Essays

What Do We Know about the Future of Art History? Part 2

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 16:00:00 GMT

In August 2020, “What Do We Know about the Future of Art History? Part 1” appeared as a special essay in caa.reviews. It explored the history of CAA’s roster of PhD dissertations, beginning with its establishment in 1963 and then delving into the changing circumstances that continue to animate its presentation. The article made the case that this list of art history dissertations constitutes more than just a procedural accounting of projects completed. When analyzed as a data set, the dissertations illuminated unexamined patterns that have occurred within the field in the United States and Canada over the past decades. A series of visualizations distilled some of these findings in a concrete format, but with the author’s full awareness of the limits of this data set—and really any data set—in capturing and conveying the complexity of the stories that we tell about our own relationships to our changing field of study.

That article generated a considerable amount of interest, suggesting that art historians across the discipline are eager to learn more about the shifting shape of the field and are not averse to pursuing the language of descriptive statistics as one possible approach. It also inspired this follow-up essay and another forthcoming one, both commissioned as installments to appear in a series in caa.reviews. All three use the CAA dissertation roster as a salient point of departure and are committed to data-inflected practices of analysis. All are similarly poised at a temporal pivot, with the claim that we must look back to move forward and that understanding our past will help us to sketch the possibilities for the future of our field at a time of great uncertainty.

The present essay, part 2, expands the data set back in time from its previous starting point of 2002 to the year 1980, relying upon the considerable efforts of data gathering undertaken by collaborators at the Visual Resources Centre at Penn State University (PSU).¹ Their meticulous work has provided a longer and richer view of these dissertations that offers clarity about the expansion of art history as a field of study. As stewards of this data set, the PSU team is deeply committed to making this resource publicly available, updated, and as accurate as possible, with the understanding that this primary source presents many opportunities for continuing research and further inquiry.² Additionally, Pepe Karmel has extended the data drawn from the CAA rosters to explore job placements over the past decade. His findings will appear as the third and final essay in this series. Whereas part 1 of this series was written under truly isolated conditions during the tight lockdown that was enacted in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York, this coauthored sequel has emerged from a lively collaboration, involving art history faculty, librarians, visual resource curators, digital humanities specialists, and graduate and undergraduate students, across several institutions.

The PSU Data Set

Before launching into a discussion of the findings, we must delve into the data itself, under the premise that art historians ought to grapple with questions about data discovery, structure, and tractability as fundamental concerns in the face of new analytical methods that hinge on computation. In 2019–20, a team of graduate assistants and staff of the Visual Resources Centre at Penn State transcribed the data from the CAA roster, including all completed dissertations, from 1980 to 2018.³ The nature of the roster, which was published first in print and then digitally, required that they manually gather data from The Art Bulletin from 1980 to 2002, using PDF files accessed from JSTOR. Entries dating from 2002 to 2018 were extracted from the caa.reviews platform, also through manual transcription, working entry by entry. By the end of summer 2020, the completed data set, henceforth known as the PSU data set, yielded 6,345 unique entries.⁴

As acknowledged in part 1, the CAA dissertation roster does not constitute a complete record of all of the dissertations that have been written in the field, due to the fact that it relies on self-reported data from institutions in the United States and Canada. In some years, participating institutions did not submit a roster and, in certain cases, they omitted some of their own eligible dissertations. Furthermore, a manual data collection method is always subject to human error despite the measures taken to ensure consistency and accuracy, which we will elaborate in the paragraphs and endnotes below. No method can be truly comprehensive, but the authors of the PSU data set affirm that they collected the data in good faith and followed best practices.

The first article featured a data set that was harvested computationally from caa.reviews and only included entries from 2002 to 2018.⁵ By contrast, the PSU data set is much larger, hand-curated, and enhanced. Graduate assistants registered each dissertation as a single entry, according to the standard subfields of the published rosters, with up to three of its associated subject areas.⁶ In the PSU data set, the information generally appears without modification, with the major exception that graduate assistants added the associated dissertation abstract to each entry. This endeavor hinged on extensive further research, using the ProQuest database, the official repository for theses and dissertations for the Library of Congress, or drawing from institutional electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) databases.⁷ The added abstracts provide greater substance about the content of the dissertations and thus present a vast catalog of art historical research. With their standard format and associated metadata, these abstracts have the capacity to reveal the emergence of certain research trends, to highlight institutional preoccupations, or to focus on specific scholarly circles. This is a considerable added value of the PSU data set. As an example, the PSU team is currently engaged in a study on the rise of “visual culture” as an area of inquiry within the history of art that can be queried through the abstracts over the past forty years. A team at the Getty Research Institute is using the abstracts to explore approaches to iconography over the same span of time.⁸ The results of their research, attained by applying techniques of text analysis to the abstracts, will appear in future publications.

This research process revealed certain discrepancies between the entries that appeared in the CAA dissertation roster, ProQuest, and the ETD. As a rule, graduate assistants deferred to the more up-to-date ProQuest or ETD record to override or correct any conflicting information published in the corresponding listing in The Art Bulletin or caa.reviews.⁹ In particular, many institutions or authors announced completion to CAA in a given year, but the dissertation ended up being filed in another year. By extension, some of the aggregated findings that appear in the following visualizations differ from those in the August 2020 essay, for which the data was not amended aside from basic cleaning and restructuring.¹⁰ As a result, the findings of the current essay and the following visualizations significantly enhance and improve upon the results in part 1.

The Growth of the Field

With its wide coverage of 6,345 dissertations, the PSU data set vividly reveals the pace and scope of art history’s rise as a field over the past forty years.¹¹ From 1980 through the mid-1990s, around 60 to 100 dissertations were completed each year. A period of marked and steep growth begins in the late 1990s, bringing the tally to around 200 to 250 dissertations completed annually. Since then, this range has been generally sustained, with 276 as the highest point, attained in the year 2013. Looking forward, this trend line is sure to experience more dips and ebbs, especially considering the fact that some graduate programs have elected to suspend admissions for the academic year 2021–22 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These decisions will likely manifest as a visible drop in the number of dissertations completed over the following years. For that reason, we assert the year 2013 as a peak for the number of dissertations completed, and one that is unlikely to be attained again in the near future. Figure 1 (below) shows the overall reporting of dissertations by year.

Fig. 1 Completed Dissertations by Year, 1980–2018, Based on the CAA Dissertation Roster and the PSU Data Set (created by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

Another pathway through the CAA dissertation roster concerns diversity in the field of art history. However, the PSU data set cannot answer this question on its own terms as the roster does not provide any personal information about the dissertation authors, apart from first and last name. For that reason, we inferred the gender of the dissertation authors using methods of prediction that data scientists commonly rely upon for large data sets in which gender is not self-reported. This study draws on the gender package written by Lincoln Mullen, and employs the data from the US Social Security Administration baby names records to predict gender based on first name.¹² Needless to say, these methods have some serious limitations and, for that reason, are widely acknowledged as a “blunt tool to study a complex subject.”¹³ Fundamentally, they hinge on binary conceptions of gender, while assuming sex assigned at birth to be a stable category. More specifically, the package draws on a data set of 91,230 US names, with attention to the frequency of their use over time.¹⁴ As such, we can attain a high level of confidence in the results for names that have been used commonly in the United States over the past century. Yet, clearly, many art historians do not fall into that category, particularly those of international origin and those with uncommon first names. If we were to remedy these shortcomings, we would have to enhance the current data set with much more nuanced information reported directly from the authors themselves, which would entail a major effort toward new data collection.

Working within these acknowledged constraints, Figure 2 indicates, perhaps to no surprise, that women have completed a large percentage of art history PhDs in the United States and Canada, even in the early years of the 1980s.¹⁵ While the number of male art historians completing dissertations has nearly doubled over the past twenty years, the cadre of newly minted female art history PhDs has tripled in size since 1980. Readers will also note the rise of “undetermined” results, which occurred when the instrument that was used failed to deliver a prediction because the first name was not represented in the database. It is worthwhile to peruse the names that triggered these statistical limitations; for example, Hyewon, Ching, Masumi, Sabine, Zeynep, Fan, and Alla, all names that are uncommon in the Anglo-American context, appeared more than once in the “undetermined” category.¹⁶ Rather than manually ascribing gender for the entries where the gender seemed apparent, they were all left as “undetermined,” with the understanding that this category holds interpretational value on its own terms. In 1987, for instance, the “undetermined” names constituted 2 percent of the overall dissertations. By contrast, they composed 16 percent of dissertations completed in 2014, representing the highest proportion during this time period. So, the rise in “undetermined” names points, at least in part, to the increased diversity of the field, with larger numbers of scholars whose names do not have an Anglo-American origin, some of whom may have been international students studying in the United States and Canada.

Fig. 2 Completed Dissertations by Year and Gender, 1980–2018, Based on the CAA Dissertation Roster and the PSU Data Set (created by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

Cameron Blevins and Lincoln Mullen’s analysis of history dissertations serves as a useful point of comparison for the art history data, although their study extends much further back, to the year 1950, and is based on ProQuest records.¹⁷ Starting from the year 1980, many more history dissertations were completed each year than art history dissertations. Yet, both areas witnessed steep growth in the 1990s. According to Blevins and Mullen’s study, history dissertations peaked in 1996, compared to art history’s later 2013 peak. While the majority of dissertations in history were completed by men in 1980, the ratio of dissertations written by male and female historians is roughly equal today. As Blevins and Mullen described, writing in 2015, “Female historians have achieved something approaching parity with male historians in terms of how many women and men complete dissertations each year.”¹⁸ This comparison highlights significant differences between the composition of the fields of art history and history. A percent stacked chart (Figure 3) demonstrates this difference even more clearly, by presenting the proportion of art history dissertations completed by year broken down by gender. It shows that, in art history, women have completed at least 50 percent of dissertations each year since 1980, and in most years, women completed between 60 and 70 percent of them. While the proportion fluctuates incrementally within this scope, there are no definitive rises or falls in either direction. Again, a comparison with the same breakdown for history illustrates that, by contrast, female historians’ share of completed dissertations rose steadily over this period to reach nearly 50 percent in the past decade.¹⁹ In art history, the scales are tipped markedly toward women and have been for the past forty years.

Fig. 3 Proportion of Completed Dissertations by Year and Gender, 1980–2018, Based on the CAA Dissertation Roster and the PSU Data Set (created by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

One wonders how this gender breakdown might be reflected among the ranks of art history faculty and other professions across North America, a topic which would require further study.²⁰ As a promising foray in that direction, Evonne Levy and a team of researchers at the University of Toronto carried out the data-driven project Canada: A History of Art History, which focused on faculty appointments. Levy’s team gathered information from annual university “Calendars,” catalogs that colleges and universities issue to provide information about their academic programs and faculty members. The team also conducted intensive research on individual programs, including interviews with faculty and staff. Their findings indicate that in 1940, 100 percent of the full-time tenure-track or tenured art history faculty in Canada were men. That situation shifted with each passing decade. By 2017, only 36.5 percent were male and the majority, 63.5 percent, were female (Figure 4). The most recent proportion of female to male art history faculty in Canada, with its roughly 2:1 ratio, thus aligns with the composition of new art history PhD holders, as indicated in Figure 3. In order to pursue the same question about the art history faculty in the United States, we would have to engage in a serious undertaking to gather data, both quantitative and qualitative, akin to Levy’s endeavor, but at a much larger scale. The project would also have to address questions about institution type and size, relative ranks of the faculty members, and the ever important issues of race, ethnicity, and contingent labor.

Fig. 4 Graphic from Canada: A History of Art History, designed by Goat (Vancouver, BC) (image provided by Evonne Levy)

Institutions and Advisers

Part 1 of this series explored doctoral institutions and advisers in order to highlight the major sites that have fostered and mentored new generations of art historians over recent years. The expanded PSU data set confirms those earlier observations in quite stark terms. Figure 5 singles out the forty-four universities at which fifty or more dissertations were completed, which constitutes half of the institutions that were included in the dissertation roster from 1980 to the present. Once again, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (IFA/NYU), appears as the most generative site for doctoral work in the United States, presenting a record of 8.6 percent of the overall dissertations completed, equalling 549 dissertations in total.²¹ It is followed by Columbia, City University of New York (CUNY), Harvard, and Yale. These five high-volume programs, all located in the northeast, clearly play an outsize role in training doctoral students for the field, with over three hundred dissertations each. Comparatively, the majority of PhD-granting institutions have a record of less than one hundred dissertations completed in the same time period.

Fig. 5 Institutions with 50 or More Completed Dissertations, 1980–2018, Based on the CAA Dissertation Roster and the PSU Data Set (created by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

Based on the expanded PSU data set, 1,281 distinct faculty members advised the 6,345 dissertations listed during this time period.²² Figure 6 singles out only those advisers who supervised twenty or more dissertations, a group that includes forty-four people, labeled with the most recent institutional affiliation for the adviser that appears in the PSU data set. As was suggested in the August 2020 article, the late Linda Nochlin remains the most generative adviser of the group. The PSU data set includes sixty-four dissertations that she supervised from 1984 to 2017, when she passed away. By contrast, ProQuest lists sixty-seven students who completed dissertations under Nochlin’s supervision. Yet, neither list can be taken to be definitive, as both include and exclude certain entries. So, the actual number of students that Nochlin supervised exceeds the PSU data set’s total and likely also ProQuest’s total. Even so, both of these figures, underreported as they may be, are considerably higher than those of the other advisers with large cadres of doctoral students on the list, which are all below forty in total. This comparison is further evidence of the quite extraordinary impact of this legendary scholar on the field.

Fig. 6 Primary Advisers of 20 or More Completed Dissertations, 1980–2018, Labeled with the Most Recent Affiliation Listed, Based on the CAA Dissertation Roster and the PSU Data Set (created by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

When viewed in the format of a list and also the dehumanized bar charts featured above, the relationships between people, namely advisers and their advisees, and their connections to institutions tend to be flattened. Alternate formats of visualization, such as the social network diagram, map ties within and across groups. As an example, Figure 7 delves more deeply into some of the relationships suggested in Figure 6, by singling out those sixty-four students who completed dissertations under Nochlin’s mentorship as they appear in the PSU data set. This diagram presents a view of the adviser-advisee relationship as a pinwheel, linking together various students through their common doctoral adviser, indicated in gray. It also highlights the fact that Nochlin advised doctoral students from three different universities, IFA/NYU, CUNY, and Yale, each differentiated by color, over this time period. Therefore, it underlines quite clearly how an important and generative faculty adviser who taught at more than one institution connected a significant cadre of students across three universities over half a century. It is notable, of course, that these three institutions, IFA/NYU, CUNY, and Yale, are all among the high-volume doctoral institutions identified in Figure 5.

Fig. 7 Linda Nochlin and Her Students, Based on the CAA Dissertation Roster, 1980–2018, and the PSU Data Set (created by Nancy Um with visNetwork; click for interactive version, where you can scroll to zoom in or out/click and drag to rearrange the nodes)

This set of relationships is extended in Figure 8, with the inclusion of the doctoral students of two of Nochlin’s students, drawn from the PSU data set. This results in two additional pinwheels, which radiate from Nochlin’s own, in addition to the appearance of a fourth institution, Binghamton University, highlighted in gold. In the cases of these two added advisers, Patricia Mainardi and Tom McDonough, there are also discrepancies between the PSU data set and ProQuest lists, so their student cohorts are only partially represented.²³ Even so, this graphic format suggests the reach of Nochlin’s training, which clearly extended far beyond the three main institutions of her affiliation. More radiating pinwheels could be added to amplify these generational registers with other institutions and programs. Figure 8 also attributes to Nochlin a high “betweenness centrality,” an index that refers to the number of times in which a node, or a person in this case, serves as a bridge between others.

Fig. 8 Linda Nochlin, Her Students, and Some of Her Students’ Students, Based on the CAA Dissertation Roster, 1980–2018, and the PSU Data Set (created by Nancy Um with visNetwork; click for interactive version, where you can scroll to zoom in or out/click and drag to rearrange the nodes)

The interpersonal ties that appear in Figures 7 and 8 constitute the fundamental fabric of art historical discourse as carried out through exchanges that operate on a human level. Yet these ties, which are both intellectual and social, appear in print in uneven ways, often relegated to the interstices of academic writing, such as the acknowledgments in a book’s opening pages or tucked away in our more personalized footnotes. There is only one scholarly format that enshrines these relationships, the Festschrift, which is unique in that it declares implicit social underpinnings as the basis for its table of contents. But clearly there is great interest in preserving these connections and seeking to understand their enduring impact within the academy. For instance, the Dictionary of Art Historians sketches the biographies of major figures in the field, providing their bibliographies and tracing connections to other art historians, both collaborators and students, although it focuses only on Western art. On another level, the crowd-sourced effort The Academic Family Tree maps adviser-advisee relationships across disciplines, thereby capturing the multiplicative character of these cross-generational relationships in a publicly accessible record.²⁴

Rosters, Repositories, and the Limits of Institutional Memory

While it has been long overlooked, the CAA dissertation roster is a valuable primary source that sheds light on aspects of the history of art history as a discipline. With its chronological expansion and the enhancement of the added abstracts, the new PSU data set will be of continuing value to the field. The PSU team is dedicated to updating this resource as new rosters become available and is exploring mechanisms to address some of the data set’s errors and absences, many of which are based on original reporting problems. The team is also currently in discussion with CAA about ways to ensure the roster’s long-term maintenance in a machine-readable format, along with public access to it. This particular project of data curation and preservation should be acknowledged as a service to the discipline and, in fact, an open alternative to commercial indexing services such as ProQuest, which controls access to vast amounts of data about scholarly production. Indeed, the fundamental premise is that we, as scholars, should make information about our own work publicly available in order to circumvent the need to rely upon those commercial entities that ultimately seek to monetize access to the same body of information.²⁵ So, there is more at stake here than a mere set of quantitative exercises.

As the researchers at PSU delved into these dissertation entries, several questions emerged that required investigation outside of the limits of the roster. Namely, they sought to track down dissertation advisers who had long left their positions in a given department or had retired or passed away. They also endeavored to locate dissertations that were reported but seemingly unfiled or those authors whose names had changed and were thus difficult to track. So, the work of compiling the data set was not at all mechanical, and in fact it inspired deep reflection about how to capture the past of our programs and, by extension, how we may keep a durable record of the people who have animated them. Levy’s Canadian study also responded to this particular concern. Her team endeavored to record departmental histories by featuring a Department Fact Sheet and a Faculty Info Sheet for almost every program in the country.²⁶ These valuable fact sheets, composed in close consultation with each department, trace the development of degree programs over time, mark historical milestones, and even record past departmental debates. The faculty info sheets serve as important records, containing lists of all tenured and tenure-track faculty that appeared in the annual university calendars, thus likewise tracking historical changes.

On the other hand, for most institutions in the United States, departmental websites serve as the main repositories for program identities. Their contents are rarely standardized and many are not kept up to date.²⁷ Moreover, they generally do not preserve historical data. For instance, some departments include the profiles of emeritus faculty members or memorial pages for those who have passed away, but rarely do they include the names of those who departed the program for another institution or the many contingent faculty members who take up a large share of teaching and advising on short-term contracts. As one very useful but quite unique example, the University of Chicago features a robust history of its art history department since 1890 on its website, including a list of former faculty members dating back to the department’s founding. For some, but not all, short biographical sketches and lists of publications were compiled by past students. The site provides a listing of dissertations completed in the department, but only since 2005.²⁸ By contrast, the list of placements of its past doctoral students extends back to the 1990s. There are, of course, various ways to capture these institutional histories and legacies, although there are no codified standards for how to do so across the discipline or across universities. Fragments of a department’s history are more frequently excavated from the dusty files (or now hard drives) of individual faculty and staff, or simply committed to the memories of its longest-standing members. This essay and its earlier counterpart serve as prompts to inspire a discussion about how (and if) we wish to write these histories and which formats might be best suited to their long-term preservation, as art history barrels forward to the next stage in its development as a discipline.

Finally, we offer these provocations and findings with a certain amount of urgency. Institutions of higher education sit at a crossroads, as we have lived through a full year of COVID-19 and now anticipate the ways the pandemic will continue to affect our lives. We are all sensitive to the momentous changes that are occuring due to increasingly constrained resources and larger shifts within our own institutions. They include the possibility of program closures, the loss of faculty and staff, the continuing casualization of the academic workforce, and diminished support for our students, in addition to a belated reckoning with structural racism, social injustice, and increasing inequality. Humanities departments are vulnerable to such precarities and realignments, even while their scholars are ideally poised to provide much-needed understanding about this changing social landscape and its implications. Institutions will make weighty decisions based on the analysis of quantitative data, such as enrollments, budgets, outcomes, and placements. Art historians need to think deeply about how we can tell the story of our field, communicating through numbers as well as through words and mobilizing the data about our past to envision a promising future for the discipline and its next generations.

Nancy Um
Binghamton University

Emily Hagen
Penn State University

Notes

¹ Elizabeth Mansfield, head of art history at Penn State University, spearheaded this project to compile and analyze data from the CAA roster, beginning in late 2019. The authors wish to thank Mansfield for her encouragement and generous support. They also thank Aaron Hyman, caa.reviews Editorial Board member, who provided the spark for this continuing project along with valuable feedback; Julie Nelson Davis, caa.reviews editor-in-chief, for her continuing enthusiasm for studies drawn from the CAA dissertation roster; and Evonne Levy, who kindly consulted about the data from Canada, in addition to Tom McDonough and Pepe Karmel, who both read the final draft and offered thoughtful comments.

² Catherine D. Adams and Carolyn J. Lucarelli, Art History Dissertations and Abstracts from North American Institutions (University Park, PA: Penn State Libraries Open Publishing, 2021/ongoing), https://doi.org/10.26209/ahd.

³ The Penn State team included Catherine Adams, assistant curator of visual resources; Jennifer Glissman, MA student; Emily Hagen, PhD candidate; Claire Heidenreich, PhD candidate; Carolyn Lucarelli, curator of visual resources; and Kyle Marini, MA student. Adams and Lucarelli were essential collaborators on this project. Additionally, Heather Froehlich, literary informatics librarian, provided valuable guidance, feedback, and training throughout. While this essay was being finalized, caa.reviews published the dissertations that were completed in 2019 and 2020. These recent additions have not yet been incorporated into the PSU data set, and thus were not included in this article, although the PSU data set is currently being updated.

⁴ The authors of this essay assert that it is the responsibility of scholars to be explicit about how they obtained their data and the choices that they made in processing, cleaning, and analyzing it, following Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s directive that all aspects of data-oriented labor and decision-making should be documented and accessible. But, it is also acknowledged that the readers of this essay may be less engaged with these procedures. For this reason, the details of data processing and cleaning are generally relegated to the lengthy endnotes that follow. See D’Ignazio and Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 173–201.

⁵ Data set and scripts are available on GitHub: https://github.com/nancyum/caa.

⁶ The standard fields include: year, author last name, author first name, title, adviser(s), institution, and the CAA subject area categories, currently broken down along the lines of chronology, geographic area, and subject, genre, media, and artistic practice. In the roster, the dissertations are organized by year and further subdivided according to subject area. Within these subject areas, dissertations appear alphabetically by author. Dissertations with more than one subject area categorization appear in the online roster multiple times. The PSU team culled the duplicates from the data set, such that a single dissertation entry may have associated with it more than one subject area category, numbered from one to three, which reflects the order in which they appeared on the roster and is not indicative of any preference or priority. As described in the August 2020 essay, the subject area categories changed considerably according to the expanding interests and shifting approaches to art history across the roster’s sixty-year span (Nancy Um, “What Do We Know about the Future of Art History? Part 1,” caa.reviews, August 18, 2020, https://doi.org/10.3202/caa.reviews.2020.74). Each of the four assistants maintained a separate spreadsheet devoted to dissertations completed within a ten-year span, from the 1980s through the 2010s, which were then combined.

⁷ Institutional repositories for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are maintained by individual institutions and are not searchable via a single database. To find abstracts not recorded by ProQuest, the Penn State team identified entries with missing abstracts, sorted by institution, located the institutional ETD, and manually queried these databases for each dissertation. The source of the abstract text, if not found in ProQuest or not found at all, was recorded in a separate notes field. Of the current 6,345 entries, 256 remain without abstracts, some due to institutional embargo. See Alexandra Gold, “The Great Embargo Debate,” Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/great-embargo-debate.

⁸ Colleagues at the Getty Research Institute, Emily Pugh and Tracy Stuber, have also kindly consulted on this project’s next steps and future potential.

⁹ Modifications were made most commonly in the year and title fields, and sometimes in the author fields, due to inconsistent naming conventions, specifically in regard to the use of initials, middle names, and diacritics. Dissertations that had different titles in the ProQuest/ETD databases were noted in a separate field.

¹⁰ Upon completion of the data entry, the PSU team cleaned the data using OpenRefine. Obvious spelling errors, leading and trailing spaces, corrupted diacritics, and special characters were corrected. Care was taken to identify duplicates and transcription errors, corrected against information recorded by ProQuest. Institution and adviser fields, which were often reported inconsistently, were reconciled to achieve consistency with the conventions of part 1 of this series. Adviser names, including those with hyphenated first names, were standardized in the format “Initial.Initial. Last Name.” Institution names appear in their shortest, most common form; for example, Washington University in St. Louis was reconciled to Washington University, and University of Maryland was reconciled to Maryland. Reconciliation of the institution field reduced the number of unique institutions from 211 to 88 in the PSU data set, which indicates the high level of variation in institutional naming conventions that appeared in the CAA dissertation roster over this period. The data was restructured for analysis, which was carried out using various packages with the R programming language.

¹¹ The PSU data set includes entries that predate 1980, when the roster first began to appear in The Art Bulletin. Those entries, which were inconsistently recorded, were not included in the aggregated results that appear in the following figures, as they would skew the appearance of change over time. For information about the scope and changing shape of the CAA dissertation roster and its move from Art Journal to The Art Bulletin in 1980, see Um, “What Do We Know about the Future of Art History?, Part 1.”

¹² Lincoln Mullen, “Gender: Predict Gender from Names Using Historical Data,” R package version 0.5.2, https://github.com/lmullen/gender.

¹³ Cameron Blevins and Lincoln Mullen, “Jane, John . . . Leslie? A Historical Method for Algorithmic Gender Prediction,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 3 (2015), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/3/000223/000223.html.

¹⁴ Birth dates were determined using thirty-four as the average age of dissertation completion.

¹⁵ The authors offer their thanks to Esol Cho, a PhD candidate in political science at Binghamton University, who wrote the original scripts and helped to troubleshoot the analysis using the gender package. Cho also ran the same data using <a href=“https://genderize.io/>genderize.io”, another package for predicting gender in large data sets. Genderize.io generated fewer “undetermined” entries per year, but it resulted in a comparable breakdown in the proportion of male and female authors.

¹⁶ Names that include a hyphen, such as Anne-Marie, were split so that only the first part was included, in order to achieve a lower rate of “undetermined” findings. The “undetermined” group also includes all of those who use an initial as a first name.

¹⁷ “Dissertations about History by Gender, 1950–2012,” graph from Blevins and Mullen, “Jane, John . . . Leslie?” It should be noted that the ProQuest database of doctoral dissertations can be searched and mined on the basis of subject fields, but not by the discipline of record of the author. So, as with the CAA dissertation roster, one cannot gain a full picture of dissertations completed in the field through ProQuest, even though that database has been used to check, rectify, and enhance the entries that appear in the PSU data set.

¹⁸ Blevins and Mullen, “Jane, John . . . Leslie?”

¹⁹ “Proportion of Dissertations about History by Gender, 1950–2012,” graph from Blevins and Mullen, “Jane, John . . . Leslie?”

²⁰ Pepe Karmel’s forthcoming study, to be published as part 3 of this essay series, will look at the career diversity of those who hold doctoral degrees in art history, including positions in museums, libraries, archives, commercial galleries, and other areas.

²¹ The preliminary results from the August 2020 essay can be viewed as comparison, including the whole group and only high-volume institutions; see Um, “What Do We Know about the Future of Art History?, Part 1.”

²² Some dissertations on the roster named more than one adviser; up to three were recorded in the PSU data set for each entry. In each case, the first name listed was taken as the primary adviser.

²³ In both of these cases, as well, the filtered lists from the PSU data set and from ProQuest differ, with certain exclusions and errors in each. Neither source provides a definitive list of Mainardi’s or McDonough’s doctoral advisees.

²⁴ The Academic Family Tree project relies on user-generated content and is divided by discipline. See “About the Academic Family Tree,” https://academictree.org/about.php.

²⁵ ProQuest is actively leveraging its database for research purposes. See “ProQuest’s TDM Studio™ Service Transforms Text and Data Mining with Efficiency, Flexibility and Power,” ProQuest News Release, January 24, 2020, https://about.proquest.com/about/news/2020/ProQuests-TDM-Studio-Service-Transforms-Text-and-Data-Mining.html.

²⁶ The linked example Department Fact Sheet and Faculty Info Sheet are for the University of British Columbia. To see additional sheets, consult the program page for each institution at https://arthistoryincanada.ca/faculty/.

²⁷ CAA’s Graduate Programs in Art History and Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts directories, formerly published annually, may serve as another resource about departmental histories, although as of 2017 they are no longer being updated.

²⁸ An examination of the list of dissertations on the University of Chicago website indicates some of the problems of reporting and record keeping that have been mentioned amply above in regard to the CAA dissertation roster. Although its entries matched up with the PSU data set for certain years, in others there were as many as six entries that were unreported to CAA, and thus did not appear in the PSU data set. Some dates of completion differed from those that were sent to CAA. In 2011 no dissertations were listed in the PSU data set, although the website includes five, one of which appeared in the PSU data set but under a different year.

What Do We Know about the Future of Art History? Part 1

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 16:00:00 GMT

Fig. 1 “Dissertations in Progress,” Art Journal 22, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 168 (published under fair use)

In spring 1963, Art Journal,¹ published by the College Art Association (CAA), featured a new section, entitled “Dissertations in Progress.”²It was introduced by a brief caveat that described the list as “tentative and incomplete” while promising that it would be augmented in future issues (Fig. 1). At that time, the editors of the journal could not have foreseen that this particular feature, which included dissertations being written at only five universities, would remain a persistent yet greatly expanded offering among CAA’s publications for decades, eventually migrating to The Art Bulletin and then caa.reviews. Now organized by an expanded system of categories, this list includes the dissertations of almost all the art historians who have been trained in the United States over the past six decades. However, it has escaped critical notice as an institutional endeavor with its own history. In fact, CAA’s dissertation roster was first compiled at a time when the organization’s membership worried that there were not enough qualified art historians to fill the rising need for such professionals in North American universities. Today, that equation is reversed. Art history PhD holders have now grown far beyond the limited ranks included in that initial roster, while humanities programs contract, along with the availability of full-time academic positions.³ The CAA dissertation roster serves as a site to explore this shifting professional context of art history.

Here I examine the formation of the roster in 1963 and highlight certain changes that have been implemented to it since that time. One of the most important shifts took place in the year 2000, when the roster began to appear on CAA’s digital platform and thus became available for computational exploration on a larger scale. Drawing from this resource, this essay captures a collective profile of art history through data about newly completed PhDs, thereby exemplifying an inquisitive approach that is distinct from more conventional forms of art historical argumentation. As such, this investigation, which relies upon collaboration with a computer scientist and aims for reproducibility, suggests a viable tool kit that may hold potential for future research about the history of art history as a discipline.

Fig. 2 “Letters to the Editor: Doctoral Dissertations,” Art Journal 24, no. 3 (Spring 1965): 284 (published under fair use)

The Beginnings of the Dissertation Roster

The CAA dissertation roster did not begin as an organized or rigidly defined endeavor. The list that appeared in 1963 was two pages long and included submissions from Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and New York University. Each entry provided only the name of the PhD student and the title of the proposed dissertation. Of these five institutions, Yale’s list was further subdivided into sections that differentiated the projects based on their stage: “Completed,” “In Preparation,” and “Plans Pending.”⁴ As promised at the outset, addenda to the original list appeared in the autumn 1963 and autumn 1964 issues of Art Journal, with entries from Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, Indiana University, and the University of Paris, in addition to notices of ongoing research projects at other institutions.⁵ There was no defined process or fixed format for submission at this early stage. As such, in spring 1965, Charles Mitchell, of Bryn Mawr College, requested that three dissertations from his institution be added to the list in a letter to the editor of Art Journal (Fig. 2).⁶

Even with its supplements, the initial list became outdated quickly. So in summer 1968 a more definitive and updated seven-page roster, entitled “Doctoral Dissertations in Art History,” was issued, featuring projects completed since 1960 along with those in progress from fourteen institutions.⁷ An introduction stated that the information had been “solicited . . . from the graduate schools in art history in the United States which are known to us” and gave a mild rebuke to the programs that did not respond in time to be included (Fig. 3). It was also acknowledged that entries from the new programs that had just launched would be added later, which points to the expansion that the field of art history was witnessing at that time. The editors also expressed the aspiration to include dissertations being written in Canada and Europe in the future. In terms of format, this list was divided first by institution and then subdivided by completion status. Of the institutions featured, only Columbia further broke down its list of dissertations in progress by subfield, the first time that subject matter categories appeared on the roster. Over the next three years, supplements, some lengthy and others including only a few entries, were published in every issue or every other issue of Art Journal.

Fig. 3 “Doctoral Dissertations in Art History,” Art Journal 27, no. 4 (Summer 1968): 398 (published under fair use)

In three years yet another update appeared, entitled “Doctoral Dissertations in Art: A Recent Survey,” which had been gathered by John R. Spencer, vice president of CAA.⁸ Indeed, during this time, academic programs were solicited directly and the responsibility for generating the list rotated among the officials and members of the organization.⁹ The autumn 1971 roster was similar in length to the previous one, while its scope was much wider, with twenty-four doctoral institutions listed. Like the summer 1968 roster, it was divided first by institution and then by dissertation status, sometimes along with other information. For instance, Harvard subdivided its in-progress entries based on subfield, while also providing the name of the adviser or advisers for each area of study. It appears that the list had by this time achieved some status among the readership of the journal, for Columbia included a postscript to its own roster apologizing to those who may have been left out (Fig. 4).¹⁰ This preemptive explanation suggests that PhD students aspired to be included on the dissertation roster, which had achieved an authoritative status only eight years after its first appearance. In the following years, the editors of Art Journal attempted to solve the problem of updating the list by providing supplements that included only newly initiated projects, under the title “Dissertations-in-Progress.”¹¹

A major shift occurred in winter 1973–74, when “Dissertations-in-Progress” was categorized by subfield, instead of the institutional rubrics that had been used for a decade. Many of these areas were grouped together, as follows: “Ancient Near East, Greek, Roman Art and Archaeology,” “Early Christian, Byzantine and Medieval,” “Renaissance: Northern and Italian,” “Baroque and Eighteenth Century,” “Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century European Art,” “American,” “Architecture and Planning: Renaissance to Present,” “East Asian,” “Iconography,” and “Miscellaneous.”¹² Institutions were noted for each entry, set off by parentheses. A short postscript indicated that German and British dissertations were being tracked in the journal Kunstchronik, the publication of record for the Association of German Art Historians, which suggests that Art Journal had abandoned the previously expressed wish to integrate international projects.¹³ In spring 1974, the dissertation list moved toward further standardization and a fixed format for reporting, with the request that each entry be submitted with the following items: “institution, advisor, general area of dissertation.”¹⁴

Fig. 4 “Doctoral Dissertations in Art: A Recent Survey," Art Journal 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1971): 122 (published under fair use)

In spring 1975, the format that continues today was essentially codified with a full roster of dissertations that had been completed, along with those in progress.¹⁵ Entries were listed under the relevant subfield, with the names of the adviser and institution. From that point forward, yearly rosters were issued, usually in the spring issue. However, in the autumn/winter 1980 issue of Art Journal, the roster concluded with a brief note: “In the future, the Dissertations Listing will appear in The Art Bulletin.”¹⁶

New PhDs for a Growing Job Market

The CAA dissertation roster began in 1963 and progressively developed until 1975, when the fixed format that is still used today was introduced. This institutional endeavor must be situated within the wider publication context of the periodicals issued by CAA. Since its beginnings, The Art Bulletin has served as the publication of record for CAA, presenting scholarly research essays in art history, an identity that it still maintains.¹⁷ Widely regarded as the organization’s “second journal,” Art Journal had a mission and purview that were, by contrast, “revamped, rehauled, and repackaged numerous times” in its history, as described by Craig Houser.¹⁸ It was first named Parnassus (1929–41) and then College Art Journal (1941–60) before being rebranded and relaunched under its current title in 1960. In its earliest stage, the content of Art Journal was mixed, including scholarly articles and book reviews that addressed art and architecture of various subfields and periods; features about pedagogy and issues of professional concern for artists and art historians; obituaries; and official news about the organization, such as the annual meeting program (now the CAA Annual Conference). As such it was, at least initially, a fitting venue for the dissertation roster. In 1980, it was decided that Art Journal would take on a thematic approach, with each issue overseen by a guest editor.¹⁹ This was likely the reason why the dissertation roster migrated to The Art Bulletin in that year. Its current focus on contemporary art was established in the late 1990s, when the thematic approach was eventually phased out. Since then, Art Journal’s readership and popularity have surpassed that of The Art Bulletin, thereby overturning its original subordinate status.²⁰

The dissertation roster’s emergence must also be located amid a set of prevailing concerns about the environment for teaching the arts in North America.²¹ In 1966, the organization published a study called The Visual Arts in Higher Education (VAHE), which was based on research undertaken in 1961 and 1962 and funded by the Ford Foundation.²² It presented data about the state of art history instruction, enumerating that there had been 453 art history PhDs completed in the United States since 1930 and that 258 students were enrolled in graduate programs at that time, along with information about their areas of specialization and career paths.²³ These efforts at garnering statistics clearly served as the inspiration for Art Journal’s dissertation roster, which then assumed this continuing task moving forward. Notably, the VAHE concluded that there was a dearth of qualified art historians to fulfill nationwide instructional needs. The editor, Andrew Ritchie, declared, “College enrollments are mounting at an alarming rate, but most departments of art history are not attracting or producing a sufficient number of well-trained graduates to meet the present shortage of teachers in the field.”²⁴ This backdrop is crucial to understanding the emergence of the CAA dissertation roster, which was established amid an undersupply of PhDs as the field, along with the broader landscape of higher education in the United States, was witnessing rapid expansion.²⁵

As an organization, CAA was founded in the early twentieth century, when North American universities were just beginning to grant doctoral degrees in art history. But, by the 1960s, many new programs were being established and needed freshly minted PhDs to fill their academic ranks. As such, the dissertation roster must also be connected to CAA’s placement services, which had been offered to members as early as 1940 but were expanded in 1977, when the organization started to offer standards for faculty searches and consolidated parts of the hiring process at the annual meeting, in addition to issuing a listing of positions, which later became the newsletter CAA Careers.²⁶ While, as Julia A. Sienkewicz describes, the “surfeit of art history positions” indicated in the VAHE had begun to recede in the 1970s, it was during this time that the dissertation roster was reordered in format—listed by subfield rather than by institution—a change that could clearly serve the needs of hiring committees seeking candidates for positions in particular subject areas.²⁷

Migration to The Art Bulletin

When the dissertation roster first appeared in The Art Bulletin in June 1981, a brief note acknowledged that this list had previously been published in Art Journal and provided guidelines for inclusion.²⁸ Students were invited to submit new or substantially revised dissertation titles directly to the CAA office, indicating that this process was now being handled by the CAA staff, rather than designated appointees among its leadership. In its new home, the list continued the standardized format that Art Journal had eventually adopted. The roster was generally divided into the two categories of dissertations, completed and in progress, which were then further broken down by subfield.²⁹ Each entry listed the name of the doctoral student, the title of the dissertation, the institution, and the name of the adviser or advisers. For the next twenty-seven years, this roster appeared in the June issue of The Art Bulletin, including the dissertations that were completed, in progress, or begun during the previous calendar year.³⁰

Even if this roster had achieved a certain amount of consistency in format, some concerns remained unresolved, such as the inclusion of international titles. The 1982 and 1983 rosters repeated the caveat that had first been delivered in 1971, that Kunstchronik was publishing its own list of British and German dissertations, perhaps as a response to members who requested the inclusion of projects that were being carried out across the Atlantic.³¹ But the place of Canadian dissertations was still unsettled. In the 1985 roster, the title changed from “Dissertation Topics” to “American and Canadian Dissertations.”³² But then, in the 2000 roster, the title was redefined starkly as “U.S. Dissertations.”³³ The title went back and forth between the two options a couple times before becoming fixed as “US and Canadian Dissertations” in the 2003 roster, a title that has been sustained to this day. Another issue of concern for the CAA staff was the problem of duplication. In their guidelines, students were frequently reminded that they should only resubmit a dissertation title if it was new or substantially changed from a previous entry or if the dissertation was completed, in order to avoid the appearance of the same project in multiple issues of the journal.³⁴ However, this rule was eventually relaxed. Since the 2000 roster, all dissertations in progress are reported yearly, which has resulted in a much longer list with many entries repeated from year to year.³⁵

The roster’s subfield categories have been subject to periodic change, related to larger overarching questions about how the various areas that constitute art historical work are defined and delimited. These issues have become more vivid as the field has expanded outside of its traditional limits and aimed for a more inclusive profile. In the early issues of The Art Bulletin, the dissertation subfield categories that were inherited from Art Journal generally continued. For example, the 1984 roster of dissertations that were begun in the previous year included categories that were similar to those of the 1970s: “Egyptian, Ancient Near Eastern, and Classical Art,” “Early Christian, Byzantine, and Medieval Art,” “The Renaissance,” “Baroque and 18th-Century Europe,” “19th- and 20th-Century Europe,” “Art of the United States (except Native American and Photography),” “Photography and Film,” “Native American, Pre-Columbian, and Latin American Art,” and “Art of Asia.”³⁶ For most of the 1980s and into the 1990s, these categories were fairly stable. Slight modifications were made to them, usually in order to accommodate the appearance of particular entries that did not fit into the existing rubrics. For instance, in that 1984 roster, the category of Native American art was extracted from the subfield “Art of the United States,” to be grouped with pre-Columbian and Latin American topics. This change was implemented, it seems, to account for three dissertations begun on Lakota, Zuni, and Haida art.³⁷ Islamic art did not appear as its own category until the 1992 roster and occupied an arbitrary position until then. For instance, in the 1986 roster, the category of “19th- and 20th- Century Europe” was expanded temporarily to “19th- and 20th-Century Europe and the Near East,” seemingly to include one completed dissertation on an Ottoman topic.³⁸ More frequently, Islamic art dissertations appeared under the heading “Asian Art,” which was not always suitable, as demonstrated when a dissertation on Islamic Spain was listed in this category.³⁹ Other examples include the appearance of “Art of the Pacific” in the 1993 roster and “African Diaspora” as separate from “African Art” in the 1994 roster, both added to accommodate a single entry.⁴⁰ Most of these examples indicate the complexities in representing fields of art history outside of the long-standing, and largely Western-oriented, rubrics, as well as the question of how granular or focused these subject headings should be.

These categories began to shift in more structurally significant ways beginning in the 1990s, responding (albeit belatedly, in many cases) to larger transformations in the field. For instance, “Art Criticism and Theory” appears as a new category under “Dissertations Begun in 1989.”⁴¹ Contemporary art was first singled out only in the 1997 roster, with the category “Post–World War II American and European Art.”⁴² In this case, the newly added designation recognized research that was long in the works, for its initial listings included seven completed dissertations and twenty-nine that were begun the previous year. It was then renamed “Post-1945 Art” in the 2000 roster, “Post-1945 World Art” in the 2002 roster, and finally “Contemporary Art” in the 2003 roster. The 2002 roster also ushered in new and redefined categories oriented around media, such as “Material Culture,” “Architectural History,” and “Photography, Film, and Digital Media.”⁴³ With the 2003 roster, the list was entirely overhauled to include a more extensive breakdown that is discussed below. In June 2008, The Art Bulletin featured its final dissertation roster, with twenty-nine subfields. It was thirty-three pages long.

The Dissertation Roster Online

Beginning with the 2000 roster, the dissertation list was also published simultaneously on CAA’s website.⁴⁴ At that time program coordinators, rather than the students themselves, were asked to compile and submit lists for each institution.⁴⁵ After the 2007 roster was issued in The Art Bulletin, the list migrated completely to the online format. It is fitting that it now appears in caa.reviews, which was established in 1998 as CAA’s first fully digital publishing endeavor.⁴⁶ This platform is devoted to reviews of books and exhibitions, although other features and essays, such as this one, also appear in it. The section entitled “Dissertations” occupies its own tab, separate from the other content. Even in its digital form, the roster retains the general structure that had been adopted by Art Journal in 1975. The list is divided by subfield and then further split between dissertations completed and in progress. In the list’s online form, one can view the spectrum of fields quite easily while also toggling fluidly between the completed and in-progress dissertations for any single category. The caa.reviews dissertation listing began in 2009, when rosters dating back to 2002 were added.⁴⁷ This listing is updated with the previous year’s entries on an annual basis.⁴⁸ The most recent update was provided in 2019 for the year 2018.

In July 2020, the data comprising records of dissertations completed from 2002 to 2018 was harvested computationally from the caa.reviews roster and then cleaned, tidied, restructured, and analyzed.⁴⁹ The following paragraphs reveal some initial results from this study. However, this exploration is preliminary and presented in order to spark interest in the possibilities of this data set, even to entice others to begin to work with it. As such, the tools that were used to carry out this analysis have also been published and documented.⁵⁰ They include the Python script that was used to harvest the data, written by Kenneth Chiu; the cleaned data set that was used for analysis; and the R markdown file (a document format combining plain text with chunks of code in the R programming language) that was used to generate the following visualizations. It is hoped that these instruments will be taken up by others who may wish to ask particular questions oriented around specific subfields, individual institutions, or a different set of concerns. Indeed, the goal is to suggest a reproducible workflow that may extend into the future, as the roster continues to be updated and new questions about it emerge. It is acknowledged that this data set is incomplete, in that the reporting institutions inevitably overlooked some projects that were eligible for inclusion and in certain instances or years did not submit a roster to CAA at all. As such there are notable lacunae, along with inevitable errors that originated at the time of submission or from data entry. Indeed, this essay endeavors to identify what the CAA data set shows along with an understanding of what it cannot reveal. With these limitations in mind, the following visualizations may help us to understand certain patterns that are not apparent when the dissertation roster is viewed in its standard format as a list.

The CAA dissertation roster from 2002 to 2018 yielded 3,924 unique entries. Plotted by completion year, Figure 5 indicates that the number of dissertations finished in any given year generally oscillated between 200 and 250. The years 2010 and 2013 each witnessed an unusually high number of dissertations, 279 and 275, representing a functional ceiling in the number of degrees that have been issued in recent years. By contrast, 2011 was the lowest year during this time span, with fewer than 200 dissertations completed. As comparison, in 1966, the VAHE had estimated the average number of art history PhDs produced each year by decade as follows: 4 in the 1930s, 6 in the 1940s, 17 in the 1950s, and 26 in the 1960s.⁵¹

Fig. 5 Dissertations by Year, 2002–2018 (graph by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

Figure 6 cuts across this data in a different way by exploring how these projects were distributed across the seventy-five institutions that granted these degrees during the seventeen-year period under consideration. The distribution is quite uneven. IFA/NYU has generated, by far, the largest number of doctoral degrees in art history in the United States and Canada in recent years, with 301 dissertations, followed by CUNY and Columbia. Figure 6 thus confirms New York City’s place as an uncontested center for issuing doctoral degrees in art history. Figure 7 provides a more focused view by isolating those institutions where fifty or more dissertations were completed in this period, indicating that they are the thirty most prolific art history PhD-granting institutions in North America.

Fig. 6 Dissertations by Institution, 2002–2018 (graph by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

Fig. 7 Institutions with 50 or More Dissertations, 2002–2018 (graph by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

Based on the information provided in these rosters, it is possible to ask questions that are more individualized regarding advising and mentorship. For example, 958 names were listed as primary supervisors for the 3,924 dissertations over this time period.⁵² Of them, only 20 served as the primary adviser for 17 or more dissertations, which amounts to one dissertation completed per year (Fig. 8). The late Linda Nochlin of IFA/NYU and Mark Jarzombek of MIT appear as the most generative doctoral advisers in the United States, having supervised 33 and 27 dissertations respectively. This data set could be filtered and then queried by institution for a more granular look at a particular program examined over the course of time.

Fig. 8 Primary Advisers of 17 or More Dissertations, 2002–2018, Each Listed with Their Most Recent Institutional Affiliation (graph by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

The question of subject matter must be approached through different methods, such as an exploration of the most commonly occurring terms that appear in recent dissertation titles (Fig. 9).⁵³ Among the top terms, unsurprisingly, “art” appears most frequently, in 943 titles. The next most frequent terms, appearing more than 200 times each, are “American” (286), “architecture” (265), and “painting” (205), in addition to more generic terms, such as “century” (364) and “early” (227). The next group of terms, which appear more than 100 times, include “contemporary” (124), “culture” (179), “history” (127), “identity” (159), “modern” (186), “photography” (131), “politics” (126), and “visual” (161). They suggest the continuing interest in certain types of historic media, such as architecture, painting, and, to a lesser degree, photography, while also pointing to the modern and contemporary orientation of the field. In the next category of terms, which appear fewer than 100 times, certain area-specific designations, such as “France,” “medieval,” “Renaissance,” “Rome,” and “Roman,” appear. Elizabeth Mansfield, of Penn State University, is also in the process of working with the CAA dissertation data set, including the associated abstracts, which will allow for a more substantive exploration of content and subject matter in the future.

Fig. 9 Top Terms in Art History Dissertation Titles, 2002–2018 (graph by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

Although they are seemingly useful, the subfield headings should be approached with caution. As indicated in the previous paragraphs, over the past decades CAA has used various categories not only to define the diverse and ever increasing art historical subfields for the dissertation roster but also to assess the scope of articles and reviews published in its journals, in addition to the content that is presented at the Annual Conference.⁵⁴ Naturally, most dissertations fit under multiple rubrics, such that a single dissertation can be reported in more than one category in any given year.⁵⁵ Beginning with the 2003 roster published in The Art Bulletin, in addition to all of the rosters that were added to caa.reviews, the subject areas were reformulated in a manner that allowed for greater differentiation of subspecialty, generally along the lines of time period or geography. For instance, “Early Christian/Byzantine Art” was severed from “Early Medieval/Romanesque/Gothic Art” and “Asian Art” was subdivided into “Chinese Art,” "Japanese/Korean Art,” and “South/Southeast Asian Art.” Moreover, categories that were oriented around medium were added or expanded, such as “Architectural History/Historic Preservation,” “Drawings/Prints/Works on Paper,” and “Decorative Arts/Textiles/Design History.”

Then in 2015, yet another transformation was implemented, but this one resulted in a major structural shift, which posited three types of categories: Chronology, Geographic Area, and Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice.⁵⁶ In order to achieve a sense of balance, chronological designations were defined by the century or a time span across centuries, and geographic area designations were based on continents or subcontinental regions. As such, certain labels, such as “Renaissance/Baroque Art” or “Early Medieval/Romanesque/Gothic Art,” were altogether abandoned. So, a dissertation about the artist Raphael that would have been considered “Renaissance/Baroque Art” before 2015 is now reported under the categories “Sixteenth Century” or “Southern Europe and Mediterranean” instead. At the same time, a wide array of topics appears under the vast grouping Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice, including certain media designations, such as “Sculpture,” and fields of study, such as “Art Education/Pedagogy/Art Therapy.” Notably, certain subfields, such as “Ancient Greek/Roman Art,” “African American/African Diaspora,” “Islamic,” and “Colonial and Modern Latin America” also appear under this heading, although not all subfields are included. Open-ended topical categories, such as “Comparative,” “Politics/Economics,” and “Race/Ethnicity,” were also added. As such, the CAA categories are highly variable and inconsistent over time, making it difficult to explore the trajectory of a specific subfield through the CAA dissertation roster. As an example, when plotted along the lines of geography, it appears as if European topics are in the minority. This misrepresentation originates from the fact that before 2015, Europe was frequently assumed as a default category and thus most European dissertations were marked not by geography but by temporal focus or medium. By contrast, dissertations about Africa, Asia, or Latin America, were almost always defined by geographical area and, as such, appear to be more numerous than those on European topics.

Fig. 10 Dissertation Categories Based on Chronology (graph by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

Even so, it is worthwhile to explore the changing categories that CAA has used over time, as they point to some of the shifting conceptions about the shape of the field of art history and its parts. Figures 10, 11, and 12 represent the various categories as they changed over the seventeen-year period.⁵⁷ Figure 10, which focuses on chronology, indicates that certain subfields have had more longevity than others, such as “Eighteenth Century,” “Nineteenth Century,” and “Twentieth Century,” which outlasted those that were based on periodization, such as “Renaissance/Baroque Art” or “Prehistoric Art.” Under geographic area, in Figure 11, “African” and “South Asia/Southeast Asian” are the only categories that are reported consistently across the seventeen-year spectrum. Others, such as those related to Latin and Central America and the Caribbean, have been redefined much more dynamically in recent years. As apparent in Figure 12, categories such as “Sound Art,” “Latinx,” and “Queer/Gay Art” appear in 2015, which was also when “Design History” received its own category, having previously been associated with the category “Decorative Arts.” The dots on these three visualizations are sized by volume, but they do not necessarily indicate the scaled rise or fall of a particular subject over time for the reasons mentioned above. Rather, they should be used to understand the qualitative shifts in categorization and conceptualization of art historical areas. Particularly, Figure 12 indicates changing notions, some subtle and others marked, about which areas may be considered as tethered together and how those areas may be named. Indeed, the CAA dissertation roster points to debates that have been taken up amply through other forms of scholarly expression over the past six decades, regarding the scope of the field and the parts that compose it.

Fig. 11 Dissertation Categories Based on Geographic Area (graph by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

Fig. 12 Dissertation Categories Based on Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice (graph by Nancy Um; click for larger version)

Dissertations Looking Forward

Even if the CAA dissertation roster has maintained a certain structural integrity since 1975, the context of its publication has changed progressively as it migrated across CAA’s print and digital publication platforms. It was first issued in 1963 at a moment when the field was rapidly widening. Today, in the year 2020, we sit in a very different position, shrouded by questions about the future of the humanities and the arts, which are driven by an economy of scarcity and an atmosphere of crisis. It is also worth noting that the process of hiring for academic positions is no longer oriented around CAA’s Annual Conference, as it had been in the early years of the dissertation roster, so those linked processes have been effectively severed. Meanwhile, new formats for remote interviewing have become standard and are poised to become even more pervasive in this age of social distancing.

It is hoped that this article will signal the richness of these records for future investigation. As mentioned above, a research team at Penn State is also working with the dissertation roster and aims to incorporate the earlier lists, beginning with 1980, which will allow for a longer view of some of these questions. Moreover, particular subfields or institutions could be queried intensively for more pointed examinations.⁵⁸ This essay responds to a rising interest in the changing shape of academia that is relevant to other disciplines as well. Recent and ongoing studies take up questions of job placement, career trajectory, and gender, race, and ethnicity, relying on the results of surveys, data from ProQuest, and other methods, suggesting potential directions for future study that could also be used for the CAA dissertation data.⁵⁹

(Click here to read part 2 of this essay, including enhanced data expanded to 1980.)

Nancy Um
Binghamton University

Notes

¹ I thank the members of the CAA staff, past and current, who kindly offered assistance with this project: Joe Hannan, Betty Leigh Hutcheson, Daniel Tsai, Vanessa Jalet, Susan Ball, and Eve Sinaiko. Both former and current editors-in-chief of caa.reviews, Rick Asher, Juliet Bellow, and Julie Nelson Davis, provided valuable encouragement and feedback on the revision of this essay. My colleague Kenneth Chiu of Binghamton University wrote the Python script that was used to harvest the data from caa.reviews and served as a valued collaborator on this essay.

² “Dissertations in Progress,” Art Journal 22, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 168.

³ Bryan Alexander, Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), 36–60.

⁴ “Dissertations in Progress,” Art Journal 22, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 169.

⁵ “Dissertations,” Art Journal 23, no. 1 (Autumn 1963): 94; “Dissertations in Progress,” Art Journal 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1964): 38, 104.

⁶ “Letters to the Editor: Doctoral Dissertations,” Art Journal 24, no. 3 (Spring 1965): 284.

⁷ “Doctoral Dissertations in Art History,” Art Journal 27, no. 4 (Summer 1968): 398–405.

⁸ “Doctoral Dissertations in Art: A Recent Survey,” Art Journal 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1971): 121–27.

⁹ “Dissertations-in-Progress,” Art Journal 32, no. 3 (Spring 1973): 384.

¹⁰ “Doctoral Dissertations in Art: A Recent Survey,” Art Journal 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1971): 122.

¹¹ “Dissertations-in-Progress,” Art Journal 32, no. 3 (Spring 1973): 384.

¹² “Dissertations-in-Progress,” Art Journal 33, no. 2 (Winter 1973/74): 180, 182.

¹³ Ibid., 182.

¹⁴ The “general area of dissertation” referred, perhaps, to the published headings that appeared in that issue, although they were not exactly consistent with the ones used in the previous year. “Dissertations-in-Progress,” Art Journal 33, no. 3 (Spring 1974): 286; “Dissertations Listing,” Art Journal 34, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 286.

¹⁵ The dates of completion were not specified. “Dissertations Listing,” Art Journal 34, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 286, 288, 290.

¹⁶ “Dissertations Listing,” Art Journal 40, no. 1/2 (Autumn/Winter 1980): 441.

¹⁷ Craig Houser, “The Changing Face of Scholarly Publishing: CAA’s Publications Program,” in The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, ed. Susan Ball (New York: College Art Association; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 48–49.

¹⁸ Ibid., 67.

¹⁹ Ibid., 77.

²⁰ Ibid., 80–81.

²¹ Matthew Israel, “CAA, Pedagogy, and Curriculum: A Historical Effort, an Unparalleled Wealth of Ideas,” in Ball, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind, 169.

²² Andrew C. Ritchie, ed., The Visual Arts in Higher Education: A Study Prepared for the College Art Association of America under a Grant from the Ford Foundation (New York: College Art Association, 1966), ix.

²³ Ibid., 4, 15.

²⁴ Ibid., xii.

²⁵ Ibid., 24, 38. The concerns that were expressed in the VAHE also prompted an expansion of CAA’s foundational mission statement. See “The Purposes of CAA,” Art Journal 22, no. 2 (Winter 1962/63): 71, 91.

²⁶ CAA Careers was established in 1991. In August 2003, job postings were moved online. Ofelia Garcia, “Mentoring the Profession: Career Development and Support,” in Ball, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind, 130–31, 133.

²⁷ Julia A. Sienkewicz, “Uniting the Arts and the Academy: A History of the CAA Annual Conference,” in Ball, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind, 106, 114.

²⁸ “Dissertation Topics, 1980,” Art Bulletin 63, no. 2 (June 1981): 347–49.

²⁹ Initially, after the move to The Art Bulletin, the completed dissertations were not divided by subfield; only those in progress were. With the 1983 roster, the list begins to divide both categories by subfield.

³⁰ As a single exception, the 1987 roster was published in the fall of 1988. “American and Canadian Dissertations, 1987,” Art Bulletin 70, no. 3 (September 1988): 536–40.

³¹ “Dissertation Topics, 1982,” Art Bulletin 65, no. 2 (June 1983): 354; “Dissertation Topics, 1983,” Art Bulletin 66, no. 2 (June 1984): 355.

³² “American and Canadian Dissertations,” Art Bulletin 68, no. 2 (June 1986): 349–52.

³³ “U.S. Dissertations, 2000,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 2 (June 2001): 367–82.

³⁴ For example, see the introductory section for the 1982 roster: “Dissertation Topics, 1982,” Art Bulletin 65, no. 2 (June 1983): 354.

³⁵ “U.S. Dissertations, 2000,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 2 (June 2001): 367.

³⁶ The categories for dissertations in progress are not always identical to those used for the dissertations completed in the same year, as was the case for the 1984 roster.

³⁷ “Dissertation Topics, 1984,” Art Bulletin 67, no. 2 (June 1985): 351.

³⁸ “American Dissertations, 1986,” Art Bulletin 69, no. 2 (June 1987): 316.

³⁹ “American and Canadian Dissertations, 1990,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 3 (September 1991): 520.

⁴⁰ “American and Canadian Dissertations, 1993,” Art Bulletin 76, no. 2 (June 1994): 383; “American and Canadian Dissertations, 1994,” Art Bulletin 77, no. 2 (June 1995): 353.

⁴¹ “American and Canadian Dissertations, 1990,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 3 (September 1991): 520.

⁴² “American and Canadian Dissertations, 1997,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 (June 1998): 404, 408.

⁴³ “U.S. and Canadian Dissertations, 2002,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 2 (June 2003): 413, 419.

⁴⁴ It first appeared under the listing for The Art Bulletin on CAA’s publications webpage, but by 2005 it was moved to its own independent heading, “United States and Canadian PhD Dissertations.” “Publications,” CAA, March 2, 2000 and October 25, 2005, accessed at https://web.archive.org/web/20000302152727/http://www.collegeart.org/caa/publications/index.html; https://web.archive.org/web/20051029094056/http://www.collegeart.org/publications/.

⁴⁵ “Dissertation Submission Guidelines,” caa.reviews, accessed June 7, 2020, http://www.caareviews.org/about/dissertations.

⁴⁶ Houser, “The Changing Face,” 84.

⁴⁷ At that time, the earlier rosters added to caa.reviews were formatted according to the 2009 standards, so they do not match their counterparts in The Art Bulletin exactly. Eve Sinaiko, email message to author, July 22, 2020.

⁴⁸ “Dissertations,” caa.reviews, May 4, 2009, accessed at https://web.archive.org/web/20090504202205/http://www.caareviews.org/dissertations.

⁴⁹ Dissertations in progress were not studied for this article, although the caa.py script could be modified to harvest and consider those listings as well.

⁵⁰ Available for consultation and reuse in GitHub: https://github.com/nancyum/caa.

⁵¹ Ritchie, Visual Arts in Higher Education, 17.

⁵² For each entry, the first adviser mentioned is noted as the primary adviser. Although the entries could include up to four advisers, only 215 listed more than a single adviser.

⁵³ The titles were cleaned lightly, only to correct typos and errors. Stop words (commonly occurring words that are frequently filtered out for natural language processing) were omitted.

⁵⁴ The first time that such categories were introduced by the organization was in 1955, referred to as the “Checklist of Fields of Specialization.” Garcia, “Mentoring the Profession,” 131.

⁵⁵ The most recent guidelines limit each dissertation to two subject areas.

⁵⁶ “Dissertation Submission Guidelines,” caa.reviews.

⁵⁷ Figures 10, 11, and 12 were plotted using the complete data set with all its duplicates, which includes 5,681 entries. “Dissertation Submission Guidelines,” caa.reviews. Identical categories, such as “Eighteenth Century” and “Eighteenth-Century Art,” were reconciled, while similar yet distinct categories were retained in order to show the subtle changes in nomenclature and grouping. For instance, see the shifts in the categories related to Architectural History, Decorative Arts, and Drawing in Figure 12.

⁵⁸ As one example, see Nancy Um, “A Field without Fieldwork: Sustaining the Study of Islamic Architecture in the 21st Century,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 10, no. 1 (forthcoming).

⁵⁹ “Data on the History Profession,” American Historical Association, accessed June 6, 2020, https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/career-resources/data-on-the-history-profession; “The SAH Data Project: Analyzing Architectural History in Higher Education,” accessed June 6, 2020, https://www.sah.org/publications-and-research/sah-data-project; Bas Hofstra et al., “The Diversity-Innovation Paradox in Science,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117, no. 17 (April 28, 2020), https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9284.

Theoretically Speaking . . .: David Carrier, Michael Ann Holly, and Andrei Pop in Dialogue

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 16:00:00 GMT

Scenario: The three former field editors for theory and historiography reflect on the state of the field(s) and try to place reviewing in the theoretical life of art history as it has been practiced historically—and as it is practiced today.

Andrei Pop: To start us off: theory and historiography strike some people, especially working art historians, as disembodied. Is there a vivid memory you have from your stint editing for caa.reviews, one that jumps out at you? Passionate exchanges with a reviewer or author? Or with a reader or book?

David Carrier: In general, the biggest problem was getting reviewers. The young are afraid of offending elders; the seniors are too busy. And of course in smallish fields, avoiding conflicts is damned difficult. (I wrote also for Artforum, and only when I went to China did they show me the “conflict of interest” statement.) I am not so concerned about conflicts, if only because many areas are balkanized and because conflicts are inevitable in any intellectually lively field. It you don’t like T.J. Clark, what can you say about his pupils’ work? There are certain fields that (for reasons I don’t fully understand) inspire endless back-and-forth discussion. At Leonardo we had to adapt a rule: no more comments on the comments on the comments about essays on perspective. That said, there’s no reason reviews shouldn’t count as much as any other scholarly publication.

Michael Ann Holly: The disembodiment of theory and historiography is, perhaps, inevitable—but only because some scholars like to claim that they do history, not theory, as though the two can be neatly separated with their own sharp scalpel. The discipline, they often claim, is called “art history,” not “art theory” or “art criticism.” After the heyday of theory in the 1980s (an attempt to reform a “backwater” humanities discipline somewhat dully dedicated to the artist as genius, connoisseurship, and the catalogue raisonné through recourse to poststructuralist theories then enlivening other disciplines) and then the 1990s (a decade of “moral urgency,” with feminism, race, and queer studies leading the charge), I began my editorship. Perhaps I was nostalgic, but I wanted to see reviews of books that continued this momentum by not returning to business as usual. Today I sense that what art historians write has often turned these interests inside out: they often rightly claim that theory and historiography (not the same thing of course) have become submerged in our field, become part of the fabric of art history. Is this invisibility a good thing or not?

AP: In 2018, caa.reviews celebrated twenty years of publication, and it strikes me that three editors in twenty-one years is not that many. (It is now four, with Jenny Anger!) Does this speak to a sense that theory is timeless, or just for the few? Did you feel a sense of historical change in what you were editing between the inception and conclusion of your work?

MAH: Really? I can’t remember how long I did this, but I guess time flies when you are having fun. If there was a change, I guess I could detect it most easily in the significant expansion of interest in global art history and postcolonial theory in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism [Pantheon, 1978]. I like to think that the changes were mirrored at the same time in the grounding of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark. We began engagements with research institutes and university departments in Central and Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and South Africa in order to remind ourselves, as well as [practitioners of] well-established historiographic traditions, of the need to take the non-Western world into consideration. We also highlighted topics ranging from object histories to studies in historiography and intellectual history, to institutional examinations, to questions in aesthetics—asking not only the “who, what, when, and where” questions that a serious scholarly commitment to the study of the past can yield but also the “why"s as they relate to the studies of the humanities in the contemporary moment. A heavy order for a new and small research institute in the visual arts.

AP: Certainly I couldn’t help noticing that monographs on the Vienna School, which once viewed their heroes in largely philosophical terms, now tend to approach them through postcolonial lenses, as scholars try to negotiate the patrimony of a multinational empire (the Habsburgs). That brings me to my next question: do art historians in fact need to know, or put more strongly, to do the history of their field, even in young regional subfields, or the methods taking off from those Michael just mentioned, like decolonial or eco-art history? In other words, do all ideas have histories?

MAH: But of course. As an avowed historiographer, would you expect me to say anything else? I love digging around in the intellectual history of the history of art. To do art history of today, it is imperative to know where that commitment and practice comes from. Nothing arrives on the scene fully formed from Zeus’s brow; any idea that sticks, however momentarily, has an origin story as well as a developmental history, however brief.

DC: I agree totally. When I moved from philosophy into art history, I was much influenced by Hayden White, whose accounts of the rhetoric of history writing were a revelation to me. Is he still read?

AP: I think so; perhaps not as much. Recently I heard Martin Jay lecture about White’s debate with Carlo Ginzburg in the nineties on historical truth claims in light of the Holocaust. Jay thought that radical claims about the rhetorical or fictional nature of history had not stood up in the face of renewed ethical and political stakes of history writing. No doubt White thought that exposing history’s literariness also had such stakes. I was never too impressed by his argument, in part because he thought it applied even to physics, in part because I thought it had been stated, more sensibly and moderately, by Peter Gay. But for you, David, it was the gateway to theory?

DC: One gateway, yes. Another, ultimately more important for me, was Paul Barolsky’s accounts of Vasari’s rhetoric. But about theory: I can only tell a story that shows how naive I was. My first Penn State book, Principles of Art History Writing (1991), sold well (for an academic book) and thus made it possible for them to do some other books that didn’t sell. Why? Because I rode the then new interest in theory! But I didn’t have any such plan.

AP: I want to come back to just what we mean by “doing theory.” Is theory—whether this be sui generis art theorizing, perhaps partly by artists, or a branch of Continental “critical theory” or philosophical aesthetics (among other options)—continuous with historiography or with art history “proper”? Should it be a kind of meta–art history?

DC: I honestly don’t know what to say about theory in art history. Speaking as a philosopher, I can only say: the various French poststructuralists were never taken seriously in the mainline departments but were, of course, embraced in literature departments. I imagine that there was a felt desire for art history also to have a theory. This is a way to understand the role of Norman Bryson, with whose writing I was modestly involved in the 1980s—why, we even wrote an essay together! I know that circa 1900 German art history was involved with theory; Michael has taught me something about that. But my sense is that right now it’s hard to use those theoretical materials, just because the whole discipline’s changed. You have to do two things: explain Erwin Panofsky, Alois Riegl, and Aby Warburg, and relate them to art. To the extent that the whole philosophical world has changed, this is a very hard task.

MAH: Critical theory is critical theory in whatever disciplinary appearance it makes or shape it comes in. If it is “imported” from another discipline, as it was from literary criticism into art history during the eighties and nineties, it still works its magic on and through the history of art. Had it not had that disruptive effect, I honestly believe that the discipline would have gradually turned to dust and blown away. From being a poor sister to literature, philosophy, and history departments in the academy, it became the place where everybody wanted to relocate. I say that from experience. As chair of the art history department at the University of Rochester for fourteen years, I even had to develop a capacious title—Visual and Cultural Studies—to accommodate all the theoretical persuasions and disciplinary “metahistorians” who wanted to join our ranks.

DC: Here is a philosophical argument for study of method. If you don’t do that in art history, then the obvious danger is that you will take for granted, as “natural,” the inherited ways of thinking, even though they of course are also philosophical. Once an art historian joked to me—he was from Scotland—that his colleagues from Oxford thought that they didn’t have an accent. Well, everyone has an accent, and everyone has a method.

AP: You have both made original contributions to art theory and historiography, to say nothing of editorial and other interventions. By contrast, caa.reviews, with exceptions like this project, is an organ for reviewing “rather than” for doing original work. Do reviews matter theoretically—perhaps as rational wrangling over methods or to articulate the self-understanding of the discipline?

MAH: Yes, I suppose so. But something has always bothered me about the genre of review writing. The reviewer so frequently has to adopt the archly overarching stance of seeming to know more than the author, who has spent years thinking, researching, composing, and then publishing the project. The best reviewers don’t do this prancing about. Instead they offer trenchant descriptive summaries braided around the author’s as well as their own theoretical angle on the substance of the book.

DC: Again, I agree entirely. The problem, as I see it now, is that because most books attract few if any reviews, inevitably a single review can have a disproportionate effect. Which I regret. It’s like the situation in art criticism, where the (very good!) New York Times reviewers matter in part because the Times is the only canonical national paper for reviews.

When young, I was a heartless reviewer. That I regret. What’s needed is both taking a book seriously on its own terms and also having a critical perspective. A tricky ideal. Were I editor now, I would tell writers: you can be very critical, but you need also to be very sympathetic. Do a balancing act—act confident, but be modest about your own limitations.

MAH: I agree with David: a review should be generous even as it might be critical. Nevertheless, it is always important to respect the work enough to engage it seriously and question how it actively matters to the ever-changing art historical horizon.

AP: A follow-up question: I often hear, “I cannot review X because he is an important senior figure in my field,” or “I cannot review this book because it is deeply flawed,” or “Reviews are a lot of work and cut no ice with my tenure committee [or British REF].” Should reviewing, and debate generally, count for more?

MAH: Considering the time put into them, of course they should “count” for more. It all depends on who is doing the counting. While it is important for young scholars to engage seriously with new books, especially outside their comfort zones, I sympathize with their reluctance for all the customary reasons. If only we all could start over again and regard reviewing as one of the most significant activities of a scholar’s intellectual life, precisely because the health of the discipline is at stake, and they have a role in its future beyond commitments to their own subfields. As far as senior scholars go, I find it most perplexing that they would turn against another generation by asking them to do what they consider somewhat petty work at the same time that they dismiss (say, in tenure committees) the work they have de facto “assigned” to this younger group. A temporary solution? Ask ten or so senior scholars to choose a book that has meant the most to them in their long career and write a contemporary review of it, even if it is decades old—thus wedding historiography and reviewing.

DC: Agreed, again. Why not ask CAA to do this?

The biggest problem: a few books get much reviewed, while many get no reviews. This is very unfortunate, for reviews provide publicity and a good perspective for the author. But I have no idea how to change this situation.

It’s the same, alas, with reviewing art exhibitions. A few shows get most of the attention, and many attract no response in print. Here, again, economic pressures, which need discussion, matter. I live in Pittsburgh, which is about to become the largest American city without a daily printed newspaper.

AP: Since we’re on the topic of the indispensability of theory and the corresponding indispensability of reviewing—are there reviews you edited for the journal that stick out? My own favorite editing experience was Monica Blackmun Visonà’s review of Hans Belting’s An Anthropology of Images [trans. Thomas Dunlap; Princeton University Press, 2011]. To estrange the universalizing assumptions of that book, Visonà compared the experience of reading Belting with her fieldwork in West Africa, treating the text as a kind of religious ceremony. The effect is witty and critical, but also, perhaps surprisingly, sympathetic.

Of course, here changes in the art discourse and the journal’s history become pertinent. The young journal covered the philosophical rediscovery of beauty in Arthur Danto’s Abuse of Beauty [Open Court, 2003] and Alexander Nehamas’s Only a Promise of Happiness [Princeton University Press, 2007], which got little coverage in art history journals. And David, you yourself reviewed widely, from Los Angeles to Beijing, from the French baroque to video art. It was a freewheeling period: field editors no longer submit reviews.

MAH: Mitch Merback’s review of Amy Knight Powell’s Depositions [Zone Books, 2012] and Jim Elkins’s review of Whitney Davis’s A General Theory of Visual Culture [Princeton University Press, 2011] go beyond being mere (and very exacting) specialist readings of the book’s detail and arguments: they craft debates about the nature of art history, its historicism and systematic ambitions, by drawing on the book under review and drawing that book into dialogue.

AP: The blurb on Chris Wood’s new book, A History of Art History [Princeton University Press, 2019], asserts that classic art historians, the kinds we read in methods classes, from Jacob Burckhardt to Meyer Schapiro and George Kubler, “struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism.” Is this important, and is it still true, if we replace “modernism” with “the art of our time”?

MAH: Replacing “modernism” with "the art of our time” wouldn’t work either, for two reasons: (1) these august writers were principally concerned with studying past art and doing history, even if grounded in serious philosophical thinking; and (2) Wood stops his own most impressive story with thinkers of the early to mid-twentieth century.

DC: Concerns with method probably are linked to the movement of art history toward a focus on the present (and maybe also on looking at other visual cultures—the Islamic world and China, for example). Because the entrenched methods that work for the Renaissance probably don’t apply to Cindy Sherman. The interesting transition was when Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried (and some others) tried to create a method for contemporary art. Speaking as a critic, I think that failed, as least for practicing critics, though it is true that when the New York Times speaks of “the male gaze,” something has happened.

AP: That happened gradually, I think. British punk rockers were ranting about the gaze and simulacra forty years ago. But I take your point that art history is especially unsettled by new art: which is perhaps why Krauss and Fried distinguish between their work as historians and critics. But why should tried and valuable methods not work on recent or even future stuff? Does new art not make sense? Is an “audience” of real living people not amenable to the schematization to which we subject the dead? All this seems to point up weaknesses in our methods, not epochal breaks. Unless you like the idea of a disenchanted Weberian art history, able to ply its iconography and social history only insofar as we no longer believe the cosmologies or political ideas we study. Then art would indeed be a thing of the past, as G.F.W. Hegel says it is “for us.” I rather think it is all up for grabs interpretively, past and present.

When calls for theory and methodology became loud in the 1980s, they often implied political claims associated with a “new art history,” one more concerned with capitalism and current social conditions than individual artists or works. Does theory or historiography have political or moral urgency now?

MAH: I do regard the “new art history” of the eighties and nineties as about more than Marxism or social history. The “new” of that time swung open theoretical gates to any number of poststructural possibilities, spurred on as it was by political developments first in France and later in Germany. And now? Critical theory always has political and moral urgency, does it not, even though much of it goes unrecognized as such today—issues of identity and inclusion and global awareness, for example. As far as historiography goes, perhaps not so much urgency, since it is about the past, although a review of where art history originated, how it evolved, and where it is tending to come to rest is quietly shadowed by a certain political and moral urgency. And since critical theory instigated the crucial need for it in the first place, historiography has some of both in its DNA.

AP: I myself have commissioned more specialist books of theoretical interest than explicit theoretical treatises or monographs on art historians. And we do want individual working art historians to be philosophically sophisticated, aware of immediate and classic sources, and engaged with what social scientists and other humanists do with their objects. In addition, I’ve noticed that from Alfred Gell to Arjun Appadurai (to stick with the letter A), a great many of the books art historians have been excited about in the last two decades are from outside the field—not from “Theory” with a capital T but from other academic disciplines. None of which is to say that what Whitney Davis calls systematic or constructive work is off the table. Unless you get the sense that it is looked on askance in art history departments? This may well be happening, in an era obsessed with the shrinking of the humanities and “tangible results.”

David, your own formation is in philosophy rather than art history: do you see the fields as capable of rapprochement? There have been recent efforts, under Thierry de Duve at a recent CAA Conference, for instance [“Does Art History Need Aesthetics?,” session at the 107th CAA Annual Conference, New York, February 15, 2019], to incorporate philosophical aesthetics. Does art history need this? Does philosophy need art history?

DC: I fear that younger faculty have enough pressures learning to teach and get published. And so asking them to undertake expansive reading is difficult. It would be great if philosophers looked at art history or vice versa! Richard Brettell’s book On Modern Beauty [J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019] offers a marvelous homespun theory, but without reference to, say, the recent Nehamas book, which actually is relevant. De Duve, whom I have also reviewed, doesn’t really tackle the philosophical literature, but then again the philosophers who do Immanuel Kant don’t look at art history. You can’t do everything!

We should mention, at least here in passing, the sad economic pressures on publishing. I am an experienced author, and so if I had to go to the forty-first publisher for one recent book, then it must be hard for young writers, especially if their concerns are not fashionable. And look at the prices of books. I’m just reviewing a good Canadian book; it’s well done but costs more than one hundred dollars. I wouldn’t know about it were I not reviewing.

MAH: Without a doubt, art history needs philosophical aesthetics. To their credit, its principal founders recognized this inevitable intertwining in all that they wrote. Sometimes the emphasis swings one way, sometimes another—even today. Advanced historical research and broader philosophical insight in the visual arts cannot help but have something to do with each other in any serious study that dares to look beyond its defined borders. And, Andrei, that’s why I use the capacious term “critical theory” to signal the range of directions arguments can take.

AP: Michael, you have in your own work made historiography a live option for art historians. (I speak from personal experience, having audited your theory class with Keith Moxey at MIT.) You have also had a front-seat view of the most exciting developments as director of the Clark Institute. Is theoretical and historiographic work flourishing institutionally?

MAH: As a reader of countless successful fellowship applications (at least 75 percent seem to be about contemporary topics) over the past decade and a half between the Clark, the Getty, and ACLS, I would say that empirical studies are enjoying something of a comeback, with materiality leading the way. Yet, as soon as I say that, I think of all the exciting work in thing theory, agency, animism, et cetera. It just seems as though sometimes very focused analyses grounded in historical positivism, or else straightforward paeans to the contemporary, reveal a tendency to squash this kind of theory even though its practitioners could gain much by paying attention to these “side,” or underside, issues. On the other hand, in the wake of postcolonial theory and the decentering of modernism, the breadth and reach of global art shows no sign of slowing down. Such queries have made us all sensitive to the relations of power that once structured the art historical canon. Traditional hierarchies of space and time have been called into question even if there is currently nothing to replace them. At least historiography has emerged as a favored “critical theory” for its ability to debunk national agendas in the history of art.

At the Clark, with its founding critical commitment to inquiry in the theory, history, and interpretation of visual art, we always hope that any art historical study we sponsor will indirectly address some of these metaquestions: What is the relation between past and present? Do written texts render visual objects more accessible or more opaque? How do works of art either possess or become invested with special significance? What is the magic of art? How does art help form a cultural moment or shape history—our own and that of the past? What are the social and political functions of art historical interpretation?

DC: The best argument for reviewing: it forces you to think critically, to not just read but reread and apply pressure. You learn how to write by reviewing.

AP: What outstanding theoretical question (or unsolved problem) is closest to your heart?

DC: I couldn’t patent the word “artwriting” when I published my book Artwriting [University of Massachusetts Press, 1987]; it was already too late: the word had been much used. But it’s useful because it emphasizes the commonality of art history, art criticism, and even the descriptions of art in fiction. At this point in history we need all of the sense of community that we can get.

MAH: Not a question so much as a wish: more attention to the rhetoric, the writing, of art history.

David Carrier
Champney Family Professor, Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art (2001–11)

Michael Ann Holly
Starr Director Emeritus, Academic and Research Program, Clark Art Institute

Andrei O. Pop
Committee on Social Thought and Department of Art History, University of Chicago

Bernini: Sculpting in Clay

C. D. Dickerson III, Anthony Sigel, and Ian Wardropper — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 16:00:00 GMT

Bernini: Sculpting in Clay, installation view, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 2013 (photograph provided by Kimbell Art Museum)

[See the multimedia review on Scalar.]

Thanks to a generous grant from the Mellon-funded Alliance for Networking Visual Culture in 2013, caa.reviews was able to complete a pilot project using the Scalar multimedia digital platform to create a “book” permitting its readers to experience virtually the 2012–13 exhibition Bernini: Sculpting in Clay (in its showing at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas). This fall, caa.reviews revisits the breathtaking Bernini exhibition by highlighting this multimedia project. The project features a number of elements, including an introductory essay; a video walkthrough that permits website visitors to experience the exhibition as if moving through galleries, circulating around vitrines, and looking closely at objects; a floor plan of the exhibition; comparative illustrations of some of Bernini’s finished works; educational videos on Bernini’s modeling techniques as seen in his bozzetti for the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome, on his Kimbell modello for the Fountain of the Moor, and on his transformation of the city of Rome; critical reviews by a scholar and an artist; an interview with one of the exhibition’s curators; and suggestions for further reading with links to books reviewed on caa.reviews (as well as to book reviews and articles on Bernini in The Art Bulletin). This project permits readers of caa.reviews and others who were unable to visit this important show to experience it in a number of ways enabled by the Scalar digital platform. It is my hope that the project will continue to demonstrate the usefulness of multimedia capabilities to enhance future exhibition reviews on caa.reviews.

Sheryl E. Reiss
Newberry Library, Chicago, Scholar-in-Residence, and former Editor-in-Chief, caa.reviews

Abstract Bodies and Otherwise: A Conversation with Amelia Jones and David Getsy on Gender and Sexuality in the Writing of Art History

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 16:00:00 GMT

On the heels of the recent publication of their books Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories and Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender, Amelia Jones and David Getsy initiated a conversation about these books and the current state of and future directions for art history’s engagements with gender and sexuality.[i] The following dialogue was conducted by email over the course of the summer and fall of 2017, and it is presented by caa.reviews as part of its commitment to engage with new ideas in art-historical and art-critical writing.

Amelia Jones: Perhaps we could start with asking ourselves: What are the different versions of “gender” as a concept and experience being deployed in art-historical and art-critical writing today?

David Getsy: Our present moment is indebted to a sustained attention to gender—first and foremost from feminist criticism beginning in the 1970s and extending through allied perspectives in queer theory and transgender studies. These ways of understanding the politics of how one writes art history are still urgent. It’s a mistake to think we’re past the need for the feminist critique of structural sexism, for queer theory’s resistance to the propagation of heteronormativity, or for the defense of gender self-determination put forth by transgender studies. Indeed, there are ongoing and complex debates about how to understand gender’s relation to societal power among these perspectives—and, most crucially, of the ways in which all gender normativities are tied up with race. Those debates can (and should) challenge the aversion to talking about inequalities of gender and sexuality that is still evident in some writing about art’s histories and current practices.

AJ: I would add an extension based on my own experience in the field. I have spent almost thirty years (!) pursuing a feminist art history and have been continually marginalized from certain powerful institutions (departments, journals, conferences, etc.) for putting gender—or, crucially (as you point out), structures of power relating to gender/sex identification—in the foreground of my analysis, as well as strategically and extensively focusing on the work of otherwise neglected woman-identified and queer artists.

Watching moments at which such emphases are momentarily fashionable emerge and then quickly pass by (say, the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, or the brief heyday of feminist shows in the US and Europe around 2005–10), I am struck by the continued failure to integrate an understanding of how gender/sex identifications function in art-historical scholarship, as well as in curating. Gender/sex plays a role either relating to self-identification or, often unspoken and hidden, identifications positioning artists’ works in a hierarchy of value based on their presumed gender/sex.

This also relates to the larger problem of assuming questions of identification to be peripheral to the “real” work of art history. I would argue, in contrast, that there is no point in doing art history without starting from the point of awareness that all making and interpretation takes place in ways that are deeply and inevitably informed by beliefs about the perceived identity of the artist, as well as by our own matrices of identification. Sex/gender identifications are not in this framework peripheral or secondary concerns. Nor are they prioritized as somehow more important or more foundational than other modes of identification such as class or race/ethnicity (these are all co-constitutive). And no art making, viewing, interpretation, historicization, collecting, marketing, or exhibition of art occurs outside these matrices of power. This is the overarching point in my book Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts.[ii] Art is all about gender/sexuality—there is nothing about it that escapes such identifications!

DG: But this is what is encouraging about all of the work that is emerging out of feminist, queer, and transgender thought today. That’s the more hopeful answer to your question about what’s happening in current writing about art. Those perspectives that take gender as a critical site at which to expose larger structures of oppression have developed an increasingly sophisticated accounting of the operations of structural heteronormativity, sexism, and transphobia. As well, the understanding of gender’s intertwining with race, sexuality, and class is a central priority today, and the terminology and methods for intersectional critique are expanding.[iii]

AJ: I think your insistence in your recent book, Abstract Bodies, on addressing the work of David Smith, Dan Flavin, and John Chamberlain through the lens of gender/sexuality (itself a kind of willfully perverse critical gesture) is one of its most interesting methodological contributions. Those are compelling chapters. Finding the evidence of views and beliefs about sexuality in discursive traces (statements, interviews, archival bits) is such a powerful strategy, and one that parallels what I am doing in my current book project (tentatively entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance). Here, I’m looking at the historically coextensive rise of discourses around “queer” cultures and subjects and “performativity” and performance in the art world; I explore the co-elaboration of gay or queer culture, theatricality, relationality, performance, and performativity in the 1950s and following.

DG: What became clear to me in writing my book was how much these canonical artists were always already talking about instabilities of gender and sexuality. The texts that they produced about their work—through interviews and writing—returned again and again to questions about gender assignment and abstraction (Smith), sex as a metaphor for artistic practice (Chamberlain), the body as a limit (Nancy Grossman), or the visual evidence of sexual differences and the effects of naming (Flavin). That is, the art-theoretical debates about abstraction, anthropomorphism, figuration, and objecthood all grappled with issues of gender’s multiplicity and transformability. Nevertheless, these topics had been ignored or sidelined in dominant art-historical discussions. For me, it became urgent to show that gender’s multiplicity, in particular, had always been at issue. Nonbinary and non-dimorphic definitions of gender greatly clarified the terms of such historical debates.

We have to attend to the silences and omissions in history. All historical debates about gender and sexuality are always also potential registrations of the capacity for non-ascribed and volitional genders and for queer resistances to emerge. I think your work on theatricality’s anxious relation to queer performativity will also help bring out such possibilities for resistance and an understanding of recognizing the importance of gender and sexuality to our received art-historical narratives.

AJ: My aim with the book is to historicize the terms “queer” and “performativity”: they have been elided in performance studies and cultural studies in particular into a concept that few question, but there is a history to their connectedness. This connectedness, this history, allows me to highlight the way in which binary concepts of gender and sexuality haunt the making and theorizing of contemporary art all the way through to the present—certainly quite directly since the 1940s.

DG: This, I think, is the reason we’re having this conversation—to discuss how important it is to recognize that gender and sexuality are not peripheral, subordinate, or distracting issues for art history but, rather, necessary and foundational to that history. As I mentioned above, however, to do this it seems necessary to expand the terms and scope of accounts of gender by arguing for the pertinence (no—the urgency) of recovering histories of gender’s already existing (and historical) multiplicity and mutability. Most accounts of historical (or current) individuals are based on a false axiom that there are only two genders and that the human species is simply, clearly, and consistently divided in two. It’s like saying the world is flat because that’s how it looks outside my window.

I tried to address this by thinking about one possible transgender studies method—one that took as axiomatic a recognition of gender as multiple, bodies as non-dimorphic, and both personhood and embodiment as transformable and successive. How do we start from such an axiom, and how do we find evidence that pursuing it produces more nuanced and complex interpretations — and narratives of potential identification and resistance? I don’t mean “alternative” interpretations. I mean head-on accounts of how gender’s potential and complexity inform artistic practice and its receptions. There is great value in the methodological choice to take as foundational an understanding that genders are volitional and multiple and that bodies are not limited by absolute dimorphism. For instance, there are some readers of my book who got angry that I would do such a thing to an artist like Dan Flavin or David Smith—artists who seemed unconnected to nonbinary genders. But my point was in alliance with yours: that all artists and all art need to be approached with the understanding that gender/sexuality and unforeclosed multiplicities are already inextricable. It’s myopic to assume that it’s only women artists who need (or benefit from) feminist critique, only non-heterosexual artists who require queer critique, or only transgender artists who are the topics of transgender studies. That assumption (an insidious inversion of identity politics) is a way of keeping people in their places and preventing wide-scale, structural critique and re-envisioning. Feminist, queer, and transgender critical approaches must be pursued expansively.

AJ: Beautifully stated, David, and a powerful nutshell summary of your complex arguments in the book. How do these theoretical points square with the need to give more time and space to the work of artists previously and consistently marginalized, though? I know you’ve gotten some flak for focusing on artists who already are fully canonized (Smith, Flavin, Chamberlain), while your chapter on Nancy Grossman fits more awkwardly into this story, since her work is largely not abstract and in fact does explicitly deal with gender and sexuality on a continuum that is quite radically unusual for feminist artists at the time.

DG: The shock of Grossman’s heads as figurative but abstract was necessary to the methodological convictions of the book. Thank you for asking about it. The inclusion of her work in the book troubles the very category of abstraction (as you note) and points to the ways in which the ideas that are distilled by formal abstraction are not limited to abstract art. But, more importantly, it allowed me a different way of tracking the unintended effects of intentionality (a key theme of the book). I discussed how Grossman’s committed engagement with gender’s multiplicity and bodily transformation in her work was caricatured and misrecognized by critics as spectacular queer performativity—that of leather and S&M, which in the 1960s became a topic of popular discussion and anxiety. For me, it felt both appropriate and important to track the development of her work beyond the abstraction of the 1960s through her turn to figuration at the end of the decade. In both, she attempted to evoke the body as transformable and gender as volitional without representing a body. Frankly, I don’t care about a locked-down definition of abstraction as pure, and I was happy to talk about different degrees of abstraction (as in my chapter on Smith) or the more propositional and analogical “abstraction” of Grossman’s sculptures of heads—representational sculptures that refused the body and, in so doing, refused the assumptions about gender that viewers invariably bring to its images.

Again, my main point in the book was to explore the possibilities of starting with the assumption that transgender capacity is pervasive and is already historical. In all four case studies, I attempted to offer a new account of the complexity contained in each artist’s work that was rooted in their artistic practices and their statements about them. The close attention to these ways of making, these statements, and these histories also, however, afforded the opportunity to demonstrate how binary or static assumptions about gender or personhood were inadequate to that complexity. Each chapter sought to provide an example of how transgender capacities can be located—in different ways and degrees—in negotiations of abstraction’s relationships to bodies and persons. I think some people read my book looking for a simple formula, but I deliberately refused such aspirations to a master theory. Instead, I believe transgender capacity is a foundational question that we must bring to all art histories. The directions of the answer to that question will be—like gender multiplicity—specific, particular, and variable.

I want to make sure we don’t just talk about the politics of art-historical writing but also about artistic practice. After all, both our books address the terms through which artists thought about their practices. But with regard to current art, it seems to me that, sometimes, there is an uptake in artists’ practices of debates in gender/sexuality that is faster, more unruly, and more direct than either in the art history or the art criticism that tries to catch up to them. Artists do history, too, and they mine art history for capacitating sites in unruly and productive ways. Are there any artists’ practices that offer methodologies for the history of gender/sexuality? That is, ones that don’t just represent or critically engage with gender/sexuality but that actually offer different ways to think about interpretation, history, or criticism (of their and of others’ work)?

AJ: I agree—the most interesting artists theorize and address history and gender and sexuality in their work; that’s what makes the practice powerful. For example, Carolee Schneemann (in pieces such as Eye Body of 1963 and Fuses of 1967), Yoko Ono (in the epic 1964-65 Cut Piece) and VALIE EXPORT (in her radical performances confronting the male gaze in late 1960s Vienna) pioneered embodied feminist models of critique before the rise of feminist visual theory. Jack Smith’s performative mode of living creatively and queerly pioneered queer performance long before Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick theorized it around 1990. Adrian Piper’s My Calling Card (1986) enacted as it theorized the relationality of identification, which scholars and writers took up in 1990s theories of intersectionality and relational aesthetics. These would be some historic examples. Other obvious examples that come to mind include artists whose work addresses questions of history and theory directly, and in turn inspires researchers looking for ways of understanding how gender/sex identifications resonate in, inform, and are informed by visuality and visual practices (as well as performance). Within feminism, that would be someone like Mary Kelly (whose psychoanalytic, Marxian feminist visual theory is enacted across her writing as well as her artwork), or obviously Piper, who is a philosopher as well as an artist (her 1988 Cornered may not explicitly address sexuality and gender, but folds these elements into our inevitably racialized encounter with Piper in the work), or Tee Corinne (who used photography to create images evoking and celebrating lesbian eroticism, which could be said to theorize visually a way of imagining nonbinary modes of sexual embodiment). These artists are all extremely learned and think as well as make in theoretically rigorous ways that in turn can inform how we understand (and historicize) gender/sex relations and meanings.

I have also developed my own thoughts about gender/sex theory and visuality/performance through the life works of Vaginal Davis and Ron Athey, who enact in their work a lived intersectional performativity that, as you say, pushes boundaries through the playing out of unruly desires and erotic actions, and those of Sandy Stone (whose performative lectures in the 1990s and early 2000s enacted as they theorized gender fluidity). William Pope.L’s maverick performances, Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry’s work as well as the performances of Cassils, Zackary Drucker, Nao Bustamante, Keijaun Thomas, and Rafa Esparza—all theorize as they enact the interrelations among visuality, embodiment, and gender/sexuality. I could go on, but these are some of the practices that have informed my thinking the most.

DG: That’s a great list. I think it’s very important to be attuned to artists who model or produce methodologies through their work. That is, works that impact how we view other artworks and the world. Here, I’m thinking of artists like Adam Pendleton, Gordon Hall, Xandra Ibarra, Carlos Motta, Andrea Geyer, Henrik Olesen, Shahryar Nashat, or My Barbarian—just to give a sense of the range of different practices.

AJ: Yes—I’m including Ibarra in my book on queer performativity (probably to disrupt the chapter called “Trans,” where I address the radical new forms of queer practice and being that have come to the fore in recent years). Our examples have been from artists who have more or less directly sought to produce such oppositional perspectives, but what are strategies for differentiating gender/sexuality theory from our assumptions or beliefs about how artists themselves are identified?

DG: Perhaps another way to phrase this is: What is the distinction between, on the one hand, the artist’s self-identified gender or sexuality and the ways in which gender or sexuality are prompted by their work? Or, how do we correlate intention and reception without reducing the artwork to the artist’s identity? The history of queer culture has been built on productive and speculative ways of carving out queer potentialities from a culture that refuses to acknowledge difference equanimously. Sometimes the only avenues of survival are to imagine communities and to find in unlikely places evidence that one is not alone. Historically, such ways of reading against the grain and beyond intentionality have proven emotionally and politically edifying. How can we value those rogue readings, queer interventions, trans capacities, and all those other means of finding cracks in the attempts to police difference and to enforce normativity? If we insist that cultural production is ultimately delimited by the identity of its creator, do we lose this practice of critical appropriation and of making counterculture? How can we grapple with the issues of structural oppression and privilege that validate certain kinds of cultural production without foreclosing the possibility that subversive or reparative uses of that same cultural production can be resources for the survival and flourishing of those marked as different?[iv]

AJ: Great questions, David—although I’ve always avoided the concept of “intentionality,” because (through the theorizing of Jacques Derrida and others) I believe it is an impossible conceit that can, in conservative forms of art history, veil projections of meaning onto works of art (i.e., the interpreter presuming to “know” the galvanizing intention of the artist, when in fact we never have access even to our own “intentions” in any full or simple sense). I’d only add to this (from the arguments in my book Seeing Differently) that the key point is often to insist on complicating the discussions around identity, art, and art’s institutions and discourses.

The tendency is to oversimplify the question into “we should or shouldn’t reduce the work to the identity of the artist”—and I think the answer to this simplistic question is “of course we should not.” Art is not reducible to some concept of identity (whatever that even means). So this question of whether or not we should connect the work directly to “identity” is completely not the point, in my opinion, not least in that it glosses over what we mean by identity and how we determine it. The point, rather, is that when we think about, make, or look at something we call art we are necessarily connecting it to a making subject, who is inevitably (if not fully consciously) “identified” in our minds. We interpret a work differently, for example, depending on whether we imagine the maker to be a white man versus a Chicana—or David Smith versus Nancy Grossman, to take your examples—and of course our own experiences and biases figure into how this distinction plays out in our relational engagement with the work.

This is, of course, a variation on the understanding in sociology since Erving Goffman in the late 1950s, and the attribution theory of social psychologists such as Edward E. Jones in the 1960s, that all meaning is relational—we engage people in a related way, although of course in the case of human interactions there is more volatility.[v] (This is where live performance can have a particular place in discussions about how we connect art to beliefs about the maker’s identity.)

DG: We have to acknowledge and understand the positionality of the artist (and, as well, of patrons, curators, etc.). But I also think that we must attend to the unintentional effects of intentionality and see artworks as embodying logics that were not planned but nevertheless operative in a work’s reception.

AJ: Yes. That’s a powerful way to nuance intentionality.

DG: Here’s an example (that may date me): the other day (thanks to Pandora radio), I randomly heard for the first time Freddie Mercury’s version of “The Great Pretender.” That version operates queerly and means differently than when that song was first sung by The Platters. A listener’s knowledge of the open secret of Mercury’s queer tactics in his music informs how that song can be interpreted and identified with. (This open secret, I learned upon some investigation, was reinforced by the 1987 video for Mercury’s version, which cycled through his looks from his Queen years and included members of the band in drag.) That is, one does the calculus of difference to ask who the proposed “you” is in its lyrics and what “pretending” means to someone who pushed the boundaries of heteronormativity’s demand that queers camouflage themselves into the supposed “normal.” This is what shifts from the R&B version sung by Tony Williams (lead singer of The Platters) to Mercury’s adoption of the song three decades later. But what’s most important about this is that—in between Williams’s and Mercury’s versions—one can come to see how a shift in context can, in this case, reveal a queer capacity in the song. (We also need to ask what is assumed and what is lost when the performer adopts this song made popular by black artists—a song that was, in turn, written by The Platters’ white, straight manager.) Paying attention to identity in this case means understanding that the writing of the song (i.e., the initial artist’s plan for it) did not necessarily intend a queer capacity, but one was nevertheless located in it by a different artist (with a different set of intentions).

A simplistic notion that all artworks are entirely dependent on (and equivalent to) the positionality of their makers is an ad hominem fallacy. However, none of this means we ignore identity. Rather, it means we understand how different identity positions inform not just intention but also reception. My (perhaps odd) example of Freddie Mercury’s re-performance of The Platters’ song is meant to highlight that any piece of cultural production must be informed by the identity and context of its maker but it is not limited by them. Indeed, an account of structural sexism, homophobia, or transphobia must, by necessity, map outward from cultural production to the network of reception in which different identity positions compete in and through that cultural production.

Rogue identifications and interpretations can be transformative. There are queer logics in texts and art objects that enable (and encourage) their misuse, their camp adoration, or their unintended embrace. Queer and transgender methods are ways to combat the reality of historical erasure and caricature, since they allow us to find capacitating sites in places beyond those with which we might more easily identify (or be told with which to identify). “Capacity” is my term for thinking about the ways in which transgender or queer potential can be located in texts and artworks (above and beyond the positionality of their authors and makers). This is derived from queer methods of reading against the grain, and it helped me to envision what one (among many) transgender studies methodology might look like with its more complex accounting of nonbinarism’s evidence in history.

AJ: We definitely have shared goals and ultimately mostly compatible frameworks, but I would eschew such dependence on the idea of an artist’s “intentions,” the concept of potential located “in” objects or texts—and this concept of “identity” that relates to both: I have argued (again, in Seeing Differently) that identification is a much more useful term. Identifications are always fluid and changing, particularly in relation to situations and others engaged; identity tends to imply a kind of determined set of characteristics that “stick” with a particular individual, that can be determined (your understanding of gender fluidity clearly would make this impossible in terms of gender/sex identifications). As for intention, I don’t find it useful to imagine (for example) that there was a moment at which the initial author of the lyrics of “The Great Pretender” had a fixed idea that was then transferred in an unmediated way to the words of the song. My creative expression certainly doesn’t work that way (I have no idea what my “intentions” are in a fully determinable way, although I try to articulate certain directions or goals). Words are just as complex in their meaning as are multimedia performances.

DG: I understand that qualification (and would agree there is no “unmediated” transfer of intent to artwork), but I also want to hold on to the idea that artists do, in fact, often plan their works in order to produce certain effects or recognitions by viewers or listeners. Such plans (intentions) are never wholly realized in the recalcitrant materiality of the artwork or the connotative excess of the text. Nevertheless, repeated formations or statements (in a series of artworks, a series of statements about those works, or within the layered process of making an individual artwork) do provide for a methodologically grounded way of locating and analyzing the intentionality—with the understanding that it is only one contributing factor to the artwork or text. The tracking of patterns allows for a way of discussing both the question of planned effects and the accounting of the ways in which they are always exceeded (or productive of new directions). In order to overcome historical erasure, a queer or transgender history of art must look to patterns of replication to help locate sites at which resistance or capacity can be cultivated—in both intentions for and receptions of works of art. This means having an account that is attuned to repeated patterns as a means of attending to intent but also giving weight to cultures of rogue reception (for instance, camp).

Right now, my two big projects are about recoveries of queer and genderqueer performance practices in the 1970s that were very visible at the time but have been written out of history—a book about Scott Burton’s queer performances and infiltrations in high-profile 1970s art institutions, on the one hand, and, on the other, a retrospective of Stephen Varble’s outrageous genderqueer guerilla actions in SoHo galleries and city streets.[vi] For both, I needed a way of talking about intent and about the ways in which these artists cultivated queer or genderqueer logics based in rogue interpretations of others’ works. Understanding the complexities of intent (and its excess) is crucial to historical work and to making a case for the importance of such queer practices to current conversations.

AJ: I’m glad you brought up this deep level of how we understand the relationship between the subject making or interpreting and the meaning of the work—in terms of sexuality. These are not arcane questions, or marginal to the politics and histories we are concerned with. They are absolutely central questions to debate.

But these are methodological and terminological nuances. We both clearly agree that gender and sexuality, however these might be theorized, understood, or experienced, are structurally implicated in any art making or interpretive/contextualizing gestures. In the end, we come to complementary endpoints with our different modes of articulating and theorizing how best to address these structures. Your turn to the performative—your new work on Scott Burton and Stephen Varble—is a thrilling new move, and I can’t wait to see what you come up with. Their interventions were deeply processual and embodied, and I think will allow you fully to explore the elements you sketch above through the playful, hilarious, and radically queer performative reworkings of earlier pop classics by Freddie Mercury. Sometimes pop culture is the most innovative place to go in order to understand how such strategies can function.

DG: Yes, the point is that issues of gender and sexuality are pervasive, and we cannot forget how central they are to cultural production and the ways we write its histories. Recognizing this means attuning our methods to questions of societal power, of intersectionality with race, of erasures in history, and of suppressed capacities. Feminist, queer, and transgender methods work on many levels not just to make visible the power dynamics of privilege and prejudice but also—we have to remember—to inspire and to incite rogue identifications, reparative positions, unforeclosed narratives, and unanticipated modes of resistance.

[i] Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, eds., Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); and David Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

[ii] Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012).

[iii] One fantastic example of this is the recent issue of the journal of the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present, ASAP/Journal, that focused on “queer form.” This collection of essays and statements stages a remarkably wide debate about the politics of form from scholars working in art history, American studies, literature, performance studies, critical race studies, and more—as well as artists, who should always be part of these conversations. “Queer Form,” special issue, ed. Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez, ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (May 2017).

[iv] While there have been many formulations of such a question, perhaps the most widely influential of them both for scholarship and for artistic practice has been José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

[v] See, for example, Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 1959); and Edward E. Jones and Victor A. Harris, “The Attribution of Attitudes,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3, no. 1 (January 1967): 1–24; as well as Jones, “Interpreting Interpersonal Behavior: The Effects of Expectancies,” Science 234 (1986): 41–46. The fact that Edward E. Jones is my father says something interesting about my own “relational” experience and how it conditions my interests.

[vi] Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble will be on view September 29, 2018–January 27, 2019, at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York.

Amelia Jones
Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice Dean of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California

David J. Getsy
Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Design History: The State of the Art

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 16:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Design is a rich word. Its core meaning is a plan, so it refers by extension to evidence of the activity of planning, such as blueprints, technical drawings, and sketches on the backs of envelopes. However, it is also used to refer to the products of the activity of designing, such as designed objects, systems, and behaviors. Design history encompasses the study of design in order to find out about the past, and the study of the past in order to better understand design. Here I will briefly sketch the development of design history for those unfamiliar with it, including the international spread of the subject, and then focus on the current state of the field with reference to several key topics and work currently in progress.

Out of Art History? The Development of Design History

Some people understand design history as an offshoot of art history, or a subfield (Fallan 2010: 4–10). Given that art and design are not really related activities or outputs—design performs a function that is tangible for the user, whereas art (and design/art and concepetual design) function to invite reflection in the audience—this association is perhaps best understood institutionally. In the United States, design history is principally studied within departments of art history. In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, though, design history is usually accommodated within design schools, as contextual studies for design-practice programs. It was in the United Kingdom, at the conference of the Association of Art Historians in 1977, that design history emerged as a discrete field of study in a process of secession from art history (Woodham 2001). Design history was thereby formed in contradistinction to art history. This seccession led to the establishment of the Design History Society in the United Kingdom, as I have described previously (Huppatz and Lees-Maffei 2013). Add to this design history’s intellectual promiscuity, in that the subject is underpinned by its interdisciplinarity (about which more below), and it becomes clear that design history is not merely a subfield of art history.

This was demonstrated at a 2011 conference at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, “At Cross Purposes? When Art History Meets Design History,” convened by Anne Puetz (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Glenn Adamson (then based at the Victoria and Albert Museum). Rather than representing a meeting of two equal entities, the conference showcased the work of art historians that engaged more or less with material culture, whether through an emphasis on materiality or process, while the work of design historians addressing art or art history was less well represented. But, design history is not reducible to an emphasis on materials or processes; rather it emphasizes the range of contexts (social, cultural, economic, geographical, political, etc.) through which design can be understood.

Design history’s development out of, and away from, art history is probably at the root of a disdain for aesthetics in the field. While designers have a professional concern for aesthetics, because beautiful things are more attractive to buyers and users, design historians consider the economic, business, labor, sociological, and theoretical contexts through which design can be understood. We consider these along with markers of identity including gender and sexuality, ethnicity, age, and so on that impact on the ideation, production, mediation, and consumption of design in a way that perceives these social relations as distinct from aesthetics. (Mediation is used in design history to refer to the discourses that exist between designers and manufacturers on the one hand and consumers and users on the other, including for, example, advertising, marketing, museum displays, retail design, the work of bloggers and vloggers, etc. [Lees-Maffei 2009].) Recent work on aesthetics in design has begun to recoup the notion for design studies and design cultures (Folkmann 2013) and for philosophy (Forsey 2013), while design history remains almost entirely mute on the subject for reasons, I would argue, related to the field’s relation to art history (Lees-Maffei 2014). An approach to understanding design as principally an aesthetic phenomenon has been regarded by design historians as associated simultaneously with the field’s roots in art history and with the fact that it has been dogged by its association with the active and profitable presentation of design in coffee table, or principally pictorial, books. Aesthetic treatments of design have been accordingly critiqued and rejected, although this is now being addressed in current, as-yet unpublished work by Folkmann, among others.

The quest to understand design within sociohistorical contexts has meant that design history and design historians thrive on linkages with sister fields including art history, of course, but also visual culture, material culture, anthropology and design ethnography, museum and heritage studies, architectural history, craft history, and the aforementioned business and labor studies and economic history, to name but a few. Design history’s prescient and integral interdisciplinarity has been regarded as a given by design historians, so that attempts to capture these connections have been few and piecemeal. While Victor Margolin posited “design issues” as a more inclusive term than “design history” as far back as 1991 (Margolin 1992), Guy Julier has offered the alternative of “design culture” (2000), also referred to in the plural as “design cultures,” for example in the MA Design Cultures, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Design issues and design culture(s) essentially perform the same purpose of uniting theory and practice (see Kimbell 2011, 2012) along with placing design and its understanding firmly within a broad contemporary context, as distinct from design history’s foregrounding of history. As an example of the productive relation of design history with related fields, we can point to Alison Clarke’s promotion of design ethnography (Clarke 2010) as one of a small number of related titles seeking to bring design and anthropology together in ways more direct than the positively capacious approach of material culture studies.

At the micro level, design history’s small scale and its status as an emerging field mean that many design historians have close connections of various sorts. So, it is impossible to write a review of the field which does not refer, where relevant, to the work of one’s friends and collaborators, such as Kjetil Fallan (University of Oslo, Norway), Rebecca Houze (Northern Illinois University, USA), Daniel Huppatz (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia) and spouse (Nicolas P. Maffei, Norwich University of the Arts, UK), and even to one’s own work.

The health of the field is sometimes measured with reference to the number of undergraduate and postgraduate programs, the number of PhDs being awarded, and academic and research jobs being advertised. By these yardsticks, design history in the United Kingdom is receding. However, a recent snapshot of the state of design history around the world suggested that complaints about the subject being in remission in the United Kingdom (because single honors undergraduate programs have shut down as a result of cost-cutting and/or streamlining efficiencies in host departments or as a result of lack of student recruitment) are matched by optimism about the subject’s growth in the United States, Western Europe, and East Asia (Huppatz and Lees-Maffei 2013). Certainly, if the number of monographs, textbooks, and anthologies being produced in a field is regarded as a measure of that field’s health, then design history is blooming. The field has shifted from being principally a teaching subject to being a research topic with great potential in the United Kingdom; in the other regions mentioned here and in my earlier article on the state of the field (Huppatz and Lees-Maffei 2013), it is now emerging and growing.

Surveying Design History

Now is a particularly good time to reflect on the state of design history because the field has recently benefitted from a stream of survey texts. The year 2009 saw the publication of a special issue of the Journal of Design History (22, no. 4) on “The Current State of Design History,” edited by Hazel Clark and David Brody in tribute to Clive Dilnot’s landmark essay in two parts, “The State of Design History,” which had been published twenty-five years previously as part of the field’s definitional phase. Dilnot argued that “The more design and designing are studied, the more important a broad context becomes,” meaning that we should focus on social and historical contexts (Dilnot 1984a: 19). In their reprise of Dilnot’s project, Clark and Brody gathered a range of views about the development of the field, and identified in these some gaps and issues for future examination, including the notions of absence and otherness (Clark and Brody 2009a). My own contribution to the volume outlined the development of design history along the lines of a “Production-Consumption-Mediation Paradigm” in which these three directions have predominated in design history albeit while also forming continuous foci (Lees-Maffei 2009). Here I argue for the utility of a focus on mediating discourses and practices that exist between producers and consumers for understanding the meanings that accrue to design. My arguments have been echoed by, for example, Fallan in his textbook Design History: Understanding Theory and Method (Fallan 2010); more recent work on mediation includes studies of the museum display of design, for example (Farrelly and Weddell 2016).

The same year that Clark and Brody published their assessment of the state of design history saw the publication of their anthology, Design Studies: A Reader (Clark and Brody 2009b), and two other anthologies examining design historical topics: Ben Highmore’s The Design Culture Reader (Highmore 2009) and Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins’s The Object Reader (Candlin and Guins 2009). Lees-Maffei and Houze’s The Design History Reader appeared the following year (Lees-Maffei and Houze 2010). These anthologies make clear design history’s interdisciplinarity through selections of texts that are considered core in the field and yet derive from material culture studies, anthropology and ethnography, the histories of art, craft, business, economics and labor, sociology, historical sociology and cultural studies, among others. Taken together, they show a field sufficiently distinct as to warrant dedicated anthologies and yet thoroughly enmeshed with neighboring fields in freeing and intellectually productive ways. These overview anthologies were accompanied by a number of field anthologies, including an early example on fashion and subsequent titles on graphic design and crafts (Welters and Lillethun 2007; Armstrong 2009; Adamson 2010).

The flurry of anthologies published in 2009–10 prepared the market and the field for a number of monumental design history texts that followed. The bibliographic evidence shows that publishers are sufficiently convinced of the robustness of the design-books market to produce major, costly, volumes. Bloomsbury is in the vanguard of this trend, having published the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design, edited by Clive Edwards in 2015, and Huppatz’s four-volume Design: Critical and Primary Sources (2016), both priced for the library market. The former is not the first encyclopedia of design, but it is the most extensive. The latter uses its monumental scale to reproduce complete articles rather than abridged versions. Huppatz tries to avoid the “history” in design history, presenting historical texts for their relevance to contemporary design practice, design studies, and design cultures. These two titles represent a desire to map the field, which springs from a general sense of its increasing scope, expansiveness, and confidence in the market for academic design books as well as the more popular titles sold to a wider readership.

A significant driver for the extension of the field has been the critiques of design history’s Western focus. Design historians have examined the industrial West at the expense of regions that have industrialized at different times and in ways divergent from the United States and Western European model. An early approach to this was Adamson, Giorgio Riello, and Sarah Teasley’s edited collection, Global Design History (2011), in which commissioned essays were presented in a call-and-response arrangement that was nevertheless concise and highly selective in its treatment of the topic. A more inclusive approach to globalization is found in Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber’s History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000 (2013), published as a textbook for their Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture program at the Bard Graduate Center, which covers six centuries of design across four continents (excluding Australasia). This approach allows a more inclusive understanding of design practice that incorporates industrialization but is not circumscribed by it. The same applies to Margolin’s World History of Design (2015) which is unparalleled in the field for both its temporal and geographic scope. As the work of one individual, Margolin’s World History of Design necessarily displays the interests and biases of its author, but this synthetic approach is a usefully inclusive corrective to the Western, industrial preoccupation of many previous textbooks of design history. Efforts to globalize design history have sometimes threatened to dismiss national studies as no longer relevant, but the national is a tried-and-tested category of analysis that informs, as well as being informed by, local, regional, and international foci (Fallan and Lees-Maffei 2016). The critical mass of work on national identities and globalization speaks to the international spread of the subject.

Current Directions in Design History

The large inclusive survey texts and anthologies that have characterized design-history publishing in recent years are necessarily reflective, but current and ongoing work in design history may be seen as responding to one or more of a handful of directions. These are the mediation turn and the globalization imperative already discussed, plus three more: sustainability, food design, and performance.

One intellectual trajectory not represented well in the group of survey texts is an emerging focus on sustainable design. Sustainability is a particularly acute issue for design historians to tackle because climate change is associated with industrialization and mass production, issues of considerable importance to design and its histories (Houze 2010). Sustainability has been examined within design studies, which is a (quasi-) social-scientific field concerned with quantitative and qualitative studies undertaken to improve design practice (Fuad-Luke 2009; Fry 2008), but has received very little attention from design historians, notwithstanding the considerable influence of Austrian-born designer and design educator Victor Papanek (1923–1998) (Papanek 1971; 1983; 1995; see also Fiender and Geisler 2010). Pauline Madge’s historiography of design and ecology (Madge 1993) was an early call to attention, and recent published studies indicate a growing concern for sustainable design (Anker 2010; Keitsch 2012; Pyla 2012), yet some ongoing research on sustainable design remains as yet largely unpublished, such as the results of the University of Oslo research project, Back to the Sustainable Future. This work promises to make clear the value of design history in that historical study of sustainability initiatives can provide the long view about their efficacy and can work in this way to confront myths and misconceptions about design and ecology.

Another relatively unexplored area of design that is currently attracting increased interest among design historians is food design. The International Food Design Society was founded in London in 2009 by Francesca Zampollo, who has since convened symposia and a conference on the topic and served as founding editor of the International Journal of Food Design. Zampollo defines food design loosely to incorporate work across design practice, design history, and design culture (Zampollo 2013, 2016). Margolin provided an early reflection on the relationship between design studies and food studies with reference to a shared history for each, in that some of the earliest tools and technologies (each the products of design) were made for the purpose of obtaining and/or preparing food. Margolin also notes, “Both design studies and food studies have profited from the development of interdisciplinary research in other fields that has occurred since the 1960s” (Margolin 2013: 385).

A final direction in current research in design history that I want to draw attention to here is the increasing concern for the history of performance. Theater history is of course a discrete field that predates design history’s interest in performance. Similarly, performativity has been a focus on work across the arts and humanities for some time. Design historians have joined this discussion very recently with, for example, the preparation of postgraduate programs in performance history and allied curatorial practice such as the record-breaking exhibition David Bowie Is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013, curated by the museum’s theater and performance curators, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh.

Conclusion: Design History Futures

In 1984, Dilnot argued that history is significant to design futures and that an expanded understanding of design is essential for realizing the idea of a designing society (Dilnot 1984b: 20). The necessarily brief survey of design history provided here has aimed to demonstrate something of the field’s richness and future. It is fitting that caa.reviews should cover developments in design history and that the organization’s commitment to the subject will be developed under the auspices of a dedicated field editor.

Grace Lees-Maffei
Reader in Design History, School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire

End Notes

Adamson, Glenn. 2010. The Craft Reader. Oxford: Berg.

Adamson, Glenn, Giorgio Riello, and Sarah Teasley, eds. 2011. Global Design History. London: Routledge.

Armstrong, Helen, ed. 2009. Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Anker, Peder. 2010. From Bauhaus to Ecohaus: A History of Ecological Design. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Candlin, Fiona and Raidford Guins, eds. 2009. The Object Reader. Abingdon: Routledge.

Clark, Hazel and David Brody. 2009a. “The Current State of Design History.” Journal of Design History 22, no. 4: 303–8.

Clark, Hazel and David Brody, eds. 2009b. Design Studies: A Reader. Oxford: Berg.

Clarke, Alison J. ed. 2010. Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century. Vienna: Springer Verlag.

Dilnot, Clive. 1984a. “The State of Design History Part I: Mapping the Field.” Design Issues 1, no. 1 (Spring): 3–23.

Dilnot, Clive. 1984b. “The State of Design History Part II: Problems and Possibilities.” Design Issues 1, no. 2 (Autumn): 3–20.

Edwards, Clive. 2015. The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design. London: Bloomsbury.

Fallan, Kjetil. 2010. Design History: Understanding Theory and Method. Oxford: Berg.

Fallan, Kjetil and Grace Lees-Maffei, eds. 2016. Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization. New York: Berghahn.

Farrelly, Liz and Joanna Weddell, eds. 2016. Design Objects and the Museum. London: Bloomsbury.

Fiender, Martina and Thomas Geisler. 2010. “Design Criticism and Critical Design in the Writings of Victor Papanek (1923–1998).” Journal of Design History 23, no. 1: 9–106.

Folkmann, Mads Nygaard. 2013. The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Forsey, Jane. 2013. The Aesthetics of Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fry, Tony. 2008. Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

Fuad-Luke, Alastair. 2009. Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World. London: Routledge.

Highmore, Ben. 2009. The Design Culture Reader. Abingdon: Routledge.

Houze, Rebecca. 2010. “Sustainable Futures, 1960–2003.” Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze, eds. The Design History Reader. Oxford: Berg Publishers. 217–56.

Huppatz, Daniel J. and Grace Lees-Maffei. 2013. “Why Design History? A Multi-National Perspective on the State and Purpose of the Field.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 12, no. 3 (July): 310–30.

Huppatz, Daniel J. 2016. Design: Critical and Primary Sources. London: Bloomsbury.

Julier, Guy. 2000. The Culture of Design. London: Sage.

Keitsch, Martina. 2012. “Sustainable Design: A Brief Appraisal of its Main Concepts.” Sustainable Development 20, no. 3 (May/June): 180–88.

Kimbell, Lucy. 2011. “Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I,” Design and Culture 3, no. 3: 285–306.

Kimbell, Lucy. 2012. “Rethinking Design Thinking: Part II,” Design and Culture 4, no. 2: 129–48.

Kirkham, Pat and Susan Weber. 2013. A History of the Decorative Arts and Design 1400–2000. New Haven: Yale University Press/Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture.

Lees-Maffei, Grace. 2009. “The Production-Consumption-Mediation Paradigm.” Journal of Design History 22, no. 4: 351–76.

Lees-Maffei, Grace and Rebecca Houze, eds. 2010. The Design History Reader. Oxford: Berg.

Lees-Maffei, Grace. 2014. “Design History and Theory.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, second edition, ed. Michael Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press. 350–54.

Madge, Pauline. 1993. “Design, Ecology, Technology: A Historiographical Review,” Journal of Design History 6, no. 3: 149–66.

Margolin, Victor. 1992. “Design History or Design Studies: Subject Matter and Methods.” Design Studies 13, no 2 (April): 104–16.

Margolin, Victor. 2013. “Design Studies and Food Studies: Parallels and Intersections.” Design and Culture 5, no. 3 (November): 375–92.

Margolin, Victor. 2015. World History of Design. London: Bloomsbury.

Papanek, Victor. 1971. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. New York: Pantheon Books.

Papanek, Victor. 1983. Design for Human Scale. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co.

Papanek, Victor. 1995. The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture. New York: Thames and Hudson.

Pyla, Panayiota. 2012. “Sustainability’s Prehistories: Beyond Smooth Talk—Oxymorons, Ambivalences, and Other Current Realities of Sustainability.” Design and Culture 4, no. 3: 273–78.

Welters, Linda and Abby Lillethun, eds. 2007. The Fashion Reader. Oxford: Berg.

Woodham, Jonathan M. 2001. “Designing Design History: From Pevsner to Postmodernism.” Working Papers in Communication Research Archive, Digitisation and Knowledge, 1, no. 1 (December): https://www.aut.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/15816/jonathan_woodham.pdf.

Zampollo, Francesca. 2013. “Food and Design: Space, Place and Experience.” Hospitality and Society 3, no. 3 (September): 181–87.

Zampollo, Francesca. 2016. “Welcome to Food Design.” International Journal of Food Design 1, no. 1 (January): 3–9.

The Getty Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI)

The Getty Foundation — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 16:00:00 GMT

The Getty Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI)

Art Institute of Chicago
Monet Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago
https://publications.artic.edu/monet/reader/paintingsanddrawings/section/135470

Art Institute of Chicago
Renoir Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago
https://publications.artic.edu/renoir/reader/paintingsanddrawings/section/138973

Freer/Sackler Galleries
The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book: The Gerhard Pulverer Collection
http://pulverer.si.edu/

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Southeast Asian Art: An Online Scholarly Catalogue at LACMA
http://seasian.catalog.lacma.org/

National Gallery of Art
Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, by Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr.
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/research/online-editions/17th-century-dutch-paintings.html/

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The Rauschenberg Research Project
https://www.sfmoma.org/rauschenberg-research-project/

Seattle Art Museum
Chinese Painting and Calligraphy
http://chinesepainting.seattleartmuseum.org/OSCI/

Tate
The Camden Town Group in Context
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group

Walker Art Center
Living Collections Catalogues
http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications
On Performativity, Vol. I
Art Expanded, 1958–1978, Vol. II
Merce Cunningham, Vol. III (forthcoming 2017)

In 2009, the Getty Foundation launched its Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI), working with a consortium of eight partner museums alongside the J. Paul Getty Museum, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Seattle Art Museum (SAM); Tate; and the Walker Art Center. As the participating institutions reach the conclusion of the production of the publications conceived and executed through this initiative, the moment is ripe for a reflection on the accomplishments of this undertaking. However, due to the diverse content and approaches represented by the OSCI program, this essay will not so much be an evaluation of the scholarship of individual catalogues, something I hope appropriate specialists will take up; instead it will discuss the implications of the project as a whole, oriented around specific questions raised by the undertaking and the projects it spurred.

A Catalogue?

With an etymology that dates back to the early fifteenth century, a catalogue originally represented a register or index of content, such as ships, books, or artworks. In the twentieth century, and up to the present day, museum catalogues have grown from mere enumerations of objects held in their collections to occasions for the presentation of new scholarship. In reconfiguring the very manner of presenting such information by incentivizing leading Anglo-American museums to apply digital technology to the practice of rendering collections accessible to the public, the Getty initiative again raises the very question of what a catalogue can represent.

Of the catalogues developed for the Getty, only those of the Art Institute of Chicago, Monet Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago and Renoir Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, use an interface that resembles a published book. Each of the other institutions has developed a form of engagement that feels more like the intersection of a website and a traditional scholarly publication. An advantage to the latter approach is the inherent connection preserved between the material presented and the holdings of a particular museum as a whole. A drawback, however, is the all too frequent challenge of navigating between the two sources and the unintentional migration of the user into other sections of the website, necessitating the reopening of the OSCI publication. Such is particularly the case with the publications created by the Tate and the Walker.

It is notable that each of the undertakings sponsored by the Getty focuses specifically on some aspect of the participants’ permanent collections. Left untouched is the question of exhibition catalogues, a topic to which I shall return at the conclusion of this essay. That said, each of the museums has taken advantage of the Getty’s support to render visible, or to provide further information concerning, important aspects of its holdings. The selection of material, as noted earlier, has been quite diverse, including two institutions—the Art Institute of Chicago and SFMOMA—dedicating themselves to representing the work of specific artists (Monet, Renoir, and Robert Rauschenberg, respectively); three institutions honing in on specific aspects of their encyclopedic holdings, LACMA, the National Gallery of Art, and SAM (Southeast Asian art, Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, and Chinese painting and calligraphy, respectively); one, the Freer/Sackler, focusing on a donor’s collection (The Gerhard Pulverer Collection of illustrated Japanese books); one, the Walker, providing thematic overviews of sections of its collection (On Performativity, Art Expanded, 1958–1978, Living Collections Catalogue, vol. 2 [a third volume, on Merce Cunningham, is projected for 2017]). Only the Tate took advantage of the online format to bring increased visibility to a less prominent group of artists, but one deserving of more attention: The Camden Town Group.

This, then, begs the question of just what type of work may be suitable to online publishing. While a flippant shorthand—“everything”—indeed is literally true, it may be the case that certain sorts of undertakings could work particularly well, especially when freed from commercial demands. The value of the digital for providing access to large-scale holdings, such as the breadth of the National Gallery’s seventeenth-century Dutch paintings or the span of the Chinese painting and calligraphy collections at SAM, makes them obviously appropriate to a digital catalogue. Yet the lack of an overview essay in the case of the Seattle publication is an unfortunate lacuna, and one that can hopefully be remedied. (A lack of curatorial essays providing integrated perspectives is similarly a weakness of the OSCI publications of the Art Institute of Chicago.) A less obvious but equally compelling choice is represented in the Tate’s decision to focus on a select group of artists whose accomplishments have not yet become familiar. This suggests the promise that digital publication can provide new access to artists or movements that might be difficult to “sell” to a traditional commercial press.

Indeed, there is an incredible value in the presentation by each of these publications of material that might not otherwise have widespread public and scholarly availability. A video interview included by the Freer/Sackler, for example, of the collector Gerhard Pulverer, or footage of Trisha Brown’s Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, performed in 2008, made available by the Walker, are equally fascinating for experts and non-specialists (Ellis Tinios, “An Interview with Collector Gerhard Pulverer,” in The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book, Freer and Sackler Museums, Smithsonian Institution, ca. 2015: http://pulverer.si.edu/node/186; Shannon Jackson, “Performativity and Its Addressee,” in On Performativity, Living Collections Catalogue, vol. 1, Walker Art Center, 2014: http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/performativity-and-its-addressee/). The caliber of illustrations included in the OSCI offerings is truly outstanding, and search and enlargement tools, such as those provided by SAM and the National Gallery of Art, make it possible to study objects closely, even from one’s desktop computer.

New Approaches to Scholarship?

Thus far, each of the publications supported by the Getty has been geared to an educated general public. Electronic links provided in virtually all of the publications make potentially obscure terms more available, and linkable footnotes and easy access to comparative figures in each of the publications is a great asset. A longer-term question may be the value of taking advantage of “readymade” resources, such as Wikipedia, as the Walker’s publications do, to provide biographical information. In addition to these links making it hard for the reader to return to the original text, the scholarly accuracy, and the viability of the link itself, may be difficult for the home institution to control.

But thus far none of the publications supported by the Getty could truly be described as a “digital humanities” undertaking in terms of the approaches to scholarship currently highlighted. Narrative overviews and discussions of the collections presented rely more on traditional “analogue” approaches to research, rather than exemplifying strategies of digital and computational analysis, such as the discernment of patterns in data or the use of tools such as geographic information systems (GISs), to explore physical geographies.

Some nod to computational analysis exists in the Freer/Sackler’s Pulverer catalogue’s graphic describing the frequency of publications of illustrated books in Japan from the late seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century. This feature also provides a point of entry to these books by readers of the catalogue (see The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book, Freer and Sackler Museums, “Browse by Date,” Freer/Sackler: http://pulverer.si.edu/search_landing). And, indeed, the Freer/Sackler provides special access to researchers upon application, enabling them to create their own files of information.

Echoing this, a similar invitation for scholars of Chinese art and calligraphy to “join our community” has recently been added to the SAM OSCI catalogue. Further interaction is invited by SAM, which provides opportunities for users to post comments in response to catalogue entries.

Ultimately, such online publications have the capacity to provide a platform for new approaches, and one hopes that they will help to encourage the open sharing of data and metadata about collections through open application program interfaces (APIs) that may permit new discoveries to be made through digital analysis. With respect to open access, each of the participating institutions is to be applauded for lavishly illustrating their publications and providing the public with ready links to sumptuous illustrations.

A further advantage, yet to be fully exploited, is the flexibility of language and translation electronic publications have the facility to offer. Some initial steps toward embracing this opportunity is evident in the Freer/Sackler’s The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book, which enables users to conduct bibliographic searches using Kanji characters. But certainly more could be done, and one of the central promises of such online resources is precisely that they can always (at least in theory) be ameliorated by further refinement and augmentation.

Authorship and Authority?

Readers of this review have no doubt noticed the credit paid to institutions rather than individual curators or scholars. Interestingly enough, only one online catalogue prominently credits a single author: Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, by Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., published by the National Gallery of Art. This shift in author credit reflects, on the one hand, the breadth of many of the collections covered by these OSCI catalogues. But it also points up a collaborative approach to scholarly projects familiar to many digital humanists and increasingly to other scholars: while publications have always relied upon the expertise of many sets of individuals—from editors, to research assistants, to photographers, in addition to scholars—the important interconnection of such teams becomes even more obvious in the digital era. Additionally, many of the OSCI catalogues combine the efforts of numerous scholars or curators brought in to comment on specific aspects of a given collection, and duly credited.

The authority of these publications resides largely in the public trust held by the significant institutions in which the Getty has invested. Each of these large, civic museums has done a tremendous service in carrying forward this experiment. But an implicit question results: to what degree are smaller, less well-resourced institutions in a position to follow suit? Despite the Getty’s generous launch of the OSCI Tool Kit, developed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, significant technical hurdles must be addressed in the creation of such catalogues, and often a good deal of data “scrubbing” is necessary to ensure that historically idiosyncratic data can be appropriately extracted for electronic output.

Technology, Access, and the Future of Online Scholarly Catalogues?

While I was writing this overview in mid-January 2016, the Rauschenberg Research Project, created by SFMOMA, was unavailable as the content was shifted to a new website. The correlation between the physical closure of the museum itself and the unavailability of its electronic data is striking, suggesting the ongoing need for electronic materials to have a long-term home. Which institutions boast the requisite stability and resources to protect and maintain digital information? Just how robust and reliable is digital data, and what steps are being taken by the host OSCI institutions to preserve the scholarship presented in their digital publications? A public discussion and unveiling of their preservation strategies would be a valuable contribution to the undertaking this represents.

In addition to the inevitable technological challenges implicit in such catalogues will be the management challenge of maintaining them. If their inherent “flexibility” is an asset, it also presents new responsibilities. While the potential for automated connections between collections data and collections management systems suggests that such information can be kept “automatically” up to date, what workflows or systems need to be put into place internally at institutions to ensure that catalogue content is regularly reviewed and updated, with internal references to “upcoming” events, for example, adjusted appropriately or conclusions appropriately modified with the appearance of new data? This, in turn, raises the question of how scholarly interpretations will be preserved in the light of changing approaches to scholarship. How does one balance archival concerns versus the necessity for accuracy and historically sensitive methodologies? Might the advent of the digital catalogue thus invite the development of a new expertise within museums: that of the digital curator, explicitly charged with the oversight of interpretive digital data?

Yet despite the inevitable hurdles to ensuring that digital data straddles new technological systems and structures, a larger question concerns the ability of users, or potential users, to gain entry to the very sites on which these catalogues rely. Along with this goes the very question of the ability to host such catalogues at all. The volumes that have been made available are offered free of charge, which is a welcome commitment, but access is clearly limited to those with the privilege necessary to take advantage of the technological infrastructure they demand.

Conclusion: Catalogues without Bindings

The experiment bravely launched by the Getty to encourage a consortium of leading Anglo-American museums to experiment with the creation of new electronic catalogues appears largely to have been a success. But the different approaches taken by each of the partner institutions raise a key question: which works best? Or will we, as seems inevitable, find that different approaches suit us in the digital age, just as they have in the analogue era?

The larger question of how the digital is shaping and reconfiguring museums and scholarships deserves further attention. The question, in some senses, is hardly new, having been entertained by André Malraux (building on the work of Walter Benjamin) in similar fashion in the era of the widespread introduction of the photograph into the realm of the museum. “A museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer us within their walls,” Malraux noted in the introduction to Museum Without Walls (André Malraux, Museum Without Walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967, 12). Yet if the electronic era holds the promise of further eroding the geographical, and perhaps political and social, barriers to museum access, certainly these have not been entirely obliterated, and it may now be even more incumbent upon museum professionals, entrusted with maintaining collections for the public good, to dedicate ourselves to ensuring digital culture does not stimulate the creation of new ghettos of exclusion. Malraux’s provocative assertion that “the museum was an affirmation, the museum without walls is an interrogation” (162) may suggest that increased access can provide a challenge to the very assumptions about scholarship and interpretation that have become invisible to us. But if so, then we must also take seriously his observation, perhaps delivered somewhat tongue in cheek, that: “The point has been reached where the real museum is beginning to resemble the museum without walls: its statues are better lit and far less frequently clustered together. Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan . . . seems admirably posed, awaiting the photographers. It belongs to both the real world of statues and to an unreal world that extends its boundaries” (110; Malraux is, of course, echoing Benjamin’s observation about photography: “To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” [Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, 224]). To what degree has the museum today, and perhaps even scholarship itself, become poised to absorb and be disseminated by new digital technology? To what degree do such new tools provide welcome interventions, and when might they threaten to compromise the very integrity of the institutions they infiltrate?

If these are heady questions, they are among the most important with respect to the long-term significance of the Getty’s important Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative. Already, it is has motivated participating institutions, such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Walker, to produce multiple online volumes. While the development of the online exhibition catalogue may remain elusive for the time being, due to the very complexities of developing and hosting such products, surely this too will come. Convenient as the hand-carried scholarly volume can be, the promise of instant access and the ability to tap into a network of knowledge from any wired hub may outweigh the benefits of flipping through pages and even the (misleading) sense of a single unified whole it conveys. While the OSCI undertaking represents but a first step, it nonetheless lays a significant foundation for the future of scholarship in the museum, and beyond. Equally important are the steps that come next and the journey that ensues.

Anne Collins Goodyear
Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Boris Charmatz: If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 16:00:00 GMT

Boris Charmatz. Levée des conflits (2015). Photograph by Tamara Tomic-Vajagic.

[See the multimedia version on Scalar.]

Introduction: “If caa.reviews were performance.reviews?”

This jointly authored review of Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (2015) inaugurates a new initiative, spearheaded by the editorial board of caa.reviews, to review time-based media. The increasing prominence of dance, performance, video, film, and sound works in museum and gallery exhibitions gives caa.reviews an opportunity not simply to broaden the journal’s scope, but also to bring a range of diverse perspectives to bear on this growing phenomenon. By inviting scholars of dance to write this review, we hope to show how caa.reviews can become a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue on artworks and institutions of interest to members of distinct but related scholarly and creative communities. In the spirit of Charmatz, we ask, “what if caa.reviews were performance.reviews?”

If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse?—a festival-cum-artwork held at the Tate Modern, London, on May 15–16, 2015—arguably provides the perfect entry point into this new series of reviews. As the Tate’s introductory text for this complex piece suggests, its titular question reframes the Tate Modern, “proposing a fictional transformation of the art museum via the prism of dance.” Charmatz—who is both a choreographer and director of the Musée de la danse in Rennes, France—answered his own question with a variety of dance-related activities. If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? included solo and ensemble dances, participatory pieces and ones performed for an audience, with some of these events overlapping or occurring simultaneously. Charmatz’s “main stage” was the Tate’s Turbine Hall [LINK to Stanger], the vast, hangar-like space on the museum’s lower level, which since 2000 has been the site for the Unilever Series, an annual commission for a site-specific work. However, Charmatz did not limit his intervention to the Turbine Hall. Events also took place in the Tate’s exhibition and collections galleries, and were broadcast via live stream.

The eight-hour continuous program in the Turbine Hall began with an hour-and-a half “public warm-up,” directed by Charmatz. A series of works choreographed by Charmatz then followed. The program began with reprises of two of Charmatz’s earlier works: the duet À bras-le-corps (To Seize Bodily) (1993), performed by Charmatz and Dmitri Chamblas, followed by three separate but related performances of Levée des conflits (Suspension of Conflict) (2010), first as a solo, then as a participatory work (led by Charmatz), and finally as an ensemble piece. Charmatz also presented Roman Photo, a piece based on his Flip Book (2009), which incorporated volunteers from the audience, and a “dispersed version” of manger (Eating) (2014), which he also presented at Sadlers Wells Theatre on May 19–20, along with a full program of concert dance. Interspersed between these staged choreographic works, Charmatz programmed two free-form events entitled Adrénaline: A Dance Floor for Everyone [LINK to Tomic-Vajagic], in which an enormous disco ball transformed the Turbine Hall into a dance party.

Meanwhile, the upper-floor galleries hosted continuous performances of two other works. On levels 2, 3, and 4, viewers would find Charmatz’s 20 Dancers for the XX Century [LINK to Zee], “a living archive of the last 100 years of dance.” At different times and in different places, twenty dancers performed a selection of twentieth-century dances. Some were drawn from the Euro-American canon (by choreographers including Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, Ted Shawn, and Alvin Ailey). Others (solos by Germaine Acogny and Tatsuki Hijikata, Irish step dance, riffs on Charlie Chaplin) threw that canon into relief. A related piece, expo zéro, was, according to the Tate Modern website, a performance/teach-in, “an exhibition project without any objects” in which ten “guide-artists” from a variety of backgrounds “discuss, enact and perform their ideas of what a museum of dance could be.”

While this brief summary of the components of If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? may seem extensive and confusing, it likely will sound familiar to readers who know Charmatz’s previous work. Trained in the elite ranks of the Paris Opéra Ballet, Charmatz founded the “association edna” in 1992 with Chamblas, and it was also with Chamblas that Charmatz began choreographing his own work (À bras-le-corps was their first work, and so it arguably counted as the twenty-first dance of the twentieth century in If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse?). Though Charmatz originated as a ballet dancer, he employs an emphatically non-balletic technique in his choreography. He draws primarily from postmodern dance styles that combine “ordinary” or everyday movements with more virtuosic or complex steps; his choreographies evoke the work of Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (his duet with de Keersmaeker, Partita II (2013), was on the program at Sadler’s Wells).

Charmatz’s museum-related interventions began in 2009 when, upon assuming the directorship of the Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne, he renamed the institution the Musée de la danse (“The Dancing Museum”). With this transformation, Charmatz aimed to question, and to reconceptualize, the institutional structures that frame viewers’ experiences of works of art—those which appear to be “fixed” (such as paintings or sculptures) as well as those (like dance) which seem more transitory. As Charmatz suggests in his “Manifesto for a Dancing Museum,” “We are at a time in history where a museum in no way excludes precarious movements, nor nomadic, ephemeral, instantaneous ones.” His belief is that the entry of dance into the literal and conceptual space of the museum can transform the latter, making it more provocative, transgressive, permeable, cooperative, and “incorporated” (that is, embodied). It is this spirit of utopian transformation and quasi-anarchic takeover that animates If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse?—and this review’s temporary “occupation” of caa.reviews.

Juliet Bellow
Professor, Department of Art, American University

Boris Charmatz: If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 16:00:00 GMT

Boris Charmatz. Levée des conflits (2015). Photograph by Tamara Tomic-Vajagic.

[See the multimedia version on Scalar.]

Museum Metaphysics: 20 Dancers for the XX Century and Dance’s Ontology in the Museum

As I walked through Tate Modern’s “Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky: Pop 1957–67” gallery on May 15, 2015, I encountered Frédéric Seguette removing T-shirt after T-shirt in a performance of Jerôme Bel’s Shirtology (1997). Seguette’s performance was part of Boris Charmatz’s 20 Dancers for the XX Century, a performative exhibition of selected moments in the history of twentieth-century dance; this work was previously staged at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013 and subsequently reincarnated at the Palais Garnier in Paris. The version of 20 Dancers for the XX Century in If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? featured twenty dancers, each of whom represented different traditions, choreographers, and styles of dance, from the balletic tradition of George Balanchine to the contemporary street style of krumping. Dispersed throughout Tate Modern’s permanent collection galleries, the dancers, equipped with boomboxes, were free to choose the location, or “stage,” in which to perform their movement. Some, like Seguette, situated themselves in galleries, thus juxtaposing their piece of the twentieth century with the artistic styles surrounding them; others chose to perform in more apparently neutral or transitional spaces, such as hallways.

The excerpts of canonical danceworks presented in 20 Dancers for the XX Century were not exact executions of choreographic scores. Instead, they were performances of the dancers’ memories and experiences of those works; Marcella Lista describes these archival performances as “bodily articulation[s] of fragments of history, absorbed and metabolized through various moments of consciousness and temporality” (Marcella Lista, “Play Dead: Dance, Museums, and the ‘Time-Based Arts,’” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 [December 2014]: 6–23). As Charmatz himself has noted in lectures on this piece, he is not trying to achieve a faithfulness to the “original” choreography. Instead, his aim is to incorporate the dancers’ experiences of these works into the history of dance, and the history of dance into the museum (Boris Charmatz, “BMW Tate Live—Museums: The Artists’ Creation,” panel [May 12, 2015], Tate Modern). 20 Dancers for the XX Century shows thereby that choreographic works are not static. They are filtered through and impacted by dancers’ and viewers’ memories of other works and by the training and other bodily experiences that the dancers carry with them.

20 Dancers for the XX Century seeks to call into question preconceptions about the metaphysical status of dance, and challenges presumptions about the way in which dance might inhabit the museum or cohabitate with works of plastic art. The project uses the museum context to reimagine what dance might be. Charmatz’s approach—his acceptance of experience and memory as part of these twentieth-century dances, rather than strict adherence to set choreography—poses a challenge to the typical paradigm of dance presentation and performance. Dance is often theorized through a type-token framework: the type, or choreography, is an enduring dancework that can be re-performed, while dance is the token, the individual, fleeting performance of a type (see Graham McFee’s The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding [Binsted, Hampshire, UK: Dance Books, 2011] for a detailed analysis of the type-token framework). With 20 Dancers for the XX Century, Charmatz blurs the line between type and token, merging the two into one experience through the memories of dancers and spectators.

20 Dancers for the XX Century liberates dance from the ephemerality of movement performance by framing it within memory, allowing dance to be experienced by and accessed through its traces. For example, former New York City Ballet dancer Antonia Franceschi performed excerpts from the Balanchine repertory in the “Realisms Room” of the Tate’s “Poetry and Dream” gallery. Before one segment, she spoke with visitors, sharing her memories of learning the work by describing what it was like to be in the rehearsal room and the importance of the movements’ relationship to the music in Balanchine works. The movements, words, and memories Franceschi shared functioned as the “outsides” of her experiences of the works she performed. These “outsides” and traces provided access to her intangible experience, allowing that experience to be displayed as an artifact (Franz Anton Cramer, “Experience as Artifact: Transformations of the Immaterial,” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 [December 2014]: 24–31).

By juxtaposing memory, speech, movement, performance, and history, Charmatz undermines dance’s ontology as transient motion and complicates the boundary between type and token. In 20 Dancers for the XX Century, a type becomes more than a choreographic work as it incorporates subjective, personal experiences; a token thereby expands beyond the moment of dance performance as dancers speak about and share other aspects of the work. This mode of presentation undercuts dance’s ontology as ephemeral and proposes alternate temporal and perceptual existences for it.

Nicole Zee
independent scholar

Boris Charmatz: If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 16:00:00 GMT

Boris Charmatz. Levée des conflits (2015). Photograph by Tamara Tomic-Vajagic.

[See the multimedia version on Scalar.]

Unauthorized Performance in the Turbine Hall

Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse? transformed Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall into a space for the display of movement. (Previous inhabitations of Turbine Hall have had similar aims. An indicative list might be found in the series of installations that made up Tate’s Unilever Series [2000–8].) Dancers performed choreography at scheduled moments, and a twice-daily disco—titled Adrénaline: A Dance Floor for Everyone—invited the museum audience to dance together. During the two days of programming, ebbing and flowing groups of onlookers surrounded the dancers (both “professional” and “amateur”) in the Turbine Hall. The upper levels of the building, too, offered places from which to gaze down upon these events. Given that the vast hall functions not only as a space for art but also as one of the building’s main entrances, and houses cloakrooms, toilets, and ticket offices, this bird’s eye view of it exposed a field of constant motion.

As I watched this movement in the Turbine Hall from the perspective of Level Three above, I noticed that alongside the “authorized” or planned performances, people also danced uninvited. On the day I attended, to my observation, these uninvited dancers usually were children. Performing solos, duos, and in little ensembles, they danced in the open stretches and at the peripheries of the hall, creating spontaneous choreographies. They ran, tumbled, and generally let loose through the expanse. Sometimes interested in the authorized dances, but often not, these unofficial performers made a place for their “work” in the Turbine Hall, enacting Tate’s institutional idea that this environment exists, according to its website, as a “place for people.”

The unauthorized dancing that took place during If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse? is surely to a greater or lesser degree already a property of the Turbine Hall, for this space lends itself to dancing. The industrial-sized stretch of floor, the volume of air reaching the vaulted ceiling, the ramp that animates bodies by displacement (how do you keep balance when on a slope?) must feel like a playground for those who love to move. However, watching these self-initiated and not-always-knowingly-observed dances from the upper levels, I did wonder if the high concentration of spontaneous dances in the room that day had something to do with the special kind of permission given by an event that brings movement to the heart of a national institution: If Tate Modern, in other words, made an environment that endorsed and catalyzed the act of dancing. That this particular kind of permission had a fixed duration—this was a temporary event and not a permanent intervention—speaks not only of Charmatz’s “living museum” but also of the idea of a dying museum (Boris Charmatz, “Manifesto,” BMW Tate Live: If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? London: Tate Modern, 2015, 6–7, 7). Here was an animated space with a shelf life, or, at the very least, here was a dancing space that lives through reincarnation, coming to life for a time in the multiple sites to which it is carried (Boris Charmatz and Molly Elizalde, “Boris Charmatz’s Museum on the Move,” Interview Magazine [October 16, 2013]).

One occurrence catalyzed by this dancing space stayed with me especially. During a performance of À bras-le-corps (1993), a pas de deux of sorts performed by Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas in the middle of the Turbine Hall, a young boy runs flat-out across the floor to the side of the performance, coming to rest behind a crowd of people turned away from him. The boy then falls onto his back and performs a fast-paced floor dance, kicking and wiggling his legs while spinning around through ever-new positions. Seen from my vantage point, the boy was not dancing alone. His unauthorized performance made À bras-le-corps into a trio. Charmatz and Chamblas were joined in their dance, yet did not realize that they had been joined by a third, nor did the boy realize that he had joined two others, since they were all hidden from one another by a border of bodies, the spectators surrounding the “authorized” performance.

Delightful as it was to behold, such an occurrence begs a question: if Charmatz’s If Tate Modern carries with it an implicit set of invitations not only to watch dance but also to dance, then what are the cultural and institutional policing mechanisms that must be negotiated for these invitations to be accepted? I do not think it a coincidence that I saw more children “getting down” at unsanctioned moments and places than I did adults. Adults not only tend to have grown into self-consciousness but also know the rules of an exhibition space: don’t get in the way. Indeed, most grown-ups wanting to dance, it seemed to me, confined their performances to the official, scheduled disco, Adrénaline. Did If Tate Modern then really engage the policing mechanisms of the museum? At most it found ways—like Adrénaline—to schedule and license spontaneity. In the end, I felt this space of sanctioned effervescence only underlined the institution’s authority to choreograph its public.

Perhaps there was no need, no desire for this project to expose the choreographic and regulatory practices of museum spaces. But Charmatz’s “Manifesto for a Dancing Museum” (2009) nods to such a need and, further, was inspired in part by his critique of the public accountability of French museums. In this respect, his manifesto recalls his realization that there was no museum in France dedicated to the history of slavery. Does his temporary importation of the Musée de la danse to the Southbank stay faithful to such a realization, bringing, as it would need to, the institutional apparatus (economic foundations included) of Tate into focus? The founding collection of Tate Gallery was acquired, after all, through a personal wealth derived from the British sugar market, an economy built upon the trans-Atlantic slave trade. (Nicolas Draper has underlined the need for Tate’s institutional “links with slavery . . . to be teased out.” See Catherine Hall, Nicolas Draper, Keith McClelland, Catherine Donington, and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 55.) If Charmatz was inspired by a lack of transparency in France’s public museum spaces as regards that country’s colonial past, then surely the question of colonial accountability should also register in his choreographic intervention into a museum that was bankrolled at its foundation by a British sugar magnate?

A final question, then. What if museums were brought to life with the performance of movement not only that was uninvited but also that called into question the authorizing practices of the institution itself? Tate Modern is no stranger to unauthorized performance. One month after Charmatz vacated the building, a view from the upper levels would have revealed another unsanctioned choreography extending across the Turbine Hall floor. Liberate Tate’s Time Piece formed part of Liberate Tate’s ongoing protests surrounding Tate’s sponsorship deal with British Petroleum. This work was performed for twenty-five hours in the Turbine Hall over June 13–14, 2015, and saw performers scribbling with charcoal onto the floor messages about “art, activism, climate change and the oil industry.” Liberate Tate’s transformation of the Turbine Hall into a place for protest may offer a clearer answer to the question of museums’ public accountability than Charmatz’s enactment of his own museum manifesto. Where If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse? encouraged a dancing takeover of an institutional space without engaging with its specific institutional histories, Time Piece took that same space to task, through movement, for its complicity with questionable economies of the present. In such protests, the Turbine Hall comes to house movement that not only authorizes itself but also, crucially, brings into relief the institutional machinery of a place made for people.

Arabella Stanger
Lecturer in Dance, Department of Dance, University of Roehampton, London