Margaret Iversen

Art and thought

Art and Thought is a collection of newly commissioned essays that explores the relationship between the discipline of art history and important movements in the history of western thought. •Brings together newly commissioned essays that explore the relationship between the discipline of art history and movements in the history of western thought. •Considers the impact of the writings of key thinkers, including Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger, on the way in which objects are perceived and understood and histories of art are constructed, deconstructed, and reconfigured according to varying sets of philosophical frameworks. •Introduces the reader to the dynamic interface between philosophical reflections and art practices. •Part of the New Interventions in Art History series, which is published in conjunction with the Association of Art Historians.

In the Blind Field: Hopper and the Uncanny

Freud’s concept of the uncanny is used in this article to interpret Hopper’s paintings and to explain why they appear to have a double valence – at once nostalgic and threatening. The famous House by the Railroad (1925), for example, is often thought to depict a forlorn remnant of an outmoded America, yet it also served as the model for the Old Bates House in Hitchcock’s Psycho. First, several modalities of the uncanny – doubles, traumatic encounters with death, life-like dolls and haunted houses – are explored in relation to Hopper’s characteristic motifs. But this attention to subject matter is later supplemented by an inquiry into the formal uncanniness of Hopper’s compositions. Here the notion of the ‘blind field’, a concept borrowed from film theory, is proposed. Both film stills and Hopper’s paintings suggest that the centre of gravity is invisible, outside the frame, either spatially or temporally. The blind field incites our desire to see, animates the picture, and makes the old house look back at us. The ambivalence of the uncanny object, both familiar and unfamiliar, was recently demonstrated by Rachel Whiteread’s House. It was perceived both as a monument to some mythical homogeneous East End community and, especially in view of the controversy it sparked, as a ghostly reminder of the area’s bitter history of racial hatred. While nostalgia assumes that the past is safely lost, the uncanny shows how it can erupt unbidden in the present.

Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean

“Analogue: On Tacita Dean and Zoe Leonard” draws on surrealist conceptions of automatism and chance. It engages with current debates concerning artistic agency and automatism that hinge on the difference between digital and analogue photographic processes. The debate is joined in this paper through the work of two artists who attach great value to the analogue medium. Both Leonard and Dean are resistant to the inexorable rise of digital photographic technologies and the corresponding near obsolescence of the analogue. In response, they are concerned to make salient the virtues or specific character of analogue film such as its indexicality and openness to chance—characteristics the full significance of which may only have become apparent under pressure of digitalization. Drawing on Eric Santner’s account of the concept of “exposure,” Iversen draws attention to a kind of photographic art practice that is marked by contingency and seared by reality.

Introduction: Photography between Art History and Philosophy

The essays collected in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly the subject of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2003), Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) (2005), or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA (2006–7). Indeed, Wall’s most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels (2011), situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography’s increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate’s first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way.