Christopher S. Wood

A questionnaire on materialisms

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

‘Curious pictures’ and the art of description

Abstract This paper is a comment on the meaning of trim contours, clean and copious detail, and glossy finish in northern painting of the seventeenth century. This manner of painting was often used to render objects like flowers, fruits, animals, and insects, although in principle it could represent any object. Such painting is sometimes called ‘descriptive’ because it appears unusually faithful to natural models.

A Newer Protagoras

In 1929, The Art Bulletin published a mock Platonic dialogue, “The New Protagoras,” by the philosopher and historian of art theory A. Philip McMahon; it summarized current thinking about art and art history, proposing that an idealistic aesthetics could serve as a corrective to the excesses of science, and that a future art history might seek to effect the critical integration of those seemingly incompatible approaches. “A Newer Protagoras” starts from the premise that seventy-seven years later, the inhabitants of Elysium would need further help making sense of the earthly intellectual landscape. Two disciples attempt to bring the Sophist Protagoras up-to-date.

Allegorie und Prophezeiung

Die Beziehung zwischen Allegorie und Kunst in der Moderne ist nicht offensichtlich, nicht entspannt. Im Jahr 1648 beschrieb Carlo Ridolfi ein Bild Tizians in der Sammlung Borghese in Rom schlicht als „due donne vicine a una fonte“ [Abb. 37]. Seit 1693 trägt es den Titel Amor divino e Amor profano oder einen ähnlich lautenden Namen.1 Fast jeder, der sich zu dem um 1515 entstandenen Werk geäußert hat, hat auch versucht, es zu deuten. Der geheimnisvolle Reiz des Bildes wird dabei in eine sprachliche Formel übersetzt, die auf eine Maxime über die menschliche Natur oder eine Aussage über das menschliche Streben hinausläuft. Man geht davon aus, dass das Bild auf versteckte Weise Bedeutung vermittelt: die Interaktion zweier Frauen, von denen die eine bekleidet und die andere nackt ist, und die auf einem Brunnenrand einander gegenübersitzen, ist schließlich eine Situation, der man in der gewöhnlichen Erfahrung nicht oft begegnen dürfte. Deshalb wird angenommen, dass es dafür eine besondere Motivation gibt: die Figuren müssen in genau dieser Weise angeordnet worden sein, um uns etwas zu sagen, was wir nicht wissen. Die Unwahrscheinlichkeit der Szene signalisiert demnach, dass es um mehr geht als man mit bloßem Auge erkennen kann. Die gefühlte Anwesenheit einer unsichtbaren Motivation, die hinter der Zeichenoberfläche verborgen ist, reicht aus, um dieses Gemälde als Allegorie zu identifizieren. Aber ist Tizians Gemälde tatsächlich eine Allegorie? Und falls es eine ist, welche Position kommt einer derartigen Allegorie innerhalb einer Genealogie moderner Kunst zu? Genau besehen ist die Allegorie eine Verdoppelung von Rede. Eine Allegorie ist ein Text, bei dem sich herausstellt, dass er etwas anderes sagt, als es bei der ersten Lektüre den Anschein hatte, sobald er mit Hilfe eines Schlüssels entziffert wird. Nicht klar ist jedoch, ob ein Bild überhaupt eine Allegorie sein kann. Tizians Gemälde zeigt uns ein Bild zwei-

Source and trace

The physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker recounted a walk in the Black Forest with Martin Heidegger. The pair came to a halt on a thick patch of damp moss. Weizsäcker pointed out that the path had come to an end. The philosopher looked at him “craftily” and explained: “It is a Holzweg, it leads to the sources [er führt zu den Quellen]. Of course I didn’t put that in the book.”1 Heidegger could not put it in the book entitled Holzwege (1950) because the two metaphors, Holzweg and Quelle, are incompatible. In a brief foreword Heidegger had explained the book’s title. The Holzwege are “forest paths” that seem to lead nowhere. They are cut into the forest on an ad hoc basis by woodcutters to permit them to transport wood out of the forest. When you follow such a path you do not know where you are heading. Your inquiry is not guided by the idea of a goal. To walk the Holzweg is to accept a condition of discontinuity. You have abandoned the known and you cannot say what lies ahead. The saturated ground noticed by Weizsäcker disturbs the metaphor of the Holzweg because it suggests that the woodcutter’s decision was not arbitrary, but rather guided by knowledge of the location of hidden springs. The damp patch, a trace of a source, explains the abrupt cessation of the path, which until then had seemed mysterious. The real nature of the Black Forest Holzweg exceeds Heidegger’s metaphor. The forest introduces the alternative metaphor, unwanted by Heidegger, of the source as a destination. The wet ground at the end of the path relocates the metaphor of the Holzweg, and the philosophical project it shapes, within a description of culture as a perpetual falling away from authenticity that can only be reversed by a return to the source. Culture, according to this account which Heidegger wished to distance himself from, is the result of an imperfect handing down of messages and symbols from the past to the present, an ongoing accumulating and forgetting. In this version of things, understanding, including the inquiry into being itself, is at the mercy of the transmission. The one who is dissatisfied with this dependency on the course of discourse is invited to correct transmitted culture by returning to the source.2 The source corrects transmission because it delivers a first and most trustworthy message. The source is a rising (surgere) or springing up of subterranean waters. The source or spring brings hidden waters to the light of day. The source is the threshold between an unknown

Introduction: Warburg's Library and Its Legacy

In this introduction to a Common Knowledge special issue on the Warburg Institute, the authors argue that the Institute remains today—as it has been, in different forms, for almost a century—one of Europes central institutions for the study of cultural history. At once a rich and uniquely organized library, a center for doctoral and postdoctoral research, and a teaching faculty, the Institute was first envisioned by Aby Warburg, a pioneering historian of art and culture from a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg. Warburg rejected the traditional view that the classical tradition was a simple, purely rational Greek creation, inherited by modern Europe. He argued that it was as much Mesopotamian as Greek in origin, as at home in the Islamic as in the European world, and as often irrational as rational in its content—and on the basis of this rich vision he devised brilliant new interpretations of medieval and Renaissance symbols and ideas. Warburgs chosen associate Fritz Saxl put his creation on a firm institutional base, first in Hamburg and then, after a narrow escape from the Nazi regime, in London. For all the changes the Institute has undergone over the decades since then, it continues to ask the questions that Warburg was the first to raise and to build on the methods that he created.

Iconoclasts and Iconophiles: Horst Bredekamp in Conversation with Christopher S. Wood

Christopher S. Wood: Your dissertation, published in 1975, focused on historical actors—Early Christian and Byzantine theologians, the Hussite rebels of late medieval Bohemia— who mistrusted and even destroyed cult images. And yet you began that book with an analysis of a journalistic photograph of a Cambodian soldier in a foxhole, cleaning his weapon, with an image of the Buddha at his side (Fig. 1). The photograph is “fascinated,” in your reading, by an earlier kind of image, a pretechnical image, that had real power—a power that we might be in a position to recover today. Your recent book Theorie des Bildakts (Theory of the Picture Act) makes the case that images do not merely reproduce a prior reality but rather actively create our reality. The power of images is ours to harness, you argue. Today you seem to have little patience for iconophobes who worry that we might be deceived by pictures. I hope we will be able to discuss these paradoxes. Let me begin by asking you how iconoclasm became a topic of art historical research for you and your generation.

Painting and Plurality

The images: can we picture to ourselves, when we hear of a plurality of images, not a collection of discrete individual images but an abundance unsurveyable and without internal differentiation? Just as one hears in so many languages of the waters: die Wässer, les eaux. . . . In the flux of experience it may be no more possible to isolate a singular “image” than it is to isolate a singular “water.” The waters, according to Roberto Calasso in his meditation on Hindu mythology, Ka, symbolize the glittering flow of inner images, the ceaseless proliferation of specters and simulacra, that constitutes consciousness.1 Nevertheless, in the most prevalent theories of images developed by theology, by classical epistemology, by the academies of art, premodern and modern alike, and by anthropology, the image is paradigmatically still, framed, and graspable. The image stands alone, outside time. Whereas in experience, which is a flow of images in time, every image is in the process of becoming another image, for percepts, memories, and dreams are images generated and coordinated by the body. According to Henri Bergson, perception is nothing other than an aggregate of images “referred to” one particular image, the body.2 The body itself is an image insofar as it receives movement, and in

Notation of visual information in the earliest archeological scholarship

A text inscribed on a durable support always looks like better historical evidence than a text merely written on perishable parchment or paper. An inscription carved on a stone tablet, for instance, gives the impression of having arrived directly from the past. Unlike a written text, it does not appear to be dependent on a chain of handmade copies with all its risk of error and misunderstanding. Material artifacts in general have great evidentiary authority, whether inscribed or not: portraits stamped on coins or carved in relief or in three dimensions; mosaics, frescoes, and tapestries; urns and sarcophagi; monuments and buildings.