Keith Moxey

Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation

Preface Introduction 1. Women, Art, and Power: Linda Nochlin 2. Semiology and Visual Interpretation: Norman Bryson 3. Using Language to do Business as Usual: Rosalind Krauss 4. What the Spectator Sees: Richard Wollheim 5. Depiction and the Golden Calf: Michael Podro 6. Description and the Phenomenology of Perception: Arthur Danto 7. Real Metaphor: Toward a Redefinition of the Conceptual Image: David Summers.

Impossible Distance: Past and Present in the Study of Dürer and Grünewald

This essay uses the historiography on Albrecht Dürer and Matthias Grünewald to argue that while the distinction between past and present is an indispensable device for historical writing, it is one for which no essential definition can be offered. The changing nature of the distancing techniques developed to keep the past at bay offers fascinating insight into the character of the assumptions brought to interpretation by individual scholars, as well as the way in which historical narratives respond to the social agendas of the cultures that create them.

Visual Studies, Historiography and Aesthetics:

This dialogue is an opportunity for Mark Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey to speak together in print for the first time since their edited collection entitled The Subjects of Art History (1998). Concerned, in that volume, with the prospect that ‘art history, like many other fields in the humanities, has entered a post-epistemological age’, the three editors wrote opening ‘position papers’ outlining, respectively, their concern for the (Kantian) philosophical imperatives of/in art history, and how the specters of context haunt the writing of the history of art, and the historiography of art history as Hegelian. Overall, their collection was a chance to reassess the role that the philosophies of history of Kant and Hegel and other philosophical, semiotic, queer, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and museological traditions concerned with ‘history’ have played, and continue to play, in art history’s efforts to legitimate its past and predict its future. In many ways, then, The Subjects of Art History was an attempt, from within the discipline of art history, to picture that area of inquiry in an expanded field that we may continue to call art history or might be more usefully designated as visual studies. The dialogue in this issue of the journal of visual culture is an opportunity to continue that conversation. Specifically, it is a chance to rethink the question of the place of both ‘aesthetics’ and ‘history’ in and through visual studies. As such, this dialogue seeks to address questions such as: how might visual studies rethink what we thought we already knew? Are both critics and supporters of visual studies right to believe that ‘aesthetics’ has nothing to do with visual studies? Why might they be right, or wrong? (And if they are wrong, how does visual studies offer us an occasion to engage with aesthetics in new ways?) What status do or should the philosophies of history of Kant and Hegel, say, have in visual studies? How does visual studies affect such models of history, or what does it mean for it no longer to believe it needs History at all? Or, to put it more kindly, is there something that visual studies can teach us about Kant and Hegel and subsequent historiographical thought? By no means looking to resolve these questions, this dialogue is motivated by an urge to problematize in productive ways the accusation that visual studies does not do, care for, take into consideration, or otherwise understand ‘history’. It hopes to indicate why visual studies has to deal with history, however conceived, if for no other reason than at least (and most importantly) that it can attend necessarily to the genealogies of the study of our visual cultures.

A “Virtual Cosmopolis”: Partha Mitter in Conversation with Keith Moxey

Keith Moxey: Reading and rereading your work in the past few years, Partha, has left me deeply impressed not only by the historical range and empirical breadth of your scholarship but by the unique perspective with which you have found to frame it. The unprecedented prominence acquired by non-Western fields poses problems as well as opportunities for the discipline’s traditional structure, which is based on a received canon of works of Euro-American art and a repertoire of established critical approaches. Your scholarship is remarkable in that it manages to recognize the distinctiveness of Indian art while locating it in the context of Western modernism. Which came first, your interest in the European tradition or the Indian past?