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

 Ross Woodrow <firdw@alinga.newcastle.edu.au>, Senior Lecturer, Head of Art Theory/History, School of Fine Art, The University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia. Tel: +61 2 49216763

Iconography and the Internet:
Warburg's fantasy becomes reality.

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

The threading of Warburg, iconography and the Internet into my title is perhaps an all too obvious evocation of Aby Warburg's desire for a merging of "magic and technology." In recent years it has become almost commonplace to link Warburg's investigative methods, or lack of methodology, and his eccentric anthropology of emblem and allegory, or eclectic search for a mnemotechnical symbolic order, with "the media age with all its surrogates and simulations."⁽¹⁾ (Holly, Rampley, Forster, for example)⁽²⁾. There is general agreement that Warburg looks "surprisingly modern."⁽³⁾

Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas [the culminating project, left unfinished at his death in 1929, consisting of 40 screens, displaying in total almost a thousand uncaptioned photographic reproductions along with boxes of notes and fragmentary observations], was hardly mentioned in art historical literature until the last decade and yet today not only has it been published to presumably meet a contemporary demand for an exemplar of a "process of exploring the function of personal and social memory" but can also be presented as a laudable "predecessor of the present-day CD-ROM electronic library of art." ⁽⁴⁾

Gombrich was the first to note that Warburg was inclined to speak of himself and art using mechanical metaphors. "He is the 'seismograph' responding to the tremors of distant earthquakes, or the antenna picking up the wave from distant cultures. His equipment, his library, is a receiving station, set up to register these influences and in doing so to keep them under control."⁽⁵⁾ Disconcertingly, his concept of memory waves reaching us from the past was perhaps meant in a less metaphoric sense.

Also, Kurt Forster has acknowledged the embarrassment of contemporary historians to confront Warburg's preference for turning representations into reproductions - as exemplified in the Mnemosyne Atlas. For Warburg "[t]he instrumental purpose of images in representing (something) recedes behind the simulation of other images."⁽⁶⁾ Gombrich put it more directly. "For though it was not only the content that interested Warburg, it was the visual image rather than the work of art that he considered the document of human civilization. We have seen that sometimes he hardly appeared to differentiate between the design for a postage stamp and a great painting."⁽⁷⁾ This sliding off of the symbolic layer from imagistic art objects which finds such reverberance in a period when the guiding theory of art is instrumental and semiotic becomes a particular problematic when discussing iconography and the Internet with its promotion of the ease and egalitarianism of communication. It is not for nothing that the navigational devices on computer programs and Web browsers are called icons - with their claim to direct, meaningful codification.

The terms iconography and iconology as they are understood in contemporary art history discourse are more correctly ascribed to Warburg's Circle. Of these scholars, linked to the Institute he founded, Erwin Panofsky's pervasive influence is indisputably founded on his articulation of a systematic programme for iconographic analysis in the form of iconology. Panofsky reputation has also undergone considerable revitalization in recent years, although his projects or methods are not generally linked to new technology. In fact Gombrich's nomination of Panofsky's book on Durer as the twentieth-century's exemplary monographic study would surely negate its potential role as precursor to a CD-ROM. Panofsky's study of Pandora's Box with its brilliant interweave of text and image sources would however be an ideal candidate for collection and stratification into a digital or multi-media programme(if this hasn't already happened). At the very least, a move from book to the virtual domain would seem to make for a clearer application of Panofsky's methodology. As he said himself: "everybody knows that iconology can be done when there are no originals to look at and nothing but artificial light to work in."⁽⁸⁾ Admittedly, this was said in a seriocomic aside but it is the point of departure for my paper.

In early 1999 I added a section on Panofsky's methodology to my teaching site on the Web. Monitoring the site during 1999 it was clearly one of the most successful and popular sections of what was by then an almost complete Web subject on image analysis. I had always included a lecture on his methodology in the conventional delivery of my subject but students had not rushed to the library to read Panofsky's books or showed the interest they do now. There are many reasons for this renewed interest, no doubt, but the only conclusion I would safely draw from this experience is that the Web is a very effective tool for teaching historical concepts that require reference to image and text. Also, grasping an outline understanding of a particular methodology is different to being able to apply it in practice.

Notwithstanding the implications of what I am saying here, with any art historical investigations the Internet has become an essential tool at the practical interface of communication between scholars, in surveys of literature and seeking locations of images. One of my postgraduate students, Lili-Ann Berg, recently researched the identification of the painter in Michiel van Musscher's (1645 - 1705) Portrait of an Artist in Her Studio, held in the North Carolina Museum of Art and conducted most of her discussions and communications via the CAAH (Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians) bulletin board and email; communicating with museum curators and scholars such as Gary Schwartz, Marianne Berardi, Dennis Weller, Andrea Gasten, Thyrza Smith, Ann Prentice Wagner, Ann Driscoll and Laurentia Cincoski,. Just six years ago, such a project would have been impossible from a provincial city in Australia, although she still has to make the visits to collections in Holland and elsewhere to view the originals. The issue engaged here is simply ease and speed of communication not iconography or art historical methodology. The promotion of the Internet almost always focuses on the ability of tele-communications to collapse time and space to the point of a fetishisation of these- if one can make a fetish of an abstract concept. Either way, this is not the place to add to the literature.

Returning specifically to Panofsky's method of collection, classification and interpretation of images. The digital archive in its micro sense of the museum database and macro sense of the Internet - the archive without a museum, as Hal Foster dubbed it,⁽⁹⁾ solves the problem of availability of images but multiplies the problems of indexing them for retrieval. A number of attempts have been made to apply Panofsky's three levels of analysis: factual (descriptive), expressional (iconographic) and interpretative (iconological) levels to image indexing for digital image databases. However these have not proved successful, suggesting that Panofsky's levels of meaning "did not translate well from the area of Renaissance art to a more general domain."⁽¹⁰⁾ The problem is deeper than this of course, because as Hal Foster implied the pledge of referentially in the digital image is not met as it is in the art object, even though they may both depend on the same iconographic data. Foster's characterisation or caricature of Getty scholars as digital iconographers conducting business as usual by building imaginary indices of "lemons in seventeenth-century Dutch still life, dogs in art, dicks in Twombly" is as telling as it is cruel.⁽¹¹⁾

If iconographic classification is difficult to translate to indexing of image databases than issues relevant to the constructional nature of art objects would seem beyond reach of a searchable database. When structural or morphological aspects relate directly to style this is possible as illustrated by Britt Kroepelien for Norwegian silver tankards ⁽¹²⁾ and in the even more rare instances where physical properties might play a indexical semiotic role - as with craquelure in oil painting surfaces⁽¹³⁾ - could formal characteristics become a useful category. Not that there is any real call for such identifications, since the strength of iconography as a method depends on submerging the importance of form to a supporting role for content.

Nevertheless, if iconography cannot find application at the fundamental level of indexing the digital archive its deeper application need not necessarily be called into question. Afterall it has been powerfully argued from rather different directions that the fundamental condition of the modern image in art is opacity. James Elkins has succinctly summarised the preference for puzzle pictures in contemporary discourse⁽¹⁴⁾ and Carlo Ginzberg has traced the history of modern art history as the development of an evidential paradigm.⁽¹⁵⁾ Even though Elkins might dispute this conflation with Ginsberg, both show that in recent art history we value the image for the difficulty as much as the depth of its signification. What the art image means is never self-evident.

On the Internet, if we accept the gush of new media gurus, everything is reduced to an image to become meaningful. The philosophy of compu-telecommunications has been presented by Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen as image-centered. Their book, Imagologies,⁽¹⁶⁾ reads with the usual pomposity of a manifesto, although remembering the influence of Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture it's difficult to be dismissive of such a tone. Typical:

With imagology, philosophy leaves the world of print culture to enter the realm of images, simulacra, gestures and art forms. Struggle now takes place in a world where images define the field of gravitation. You become relevant through your image only if you become an artist and exploiter of the imaginary register. (p.20)

Since their book was first published in 1994 we can now test the accuracy of the predictions they make for the cybermuseum.

The museum of the twenty-first century will, like all other institutions, be international, for, when the whole world is wired, the local is not merely local. The objects on display will undergo radical change. In the culture of the simulacrum, it will no longer be necessary to exchange the "real thing." Reproductions will become"better"than the actual object - be that object an archaeological artifact, a piece of sculpture, or a painting. It is possible to imagine a museum constructed in cyberspace where objects from the entire world are assembled for display. Furthermore, just as telewriting allows readers to become writers, so the museum of the future will allow viewers to become curators. Imagine a museum with an inexhaustible image file and multiple paths that allow navigation through the archive. Each person could, then, assemble an exhibition from whatever point of view seemed interesting or for whatever occasion seemed relevant. For more than a century, the model of the museum has been the encyclopaedia. Having realized the futility of the enlightenment project of the encyclopaedia, the museum of the future will be hypertextual.

The name of the new museum will be: The Cybermuseum. There will be great resistance to this new institution. Critics will bemoan the disappearance of the art object and insist that the reproduction cannot do justice to the "real" thing. In launching this critique, all of the resources of the metaphysics of presence will be invoked to reinvest the original work of art with its unique aura. But the struggle to save the encyclopaedic museum is futile because its time has passed.

How wrong they were, on most counts anyway. The encyclopedias have been replaced by CD-ROMs to be sure, but the encyclopedic museum flourishes still and what's more the holdings, in archived digital form, have become another valuable asset for revenue raising. Virtual galleries are up and running at all points on the web. Even as a hypertextual tutorial gallery for historical painting using the example developed in 1997 at the University of Queensland in Australia.⁽¹⁷⁾ I don't want to dwell on the issue of the virtual museum but the claimed disappearance of the art object as it relates to iconography, or indeed imagology, for in a particular sense this prediction has proved correct.

I am not about to bemoan the collapse of the real into the illusion of the digital image since the difference between a black and white photograph in Warburg's archive or Mnemosyne and its referent is no less great than between a full-coloured digital screen image and its originating work.

I might also be facetious and say media philosophers should read more art history since Hans Belting has shown that the transparency of images is an old not a new condition and locatable to the era before art, as he termed it, when religious icons were not representations but the thing itself and much better than the actual objects.⁽¹⁸⁾

The disappearance of reference to actual objects of which the authors of Imagologies speak is simply a restatement of what Lyotard predicted twenty years ago when he noted that the telematic age would only value what could be transmitted in electronic form.⁽¹⁹⁾

The Internet has become not a cybermuseum but countless cybermuseums some of which resemble the encyclopedia, literally in the case of Nicolas Pioch's popular Webmuseum, Paris ⁽²⁰⁾site, or the canonical iconographic record as in Carol Gertin-Jackson's Virtual Art Museum.⁽²¹⁾ Others are perhaps closer to Warburg's Mnemosyne in structure with their eclectic mix of images and fragmentary texts and links. Mark Harden's Texas Net Museum ⁽²²⁾ might be characterised as a mix of all of these. The selection of these non-institution based sites is intentional, to highlight the problems of a domain where (to use that punctilious phrase of Paul Mann) the "stupid underground" ⁽²³⁾ has flooded up through the cracks in the floor of the academy to become an indistinguishable and indeed essential part of its structure. An iconographer using the web has access to magnificent institutional sites such as the National Gallery in Washington or cross-institutional projects such as Perseus; but if you are seeking an image of Las Meninas, for example, it will not be found on the Prado's site but in any or all of the sites mentioned above. Useful or vital primary sources such as the hypertext version of Vasari can be found in the controlled network of academic authority. In this case on the Australian National University site. However, hypertext versions of Cenini, Alberti, Ruskin and many others are located on a private and essentially anonymous site Notebook (over the past few years I have sent a number of unanswered emails to the author/s of Notebook). The status of any site might not matter, only if transparency of intention, stability of location and accuracy were not important issues in scholarship. [I might add that the gatekeeping role played by institution-based members of the AHWA and others gets more difficult each year.]

It has been argued elsewhere, in relation to the replacement of books by computers, that the imaginary register of the hypertextual is not so much an infinite world as an indefinite one. The unlimited spread of codes across the worldwide web is a further estrangement of signs from the world, whereas the book at least materialized the "memory of the world" in a delimited sense.⁽²⁴⁾ In relation to art objects the issue of materiality is of far greater significance.

When critics wrote about art in the nineteenth century they found it easy to make a distinction between discussion of reproductions and actual paintings for example. A browse through numbers of the London Art Journal from the 1870s will make the point abundantly clear. When an engraved illustration is discussed the reproductive value is acknowledged and often qualified in terms of quality and degree of verisimilitude. In Royal Academy reports, when the pictures are not illustrated it is common to find references to the physicality of the work or its technical construction. Common currency are descriptive phrases such as: the vigour of application: the dexterity or tender grace of treatment; the suavity of manner; thin and insubstantial effect; careless or good execution; reference to works being cleverly, admirably or sweetly painted or represented in the most vivid fashion. ⁽²⁵⁾ They all sound such anachronistic terms not only because of the taint of florid Victorian language but also because of the redundancy of their purpose. Manner was often coupled with style in such descriptions but their interdependency was mostly understood.

In recent times the most rigorous application of Barthes semiotic method to paintings focused on Victorian painting (Edwin Landseer's highland pictures). The centrality of their codification was presented solely in the iconographic stratum.⁽²⁶⁾ This is a startling contrast to the way a reviewer discussed a work of that other giant of Victorian painting Frederick Leighton, in the 1873 Royal Academy exhibition - dismissing an iconographic reading. "Here, not the subject, but the grand treatment of the subject, is made the object of the painter's labour. What is to be represented is of less moment than the method of its representation; for the interest and power of the work must spring from the perfection of its manner."⁽²⁷⁾ When the same nineteenth-century reviewer articulates their theoretical programme we naturally discover the aestheticism which Warburg and modern art historians found so objectionable:

"In the highest form of Art, the beauty of the representation overpowers the mere literary significance of the story or legend, and we are content to gaze upon the picture for its own sake. Our artists have seldom reached this elevation. Their work is by turns pathetic, humorous, or tender, but it seldom gains the perfect pictorial beauty which comes of deep knowledge of living form, and delight in harmonious colour."⁽²⁸⁾

The use by those in Warburg's circle of "sources such as paintings, engravings viewed to the greatest possible extent independently of their qualities as works of art"⁽²⁹⁾ has been presented as a necessary step away from formalist methodology which privileged stylistic analysis. However, an argument against iconographic methodology is not necessarily an argument for determinism or aestheticism. Any abstract rationalization of images by necessity must elide the polysemy of the art image if not the totality of artistic expression through material images. But any reference to the materiality of images is rare in contemporary analysis. A notable exception being Svetlana Alpers reference to technique , means or modes of representation within her complex fusion of theme, ideology and intention in her major study of "Rembrandt's enterprise." ⁽³⁰⁾

The resonance of iconographic method to modern art historians might seem obvious given the dominance of semiotic analysis - by far the most visited section on my Analysis of the Visual Image site is the brief overview of visual semiotics - but pictures as symbolic signs are very different to paintings as expressional objects for example. It is easy to pull the symbolic layer away through reproduction and to discuss the iconic or symbolic emblems, allegories and motifs in a given work. It is also possible to analyse, usually abstract, painting at the level of an indexical semiotic - the arc of Pollock's arm movement, the slashing gesture of a De Kooning charcoal mark, and so on. But a Velazquez painting or a Raphael fresco contains both the symbolic and material layers of meaning at the same time and this vital reality (something Panofsky and other iconographers at least paid lip service to) is completely elided in digital reproduction.

The lack of drawing in the Internet archive (as opposed to cartoons and reproductions of paintings and prints) is evidence of the primacy of the symbolic layer. Without wanting to invoke nineteenth-century theories of haptic experience I quote James Elkins: "Drawing is strongly tactile, both in the way it is made and in the way it is seen. The lines of a drawing record the pressure of the fingers on the pencil that made it, the speed and ease of the marks, and their impatience, control, or anxiety."⁽³¹⁾ Partly because of this, drawing had been since the early Renaissance (the age of art) the most valued index of the artists touch and presence but it rightly has been banished from the formless digital world where it has little substance and less meaning.

In turn, drawing has little relevance in the contemporary art school or contemporary art practice.

More particularly, most artists today are not making pictorial images and, more significantly, few are making art on the Internet in any form.

Warburg went to the desert to find the echoes of antiquity in the primal magic of Indian ritual. The rituals that artists practice in the desert today still involve the manipulation and magical transformation of objects and texts. The photographic evidence of these rituals is much more important than in Warburg's time. Now this evidence can be disseminated across time and space via Internet transmission as has happened with this image along with the other stills from this particular series of works by the Australian artist Jill Orr. ⁽³²⁾ Fortunately, the metaphoric or symbolic function and meaning of these rituals can be controlled by an accompanying text. Warburg's fantasy of an implosion of magic and technology is now realised. We have an art for both the iconographer and the Internet - potent images without substance.

Endnotes

1. Kurt W. Forster, Aby Warburg: his study of ritual and art on two continents" October 77 Summer 1996 (pp. 5 - 24) p.9

2. For example in: Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of art History, Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca and London, 1984; Forster (ibid..); Matthew Rampley, "From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg's theory of art," Art Bulletin, Vol. 79, No.1 pp.41 - 55.

3. Richard Read, quoted in Michael Ann Holly (CAA Reviews)2000 Available online: http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/warburg.html

4. Tetsuhiro Kato, "Crossing the Border: The Current Significance of Warburg's Iconology"
(An unpublished Preprint for the XIIIth int'l Congress of Aesthetics in Lahti, Finland, 1995)
Available online: http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/people/katok/awiaa.html

5. Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: an intellectual biography, London, 1970 (second ed. 1986) p.254 (also quoted in Holly, p.106).

6. Forster (op. cit.) p. 14

7. Gombrich, Aby Warburg , p.317.

8. Unpublished correspondence, quoted in: Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of art History, Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca and London, 1984, p.14.

9. Hal Foster, "The Archive without Museums" October 77, Summer 1996, pp.97 - 119.

10. Hsin-Liang Chen and Edie M. Rasmussen, "Intellectual Access to Images: image database systems" Library Trends, V.48 No. 2, Fall 1999 pp. 291 ff. Available online (Expanded Academic ASAP)

11. Foster (p.cit.) p.112.

12. Britt Kroepelien, "Image Databases in Art History: an expert system for Norwegian silver" Computers and the History of Art Vol. 8 No. 1 1998 pp.17 - 38.

13. Spike Bucklow, "Representations of a Class of Visual Textures" Computers and the History of Art, Vol. 8 No. 2 1999, pp. 37 - 54.

14. James Elkins "Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? Some Thoughts on Writing Excessively," New Literary History Vol.27 No.2 (1996) pp.271-290. (Also published in extended form as: Why are our Pictures Puzzles?: on the modern origins of pictorial complexity, Routledge, New York, 1999)

15. Carlo Ginzberg, "Clues: roots of an evidential paradigm" in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1989 (original Italian 1986), pp. 96 - 125.

16. Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies: media philosophy, Routledge, London, 1994 (reprints 94, 95 &96).

17. Jillian Hamilton, "The Virtual Tutorial Gallery: a dialogic approach to multimedia and art history education" CHArt journal Vol8, 2, 1999, pp 71 - 88.

18. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: a history of the image before the era of art, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1994.

19. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge, Manchester Univ. Press, 1984, esp. pp 41 - 53.

20. Available online: http://www.oir.ucf.edu/wm/

21. Available online: http://mirror.tvd.be/cjackson/

22. Available online: http://www.artchive.com/ftp_site.htm

23. Paul Mann, Stupid Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture No. 53, 1995. Available Online:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v005/5.3mann.html

24. Regis Debray, "The Book as Symbolic Object" in Geoffrey Nunberg ed., The Future of the Book, Univ. of Cal. Press, Berkeley and L.A., 1996 pp. 139 - 151 esp. p. 147

25. This selection taken from The Art Journal, London, Vol.14 new series (old. 37) 1875 pp. 219, 220; Vol. 17 1878 pp. 166, 167, 199.

26. Trevor R. Pringle "The privation of history: Landseer, Victoria and the Highland myth (Chapter 8, pp. 142 -161) in: Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels eds., The Iconography of landscape : essays on the symbolic representation, design, and use of past environments, Cambridge University Press [Eng.], 1988.

27. Anonymous Review, Art Journal, London Vol 12 (new series) August 1873, p.240. The work under discussion was the design "Industrial Arts of Peace" for South Kensington. This mural has now been restored to something of its former glory and currently some of the designs are displayed next to it in the V&A in London.

28. Anonymous Review, Art Journal, London Vol 12 (new series) June 1873, p.197

29. Carlo Ginzberg, "From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: a problem of method" in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, 1989, p31.

30. Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt's Enterprise: the studio and the market, Chicago, 1988.

31. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: on the nature of seeing, New York, 1996, pp. 226/7 226/7.

32. http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/visual_culture/projects/diva/jorr.html

Abstract

Title:

Iconography and the Internet: Warburg's fantasy becomes reality.

Aim:

I propose to show that the Internet presents a perfect projection of the model Aby Warburg established for iconographic analysis. The image archive he established which once seemed vast in its scope now looks insignificant compared to the imagistic data available on the Internet. Also, it might be claimed that the categorization of images into electronic databases is no less quirky or arbitrary than that used by Warburg.

Primary material:

In this paper I will draw on several years of experience in teaching image analysis using the Internet and highlight the possibilities of a revitalised application of iconographic methodology. My conclusions will be supported by data from international feedback on my Image Analysis site
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/fad/fi/woodrow/analysis.htm
and formal student evaluation of its effectiveness.

Central argument:

The scope of the available archive was always the major limitation in the study of iconography as proposed by Warburg and refined by Erwin Panofsky and Rudolf Wittkower. The Web has erased this restriction although a limitless archive brings its own limitations as Umberto Eco noted.. In particular I will foreground the sometimes negative impact of iconographic focus on our understanding of, and relationship to, material art objects.

Relation to Section Theme:

Iconographic methodology using the Internet highlights the contradictory nature of real time access to historical images that must then be constructed into an imaginary evolutionary time frame.