Why art historians should learn to paint the case for studio experience

- 1Why Art Historians Should Learn to Paint: The Case for Studio Experience James Elkins jelkins@artic.edu Abstract: This is a speculative lecture on the links between the making of art, in studio art classes, and the study of art, in art history I address several subjects, including theories of materiality, “somatic criticism,” studio-art PhDs, and parallels between studio art instruction and music instruction But the main focus is the distance and misunderstandings between studio instruction and art historical study Without a good account of the relation between studio art and art history, there is nothing to prevent studio art departments from becoming marginal in university life My principal example is a class I have taught in Chicago in which students copy Old Master paintings and speculate on connections between their experiences and the evidence of art history I have also led drawing sessions for non-art historians In Vienna in May 26, 2006, for example, a roomful of curators and art historians from the Kunsthistorisches Museum spent a couple of hours copying drawings The notion wasn’t to create masterpieces after only an hour of work: it was to generate conversation about bridging the gap between studio experience and scholarly understanding And for readers in a hurry, the crucial conclusion is marked by underlining on pp and 12 I wouldn’t ordinarily underline things in the middle of texts, but in this case I think there is only one crucially important test of the relation, or lack of it, between studio art and art history— at least it’s the best I have been able to come up with - 2Preface I think that the most difficult and important questions about medium and subject in art are to be found in the intersection between two fields.1 The first field is the historical and philosophic conceptualization of art, including such topics as the history and nature of media, the place of subjectivity, the structure of expression, and the various understandings of substances — including, in short, the range of problems that are posed in philosophic and historical settings concerning the experience of making and interpreting art The second field is the practice and pedagogy of studio art, by which I mean the talk, the actions, and the gestures that accompany the making of specific objects in institutional settings, broadly understood — anything from first-year art school life drawing classes to professional studios I will call the two “studio art” and “art history” for short.2 There is an asymmetrical overlap between them, because even though studio art rarely impinges on art history (you don’t usually make things in art history classes), all sorts of philosophic and historical talk happen in studio settings and classrooms Phenomenological, hermeneutic, semiotic, psychoanalytic, and archival discourses are all part of studio instruction — but they are outsiders, and it’s a cardinal error of academic art history and philosophy of art to assume that they are sufficient to account for what happens in studios It’s common to hear art historians, art theorists, and philosophers talk about the processes and practices of artmaking as if they could be adequately covered by poststructural discourse, or themes adapted from the Frankfurt School, or adopted from Merleau-Ponty “Studio talk” — the sorts of conversations that happen in art schools and in studio visits — is different in kind from philosophic discourse, and it isn’t cogent to think of studio talk as a vernacular version of ideas better articulated in theory The same goes for art history: historians assume that by using terminology carefully (adopting technical terms from the time and place of the artist, taking care not to be anachronistic) they can represent the studio as a version of public discourse and reception But the studio, at least in Europe since the Renaissance, has not generally been a public place, and it hasn’t spoken the confident languages of advertisement and interpretation My claim, then, is that the most challenging problem for conceptualizing medium and subjectivity, and also for understanding art history and its relation to its objects, or - 3understanding studio art and its relation to art history, is to be found in the gap between studio art and art history For me this is an ongoing problematic, and I will not be solving it today What we decide about it determines not only the way that questions of mediality, subjectivity, substance, expression, denotation, “work,” and “creation” can be answered, but it also whether it can make sense to offer studio art instruction in universities, how it might be possible to understand the “application” or “use” of theory in production, and what limits there might be to the explanations of art that we will be discussing in this conference — explanations that come, in the end, from philosophic, aesthetic, or arttheoretical perspectives, and therefore from the first of the two discourses rather than the second So I won’t solve the problem, but I will propose an optimal way to ask about it in the case of a traditional medium, painting The question I’m going to set out at the end of this talk cannot be improved, I think, if the purpose is to ask whether art history is linked to studio art And if the two aren’t linked, then institutions that offer both might rethink that decision, and explanations of art that hope to be sufficient without employing the knowledge of the studio might find themselves at an impasse I have organized this lecture into three parts First, I’ll consider ways in which the conceptualization of materiality and artists’ experiences of materiality in “art history” are limited, rather than empowered, by art history’s traditional concerns such as phenomenology, kinematics, somatic criticism, and theories of empathy (This is all much more developed in an essay called “Limits of Materiality in Art History.”) Second, I’ll say something about creative-art PhD degrees, which are places where studio-art pedagogy and art history can meet at a high level (That is all much more developed in s book called Artists with PhDs, excerpted here, here, and here.) Third, I’ll propose the optimal question that I have in mind, which I ask in a class I have designed that brings art history students into the museum in Chicago, the Art Institute, where they copy paintings The non-existence of the problem An initial problem with this subject, the relation between studio art and art history, is that it is not recognized as a problem Discussion rarely gets started, because - 4“studio art” (in my synecdoche) is understood to be adequately theorized, ab initio, by “art history.” I will give two examples of this pre-theoretical problem First a few words on a book called Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression The author, Patrick Maynard, wants to theorize and systematize the possibilities of drawing, and to that he begins with Anglo-American philosophic accounts of representation: Nelson Goodman, E.H Gombrich, J.J Gibson, Kendall Walton, Richard Gregory, and Richard Wollheim He adds references to art historical accounts from the 1960s through the 1980s, including John White and Sam Edgerton (His bibliography is limited to English-language art historians concerned explicitly with theories of naturalism, so he does not cite writers such as Hubert Damisch, Georges DidiHuberman, Daniel Arasse, Göran Sonesson, Wolfgang Kemp, or Willibald Sauerländer, all of whom have written, in different ways, on the specifics of mark-making.) At any rate, Maynard applies the theories of representation to studio-oriented books, especially Philip Rawson’s Seeing Through Drawing, and Joseph Meder’s Die Handzeichnung (written in 1919, translated into English in 1978) Maynard’s Drawing Distinctions is a large book, which considers many aspects of drawing one after another: chiaroscuro, outlines, fields, shade and shadow, perspective, lines, relations between planes, blobs, “bubbles, facets, and ovoids” (p 157) It is intended as a comprehensive theorization of drawing’s “own devices,” its “resources” (pp 137, 184) What I want to ask about a book like this is: how is the production of drawing, as it happens in studio art, involved in the analysis? At the end of the book, Maynard says, “with our theoretical basis it should be easier to investigate the richness of unique cases” (p 230) But there is very little in the book about specific choices made in the course of creating individual drawings (There’s nothing particularly “rich” and little attention to whatever counts as “unique.”) Drawings are used as examples of conceptual and perceptual categories, whether they are aesthetic, epistemological, kinetic, or psychological The assumptions are (a) that drawing pedagogy and practice have called for this particular theorization, and (b) that such a theorization will allow further research to go forward To me Maynard’s project appears as an analytic and perceptual - 5justification of some twentieth-century systematizing pedagogy, not as a bridge to the ways people talk about or teach the production of individual drawings Even though art history is taught together with information on historical advances in technique, there is a tendency to assume first-hand experience of techniques is optional for working art historians In North America, graduate programs in art history often include classes on methods and materials, but those classes not involve hands-on work: instead they are connoisseurial, and are intended to help students gain awareness of different media A clear example of the lack of first-hand experience is an article by Marc Gotlieb on the concept of “artists’ secrets” in the Art Bulletin Marc is an excellent scholar (he is currently editor of the Art Bulletin) and in the course of the essay he manages to review much of the history of the idea that artists had secret techniques I say “the idea that they had secrets” since he is not interested in the possible existence of actual secrets: he is after a history of reception, a Rezeptionsgeschichte He wants to determine the repercussions the idea of artists’ secrets had on printmakers who were interested in illustrating artists’ studios I’d like to suggest there is another discourse, one that is at once apparently irrelevant and ultimately indispensable, that would treat the history of ideas about the actual secrets In the Foucauldian frame of Marc’s argument, the actual secrets are irrelevant: but ultimately, a full analysis of the subject would have to include them Those are my two opening examples They could of course be multiplied In ways like that — subtly, in ways that are entirely in keeping with the concerns of scholarship, the meanings of the studio are left behind and traditional links between seeing, knowing, and making are weakened Ultimately, ignorance of the studio in the case of traditional media tends to produce a kind of art history that is in some cases measurably dissociated from the kind of talk about the objects that occurs in studios and classrooms An absence of knowledge of the studio has specifiable and historically relevant effects on the art historical discourse that is putatively independent of such knowledge I may seem that the two fields, art history and studio art, have made significant progress in understanding their relation to one another, thanks to two developments in the last decade: the new philosophic accounts of subjectivity and representation, and - 6contemporary theorizing about new forms of art criticism that respond to “time-based” arts I will consider the two very briefly Regarding philosophic accounts of subjectivity and representation: phenomenology, theories of empathy, semiotics, psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity, and other methods have been brought to bear in understanding the conditions of materiality In this context I cannot justice to the issues that these practices raise Let me simply telegraph, in a series of points, some particular limitations I have observed (i) In relation to Merleau-Ponty: it continues to seem to me to be an important limitation that phenomenological accounts inspired by Merleau-Ponty are based on a limited number of really quite general concepts, such as horizon, body, sight, and world The specificities of art practices remain beyond the reach of such language (ii) It also concerns me that Merleau-Ponty is often understood to be an optimal theoretician, which is to say that his concepts are taken more or less outside their original historical contexts, in the same way that any number of psychoanalytic terms including the Oedipus complex are taken to comprise our “interpretive horizon” or our “age,” as Derrida said.3 (iii) I wonder, too, if theories of materiality in philosophy, from Heidegger’s critique of the object, through Bachelard’s investment in elements, to the poststructuralist revival of Bataille’s hypostasis, are not all best understood as twentieth-century concerns and therefore historically inappropriate for most practices The second area in which it seems progress is being made in theorizing relations between studio art and art history is in some new theories of art criticism, in which criticism itself is rethought in response to time-based media, ephemeral performance practices, and above all in response to collaborations between curators, artists, critics, and historians Again I can’t go into this in detail; I am thinking of theorists such as Peggy Phelan and Irit Rogoff, and books like After Criticism, edited by Gavin Butt.4 The assumption in some of the new work is that the changed epistemological and social conditions of art calls for a new writing In other work, principally Rogoff’s, the idea is that a critic should work continuously to undermine her own assumptions, in order to reach a point of aporia that is consonant with the work — which can then be encountered, - 7as opposed to perhaps just catalogued or registered, resulting in a new configuration of practices and finally a new theorization What matters is process, possibilities, and openings to the future, not finished works or one-way acts of understanding between critic or historian and artist I am unconvinced by these projects for several reasons (i) It is be definition impossible to theorize the particular state of nonconceptuality that is required Attempts have been made along these lines, especially by Rosalind Krauss in The Optical Unconscious, using Jean-Franỗois Lyotards concept of the matrix; the resulting theory can only be dependent on pre-existing notions of rationality — it can never be purely non-rational; nor can it prescribe routes to unforeseeable configurations of doubt or aporia.5 (ii) There is no connection between the new temporal and social forms of the work, and any specific narratological decisions that might be considered appropriate responses (iii) There is little — perhaps no — space for consideration of media per se In fact, notoriously, the artwork appears as conceptualization So, in sum, in the welter of theoretical agendas that art history currently debates, the issue of the studio seems the least tractable of all: it is harder to think about studio problems than it is to work in phenomenological or other hermeneutic issues bounded by philosophic concerns This is the most serious challenge to an art history that finds itself increasingly distracted by texts and methodological imperatives Creative-art PhDs These degrees, in which a student makes artwork and also writes a dissertation, are increasingly common in Australia and the U.K It is estimated that there will soon be ten to twelve institutions in Australia that grant such degrees—either DCAs, “doctorate of creative arts,” DFAs, or PhDs In England it is estimated that there are 2,000 students enrolled in programs that can lead to the PhD For the past four years there have been sessions at the annual meetings of the art historians’ and studio artists’ associations in North America, and now there are two books on the subject.6 Boris Groys, who teaches at ZKM Karlsruhe, informs me there have been several panel discussions on this subject in - 8Germany, at which the principal concern was the creation of professional inequalities between those who have traditional degrees, and those with the new PhDs These new programs raise difficult questions about the relation between studio and scholarly practice There is enough there to take up my whole time in this lecture; I just want to point out two things (i) There is a growing body of theoretical literature claiming that creative work is also “research” that leads to “new knowledge.” These claims are necessary in the U.K (and Australian) systems because the structure of university funding requires that doctorate-level work be “research” that produces “new knowledge.” I find much of the reasoning unconvincing A fair percentage of it comes from an idea that I would trace through Bachelard and Lévi-Strauss to Hubert Damisch and phenomenologically-based art criticism (as well as Mark Johnson etc.), namely that media have their own inherent logic Stephen Melville has written some good pages on this problem in the book As Painting.7 The theorists that are adduced in the current discussion include Christopher Frayling (a distinction between “into,” “through,” and “for” research), Paul Hirst (the idea that knowledge in studio is “knowledge-of-the-object”), and Colin Painter (that anything that produces new knowledge can be called “research”).8 I find all these arguments gloss over the fact that in the sciences “research” and “new knowledge” have different meanings, and that their extension to studio is metaphoric In addition it seems clear from a non-U.K vantage that the underlying reason for kind of argument is to produce a university-wide bureaucratic consensus on the place of the new degrees (ii) The studio arts have long been marginal and endangered in university curricula We should therefore be suspicious of theorizing that purports to solve the problem of studio’s incommensurability Whatever answers there are they must be more difficult than the ones that have been proposed The new degrees should be treated, I think, as hybrids, not as ordinary interdisciplinary degrees The class in the Art Institute Now I’ll turn to the optimal question I mentioned, which comes up in a course I teach, in which students copy paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago They choose one - 9painting, and copy it for fifteen weeks, spending between six and twenty hours per week in the museum It’s a course that requires a certain bravery because the students are often surrounded by visitors who try to critique them The course is also psychologically demanding because students obsess and even dream about their paintings There is usually a sequence from enthusiasm to boredom to exasperation to fascination — an arc of responses that is not replicated elsewhere in academia as far as I know, because it depends on the unusually protracted amount of time that the students are compelled to spend in front of a single image When this class works well, it provides the best evidence I know that art history and studio art are connected The students have three assignments: Make a strict copy of one painting, in the fifteen-week time period Research the art historical literature on the painting, from primary sources to the object files (which include conservation reports, X-Rays, etc.), and including as much of the twentieth-century literature as possible (a) For the art students in the class: produce a “free copy,” which is intended to be halfway between the student’s ordinary practice (no matter what that is — video, performance, etc.) and their strict copy The idea there is to decide whether the experience of the class has any living connection to their ordinary work, and if it does, to determine what counts as halfway to the Old Masters (b) The art history students have to write a report, answering the following question: What would the art historians have written differently if they had had the experience of copying the painting before they wrote about it? It has long seemed to me that this is an unimprovably good question to ask about the relation between studio practice and art history, and it is tremendously difficult to answer I will begin by reviewing three attempts to answer the question (The pages that follow aren’t illustrated: for that see the full account in the book Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing.) Late El Greco paintings are made by a continuous process of overlapping, in which a dark contour will strengthen a passage of continuous tones, only to be blurred by a color area and restrengthened His outlines shift like flames, or like “flaming ice,” as a - 10 contemporary put it, and it is possible to argue that the flickering contrapposto is to be imagined as a Manichaean conflict of light and dark, good and evil For this reason there is a great difference in El Greco between putting a light into a dark and darkening something that is already light: the former is a metaphor of creation, and the light “knows” and “resists” the dark; and the latter is a figure of destruction or death, because the dark suffuses the light and threatens to extinguish it When darkness forms inside light, “but knows it not,” the working of the paint is a repetition of Christian prayer, and when light is surrounded and swept away by darkness, the painter’s gestures can narrate a loss of faith, or even a moment of Gnostic pessimism Copying is a way of re–enacting this, and it unfurls a drama that is not accessible to those who see only the completed struggle A dialectic of dark and light is frozen into the paintings, but in the process it is a living exchange, a prayer, a story, a dialogue or the silent exposition of an inner agon Every inch of the painting, and each moment of copying, plays out a part of that nameless drama Copying such passages, a painter has to struggle to keep the silvery white from melting into the ultramarine darkness That drama is largely lost to someone who only looks at the finished work, though there are enough clues to give a sense of it All that is clearly visible is the last moments of the agon: El Greco painted sharp comets of light over fields of darkness, and comets of darkness over the highlights Titian’s late paintings are different but no less eloquent witnesses to the relation between process, mark, and meaning As a rule Titian softens the narrow strips on either side of his outlines, melting figure into ground, fusing the two into a single shade The candent highlights between the contours hold the strongest colors, and they fade in intensity and value as they approach the blurred outlines In this way Titian’s technique mirrors the (sometimes overstated) Venetian concern with colorito and relative unconcern with disegno; but a first–hand knowledge of the technique reveals something other than the static polarity of theory In Titian, disegno is something that is given, in the sense that it is present at the beginning of the painting process, and he effaces contours with repeated low-chroma glazes of dusky blues, siennas and umbers—that is, the contours are dissolved in an act that has no strong connection to either term of the theoretical polarity The erasure and softening of contours does not require effort, and is more like a laying- - 11 down of force, and a way of increasing the distance from outline, light and color Colorito, on the other hand, is an active struggle, something that must be strengthened by force Color areas are built up slowly, sometimes with the ribbed gloss that comes from rubbing with the fingers (fingerprints provide the characteristic gloss), and the boundaries of color areas are occasionally hard–edged and at variance with the blurry directions of the contours that they would be expected to echo The energy spent on colorito can also appear as bright glazing over a highlighted area, or sharp wet highlights within a field of color, but it is always strenuous work Color is drawn, and even sculpted, and so it does not oppose Florentine disegno, which is often allowed to collapse into weak pools of indifferent shadow And again the act of doing is the only way to make these claims clear, and to articulate the way the theoretical dynamic is rethought in the studio In fifteenth-century Italian painting, the act of copying sometimes reveals an unexpected delight in passages such as patterned fabrics that would be, to a modern painter, inexpressible tedium It is not so much the painter’s attention to unique objects (such as chalices, crowns, thrones, and jewels) that seems difficult to fathom as their relish in repeated forms (brocades, baskets of identical flowers or fruit, finicky architectural ornaments) Often it is said that such details were given to assistants, but we may mistake our reaction for theirs by implying that the assistants would therefore have been given a kind of drudgery Certainly the artists and patrons alike delighted in the fastidious labor of repeated ornament Would we want to say that Carlo Crivelli, an especially fastidious painter of detail, thought of brocaded drapery as a kind of work, something requiring patience? And does it make sense to say that he enjoyed the bizarre touches that have contributed to his fame (the little flies, glistening pearls, and wrinkled fruit) more than the passagework that links them? The experience of copying Crivelli shows that what we see in his works is not so much inattention provoked by drudgery and meliorated by moments of freer invention, as two species of attention, with complementary virtues One is an utterly unhurried meditation, a uniform myopia, much as in some medieval illumination The copyist’s body is not cramped, but also not relaxed—it has the kind of working tension that happens in any repetitive task Like actual weaving or mending, the brocades in Crivelli’s paintings are the objects of steady, patient attention The other kind of attention, the one - 12 given to the odd details, is an occasion for special concentration The body hunches up, the fingers cramp, the eyes squint and the face wrinkles It is unpleasant but also exhilarating, and it punctuates the longer periods required for more measured work The two species might be retrieved for art history by making a parallel with two aspects of religious devotion: Crivelli’s endless brick walls and patterned fabrics may be visual rosaries, species of prayer Roberto Longhi saw signs of a declining art in the “decorative exuberance” of vines and flowers in Crivelli’s Madonna della Candeletta, but they may also signify a measured, ritualized devotion—one counts the pears and oranges as one counts beads in a rosary The second kind of attention is not unlike homilies, the sacrament, and other moments of articulation of the Catholic mass A few cherries and pearls punctuate the Madonna della Candeletta as the sacrament punctuates the mass: they belong to the same fabric, but they command a different kind of meaning or reverence It may well be that this is over-conceptualizing two kinds of uncognized habits of the arm and eye But such meanings could be brought into art history more readily than the local, “meaningless” dramas of light and dark in El Greco, because each orange and each pearl might be given a meaning (they might be the visual equivalents of a rosary bead or a sacrament) They are visible in the completed paintings, rather than half–erased traces of something that happened before But again this is not evidence that art historians should draw before they write about works, since it would be unnecessary for an art historian to re–experience these ostensive acts of reverence: if the reading seems to make sense, it can be cited and added to any essay on Crivelli.9 Now I not mean to imply that the Crivelli is getting closer to a solution to the question The reason I not consider these full answers to the question posed in the class is that art history could readily assimilate such findings In the case of El Greco, an art historian could develop accounts of Manichaean contrapposto, and publish them in art historical journals After that there would be no reason for another art historian to go into a studio in order to test or replicate these observations: if the observations seemed plausible, they could in principle become part of art history, and accessible as propositions adequately expressed in texts - 13 There is also a second reason why these are not adequate answers to the question I posed to students There is meaning in the moment–by–moment unfolding of the process, but I cannot see how a text on Titian or El Greco could find a place for a review of the variegated agon of light and shade as it is played out in a few square inches of canvas When those struggles happen in some fold of drapery, far away from the painting’s center, they are “meaningless”—apparently not worth recounting in their specificity How could such a drama be told, and if it were, what could it mean? Still it is important that the experience of copying an El Greco or a Titian, and observing these plays of meaning, is not entirely a nonverbal or intuitive experience Each moment has its words, but they fail to connect with what art historians continue to want to take as the paintings’ legitimate meanings There is a very useful philosophical distinction that can be borrowed from Aristotle: the difference between technē and empeiria For these purposes technē is everything that can be stated as a logical proposition, and therefore repeated, taught, and learned in a systematic fashion Empeiria is whatever is “empirical,” but in the special sense of something that cannot be assimilated to rules or logic It can only be passed on, therefore, by doing All these examples, even though the experiences of the studio are partly unassimilable to the languages of art history, are still subject to citation If a gesture in the “practice” of technē can be written as a concept in the “theory” of technē, it will become the property of history, and there will be no pressing need to obtain it again in the studio It may be that others will discover that there are things to be done in the studio that both are and are not part of writing—things that cannot be systematically pressed into language, but which can still find ways to connect with writerly concerns—but I have not found examples of such marginal acts In general, if an act can be given historical meaning, the conceptual apparatus of art history can pull it back, away from the studio and into the world of texts, slides, and libraries Before I go on to some observations about the non-verbal in studio instruction, I want to pause to say that many of the most interesting experiences in the class have not proved susceptible to any meaningful encounter between studio art and art history A - 14 cardinal example of that, for me, is the three encounters with Mondrian I’ve had over the last number of years Three different students have asked to copy the lozenge-format Mondrian painting in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago At first I resisted, thinking that the painting is constructed in too obvious a fashion, and that nothing much could be learned form copying it I have since entirely changed my mind The painting has some extremely subtle techniques.10 First, Mondrian uses the warp and weft of the fabric to create a grid-like pattern at forty-five degrees to the orientation of his stripes (because the painting is lozengeformat, the canvas is stretched at forty-five degrees to his painted grid) However he does not permit the canvas weave to show through in every rectangle Some are painted more thickly, which obscures the weave In those rectangles, the brushstrokes follow the orientation of the lozenge format, so they run at forty-five degrees to the canvas, creating a contrast between thicker and thinner rectangles That difference is modified and multiplied by several different textures of paint in the different rectangles The students and I noticed that the borders of the stripes are not accurately linear With the help of a pair of glasses fitted with surgical microscope lenses (a kind of eyeglasses that is used by surgeons), we examined the surface, and found that Mondrian had shifted the position of the paper strips (which he used to mask the rectangles) He would put down a strip, paint the neighboring rectangle, move the strip, and paint the rectangle again The result, when it was repeated several times, created an impression of steps leading up from the strip, on both sides From an average viewing distance, and without the special magnifying glasses, the effect is one of bas-relief The color areas and bordering strips seem to lie at different elevations The interest some art historians (such as Yve-Alain Bois) have shown in Mondrian’s complex sense of space may be due in some measure to this very subtle, but clearly visible, strategy (I think it is a strategy, rather than a side-effect of repeated over-paintings, because the step-like forms are very regular throughout the painting If Mondrian had simply been repainting, and trying to match the position of his paper strips, he would have created different kinds of borders for his color stripes.) Most subtly, we discovered that the borders of the strips are not all painted by dragging the brush along the edge of a paper strip Many of the borders are painted - 15 freehand There are two forms of freehand borders: those where the brush moved parallel to the painted stripes, and those where it moved toward or away from the stripes In both cases, there is no reason to assume that the strips of masking paper were in place when Mondrian was painting Because he could not paint perfectly straight lines, the first kind of freehand border creates a wavy line between the colored rectangles and the stripes The second kind creates a serrated border, as he brings the brush down toward a colored stripe, and then stops — and each brushmark stops in a slightly different place The effect of this freehand painting, from a normal viewing distance and without optical aids, is an overall painterliness The canvas has a kind of optical motion or instability that comes from the impression of many inaccurate lines and curves By comparison, other De Stijl paintings (including several that often hang next to the Mondrian) seem dry and flat It is not an exaggeration to say that an awareness of this painterliness connects Mondrian’s canvas to the tradition of painterly painting that goes back to Renaissance Venice And yet… we have not been able to draw any links between these observations and the most detailed art historical examinations such as those in the exhibition Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings, or in essays by Yve-Alain Bois.11 I am convinced such connections exist, however, and I hope to pursue them in future Music instruction, and the non-verbal Now I’d like to turn to music and music instruction, because I think these same concepts can be readily applied there What I am going to say was first proposed in a conference in Richmond, Virginia, in spring 2001, on the subject of Baroque music and art That is why the examples I am going to give are mostly Baroque, even though I think they could be taken from any period There are close parallels between music instruction and studio art Music departments are similarly divided between practitioners (performers) on the one hand, and theorists and historians on the other There are also historical parallels between the theoretical debates in musicology and history of art (A good book on that is Joseph Kerman’s Contemplating Music.12) And most important, there are intriguing parallels between performance classes in music and studio-art instruction Both depend on nonverbal cues, and both have troubled relations to history and theory - 16 I’ll make two points: first, the importance of non-verbal instruction; then, I will revisit the theme of “boredom.” If I have time I will open a third subject, on the possibility that there is music written “for the hands alone”: that is, just for the tactile pleasure of the making, and not for the listening or even for the visual pleasure of looking at the score or watching the performer The idea of comparing pedagogic principles in music and in the visual arts has occurred to me several times in the past I used to attend the music performance master classes at the University of Chicago, back when I was studying painting there as an MFA student I was struck then by the deep affinity between music and art instruction when it came to non-verbal, or at least non-linguistic, instruction Most instruction, in both fields, is verbal, but the resources of ordinary language are often strained Painting instructors and music instructors tend to use extravagant metaphors to get their points across: you hear things like “You should put some more bite into that,” even though it can be next to impossible to say exactly what bite is in painting or in musical performance But then there comes the point where even the most far-fetched metaphor will no longer the job The painting instructor might bring her hand up to the student’s picture and make gestures in the air mimicking the way the brushstrokes should look She might say something like “I’d it like that” (making a sweeping curve) or “You need more of this kind of thing” (scrubbing motions are especially common in oil painting) Some painting instructors even ask for the students’ brushes and paint directly on their paintings (I’ve done that myself when I can’t think of any way to put my suggestion in words.) In the 1950s the Art Institute had a painting teacher who reportedly never spoke: she just went around the room painting directly onto the students’ pictures The same kind of non-verbal communication takes place in music master classes An instructor might say something like, “That passage isn’t really ‘da-da-da-da-da-dada,’ but more like ‘da-da-da-da-da-da-da’.” My favorite moments in the master classes at the University of Chicago were when the instructors bent over the students as they played, and sang or hummed to them sotto voce, like this—“Huh, huh, huuuuh… la, la, huuuuh, mmm….” Those quiet little vocalizations were not necessarily in any key, or even related in any rational manner to what was being played But like the apparently meaningless gestures of the painting instructors, they were teaching on a very high level, - 17 capturing nuances and complexities of rhythm, pitch, timbre, and expression well beyond the what the teachers or the students could have paraphrased (A mathematician named Sha Xin Wei, currently at Arizona State University, was interested in the nondescript little doodles that mathematicians draw when they are working out problems together on a blackboard The gestures and scribbles can’t be correlated with the rigorous equations and geometric figures they eventually produce, but somehow they are at just the right level of openness and nuance to help the process of discovery His work made me wonder how many other disciplines make use of nonverbal, gestural instruction.13) So non-verbal or extra-linguistic communications are one parallel between music and art instruction, and I am going to posit that they were just as important in the Baroque as they are today I should also say that by calling them “extra-linguistic” I don’t at all mean that they could not be analyzed They could Art historians have looked closely at the films of Pollock painting, and in my opinion they have only begun to extract the kinds of information that the films preserve about force, the commitment to a mark, the acquisition or the relinquishing of control, the repertoire or “vocabulary” of different marks, and above all exactly what counted at any given moment as a successful mark Much the same could be done with paintings by other artists who were never filmed The little sing-songs of the master class instructors could be taped, and the tapes could be run at very slow speeds to see how the funny noises corresponded, instant by instant, with the sounds the student was making There is a kind of passage in Western painting, I will say from the fifteenth century onward, where the marks were made just for the pleasure of marking, and not for their illusionistic payoff The art historian Whitney Davis calls such marks “nonsemantic,” meaning they not refer to anything outside the picture, even though they were intended to be expressive and also to contribute to a work that was primarily or ultimately illusionistic.14 I suppose that nonsemantic marks are present in any painting, and certainly some modernist paintings have been described as exclusively nonsemantic What’s intriguing is that in premodern painting nonsemantic marks tend to go unnoticed, even though they can sometimes be identified because they are in opposition to passages that are clearly mimetic in intent - 18 I’ll give two examples, both from a class I teach in which students copy paintings in the Art Institute The first is our Rubens Madonna and Child Rubens’s paint medium is still the object of all kinds of arcane scholarship—there was even a patent taken out on his method a few years ago Whatever media he used, the paint was exceedingly sticky, like half-set glue Art students often assume he used stand oil, which is a commercially available thickened linseed oil: but stand oil does not come close to matching Rubens’s viscous textures, as this student’s experience proved In copying the Rubens there are moments where the illusion is paramount, such as the brilliant artifice of suggesting the woven wicker basket by allowing the underpainting to show through, so that it produces the ghostly image of the counter-weave The skin, too, is a virtuoso performance because so much of its realism is due to the underpainting that is allowed to represent the shadow In other passages the paint was made viscous just for the joy of it: the paint that constitutes the garments, for example, is sticky well beyond what would have been necessary for naturalistic effect It was just plain fun, I think, to produce fabric by pushing tacky pigment on a slippery ground Another Baroque example is the Art Institute’s still life by Sanchez Cotan, which was copied very well by another student Parts of the painting are intended purely to produce the effect of duck feathers, or cabbage leaves Those passages are like the iterated, academic marking I was mentioning earlier But the picture also has its share of passages in which the act of painting itself must have been tremendously pleasurable, almost entirely aside from the naturalistic purpose The mottled cantaloupe flesh is an example: it is made by painting, wiping, and re-painting the canvas until it yields a particular texture None of this, of course, is without its naturalistic payoff My favorite example of the sheer joy of painting is the seeds in the cantaloupe, which are made by single strokes of the brush: the brush presses down into a half-set pool of paint, pushing the paint off to the sides If the paint is just the right consistency, the brush will leave an indentation and the extruded paint will stay where it is From a distance, each such mark is a perfect melon seed with a thickness, a translucency, a shadow, and just the right amount of juiciness But—and this is what I want to stress—painting those seeds is astonishingly pleasureful on account of the gesture itself: the little droplet of paint that has to be laid down beforehand, and the dip and press of the hand that makes the mark - 19 Is there a musical equivalent to nonsemantic painted marks? I think there is, and I will spend the remainder of my time defining it and proposing how some passages might be found In a sense, there is no problem finding nonsemantic marks in music notation Musicologists are very familiar with graphic marks in Baroque music—for example, voices crossing to produce signs of the cross In modern music, graphic music notation is widely studied—although I have to say I have not been able to find a single study that explores how the graphic notation of a piece by Xenakis, Stockhausen, Crumb, or Boulez, for example, influences the performance (The question is: How is the performance different when the musicians are reading from Xeroxes that have been cut and pasted from the original graphic notation, as opposed to trying to play from the design itself? To me that question bears on the expressive properties of the experimental graphic notation I hope some performers will try to write something along those lines Even Erik Satie’s notations influence performance—but exactly how?) At any rate graphic elements in premodern music are clearly nonsemantic in that they are not heard in performance, but seen on the page In the same category goes the influence of the composer’s handwriting, when the piece is performed from a facsimile of the autograph (That is another unstudied question, as far as I am aware, except for anecdotes about Liszt and others showing their virtuosity by sight-reading Beethoven manuscripts.) I not think that graphic marks and notations are a good parallel to the nonsemantic marks I was talking about in painting, because even in modern experimental music graphic notations are an uncommon interest Nonsemantic marks are ubiquitous in painting, and can even be said to be constitutive of the enterprise of painting in modernism The proper parallel to paint that gave pleasure in the painting is music that gives pleasure in the playing, by which I mean tactile pleasure—pleasure for the muscles of the hands and body—as opposed to any pleasure of the sound This is different from the look of musicians as they perform, which has been explored in books like The Sight of Sound.15 Nor is it the same as the problem of “pure music” which has been so extensively debated in Baroque musicology I am not concerned with the way music is experienced when it is read off the page instead of - 20 played, but rather with passages in compositions where the pleasure seems to be located specifically in the performer’s own body Now in one sense this is a commonplace When I was thinking of writing this lecture, I asked a number of musicologists and performers, including Alex Silbiger and Leon Botstein Everyone agrees the phenomenon is known—anyone who performs music knows it, just as everyone who has painted knows the painter’s pleasure in some marks— but apparently no one has written about it (If I am wrong about that, I hope someone tell me!) As in painting, a large part of the problem is finding criteria that will help locate passages whose primary purpose is to give pleasure to the player’s hands or body I not think pictorial representations are the place to look, even when they show solitary musicians And of course it is not helpful to review the large literature on listener’s reactions I have some musical examples in mind—the kinds of pieces and passages that seem good candidates Especially, for me, there is the whole of the Well-Tempered Clavier I am one of many people who are basically addicted to the Well-Tempered Clavier, but—and I know this is a very personal evaluation—I would never think of listening to performances of it anywhere near as often as I want to play it To me, the 48 preludes and fugues are often much more entrancing to my fingers than they are to my ear, or my eye I can’t specify exactly why that is, but it certainly has something to with the demands of polyphony, for instance the tricky moments where voices are shared between the two thumbs (as in the A major prelude in Book I, where the hands switch four times in one measure) Tactile interest increases when three or more voices have to be managed at once, especially when their rhythms are similar (as in the “subtle and complex scherzo that follows that prelude) (The entanglement of voices is the reason why it is not appropriate to separate the voices of the fugues in the WTC onto difference staves, as several editors, including Bartok, have done The separated voices show at once that the WTC is not intended to have visual appeal, and that the interlocking of voices has a certain meaning for the hands, which is lost when the music becomes graphically clear I should also say I am not counting passages where the hands are crossed longer than necessary, which happens - 21 many times in Scarlatti, because I always suspect that their appeal is also visual—they are showpieces for the audience.) I would also adduce the canon at the unison in the Goldberg Variations Here the two voices here are far too closely interwoven to be followed by the ear Listeners can tell the piece is a canon, and they can hear moments when one voice echoes the other, but much of it is a tangle Notice, too, that there is very little pleasure here for the eye: on the page the canon is mostly a mess But to the fingers it is absolutely entrancing, because the fingers can follow the voices in ways that they often cannot in Bach’s fugues, especially where voices have to be shared between hands Conclusions I hesitate to draw a conclusion to this entire lecture, because these problems are so open-ended and so deeply resistant to theorizing—that is, to technē But it seems tremendously important to keep trying to find links between studio practice and historical research Without such theorizing, there is nothing to stop studio and art practice departments from becoming even more marginalized than they currently are I’ll close by observing how it is possible to notice what goes unnoticed in art history To some degree it is a simple matter of looking closely, up to the point where generalities no longer hold sway A ready example is this detail, which is nearly unidentifiable; stepping back, it is revealed as a small section of the roof of a cathedral, in a painting by Constable (There is an art historical connection here, because the detail shows Constable’s technique of running a brush loaded with white paint over a portion of the canvas that had dried; the white paint catches on the raised dry paint, creating an impression of sparkling highlights.) Or — another example, among an infinity of possible examples — this detail, which is from a painting by Jackson Pollock (It too has a possible art historical connection, in that it addresses the theory, held intermittently since Pollock’s generation, that his paintings are “scaleless” — that their smallest forms mimic their largest forms In this case the tiny bubbles and swirls in the paint could not possibly have been controlled by Pollock, but he has managed to produce a painting in which the largest forms seem like those small forms.) - 22 But I not want to end by suggesting that links between studio practice and art history are always available, or even that they are commonly available Normally they are apparently completely unavailable I merely want to suggest how easy it is to begin to pay attention differently, and to start seeing what art history misses Somewhere in that apparently unrewarding passage from the nonverbal “studio art” experience into the fully articulate “art historical” understanding, lies a problem more difficult than even the most abstruse theoretical interests - 23 This text is adapted from the end of chapter of my book Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1997]); parts of the argument on painting also appeared in “Histoire de l’art et pratiques d’atelier,” Histoire de l’art 29–30 (1995): 103–112 Readers are referred to both of those sources for further elaborations This text was originally written for a conference in Richmond, Virginia, in April 2001; it was revised October, 2002, October 2003, December, 2005, and May 2020 Conceptual background for this is in my Why Art Cannot be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001) Derrida, “’To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,” translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 227-66 After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, edited by Gavin Butt (Madlen, MA: Blackwell, 2005) Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 284 The first is The New PhD in Studio Art, edited by James Elkins, no in the occasional series called Printed Project (Dublin: Sculptor’s Society of Ireland, 2005); the second is Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art As Research, edited by Katy Mcleod and Lin Holdridge (London: Routledge, 2006) Melville, “Counting / As Painting,” in As Painting: Division and Displacement (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, the Ohio State University; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 1-26 - 24 Paul Hirst, Knowledge and the Curriculum (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974); Colin Painter, “Fine Art Practice, Research and Doctoral Awards: Part 1,” in Proceedings of the National Research Conference Art and Design in Education (Brighton: Fribble Information Systems Inc Ltd., with the National Society for Education in Art and Design, 1991); these and others are cited in Timothy Emlyn Jones, “A Method of Search For Reality: Research and Research Degrees in Art and Design,” in The New PhD in Studio Art, op cit I argue this further in an essay called “On Modern Impatience,” Kritische Berichte 3, 1991, pp 19–34 10 For comparison see Harry Cooper, “Surface as Psyche: A Progress Report,” Res 36 (1999): 253-62.; Cooper, “Mondrian, Hegel, Boogie,” October 84 (1998): 118-42; these are macrophotographic studies of Mondrian’s brushwork See also the following note 11 Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings, edited by Harry Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 2001); Yve-Alain Bois, Piet Mondrian (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1995) 12 Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges for Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 13 See www.lcc.gatech.edu/~xinwei/, accessed December 2005 14 Davis, Replications: Art History, Archaeology, Psychoanalysis (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1996) 15 Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)  ... academic art history and philosophy of art to assume that they are sufficient to account for what happens in studios It’s common to hear art historians, art theorists, and philosophers talk about the. .. halfway to the Old Masters (b) The art history students have to write a report, answering the following question: What would the art historians have written differently if they had had the experience. .. that art historians should draw before they write about works, since it would be unnecessary for an art historian to re? ?experience these ostensive acts of reverence: if the reading seems to make