Visual worlds chapter 27, how art historians look at images

This is an excerpt from the book Visual Worlds, co-authored by James Elkins and Erna Fioren>ni The book is available on Amazon Please send comments, ques>ons, and sugges>ons to jelkins@saic.edu How Art Historians Look at Images 27 The practices and methods of art history are variegated and the Leading Concepts objects of continuous discussion There is therefore no unitary formal analysis (strong and weak) style analysis formal concepts (Formbegriffe) forms of seeing comparative seeing (vergleichendes Sehen) double slide projections image dissection the beholder’s share the period eye and consolidated way in which art historians look at images They question different problems in very different ways: for instance, they may ask what the form of an image conveys, or what an image means beyond what its form shows, or in what contexts the image came into being, or what role was played by those who first saw the image, or how the image has been interpreted from the time it was first shown to the present Yet art history has a fundamental allegiance toward a certain understanding of formal analysis: the apparently rudimentary inventory of an image’s contents Formal analysis is not all that art historians do, and it can be understood in several ways, but it remains more central to art history’s sense of itself as a discipline than any other interpretive strategy In this chapter we introduce the concept of formal analysis, give some examples of its use both in art and in other fields, and criticize its apparent neutrality 27.1 Senses of Formal Analysis The art historian Whitney Davis (b 1957) has distinguished between what may be called strong and weak formal analysis, and also between an original version of formal analysis and a “postformalist” practice that differs philosophically from the first Strong formal analysis, which is associated with modernist art, reflects the belief that the elements of an image that are apprehensible to the senses hold the work’s meaning It is sufficient to interpret a painting by Mondrian, for instance, by making a careful inventory of the fictive space of the painting, its proposals about what counts as figure and ground, and the structural criteria regulating its colors and formal analysis in art history and criticism, formal analysis is a visual description of the structure of a work of art Strong formal analysis is the idea that the meaning of a work of art is entirely contained in its visual elements Weak formal analysis is the idea that the meaning of a work of art depends not just on its visual elements, but also on the artist and the ideas of his time | elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 349 349 11/19/19 06:27 PM 350 | HOW ART HISTORIANS LOOK AT IMAGES Figure 27.1 Mondrian, New York City, 1942 style analysis in art history, a comparison of artistic styles; in Wölfflin’s work, this consisted of analyzing visual qualities he described as formal concepts, such as linear or painterly treatments See formal concepts formal concepts [Germ Formbegriffe] in art history, Wölfflin’s five pairs of visual qualities for comparing artistic styles are linear versus painterly; plane versus recession; closed versus open; multiplicity versus unity; and absolute versus relative See style analysis forms of seeing an idea due to Wölfflin that artistic styles are shaped by historic and by local events, leading to changes in style over time elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 350 stripes In a strong formalist view, it is not necessary, and it may be misguided, to look at such things as the artist’s intention, the critical reception of his work, or the social conditions in expatriate community of New York City, where Mondrian lived from 1938 until his death in 1944 Weak formal analysis holds that the artwork’s visible properties can contribute to better understanding, but that a mere inventory of visible properties is not necessarily essential to describe what makes the artwork significant The art historian Yve-Alain Bois (b.1952), writing about Piet Mondrian’s New York City (1942; Figure 27.1), remarks that the critic Joseph Masheck says the painting achieves its particular flatness by “overloading the system with more identity than differentiation.” The “multitude of yellow-and-yellow intersections,” Masheck suggests, “tightens the surface.” For Bois, this is good but “not specific enough.” He goes on to provide a detailed analysis of Mondrian’s separation of rhythm and repetition, “the abolition of line as form,” and Mondrian’s position in relation to previous senses of flatness in cubist collage, Cézanne, and Seurat Bois’s account is one of the most careful and detailed of its kind in all of art history Even though he cites sources other than Mondrian and Masheck—including especially Walter Benjamin—his account is formal in that it is about what is optically available and what Mondrian intended in regard to flatness Davis has also distinguished between an original version of formal analysis in the early work of the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), and a later, “postformalist” version that can be found in Wölfflin’s later work and also in the practices of art history up to the present Wölfflin’s main contribution to art history was a method he called style analysis, described in his Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History, 1915, Figure 27.2) His interest was in the history of artistic styles, particularly the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque To explain and describe that history, he analyzed the visual qualities of artworks, looking for certain “formal concepts” (Formbegriffe)— preeminently what he called “linear” as opposed to “painterly” treatments Looking for the occurrence of such general forms of representation, Wölfflin did not want to “analyze the beauty of Leonardo’s or Dürers work, but the element in which this beauty could take form.” Wölfflin directed his analysis to “the conceptions that underlay the arts in different centuries,” which he called Sehformen, the historically and locally constrained “forms of seeing” that shape artistic 11/19/19 06:27 PM 27.1 Senses of Formal Analysis styles at specific moments in history His early formal analysis was therefore not directed only to the history of art works as formal objects, but also to the conditions necessary to their formation and character In 1933 Wölfflin published a revision of his treatise, mostly in response to a critique expressed by his former student Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) in 1932 He had accused Wölfflin of “pseudo-formalism,” because his method involved not just an attentive analysis of forms, but also a subjective, modern categorization of their meaning Wölfflin had claimed that his method enabled scholars to see through the forms into the “optical strata” (optische Schichten)—what we call variants of looking—in which artists operated The goal of formal analysis, Panofsky argued in contrast, is rather to immerse ourselves in the variant of seeing in which the images originated To this, formal elements of the picture should be analyzed as “symbolic forms,” signs of the national, religious, or philosophical principles that informed the activity of the artists in their time Such a study, Panofsky wrote in 1938, would be a “rational archaeological analysis at times as meticulously exact, comprehensive, and involved as any physical or astronomical research.” (Panofsky’s observations continue to be influential among North American art historians.) In the 1933 revision, Wölfflin specifies that what he had previously called “forms of seeing” (the “optical strata” accessible to modern analysis) refer to “the artist’s way of ‘seeing’ things, by which we really mean the way things take shape in his imagination I not know whether people have always seen things the same way . .  but it is safe to say that one can observe different types of imagination [Vorstellungsarten] in successive stages of art.” He compares the “imagined forms” (Vorstellungsformen) arising from these to the “warp and weft of a fabric into which artists weave their colorful images.” Wölfflin acknowledges, in the end, that “concepts of form” remain interwoven in intellectual history outside the paintings themselves, and can even offer the keys to that history What makes both Wölfflin’s early and later ideas formalist is their dependence on the visible properties of artworks Both, however, may be considered postformalist in that they consider constraints—at first historical first, and later intellectual—on the emergence of those properties It is in the later theory, however, that the ground shifts stronger to the history of ideas, situating Wölfflin, as Davis has noted, as the “very first post-formalist avant la lettre.” elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 351 | 51 Figure 27.2 Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, first edition, 1915 11/19/19 06:27 PM 352 | HOW ART HISTORIANS LOOK AT IMAGES These dimensions of formalism, weak and strong, formal and postformal—are helpful in thinking about the many kinds of formal analysis, which also occur outside of the discipline of art history 27.2 Practices of Formal Analysis A rudimentary kind of formal analysis is widely taught in schools, from elementary levels up through introductory university classes In this practice, artworks are considered to be comprised of elements such as line, shape, balance, harmony, rhythm, movement, proportion, emphasis, variety, contrast, pattern, and color, organized by schemata such as space, depth, perspective, and time These elements are repeated in innumerable textbooks and lesson plans For example, the Education Department of the J Paul Getty Museum has produced a simple guide for formal analysis, including assertions such as “shape and form define objects in space” (Figure 27.3) Guides to “art appreciation” present their subject as being outside of any particular time or place, and in that respect they are examples of strong formal analysis, and certainly not instances of postformalism From an historical, postformalist point of view, textbooks that explain art by recourse to forms are actually derived from modernist agendas that were first elaborated at the Bauhaus and other academies in the first half of the twentieth century The use of words like “line,” “color,” Figure 27.3 “Understanding formal analysis,” J Paul Getty Museum, Education Department website, 2015 elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 352 11/19/19 06:27 PM 27.2 Practices of Formal Analysis and “form” in these books is not universal, but closely bound to early twentieth-century senses of what images are In the common practice of art history, weak formal analysis of the Wölfflinian sort is prevalent The most important form is comparative seeing (vergleichendes Sehen), the classroom comparison of objects or their reproductions Currently, comparative seeing and strategies of perception, description, and sorting are being renegotiated from a transdisciplinary perspective, involving art history, biology, architecture, psychology, and informatics Comparative seeing was present as early as the eighteenth century, in classicist archaeology (for example, in Johann Joachim Winckelmann), and later in nineteenth-century natural history (Alexander von Humboldt) Art history appropriated the method from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and it became institutionalized in 1875 when Hermann Grimm, chair of the art history department at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (later the Humboldt-Universität) in Berlin, introduced the method of double slide projection (see Text Box 27.1) With Wölfflin, who succeeded Grimm, the evaluation of two side-by-side images became what Heinrich Dilly calls a “disciplinary imperative of art history” (see Figure 27.4) In comparative seeing, particularly when supported by double-slide projection, formal analysis is directed toward the identification of formal parameters that can point either to contrasts or stylistic differences or to analogies and similarities Collecting such differences and similarities can result in a determination of the dates and | 353 comparative seeing [Germ vergleichendes Sehen] the use of side-by-side objects or images to better compare styles, descriptions, or categorizations double slide projection the ability to project two transparencies on a screen side by side was developed around 1870 and spurred the growth of comparative seeing in the formal analysis of art See comparative seeing Figure 27.4 Example of an art history lecture slide comparing Gerhard Richter and Caspar David Friedrich elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 353 11/19/19 06:27 PM 354 | HOW ART HISTORIANS LOOK AT IMAGES TEXT BOX 27.1 Double Slide Projection Around 1870, the development of reversal film techniques allowed the use of transparencies that could be projected simultaneously on a screen The first parallel slide projections were shown in 1875 at the first department dedicated to art history, the Institute of Art History at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin Hermann Grimm (1828–1901), the first chair of the Institute, was passionately committed to the use of modern media like photography in research and teaching As early as 1893, he installed his own photographic laboratory at the Institute In the 1880s, Grimm started collecting large-format transparencies, which could be produced in-house They were based on several photographic collections like the Alinari collection in Florence It was Heinrich Wölfflin who, after taking over the Institute in 1901, enlarged and improved the inventory, developing the use of double slide projection for teaching and research (it fitted in fact his approach to art works, which implied not only the analysis of the forms but also the comparison of their changes) This was a crucial step for the methodology of art history The teaching practices of comparative seeing adopted as elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 354 early as the mid-nineteenth century, which we described above, involved the distribution of graphics and drawings, and later photographs, of artworks to students, for comparison and discussion But unlike drawing, graphics, and photographs, the simultaneous slide projection made it possible to synchronize the visual comparison of images with the teacher’s explanation and the students’ questions or comments This method also shifted the way in which art historians look at images toward a more functional mode of investigation In fact, as Felix Thürlemann has pointed out, a single picture and a pair of pictures are “two different classes of images” that provoke “two fundamentally different behaviors towards the picture.” So a single image implies its own isolation If it’s perceived alone, a sacred image or an erotic representation activates reverence and admiration, personalizing the object represented or even the image itself, humanizing it and at the same time reifying it as something “untouchable.” Comparing a pair of images simultaneously projected on a screen is not an affective, but an intellectual operation As Thürlemann argues, in fact, double image projection induces the perception of a “binary hyperimage” that urges the observer to categorize, to conceptually grasp the two image’s common features and unique particularities Double slide projection proved to be a revolutionary technique able to make the study of images a highly efficient tool for formal analysis It radically remodeled teaching and research in art history and has remained one of its primary working strategies Even digitization has not erased its interpretive protocols: Powerpoint and digital projectors are still often used by instructors to display comparative images 11/19/19 06:27 PM 27.2 Practices of Formal Analysis context-specific formal properties of the images, and comparative seeing is used to decipher the images’ historical and cultural substrate The method remains nearly universal in art historical pedagogy, even though a number of comparative projects have failed, for example the ambitious analytic and educational visual systems of Aby Warburg’s anthropological atlas Mnemosyne (see Chapter  19, section 19.3), or André Malraux’s Imaginary Museum (Figure  27.5) Both collapsed under the burden of their many comparisons It is worth mentioning, parenthetically, that very different kinds of formal analysis can be found outside of art pedagogy and art history In particular, formal analysis is often built into scientific, engineering, and medical images before they are published or studied Certain individual analytic operations such as contrast enhancement, which would once have been done by the viewer, are built into the image software, so that the images scientists, technicians, and medical personnel see are often already the result of formal operations It is as if some of the formal analysis of the image had been incorporated into the image itself: in part, the image is the analysis The algorithms of scientific and medical image analysis software are the analogues of Wölfflin’s individual “formal concepts” (Formbegriffe) Watershed analysis, for example, is an algorithm built in to a range of scientific imaging packages (see Figure 27.6) It is available, for example, on the free platform ImageJ, widely used in the biological sciences In this image the software has performed a gradient analysis, segmenting the image This is the same algorithm that produces “mosaic” and “impressionist” effects in popular image software applications such as Photoshop, mimicking various historical styles of art The sociologist of science Karin Knorr-Cetina (b 1944) first used the term image dissection to describe how scientists produce and interpret images “The work of image analysis,” she writes, “brings the outside of the image into it and takes the inside out.” In the terms we are developing here, what is put “inside” are strategies of formal analysis The images are prepared for formal analysis by becoming partly the products of that analysis This could also be put in terms of the philosopher Bruno Latour’s (b 1947) actor–network theory Images that are processed in these ways become hybrid objects, partly records of the world, and partly the embodied results of interpretation of those elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 355 | 355 Figure 27.5 Maurice Jarnoux, André Malraux with the photographs for his book Le Musée imaginaire, c. 1947 image dissection in art history, the partitioning of a work of art according to concepts of formal analysis for more detailed comparison; the resulting image often incorporates these concepts into a new image 11/19/19 06:27 PM 356 | HOW ART HISTORIANS LOOK AT IMAGES Figure 27.6 Watershed analysis Gombrich’s science is discussed in Chapter 3, section 3.4, in Chapter 14, and in Chapter 15 beholder’s share the idea in art history that the viewer of a work of art interprets it in personal terms to give it meaning This contrasts with scientific and medical viewing of images records Image dissection and other protocols “re-create” the participants’ practice, displaying it, in Knorr-Cetina’s words, “as a stream of activities that have a history and a purpose.” The elements of formal analysis embedded in images produce new kinds of images that can no longer be understood as the direct results of instrumentation They are new kinds of objects, which show not only the represented world but also the literalization of the acts of seeing that have been applied to them These properties of non-art images are an intriguing example of our theme of the relation between vision science and art theory In general artworks are reproduced as faithfully as possible, and the assumption is that formal analysis is what E H Gombrich called the “beholder’s share,” in which the viewer interprets what she sees in personal terms, adding meaning to the picture But scientific and medical images are often hybrid objects, incorporating both their originals and their formal analyses 27.3 The Apparent Neutrality of Formal Analysis Formal analysis is a fundamental tool in art history and criticism, practiced in art history classrooms around the world The student’s eye travels slowly and systematically over the image, overlooking nothing, noting as many forms as possible, building a systematic account of how the picture was assembled This systematic, rational, and thorough analysis differs in its character depending on whether it is exercised on a single image or on a pair of images According to the linguist Felix Thürlemann (b 1946), a single image and a pair of images provoke two fundamentally different variations of seeing and analyzing The comparative observation of a pair of images triggers a reflexive complex intellectual operation in which the student considers not only the form, but also the reasons for the contrast or analogy Hence comparative seeing is a common setting for weak formal analysis Conversely, the consideration of a elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 356 11/19/19 06:27 PM 27.3 The Apparent Neutrality of Formal Analysis single image is conducive to strong formal analysis in that the act of seeing is not immediately engaged with historical, political, or social meanings and the student can focus entirely on the visible properties of the image A formalist inventory, as it is traditionally practiced, takes one element at a time, excises it from its context, and proceeds to the next, until all the salient or nameable elements of the image have been distinguished from one another The parts of the image or visual object are articulated and ordered, and it is made available for further study, creating a sense that it has been mastered In the common pedagogy of art history, formal analysis is presented as a preparatory activity, a sort of ideologically or critically neutral stock-taking But formal analysis is relatively recent and culturally specific, and it can be argued that it is not a neutral, heuristic step in the understanding of images A strong formal analysis can be cold and methodical, and at its most concerted it can become a powerful, invasive, and destructive operation that severs the image from itself, cuts it into pieces, and leaves it dismembered and ready for further interpretation Art history and theory students are expected to “master” images by looking methodically and taking systematic, patient inventory of their parts In effect the act of formal analysis is a kind of dissective seeing that both renders and rends the image, displaying it in parts Scholars who study violent images, such as the torture and execution lingchi illustrated in Chapter 25, use formal analysis to help control the power of the images Knowing facts, places, and names about these executions takes away some of their power In a similar way surgeons become accustomed to looking at images of viscera But not all images can be normalized by formal inventory, and not all aspects of violence or pain can be softened by repeated looking—certainly images like Chapter 22, Figure 22.5, or Chapter 15, Figure 15.5, retain their power to disturb no matter how carefully they are studied The ordinary, pedagogically instilled, rote and routine formal analysis of a single image reveals and articulates the viewer’s desire to understand as a painful desire And that, in turn, permits the art historical or critical analysis to go forward and create its own pleasure There is a dialectic of painful interpretation and interpretive pleasure in art history, theory, and criticism, and its opening move is the immobilization and dissection of the visual image The pain and pleasure feed on one another Formal or iconographic analysis feed the viewer’s desire by increasing whatever pleasure can be found in the pain of an image Analysis produces the pain of interpretation as the pleasure of the picture | 357 See Chapter for thoughts on naming types of seeing * This reading of the violence of a rudimentary protocol of art history is consonant with a reading, which we began in Chapter 19, of art history as a discipline invested in administering images To the extent that acts of administration inevitably fail, art history can be conceived as an institution whose interpretive strategies work in part to recuperate and repair failures of administration elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 357 11/19/19 06:27 PM 358 | HOW ART HISTORIANS LOOK AT IMAGES TEXT BOX 27.2 Formal Analysis and History One of the central points in the methodical discussion concerning formal analysis is the way in which art historians should consider older ways of looking at images Following the dispute between Wölfflin and Panofsky that was described in the text, one of the most influential recent contributions to this discussion is art historian Michael Baxandall’s (1933–2008) observation, first made in 1972, that art history should attempt to understand the whole of the cultural and social motivations, both artistic and nonartistic, that shaped the artist and her public This is what he called the period eye, a constraint on viewing that historically justifies the selection of formal features of art objects Still, it can be difficult to know when a plausible period eye has been located, especially when it seems—as it does to a number of contemporary scholars like Donald Preziosi (b 1941)—that formal analysis, like any attempt to “see” into history, is guided by different gazes all rooted in their present The negotiation between formal analysis and history is not an easy one, and the literature on the subject continues to grow period eye in art history, the idea in weak formal analysis that a work of art should be understood in the context of all the cultural and social motivations that affected the artist and the viewers of that time See formal analysis elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 358 Further Reading Davis, Whitney: A General Theory of Visual Culture, 2010, chapter 3; Davis, “What is Post-Formalism?” nonsite.org, October 11, 2012 Bois, Yve-Alain: “Piet Mondrian, New York City,” Critical Inquiry, 14, No (Winter 1988): 244–277; Bridget Riley, “Mondrian: The ‘Universal’ and the ‘Particular,’” Burlington Magazine 138 (November 1996): 751-753 Wölfflin, Heinrich: Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 1915, and “Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe Eine Revision,” Logos 22 (1933): 210–18 (both in English as Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art, translated by Jonathan Blower, 2015) Quotations from the German edition pp 6, 14; “forms of seeing” and “formal concepts” in the 1933 revision, p 321; passages on Vorstellungsformen, pp 320, 215 respectively Panofsky, Erwin: critique of Wölfflin in “On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts,” Critical Inquiry 38, no (Spring 2012): 467–82, here 469; “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst,” Logos 21 [1932]: 103–19, here 105); “On the Relationship of Art History and 11/19/19 06:27 PM Further Reading | 359 Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art,” Critical Inquiry 35, no (Autumn 2008): 43–71 (“Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie Ein Beitrag zu der Erörterung über die Möglichkeit kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe,” in Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, edited by Hariolf Oberer und Egon Verheyen, 1992, pp 49–76); symbolic forms, “Art History as a Humanistic Discipline,” in The Meaning of the Humanities Five Essays, edited by Theodore Meyer Greene, 1938, p 106 and “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1924–1925, pp 258–330, English Perspective as Symbolic form, 1991 J Paul Getty Museum: http://www.getty.edu/education/teachers/building_lessons/ formal_analysis.html comparative seeing/vergleichendes Sehen: Whitney Davis “What is Post-Formalism?” nonsite.org, issue 7, October 11, 2012, https://nonsite.org/article/what-is-postformalism-or-das-sehen-an-sich-hat-seine-kunstgeschichte; Peter Geimer, “Vergleichendes Sehen oder Gleichheit aus Versehen? Analogie und Differenz in kunsthistorischen Bildvergleichen,” in Vergleichendes Sehen, edited by Lena Bader, Martin Gaier, and Falk Wolf, 2010, pp 45–70 history of comparative seeing/vergleichendes Sehen: Helga von Kügelgen, “Klassizismus und vergleichendes Sehen in den Vues des Cordillères,” Humboldt im Netz 10 (2009): 105–24, https://www.uni-potsdam.de/romanistik/hin/hin19/kuegelgen.htm Dilly, Heinrich: “Einführung,” in Kunstgeschichte: eine Einführung, edited by Hans Belting, Heinrich Dilly, Wolfgang Kemp, Willibald Sauerländer und Martin Warnke, 1986, p 12 watershed analysis: John Gauch, “Image Segmentation and Analysis via Multiscale Gradient Watershed Hierarchies,” IEEE Transactions, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 8.1 (Jan 1999): 69–79 image dissection: Karin Knorr-Cetina and Klaus Amann, “Image Dissection in Natural Scientific Inquiry,” Science, Technology and Human Values 15, (1990): 259-283 Values, Gombrich, E H.: Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1960 Thürlemann, Felix: “Bild gegen Bild,” in Zwischen Literatur und Anthropologie-Diskurse, Medien, Performanzen, edited by Aleida Assmann, Ulrich Gaier, and Gisela Trommsdorff, 2005, pp 166–67; Thürleman, “Vom Einzelbild zum Hyperimage: Eine neue Herausforderung für die kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik,” in Les hermeneutiques au seuil du XXJeme siecle-evolution, 2004, pp 230–31 Text Box 27.1: Heinrich Dilly, “Die Bildwerfer: 121 Jahre kunstwissenschaftliche DiaProjektion,” Rundbrief Fotografie, Sonderheft (1994): 39–44; tinyurl.com/HUBerlin-mediathek-collection; Felix Thürlemann, “Bild gegen Bild,” in Zwischen Literatur und Anthropologie-Diskurse, Medien, Performanzen, edited by Assmann, Gaier, and Trommsdorff, pp 163–74, here 166–67 Text Box 27.2: Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 1972; Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art HIstory, 1989 For the period eye in social art history, see Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 1951 elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 359 11/19/19 06:27 PM elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 360 11/19/19 06:27 PM Conclusion PART SIX Throughout this book we have been pursuing the book’s second problematic, the variety of seeing, using several different concepts In Part Two, we discussed types, which are gerunds naming acts of seeing (peering, glimpsing, glancing); they can appear to be independent of subject matter or historical context Along with these two principal distinctions we have experimented with styles of looking and languages of seeing In Part Three, styles were introduced as self-regulating discourses, such as the ways people look at and write about photographs, or advertisements In the introduction to Part Six, we introduced variants of looking as affiliated families of practices that share common vocabularies, favoring this notion over languages Now we have distinguished six of these variants operating in different disciplinary fields There is an active variant of seeing at work in military image production, because the object of study may also be a target, an object of attack The military expression “object of interest” indicates just how far military seeing is from the “disinterested interest” made famous by Kant, in which a view does not desire to own (or kill) the object of attention As Kant said, an aesthetic judgment is entirely disinterested, even if it is itself very interesting (uninteressiert, aber doch sehr interessant) In military usage, “interest” is never uninteressiert Chapter 24, on medicine, presents a dynamic variant of seeing In spite of the development of automatic imaging techniques, the search for symptoms and signs, the visual evidence of the patient’s health, creates a continuous tension between the quest for objectivity and the doctor’s judgment In addition, medicine typically confronts doctors with images that are already visually optimized for analysis The software itself conducts the first analytic operations, framing the object and isolating salient features The images are already their own analyses, shifting the doctor’s focus to the interpretation of the body behind the image This is a dynamic variant of seeing, subject to modification and adjustment, sensitive to a certain ethics of evidence as an instrument for the construction of reality In law, subject of Chapter 25, there is an evidential variant of seeing, in which images become objects analogous to witnesses Emmanuel Alloa’s useful expression witness-image (image-témoin) captures this hybrid function An image can be “entered into evidence,” but it is also presents testimony: it “speaks,” the way a witness might speak, in the sense that its testimony might be impugned, whether or not its status as evidence is rejected In Chapter 25, images are classified as evidence: | elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 361 61 11/19/19 06:27 PM 362 | CONCLUSION but they also testify to the truth, and what they say is, in Alloa’s words, “as precarious as the witness’s words.” Chapter 26, on science, differentiates three ways in which science looks at images Numerical seeing is when images are made to be containers for information They convey the general logic of an occurrence by means of quantitative and statistical evaluation We find vampire seeing when the image is an intermediate stage in the research process, involving the extraction of information and the discarding of the image; and in modeled seeing, the image is a working model for a scientific theory, allowing scientists to see analogies between their theory and the world Even in the aseptic world of numerical evidence there is a considerable amount of individual selection and feedback accompanying the production and the use of images; perhaps a general expression for scientific seeing in this context would be the selective variant Art history, subject of the following chapter, might be identified as a comparative variant Art history does not produce images, and unlike medicine or the military, which have interests, targets, and operations, art history’s purpose is interpretation—an intermediate step in the analysis of a military or a medical image In that sense art history is close to Kant’s disinterested interest—it is uninteressiert, aber doch sehr interessant Art history compares features in a single image; compares images and their features with visible occurrences in the world; compares images with each other; compares its own perception of the world with images; compares its own perception of images with that of other beholders; compares images with the historical contexts to which they belong; compares material features of images in different media In this respect art history is the comparative variant, the specialist in comparative seeing (vergleichendes Sehen) Needless to say, this entire book is suffused with this ideology of comparison: as we remarked in the preface, it gives our book what structure it has (In regard to our first principal theme, the impossible textbook: if this book does function as a textbook, it is by virtue of the interpretive power of comparisons.) elk90915_ch27_349-362.indd 362 11/19/19 06:27 PM ... | HOW ART HISTORIANS LOOK AT IMAGES Figure 27.6 Watershed analysis Gombrich’s science is discussed in Chapter 3, section 3.4, in Chapter 14, and in Chapter 15 beholder’s share the idea in art. .. | HOW ART HISTORIANS LOOK AT IMAGES Figure 27.1 Mondrian, New York City, 1942 style analysis in art history, a comparison of artistic styles; in Wölfflin’s work, this consisted of analyzing visual. .. (1933–2008) observation, first made in 1972, that art history should attempt to understand the whole of the cultural and social motivations, both artistic and nonartistic, that shaped the artist and