Dennis Hollingsworth

Swimmer

forming conceptions

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breaking preconceptions

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all conceptions become preconceptions

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Link: Dan's Iconoduel's "Looky, Looky"

They are getting into it over Kuspit; history and criticism; the Modern and the Contemporary. Specifically, Kuspit's recent "The Contemporary and the Historical":

There may be a history of modern art and a history of traditional art, but there can be no history of postmodern art, for the radically contemporary can never be delimited by any single historical reading. Even if one was a Gibbon one could not fit all the pieces of contemporary art together in a unified narrative. In postmodernity that is no longer any such thing as the judgment of history, only an incomplete record of the contemporary. If every piece of art is contemporary, no one piece can be valued more highly than any other, except from a certain psychosocial perspective. But every perspective turns out to be procrustean because it shuts out art that contradicts its premises.

Smart fellows all. But they seemed confused... or rather, I don't feel like joining the debate in their terms. I see history a little differently, maybe it's because of my own peculiar timeline.

Are they are throwing up their hands over the task of describing the PostModern? (well, nickname me "Gibbon".)

Don't give up so fast, fellas. The art world may not be the best vantage point from which to view history. Art people by and large seem to be too inside to see the contours clearly. (But I should be wise enough to cautiously pull back from claiming to hold onto the certain panoramic view.)

Perhaps our terminology is mangled:

The Contemporary is what the Modern used to be, except we calcified the original term with historical narrative. Language is fugitive, plastic, apt to be spoiled or badly used. Now that we have museums of modern art, we need a name for the phantasmagoria that is art-in-the-making....

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I think of the Didion quote that I flag in the colophon:

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live... we look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of the narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." (from "The White Album", Joan Didion)

A history named is not fixed, or an impediment to another history named... one sermon in the suicide won't sideline the moral lesson in the murder of five. So there is no straitjacket of interpretation that Kuspit seems to fear.

We live in phantasmagoria but we move through it by freezing it... then breaking it... so that we may freeze it again in another way.

Fluidity.

No wonder so much of our thinking seems like so much stone. Impass. Deadlocked. Cold sweat from the "end of history". Life in the river delta. Mosquitos. Methane. Sunburn. "Stella!"

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Then I stumble across this link, an article on "Roger Cass, the Last Optimist" (I like optimists) and I become fascinated by this passage:

In other words, Cass learned an intensely calming lesson: Change is a vastly overrated concept. "Things don't change," explains Malcolm Tulloch, 50, one of Cass's colleagues who runs Tulloch Research, a London-based hedge-fund advisory firm. The way Cass sees it, the future only has two tricks up its sleeve: bigger and smaller. Good times alternate with bad times at predictable intervals. If nothing changes much -- if the fundamentals stay the same -- then you can actually see what's coming next.

It is a lesson that Cass learned from the writings of a French historian named Fernand Braudel, who conceived the notion of projective history: an oxymoronic way to discern the future by studying the past. According to Braudel, you can learn only so much from change -- from the movements of great men, wars, and treaties, from CEO hirings and firings, or from the rise and fall of big companies. The future can't be found on the front page of today's newspapers. Rather, the future can be found by looking at what doesn't change. By studying the eternal truths of history, you can see what has to come next.

Cass, like Braudel, works at a level where things don't change. He studies in detail the small, permanent features of the economy: interest rates, housing, loans, money, taxes, energy consumption. These things are immortal in economies. They have been around ever since the time of Hammurabi, and they are still around today. Trade is as old as the sea itself. Consumer confidence is an eternal condition. Technology has always existed. Trace the deepest movements of economies, and they will tell the story of how change actually occurs in the economy. The message that economies carry is that change is very rarely new. Instead, it unfolds in clear patterns. It unfolds in waves.

I think of how this can help us view art history in a different way than before. (Do you want to get dizzy? Find the section in the article entitled "Sidebar: The Five New Economies" and try to match art history to the five historical waves described.)

I begin to realise something that I had always (unconsciously) assumed all along: art history alone is insufficient to describe it. Other histories are needed. Context.

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I google for Braudel:

Until the turn of the century, traditional history was built around the acts and facts of "great men", political and military personalities who became the stuff of legends: Alexander and Caesar, Gengis Khan, Louis XIV and Napoleon. These exceptional individuals defined the scale of history; their deaths signalled a change of era and also of books and authors.

Without contesting the value of these accounts, Fernand Braudel nonetheless proposed a shift in the historian's focus. Beneath the rapid succession of events on a human scale, which the historian likens to ripples on the ocean's surface, Fernand Braudel attempts to charter a course through deeper waters to find the slower currents typical of the history of human groups relating to their environment, the structures that shape societies, be it essential trading and sailing routes or mentalities.

A two-speed history

With Braudel, the subject matter of history changes because the time frame of history changes. The swift pace of events, the short-lived and dramatic moments of battles are replaced by the lengthy rhythms of material life. However, with such a change in perspective, he has also had to rethink history itself. Braudel demonstrates quite clearly that history does not exist independently of the historian's gaze. As in all knowledge, the historian intervenes at every stage in the making of history; indeed, history per se does not exist, only past phenomena submerged under the dark cloak of all-consuming time. The approach adopted by Braudel leads him to tell of a history that not only calls on witness accounts and psychology but also on geography, political economics and sociology. Braudel introduces new disciplines like new colours on the palette of history: he brings social sciences to history.

Posted by Dennis at May 18, 2005 7:50 PM