Daniel Siedell writes another post of note, reflecting on the well-established (to my eyes, at least, being an art historical child of the double-aughts) rift between formalism and, for lack of a more specific generalization, contextualism. For the non-jargon inclined, formalism is one way of looking at art in which one considers a painting, sculpture, or what have you, as a powerful object in its own right that can be enjoyed (or at least experienced) fully without needing to know anything about its creator, contemporary viewers, or the politics of its commission. Siedell considers the implications for religious art:
They will extract an image from a painting, like a cross (or, in my own case, a chocolate Easter bunny), and perform an iconographical analysis. The problem is that such analysis doesn’t actually require the particularity of that cross and its function in that painting. It thus becomes merely a visual catalyst for religious and spiritual reflection that exists outside the work. We thus can find ourselves in the uncomfortable position in which the work of art is actually powerless to do anything except move us toward something else, toward religious or spiritual meaning, for example, that exists outside or beyond the work.
Albrecht Dürer self-portrait (1500, Alte Pinakothek, Munich)
Every group I take through the museum brings a slightly different take on this debate, even as (for the most part) they do it unknowingly. One of the most blatant examples occurred earlier this summer when I gave two tours to the Williams Summer Humanities and Social Sciences program, a group of a dozen or so from the incoming class of 2013. They come up here for a few weeks and get an intro to the kind of critical thinking that will be demanded of them starting in their first semester. Our first tour was a close look at a handful of pieces in the Rose Study Gallery that engaged with American commercialism and racial issues. Now this group was coming in with a mandate to do social analysis, and I didn’t even say a word before they ran up to the three pieces we had out and started ferreting out all kinds of references. We dove in, but at one point I asked them to pull back and consider the works formally – how did medium, composition, etc. change the way they experienced the piece? They froze up, and started pivoting back to the earlier mode of discussion. The next week, on a more general tour of the museum starting at our Sol LeWitt wall drawing, one girl immediately asked what the thing meant. When I asked her to try out an answer to her own question, she was frustrated that there weren’t any obvious contextual handholds “like the art we looked at last week.”
Did I screw up in letting them dive too quickly into things like social context? This particular group came pre-programmed to look for social history and meaning – should I have pushed them to hold off until they considered primary artistic elements? Or is it a fallacy (albeit one originating with Erwin Panfosky) that formal understanding should or must come before some kind of “iconological” understanding?
Then again, other groups this summer have been perfectly responsive to the formal joys to be found in an object you know nothing about except what you can see. One precocious kindergarden girl this week remarked, after I had to bodily block her for the third time from touching the Louise Nevelson we were looking at: “Um, um, excuse me! Could you please not stop me next time I try to touch the sculpture?”
