CIHA London 2000. Thirtieth International Congress of the History of Art Art History for the Millenium: Time. Section 23 Digital Art History Time London, 3-8 September 2000

 Peter Walsh <plwalsh@mindspring.com>, Chairman, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Art Commission, State House Room 72, Boston, MA 02133. Phone: 617-727-2607, ext. 517. Fax: 617-727-5400.

Mail address:
336 Lake Avenue, Sunapee, NH 03782 USA.
Phone: 603-763-8921. Fax: 603-763-7465

The Web, the Millennium, and the Clerks of Nostalgia: Effects of Electronic Media on Visual Studies

 © each author has full responsibility in owning copyright on the texts and on the images they publish on this website

This paper takes its title from a sentence in John Berger's influential collection of polemical essays, Ways of Seeing (1972): "The issue is…," Berger writes, "between a total approach to art which attempts to relate it to every aspect of experience and the esoteric approach of a few specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline.[1]"

Earlier, Berger maintains that "the way original works of art are usually approached--- through museum catalogues, guides, hired cassettes, etc.--- is not the only way they might be approached." He explores the idea of the personal bulletin board, on which individuals assemble reproductions, notes, doodles, photographs, and other personally meaningful imagery. "On each board all the images belong to the same language…because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room's inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums."[2]

Berger has identified, I think, an essential quality of art as it is truly lived. This is a quality that art museums and art history in general has worked for decades to repress--- namely, the messiness of art, its quality of attracting the clutter of personal meanings, bad taste, desiderata, and gross misinterpretation. Moreover, the meaning human beings themselves attach to objects--- whether they are great paintings by recognized geniuses, relics of a deified celebrity, or souvenirs of romantic vacations--- trumps everything else. In the antique shop, the auction gallery, the museum, or the boudoir, such "sentimental" value outweighs everything else.

My own metaphor for this untidy process is the West European cathedral--- inside and outside a jumble of periods, styles, and media; reused and restored materials; conflicting printed and spoken interpretations; souvenir shops and ranks of candles; Christians and tourists.

This is the jumble in which art has been made and experienced for centuries. It is the awkward, messy, natural way art lives in the real world. The function of the art museum--- aided and abetted by the professional art historian--- has long been to tidy all this up, to pull everything out of that messy cathedral chapel and sort it into the proper historical galleries, surrounded by white walls, aesthetically lit, and bolstered by curatorial approved pedagogic labeling.

As part of the process of museumification, the art has not only be de-contextualized, it has been emotionally neutered. As David Freedberg has suggested, in the context of the museum and classroom, emotional reactions--- which, after all, is what the art was created for--- are suspect and dangerous. They invite comparison to the uncontrolled destruction of the iconoclast and the vandal. "… for the most part we absolutely prefer to put [such deeds] well beyond the psychological pale," Freedberg writes of the powerful reactions of the art vandal. "Still we recognize the dim stirrings of antipathy and involvement that outleaps control in the iconoclast. The issue that presents itself to us is one of repression."[3]

The atmosphere of the art museum is repressed to a level of silence and decorum more restrained than that of any cathedral. Yet, apparently instinctively, museum visitors, especially children and eccentrics, strain against it. On the conscious level of our collective culture, museums are praised, admired, and truly loved by millions. Yet, as if suggesting subconscious hostility towards them, museums in popular movies and serious literature alike are often the locus of disruption, chaos, and anti-social mayhem--- theft, fraud, extortion, hostage taking, seduction, insanity, murder, and even cannibalism.[4]

The central character in John Lanchester's novel Mr. Phillips, encounters one such disrupter during a visit to London's Tate Gallery.

"I come here every day," the elderly woman says. "Mainly I come to heckle the tour guides. They talk the most fearful tripe and need much correcting. I used to pick them up on more or less everything they said but now I wait for errors of fact before I pounce. I think it helps them keep on their toes. Then once I've established a bridgehead I broaden out into more general interpretive points. I like to think that my perspective is broadly feminist though also unmistakably personal. And then sometimes, not often but every now and then, I like to spout any old mad rubbish just to see if they notice the difference, and you know the shocking thing is they never seem to."[5]

The task the art museum has set for itself is essentially impossible. The accumulation of objects and meaning is spontaneous and organic. Clipped of all so-perceived irrelevant meanings in the museum setting, the art work grows new ones, like roots reaching down to the collective unconscious--- meanings that may have little to do with the work's original intent or the current art historical interpretation of it. Moreover, these rootlike meanings are rarely noticed as meanings at all.

Norman Bryson has noted this process both in art and in commercial advertising. The advertisement is a collage, associating the product with images suggesting power, popularity, love, and other things not necessarily part of the product itself. But the meaning of the images and the product become inextricably mixed.

"The purchase of the product becomes a way of incorporating into oneself those tantalizing qualities," Bryson writes. "What is happening in this kind of case is an eclipse of signification beneath materiality: the meanings are kept hidden, but the physical product is spotlighted, and if the process works, it is by keeping the consumer unaware that meanings are involved at all."[6]

Something very similar--- but, if anything, even more powerful--- happens when art moves into an art museum. Despite every effort to repress the emotional power of the art, it goes right on spinning those hidden meanings.

Consider an example presently close at hand: the so-called "Elgin Marbles." (I am using the term "Elgin Marbles" rather than the more academically accepted "Parthenon Marbles" to distinguish the portion of the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum from those that remain in Greece.[7]) The politically correct point of view is that these fragments of the Parthenon are part of the Greek cultural heritage. For some decades, the Greek government has been using this justification to ask for their return. The British Museum's response has been rationalizing and legalistic.

Yet both sides ignore the fact that, over the last two centuries the transplanted Elgin Marbles have put down roots of meaning in Britain. They are not only a symbol of an important period of British cultural history, they are an emblem of the whole classical heritage in Western Europe. To remove the Parthenon marbles from London now, it could be argued, would be at least as wrenching as moving them from Athens in 1801[8].

In the past, art collections were acquired at least in part for the ability of art to acquire such meanings. They were especially useful in acquiring, for modern plutocrats, the aura of the "ruling class in decline" to which Berger refers.

S. N. Behrman wrote in his biography of art dealer Lord Joseph Duveen:

"The article on [Henry Clay} Frick in the Encyclopedia Britannica runs to twenty-three lines. Ten are devoted to his career as an industrialist, and thirteen to his collecting of art. In these thirteen lines, he mingles freely with Titian and Vermeer, with El Greco and Goya, with Gainsborough and Velásquez. Steel strikes and Pinkerton guards vanish, and he basks in another, more felicitious aura. The old boys take him cozily under their wings; they carry him along."[9]

Today digitized images and works of art are easily available and quickly and cheaply duplicated, circumventing the old restrictions of institutional controls and the high costs of reproduction. Uncounted thousands of individuals--- not just extraordinarily wealthy industrialists like Frick--- are able to assemble images in ways that makes sense to them, add their own, sometimes highly unconventional, thoughts on the arrangement, and broadcast the results to the world at large. The web has, in effect, become the "public bulletin board" Berger anticipated thirty years ago. John Lanchester's tour guide heckler has been loosed on the world.

I'd like to briefly give a few examples of what is happening there, walking backwards, as it were, as these websites move progressively away from the museum-oriented approach. But first let me make a couple of general observations about these sites:

1. These sites were among the very first things to appear on the web. It's almost as if their creators were waiting in the virtual wings for the technology to be ready.

2. Thousands of people with no professional interest in art are devoting hundreds of unpaid hours to creating and maintaining these sites, indicating a strong psychological need for the kind of self-expression they represent.

The Web Gallery of Art is typical of a proliferating number of "web museums." Created by private individuals with a non-professional interest in art, web museums actually began to appear before museum web sites were common, but now they tend to imitate official art museum websites with galleries, tours, even museum shops and bookstores. A number of them now specialize, as does this website in European art from 1200 to 1700 A.D. The Web Gallery of Art is also typical of web museums in staying as close as possible to the orthodox art historical-art museum line.

Next Monet.com, on the other hand, is an example of the many commercial art-oriented websites established to market posters, reproductions, and original art. Typically, these sites use the Bryson approach of collaging their wares with well-established names in the art world. Sometimes these sites actually mingle well-known examples of fine art with significantly less important works to blur the distinctions between the museum-sanctioned object and the work of unknown or commercial artists.

The Transhumanist Arts Center- Extropic Arts Universe moves one step beyond. Such sites take full advantage of the ambiguity of the web, which makes it unclear whether a website is the product of a legitimate organization, an elaborate performance art piece, a hoax, or the hobby of a budding schizophrenic. This site I think deliberately conceals its true significance behind an elaborate jargon of science fiction and quasi-cult phrases like "extropic" and "upwinger." Some such sites make use of museum art images--- especially Egyptian-related--- borrowed from other sites. This particular one presents its own web art such as the "PRIMO 3+ Ageless Body and Mind."

Artroots.com is one of what I find the most interesting development on the web--- the personal art site that pays no more than a nodding homage to the museum-based approach. The individual who created this site simply assembled art works she liked--- it is not clear whether or not she owns some of the originals. Some of the art works are attached to well-known names and others are not. Rather than borrowing ready-made art historical categories, she has assembled her own, such as "Impressionism: Deceased Individual Artists," "Upper Bavarian Fine Art of Germany," and "Taos Painters (The Masters) and Links."

The webmaster furthermore makes no claims whatsoever for her site and its commentary. "I am very happy if you enjoy this collection of paintings," she writes to her visitors. "Please be kind enough to accept the fact (and to not get angry) when I fail to respond to your email regarding these pages. After all, this is just a spare time hobby and if I had to answer dozens of questions it might not be fun anymore. The fact is that I am simply too busy to answer questions and even if I did, I'm no authority on the subject anyway."

Here is where the web comes closest to Berger's bulletin board. It is just one example of thousands that mingle art, private thoughts, obsessions, categories, and commercial imagery in a way that reflects private meanings and values rather than "official" ones.

Walker and Chaplin have defined "visual culture" as "those material artifacts, buildings, and images, plus time-based media and performances, produced by human labour and imagination, which serve aesthetic, symbolic, ritualistic, or ideological-political ends, and/or practical functions, and which address the sense of sight to a significant extent."[10]

Much as this definition seeks to be comprehensive, I think it skims over what I think is the key ingredient in any scientific approach to visual studies: the understanding of how the visual relates to meaning and how that meaning changes over time, even as human languages change over time.

I think this aspect of the World Wide Web holds the potential for yielding what might be called this "dark side" of Visual Studies. By this I mean the study of visual meanings and significance that do not reflect the scholarly assessment of their art's original intent, or of an individual critic's contemporary opinions, but the evolution of the meaning art works over time. Critical to such an understanding is grasping how art conveys meaning for the ordinary individual, not the specialist or connoisseur--- not, in other words, for Berger's "clerks of nostalgia."

For the first time in history, the World Wide Web allows us to eavesdrop on many such ordinary individuals as they apply meanings to art. I'd like to suggest that the World Wide Web is where some of the most exciting discoveries in the field of Visual Studies lie yet to be made.

[1]John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972), p. 32.

[2] Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 30.

[3]David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 11.

[4] Examples include Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, director, 1929, blackmail, attempted rape), Topkapi (Jules Dassin, director, 1964, forgery, terrorism, theft), How to Steal a Million (William Wyler, director, 1966, forgery, fraud, theft), From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (E.L. Konigsburg, author, 1970, child runaways), Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, director, 1980, seduction, murder, insanity, transvestism), Batman (Tim Burton, director, 1989, corruption, extortion, art vandalism), All the Vermeers in New York (Jon Jost, director, 1990, seduction, corruption), Murder in the Museum of Man (Alfred Alcorn, author, 1998, murder, cannibalism).

[5]John Lanchester, Mr. Phillips (New York: Putnam, 2000), quoted in Gabriele Annan, "Close to the Edge" NY Review of Books June 29, 2000.

[6]Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) , p. 15.

[7]Alternative terms, e.g., the "British Parthenon Marbles" or the "Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum," are neither as clear, concise, nor any more acceptable. The current academic fashion for attempting to remove awkward histories by changing terminologies has always reminded me of that quaint Victorian notion that, by avoiding the common names for certain body parts, we could somehow erase the fact that our ancestors actually used them. Like it or not, Lord Elgin will always be connected to the history these sculptures. To bury that fact, as Santayana reminds us, is only to invite more awkwardness in the future.

[8] When this paper was first presented in London in September 2000, some in the audience interpreted this passage as an argument for keeping the marbles in the British Museum. This was not at all my intention, however. My own opinion on repatriation is sufficiently ambiguous to keep me neutral on the issue. I would love to see the marbles returned to Athens. On the other hand, I would truly hate to see them leave the British Museum.

[9]S.N. Berman, Duveen (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 232-233.

[10]John A. Walker and Sarah Chaplin, Visual Culture: An Introduction (Machester: Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 2.

Abstract

Title: The Web, the Millennium, and the Clerks of Nostalgia: Effects of Electronic Media on Visual Studies

Aims and objectives: This paper proposes to examine some of the unexpected effects that new digitial media, especially the World Wide Web, are having on art history and the developing field of visual studies, demonstrating the new mediaís potential for drastically shifting the focus of visual studies, from the concerns and values of a small group of art specialists to the broader study of the new language of images.

Summary description and central arguments: The paper takes its title from a sentence in John Bergerís influential collection of polemical essays, Ways of Seeing (1972): "The issue is not between innocence and knowledge (or between the natural and the cultural) but between a total approach to art which attempts to relate it to every aspect of experience and the esoteric approach of a few specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline."

Bergerís book, which was one of the inspirations for the so-called "New Art History," presents a dichotomy between the limited, detached, cerebral approach of traditional art history to art and the far broader, organic, and emotionally charged way images are experienced in the real world. Berger maintains that "the way original works of art are usually approached--- through museum catalogues, guides, hired cassettes, etc.--- is not the only way they might be approached." He explores the idea of the personal bulletin board, on which individuals assemble reproductions, notes, doodles, photographs, and other personally meaningful imagery. "On each board all the images belong to the same languageÖbecause they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the roomís inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums."

This paper will argue that new technologies have transposed Bergerís "image board" to the World Wide Web. Today digitized images and works of art are easily available and quickly and cheaply duplicated, circumventing the old restrictions of institutional controls and the high costs of reproduction. Uncounted thousands of individuals are able to assemble images in ways that makes sense to them, add their own, sometimes highly unconventional, thoughts on the arrangement, and broadcast the results to the world at large.

Whether or not these new "electronic image boards" replace museums, they are making dramatic additions to the store of data available to those who study images and their role in society. For the first time in the history of image-making, the thoughts and reaction of non-specialists to art and other images are being recorded in large numbers.

In the early years of the World Wide Web, scholars saw the new digital media as a potential means to conduct traditional art history more efficiently. This paper will explore aspects of the World Wide Web as an object of study in itself. It will compare current developments in the World Wide Web to the ideas of such visual theorists as David Freedberg and Norman Bryson. Finally, it will propose ways new media will shape Art History and Visual Studies in the new millennium.

Relation to section topic: This paper will relate most directly to section topic 23, "Digital Art Time," in that it will explore "web-sites and other digital resources in the teaching, learning, researching, and publishing of art history."