James Elkins

Art History and Images That Are Not Art

A number of disciplines are showing new interest in the study of images. Although art history has the most developed critical and historiographic tools for interpreting images, art historians have not ventured far outside the domains of fine art and popular imagery. As a result, image studies in other disciplines are proceeding independently, without utilizing art historys critical apparatus. This essay introduces image studies and shows how even the most technical illustrations can be just as rich in pictorial meanings as central examples of fine art.

Preface to the book A Skeptical Introduction to Visual Culture

Last year members of the editorial board of the journal of visual culture were asked for brief statements about the state of the discipline. My contribution, which follows, was framed, Borges-fashion, as the Preface to an imaginary book. In the months since I submitted the Preface, I have begun to think more seriously about actually writing such a text. Further ruminations, along with sketches for chapters, are on my website, www.jameselkins.com.

On the conceptual analysis of gardens

Abstract Garden history, unlike the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture, has no conceptual foundations. It lacks the elements of scholarly and critical consensus: a conventional set of interpretive methods, agreed-upon leading terms, ‘ruling metaphors,’ and descriptive protocols. Painting, for example, has a recurring set of critical problems, including fictive space, the picture plane, the position and nature of the beholder, and notions of realism and representation. In art history, even the most abstract theoretical accounts of painting dwell on these same topics. The more specialized organs of art history, such as iconology, semiology, formal analysis, and psychoanalytic criticism, all return to these issues as if to a kind of home.

Visual Practices Across the University

All images in this essay are copyright as indicated. The author, James Elkins, takes all responsibility for copyright issues. In 2005, I was working at the University College Cork in Ireland. Visual studies, film studies, and art history were expanding, and the time seemed right for a university-wide center for the study of images. I was interested in finding out who at the university was engaged with images, so I sent an email to all the faculty in the sixty-odd departments, asking who used images in their work. The responses developed into an exhibition that represented all the faculties of the university.

Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History

Part of a symposium on how digital technologies affect the practices of art and art history. The writer discusses new possibilities and problems that arise from the introduction of digital imagery and networking into the teaching of art history. New computer-based technologies confront teachers of art with many opportunities, but a great deal remains to be done to find the most effective pedagogy to take advantage of them. Teachers must remember that their art historical knowledge and their experiences of how students learn are their most important assets. It is that knowledge that will allow them to give “added value” to the countless images of works of art that new technologies are making available.

Piero della Francesca and the Renaissance Proof of Linear Perspective

The extant Italian Renaissance treatises on perspective often mention its geometric foundation without making a rigorous connection between geometry and perspective practice. Renaissance texts are normally didactic manuals whose authors take it for granted that perspective is a vera scienza. Alberti mentions but does not record a proof for his construzione legittima; the missing demonstration can be identified with two propositions in Book I of Pieros De prospectiva pingendi. The proof, which contains some lacunae, is here annotated and translated. It is unusual by modern standards, both because it exemplifies the quattrocento love of proportions by proving more than is mathematically necessary, and because it reduces the three-dimensional conditions of perspective to a two-dimensional configuration of lines. Most unexpected, in light of subsequent developments in perspective, is the small part played by optics in a “science” predicated upon vision.

What does Peirce's sign theory have to say to art history?

Art history has lost and rediscovered semiotics several times since the 1950s, and at the moment writers employ an eclectic mixture of theories derived mainly from Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce. Of the two, Peirce is possibly the more influential model, on account of his tripartite theory of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. (The Saussurean model is identified more closely with the poststructuralist moment in art history, beginning in the 1970s.) The question of semiotics is once again topical now that visual culture is consolidating as a discipline, because the new field can choose from a wide range of semiotic practices – or it can choose to bypass semiotics altogether. This essay is a contribution to that current state of affairs. My principal point is that Peirce is much stranger than he is taken to be: he is idiosyncratic and demanding, and at times outlandishly hermetic. For most of what art history and visual studies aim to do, Peirce is simply not necessary; and when he is pertinent, he is so mainly as a model for concertedly logical thinking of a sort that is rare in visual studies or art history.

On the Arnolfini Portrait and the Lucca Madonna: Did Jan van Eyck Have a Perspectival System?

Exchanges on the topic of Jan van Eycks pictorial constructions have been going on intermittently since the turn of the century. The most recent hypothesis, put forward in 1982–83, has if anything clouded the issue further by proposing an entirely new “elliptical perspective.” The ensuing debate, which appeared in The Art Bulletin, raises fruitful questions for further research: the problem of knowing how accurate a reconstruction needs to be, and of how reconstructed lines should be interpreted. The present essay has two purposes. It attempts to settle the question of fan van Eycks perspective, at least in the case of the Arnolfini Portrait and the Lucca Madonna, and to introduce a new, higher level of accuracy and reproducibility for perspectival reconstructions in general.1

Critical Response: What Do We Want Photography to Be? A Response to Michael Fried

938 1. I would argue two things about uses of the index and indexicality in photography theory. First, such readings have made use of a very selective reading of Peirce’s semiotic, ignoring for example the interdependence of all three kinds of signs; their division into trichotomies according to function (what Peirce calls firsts, seconds, and thirds); the fact that icon, index, and symbol are taken in relation to objects and that two other divisions name signs in relations to themselves and to what Peirce calls interpretants; and their ramification into divisions and even 59,049 cases. (In short: such readings are so abbreviated that it becomes unclear in what sense they are citations of Peirce’s semiotic at all.) Second, uses of the index in photography theory have tended to identify the indexicality with cause and effect, so that the work indexicality has been made to do could often have been done without any reference to Peirce. These points are discussed in my “What Does Peirce’s Sign System Have to Say to Art History?” Culture, Theory, and Critique 44, no. 1 (2003): 5–22. 2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981), p. 28; hereafter abbreviated CL. Critical Response: What Do We Want Photography to Be? A Response to Michael Fried

Art History and the Criticism of Computer-Generated Images

As the field of computer graphics expands, it tends to be taught in a manner that is increasingly isolated from the history of art. The author shows how computer graphics can reconnect to wider sources of meaning in three arenas: (1) continuous traditions spanning Western painting and contemporary rendering techniques, (2) linear perspective, and (3) drawing. The comparisons are used to demonstrate that the history of art is intimately associated with the exploration of computer-assisted imagery, even though it remains largely absent from its pedagogy.