through

categories such as pre-colonial/colonial/postcolonial prioritizes the coloniser’s
perspective and can be, itself, a form of neo-colonialism. 学习前/中/后殖⺠民时期容
易易让⼈人产⽣生殖⺠民视⻆角从⽽而形成⼀一种新的殖⺠民主义
- the English scholar Raymond Williams (1921-1988)
- culture is an organic “way of life.”
- culture can also be: social process, communication,

interaction between people, the common frames of reference for interpreting
experience.
- culture is group identity.
- culture is a site of struggle for dominance by competing

groups.
- Race and postcolonial theory
- Stuart Hall
- there are two kinds of identity: identity in being (which offers

a sense of unity and commonality) and identity as becoming (or a process of
identification, which shows the discontinuity in our identity formation).
- identity: a process of “imaginative rediscovery”
- cultural identities are subject to the continuous “play”

of history, culture, and power. Against the idea of identity as true or essential.
- identities of race or gender are not an unchanging

essence, but a positioning, unstable points of suture 缝合 within the discourses
of history and culture. 身份是在⽂文化和历史中被定位的，不不是不不变的
- one influential definition:
- the term “postcolonial” signifies “all the culture affected by the

imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day… there is a
continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European
imperial aggression.”
40
- colonial relationships: inherently unequal (social, political, and
economic power are held by the colonizer, who exploits the colonised people and
territory.)
- there is no one, single type of colonial experience.
- settler societies: Europeans emigrated in large

numbers such as Australia and the United States
- colonies that served primarily as sources of raw

materials and as market outlets 销售点 like many African colonies
- there is variation among both the colonists and the

colonised, based on race, class, education, religion, gender, and other factors
- an army officer, a merchant, and a low-level plantation

manager would potentially have very different colonial experiences, as would,
among the colonized, a local aristocrat and a plantation worker.
- the Palestinian cultural critic Edward Said (1935-2003), Orientalism

(1978)
- employed Foucault’s ideas about discourse and power to

assert that the West, via Orientalism, represented the East (including the Middle
East, China, Japan, and India) as exotic, mysterious, distant, unknowable, as a
way of controlling it. 把东⽅方描绘成⼀一种具有异域⻛风情⽽而未知的地区，通过这种⽅方式
来控制它
- there never was an “Orient,” except as an invention that

Westerners used to subjugate the region. “东⽅方”从来不不存在，是⻄西⽅方⼈人⾃自⼰己创造出来
的对⽴立阵营，为了了征服那⽚片地区⽽而设计的名字
- critique by Bernard Lewis and Aijaz Ahmad: Said’s divide

between East and West is too simplistic, that colonial experience was more
complicated and multifaceted, with more players and participants, than this binary
division allows.
- scholars have applied Said’s framework to a variety of

colonial situations and relationships, some of which it doesn’t fit very well.
- significance: a set of theoretical issues-especially about

representation and discourse-that has been widely influential.
- Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994)
41
- explores mimicry and hybridity as ways of negotiating the
power relationships between coloniser and colonised.
- mimicry: the colonisers compel the colonised to imitate

them-to use their language, customs, religion, schooling, government, etc. (How
does it distort culture and experience to be imitated? What are the power dynamics
of the relationship? How is resistance possible?) 殖⺠民者让被殖⺠民者模仿⾃自⼰己的⽂文
化，使⽤用⾃自⼰己的语⾔言，⽤用⾃自⼰己⽂文化的体系等
- hybridity: when cultures come into contact with each

other, especially in colonial situations. He argues against binary oppositions (such
as First World/Third World, black/white, men/women) and fixed borders. He
explores what happens at the interstices, at the places where peoples, cultures,
and institutions overlap, where identities are performed and contested. 探讨⽂文化
交融点到底发⽣生了了什什么，⽽而不不是简单粗暴暴的⼆二元论
- Stuart Hall
- within colonial contexts a process of “self-othering” takes

place, which is distinct from Said’s Orientalism.
- the coloniser had “the power to make us see and experience

ourselves as ‘Other.’” That is, in a colonial regime, the colonised people begin to
see themselves as inferior, strange, uncivilised, etc.-they internalise the
negative view of the coloniser. 被殖⺠民者开始把⾃自⼰己主动认知成了了更更低⼀一等的存在
-this inner expropriation 没收 of cultural identity

undermines people, and he emphasises the need to resist it.
- Fanon: this process produces “individuals without an anchor,

without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless-a race of angels.”
- a process that has implications not only for formerly

colonised nations such as Jamaica, Ghana, or Papua New Guinea but also for
people of colour in places such as New York and London.
- Colonialist Photography: Imagining Race and Place (2002)
- includes essays on subjects as diverse as Algerian postcards,

French films of the Second World War, and Hawaiian advertising images.
- Australian art historian Bernard Smith (b. 1916)
42
- the European depiction of the Pacific and Australia, and the
kinds of values expressed in those images, which addressed difference, the
exotic, the taming of the wilderness etc.
- hybridity in art historian discourse: official architecture (court

house, governors’ mansions) and the houses, churches, and market buildings of
colonised peoples grappling with newly introduced forms.
- new understandings of modernity and modernism: there isn’t just

one Modernism, located in Europe and the United States, but multiple Modernisms
that developed in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere.
- African-American Studies (also called Black Studies): develops

theories of race and power and also mines the archives to recuperate forgotten
histories.
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
- stressed the need to define a canonical tradition in

African-American literature.
- David Driskell & Sharon Patton
- Whether or not a canon is necessary (canons work both

to include and exclude), art historians have worked at recuperating the history of
African-American artists, from highly trained sculptors and painters to
quiltmakers and potters.
- Subaltern Studies
- Subaltern Studies Group: the discipline of a loose collective of

scholars who study colonial and postcolonial history, largely in South Asia.
- subaltern: literally means “subordinate”, comes from the work

of Antonio Gramsci: he used it to indicate the ways in which proletarian voices are
deliberately silenced by dominant, bourgeois capitalist narratives.
- emphasises that powerful institutions and individuals (the

government, the Church, business leaders) control the ability and opportunity
to tell history and to represent what’s going on in society, even as they suppress
the voices of protesters, the poor, revolutionaries women, the sick or disabled.
- seeks to recuperate those silenced voices, especially those

of peasants, merchants, small land-holders, and others who either do not have
power or else have limited kinds of power, within colonial and postcolonial regimes.
43
- innovative historical methods: scholars read the sources
produced by the dominant culture “from within but against the grain” so that
subaltern voices emerge, and evidence of agency and resistance can be uncovered.
(court records 法庭笔录) 学者专⻔门去查看⼀一些诞⽣生于主流⽂文化内但是反对主流⽂文化的
声⾳音
- Gayatri Spivak: these voices are a necessary and

pervasive part of such records, even though the records deliberately try to suppress
them.
- Art history, Cultural Studies, and Visual Culture
- Visual Culture Studies as a distinctive arena within Cultural Studies
- What’s the difference between art history and visual culture?
- in certain respects, visual culture invites the study of a broader

array of objects than art historians, typically engage with.
- in visual culture studies, art historians focus not on “high” art

produced by trained artists, but on middle-range housing, family snapshots,
textiles, advertising images, postcards, etc.
- visual culture focuses not on objects but subjects-that is,

the ways in which works of art (broadly defined) catch up their creators and viewers
in interconnecting webs of cultural meanings and relations of power. 物品与其创作
者和观众互相在⽂文化意义的⽹网络下与权⼒力力结构间交织对话
- Critique: this focus on subjects fails to engage with the materiality

of art objects, or else they object that it promotes the model of textual analysis
in ways that don’t address the specific visual characteristics of works of art. 这
种研究⽅方式没能把艺术物品的物质性表达出来，⽽而是更更注重于它的⽂文字性含义，并⾮非
视觉的特征
- the kinds of questions asked in Visual Culture Studies already

have their roots in the art history of an earlier generation: scholars such as Alois
Riegl ranged widely in the questions they asked and the kinds of objects they
addressed. 视觉⽂文化的问题早就根植在了了上⼀一辈的艺术史中，上⼀一辈讨论的艺术品早
就不不限于high art了了
- art historians sometimes use the term “visual culture” in

a very specific way to discuss theories and the technology of vision in different
cultures and periods. (Jonathan Crary and Barbara Maria Stafford)
44
- Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories (1995)
- Rand brings all her critical skills to bear on Barbie,

controversial and beloved doll.
- examine not only the cultural messages encoded in Barbie

that work to reinforce a very narrow vision of womanhood, but also how
consumers of all ages have rewritten the Barbie script to challenge
discriminatory cultural messages about bodies, gender, and sexuality.
- Practicing art history informed by Cultural Studies/postcolonialism
- pages from The Harmsworth History of the World (London 1909)

captioned “Racial Contrasts under the British Flag” and “Dusky Beauty and
Ugliness under the British Flag”
- repatriation 遣送回国 of War God figures, ahayu:da to the Zuni

people of New Mexico
- Conclusion
- a number of ways to address contextual questions in art history
- contextual questions have compelled art history to reach out to

anthropology, political theory, sociology, and other disciplines
- break down the barrier between academia and the world at large,
especially in relation to aspects of identity such as gender, sexual orientation, race,
and class.
- open up the primary focus of art-historical study: we look at advertising,

industrial ceramics, women’s embroidery, snapshots, missionary churches
alongside Michelangelo and Monet.
- the canon: Griselda Pollock has pointed out that it is a “discursive 散漫的
strategy for the production and reproduction of sexual difference and its complex
configurations with gender and related modes of power.”
- the art-historical canon: also works to produce and reproduce differences in

class, sexuality, race, and ethnicity.
4. Psychology and perception in art p88

- Tradition of writing: ekphrasis, in which people describe works of art (among
other things) and record their impressions of them
- Art history and psychoanalysis
45
- psychoanalysis narrowly speaking: a method of analysing psychic
(psychological) phenomena and treating emotional disorders
- psychoanalysis broadly speaking: a philosophy of human consciousness,

both individual and social
- modern founder: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
- Austrian doctor who developed a therapeutic method for analysing

the unconscious through the interpretation of dreams, verbal slips, jokes, etc. and
through the use of free association.
- psychoanalysis: an enormous field of inquiry in its own right
- been used to address the content/subject-matter of individual

works of art
- the relationship of the viewer to the image
- the nature of creativity and of art itself
- Basic Freud (remains a touchstone of psychoanalytic theory although

subsequent theorists have challenged virtually every aspect of his
work)
- his field of knowledge:
- repressed desire was at the root of human civilisation.
- desire (sexual and otherwise)
- the workings of the mind
- basic human interactions
- the human sense of self
- assumption of Freud’s theory: humans have to work to survive, so we have

to repress (key to the human psyche) some of our tendencies to pleasure and
gratification.
- Terry Eagleton (literary critic): if Marx looked at consequences of

labor in terms of social relations, politics, and the economy, Freud looked at its
implications for the psyche.
- historical context: both the materialist conception of history (Marx) and

psychoanalysis emerged amid the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of
nineteenth-century Europe, with its new forms of work that oppressed body and
spirit.
46
- the unconscious: the place in ourselves where we store our unfulfilled
desires
- the way to manage our unfulfilled desires: through sublimation,

directing them toward a more socially valued objective.
- neurosis: the reality principle (the necessity of work) represses the pleasure
principle (the desire to have fun) so much that it makes us sick.
- the sequence of childhood development:
- the harnessing 控制 of the libido 性欲 (centered first on the child’s

body)
- the pleasure from nurse: the first dawning 展现 of sexuality
- the anal 肛⻔门 stage (after weaning 断奶): the anus becomes
an erotogenic 唤起情欲的 zone; takes a sadistic pleasure in defecation 排便便; at the
same time the child is anarchic and aggressive
- the phallic stage: the erotogenic zone shifts from the anus to
the genitals
- girls had to be content with the clitoris, which he saw

as inferior to the penis.
- the Oedipus complex in boys & the Electra complex

in girls: involves the child’s unconscious desire to possess the opposite-sexed
parent and to eliminate the same-sexed one.
- boy: feels aggression & envy toward his father,

yet also fears the retaliation 报复 of this powerful rival; the boy has noticed that
women have no penises, and he fears that his father will remove his penis, too. He
only resolves the conflict by realising that he can possess his mother vicariously 代
理理地 by identifying with the father, thereby assuming his appropriate sexual role in
life.
- girl: she lacks the penis that her father and other
men possess. Her love for her father then becomes both erotic and envious, as she
yearns for a penis of her own. She comes to blame her mother for her perceived
castration, and is struck by penis envy, the counterpart to the boy’s castration
anxiety.
- the individual’s psychic (not merely sexual) energy
47
- the pressure of dealing with conflicting and repressed desires
splits the mind into three aspects: id, ego, and superego. The psyche attempts to
make up for the loss of the perfect life experienced as a baby. (revolutionary idea in
Freud’s time: the self is split into warring 互相冲突的 parts — traditional idea: unified
self, which is whole & exercises free will & self-determination)
- id: the part of the self devoted to the pleasure-principle,

the part that can’t suppress or defer pleasure, but instead always demands
immediate gratification 娱乐⾄至上
- ego: has a better grasp on the reality principle - it

understands that sometimes it’s preferable, even safer, to delay gratification.
Because of this, the ego often has to repress the id. 压制娱乐机制的理理智
- temporarily repress the id in fear of punishment,

eventually these external sources of punishment are internalized
- superego: uses guilt and self-reproach to enforce

these rules and repress the id
- superego is subdivisible into two parts:

conscience 良知 (tells what is right and wrong, and forces the ego to inhibit the id in
pursuit of morally acceptable, not pleasurable or even realistic, goals) and ego ideal
⼼心中的理理想⼈人物形象 (aims the individual’s path of life toward the ideal, perfect goals
instilled by society)
- has implications for the understanding of the

workings of ideology
- The repressed desires: aren’t just stored in the unconscious like

unwanted files in an office warehouse; instead, they always seem to have a way of
leaking out.
- dreams: the expression of repressed desires that play out in

symbolic terms because they are too disturbing to express directly and think about
consciously.
- parapraxis 嘴瓢: unexplainable failures of memory, mistakes,

misreadings, mislaying (you can never seem to find your keys on weekday
mornings), and the odd misspeaking we call “Freudian slips.”
- Freud argued that these aren’t random occurrences,

but can be traced to unconscious wishes and intentions.
48
- jokes: express unconscious libidinal, aggressive, or anxious
impulses.
- neurosis, paranoia, or schizophrenia: if the repressed desires

are very strong, the ego will have to work extra hard to reroute them & results in
problems
- psychoanalysis, “the talking cure,” as a way to heal

psychic conflicts.
- the operation of the human society: resembles the individual psyche, but
on a grand scale.
- culture: provides a way to express and manage desires in conflict

with one another and with society, and is at the same time the product of impulses
推动 denied a more directly sexual or aggressive satisfaction.
- civilization: is always vulnerable to radical disruptions.
- increasingly violent social crises during the World Wars: Freud

interpreted as irrational “symptoms” 症状 of these primal conflicts.
- In Civilisation and its Discontents (1930): he explored the

consequences of repressing impulses in order to live in society.
- Pessimistic view: civilisation must curtail 剥夺 the death

instinct, but, if people are denied the satisfactions of aggression, they turn against
themselves.
- Freud on art
- only two of Freud’s publications directly analyse the visual arts:
- an essay on Michelangelo’s Moses (1914)
- he discusses the similarities in the ways that art history and

psychoanalysis both focus on the significant, but overlooked, detail, and he
interprets the Moses via a close examination of the figure’s posture and gestures.
- Michelangelo depicted Moses just at the moment when he

stops himself from breaking the tablets. Thus Michelangelo represented an inhibited
action, Moses’s triumph over his passionate anger for the sake of a higher cause.
- Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910)
- developed the pathographical 病历 approach, applying the

methods of clinical psychoanalysis to the artist’s life and work, trying to “explain”
49
the artist’s homosexuality, the slowness with which he worked, even his use of
certain forms and motifs.
- focus on Leonardo’s early childhood, which he spent with his

unmarried mother, only moving to his father’s house later. One of Leonardo’s
childhood memories concerned a vulture that came to him in his cradle, opened his
mouth with its tail, and repeatedly struck his lips with it.
- Freud argued that this was actually a fantasy, transposed to

childhood, that concealed Leonardo’s memories of nursing at his mother’s breast
and also expressed his unconscious desire for fellatio. The replacement of his
mother by the vulture indicates that the child was aware of his father’s absence and
found himself alone with his intensely affectionate mother.
- Mona Lisa’s famous smile embodies the history of his

childhood, simultaneously maternal and boyish, tender and menacing.
- Jungian archetypes
- Carl Jung (1875-1961), one of Freud’s sometimes collaborators, the Swiss

psychoanalyst. ⽤用⼼心理理学研究法寻找⽂文化之间的共性(原型)，通过理理解原型来治疗⼼心理理
疾病
- argument: the unconscious was not individual but collective and shared by
all humanity. The collective unconscious is a kind of knowledge we are all born with,
though we are never conscious of it.
- In Man and His Symbols (1964) and other writings: Jung discussed the
archetypes, key symbols or images, which, he argued, appear in the arts, histories,
philosophies, myths, and dreams of all cultures.
- archetypes: include the shadow, the animus and anima, the mother,
the divine couple, the trickster, the child, and the maiden, among others.
- Because archetypes are not under conscious control, we may fear

them, people who experience mental disturbances or illnesses are haunted by
them.
- Psychoanalysis, for Jung, is an exploration of the archetypes, so that

we can heal by understanding how they shape our emotional and spiritual lives.
- Mid-twentieth century: Jung’s ideas were widely discussed among people

interested in psychoanalytic interpretations of art.
- Today: art historians are more interested in culturally specific interpretations

of images, rather than cross-cultural comparisons and analogies that may work to
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erase cultural difference and historical specificity. 如今的艺术史学者更更倾向于去理理解
不不同⽽而不不是相同
- Freud’s critics
- the realm of the unconscious is widely acknowledged
- Terry Eagleton: Freud makes it (parental roles, modes of caring for

children, the notion of the ideal individual all vary considerably from one society or
era to another) possible for us to think of the development of the human individual
in social and historical terms even if Freud’s own presentation of the material is
often universalising and ahistorical.
- Freud’s theories of development and the workings of the psyche are very
culturally specific, not universal.
- toilet training takes place in different ways and at different times in

the child’s life in different cultures and may not always be the source of conflict and
repression that it often was in late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Europe.
- the question of what’s normal-or normative-in personality and the

psyche and who gets to decide such questions
- some critics: psychoanalysis is a repressive form of social

control, working to eliminate ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are
uncomfortable or inconvenient for society. ⼼心理理学抑制多元化思考
- Feminists: vocal critics of Freud’s theories of the body, sexuality, and

individual development.
- within psychoanalysis: Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, Nancy

Chodorow
- outside: Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millet
- argument: ideas such as the Oedipus and Electra complexes, the

castration complex, and penis envy reflect Freud’s experience of nineteenth-century
bourgeois male culture, not the range of human experience.
- challenge the way Freud places the penis at the centre of

human sexuality and his inability to see the clitoris and vagina as anything other
than inferior alternatives to it. 男性⽐比⼥女女性⽣生理理上就占据优势
- In Freud’s terms, female sexuality is never without conflict and

not really fully resolvable, unlike male sexuality. ⼥女女性⽆无法像男性那样有⼀一个完美的解
决⽅方式
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- Judith Butler: have challenged the ways that Freud privileges
heterosexuality by making it the normative model for all sexualities and sexual
identities, with homosexuality a “deviation” from that norm 同性恋是异性恋的变形，
异性恋才是主流
- Freud: (有建设性的观点) heterosexuality is not natural or

inevitable - everyone is born bisexual and everyone experiences a homoerotic
phase of psychosexual development, and argued that the search for a sexual
object can lead either to heterosexuality or homosexuality. 每个⼈人不不是⽣生来就是
异性恋的，⽽而是从双性恋逐渐过渡到异性恋
- (⽆无建设性的观点) he regarded homosexuality as

undesirable, and, in many respects, pathological; for him, it was an immature form
of sexuality typically resulting from bad or incompletely processed childhood
experiences. 把同性恋看成病理理现象，在性发育中不不成熟的状况，由不不完整或者不不好
的童年年产⽣生
- Questions remained:
- in art history: pathographical method is not an approach used today,

though psychoanalysts sometimes do
- challenges:
- (the nature of the evidence available) to understand an artist’s

conscious intentions & unconscious intentions (not easy/impossible to diagnose a
patient with whom you can speak)
- (the nature of works of art) works of art don’t really function

like parapraxes/jokes, expressing unconscious desires, because pathography
assumes that the meanings an artist invests in a work are primary, and it potentially
overlooks the role of patrons or sitters, and the larger social context.
- Meyer Schapiro in “Leonardo and Freud: An Art Historical

Study”: Freud’s framework does not allow Leonardo’s work to be related to his
artistic context. The features of such figures as the Mona Lisa and St. Anne are not
only significant for Leonardo’s personality or pure invention on his part, but
exist within the larger history of art of that time.
- the Mona Lisa’s smile was probably adopted from the

sculptural style of Leonardo’s master, Verrocchio.
- Object Relations theory and the nature of creativity: 为什什么我们拥有创造⼒力力？
52
- Melaine Klein (1882-1960): Austrian psychoanalyst ⼥女女
- “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the

Creative Impulse” (1929): closely examined artistic creativity
- the creative impulse stems from a desire to make reparation

修复.
- because of its frustrated desires, the infant experiences

contradictory phantasies (sic) about the maternal body: phantasies of erotic
possession (the “good breast”) and phantasies of violent dismemberment (the “bad
breast”). 这⾥里里的phantasy以ph开头，为了了和普通的fantasy区别开来
- this creates a profound psychic conflict in the infant that it

carries throughout life; making art is one way to make reparation, to atone 赎罪 for
the fantasies of hatred and destruction that the infant harboured about the maternal
body.
- The Kleinian view of art as a kind of “constructive guilt”
- influenced a number of art historians & critics: Adrian Stokes and

Richard Wollheim
- D.W. Winnicott (1896-1971) British psychoanalyst
- located the origins of creativity in the early pre-

Oedipal relationship of mother and child
- the transitional object: between four and twelve

months of age babies become attached to a blanket, stuffed animal, pacifier, etc.
- transitional phenomena: singing, babbling, and

daydreaming
- function: enable the baby to separate from the

mother because they stand for her in some way, and these transitional objects &
phenomena form the basis for creative pursuits later in life: the transitional
objet serves as a template 模板 for all art, which always has a transitional
function, standing in for something else.
- Basic Lacan ( Jacques Lacan (1901-1981): French psychoanalyst,

revolutionalized his field by reinterpreting Freud’s work through
semiotics, linguistics, and structuralism)
53
- the ego-the sense of self as coherent, rational actor expressed in the word
“I”-is nothing but an illusion of the unconscious, which is the true foundation of
all existence.
- difference from Freud:
- Freud: focused on how the pleasure-seeking, anarchic child learns to

repress his desires so that he can become a (productive, heterosexual) social being
- Lacan: asks how this illusion of the self comes into being in the first
place
- Freud: the oral, the anal, the phallic (3 stages from infant to adult)
- Lacan: the Real没有需求时期, the Imaginary认识到他⼈人和⾃自我时期,

the Symbolic
- Original point: Infants have no sense of self, no sense of an

identity separate from the mother (between self and other). The baby’s needs for
food, comfort, etc. are satisfied by an object (the breast, the diaper, etc.)
- The Real: all fullness and completeness, where there’s no

need that can’t be satisfied. No absence, loss, lack, so no language. Language is
always about loss or absence; you only need words when the object you want is
gone.
- Between six & eighteen months of age: the baby starts to be

able to distinguish between its body & everything else in the world. The idea of
“other” is created (but not the binary opposition of “self/other”, because the baby
still doesn’t have a coherent sense of “self”) → awareness of separation/the fact of
otherness creates anxiety and loss, having demands which can’t be satisfied
with objects
- The Imaginary(mirror stage/the phase of demand): other adult

reinforces the baby’s identification with its image, then the baby begins to have a
(mistaken, but useful) sense of itself as a whole person. Ego is created. (ego: a
fantasy, an identification with an external image)
- the mirror image: an “ideal ego”, a perfect self who has

no insufficiency & this “ideal ego” becomes internalised, we build our sense of “self”
by (mis)identifying with this ideal ego
- significance: compensate for having lost the original

oneness with the mother’s body that the baby enjoyed in the Real.
54
- The Symbolic: the realm of culture and language. To become
speaking subjects & to designate themselves by the “I” that was discovered in the
Imaginary.
- obey the laws & rules of language, which Lacan refers

to the Law-of-the-Father in order to link the entry into the Symbolic to Freud’s
notion of the Oedipus, Electra, and castration complexes, with their pivotal figure of
the angry father.
- core idea: the unconscious is structured like language. Freud’s dream

analyses and most of his analyses of the unconscious symbolism used by his
patients, depend on word-play, puns, associations, etc. 梦境与语⾔言的相似性
- inspired by the work of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-

Strauss (b. 1908) and the semiotician Ferdinand Saussure (structuralism &
semiotics)
- the linguist Roman Jakobson: noted the similarities between dreams

and language, for both rely on metaphor (condensing meanings together) and
metonymy (displacing one meaning on to another).
- Lacan focused on relations between signifiers alone.
- the elements in the unconscious all form signifiers, which in tun form
a “signifying chain.” There are no signifieds attached to signifiers in the psyche:
they don’t ultimately refer to anything at all. 虽然有形成的图像，但是没有其所指的含
义，因为形成的图像本身没有什什么意义
- Because of this lack of signifieds, the signifying chain is constantly

shifting and changing.
- The process of becoming a “self” is the process of trying to stabilise the

chain of signifiers so that meaning-including the meaning of “I”-becomes
possible. (Of course this “I” is only an illusion, an image of stability and meaning
created by a misperception of the relationship between body and self.) “⾃自我”是试图
去稳定并巩固signifiers的结果，本质是幻象
- The Law-of-the-Father (or Name-of-the-Father): another term for the

Other, for the centre of the system, the thing that governs the whole structure-its
shape and how all the elements in the system can move and form relationships
- centre: is also called the Phallus, to emphasise the patriarchal

nature of the Symbolic order. No one is or has the Phallus, just as no one actually
rules language. The Phallus governs the whole structure, it’s what everyone
55
wants to be (or have), but no element of the system can ever take the place of the
centre: the desire to be the centre, to rule the system, is never satisfied. 没有⼈人能成
为权⼒力力中⼼心
- the individual’s position in the Symbolic is fixed by the Phallus.
- the Phallus limits the play of elements (different from the

unconscious), and gives stability to the whole structure.个⼈人的位置被语⾔言框架巩
固、限制
- The Phallus stops play, so that signifiers can have some stable
meaning in the conscious world, even if that stable meaning is an illusion语⾔言框架为
元素提供了了稳定的意义
- Lacan on art
- interested in Melanie Klein’s interpretation of art as reparation
- But also: art isn’t only private fantasy: it belongs also to the public
arena of history and culture.
- The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60): “no correct evaluation of

sublimation in art is possible if we overlook the fact that all artistic production,
including especially that of the fine arts, is historically situated. You don’t paint in
Picasso’s time as you painted in Velázquez’s.”
- The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964): psychoanalysis

must go beyond Freud’s pathobiographical concerns.
- Art is about lack: “A work of art always involves encircling the

Thing.” Art is not straightforward, it does not simply represent the presence or
absence of the object of desire (the Thing). Instead, paradoxically, art represents
the Thing’s presence as its absence, and helps society bear this void.
Psychoanalysis enables us to address not only the artist’s own psyche, but
also the larger social dimensions of sublimation through art. 艺术弥补的是社会
中所⽋欠缺、忽视、没能达到的东⻄西，⼼心理理学不不仅仅能帮我们分析艺术家的⼼心理理，还能
通过艺术本身理理解更更⼤大的社会层⾯面
- Lacan’s critics: suggestion of a single unitary self

- fiercest critics & defenders: feminist psychoanalysts → Lacan’s re-reading
of Freud are both enormously liberating and deeply problematic
- Lacan’s plus: elimination of much of Freud’s biological essentialism
56
- Both Lacan & Freud’s missing pieces: motherhood
- feminists: argued for the centrality of the maternal function and its
importance in the development of subjectivity and access to culture and language
- Problem of Lacan & Freud: If our primary motivation for entering the
social realm is fear of the father, then more of us should be psychotic
- French psychoanalyst and linguist Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) Tales of Love
(1987): maternal regulation is the law before Paternal Law, before Freud’s
Oedipal complex or Lacan’s mirror stage.
- “Motherhood According to Bellini” (1980) and elsewhere: the

maternal function cannot be reduced to “natural” ideas about the mother, the
feminine, or womanhood.
- She separates the function of meeting the child’s needs from

both love and desire. ⺟母亲喂养孩⼦子不不是出于⾃自然本性
- Kristeva’s analysis suggests that to some extent anyone can

fulfil the maternal function, men or women. As a woman and as a mother, a
woman both loves and desires and as such she is primarily a social and speaking
being. As a woman and a mother, she is always sexed. 不不管是不不是⺟母亲，她都是⼥女女
性，拥有爱和欲望。But, insofar as she fulfils the maternal function, she is not
sexed. 然⽽而⺟母性喂养本身是不不被性别化的。
- Kristeva uses the maternal body, with its two-in-one structure,

or “other” within, as a model for all subjective relations, displacing Freud and
Lacan’s idea of the autonomous, unified (masculine) subject. 使⽤用⼥女女性作为“⼈人”的参
考标准，⽽而不不是拉康和弗洛洛伊德的男性假设来思考问题。
- Like the maternal body, each one of us is what she

calls a subject-in-process. As subjects-in-process we are always negotiating the
“other” within, that which is repressed. Like the maternal body, we are never
completely the subjects of our own experience. But even if the mother is not the
subject or agent of her pregnancy and birth, she never ceases to be primarily a
speaking subject. 我们每⼀一个⼈人的内⼼心都有被压抑的“other”，就像⺟母亲的身体⼀一样，
我们从来都不不是完全独⽴立的，然⽽而，就算⺟母亲不不是⾃自主怀孕/拥有主权的，她也依然有
说话的⾃自主权。
- French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (b. 1932):
57
- There is no one single female sex organ that corresponds to the
penis. (Freudian & Lacanian unitary subject reveals itself in the way psychoanalysis
approaches the issue of sexuality, based on the norm of the single unitary
member: the penis)
- Both Freud & Lacan do not have an adequate way of talking about
women’s sexuality and women’s bodies because they are wrapped up in this idea
of the penis and can define women’s sexuality only in terms of male bodies.
- Freud: female genitalia are “nothing” since he sees girls as

castrated boys, essentially)
- Female desire is like a lost civilisation whose language hasn’t been

deciphered. We must find specifically female imaginary and symbolic realms,
challenging the necessity of the monolithic law of the father.
- female sexual pleasure (jouissance) is of a completely different

order from male sexual pleasure.
- Uniqueness of women’s sexuality: for woman touches herself

all the time-via the “two lips” of the vagina-whereas a man needs something
external (the hand, vagina, language) to touch the penis to produce pleasure. ⼥女女性的
器器官与男性有根本性质的不不同，是两种完全不不同的体系，不不能⽤用男性器器官思考⼥女女性问
题
- French novelist, playwright, and feminist theorist Hélène Cixous:
- the idea of a unique female way of writing, écriture féminine, as a

way of breaking free from patriarchy.
- an “Other” mode of discourse, subverts the phallocentric

symbolic order even as it is repressed by it.
- gives voice to that which is silenced or marginalised in the

masculine symbolic order.
- critics: this is an essentialist idea (Cixous: neither woman nor

language is natural-they are both socially constructed). 
- American literary theorist Jane Gallop (b. 1952):
- challenged Lacan’s insistence on the split, the divided subject.
- The antagonistic model emerges from a certain male-cantered

ideology in which both Freud and Lacan are immersed.
58
- feminist & post-colonial theorists: critiqued the processes of Othering
that are foundational to what Europeans call “Western culture”
- The Self is always white and male, the Other always female or
dark-skinned. This Othering, this split in Western culture is a heavily policed
border aimed at the domination and exploitation of women.
- Question whether the relationship to the unconscious has to be

adversarial, constantly undermining the ego. 潜意识⼀一定要与⾃自我意识对着⼲干吗？
The unconscious can be a wonderful ally and a tremendous resource.
- Other critics: psychoanalysts, linguistics
- the clinical and therapeutic value of Lacna’s work were widely

debated
- his dependence on Saussure’s work: critiqued by Noam Chomsky &

others
- adequate only to the individual word and unable to address

grammar or context
- Psychoanalysis and contemporary art history

- themes: the personality of the artist, the creative process, the effect of art
on the viewer, as well as the issues of reception
- philosopher Richard Wollheim: 绘画能反映出画家的潜意识
- Painting as an Art (1984): analyses paintings as parapraxes, actions

motivated by unconscious intentions. 绘画是由潜意识引导的
- demonstrated that the explanatory roles of painter and painting can

be reversed: the painting reveals the painter’s intentions no less than the
painter’s intentions illuminate the painting. 正如画家能主观描绘绘画作品，绘画也
能反映画家的意图。
- drawing on the work of Melanie Klein and Adrian Stokes
- focuses on the specific formal and visual ways in which the artist
transfers his/her unconscious fantasies to the painting
- Paintings are particularly suited to expressing unconscious

desires that can’t adequately be expressed in words.
59
- The distinction between abstract and figurative art is largely
irrelevant: an abstract painting can metaphorically evoke the body without actually
depicting a body
- the more important thing is the extent to which the artist

emphasises the distinction between abstraction and interpretation.
- American art historian Suzanne Preston Blier 通过⽤用艺术作品的⼼心理理治愈性

理理解⾮非洲⽂文化，⽤用⼼心理理学理理解其他种族的⽂文化从⽽而获得更更加真实客观的图像
- African Vodun (1995): brings psychoanalytic theory to bear on the

investigation of small sculptures called bo or bocio, made by the Fon people pf
Dahomey (now Benin).
- the notion of transferences 转移: unpack the spiritual and

political power of their sculptures. 接受精神分析的⼈人在⼼心理理治疗时把问题转移到了了分
析者，⽽而这个雕像代替了了分析者做到了了转移观者情绪的作⽤用
- the sculptures: therapeutic tools, helping to achieve

the psychic health of the individual and the community, deflect or absorb
harmful forces, such as sickness.
- the person who acquires a bocio projects onto it his or her

own anxiety in order to restore a sense of balance and control. 这个雕塑通过投射焦
虑来平衡⼈人⼼心
- bocio testify to the disturbing effects of war, poverty, the slave

trade, and the plantation labor system supported by the Dahomean monarchy.
Transfering strong and potentially disabling emotions to these sculptures enables
Fon people to manage their emotions and survive in a difficult and hostile world.
bocio这个雕塑的流传让Fon⽂文明得以在各种灾难下⽣生存下来
- significance: Blier takes figures that were once called “fetishes” and
regarded as signs of the superstitious “primitive” mind, and shows how they
“make sense” aesthetically, culturally, and intellectually in a local context.
Enables the outside viewer to makes sense of them as well. 通过这种解读⽅方式为原
住⺠民的艺术提供了了正向的解读
- art historian Rosalind Krauss 现代艺术中的潜意识对视觉的影响
- The Optical Unconscious (1994): psychoanalytic theory as a way of

rethinking the history of modern art
60
- drawing on the German philosopher Walter Benjamin
(1892-1940)
- examines the “optical unconscious” of modern art, focusing

on the way in which a number of different modern artists, including Max Ernst,
Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, and Eva Hesse, construed their work “as a
projection of the way that human vision can be thought to be less than a master of
all it surveys, in conflict as it is with what is internal to the organism that houses it.”
在这些现代艺术家的作品中，⼈人的⾁肉眼视觉已经不不是主要的了了，⾁肉眼视觉会与内在寄
宿的有机体（灵魂）产⽣生冲突，所⻅见不不⼀一定是⼼心灵的真实，光学真实中潜藏着⼼心灵真
实
- critic to the formalist history of modern art as practiced by

Clement Greenberg or Michael Fried: they focused on formal and optical works of
art at the expense of art generated from the unconscious. → Krauss labels this art
“modernism’s repressed other” 现代艺术史中的形式主义是被压制的他者
- assumption: the artist is not a master in control of the process

of creating and viewing, so much as a force who releases unconscious drives
and desires through represented (painted, sculpted) seeing. 作品本身流露露出来
的⽆无意识引导并不不是画家有意为之
- exploration of seeing itself: about the viewers
- the way in which the work positions the

spectator and by formal qualities such as rhythm, variation, and repetition. 作品引导
观众在某⼀一特定位置观赏/⼀一些特定的节奏感、重复性等
- significance: to analyse modern artists’ inventive working processes,

such as Max Ernst’s collage technique and Duchamp’s readymade. 解释现代艺术家
的特定制作艺术品的⽅方式
- Ernst created his collages not only by clipping images from

magazines, catalogues, scientific manuals, etc., and adding elements to them, but
also by removing unwanted elements from those pages-a subtractive as well as
an additive process.
- literary theorist and art historian Mieke Bal
- the idea of the mirror stage in the analysis of works of art, seeing it
as a process experienced not only in the individual level but also at the societal
level. 镜像⼼心理理学不不仅仅可以⽤用在个⼈人上，还可以⽤用在社会层⾯面
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- Societies, too, know and define themselves in relation to
others, and a society’s sense of itself is not unified and identical with the self,
but is the product of its relation to the other (the mirror image).
- a provocative analysis of Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus
- Narcissus mistakes a sign for reality
- rewrites Lacan’s narrative of the mirror stage through

Caravaggio’s image
- points out that the “real” body of Narcissus in the

painting is disjointed and fragmentary, while the reflected Narcissus is much more
coherent.
- departs from Lacan’s theory in noting the presence of the

viewer in this exchange: the sharply foreshortened knee of Narcissus is
recognisable as such only from the viewer’s vantage point.
- The mirror stage → not a story of self and other, but

of intersubjectivity-the I/you exchange that incorporates the viewer.
- The gaze & film theory: provide an account of the individual experience of
viewing, those theories are able to account for gender, sexual orientation,
race, and class as factors shaping the gaze and subjectivity 其他理理论
(theories of vision & psychology of art)做不不到
- Freud: desire is crucially involved in the process of looking
- Lacan: saw the Gaze as one of the main manifestations 显示，表现 of the
four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis-the unconscious, repetition,
transference, and drive.
- we try to give structure and stability to our illusions, our fantasies

of self and other via the Gaze. It is only through art and language (that is, through
representation) that the subject can make his or her desire for the lost object known.
- Looking at art is not a neutral process: instead, the viewer is a

desiring subject open to the captivation exerted by the work of art. 观看的⼈人被作品
俘虏
- the function of the work of art (especially a painting employing linear

perspective) is to “trap” the gaze (dompte-regard), because the image (falsely) puts
the viewer in the position of the eye.
- psychoanalytic theory following Lacan:
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- “Gaze”: refer to the process of looking, which constitutes a network
of relationships
- “gaze”: refer to a specific instance of looking
- Film theory: emphasised the psychic process and experience of viewing.
- English filmmaker and feminist theorist Laura Mulvey: “Visual

Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) → drawing on psychoanalytic theory
- challenged patriarchal models of viewing in her critique of

classic Hollywood cinema: Hollywood cinema reflects and reinforces the way that,
in patriarchal society, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and
passive/female.”
- viewers derive pleasure from films in two ways: through

scopophilia (or voyeurism), the pleasure in looking, and through identification with
the ideal ego, represented by the on-screen hero. 观者通过两种⽅方式获得快乐：窥视
与对主⼈人公的情感带⼊入
- Hollywood films: hero is male and active and

possesses the gaze; he makes the story move forward. In contrast, the film treats
women as objects of desire, not heroes: they are passive, and rather than
possessing the gaze, they are the object of it. 好莱坞电影清⼀一⾊色的，男性是可以情感
带⼊入的英雄⻆角⾊色，⽽而⼥女女性则是被观赏者⻆角⾊色
- Result: the woman’s appearance on screen often

interrupts the flow of the narrative-she is pure spectacle. ⼥女女性⻆角⾊色总是打断剧情出现
- Problem: Hollywood films leave the female viewer in a

tough spot because Hollywood’s ideal viewer is straight and male (African-
American cultural critic bell hooks would later point out that he’s white, too).
- Does she suppress her identity in order to identify with

the male hero?
- Does she identify with the passive spectacle of

womanhood on the screen?
-Result: classic Hollywood cinema forecloses her gaze, and her

pleasure in film, in multiple ways
- Responses to Mulvey’s essay:
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- whatever Hollywood may intend, viewers may actually occupy
multiple viewing positions, not just the binary either/or male/female. 观看者有很多
⽅方式看电影获得快乐，不不⼀一定⾮非要情感带⼊入主⻆角之类的
- various ways to possess the gaze or to be excluded

from it due to such factors as sexual orientation, class, or race (factors that
shape the gaze & subjectivity in general)…
- male body can also be fetishised and displayed as

spectacle.
- bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze”: argues for a gaze that

challenges and critiques what’s going on in the film, rather than passively
complying with it. 寻求⼀一种新的看电影的⽅方式，⼀一种挑战电影叙事、批判性的观看
⽅方式
- Reception theory I: the psychology of art

- Reception theory shifts attention from the artist to the viewer. The
development of reception theory has been an interdisciplinary effort.
- Reception theory developed by Stuart Hall:
- media texts are encoded and decoded. The producer encodes

messages and values into their media which are then decoded by the audience.
However, different audience members will decode the media in different ways and
possibly not in the way the producer originally intended.
- the idea of the psychology of art: the viewer actively completes the work
of art.
- Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) calls this “the beholder’s share,” the

stock of images stored in the viewer’s mind that she brings to the process of
viewing art. 观者把看到的图像存储到脑海海中的储藏柜中，这些脑中的图像会影响他观
看新的艺术品
- Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902)
- the painters of Dutch group portraits assumed an ideal viewer who

could negotiate the interplay between collective and individual identity in these
images. 荷兰群体肖像画假定了了⼀一个理理想观众，能够协调集体和个⼈人身份之间的作⽤用
- Art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris (1900-1957): proposed a theory

of creativity and artistic experience that was important in the development of
reception theory
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- through art, the artist-and, vicariously间接地, the spectator-secures
psychic gratifications喜悦 that are unavailable in daily life via a process of
regression 逆⾏行行. 通过艺术，艺术家和观众确保了了⼀一种⼼心理理上的喜悦，是⽇日常⽣生活中⽆无
法进⾏行行的
- the regression does not occur defensively or under pressure, rather

the ego exploits it
- the regressive gratifications are not related to specific desires but

come from recognising that there are such sources of pleasure that may still be
tapped. 递减的满⾜足感并不不与特定的欲望相联系，⽽而是来⾃自于认识到还有这样的快乐
源泉可以被挖掘
- partly inspired by Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the

Unconscious (1905)
- the creation of a work of art is not a narrowly individualistic

activity: it requires the participation of both artist and spectator.
- Ernst Gombrich: took the point further
- the essentially social character of art imposes limits upon what

psychoanalysis can explain: psychoanalysis cannot fully addressing either the
social, political, and religious context in which the artist had to work, or the choices
the artist must make within “the logic of the situation.” ⼼心理理分析的局限性：社会因素
局限住⾃自由发挥的可能性
- question: how style comes into being-the idea, which he takes

from Wölfflin, that “not everything is possible in every period.”⻛风格是怎样形成的？这
个概念怎么形成的？如果只是⼼心理理分析，不不会有特定的⻛风格形成
- the illusionistic style-the representation of the real-is a lot more

complex than it may seem at first to people like us, who are used to negotiating
illusion. 图像⽐比我们想象的更更复杂
- duck/rabbit diagram: we cannot simultaneously see both a

painting itself (as literally paint on canvas) and the representational illusion it creates
我们⽆无法同时看到材质和呈像
- critique: Richard Wollheim Art and Its Object (1980)
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- this wouldn’t happen if we had to alternate our gaze
between the materiality of the work and the illusion of representation it creates如果
我们交替看材质和呈像这种事就不不会发⽣生
- example: Titian and Vermeer use their virtuoso skills

with line, colour, and brushwork to focus our attention on particular representational
effects
- Art and Illusion (1960): the work of art is fundamentally the record of
a perception that is itself shaped by the previous representations available to the
artist in his/her tradition. 艺术品是⼀一种对观念的记录，被艺术家本⼈人接触过的图想
表达所影响
- when an artist confronts a problem, she turns to tradition, to

the work of previous artists, for a formula or schema that she can use to create her
image. When she realises that they are inadequate for the task of representing her
own perceptual findings, and she must modify them accordingly. 找传统范式，再根
据特殊情况加以改变创造 The modified schemata 图解 then enter the repertoire
of visual schemata available for use, testing, and modification by other artists.
这种改变后的图像就进⼊入了了⼀一个⼤大循环中
- Rudolf Arnheim (b. 1904): 视觉与思维并不不是分离的
• • • •• • • • • •
- challenges the idea that vision is a mechanical and primarily

• • • • • • • •• •
physiological function, and argues vehemently that vision and thought are two
separate processes.
- inspiration: Gestalt psychology (Gestalt: shape/form): focuses on

experiments in sensory perception
- Art and Visual Perception (1954): traces how vision becomes the
apprehension of significant structural patterns (republication in 1974)
- Visual Thinking (1969): expanded his challenge to the idea that

verbally articulated thought precedes perception
- artistic expression is a form of reason-“A person who

paints, writes, composes, dances, I felt compelled to say, thinks with his senses.”
- The Power of the Centre (1982) and The Dynamics of Architectural

Form (1977)
- explored particular spatial and pictorial patterns, such as the

grid, and argues that form and content are inextricably intertwined.
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- Norman Bryson and others: have critiqued the psychology of art focusing
exclusively on the artist’s “arc of inner vision or perception” running from the hand
to the retina.
- Problem: excludes the arc that extends from the artist to viewer,
across the contextual (and conceptual) spaces in which the artist, the work of art,
and the viewer are all situated. 艺术⼼心理理分析的缺点是缺少艺术家到观者到更更宏⼤大的
世界与艺术家的联系
- Visual Theory (1991): the psychology of art leads to “a vision of art in

isolation from the rest of society’s concerns, since essentially the artist is alone
watching the world as an ocular spectacle but never reacting to the world’s
meanings, basking in and recording his perceptions but apparently doing so in
some extraterritorial zone, off the social map.” 艺术家并不不参与社会，⽽而是冷眼旁观
- The anxiety of influence

- artistic influence beyond identifying sources for motifs and images to
consider the complex ways in which artists respond to the art of the past. 艺术影
响⼒力力有时候超越了了图像来源，与过去交相呼应
- the American literary critic Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence 1973
- new poems originate mainly from old poems because the primary
struggle of the young poet is against the old masters.
- young poet: “clear imaginative space” for her own work through a
“creative misreading” of previous literature
- gifted poets can overcome this anxiety of influence
- lesser artist: become derivative flatterers and never achieve

greatness for themselves
- the truly great poet: succeed in making us read the earlier works
through the lens of her creative misreading
- Norman Bryson, in Tradition and Desire (1984)
- adapts Bloom’s work, and that of literary critic W. Jackson Bate to

the history of art
-negotiated the promise-and the burden-of tradition
- tradition “supplies every reason for activity and celebration”

when it inspires and excites us. At the same time, for the artist who is obliged
67
by a stylistic consensus to imitate the art of the past, or who perceives himself
as a latecomer to the tradition of art-making he admires, tradition can be
inhibiting and anxiety-producing, threatening the artist’s sense of self. 传统既能
成为灵感点亮我们，也能扼杀艺术家的⾃自我
- Example: For Ingres, the meaning of a painting is always,

explicitly, another painting. The Rivière portraits reference works by Raphael, and
in so doing, set up a signifying chain, a series of displacements in which no sign,
no image, stands alone. The portrait of Mme Rivière may reference Raphael’s
Madonna of the Chair, but only by way of the Giardiniera. These links are elusive-the
viewer is left with an enigma, rather than a direct and conclusive viewing
experience. 画家通过引⽤用图像、姿势等来提⾼高⾃自⼰己的艺术影响⼒力力
- Reception theory II: reader response theory and the aesthetics of reception
- Reader-response theory: meaning happens through reading
- Polish literary theorist Roman Ingarden (1893-1970)
- the text is nothing more than a series of schemata-predictable or

usual patterns-which the reader then interprets and shape into meaningful
language.
- the world of the author→the world of the text→the world of the

reader
- German literary critic Wolfgang Iser (b. 1926) in The Act of Reading (1978)
- the idea of the schemata, the strategies that texts use, and the
repertoires of familiar themes and allusions they contain.
- the text: suggests the existence of an “implied reader”, who may or

may not fit the profile of the actual reader
- the reader: who is familiar with the strategies and repertoires 全部节
⽬目 employed in the text will have a fuller, richer reading experience
- There is never going to be a perfect match between the text’s

codes and the reader’s codes.
- give literature its power to challenge, awe, surprise, and

change us.
- ignores the social and historical dimensions of reading
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- purpose of reading: to stabilise meaning, to eliminate the text’s
multiple possibilities and pin down one true meaning
- German literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1977)
- emphasises that people within a culture share a common set of

understandings about what’s possible or probable. He calls this “the horizon of
expectations”
- Texts and literary traditions are themselves actively altered

according to the various historical horizons in which they are received by
readers.
- American literary theorist Stanley Fish (b. 1938)
- readers belong to “interpretive communities” that share reading

strategies, values, and assumptions-that’s what constitutes the “informed reader.”
- concerned with what the text does, rather than with what the text
means.
- “Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost” (1967)
- the text of Paradise Lost employs a number of literary

techniques to lead the reader into a false sense of security, only to then introduce a
surprise, disappointing the reader’s expectations and making her aware of her own
proud-and mistaken-sense of self-sufficiency.
- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973)
- opposed Iser’s idea of stabilising meaning, eliminating the text’s

multiple possibilities and pinning down one true meaning
- pleasure of the text lies in enjoying the free play of words-the

gliding of signs-as the reader catches provocative glimpses of meanings that
surface only to submerge again. (obvious connection to Lacanian psychoanalysis &
the sliding of signifiers in the unconscious)
- German art historian Wolfgang Kemp (b. 1946)
- outlined a methodology and history for the process of what have

been called the aesthetics of reception
- the context of reception has to be taken into account in any

interpretation of a work of art.
69
- critical of the institutions and modern techniques of reproduction that
present works of art as single entities unrelated to anything else-“ubiquitous,
homeless, displaced.”
- borrows the idea of the implied reader from reader-response theory

to discuss the notion of the implied beholder-the idea that the work of art
implies a particular viewer or tries to set up a particular viewing experience.
- Forms of address: the ways in which elements or figures in the image

interrelate with each other and with the viewer.
- example: a figure (focalizers) makes eye contact with the

viewer to draw her into the image/direct the viewer’s attention toward a particular
element within the scene, perhaps by pointing directly at it
- example: perspective works to situate the viewer in relation to

the image
- pay attention to the ways in which the artwork is unfinished or

indeterminate.
- spectator as part of the viewing experience, must mentally

complete the invisible reverse side of a painted figure, or trace the course of a
staircase past its curve. 观者必须脑补全图像
- Sometimes these missing elements are as important as what

is actually there-they are often used deliberately to emphasise schemata and are
meant to trigger particular responses in the viewer.
- Practicing reception theory/psychoanalytic art history

- Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863; Yasumasa Morimura, Olympia, 1990.
- Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999.
- Shirin Neshat, Fervor, 2000.
- Conclusion
- psychoanalysis and reception theory: destabilises our sense of self,
challenging what we think we know about ourselves
- also destabilises our sense of our own discipline, what we think we

can know about the artist’s intentions or the viewer’s experience.
- questions about the self, the mind, and society
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5. Taking a stance toward knowledge p122
- Ways of thinking about ways of thinking
- Hermeneutics
- focuses on the theory and practice of interpretation
- first developed as a branch of philosophy and theology largely concerned

with the interpretation of biblical texts.
- Hermeneutic readers of the Bible held that all biblical tales-however

mythic, folkloric, or even strange they seemed-were divinely inspired and
therefore contained moral truths and lessons, if they were interpreted
correctly.
- Practitioners studied grammar and phrasing, and tried to set biblical

stories in a historical context.
- expanded to the analysis of many kinds of spoken and written texts, and it
has since been applied to all sorts of representations and cultural practices.
- the hermeneutic trio
- three particular kinds of non-biblical hermeneutics:
- the German scholar Wilhelm Dilthey (1831-1911):

distinguished between the human sciences (history, economics, religion,
philosophy, the study of art and literature, etc.) and the natural sciences
- the goal of the human sciences was understanding,

while the goal of the natural sciences was objective explanation. ⼈人⽂文科学的⽬目
标是理理解，⾃自然科学的⽬目标是客观的解释
- “understanding”: can address the meanings

expressed in a range of cultural practices, including texts and images.
Understanding a particular cultural practice or object requires a familiarity with
both its social and cultural context and also with fundamental human mental
processes. Understanding requires an almost mystical, sympathetic identification
with the mind of another person or the culture of another era.
- the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976): joined

the Nazi Party in 1933 and had participated in the Nazification of the University of
Freiburg
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- Being and Time (1927) had a profound influence on
twentieth-century thought
- addressed himself to the basic philosophical

question “What does it mean to be?”
- concerned that modern industrial society had

fostered nihilism, depriving human life (being) of meaning.
- the “pre-understanding” that underlies any

human knowledge: human beings don’t exist apart from the world-the world isn’t
just out there somewhere, waiting to be analysed and contemplated from the distant
heights of rationality. Instead, we emerge from and exist in the world, and can
only know it, and ourselves, as part of it, as being-in-the-world. 我们诞⽣生并存在
于世界⾥里里，我们作为世界的⼀一部分认知世界 Understanding isn’t an isolated act of
cognition but part of human existence, emerging from the assumptions and
opinions generated by our concrete experiences in the world. Understanding, then,
is rooted in history and rooted in time: it is always embedded in the observer’s
experience.理理解并不不是⼀一种孤⽴立的认知，总是建⽴立在观看者的认知基础上的
- significance of language: “the human being is

indeed in its nature given to speech-it is linguistic.” Language isn’t just a tool for
conveying information; instead, it is our way of being in the world.
- “calculative” or scientific/
representative language: language is information, and it pretends to describe
things as they are.
- “essential” or meditative/philosophical/
non-representative language: doesn’t describe things as they are. It deals with
being, the ground of reality, via the intricate relationships of language.
- poetry and philosophy say what they have to say

not directly but through metaphor.
- metaphor: not literal and descriptive, but

imaginative and allusive, and a better way to show relations without ossifying 僵化
them as literal things via representational, descriptive language.
- “The Origin of Art”
- the work of art has a special character: it is “a

being in the Open” and “opens up a world.” The Open is a cultural space created by
a particular understanding of what it is to be a being-a thing, a person, an
institution.
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- Works of art express this shared cultural
understanding of the meaning of being, for they give “to things their look and to
men their outlook on themselves.” 艺术品能解释这种共享⽂文化下对事物的理理解，因为
他们能够传递给⼈人们⽂文化的看法 When art functions in this way, it can clarify and
make coherent any number of related practices.
- But, at the same time, art cannot itself be

explained and rationalised; the artwork has a kind of stubborn irreducibility-
this is why people argue about the meaning of art. 艺术品⽆无法真正被理理性分析，
这就是为什什么⼈人们总是在艺术的意义前争论不不休
- when artworks no longer function as cultural

paradigms, they can become “merely” objects of aesthetic contemplation-
precious treasures, perhaps, but relegated to the margins of human
experience. 当艺术品不不是⽂文化模范的产物，他们就会成为纯粹的美学欣赏的存在-可
能是收藏品，但是会被分配在⼈人类⽣生活经验的边缘。Heidegger argued strenuously
against this kind of aesthetic appreciation of art; for him, art is about experience,
not about feeling. He also opposed the idea that art is representational or
symbolic, arguing that this approach can’t even begin to capture the way that
art functions to shape human experience. 海海德格尔认为艺术是关于经验的，⽽而不不
是关于感觉得。艺术并不不是表达/象征的，因为以这种⽅方式根本⽆无法去理理解艺术是怎样
作⽤用于⼈人的经验的。
- late German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002),

Heidegger’s student
- Truth and Method (1960)
- engaged with the history of Western philosophy,

entering into dialogue with the philosophical tradition in order to interpret and
understand it.
- the meaning of literature-or art, for that matter-

isn’t limited to the creator’s intentions. Rather, art takes on new meanings as it
passes into different time periods and different cultures, meanings that could never
have been anticipated by the creator. “the work of art is one with the history of its
effects.”艺术的意义并不不局限于创作者的想法。当艺术在新的时间与不不同的⽂文化中获
得了了新的含义时，这些含义往往并没有被创作者预⻅见到。
- interpretation is not a sympathetic 和谐的 leap

into another’s mind, but a process of language and communication. The
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hermeneutics in search of understanding cannot overcome historical distance from
her subject. 解释学并不不能直接得知他者脑⼦子⾥里里想的是什什么，它是⼀一种沟通交流的⽅方
式，因为寻求理理解本身⽆无法超越历史的隔阂。
- the contemporary interpreter can never

perfectly recreate the artist’s original intentions, or the original conditions of
reception. Both the artist and the hermeneutics are limited by their different social,
cultural and intellectual horizons. 当代解说着是不不可能还原艺术家原本的想法的，也
不不可能完美还原出最原初的反应。艺术家和解释学者都被⾃自身的框架所局限。
- The interpretation of a work of art is a dialogue:

the hermeneutics tries to alter her own horizon to encompass the horizon of the
work. As a result, both horizons are changed, and neither the meaning of the work
nor the nature of the interpreter remains the same. A common language, the
product of previous interpretations, connects past and present, artwork and
interpreter, and each interpretation contributes to and extends it. 对艺术品的理理
解是⼀一次沟通交流，两边都有妥协，艺术品的意义和解释者的本⼼心都不不再维持原样。
⼀一种共通的语⾔言能够连接过去和现在，艺术品和解释⼈人，⽽而且每种解释都会赋予它新
的意义。
- the hermeneutic circle
- Heidegger and Gadamer:
- “the hermeneutic circle” governs all knowledge: the

process of interpretation does not proceed in linear fashion, from a beginning point
(no knowledge) to an end point (full knowledge). Rather, interpretation is circular, a
constant process that we are always already engaged in. 解释并不不是线性的（从没
有知识到拥有所有的知识）解释是螺旋的，我们⼀一直都在其中
- Dilthey:
- the hermeneutic circle arises because the meaning expressed

by a cultural artefact or practice does not emerge only from the creator’s intentions,
but also depends on the whole system of meaning of which it forms part. To
understand each part implies an understanding of the whole, yet there is no way of
understanding the whole independently of its parts. 解释圈之所以会起来，是因为对
于⽂文化产物的解释并不不只来源于创作者的⽬目的，还依赖于整个意义体系。理理解每⼀一个
部分会对理理解整体有帮助，但是没有⼀一种对整体的理理解能够独⽴立于部分存在。
74
- the hermeneutic circle: means that all understanding begins
somewhere in the middle of things, with some sort of pre-understanding
already in place. 所有的理理解都处在事物的中间，是基于某些假设进⾏行行的理理解
- Gadamer: interpretation is about achieving “an”

understanding of the work, not “the” understanding. All truths are relative,
depending on time and place and interpreter. ⽐比如学艺术史之前不不代表你完全对
艺术史没概念，之前的经验已经让你有了了⼀一定的感觉和基础，所以学习艺术史的概念
是从中间开始的，⽽而不不是从零开始。解释是尝试达到某⼀一种对物品的理理解，⽽而不不是某
⼀一个特定的理理解。所有的真相都是相对的，被时间、地点和解释⼈人决定。
- example: history of reception
- quilts made by African Americans during the era of slavery

and reconstruction.
- 19th & early 20th century: they were seen as craft.

Media hierarchies meant that quilts, as textiles, were less valued than the arts of
painting or sculpture, and works by African Americans (and local artisans generally)
were valued less than those produced by highly trained artists. So, the media
hierarchies of the art world, combined with the racism of society at large, meant
that these works were largely ignored and unappreciated, except by the people
who made them and the family members who inherited them.
- with time: not only have quilts come to be seen as an

art form, but society at large has begun to challenge the race and class
prejudices that rendered these works invisible. There is no such thing as an
unchanging, eternally correct interpretation. 没有⼀一种理理解是永远不不变的，但是有⼀一
些理理解会⽐比其他理理解更更加有说服⼒力力 At the same time, of all the interpretations
available at any given time, some will be more persuasive than others and better
able to account for the available evidence.
- in practical experience: the process of interpretation may seem to

stop, just as semiosis may seem to stop, when the interpreter reaches an
understanding that makes sense at that moment, but the hermeneutics takes a
larger perspective and knows that the hermeneutic circle goes on. 当⼀一种解说完美
地解释了了当下，但是这种解说也会拥有⼀一个更更⼤大的视野，看到巨⼤大的螺旋在继续进
⾏行行。
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- Heidegger: “what is decisive is not to get out of the circle
but to come into it in the right way.” 你应该坚定地进⼊入这个循环⽽而不不是跑出这个循
环
- hermeneutics and art history
- contemporary art history has a hermeneutic orientation, in that

art historians are self-conscious about the process of interpretation. They work from
an awareness of the historical context not just of the work of art, but also of the act
of interpretation.艺术史学者很明⽩白⾃自⼰己在理理解艺术，他们很清楚清楚艺术品历史背景
与解释的背景
- Although art historians are still deeply interested in the artist’s

intentions, this interest is accompanies, and shaped, by a greater skepticism
about our ability to know the intentions of the artist fully, or to interpret them in
any way other than through our own cultural lens.
- numerous links between: Gestalt psychology, hermeneutics, and

reception theory
- reception theory: the viewer “completes” the works of art,

owes a great deal to hermeneutics, especially to Gadamer’s work.
- Swiss scholar Oskar Bätschmann (b. 1943): take the aesthetic

experience as a starting point for interpretation, and examine the interrelationship
between aesthetic experience, theory, art history, and the practical work of an artist.
美学体验只是解释的开始，美学体验、理理论、艺术史、实践艺术之间是互相有联系的
- Art historian Gottfried Boehm: interested in hermeneutic perspectives

and the history of ideas
- coined the phrase “iconic turn” to describe the proliferation

of visual images in the twentieth century and their increasing centrality in cultural
practice.
- the edited collection Was ist ein Bild? (“What is a Picture?”,

1994)
- Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous

History (1999)
- the work of art actively produces the viewer’s subjectivity.
- the work of art “thinks” culture: sees art as actively shaping

its social and historical context, rather than merely reflecting it.
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- whereas traditional art history sees the artwork’s cultural
context as fixed historically at its point of creation, Bal’s art objects produce
interpretations of the culture they occupy, including the present, where they may
exist as museum objects or reproductions. 对于Bal来说，艺术品不不仅仅是时代的产
物，它还具有解释时代⽂文化的能⼒力力
- focuses on images in which contemporary artists, such

as Andrés Serrano and Carrie Mae Weems, use visual techniques that are akin to
Caravaggio’s. These artworks suggest a kind of “preposterous 荒谬的 history”
composed of scraps and fragments of other discourses, in which the image
that comes later in some ways gives rise to the earlier.这些当代艺术家的作品使
⽤用了了以前⼤大师的技法，引⽤用以前的东⻄西但是创作出了了新的含义
- practicing hermeneutic art history
- Minoru Yamasaki, World Trade Center, 1966-77. New York
- Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), Geisha with Samisen
- Structuralism and post-structuralism

- Structuralism: emerged in France in the 1950s and 1960s among
anthropologists, sociologists, and literary theorists who took as their model the
linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure.
- Saussure: saw language as a network of structures that could be

studied if one broke them down into their component parts-such as letters or
words-which could then be defined by their relationship to each other.
- Structuralists: this Saussurean concept of language structure

provided a model for the analysis of many different kinds of cultural production,
from myths to kinship networks to literary genres. 将Saussure对语⾔言的框架与⽂文化实
践本身相类⽐比，认为⽂文化产物也存在着框架
- views cultural practices as being made up of a system of

underlying structures.
- culture as structure
- French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) made major

contributions to the development of structuralist thought. Worked in the Amazon as
a young anthropologist. During the Second World War, as a refugee living in New
York.
- re-evaluate his concept of “primitive” peoples
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- influenced by structural linguist Roman Jakobson
- analysed kinship, myths, totems, and other cultural

phenomena as if they were language systems.
- such phenomena were built according to structures

inherent in the human mind, structures that cut across cultural differences.⼀一种超
越了了⽂文化差异的框架在⼈人的脑海海中
- even though myths seems to vary widely from culture

to culture, they are, in fact, merely variations on basic themes (or structures): “a
compilation of known tales and myths would fill an imposing number of volumes.
But they can be reduced to a small number of simple types if we abstract from
among the diversity of characters a few elementary functions.” 虽然各个⽂文化的深化
都不不⼀一样，但是都被分成了了⼏几个相同、主要的主题
- myths, like languages, are created from units

that are assembled according to known rules.
- These basic elements of language (a letter,

sound, or word) are called phonemes
- mytheme: refer to these basic units of

mythology.
- What’s important is the larger set of relations

contained in a myth, not simply the relationship between the signifier and signified
in a particular mytheme: “normally we do not express ourselves by using single
linguistic signs, but groups of sings, organised in complexes which themselves are
signs.” 重要的是那个更更⼤大的框架⽽而不不仅仅是signifier和signified
- Myths aren’t entirely preprogrammed according

to their structures. Myths, as they are retold, change in various ways: they can be
expanded or edited, paraphrased or translated, and elements of the story can be
emphasised or de-emphasised. In this way, myths have both synchronic and
diachronic aspects. 神话的超越时空性，通过⽆无数次的转述，它既有不不变的部分
synchronic也有变得部分diachronic
- synchronic: the unchanging, basic

structure of the myth
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- diachronic: the specific telling of the myth
at any particular time. 这个synchronic/diachronic的对⽐比是Saussurean对language/
parole的类⽐比
- French cultural critic Roland Barthes: applied structuralist analysis to

contemporary Western culture, noting that such structures were not only
characteristic of so-called primitive societies but also of modern industrial
societies.
- Mythologies (1957), Elements of Semiology (1964), The

Fashion System (1967)
- examines the structural units of cultural practices in

diverse arenas, from advertising to clothing.
- popular icons could be interpreted in just the same

way as Levi-Strauss’s myths, for a myth is something that “transforms history into
nature.” 神话将历史变成⾃自然的 Myth is read as true and non-ideological-as if its
representations, the relationships between its signifiers and signifieds, were natural
instead of constructed. 神话被解读为真实的，并⾮非意识形态的产物，就好像它的发声
本身就是个⾃自然的产物，⽽而并⾮非⼈人为的
- myth can be used to justify dominant beliefs,

values, and ideas. 神话可以⽤用来论证⼀一些主流信仰、价值观和思想 But where Lévi-
Strauss insisted on the scientific nature of his structuralist method, Barthes
approaches cultural analysis as a form of play. 两个⼈人的思想观念⼀一个注重在科学的
框架性，另⼀一个则把⽂文化视作了了⼀一出戏的表演
- The English anthropologist Mary Douglas (b. 1921)
- Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution

and Taboo (1966)
- emphasises the importance of looking at the larger

context of any cultural practice, observing that dirt is only matter out of place.
我们应该关注更更加宏⼤大的⽂文化实践，⽽而不不是只关注灰尘
- the soil in a flower bed may be admired as fertile loam,

but as soon as a careless gardener tracks it into the house, it becomes dirt that
must quickly be swept up. As scholars we don’t want to locate ourselves either
in the flower bed or in the house-we need to encompass both viewpoints on
soil. 花坛⾥里里的⼟土既可以是肥料料，也可以是灰尘，作为学者我们应该将两种视⻆角都看到
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- binary oppositions
- Lévi-Strauss:
- myths are important because they provide a logical model

capable of overcoming contradiction. Myths seek to explain these opposing
concepts (life/death, beauty/ugliness, selfishness/altruism, violence/peace etc.)
because every culture organises its view of the world through pairs of
opposites, and the idea of binary oppositions is central to structuralist
thought.
- structuralist: emphasise the fundamental nature of these binary

divisions to human thinking, seeing them as part of the “deep” or hidden structure
of human creations. ⼆二元论的思想深深根植于⼈人⼼心中，从Saussure的观点中来
- Saussure: we define signs in relation to each other: a working

definition of “healthy” is “not sick.” 我们定义符号的时候会给予他们关联性，健康
不不代表不不⽣生病 These paired opposites, known as antonyms 反义词, are practical and
useful because they help us sort out our experiences. 反义词让我们能够理理清⾃自⼰己的
经历
- Binary oppositions don’t only exist alone, in isolated pairs. Instead,

they link up, or align, with other binary pairs, to create “vertical” as well as horizontal
relationships. ⼆二元对⽴立的词汇们是相互依赖的，并不不单独存在
- Saussure: analogies enable us to see some oppositions as

metaphorically resembling other oppositions (“edible” is to “inedible” as “native” is
to “foreign”) 类⽐比让我们能看到⼀一种对⽴立与另⼀一种对⽴立之间的关系 Units within the
system have meaning only in relation to other units, and can be analysed only in
binary pairs. You should look not at why A is A, but at how A is to B as C is to D.
- Binary pairings aren’t always equal: often, one term is valued more
highly than the other. ⼆二元论的组合并不不总是平等的，总有⼀一⽅方⽐比另⼀一⽅方更更⾼高
- Lévi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked (1964)
- in the pair healthy/sick, we would typically pick out the

term healthy as the preferable term.
- structuralist: the preferred term → the unmarked

term; the less desirable term → the marked term Although the two terms can only
really be defined in relation to each other-neither one makes sense without the
other-it can often seem as if the unmarked term is independent of the marked term,
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as if it doesn’t need the marked term to make sense. 更更好的词汇总会显得脱离了了这
个⼆二元框架独⽴立存在，似乎不不需要依赖另⼀一半 The unmarked term can appear to be
universal, timeless, fundamental, original, normal, or real while the marked term
seems to be secondary, derivative, dependent, or supplementary. But this is an
illusion: the secondary term, although considered marginal and external, is
essential to the existence of the primary term. The unmarked term is “transparent”
and its privileged status isn’t immediately evident, while, in contrast, the deviance or
inferiority of the marked term is immediately obvious. 更更好的词汇感觉是普世性的，
超越时空的，最基本最原初的存在，但是这是幻象：那个看起来⽐比较差的词汇实际上
是核⼼心。因为好词汇的核⼼心含义虚⽆无缥缈，⽽而差词汇的核⼼心含义却显⽽而易易⻅见。
- intertextuality and the death of the author
- structuralists & post-structuralists argue that the concept of

authorship-the idea that individual genius and expression determine the work of
art-is itself a cultural construct, a legacy of the Renaissance which reached its
peak in the Romantic era.
- They see texts and images as works that are embedded in

a web of cultural representations, where the reader’s (or viewer’s) context, the
patterns and conventions of representation with which she is familiar, are as
important as the author’s or artist’s intentions. 读者⾃自身的背景，读者能够辨识出来
的表达和作者的⽬目的同样重要
- Saussure: emphasised that language is a system (or structure) that

pre-exists the individual speaker: communication, therefore, always employs pre-
existing concepts, patterns, and conventions. 语⾔言这个系统深深扎根在说话的⼈人脑
中，总会有假设性的观念和习惯存在
- Barthes: refer to the subject as being spoken by language. “it is

language which speaks, not the author; to write is … to reach the point where only
language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me.’” 说话的只是语⾔言⽽而不不是权威本身
- moved away from rigid structuralism, coming to understand

that writing was not a process of recording pre-formed thoughts and feelings-that
is, working from signified to signifier. 不不是严谨的结构主义，理理解写作并不不是记录事先
想好的想法与感觉，并不不是简单的signified和signifier的关系
- writing meant working with the signifiers and letting the

signifieds take care of themselves. 写作意味着要通过signifier让signifieds能够⾃自⾏行行运
转 There are not fixed, pre-given meanings for Barthes, for he notes that “writing
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ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it.”世界上没有固定不不变事先就
给好的意义，写作本身不不停地赋予意义，不不停地让意义消失
- Structuralist: against the humanist idea of the autonomous, thinking,

coherent, integrated, human subject 反对完整⽽而会思考的⼈人的假设的存在
- language pre-exists the individual speaker 语⾔言先于个体存

在，⼈人的思想产⽣生于框架之下
- humanist tradition: the human subject can know the world

through rational thinking and through language that is fixed and conveys fixed
meanings. In art history, this leads to an emphasis on the artistic genius as the
centre figure in cultural production, so that the scholar’s primary goal becomes that
of uncovering the artist’s intentions. ⼈人能通过理理性思考和语⾔言知晓世界，导致艺术史
会强调艺术的天才性，从⽽而使得学者尝试揭露露艺术家的⽬目的
- Problem: meaning, in a larger cultural sense, cannot be

reduced to her intentions. An artist may, for instance, communicate things without
intending to do so. 在⼀一个更更⼤大的⽂文化框架下，艺术家的个⼈人⽬目的并不不能简单地等于
作品的意义，因为某些沟通的产⽣生并不不是具有⽬目的性的
- Roland Barthes: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of

the death of the Author.” The author doesn’t endow the text with organic unity.
Instead, the work of art or literature is an artefact that brings together any number of
codes available in the artist’s or author’s culture. 作者⽆无法把⾃自⼰己的作品看成⼀一个有
机整体，但是作品本身将各种的code聚集在⼀一起形成了了整体性
- the concept of intertextuality reminds us that each text

exists in relation to other texts, to other cultural expressions-texts owe more to
other texts than to their own makers. 每⼀一段⽂文字都与其他的⽂文字有联系，跟⽂文化表
达的联系⽐比作者本身更更深
- Kristeva: the text is really an intersection of texts in which we

read yet another text; the act of reading is in this sense also an act of creation. 阅读
本身也具有创造性，因为我们阅读的书⽬目之间会产⽣生创造性
- post-structuralism
- post-structuralism: the theological movement that grew out of

structuralist theories.
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- Art historian Jonathan Harris: we can take this “post” in two senses-
as “over/finished/after,” or as “in light of/in relation to/meaningful in terms of.” 我们
可以把后结构主义中的“后”理理解为结束，或者与其有联系的另⼀一思想
- problem of structuralist thought: structuralism was

ahistorical→if structures are always already there, what do we make of class
struggle or feminist struggle in the context of this theoretical framework? How
do we account for social and cultural change?如果结构不不论何时都存在，我们该
如何解释阶级⽃斗争？
- structuralism often assumes the presence of an ideal

reader/viewer and doesn’t take the experience of actual readers or viewers into
account. 结构主义总是假设⼀一个完美的读者的存在
- result: many of the same theorists worked in structuralist and

post-structuralist modes, and, despite a tremendous diversity of perspectives,
post-structuralists share fundamental assumptions about language, meaning,
and subjectivity. 很多⼈人同时做结构主义和后结构主义的模型，即使观点⽅方向⾮非常不不
同，后结构主义和结构主义都有着相同的根基-对语⾔言、意义、主体性的假设
- Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)
- arguing against a static and ahistorical model of structures.
- addressed the social and cultural issues raised by the Russian

Revolution and Stalinism.
- language was always ideological-it was always rooted in

struggle and the social conditions of speaking. Theories of language have always
postulated an isolated, single speaker, whose utterances create unique meaning.语
⾔言⼀一直是意识形态的产物，⽽而并⾮非被孤⽴立出来的 He calls this monologic language,
because it seems to come from a single, unified source, and contrasts it with
“heteroglossia,” 多声性 the multiple forms of speech that people use in the course
of their daily lives.
- example: you may have very different ways of speaking

with the random people that you encounter daily-from the waiter who takes your
breakfast order to the police officer who stops you for speeding. These different
ways of speaking use different vocabularies, sentence structures, accents, even
tones of voice. 每个⼈人都有多种不不同的说话⽅方式，所以就算是⼀一个⼈人的语⾔言也都不不是
单⼀一性质的
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- monologic language is centripetal 向⼼心的: the speaker of
monologic language is trying to push all the varied elements and forms of language
into one single form or utterance, coming from one central point. 说话的⼈人试图将所
有的元素都形成⼀一种单⼀一形式的⽅方式表达，从某⼀一个中⼼心说话
- monologic language requires one standard language,

an “official” language that everyone would be forced to speak (the ongoing debate
over the validity of Ebonics, or Black English, is a good example). 这种单⼀一表达要求
⼀一种官⽅方⽤用语，所有⼈人都必须说的语⾔言
- Heteroglossic language, on the other hand, tends to be

centrifugal 离⼼心的, moving language toward multiplicity by including a wide variety
of different ways of speaking, different rhetorical strategies and vocabularies.
- Both heteroglossia and monologia are always at work in any

utterance. This concept is critical for helping us to recognise, value, and interpret
the different ways of speaking in relation to and via the visual arts-whether that’s
studying home-made quilts as well as the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or researching the
experience of working-class families at museums as well as the work of Clement
Greenberg or other celebrated art critics. 这个概念帮助我们发现理理解并评估不不同的通
过视觉艺术说话的⽅方式
- Post-structuralists: structures aren’t some kind of universal,

timeless truth just waiting to be uncovered. Rather, structures are fictions that
we create in order to be able to interpret the world around us. 结构并不不是普世性
的，超越时空的真理理。结构只是⼀一种我们⾃自⼰己假想的⼯工具，我们通过它来理理解周围的
世界 Meaning is a lot less stable than structuralism would suggest. ⽐比起结构主义，
后结构主义认为“意义”是更更不不稳定的 Post-structuralism emphasises the constant
slippage in the play of signs, in the relations between signifier and signified.
- Kristeva: a text-or, a cultural practice-is not a “structure” but a

process of “structuration.”
- Jacques Derrida: in texts, structures are really dependent on

the conventions of writers. 结构取决于作者⾃自身的惯性
- Post-structuralist historians: history isn’t just waiting out there to

be found in documents and images. When we write history, the context that is
important is not only the past but also the present, which conditions what we
find and how we interpret it (a notion that hermeneutics also recognises). 历史不不是
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被发现的，⽽而是被构筑的，对过去和现在同样重要，因为历史取决于我们如何寻找并
理理解它
- Art historian Norman Bryson: the evidence for historical

interpretation is vast-potentially limitless. 为了了历史解读的证据逻辑上来说是⽆无限
多的
- the shape of the final interpretation can’t really come from this
enormous mass of evidence: it has to come from the perspective the art
historian brings to the process of interpretation. 最后的解读不不可能都来⾃自于⽆无限
多的证据，⽽而是来⾃自于艺术史学者本身的视⻆角。
- example: issues of gender and sexuality→these issues

were always there, but it took the right “lens” to focus on them.
- Foucault’s history: knowledge is power
- Michel Foucault (1926-1984) has had a profound influence on the

humanities and social sciences since the late sixties. Although he has been
attacked variously as a poor historian, an ideologue and a charlatan, I believe there
is a great deal to be learned from his work.
- starts from a fundamental question: who are we today?
- to answer this question, we have to ask, how did we get to be

this way?
- history, effective history, is for Foucault a genealogy系谱 of

the present. We don’t trace from the past to the present; instead we trace from the
present to the past, examining the choices and accidents that resulted in the
present. 我们并不不是从过去追溯到现在，⽽而是从现在追溯回过去，审视那些对现在产
⽣生影响的选择和事故
- There is no inevitable march of history, no model of progress,

there are no continuities: history is a process of leaps, gaps, accidents, ruptures,
and disjunctures, and the task of the historian is to focus on these. 历史本质上不不过
是⼀一堆跳跃性的、不不连贯的事件的结合体
- The historian disconnects the past from the present,

challenging our sense of the present’s inevitability and legitimacy. 历史学者将过去和
现在分开，挑战我们对现在的必然性和正当性的认知 History is about asking who
are we in terms of our knowledge of ourselves, about inquiring into the
political forces that shape us, and investigating the sense of our relationship to
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ourselves-the ethical choices we make to govern these internal relationships.
历史是⽤用我们的知识来询问我们是谁，质问塑造我们的政治⼒力力量量，并且调查我们⾃自⼰己
与⾃自⼰己的关系-那些道德抉择
- 历史的作⽤用 This means that history has to focus on tracing

the effects of power in society, how it acts, who has access to it. Instead of the
story of great men and battles, history is about institutions, ideas, beliefs, and
practices; it is about ordinary people caught in the web of power relations. 历史是关
于体制、信仰、⾏行行为的，是关于正常⼈人如何被权⼒力力关系抓获的
- Foucault’s work focused on topics in European history that

hadn’t ever been framed in quite this way: the history of sexuality, the history of
prisons, the history of insanity. 他使⽤用了了新鲜的滤镜重新看历史
- Power: is a critically important concept, but it is elusive and

not easily defined, taking on multiple associations and meanings in different works
- power is hard to grasp conceptually because it is

itself plural, fragmentary, and indeterminate. Power is “a multiple and mobile
field of force relations where far-reaching, but never completely stable, effects
of domination are produced.” 权⼒力力⽆无法被观念性地总结因为其本身是多重的、碎⽚片
的、⽆无法被确定的 At the same time, it is historically and spatially specific, working
through normative values, social institutions, and politics. 权⼒力力是被时空特殊化的
Moreover, power isn’t only at issue in the State or the Law: it permeates all aspects
of society and all relations, from the economic to the spiritual, sexual, or artistic. 权
⼒力力并不不指发⽣生在上层建筑上，它渗透⼊入了了社会的各个⻆角落
- The Archaeology of Knowledge (1974)
- How do we present and deploy knowledge in society?

How does knowledge relate to power? How is power invested in particular
institutions, theories, or ideologies? 我们是如何将知识展示在社会中的？知识如何与
权⼒力力产⽣生联系？权⼒力力是如何在特定的体系、理理论、意识形态中存在的？
- explores the conditions that allow discourses (texts,

terminologies, images, and concepts, but also cultural practices and artefacts such
as maps, calculations, and experiments) to develop.
- discourses collect in “fields,” intersecting 贯穿

formations or strands of knowledge. 论述在⽥田野中进⾏行行收集，贯穿了了不不同线的知识
Discourses are powerful because they represent what is asserted as truth by
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the people and institutions who control language, and reality can’t exist
outside these discursive frameworks. 论述是强⼤大的，因为它们表达了了⼈人们所认为
的真理理，现实不不可能存在于论述框架之外。
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995)
- interested in the ways that society seeks to control,

manage, and monitor human bodies, what he calls “the political technologies of
the body.”
- traces the history of the development of prisons

genealogically. We may think from our cultural perspective that prisons have always
been around, but they’ve only existed a few hundred years.
- Foucault looks at the eighteenth century, when penal

systems began to move away from punishments such as whipping or branding to
reform as their primary goal. This necessitated 迫使 the building of prisons
where the bodies of offenders would not be punished, but regulated,
controlled, and reformed so that they would learn not to transgress again.
- History of Sexuality
- look at sexuality as a social construct, rather than

innate or natural, and as an instrument of the regimes of power.
- questioning the widely accepted belief that our post-

Victorian culture represses sexuality
- our culture engages in discourses that actively

produce sexuality and sexed subjects. This is because sexuality is a key
“transfer point” for relations of power in multiple directions and between many
partners: men and women, young and old, priests and laity, etc.我们的⽂文化参与
了了积极产⽣生性和性主题的话语，这是因为性是多⽅方向权⼒力力关系的关键“转接点”，在许
多伴侣之间：男⼈人⼥女女⼈人，年年轻⼈人⽼老老年年⼈人，牧师俗⼈人等。
- since the eighteenth century, the web of knowledge/

power relations on sexuality has relied on four essential strategies: the
“hysterization” of women’s bodies, the “pedagogization” of children’s bodies,
the socialisation of procreative behaviour, and the psychiatrization of perverse
behaviour.
- Structuralism, post-structuralism, and art history
- Structuralism:
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- French art historian Hubert Damisch
- used structuralist approaches in his work on

Renaissance art, suggesting that the strict linear perspective of Renaissance
painting is countered by the use of clouds and other hazy atmospheric effects.
- Heinrich Wöfflin’s use of binary oppositions to perform visual

analysis (linear/painterly, open/closed forms) is a good example to show that
elements of structuralist thought have long been present in art history.
- Post-structuralism:
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

(1982)
- an eloquent meditation on portrait photography and the

relationship between the photograph as signifier and the sitter as signified
- notes the peculiar way in which we do not separate the

photographic representation from the person represented.我们并不不会把照⽚片的表达
与那个⼈人相分离看待
- Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism,

Cultural Politics, and Art History (1994)
- visual forms are not mimetic, they are not a means by

which the artist captures the qualities of the real world; instead, visual forms are
value-laden interpretations of the world which vary from culture to culture and
period to period.视觉图像并不不是模仿性的，⽽而是⼀一种理理解，不不同的⽂文化和时间段有不不
同的理理解
- post-structuralism points out the artificiality of those

interpretive frames, even though they may seem natural or inevitable.
- Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola
- it may be more provocative to trace a particular motif or

a practice such as iconoclasm, or to group artists or images in new ways
- makes unexpected connections among these three

very distinctive thinkers.
- post-structuralist art history: instead of simply

cataloguing an artist’s “influences” to see what works from the past or present
interest her, the focus shifts to asking why she’s choosing particular artists and
images-asking what she is seeking to do in reusing and reworking visual
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images in her present context, and tracing the effects of these choices on the
viewer. 后结构主义的艺术史运⽤用关注在：为什什么她选择了了某个艺术家和某个图？她
是如何在她现存的背景下重新⽤用视觉图像的？这些选择对观众的影响是什什么？
- Nicholas Mirzoeff draws on Foucault’s work to trace the

“body-scape” -the body as a cluster of multiple, flexible signs-to explain how
different versions of the ideal figure have been created in art. 艺术中的完美形象
可以有很多种
- Foucault: ideas about power, the political technologies

of the body, sexuality, and the nature of history have had a strong impact on art-
historical practice
- examine art’s institutions-such as museums or

art galleries-just as Foucault examines mental hospitals and prisons
- practicing structuralist and post-structuralist art history
- attitudes passionnelles, Iconographie photographique de la

Salpêtrière
- Deconstruction
- misused deconstruction
- a synonym for “analyse” or “interpret,” as in “Let’s deconstruct this

painting.”
- mean finding out hidden “errors.”
→indicates a serious lack of engagement with this very specific, and

complex, theoretical construct.
- The French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) coined the term
deconstruction to indicate a theoretical project that explores how knowledge and
meaning are constructed.
- adapted the term deconstruction from Martin Heidegger, who used

several different terms (including destruction and retrieve恢复) to indicate his
complex relationship to philosophy’s past. Heidegger felt that he was
simultaneously critical of Continental philosophy 欧洲⼤大陆哲学 and deeply attached
to it.
- Derrida deeply attached to the text and yet critical of it.
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- even though we typically think of language as conveying meaning,
language can simultaneously convey both the presence and the absence of
meaning. 虽然我们认为语⾔言能够表达意思，但是实际上语⾔言可以同时表达意义的出现
与缺席 The shifting play of signs makes this tension between meaning and non-
meaning possible.
- what any given statement tries not to say may be as important

as what it does say. 尽⼒力力避免去说的和说出来的同样重要
- Deconstruction starts from the idea, articulated by a number of

post-structuralist thinkers, that structures are not some kind of deep truth waiting to
be uncovered, but are themselves cultural constructs created through discourse. 框
架并不不是什什么隐含的真理理，框架本身也只是⽂文化通过论述建构出来的产物 There is no
objective, universal way to achieve knowledge or to claim truth. 根本没有任何⼀一种能
够完全客观⽽而统⼀一的⽅方式接近真理理
- 1967Derrida laid out his central ideas with the publication of three
important books: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of
Grammatology.
- challenges the metaphysical certainty that the speaking

subject puts forth a consistent, intentional, and rational point of view, and a unified
meaning that directly refers to a pre-existent reality. 挑战形⽽而上学的确定性-⼈人们追求
⼀一个稳定⽽而理理性的观点，⼀一个能够直指真实的观点
- deconstruction is a necessary strategy of reading because

the idea of rationality is so deeply embedded in Western thinking and language-and
yet completely unacknowledged. 解构是⾮非常重要的阅读步骤，因为理理性这个观念已
经深深根植于⻄西⽅方的思考和语⾔言中，⽽而且完全没有被意识到
- Derrida challenged the binary oppositions (nature/culture,

man/woman) that are accepted as customary and foundational in a given context.
- exposes them as human constructions, rather than

the essential truths they pretend to be: “the reading must always aim at a certain
relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he
does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.” 德⾥里里达将⼆二元对⽴立
的想法解剖开，证明⼆二元结构本质上是⼈人⾃自⼰己建构起来的，并不不是核⼼心的真理理。阅读
瞄准了了⼀一种关系，这种关系⽆无法被作者察觉，介于他所掌握与⾮非掌握的语⾔言模式之间
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- question: why these constructs were put into play in the
first place? Why might a text construct culture as superior to nature? Or men as
superior to women?
- key idea: différance
- différance is not a word or a concept, its usage over time in

effect makes it seem like both.
- différance is a (mis)spelling of the French word différence,

which is roughly equivalent to the English “difference.” Différance, however, refers to
the idea that signifiers and signifieds are not identical: they differ from each
other, there is a space between them. 在signifier和signified之间是有空隙的
- Signs not only differ, they also defer (différer) to many other
signs as part of the endless chain of signifiers. The differing and deferring of signs
means that every sign repeats the creation of space and time. In the end, there
can be no ultimate truth, because truth can only exist by virtue of difference: it can’t
be absolute or universal because it can’t be outside time and space (which are
both essential to the creation of meaning). 没有符号能超越时空存在，因为他们⾃自身
会重复它们所处在的时空
- Any truth is therefore contingent, relational, and partial.

Signs only signify, or create meaning, via difference (just as in Lacanian
psychoanalysis, the Self exists only because of its relationship to the Other). 所有的
真理理都是相对的，临时的 If a word signifies, it signifies by differing and what it
differs from becomes a trace-an inevitable, absent part of its presence. 只有通
过“不不同”，符号才能得以指向某物
- Culture becomes a network of relations:

differences, displacements, traces, deferrals. ⽂文化成为了了⼀一种关系⽹网络
- although Derrida insists that deconstruction doesn’t provide a

methodological program for analysing texts, in the three early works cited above
he developed a practice of close reading that has been influential among cultural
critics in many fields. 解构是⼀一种重要的阅读⽅方法
- The Truth in Painting (1978) and The Post Card (1980)
- experiment with new relationships of theme and form

rather than the systematic treatment of language and interpretation. ⽤用主题与形式进
⾏行行新的实验
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- art history and deconstruction
- Derrida: art is critically important, for it is capable of challenging

the metaphysical foundation of our civilisation. 艺术能够挑战我们⽂文明的形⽽而上学的
地基 Works of art may be able to point a way out of logocentrism because they
transcend the logic of sameness, they foreground the play of différance. 艺术可
能可以为我们指向不不以逻辑为中⼼心的另外的路路
- work of art itself deconstructs the quest for presence and

truth, or truth as presence. 艺术品本身就在解构真理理 If deconstruction challenges
the dangerous idea that we can know the world with any clarity-much less express
and act on what we know with any clarity-then visual arts are a prime example of
this indeterminacy, of the open play of signifiers.
- The Truth in Painting
- examines art historian Meyer Schapiro’s response to

Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935), which addresses van
Gogh’s painting of two shoes. “This equipment,” Heidegger wrote, “belongs to the
earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman… Van Gogh’s painting
is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth… This
entity emerges into the unconcealment of its being…” For Heidegger, the image of
these battered shoes evokes, and brings into being, the world of the peasant; but
Schapiro attacks this as a dangerous sentimentalism of a kind that the Nazis
employed so ruthlessly. 海海德格尔认为梵⾼高的画作唤醒了了农⺠民的世界，但是Schapiro
反驳这种观点——这种被纳粹利利⽤用的感情主义 He goes on to argue that these were
not peasant shoes but the shoes of the urbanite Van Gogh himself. 海海德格尔不不
过是陷⼊入在了了纯粹的⾃自我感动中罢了了
- Derrida: because Heidegger had ties to the Nazis,

Schapiro’s analysis was an act of revenge-and restitution. 因为海海德格尔在纳粹的影
响下，⽽而Schapiro的分析则是⼀一种复仇，或者说恢复
- to whom does the painting belong? Why did

Schapiro feel compelled to return it-restitute it-to its “rightful” discourse? 这幅画到
底属于谁？为什什么Schapiro想要将论述恢复成“正确的”样⼦子？What is restituted in a
painting anyway? 到底什什么被恢复了了？Does mimesis-the representation of the
shoes in this case-restore the shoes to us? 对鞋的模仿真的能把鞋原初的样⼦子展现给
我们吗？If a painting renders something, in the sense of representation, does it then
also render it to its owner (the viewer, painter, or subject)? 如果⼀一幅画传递了了什什么信
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息，那么它也会把这个讯息传递给它的创作者以及其他⼈人吗？In this way, the
problem of mimesis parallels the problem of ethics. 模仿的问题与道德标准问题是平
⾏行行的
- question: why Heidegger and Shapiro both

assume that the painting represents a pair of shoes, rather than simply two shoes.
为什什么两个⼈人都假设了了画⾯面上的是⼀一双鞋⽽而不不是两只鞋呢？
- To respect the work of art is to avoid

jumping to conclusions, but as soon as we assert that this painting represents a
pair of shoes (a right and a left shoe that go together), Derrida declares, we have
already started to arraign 责难 the artwork. 当我们说它是⼀一双鞋的时候，就已经开始
架设了了 And yet this kind of “arraigning” of the artwork, which Derrida finds so
problematic, is fundamental to art-historical practice.
- From Vasari to Panofsky, art historians have focused on

explanation-the idea that the work of art is logical and comprehensible, that it is
mimetic and represents reality. 艺术史⼀一直在假设艺术品是逻辑性的、能被理理解的、
模仿⾃自然的 In the spirit of deconstruction, some art historians have
deconstructed the binary oppositions of the discipline itself by emphasising
art’s resistance to interpretation, a resistance that art history would be all too
happy to push to the margins (after all, if art really can’t be explained, then there
wouldn’t be any need for art historians). 艺术史受到解构主义的影响，开始强调艺术
拒绝被理理解性，毕竟如果直接说艺术不不可被解释，那么就没艺术史啥事⼉儿了了
- Art historian Stephen Melville: “The question of the object in and for
deconstruction… is a question not about what the object is, but about how or, even
more simply, that it is.” 对于物品的解构，我们应该提出的问题不不是那个物品是啥，⽽而
是那玩意⼉儿咋成那样的
- Once deconstruction recognises itself in the object, it must

be careful not simply to replace it with a discursive representation that reduces
the object to a “mere” theoretical construct. 我们需要注意不不要将论述变成了了简单的
描述，让物品本身变成了了⼀一个仅仅由理理论架构起来的产物 That is, the threat that the
object is but a construct of theory surfaces once theory attains self-recognition in
the object. If objects are objects, it is because they resist (object to) theory on
some level. At the same time, however, the “interdisciplinary framing of the
object” is not an imposition on the object but “a not wholly proper effect of the
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object itself.” 如果物品是物品本身，其⼀一定具有某种对抗理理论的⼒力力量量，但是，跨学
科的⼒力力量量并不不是额外附加的，⽽而是⼀一个不不完全对物品本身的的影响
- The object’s effects stem not from its essence, but from its
relations with the subject of art history: the object prefigures 预示 its own
historiographical and theoretical accounts. 物品的影响并不不来⾃自于其本身，⽽而是来⾃自
于其与艺术史之间的关系-物品预示了了他⾃自⼰己的史学和理理论解释
- practicing deconstructive art history
- Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867. Marble. Howard University Art

Gallery, Washington, D.C.
- Installation view of Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum,

London, looking toward the East Pediment figures.
- Postmodernism as condition and practice

- first we need to define what is modernism before we move on the post-
modernism
- defining modernism(s)
- beginning of modernism: located in France in the 1850s with the

work of such artists as Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet and the writer Charles
Baudelaire. Modernism is generally recognised as coming to full flower in the
first half of the twentieth century.
- use the terms modernism or modernist to designate a time

period, an artwork or group of artworks, a culture, or an approach to the
interpretation of culture.
- modernist artists & writers: found the inspiration for their art in the
ever-changing present, in the dazzling spectacle of the city, and in the modern
world. 现代社的会巨变带给了了艺术家们灵感
- They deliberately rejected the idea that they should look to

past traditions of art, as the academies taught. 拒绝⾯面向传统 This break with the
past meant that modern artists had to invent forms, compositions, media, and
signs that would be adequate to express the novel and breakneck pace of the
modern world. 现代艺术家们必须⾃自⼰己创造适合于现代社会的形式、构图、媒介和符
号
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- example: when Manet decided to paint a female nude,
he didn’t produce a sentimental, soft-focus image of a pseudo-Greek goddess;
rather, he painted a vigorous modern woman, a prostitute-complete with
bouquet-bearing servant, a joke of a cat, and a challenging stare.
- example: In a similar tradition-breaking spirit, in the

early twentieth century Marchel Duchamp signed a urinal “R. Mutt” and hung it on a
gallery wall
- example: Wassily Kandinsky delved into abstract form;
- example: the Surrealists delved into the unconscious
- idea of the avant-garde: the idea of being self-consciously at the

cutting edge, of creating and seeking out the new, of attacking the established
institutions of art and culture. ⾃自⼰己明⽩白⾃自⼰己在时代巨变的节点
- Duchamp made the urinal precisely to shock the art-viewing

public, consciously rejecting past traditions of representation and striving toward
something that was more direct, honest, and fundamentally more legitimate.
- Artists worked to create new forms and media-new images,

and new social orders, to be built on the ruins of the old. And yet, in spite of its
revolutionary aims, in many ways this modernist movement displaced one
authority with another, as one overarching view of culture and cultural
production displaced another. 然⽽而现代运动只不不过是将权威替换了了
- Modernism became associated with a particular way of telling the

history of art, a particular narrative of art history. 现代主义成为了了⼀一种典型的述说艺
术史的⽅方式 It was a unitary, totalizing narrative-one that emphasised the figure of
the heroic (male) artist, the centrality of Europe (and, much later) American cultural
production, one that traced a history of art from the ancient world to the present. 这
是⼀一种集权式的同意叙事，以欧洲为中⼼心，男性英雄艺术家为中⼼心，从古代世界追溯
到现代世界
- Art history has been so preoccupied with European and

American modernism that it has often overlooked modernist phenomena elsewhere.
艺术史⼏几乎完全被欧洲和美国的现代主义覆盖了了，导致它忽略略了了其他地⽅方的现代主义
The modernist movement unfolded very differently in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and
Latin America than it did in Europe or the United States. Modernism didn’t just
happen in Europe, and it didn’t just happen there first and then export itself whole to
other parts of the world (in spite of the mechanisms of colonialism). There were
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modernist practices both distinct from and in dialogue with Western modernism. 其
他地域的现代主义是同⻄西⽅方的现代主义有区别和沟通交流的
- adding the “post” to modernism
- the word first appeared in the 1930s, and gained currency in literary
criticism in the 1950s and 1960s, but it didn’t really take hold until the seventies
and eighties as a way of talking about forms of literature, music, and visual arts
that departed from modernist conventions.
- the term: first came into wide use to describe architecture that
found its inspiration not only in Modernist structures but in an eclectic 折中的
array of buildings and motifs from the past. 最开始这词⼉儿是⽤用来形容同时使⽤用了了
传统和现代⽅方式的建筑
- In painting, sculpture, and other media, postmodernism is

associated with a rejection of the rigid truths and hierarchies of modernism: an
interest in the past traditions that modernism rejected; pastiche, the varied mixture
of elements and motifs; and a return to figurative imagery. 在其他领域⾥里里⾯面，后现代
主要是对现代主义所提供的死板的教条进⾏行行打破，重新看向传统
- examples: New York City’s AT&T (now Sony) Building

(1984), designed by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee (b. 1933), James
Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie (1977-83) in Stuttgart, or Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo City Hall
(1991).
- Cultural critic Hal Foster: postmodernism is not just an artistic

style but a condition of life in a media-saturated global village, in the context of
the shifting class and culture formations of post-industrial societies. It constitutes a
major challenge to ways of thinking about the world that have their origin in
Enlightenment theories of rationality and progress. 后现代是⼀一种在媒体渗透的地
球村中的⽣生活⽅方式，在后⼯工业化社会中，阶级的转变中迎来的新的思考⽅方式——不不同
于启蒙时代所根深蒂固的关于理理性与进步的思想
- anthology The Anti-Aesthetic (1983)
- contains not only his own very useful overview of

postmodern theory, but also key essays by Jurgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard,
Frederic Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, and others.
- these critics explore postmodernism’s critique of the

central truths of modernism and they challenge dichotomies such as center/
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periphery, civilised/primitive, high art/low art, culture/nature, image/reality,
innovation/tradition. 对⼆二元架构提出挑战
- Huyssen, “Mapping the Post-modern” (1984)
- postmodern theory and cultural practice no longer

automatically privilege the first term in such pairs. 在⼆二元框架中，后现代理理论不不
再崇尚“好”的那⼀一边
- less optimistic views of postmodernism: the American literary critic

Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) in Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991)
- links postmodern culture to a new wave of American

military and economic domination-“in this sense,” he argues, “as throughout
class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.” 对后现代
主义⽐比较悲观的看法，认为这代表着新的美国军事经济上的霸权
- challenging master narratives
- the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern

Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)
- Western civilization’s master narratives-those overarching

truths that claim to explain everything-no longer work. ⻄西⽅方⽂文明中权威所说的能
解释⼀一切的真理理不不再有⽤用了了
- that grand, totalizing theories such as humanism don’t help

us understand the constant flux of culture, its endless processes of synthesising
and resynthesizing forms and practices. 权威说法⽆无法让我们真正理理解⽂文化的流动性
- No single explanation for culture is possible-culture can’t

be reduced, for example, to economic determinism alone, as some Marxists would
have it, or psychic determinism, as some psychoanalysts might hold. 不不可能只有⼀一
种解读⽂文化的⽅方法，因为⽂文化本身⽆无法被压缩成像经济决定论的说法，或者⼼心理理学决
定论等
- ask us to examine culture as a process rather than a thing,

and they emphasise the social contexts that shape that process. We must identify
the master narratives that shape our culture and society, those narratives that
conceal as much as they reveal, and that work to oppress as much as to enable
human action. ⽂文化是⼀一种过程，⽽而不不是⼀一件物品，社会背景会塑造过程，我们需要
97
看到权威叙事是如何塑造我们的⽂文化和社会的，我们需要看到权威叙事背后的⼀一⾯面，
不不仅仅只是它展露露出来的⼀一⾯面，看到它镇压的⼀一⾯面也看到它开放的⼀一⾯面
- History and culture are not single narratives, in this view,

but conversations which struggle to come to terms with the relations of power.
历史和⽂文化并不不是单⼀一叙事的，⽽而是权⼒力力关系之间的沟通与交流
- Postmodernists such as Lyotard reject the idea that the European

tradition sets a universal standard for judging historical, cultural, or political truth.
No tradition can speak with authority and certainty for all of humanity. Instead,
a wide range of traditions can be valued for their particular ways of viewing the
world. Traditions are not valued for their claims to truth or authority, but for the
ways in which they serve to liberate and enlarge human possibilities. 传统需要
被珍视并不不因为它们讲述了了真理理，⽽而是因为它们能帮助⼈人类变得更更⾃自由，拥有更更多可
能性⽽而存在
- In this way, postmodernism, feminism, queer theory, and post-

colonialism have much to say to each other, for, in challenging the primacy of
Western culture, postmodernism opens a space for the politics of race, gender,
sexuality, class, ethnicity, etc. 后现代开放了了新的空间，不不再使⻄西⽅方⽂文化成为中⼼心扼制
其他论述的发展
- Postmodern theorists share with Marxist theories of ideology

the perspective that culture is just as important as economics in shaping human
existence and identity, and its just as much as site of struggle. ⽂文化与经济建构同等
重要
- Just as postmodernism decanters Western culture, so too it

decenters the Western idea of the subject.
- challenge the single, unified, whole subject speaking

from one place with a sense of authority.
- postmodernism shares the post-structuralist concept of

the subject as fragmented and contradictory, and challenges the idea that
human consciousness or reason are powerful forces shaping human history.
⼈人不不是完整、独⽴立、⾃自主的主体
- the postmodern subject is fragmented, decentered,

speaking from a particular place with only his or her own authority from a
particular viewpoint.
98
- Andreas Huyssen: postmodernism does not argue for
the death of the subject, like post-structuralism, so much as work toward new
theories and practices of speaking, writing, and acting subjects. 后现代并不不认
为主体已经死亡，⽽而是⼀一种新的理理论和实践⽅方式 Instead of celebrating (or negating)
the individual subject, the emphasis is on how codes, texts, images, and other
cultural artefacts and practices shape subjectivity.
- fragmentation, pastiche 模仿画, and the simulacrum
- postmodern art and culture: a number of discursive practices
- fragmentation, pastiche, and the simulacrum
- postmodernism: associated with pluralistic thought-the idea

that there is no single correct way of seeing the world. 后现代主义⾥里里，没有⼀一种看世
界的⽅方式是完全正确的
- the fragmentation of the subject replaces the

alienation of the subject that characterises modernisms. 主体的碎⽚片化取代了了现代
主体的异化
- in modernism: the subject feels alienated from the

world around her-but at least, she has a way of knowing both herself and the world
and recognising the gulf that separates her from it. 虽然主体被异化了了，但是⾄至少主
体还是知道她有⼀一种看世界的⽅方式
- Fredric Jameson: the fragmentation of the subject develops

because of the new ways of living in the world and occupying space that have
developed in late capitalism. 主体性的碎⽚片化替代了了异化，因为新的⽣生存⽅方式在后资
本主义时代诞⽣生了了
- late capitalism: transcended the ability of the individual

human body to locate itself, to organise its immediate surroundings perceptually,
and to map its position in the vast, multinational network of communication and
capital in which we’re all caught. 后资本主义超越了了⼈人的⾁肉体，将⾃自⼰己随意定位在巨
⼤大的资本⽹网络中
- late capitalism aspires 渴望 to this hyperspace 多维空

间, an unprecedented vastness of scale.
- late capitalism is also marked by a focus on the

recycling of old images and commodities, and postmodern art and theory
99
challenge the very idea of originality, the very notions of progress and of the
continual remaking of civilization.
- 对originality的反抗： Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) posed herself

in photographs modelled deliberately on film-stills, and her contemporary Sherrie
Levine (b. 1947) simply rephotographed photographs by other artists. Jameson
cites the artist Andy Warhol’s work as a prime example of a world transformed into
images of itself.
- French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), Simulacra and

Simulations (1981)
- explores the simulacrum, the copy without an

original. 没有原型的复制品
- in the mass media there is no signified attached to the

signifier: there is no reality, no thing that the signifier reproduces or represents. 没
有真正signified和signifier之间的联系
- In this way, the simulacrum-the image-becomes the

reality.
- there’s no way of getting away from simulacra,

because of mass media. Simulacra are everywhere, and they determine our reality,
how we live and behave. They provide us with codes or models that tell us what to
do, and we’re passive before this onslaught 猛攻. 仿真到处都在，因为⼤大众媒体的普
及，他们决定了了我们的现实，我们怎样⽣生活与⾏行行动
- when the image is more “real” than any other

“reality,” where there is only surface but no depth, only signifiers with no
signifieds, only imitations with no originals, we are in the realm of hyperreality.
- example: Disneyland
- postmodern cultural critics have made a minor industry of analysing

such celebrities as Madonna, who are all image: between the PR machine, the
make-up artist and image consultants, the studio remixes, the video manipulation,
etc., who’s actually there when it comes to Madonna?
- The emergence of the simulacrum threatens the very

foundations of Western thought, which since the time of Plato has made a
distinction between the original and the copy, the latter being inferior or of less
value.
100
- modernism, postmodernism, and art history
- modernist: describe a particular way of telling the history of art-

especially modern art.
- modernist art history: based on the kind of totalizing narrative that

postmodernism critiques.
- art history focuses on Europe, especially urban centres such

as Rome, Paris, and Berlin.
- proceeds according to a model of rationality and progress-all

of art’s history is a march toward the (inevitable) present. The rest of the world is
largely ignored, and the focus is on male artists who are trained to produce high
art: painting, sculpture, and architecture.
- postmodernist art historians: worked to replace this single master

narrative with the practice of multiple histories of art.
- in particular, in telling the histories of modern art, the

emphasis is on modernisms rather than the singular modernism, as art
historians work to incorporate both regional and multi-national perspectives, as well
as issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. 艺术史学者加⼊入了了更更多的视⻆角
- there is new attention to the distinctive modernisms of

Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and Latin America, as well as a fuller range of visual arts,
including “high” and “low” art.
- examples: Okwui Enwesor’s exhibition catalogue, In/

Sight (1996), which focuses on photography in twentieth-century Africa, and
Enwesor and Old Oguibe’s edited volume Reading the Contemporary: African Art
from Theory to Marketplace (2000).
- interrogate the foundational beliefs and practices of

modernisms-as in Rosalind Krauss’s essay “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A
Postmodernist Repetition” (1981)
- examines the beliefs about originality and masculine

individualism that underlie the idea of the avant-garde.
- for art historians, postmodernism has prompted a re-

evaluation of the history of the discipline and our relationship to the art and art
history of the past.
- German art historian Hans Belting (b. 1935) in The End

of the History of Art? (1983)
101
- art history had experienced a split in the
nineteenth century, when modernist artists turned away from the past. As a result,
he says, we’ve developed two different ways of telling the histories of art, one
for the pre-modern period and another for the modern period.
- art historians must bring these two approaches

together, rejecting the idea of “art for art’s sake” in favour of an awareness that
art shapes and is shaped by cultural practices. In this way art historians will
deconstruct the old binary oppositions between art and life, image and reality.
- art historians must also take an interest in

contemporary art, which, unlike modernist art, is grounded in intense historical
and cultural awareness and no longer pretends to a totalizing narrative.
- American art historian Donald Preziosi (b. 1941) in

Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (1989)
- the crisis art history experienced in the 1970s

and 1980s was nothing new. The questions raised by post-structuralism,
postmodernism, and by critical theory generally, could be traced to the very
foundations of art history as an academic discipline.
- practicing postmodernist art history
- Yinka Shonibare, Vacation, 2000. Mixed media installation. Stephen

Friedman Gallery, London.
- Conclusion
- the nature & significance of theory
- a way of describing a particular style of analysis
- structuralism & post-structuralism, postmodernism, hermeneutics, or

deconstruction as discourses that raise important questions about how we live and
think
6. Writing with theory p159

- Mix of formal, iconographic, and contextual analysis.
- The kind of paper you’re probably writing now (theoretically informed ways)
- one way: follow Panofsky’s method for iconographic analysis
- deliberately proceeding from pre-iconographic analysis

(interpretation based on purely visual analysis and practical experience) to
102
iconographic analysis (connection to literary sources) to iconological interpretation
(addressing the meaning of the image in its historical context).
- limited to Panofsky’s method: reception of the viewer & audience 思

考观众的接受与反应
- Semiotics: Meyert Schapiro’s famous essay on the frame
- interrelation of iconographic, iconological and semiotic

methods
- others: politics could be explored further via materialist or Marxist analysis.
- Learning how to write with theory
- read a lot of theory, and a lot of art history
- pay attention to what you are reading not only for content but also
for the style and structure of the argument.
- think about how the material you’re reading might relate to an analysis of
the visual arts.
- when the theoretical work comes from outside art history

(psychoanalytic/Marxist theory), be sure to read some art historians who work from
these theoretical perspectives as a model for your own work.
- pay attention to the way the author structures the arguments.
- How is the author using theory to generate questions?
- What’s the interplay between theory and practice in her

work?
- Is the theory driving the argument or does it seem

extraneous ⽆无关的?
- Is the theoretical apparatus convincing, or are there

logical flaws in the argument?
- The place of theory in research

- Which comes first?
- the or the research topic? 没有固定答案
- 1. Start from the material first (a particular artist, image, or issue)
103
- 2. Go out and find an appropriate theoretical framework to help you
develop your interpretation.
- 3. As you keep working with theory, reading more widely and

becoming more conversant with different theories, you’ll find yourself developing
certain interests or commitments to particular theoretical frameworks
- 4. Develop a point of view, a distinctive interpretation that you want

to present.
- using theory to generate questions about your topic, to guide

your research and push it in new directions
- 5. You may not end up using a lot of what you read
- How do you know which theory (or theories) to use?
- a good fit between your subject and your theoretical framework

(depends on how you think & write & work with the visual arts)
- artists themselves were interested in that theory (modern &

contemporary artists were actively engaged with many kinds of theories)
- Surrealist artists in the 1920s and 1930s: deeply interested in

Marxism & psychoanalysis, and these theoretical frameworks often provide a
productive approach to the analysis of their work.
- the direct connection is not always present: non-Western or ancient

art, where theoretical framework you’re using may feel very foreign to the material in
some sense
-Remember: any theoretical framework is imported, in some

sense, because the way you use it is particular to you and your way of thinking.
- an awareness of your own position in relation to the material you’re

studying:
- Why are you interested in the material?
- What do you hope to accomplish in studying it?
- What are the relations of power that shape your study? How
do gender, class issues, or the legacy of colonialism shape access to education and
information in relation to your topic?
- Writing the paper
104
- Writing center的⽼老老师不不能辅助你理理论性的思考，所以要在office hour的时候
去找⽼老老师
- long-term strategy: advanced writing courses
- writing: a process of thinking
- Crafting a theoretically driven argument:

- Theory shouldn’t be separate or introduced later, but should shape the
analysis you present at every step.
- Pitfalls 陷阱 in integrating theory:
- Descriptive writing: 拒绝胡乱⼤大量量引⽤用，要知道⾃自⼰己为什什么引⽤用，与论点游戏

⽽而不不是⽣生硬嵌⼊入论点
- Losing the focus on art: 弄弄清楚到底要讲艺术品还是理理论，⼆二者平衡把握好
- Supporting your points/providing evidence: 不不要只是放点材料料就撒⼿手不不管

了了，要去解释那些材料料是怎样⽀支撑你的观点的。驳倒⾃自⼰己的反⽅方。
- argue against yourself
- acknowledging possible weaknesses in your interpretation
- presenting evidence to counter potential criticism
- Creativity, Imagination, and truth
105

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Methods and Theories of Art History

1. Thinking about theory p5

- Is theory pure, universal, and impartial?

- Positivism, or the theory of anti-theoretical positions

- Thinking through theory

- What’s the diﬀerence between theory and methodology?

2. The analysis of form, symbol and sign p17

- iconography: art historians developed it as a distinctive mode of inquiry

- formalism: an approach to works of art that emphasises the viewer’s

- Formalism in art history

- formal qualities are the focus: composition, material, shape, line,

- not the focus: its representation of a figure, story, nature, or idea.

- 这种理理念与现在的艺术史相反，but the idea that works of art have a

- argued for the special character of aesthetic experience

- the poet seeks “to go beyond the limits of experience

- proposed theories of form and style

- context: writing at a time when sciences and social sciences

- a similar unchanging principle governed artistic style: the

- he likened the functioning of this “law” to a stone that,

- the way to explore this dynamic was through rigorous formal

- primarily on Renaissance and Baroque art

- with the rise of modern art, formalism found another champion

- artworks have no real connection either to their creators or to

- artwork is irreducible 不不可简化的 to context: the power of art

- his personal and intellectual resistance to the growing field of

- developed a widely debated theory of formalism: The Life of Forms in

- saw artistic forms as living entities that evolved and

- emphasised the importance of the viewer’s physical

- The Art of the West in the Middle Ages (1938)

- traced the development of Romanesque and Gothic style in

- Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), a prolific and controversial American art

- “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), appeared in the Partisan Review, a

- avant-garde art, unlike the kitschy popular art promoted by

- “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940)

- “Modernist Painting” (1961)

- Abstract Expressionist painting: focus on abstraction, the

- stresses formalist concerns, though through post-structuralist

- “In the Name of Picasso”, first delivered as a lecture in 1980 at the

- argues against using biographical or contextual information to

- Picasso’s collages engage in “material philosophy,” that is,

- criticises “Autobiographical Picasso”: the practice of

- challenges the way that art history ignores “all that is

- Iconography & iconology

- practice of iconography: identifying motifs and images in works of art

- example: a woman with a wheel in her hand represents St. Catherine

- iconographers: focus on a particular element within an image/focus on the

- the process of identification often requires extensive knowledge of a

- iconology象征⼿手法: picks up where iconography 图像学 leaves oﬀ. 图像学

- iconology takes the identifications achieved through

- aim: to explain why we can see these images as “symptomatic” or

- History: iconography and iconology were developed first by art historians

- the Roman scholar Pliny (AD 23-79), in Natural History

- discuss the subject matter of the images he was

- sixteenth century: more systematised when iconographic

- Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1615-1696), Lives of the Modern

- combined elements of his predecessor Giorgio

- Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768)

- laid the foundation for the modern, systematic

- Austrian art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and his students

- developed modern iconographic theory, rejecting what they

- a given period’s art was connected in numerous ways with

- Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968)

- “In a work of art, ‘form’ cannot be divorced from ‘content’: the