Grey on Grey
Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar (eds)
£105.00
About this book
Contends that works of visual and spatial art have a shaping effect on natural human vision itself
- Explores how professional art history (from the early nineteenth century to the present) conceived the nature of human visual perception
- Examines how vision develops historically, in part, as a specific function of human visual art-making, and considers the possibility of an ‘art history’ of vision
- Considers how different art historians and writers on art have conceived the nature of art-historical change and compares these different models
- Investigates how art historians have drawn on psychology, philosophy and anthropology to model the visual processes involved in art-making
Whitney Davis reconsiders the work of major art historians and writers on the arts, from the early nineteenth century to the present day, including G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Cassirer, through to E. H. Gombrich, John Onians and David Summers, in order to show that vision has been shaped historically by the visual arts. The book includes an intellectual autobiography recounting Davis’s trajectory in his discipline.
Emphasising interactions between several generations of modern art history and the psychology, anthropology and philosophy of art, he explores a whole new field: the relevance of vision to this history of art.
Table of contents
Preface
Sources and Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Organisation, Origins and Autobiography
The Organisation of This Book
Genealogical Connections and Underlying Themes
An Intellectual Autobiography
Part One—Ancient Art and Modern Thought
Chapter 1: Hegel and the ‘Symbolic Art’ of Ancient Egypt
‘Symbolic Art’ in Ancient Egypt
The Cognitive Structure of the Symbol
Theriomorphic Symbols in Ancient Egypt
The Anthropomorphic Criterion
Symbolic Art and Cosmological Perspectivism
Chapter 2: Walter Pater and the Classical Ideal in Art
Nachahmung: The Dialectic of the Delicate Pause
Rhythmos: The Configuration of the Pregnant Type
The Temporal Disparity of Pause and Type
Chapter 3: How Modernism Redefined Classicism
The Breakdown of Modern Neoclassical Technique
Naturalism in Classical Greek Art
Classical Greek Naturalism and Pure Abstraction in Art
Part Two—Art and Psychology
Chapter 4: Heinrich Wölfflin and the History of Vision
The Double Root of Style—Histories and Metaphors
The ‘Wölfflinian Method’
Formalism and Formalisticism
The Root of the Double Root of Style
The Effect of Picture on Picture
Post-Wölfflinian Vision Historicism
Neuroaesthetics and Vision Historicism
Chapter 5: ‘Self-Analysis’ and Freud’s Picture of Rome
Three Comparisons for the Psyche
Freud’s Graphic Representations of Psychic History
Representations of the Archaeology of Rome
Composite Formations
Composite Formations and the Unconscious
Chapter 6: Schema and Correction: The Origins of Gombrich’s Psychology of Pictorial Representation
Backgrounds and Overviews
The ‘Egyptian Methods’
Löwy’s ‘Memory Pictures’
Erwin Panofsky on ‘Egyptian Methods’, Schäfer and Löwy
‘Phenomenal Regression to the Real Object’
The Origins of ‘Schema’: F. C. Bartlett’s Remembering and the ‘Effort After Meaning’
Refinements of ‘Schema’, and the Final Formula
Many Metaphors of Mind: ‘Mental Sets’, ‘Models’ and ‘Maps’
Ethological Perspectives: Substitutes, Classes and Innate Releasing Mechanisms
Part Three—Problems of the Symbol
Chapter 7: Franz Boas’s Theory of the Beholder’s Share
Primitive Art and Boasian Anthropology
Boasian Iconographic Disjunction—The Case of the Chilkat Blanket
Explaining Contradiction: Formalism, Memory and Translation
What Is ‘Reading-In’?
Reading-In as a Theory of Projection
Aspective Obligatoriness in Seeing and in Natural Language
Boasian Structuralism?
Chapter 8: ‘Perspective as “Symbolic Form”’: The Dialogues between Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger and Erwin Panofsky
Pictorial Perspective and the Symbolic Forms of Space
Cassirer, Heidegger, and Hegel’s Ladder
Transcendental Imagination and Sensuous Reason
The Successions and Recursions of Perspective
Chapter 9: Erwin Panofsky’s Art History and the ‘Tyranny of Humanism’
Art History and ‘The Humanities’
The ‘Two Cultures’
‘Art History as a Humanistic Discipline’
Philosophy of Humanism
Art History and the Tyranny of the Humanities
Part Four—Philosophy and Anthropology of Art
Chapter 10: Arthur Danto on the Birth of Art
Natural Pictorial Competence and Natural Artistic Capacity
Art in the Narrow Sense: Vorkunsten and Transfiguration
Art in the Larger Sense: Ausderkunstweltkunstleren and Pre-Historical Art
Chapter 11: Analogue and Digital Pictures in the Age of New Media (Homage to Nelson Goodman)
Analogue and Digital in Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art
‘The Sketch’: Pictorial Symbol Schemes
Pictorial Schemes as Analogue
‘Continuous Correlation’ in Analogue Symbol Schemes
The De-Differentiation of Analogue and Digital
Co-Mingling Analogue and Digital in New Media Art
Making Analogies Digitally
Digital Analogy to the Digital World—or to the Analogue?
Chapter 12: Abducting the Agency of Art: Alfred Gell’s Anthropology of Art
Abducting and Indexing
Gellograms and Art History
The Phenomenology of the Art-Index and its Agency
Indecipherability, Plurality, Regress and Opacity in the Abduction of Agency
Part Five—Visual Culture Studies and World Art Studies
Chapter 13: Michael Baxandall and Art-Historical Reconstruction
The Triangle of Reenactment and the Idiographic Stance
Popper, Gombrich, and Baxandall on ‘Historism’
Reenactment in Panofsky’s Iconology
Reenactment in Collingwood’s Philosophy of History
Baxandall and the Reenactment of Thought in Art
No Re-Thinking in Art History
The Parameters of Art-Historical Reconstruction
‘Good Pictures’ and Visual Cultures
Idiography and Nomology in Art History
From Cosmology to Connoisseurship
Chapter 14: The Analytics of Visual Culture Studies
Art History and Visual Culture Studies
‘Visuality’: Visual Culture Studies and Visual Studies
Cultural Studies and Aesthetics
Analytics of Visual Culture: ‘Look’ and ‘Likeness’
Chapter 15: Radical WAS: Art, History and World Art Studies
WAS and the Diversity of World Arts
WAS and Globalisation
The Historical Order of World Art: Form-Classes and the Rule of Series
The Historical Order of World Art: Conjunction and Devolution
The Ontology and the (Pre-)Historicality of Art in WAS
Chapter 16: ‘Abstraction to the Notional’: David Summers’s Principle of World Art History
Summers’s Post-Formalism
Abstraction
Abstraction to the Notional
The Evolutionary Paleoanthropology of Abstraction to the Notional
Potential and Resistance in Becoming-Form
Abstraction from Size and the Matter of Sizing in Metric Naturalism
Abstractions of Planarity
Gombrich and Summers on Western Modernism
The Qua-Operator in Facture
Part Six—Art, Eye, and Brain
Chapter 17: John Onians’s Neuroarthistory
John Onians’s ‘Neuroarthistory’
The Fundamental Propositions of Neuroarthistory
Jasper Johns’s No (1961)
Melville Herskovits’s Anthropology of Visual Perception
Gombrich’s ‘Schemas’ and Neuroarthistory
Baxandall’s ‘Period Eye’ and Neuroarthistory
Bildwissenschaft and Neuroarthistory
Psychoanalysis and Neuroarthistory
Positive Plasticity and Destructive Plasticity
‘Neuro’ and ‘Evo-Devo’
Evolution and Speciation of the Visual Brain
Neuroarthistory as Formalism
Recursions and Regress
Chapter 18: The Mondrian Stimulus
Designing a Colour Mondrian Stimulus
‘Binding’ Unbound?
The Mondrian Stimulus Bottom-Up and Top-Down
A Real Mondrian in Different Visualities
Will the Real Mondrian Please Stand Up?
Forms of Likeness: The Afterlives of the Stimuli
What Makes the Difference?
Why Mondrian?
Afterword:
Afterwards, by Sarah Betzer
“But I am an art historian…” by Aron Vinegar
