Particular and General in the Writing of Art History
1 December 2022 at 2:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Dr Francis Plagne, University of Melbourne
Associate Professor Anthony White, University of Melbourne
Session Speakers
Geoff Hondroudakis, University of Melbourne
Associate Professor Tara McDowell, Monash University
Dr Francis Plagne, University of Melbourne
The relationship between general and particular is a central problem of art history. As Baxandall and others have argued, even the apparently simple act of describing a single work can be seen as complicated by the inherently generalising nature of the language used and its indirect relationship to the object. These complications multiply when individual artworks are analysed within broad historical or theoretical frameworks, leading often to accusations that they are taken out of context, over-simplified, reduced to little more than props, and so on. In response, many writers on art have turned to intensive focus on individual works, at times stressing the experiential dimension of their own encounters with them as the site of an inexhaustible surplus of visual over verbal.
This panel reflects on these questions in relation to historical traditions of writing about art and contemporary applications. What uses have individual examples been put to in past art history? Can anything be salvaged from the ambitious ‘grand narrative’ approaches to writing these histories, now often discredited? What challenges do individual objects pose to historical and theorical paradigms? How is the dialectic between general and particular at play in artists’ identities and contemporary modes of art production?
Systematizing Contingency: Dall-E, Computation, and Cosmotechnics
Geoff Hondroudakis, University of Melbourne
Recent developments in deep learning image-generation have prompted much popular interest, with commentary on systems such as DALL-E tending to focus on the novel capacities of such technologies and their potential to alter art practices and economies. In this paper, I pursue a different question, by taking these developments as a useful example for examining the relationship of systematicity and contingency in aesthetics. Broadly, I take deep learning models like DALL-E as an instance of a broader cosmotechnics that privileges a specific mode of computational aesthetics, whereby contingent variation is recursively reincorporated into a larger cybernetic logic of representation. This is a model of systematicity that actively requires and accounts for contingency in its production of a generalised aesthetic framework. I draw on Yuk Hui’s Art and Cosmotechnics (2021) and Recursivity and Contingency, and M. Beatrice Fazi’s work on computational aesthetics (2018) to argue for this systemic-logical view of how technical systems mediate the particular and the general in aesthetics. I contend that this understanding of systematicity can aid in the interpretation of not only computational art, but art practices that are now inevitably situated within this context.
Love Is a Battlefield: The Artist as Mother
Associate Professor Tara McDowell, Monash University
Arguably no human condition more dramatically activates the dialectic of specific and generalised experience than that of motherhood. When the mother is also an artist, that poses particular challenges and opportunities for the art historian. The artist is a producer, but the mother-artist is a producer of both art and child. For many years, these two modes of production were at odds, even cancelling one another out, most vehemently through the anti-natalist feminism of Shulamith Firestone. But in recent years a profound shift has occurred, in which many contemporary artists—as well as writers, poets, filmmakers, and other creative practitioners—are now making mothering the subject of their work, as well as its condition. Mothering could easily expand beyond its specific, vexed biological limitations to a collective mothering in solidarity with care culture, but at what point is an expansion a dilution? Where should the art historian draw the line? This paper examines the fraught, if rich, terrain of motherhood and art, to recognize it as full of friction and contradictions, and to test mapping it through individual artistic practices that coalesce into a field marked by difference, but nonetheless allows an increasingly vital subject to come into view.
T.J. Clark and the tradition of Marxist art history
Dr Francis Plagne, University of Melbourne
T.J. Clark is one of the most influential Anglophone art historians to engage with the Marxist tradition. Peppered throughout his writings since the 1970s is a series of methodological reflections, in which he poses his own formulation of the social interpretation of art against the canonical Marxist art histories of figures such as Antal and Hauser. Like many non- or anti-Marxist critics, Clark sees the tradition of Marxist art history as weakened by mechanical and over-determined styles of interpretation in which grand narrative operates at the expense of detailed engagement with the aesthetic properties of works of art. Exactly how he understands and puts into practice his own model of Marxist social history remains an open question, especially as his work of recent decades has developed toward an overtly subjective approach that rupture norms of academic argument. How exactly should we understand Clark’s Marxism? How are materialist understandings of history and society evident in his strikingly detailed and creative close readings of works by canonical artists from the renaissance to late modernism?
Biographies
Dr Francis Plagne, University of Melbourne
Francis Plagne teaches in Art History and Curatorship at the University of Melbourne. His writings on Australian contemporary art have been published in many magazines and he has written texts for exhibitions at institutions such as Gertrude Contemporary, Monash University Museum of Art, and QUT Art Museum, as well as many private galleries. He completed a PhD in Social Theory at the University of Melbourne in 2018.
Associate Professor Anthony White, University of Melbourne
Anthony White is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the history of modern and contemporary art. His current project, Recentring Australian Art, investigates artists who have been overlooked by mainstream art history. He is the author of Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism (Routledge, 2020); with Grace McQuilten, of Art as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art (IB Tauris / Bloomsbury, 2016); and Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (MIT Press, 2011). His writing has appeared in Grey Room, October, Third Text, and Artforum.
Geoff Hondroudakis, University of Melbourne
Geoffrey Hondroudakis is a graduate research candidate at the University of Melbourne in media theory and philosophy of technology. His work examines the concept of scale, drawing on theories of abstraction from across philosophy of science, aesthetics, media theory, computer science, ecology, and materials engineering. He is on the editorial team for Platform: Journal of Media and Communication.
Associate Professor Tara McDowell, Monash University
Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University. She publishes and lectures frequently, and has held curatorial appointments at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Her recent books include The Artist As (Sternberg Press, 2018) and The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (The MIT Press, 2019), which was awarded the Millard Meiss Award and was a nominee for the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in the field of American art, Smithsonian American Art Museum.