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Table of contents
1. What matters is art history............................................................................................................................ 1

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Document 1 of 1

What matters is art history

Author: Mathews, Patricia
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Abstract (Abstract): Mathews wants her students to come out of her "Approaches to Western Art History" class
excited about art and art history, with an understanding of the complexity and range of the subject and with an
ability to enjoy the intellectual experience of art. The teaching techniques Mathews uses are described.
Full text: At Oberlin College art historians have struggled for more than a decade to find the proper approach to
introduce liberal arts students to our discipline. After abandoning the survey of Western art as superficial-formerly a course with 150 students taught over two semesters with the participation of each professor in her or
his specialty--we turned to a format of a one-semester thematic course limited to twenty-five students and
taught by each art historian once a year, titled "Approaches to Western Art History." We hoped this course
would give our students the essential tools for a more intensive study of art. We disagreed, however, as to what
exactly those tools should be. Therefore, with such common goals as developing visual literacy and critical
reading skills, each of us have developed our course as we have seen fit.
Chronology was one major point of disagreement. Some of my colleagues held that chronology is essential, and
indeed, students seem to long for the security and sense of cogency that a chronological approach offers.
Others, such as myself, abandoned it altogether to focus on issues of art practice and historical as well as
current interpretative models.
The chronological survey is one of the most difficult things for an art historian to relinquish because traditionally
it has been the foundation of the discipline. Without it alarming visions of art appreciation courses with little
substance beset us, those infamous and trivializing "gut courses" that so diminish the reputation and the caliber
of the study of art. Yet chronology has its own set of problems for an introductory course. First, one cannot do
justice to the history of Western art, much less of the world, through a chronological survey even if each era is
taught by a specialist in the field. There is simply too much material and not enough time to communicate its
complexity. In my experience, no matter how complex the ideas presented in the survey course were, the
students seemed incapable of absorbing them on any but the most cursory and uncritical level. Ideas need
careful explication, not simple declaration.
Second, chronological surveys typically misrepresent the history of art as a seamlessly coherent narrative. Yet,
as one of my colleagues put it, "the nineteenth-century passion for synthesis will no longer serve the needs of
serious art-historical thinkers." The history of art cannot be usefully synthesized into a body of learning to be
distributed over one or two semesters without profound distortion. Nevertheless, the majority of survey courses
rely on a canon of artists who follow one another in linear progression. Art historians have labored under the
misconception that the canon is the product of careful culling to produce those artists of greatest quality.
However, as many would now agree, the canon is not the product of some supposedly universal notion of
"quality" imagined by modernist art historians. Quality is a historicized set of standards derived from a specific
culture at a given historical moment that served certain purposes. A canon therefore offers only a partial view of
the scope of artistic practice. A chronological survey course could not effectively acknowledge such a scope.
Nor is there a single approach through which one can discuss the range of art processed in a survey.
Approaches to art history are as diverse as the artworks and periods we study, as medievalists will attest, and
cannot without simplistic reductionism be forced into a straitjacket of linear progress and categorical concepts of
development and artistic genius. Chronology becomes more relevant in upper-level courses where one has the
time to examine the broader context of a given subject.
I subscribe to an art historical approach that acknowledges the dynamic, fluid, varied nature of art and its
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interaction with culture. Not only the canon, but those excluded from it, play a fundamental role in the production
of cultural meaning. In my view art history should teach students about the role of art in the formation of culture,
about the diversity of approaches and meanings that constitute the art of a given historical moment, and about
the interpretative modes used to understand it.
Finally, I believe that critical thinking and visual literacy are more important to a student than chronology. Art
historians have fetishized a chronological, diachronic model based on causality and often teleology that
supports a linear model of history and an elitist, exclusive lineage of art. Are the questions of who did what
when really the most important information for a student to absorb in their first art history course? I think not.
My "Approaches" course is based on discussion of images and readings. We are fortunate to have a very fine
museum at Oberlin; almost half the course time is spent looking at actual works of art. I have found no text ideal
for my purposes, so I rely on articles on library reserve. I also assign five projects: an analysis of how an
advertisement visually communicates its message; an iconographical analysis of an image in the Allen Art
Museum that discusses the relationship between a work of art and the text on which it is based; a historical
analysis of a work from the museum based on research into the artist's context, period, style, and subject matter
(students often choose little-known artists for this assignment); a self-portrait exchanged with another student
who critically analyzes it; and an architectural study of the function and plan of a building on campus.
The course begins with a discussion of the form and content of advertising images in class. The students then
choose an advertisement of their own and analyze it. Although they feel at ease critiquing such pervasive
cultural images, they discover in the process that there is much more to the advertisement than they thought.
This assignment introduces them to critical reading in an area with which they are familiar and serves to alert
them to the notion that all images are representations with ideological implications. They also discover that the
same visual language applies to both media culture and "high" culture, and their preconceptions about the
"elevated" and "sacrosanct" nature of "high" art begin to erode.
In the next section of the class, the students are asked to read two simple but oppositional texts (John Berger
and Kenneth Clark) and discuss the implicit assumptions in each about the nature of art and the "proper"
method to interpret it. Class discussion focuses not on the "correct" approach, but on the various meanings
produced by different methodologies. Students enjoy recognizing that art history is just as contingent as the
world they live in and has more to offer that world than just aesthetic enjoyment or a cloistered history divorced
from social concerns.
After setting up the basic themes of the course--visual literacy, critical reading, and the contingency of
interpretative modes--we spend the next few class sessions in the museum studying the specifics of visual
analysis. Then we consider traditional interpretive modes within the discipline from periodization and style to
iconography. Such classic art historical texts as Heinrich Wolfflin and Erwin Panofsky are read against such
writers as Roland Barthes and Michael Baxandall. The iconography and historical exercises help students to
connect research to actual objects in the museum and allow them entry into the complex signifying nature of art.
The second segment of the course deals with more contemporary issues of art and the artist, again through
conflicting texts: the role of biography in art (Janet Wolff, Albert Aurier), the critical reception of the artist (Meyer
Schapiro, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Griselda Pollock on Cezanne), and various constructions of the artist (Linda
Nochlin, Pollock).
A look at interpretive acts follows, employing such themes as ideology and aesthetics (Susan Sontag, Wolf, and
the role of art and ideology in the construction of gender (Carol Duncan, Clark, Berger) and race (Cornell West,
Eunice Lipton). During this section each student performs two acts of interpretation. She/he makes a selfportrait and exchanges it with another student's to critique. We devote two class sessions to discussions of
these portraits: first the "critic" addresses the work, then the entire class responds, and finally the artist reveals
her/his intentions. This has proven to be a very successful learning experience for students. They attain a better
understanding of both art and critical processes and of the inevitable conflicts between intention and reception.
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The last classes are devoted to experiencing and writing about architecture on the Oberlin campus (John
Summerson, Robert Venturi) and to discussing the role of art institutions (Richard Bolton, Hans Haacke,
Richard Spear).
In comparison to the survey course, students in my "Approaches" class are much better prepared for the study
of all periods in art history. They may not have a strong background in chronology, but they are able to do art
historical research, to relate form to content in images, and to have some grasp on interpretive strategies.
Ideally, the students will be able to locate many perspectives in the work itself, from formalist to iconographical,
empirical, poststructuralist, and feminist, and they will learn as a result how to make distinctions between
different kinds of reading, so that they may appreciate and be open to different methodologies and different
interpretations.
My approach to teaching the introductory course raises a number of pedagogical issues that I would like briefly
to discuss. The idea of art as a site of conflicting voices and intersecting discourses is fundamental to my
teaching of art history. Because of my own concerns about the exclusive nature of art history, I insist on the
continual acknowledgment of issues of gender, race, class, sexual preference, and so forth. It may be that in the
future the focus on these issues will arise at the appropriate moment within the context of a particular work, but
as it now stands, these issues are still so rarely considered in art history that I strongly emphasize them as a
palliative.
I am not satisfied, however, simply to add to the canon all those left out of it. When I first became interested in
women artists in graduate school and taught myself about them because none of my professors had either
interest or expertise in the subject, I assumed that I would simply insert them into the existing canon. I soon
found, however, that women artists did not fit. At best, they seemed cramped by this model, and at worst, they
looked second-rate when judged by the canonic standards for artistic practice of the period under study. To take
an example from my own field, modern art, the virility and aggressive formal distortion of early twentiethcentury, avant-garde art practice is lacking in most women artists of the period (compare fig. 7 and 8). However,
when these women artists are studied in terms of their own themes, cultural positioning, and approaches, their
role in the construction of cultural meaning emerges (see fig. 9). To teach only one perspective misrepresents
history as well as the role of art in the production of culture and silences the voices of women and other artists.
(fig.'s 7, 8, and 9 omitted)
The appropriation of difference as a pedagogical tool by members of the "dominant" culture is suspect however.
Students are especially sensitive, at least at Oberlin, to a male teaching about women or a white woman
teaching about African American art. They see such roles as another enactment of gender and racial
oppression, in effect as another form of imperialism. How can these professors teach something they have only
experienced secondhand, and from a position of privilege? My own response to this situation comes from the
advice of bell hooks: As long as we do not claim ultimate authority over the subject, we have the responsibility
to learn about and teach the work of Others. If authority and mastery in the classroom can give way to facilitated
discussion, students not only learn more, but they learn more about how to learn and how to speak to each
other about difference.
We live in a global economy, in which traditions other than those of the West are increasingly asserting their
presence as actors on the stage of world history. Our student bodies are beginning to express a similar
diversity. We can no longer put our heads in the sand and pretend that traditional approaches to art history and
the history of Western art itself have the same cultural cachet as they did during the reign of the West. Students
want to know and deserve to know more about the different traditions within and without Western art.
To incorporate, however, different ways of looking and valuing art, such as those of Africa or China, would be a
difficult task for most art historians trained in Western ways of seeing. Moreover, I feel strongly that one should
not try to teach outside of one's expertise. In my opinion to try to discuss an "African" way of seeing based on
visual analysis alone essentializes African art. To do it justice, one should be deeply knowledgeable about
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Africa's various cultures and arts and be able to elucidate the complexity they exhibit. Rather than all becoming
generalists spread too thin, we need to commit ourselves to hiring more specialists in non-Western areas.
In summary, I want my students to come out of my cited about art and art history, with an understanding of the
complexity and range of the subject, with the ability to enjoy on a fairly sophisticated level the visual and
intellectual experience of art, to have some concept of the history and the methodologies of our discipline, and
with the tools if not yet the mature ability to critically assess interpretations of art as well as the assumptions and
approaches of the discipline. For majors and nonmajors my "Approaches" course is designed not only to create
a foundation for interpreting art and understanding art history, but to unsettle preconceptions about the role of
art in the production of culture and the ideological values and assumptions that underlie the discipline of art
history and of culture more generally. Finally, I hope to leave the student with the sense that art history and art
have relevance outside of the narrow confines of the discipline, both for their other course work and for their
understanding of the larger culture.
Subject: Teaching; Art history;
Publication title: Art Journal
Volume: 54
Issue: 3
Pages: 51
Number of pages: 4
Publication year: 1995
Publication date: Fall 1995
Year: 1995
Publisher: College Art Association, Inc.
Place of publication: New York
Country of publication: United States
Publication subject: Art
ISSN: 00043249
CODEN: ARTJA5
Source type: Scholarly Journals
Language of publication: English
Document type: Commentary
Accession number: 02527864
ProQuest document ID: 223305203
Document URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/223305203?accountid=149759
Copyright: Copyright College Art Association of America Fall 1995
Last updated: 2014-05-19
Database: ProQuest Research Library

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