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Abstract
This article addresses a series of problems regarding the definition of the periphery in art history and its relation with the concepts of space and time. It seeks to disentangle the periphery from its geographical association by examining how it has instead been constructed as a primarily temporal concept. For this purpose, a tentative definition of the periphery is advanced based on the example of eighteenth-century Portugal. Also analysed is what can be termed as the delay discourse on the periphery (patent in several national historiographies of art, with Portugal serving again as an example), which was criticized by Carlo Ginzburg and Enrico Castelnuovo, as well as Nicos Hadjinicolaou already in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a way out of the impasse of different or multiple temporalities (and the implication of fast and slow time) proposed by art historians from George Kubler to Keith Moxey, this article proposes the concept of historical time as developed in the writings of French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990), in his analysis of Capital by Karl Marx (1818–1883), as a useful category in deconstructing the ideological dimension of periphery's temporal character. Rejecting both longue durée and a linear, ideological reference time, Althusser's terminology and concepts offer an incentive to think anew of time and the periphery, while insisting on the fundamentally unequal power configurations that have shaped both the practice of art history and a discourse on the periphery that continues, for the most part, to be produced in the centre(s).
Acknowledgements
An initial version of this article was read at Mapping Uncharted Territories, the 11th Triannual Nordik Committee for Art History Conference in Reykjavik (May 2015), with the financial support of the Instituto de História da Arte. I would like to thank the organizers of the session “Expanding Perspectives on the Study of Art Historiography,” Hans Hayden and Charlotta Krispinsson, as well as the insightful comments of the participants in the debate, and particularly Terry Smith. I would also like to thank Visual Resources editor-in-chief Barbara Pezzini for her enthusiasm, keen eye and passionate commitment in producing this article.
ORCID
Foteini Vlachou http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9096-0213
Notes
1 Voice off, from William Dieterle, Portrait of Jennie, film, Vanguard Films Selznick Studio, 1948. Based on the novel by Robert Nathan, Portrait of Jennie (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940).
2 James Elkins, review of Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939, by S.A. Mansbach, The Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (December 2000): 783.
3 Wen C. Fong, “Wang Hui and Repossessing the Past,” in Wen C. Fong, Chin-Sung Chang, and Maxwell K. Hearn, Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632–1717), ed. Maxwell K. Hearn (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), 43–4.
4 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time. Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 26, makes a useful distinction between historical and chronological time: “Chronological time provides a measure for relations between different times within this ongoing history. It does not constitute this time qua historical time.”
5 Centre and periphery are here discussed as concepts; it is nowhere implied by the use of the single form that there is only one centre or one periphery. On the contrary, it is assumed as a given that these are multiple and, not infrequently, overlapping.
6 See Christopher B. Steiner, “Can the Canon Burst?,” The Art Bulletin 78, no. 2 (June 1996): 213–17 (from Michael Camille, Zeynep Çelik, John Onians, Adrian Rifkin, Christopher B. Steiner, “A Range of Critical Perspectives. Rethinking the Canon,” The Art Bulletin 78, no. 2 (June 1996): 198–217.
7 For art history in particular, see Is Art History Global? ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007) and, more recently, Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, ed. Jill H. Casid and Aruna D'Souza (Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2014).
8 Recently, a circulatory history of art, partly inspired by Piotrowski's “horizontal” spatial model (see below), has been advanced with the purpose of avoiding the pitfalls of assigning “artistic superiority to any agents of the encounter, either the ‘center’ or the ‘periphery.'” See Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Reintroducing Circulations: Historiography and the Project of Global Art History,” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 1–22 (2). It is however difficult to imagine any encounter occurring in conditions of equality. See Eric Cazdyn, “Uses and Abuses of the Nation: Toward a Theory of the Transnational Cultural Exchange Industry,” Social Text 44 (1995): 135–59: “Can exchange ever take place free of domination? … Two interlocutors, save perhaps in a theoretical construct, can never exist on an equal footing” (151).
9 Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space/Time,” New Left Review 196 (November–December 1992): 71–6.
10 Massey, “Politics,” 72.
11 For a prior formulation of this definition, see Foteini Vlachou, “Art in the European Periphery: History Painting in Portugal at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century” [in Greek], PhD thesis, University of Crete, 2013, 8–20.
12 See the classic article by Denis Mahon, “Eclecticism and the Carracci: Further Reflections on the Validity of a Label,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16, no. 3/4 (1953): 303–41.
13 See for example the hybrid text of Cyrillo Volkmar Machado, Conversações sobre a pintura, escultura, e architectura. Escriptas, e dedicadas aos Professores, e aos Amadores das bellas Artes, 2 vols (Lisboa: Na Of. de Simão Thaddeo Ferreira, 1794–8), a deliberate selection from other texts, although not a compilation. Cyrillo translates entire texts, without bothering to mention either title or author, selectively omitting paragraphs when they are irrelevant to his argument, and unconcerned that some of his own opinions clash directly with the opinions expressed in the texts (as, for example, when Cyrillo's praise of Bernini contradicts Winckelmann's condemnation of him). For a study of the Conversações and identification of the texts in question, see Vlachou, “Art in the European Periphery,” 95–105.
14 Stanley J. Tambiah, “Transnational Movements, Diaspora, and Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 178–9.
15 Kenneth Clark, Provincialism. The English Association, November 1962.
16 Terry Smith, “The Provincialism Problem,” Artforum 13, no. 1 (September 1974): 54–9; reprinted, without authorization, in Malasartes 1 (October–November 1975).
17 Smith, “Provincialism Problem,” 59.
18 Smith, “Provincialism Problem,” 54. See also Terry Smith, “Provincialism Then and Now,” ArtMargins (forthcoming), an article that revisits the writing of the 1974 text: “Yet I was not offering a prognosis of the future, or outlining an eternal state of affairs, but instead making a strategic statement about what artists committed to genuine transformation were up against. We were convinced that seeing this situation for what it was – not a natural state of affairs but as a systemically iniquitous cultural construction – was the first step toward its revolutionary overthrow.” I warmly thank him for providing me with an early draft.
19 See the overview by Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 79–84.
20 Jan Bialostocki, “Some Values of Artistic Periphery,” in World Art. Themes of Unity in Diversity, ed. Irving Lavin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), vol. 1, 49–58. Burke, History and Social Theory, 83, also argues that the periphery can be analysed in similar ways as the frontier has, namely “as a region favouring freedom and equality, a refuge for rebels and heretics,” an approach that cannot be applied indiscriminately to all peripheries.
21 Ljubo Karaman, O djelovaju domaće sredine u umjetnosti hrvatskih krajeva [On the impact of place in the art of Croatian regions], Zagreb, 1963 (cited in Bialostocki, “Some Values,” 50).
22 Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg, “Symbolic Domination and Artistic Geography in Italian Art History,” trans. Maylis Curie, Art in Translation 1, no. 1 (2009): 5–48 (7). Castelnuovo and Ginzburg's article first appeared as “Domination symbolique et géographie artistique dans l'histoire de l'art italien,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 40 (November 1981): 51–72, itself a shortened version of their chapter “Centro e periferia,” first published in Storia dell'arte italiana in Turin, in 1979.
23 Castelnuovo and Ginzburg, “Symbolic Domination,” 18.
24 Ibid., 9: “Only an extra-artistic center of power, be it political and/or economic and/or religious, may be an artistic center. The simple presence or even the concentration of works of art in a given location therefore do not suffice to make this particular place an artistic center in the sense we propose.”
25 Nicos Hadjinicolaou, “Καλλιτεχνικά κέντρα και περιϕερειακή τέχνη [Artistic centres and peripheral art],” in Νοήματα της εικόνας. Μελέτες ιστορίας και θεωρίας της τέχνης [Meanings of the image: Studies on the history and theory of art] (Rethymno: Crete University Press, 1994): 387–414 (1st ed. Kritische Berichte 11, no. 4 [1983]).
26 Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 474.
27 Harootunian, “Remembering,” 474.
28 Jeanine Baticle, “Quelques réflexions sur Sequeira et le préromantisme,” in Le XIXe siècle au Portugal. Histoire-Société, Culture-Art (Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Centre Culturel Portugais, 1988), 50: “Au cours de cette période, Sequeira continue à peindre à la manière ,troubadour' des sujets tirés de l'histoire ancienne portugaise, oeuvres de vingt ans en avance sur la peinture anecdotique romantique, qui sont mal perçues par les amateurs, lesquels, les yeux tournés vers Paris, admirent David et Gros dont les compositions sont consacrées à la saga napoléonienne et où les réminiscences de l'antique commencent à disparaître” (emphasis added).
29 Osborne, Politics of Time, 17.
30 See his doctoral dissertation, José-Augusto França, Une ville des Lumières : La Lisbonne de Pombal (Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian–Centre Culturel Portugais, 1988; 1st ed. Paris, 1965).
31 Mariana Pinto dos Santos, “Estou atrasado! Estou atrasado! – Sobre o atraso da arte portuguesa diagnosticado pela historiografia,” in Representações da Portugalidade, ed. André Barata, António Santos Pereira, and José Ricardo Carvalheiro (Lisbon: Caminho, 2011), 231–42.
32 There are various examples from França's oeuvre that typify this attitude. See for example his comments in José-Augusto França, A arte em Portugal no século XIX, 3rd ed. (Lisbon: Bertrand Editora, 1990), vol. 2: 100 (“atenção desacertada com o tempo histórico”), 103 (“atraso cronológico”) etc. For França, there is only one historical time, the reference time of the centre, and anything else qualifies either as delay or desacerto (literally, an inability to set the clock to the correct time).
33 Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 47.
34 See for example Smith, “The Provincialism Problem,” 54: “Provincialism … [is not] merely a function of geographic location,” and Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaction Books, 2007), 8–9: “Yet, the centre-periphery relationship is not one of geography but of power and authority that affects not only race and gender but also regions.”
35 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Piotr Piotrowski, “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History,” Umění 5 (2008): 378–83. Piotrowski proposed “horizontal art histories” (the plural is crucial here) as an alternative to the vertical, hierarchical art-historical narrative that is dominant in the discipline. He was particularly insightful on how the centre appears fractured (as opposed to homogenized) when viewed from the periphery, and how canon and style function as homogenizing categories (380).
36 Louis Althusser, “The Errors of Classical Economics: Outline of a Concept of Historical Time,” in Reading Capital, by Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, trans. Ben Brewster, 4th ed. (London: Verso, 1987), 91–118.
37 See also from the same book Althusser, “Marxism is not a Historicism,” 119–44: “I suggested that we had to submit Marx's text [the Capital] not to an immediate reading, but to a ‘symptomatic’ reading, in order to discern in the apparent continuity of the discourse the lacunae, blanks and failures of rigour, the places where Marx's discourse is merely the unsaid of his silence, arising in his discourse itself” (143). On Althusser's theory and practice of reading, see Ellen Rooney, “Better Read Than Dead: Althusser and the Fetish of Ideology,” Yale French Studies 88 (1995): 183–200 (from the special issue “Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey, and the Labor of Reading”).
38 On the importance (and timeliness) of Althusser's interpretation of the Marxian concept of the social whole, on which his analysis of historical time is based, see Michael Gordy, “Reading Althusser: Time and the Social Whole,” History and Theory 22, no. 1 (February 1983): 1–21.
39 Althusser, “The Errors of Classical Economics,” 94: “In other words: the structure of historical existence is such that all the elements of the whole always co-exist in one and the same time, one and the same present, and are therefore contemporaneous with one another in one and the same present.”
40 Cf. Gordy, “Reading Althusser,” 4: “A cross section, or an ‘essential section,' through a society at any moment in time therefore displays a temporal homogeneity wherein the contradictions in every social structure are perfectly coordinated with those in every other.” Temporal homogeneity can also be considered as the chief feature of universal history as the culmination of historicism. See Walter Benjamin, “Sur le concept d'histoire [1942],” in Oeuvres, trans. Maurice de Gandillac, Rainer Rochlitz and Pierre Rusch (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), vol. 3, 426–43 (441): “L'histoire universelle n'a pas d'armature théorique. Elle procède par addition: elle mobilise la masse des faits pour remplir le temps homogène et vide.”
41 Althusser, “ Errors of Classical Economics,” 96.
42 The Annales school that shunned political and diplomatic history (especially in their empirical, historicist versions), focusing instead on social and economic history, was the hegemonic school of the production of history in France for much of the twentieth century. For its prehistory and sources of inspiration (including among others the geography of Vidal de la Blache), its foundation by historians Marc Bloch (1886–1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), and Braudel and the post-Braudel period, see François Dosse, L'histoire en miettes: Des “Annales” à la nouvelle histoire (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1987).
43 Althusser, “Errors of Classical Economics,” 96.
44 Ibid., 104–5. For Althusser's critique of Braudel's “objective world time,” see also John R. Hall, “The Time of History and the History of Times,” History and Theory 19, no. 2 (February 1980): 113–31 (esp. 119–23).
45 According to Osborne, Politics of Time, 25, one such problem would be the inability to conceptualize the development of the social whole.
46 Althusser, “ Errors of Classical Economics,” 97.
47 Ibid., 99.
48 Ibid., 100.
49 Cf. Gordy, “Reading Althusser,” 19: “Economism is such a ‘false Marxism’ … Despite its use of Marxist terminology, its categories are oriented within an idealist problematic that is but a variant of the Hegelian totality. The economist conception portrays the social whole as a simple unity in which all social practices are viewed as expressions of the economy.” On the contrary, Jameson's reading of Althusser at this point is rather superficial. See Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 707–8: “ … the premise no doubt posits the primacy of labor time, implying that the temporality of a given type of production has a more general influence on the way time is conceptualized and lived in the rest of the society … The Althusserian suggestion … promotes a … conflation of the various levels of a given historical period, in which a specific form of temporality becomes the hallmark of everything from architecture to statecraft, from mathematics to artistic style.” Nowhere does Althusser suggest that one temporality assumes primacy over the others.
50 Althusser, “ Errors of Classical Economics,” 106.
51 See for example Terry Smith, “Contemporaneity in the History of Art: A Clark Workshop 2009, Summaries of Papers and Notes on Discussions,” Contemporaneity 1 (2011): 1–34, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2011.32.
52 Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 5.
53 Moxey, Visual Time, xi. I am not here concerned with Moxey's concept of “aesthetic time,” that is “the time created by the object,” as opposed to “the temporal conventions of the location in which that response is lodged” (Moxey, Visual Time, 5). For a recent review, see Jae Emerling, “‘To Render Time Sensible: Transmissibility’: Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013,” Journal of Art Historiography 13 (December 2015), https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/emerling-review.pdf. The review barely engages with the book's main arguments, discussing instead Deleuze (who is not central to Moxey) and proposing, unsurprisingly, cartography and mapping as the alternative to a “positivist, chronological, diachronic system” (9).
54 Matti Bunzl, “Foreword/Syntheses of a Critical Anthropology,” in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, by Johannes Fabian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014; 1st ed. 1983), xi.
55 Fabian, Time and the Other, 31, justifies the choice of the neologism “coevalness” as an attempt to evade the conundrum of the synchronous/simultaneous and the contemporary. As “denial of coevalness,” he defines “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (emphasis in original).
56 See Moxey, Visual Time, 13. By contrast, see Osborne, Politics of Time, 16: “the idea of the non-contemporaneousness of geographical diverse, but chronologically simultaneous, times which thus develops, in the context of colonial experience, is the foundation for ‘universal histories with cosmopolitan intent.'” See also Terry Smith, “Currents of World-making in Contemporary Art,” World Art 1, no. 2 (2011): 175.
57 Moxey, Visual Time, 14, 16, 17.
58 Moxey, Visual Time, 17, admits – while discussing multiple contemporaneities – that “their speed … is assessed by the dominant cultures of the day.”
59 Fabian, Time and the Other, 23.
60 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008; 1st ed. 1962). On Kubler more recently, see Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, 219–38; the forum “The Shape of Time, Then and Now,” Art Journal 68, no. 4 (2009): 62–104; and the online publication Systems of History: George Kubler's Portuguese Plain Architecture, ed. Eliana Sousa Santos, cescontexto Debates 3 (September 2013).
61 See for example Kubler, Shape of Time, 87–8: “[T]here are only two significant velocities in the history of things. One is the glacier-like pace of cumulative drift in small and isolated societies when little conscious intervention occurs to alter the rate of change. The other, swift mode resembles a forest fire in its leaping action across great distances, when unconnected centers blaze into the same activity.”
62 George Kubler, “The Shape of Time: Reconsidered,” Perspecta 19 (1982): 113.
63 More interesting perhaps was Kubler's concept of transmission of energy, impulses, generating centres and relay points. See the chapter on Kubler in Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 219–56: “Kubler's model of time, then, is neither wholly causal nor progressive; like an electrical circuit charged with a new signal, it breaks off into vectors that may fire up others, short-circuit, or potentially link different solutions to a shared problem. As a result, The Shape of Time – a book ostensibly devoted to the historicity of things – reads like a manifesto of information theory” (242–3).
64 Although this does not have to be an either/or question. See Massey's critique of Ernesto Laclau (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London 1990 ) in “Politics and Space/Time,” 67–68: “Laclau's view of space is that it is the realm of stasis. There is, in the realm of the spatial, no true temporality and thus no possibility of politics … Time (or temporality) for Laclau takes the form of dislocation, a dynamic which disrupts the predefined terms of any system of causality. The spatial, because it lacks dislocation, is devoid of the possibility of politics.” Interestingly, Laclau uses the term “dislocation” – the same one that Althusser employs when discussing the diversity of different temporalities.
65 Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 20.
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Notes on contributors
Foteini Vlachou
FOTEINI VLACHOU is a visiting assistant professor at the Departamento de História da Arte, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas and a researcher at the Instituto de História da Arte since 2010 (IHA, DHA, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa). In January 2016 she was awarded a three-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Instituto de História Contemporânea (IHC, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa). She studied art history with Nicos Hadjinicolaou at the University of Crete, where she obtained her PhD in 2013, with two consecutive doctoral grants from the Panagiotis and Effi Michelis Foundation (Athens) and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Lisbon). She has participated in numerous research projects, including “Portrayals of the Peninsular War: From the Novel to the Screen” (2008–2010) and “Crossing Borders: History, Materials and Techniques of Portuguese Painters from 1850–1918” (2014). She is currently writing a book on Portuguese history painting, monarchy and the empire at the end of the eighteenth century with a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (under contract, Routledge) and guest-editing two special issues on nineteenth-century transnational landscape (RIHA Journal) and the Portuguese historiography of art (Journal of Art Historiography, co-edited with Joana Cunha Leal).