Karen Lang. Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. xiii + 295 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8014-8855-9; $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-4166-0.
Reviewed by Emily Levine (Department of History, Stanford University)
Published on H-German (June, 2007)
Seeing, Representing, Knowing
This volume is a thoughtful, challenging book on many important themes that touch on philosophy, art history, history, and art criticism. It capitalizes on a recent interest in the so-called founding thinkers of art history, including Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg, and their work on the perception of images.[1] As a philosophical investigation of the perennial problem of perception, this volume is an impressive feat, though readers may detect an accompanying structural weakness in the work.
The book begins with an exposition of Plato's dialogue Theaetetus (c. 369 BCE) in which Socrates and Theaetetus attempt to answer the classic epistemological question: What is knowledge? In this dialogue they chart the movement from seeing to representing to knowing. To achieve knowledge, Socrates concludes, requires establishing a point of view outside the scene of perception, which thereby enables the transformation from so-called "sight to insight" (p. 1).
The transformation from seeing to representing to knowing, Lang argues, is, in effect, the problem posed by disciplinarity. As is the case with other disciplines, to be successful, art historians must establish points of view that transform aesthetic phenomena into objects of knowledge. In contrast to disciplines like science, in art history, subject matter does not inherently lend itself to a traceable, progressive narrative. As Lang explains, "While the classification of a unique work of art may appear to offer nothing short of an epistemological paradox, art history has resolved this dilemma rather well through its primary analytical category: style" (emphasis in original, p. 193). Indeed, style categorizes, classifies, and orders with the goal of turning aesthetic phenomena into objects of a credible discipline, enabling their study according to an agreed upon "disciplinary objectivity." The balance of the remainder of the book is an examination of this conceptual problem in different iterations by art historians and theorists from the beginning of the twentieth century: the pioneering efforts of Erwin Panofsky at the discipline's earliest stage; the problematic of the Kantian idealized subject; the challenge posed by Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer's "symbolic form" to historical narrative; and Alois Riegl's and Walter Benjamin's notions of time and history.
The concepts of the title, "chaos and cosmos," forge the metaphorical link between the epistemological and art-historical problem. The introduction's epigraph, by Wassily Kandinsky, makes this connection clear: "Technically, every work of art comes into being in the same way as the cosmos--by means of catastrophes, which ultimately create out of the cacophony of the various instruments that symphony we call the music of the spheres" (quoted, p. 1). The book accordingly addresses "the interplay of chaos and cosmos in history, art history, philosophy, and epistemology, tracing shifts in point of view and transformations of aesthetic objects into historical objects and even into objects of knowledge." Lang continues, "Taken together, the chapters relay the manifestations of practice--and, I would argue, a condition--at the heart of the academic study of art in the early years of the last century in Germany" (p. 10).
The book does not follow a chronological or even a thematic organization. Rather, each chapter is linked by the central philosophical and epistemological problem, returning, on occasion, to the leitmotif of the relationship between chaos and cosmos. Chapter 1, "Points of View in Panofsky's Early Theoretical Essays," takes as its starting point the question from Panofsky's 1940 essay, "History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," in which the author asks: "How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?" (quoted, p. 15). Lang then maps Plato's structure of seeing, representing, and knowing onto the early history of the discipline in order to explain how Panofsky sought to establish an absolute principle on which to ground the analytic study of images. Influenced by the attempts of his predecessors Riegl and Wölfflin, Panofsky's early theoretical work nevertheless sought to improve upon their respective concepts of style and Kunstwollen, or artistic will.
In chapter 2, "The Dialectics of Decay: Rereading the Kantian Subject," Lang returns to Panofsky's model and its inspiration in the works of Immanuel Kant to examine the Kantian legacy in art history. According to Lang, art historians, Panofsky included, have simplified the Kantian subject in order to assimilate his ideas of viewing for epistemological clarity. According to Lang, "The idealized subject of art history is not so much a person but a framework, one within which and by which judgments are made in the history of art and on the objects of its study" (p. 86). This chapter is unconventional because of the way Lang strains the so-called "Kantian edifice" by incorporating ruin, as emblem and idea, within the framework of Kant's own system. Lang concedes that ruins, while a topic of fascination and scholarship in the late eighteenth century, were not themselves present as an object of analysis in Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790). Nonetheless, they prove fruitful in Lang's analysis. Analyzing Kant in light of ruins, Lang argues, yields a picture of the subject that may prove less coherent than either Panofsky or his American counterpart, Clement Greenberg, suggests.
Chapter 3, "Goethe, Warburg, Cassirer: Symbolic Form as Orientation," examines Warburg's and Cassirer's idea of "symbolic form," an idea which, in contrast to the idealized Kantian subject, defies the "easy slide from nature to reason" (p. 87). Influenced by J. W. Goethe's concept of "symbolic form," Warburg and Cassirer understood "symbolic forms" to be elements akin to myth, language, religion, art, and knowledge that shaped the world of experience at a given point in time. Warburg and Cassirer make an interesting test case for Lang because, as she argues, they capture the dialectic at the heart of representation through cultural forms: art creates distance from the world; however, that distance is precisely what is required for understanding it. The dialectic is more elegantly represented by Goethe's dictum, which also provides the epigraph for the chapter: "There is no way of more surely avoiding the world than by art, and it is by art that you form the surest link with it" (quoted, p. 88).
In this chapter, Lang draws a useful parallel between the groundbreaking achievements of Albert Einstein within the discipline of science and the theoretical efforts of Ernst Cassirer within the discipline of philosophy. In its ability to uncover order in the so-called chaos of the cosmos, the theory of relativity, Cassirer wrote, "represents the style of modern physics" (p. 123). In this way, Lang argues, Cassirer claimed to have found in the concept of myth the corresponding "style" of philosophy: "If mythical thought reveals a magical notion of causality," Cassirer wrote, "it also intimates the direction causality can take in scientific thought, where the concept of causality is demonstrated through the powers of intellectual analysis alone" (p. 123). For Cassirer, the style of philosophy was no more relative than the style of physics; both were abstract principles that created credible systems of knowing. In contrast, Warburg never succumbed to a notion of style that harnessed disorder to a theory of cosmos or art history. As a result, Warburg's art theory has posed difficulties for those who attempt to reconcile it with a diachronic notion of art historical development.
Chapter 4, "The Experiences of Time and the Time of History: Riegl's Age Value and Benjamin's Aura," examines the mediation of the image through a framework of memory. To this end, Lang examines aspects of memory and history in the writings of Alois Riegl and Walter Benjamin. Both Riegl and Benjamin sought to open the field to new perspectives on the philosophy of history and to challenge reigning systems of aesthetic value. They emphasized individual perception and the experience of the beholder, countered the faculty of reason, and focused on emotion and memory in relationship to aesthetic and historical experience. Specifically, Riegl's age value and Benjamin's idea of aura both resisted the subsuming of the past into fixed narratives in the present. Lang observes: "Riegl and Benjamin clearly understood the rub: In order for facts or objects to be meaningful, we have to be able to relate them to concepts; conceptual thinking, however, constrains what we might 'know' about an aesthetic object. Widening the conceptual compass of the object and its perception, Riegl and Benjamin aimed to bring to light aspects of aesthetic objects and aesthetic experience suppressed or neglected in previous art-historical accounts. At the same time, they sought to bring object, meaning, and context together in new and provocative ways" (p. 152).
In her conclusion, "Encountering the Image," Lang points to the "Berenson Scandal," in which Bernard Berenson, "the supposedly incorruptible connoisseur," took a bribe to authenticate Italian Renaissance paintings of dubious provenance, in order to question the idea of the disinterested connoisseur. As Lang demonstrates, the scandal raises questions at the heart of art historical methodology and the themes of her book: Who constitutes a proper aesthetic judge? When is objectivity possible? Is there an immanent unitary truth or singular meaning in a work of art? Lang concludes by arguing for a "dialectical objectivity" that incorporates subjectivity into the framework of viewing aesthetic phenomena because, as the Berenson affair reminds us, "vision is always the view of someone from somewhere" (p. 193).
After a long and difficult book, the afterword feels overwhelming. Lang's "Toward an Aesthetic Way of Knowing," is important, however, to the extent that her book is motivated by a desire not only to investigate epistemological problems of the past, but also to do art history in the present. Lang presents the work of contemporary video artist Bill Viola as an example of precisely how one might incorporate objective and subjective points of view simultaneously. In his video installation, Stations (1994), Viola projects images of different stages of life on upside-down screens plunged in water in a darkened space. Because the images projected under water upside down are also reflected upright on slabs positioned on the floor, the thirty-minute looping installation does not enable one single point of view. "Rather than an overcoming of nature by the subject," Lang explains, "Stations presents subjects suspended in nature and invites us to contemplate the implications of their immersion" (p. 211). Lang concludes that aesthetic images are best considered through a dialectical form of objectivity that includes more than one form of viewing, as in Viola's installation--subjective and objective, presence and distance.
The strength of Lang's book--its far-reaching grasp of a profound problem at the heart of much academic methodology not limited to art history--is also, in a way, the source of its structural weakness. While Lang asserts the importance of historical context, which she defines loosely as the years between the 1880s and 1940, she does not distinguish between the cultural and intellectual contexts of her subjects. Allusions to cultural context such as modernism or World War I appear throughout the text, although Lang is not precise about the necessary link between these contexts and the ideas themselves. A clearer connection between these historical references and intellectual issues would have contributed to a richer portrayal of the matters at stake.
Impressively, Lang occasionally extends her inquiry further and hints at what is at stake ethically in this project: Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic form is so appealing, for example, precisely because it resists the totalizing that falls easily into totalitarianism. Concluding her discussion of the Berenson scandal, Lang asserts that "the aesthetic object remains a stubbornly ethical presence in the age of global capitalism" (p. 198). While she does not completely unfold this line of thought, it offers another reason why this book will undoubtedly remain of interest to scholars in many disciplines for some time.
Note
[1]. The collection of essays edited by Philippe-Alain Michaud reflects a growing interest in the Warburg circle that extends across several disciplines: Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, tr. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004).
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Citation:
Emily Levine. Review of Lang, Karen, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13309
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