Genevieve Warwick and Natalie Adamson

Editorial

Genevieve Warwick and Natalie Adamson

In 2010 the British Museum launched a series of broadcasts entitled A History of the World in 100 Objects, presenting to the public a selection of artefacts from around the world out of the museum’s holdings.[1] Through objects, the broadcasts argued the case for the role of the museum as a repository of historical memory embodied in material culture. Each artefact acted as the key to a series of distinct cultural identities bounded by time and place: ancient Mesopotamia, Ming-dynasty China, medieval Scotland, and so on. The virtual museum it presented was thus a collocation of cultures, each one discrete within itself.

In the university sector by contrast, across the humanities and social sciences alike, we have in recent decades been much concerned with problems in the translation of cultures. Government agencies and policy-makers have seed-funded research on strategies for inter-culturation.[2] Cultural critics have theorized the fault lines of cultural identity, displacement and ‘othering’, and stressed the borders between cultures as liminal sites of conflict and negotiation as well as translation and assimilation. More specific to the realm of material and visual culture, scholars have addressed the translatability of objects, arts of ‘contact zones’, and a ‘modern ethnography of conjunctures’ manifest in models of hybridization.[3] Institutionally we now work between paradigms of ‘art history’ and ‘world art’ to encompass the range of temporal as well as geographical specialisms that characterize the discipline. While acknowledging those canonical objects that seem to embody whole cultures within themselves, we have privileged study of the hybrid, transactional object that unsettles those conventional categories by crossing chronological and geographical borderlines as part of a ‘translation turn’ across the academy (plate 1).

Within this array of both specialist and cross-border areas of art-historical investigation, our shifting attention over the last decade to questions of materiality has reframed the study of objects as a key disciplinary tool. What is at stake is the choice of objects for analysis: those that reify, or those that open up critique of existing cultural paradigms. In this regard too, we are engaged with a larger question across different realms of intellectual enquiry, the adequacy of our subjects of study to address broader critical issues, and to bear the weight of explanation we attribute to them. We are thus collectively engaged with the status of the case study.

The case study itself is also the subject of analytical debate.[4] As the primary methodology of law, criminology, the social sciences and psychoanalysis, the specificity of its features and usage are most explicitly defined within those disciplines. If, on the one hand, ‘the exemplar can provide a way of proceeding together to generate knowledge in the absence of a theory’, on the other ‘it is precisely in the reflection about what x is a case of that real theory arises.’[5] Within the historical disciplines the question of the case study took on characteristics specific to the analysis of the past in the form of ‘microhistory’, the thick description of a single event, community or person that identifies definitive characteristics of larger historical problems of periodization. Portrait-like, microhistory’s case studies succeed in their ability to ‘to and fro’ between the close-up detail and the long view of historical change.[6] This shift to the fragment as the focus of our historical enquiries has, within art history, also yielded a turn towards the detail.[7] Facilitated by photographic technologies able to reproduce views of objects at closer range than any physical viewing encounter, the ‘telling’ detail is, like the exemplar, the lodestone that relates a larger narrative, be it historical, critical, or theoretical. Whether a detail of a work of art, a single artefact, or a cluster of related objects, what is at issue is the ability of that choice of object for study to represent, even to speak for, broader claims, questions, and paradigms.

The founding ambition of the journal Art History, as defined by John Onians in his opening editorial, was to act as a forum in which to practise art history ‘according to a wider definition’.[8] The subsequent history of the journal was to effect such disciplinary transformation, challenging both the methods and the means through which we worked. In its emphasis on thematic enquiry through the inauguration of dedicated special issues, its openness to experimental writing and research, and to the expanded field of visual culture, its pages have debated the nature and reach of art history as a discipline.[9] In taking up the challenge of the editorship of Art History, we are conscious of its leading position in the national and international development of our subject. Our thought is to further its history of ground-breaking initiatives by charting new avenues of enquiry through a range of varied forms for art-historical writing.

To complement the journal’s established format of discursive essays we are now publishing essays dedicated to the study of a single object, fragment, detail, or cluster of related objects, positioned as a case study. With the advantage of our full colour reproduction format, these essays foreground close visual analysis conducted through a range of articulated methodological positions, with attention to the status of the case study in art-historical writing.

At the same stroke, we are introducing a strand focussed on issues of translation. This aims to translate leading art-historical texts in other languages never previously available in English, in tandem with newly-published essays that critique, engage with, draw on or extend the significance of the original work. This initiative, in another sense, also recalls the journal’s founding aims. Onians early on noted that its title, Art History, was more accurately a translation of the German word, Kunstgeschichte, than a native English term.[10] Its choice reflected the journal’s ambition to draw on the philosophical origins of the discipline in its early twentieth-century German foundational writers who posed questions of form and meaning that still engage us today. Similarly, an early commentary by Jan Bialostocki argued for an internationalization of the discipline, which we reclaim here as part of what T. J. Clark once termed art history’s need for ‘a massive act of translation’.[11] We are delighted to launch this with a translation of Heinrich Wölfflin’s essays, ‘Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll’ (‘How One Should Photograph Sculpture’), alongside a new essay on this subject, appearing together in this issue.

In a similar vein, we are publishing a further range of paired articles. These bring together art-historical essays coupled with texts by artists, writers, art critics, conservators, or curators that reflect on the same issue from different points of view. In this way, they extend the parameters of the discipline by presenting material through a range of diverse, even conflicting, critical perspectives. (here a note to the creative writing volume?)

Finally, we are pleased to announce that the full history of Art History itself will shortly be available online through a complete digitalization of all articles published in the journal since its inception in 1978. From the first volume, which published essays on topics including Renaissance urbanism and Native American surrealism, for example, through to the new articles available on the ‘Early View’ section of our online platform even before the hard copy is printed, the complete archive of the journal will enable a historiographical self-consciousness to inform our disciplinary reflections.

To conclude in the manner of art-historical writing by case study, our accompanying illustration is charged with the weight of evidentiary explanation (see plate 1). A composite artefact both materially and culturally, it was purposefully constructed as an object of cultural migration, bringing together the exotic ‘rawness’ of a coconut with early modern European silver chasing.[12] As a hybrid ‘object of translation’, it is a material testament to the processes of inter-culturation that produced it, and an apt illustration of a global art history, ‘according to a wider definition’.

Notes

[1] The broadcasts were a collaboration between BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum; see the accompanying publication, Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, London, 2010.

[2] Consider one of the AHRC’s current funding themes, ‘Translating Cultures’, for example.

[3] For example: James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA, 1988; Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession, 91, 1991, 33-40; and Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter, Princeton, NJ, 2009.

[4] See the double issue of Critical Inquiry edited by Lauren Berlant: ‘On the Case’, 33: 4, 2007; and ‘Making the Case’, 34: 1, 2007.

[5] Berlant, ‘On the Case’, 666 and 669, citing: John Forrester, ‘On Kuhn’s Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm’, Critical Inquiry, 33: 4, 2007, 782-819; and Andrew Abbott, Time Matters: On Theory and Method, Chicago, 2001, 129.

[6] For example: Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Baltimore, 1980 (first published as Il formaggio e i vermi, Turin, 1976); and Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge, MA, 1983.

[7] Daniel Arasse, Le détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture, Paris, 1996.

[8] [John Onians], ‘Editorial’, Art History, 1: 1, 1978, v-vi.

[9] Special issues were inaugurated by Marcia Pointon and Paul Binski with ‘Representation and the Politics of Difference’, Art History, 16: 3, 1993. See also: Adrian Rifkin and Dana Arnold, ‘Editorial’, Art History, 20: 4, 1997, 515; Deborah Cherry, ‘Art: History: Visual: Culture’, Art History, 27: 4, 2004, 479-493; and David Peters Corbett and Christine Riding, ‘Editorial’, Art History, 31: 5, iv-v.

[10] [John Onians], ‘Art History, Kunstgeschichte and Historia’, Art History, 1: 2, 1978, 131-133.

[11] Jan Bialostocki, ‘A Plea for Internationality’, Art History, 1: 4, 1978, v-viii; T. J. Clark, ‘The Conditions of Artistic Creation’, Times Literary Supplement, 3768, 24 May 1974, 561.

[12] Timothy B. Schroder, The Gilbert Collection of Gold and Silver, Los Angeles, 1988, 526-529 (cat. no. 142).