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The Art Bulletin

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Regarding Art and Art History

Zainab Bahrani
Published online: 30 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Zainab Bahrani (2013) Regarding Art and Art History, The Art Bulletin, 95:4, 516-517, DOI:
10.1080/00043079.2013.10786090

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 REGARDING ART AND ART HISTORY
Zainab Bahrani
The Symbol, in the meaning of the word used here, constitutes
the beginning of art, alike in its essential nature and its historical
appearance, and is therefore to be considered only, as it were, as
the threshhold of art. It belongs especially to the East and only
after all sorts of transitions, metamorphoses, and intermediaries
does it carry us over into the genuine actuality of the Ideal as the
classical form of art.—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1975)1
In the founding moment of Enlightenment aesthetic
thought, the distinction between high art and its earlier
preliminary stages was established along the axis of East to
West, ancient to modern. Hegel, in his Aesthetics, as in his
lectures published as The Philosophy of History, defines the East
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as the realm of the Symbol. It is the threshold of art, both a
geographic expanse and an era of the symbol, an era of
representation before the emergence of the image properly
so called. Thus, far from being a peripheral field that was
only recently incorporated into art history and aesthetic phi-
losophy, the ancient Near East was an indispensable compo-
nent of the development of a concept of a recognizable
aesthetic in European discourse. It is the other that permitted
the construction of the self. But lost in translation is any interest
in the artworks or what the ontological status of images actually
was in antiquity. Can one speak of images, aesthetics, or art in a
pre-Enlightenment world? What is Sumerian or Babylonian
sculpture and what is its relation to the real (Fig. 1)? What is
ancient Near Eastern art? To paraphrase Jacques Derrida, if we
do not change the question in its question form we only reify
what has already become naturalized.
Comparative approaches to ancient art are certainly not
new, and they are not always the progressive method. They
have in fact been part of the disciplinary structure of the
history of art since the days of Johann Joachim Winckel-
mann’s treatise on ancient art and Hegel’s Aesthetics, where
the East, being the realm of the symbol, is not, in that case,
the realm of the image. So here we have one of our originary
comparative points of departure for the study of my field. We
begin, shackled with this history. For a long time now, I have
addressed this a priori damage to the art historical method-
ology, and no doubt I will have to continue to do so for some
time into the future before art history begins to tackle in
earnest the legacy with which we work.2
In more recent years, there has been a pointed effort to
move away from a taxonomy of the Geist to a study of things
and their movement in space, across geographic regions and
landscapes, as well as the movement of things in time, most
noticeable in the current Warburgian revival in art history. In
addition, the approaches of the anthropology of art have
helped to decenter some of the working methods of art
history. These new directions have permitted a reappraisal of
the place of ancient Near Eastern art as an area of art history
that is not simply in the service of a greater narrative struc-
ture but that encompasses works of art worthy of viewing and
studying and that has something to contribute to the refram-
ing of the field itself. But let me turn to the image and its
ontological status, which is my own area of research and
publication in the midst of the multiple and quite productive
approaches that exist in art histories of antiquity today. For
me, the problem of the image has always been a radical
problem and so one of ontology. I have also seen my focus on
the problematics of the image partly as a way out of an
impasse, a tactical approach. What I have been attempting to
do in my own work in the past decade or so is to turn to a
slightly different direction of metaphysics or ontotheology in
thinking about ancient images, but what I mean by that is
both ontologies, ours as well as theirs. This means also taking
into account our own positions as cultural translators with the
entirety of the history of Orientalism and the unexpressed
colonial origins of ancient Near Eastern art studies and ar-
chaeology in the West. Today, with the iconic turn and the
renewed interest in images, these problems have not improved.
Instead, rather than being acknowledged they become even
more tacit. Rather than being progressive, the move away from
an art history centered on aesthetic values generated in the
modern West and toward the seemingly more accepting and
all-encompassing history of images has made us even less likely
to consider the ways in which we dismiss, or even denigrate, the
artworks or aesthetic practices of others.
What I would therefore like to do in the context of this
journal, and considering myself to be addressing old friends
and colleagues whom I see as allies rather than adversaries, is
to call for a more critical theory of images and artworks. Okay,
you might well ask, but how is this different from W. J. T.
Mitchell’s work and/or the German school’s Bildwissenschaft,
or from visual culture studies?
First of all, going back to my first point regarding the
history of the discipline and its early ties to racial theories and
evolutionary taxonomies, of primitive to modern, for a com-
parative image ontology or a diacritical theory of images, we
first need a description or representation of the conditions
that make discourse possible. We need to look at the norma-
tive in our own discourse, something that a method like
Bildwissenschaft has failed to do.3 In Near Eastern antiquity,
images, embedded in an entire economy of signs, are consti-
tutive of meaning, not simply a medium that carries or trans-
ports a meaning that preexists elsewhere. In that, I find the
theoretical outlines presented by some of the recent image
scholarship as if they were common sense parameters inap-
plicable to antiquity or to the elsewhere of the Western,
European tradition, and thus constraining in their frame-
work of thinking. Of course, there would not be a point of
criticism here if these new approaches were not self-defined
as “universalizing” theories of the image. So I must insist that
any proposed universalizing theory of the image or what the
real definition of art is needs to be challenged head-on, if it
does not in fact do the hard labor of looking into the cultures
that it generalizes into comparative foils. We have to inter-
rupt these discussions of the image because they are setting a
new paradigm that is still misleading, even if it moves away
 REGARDING ART AND ART HISTORY 517

from the grand narrative of East to West and primitive to

modern.
It is a mistake to condemn global and universalizing meth-
ods as being entirely Western and not taking other areas of
art into account. In fact, they rely on the other. It is important
to restate that the narrative of the progress of civilization, in
which cultural difference plays a significant role, is not, nor
ever was, a simple and separate opposition of primitive non-
Western and developed Western civilization. Alterity is posi-
tioned within the formation of the narrative itself and not
merely as a radically exterior other. The East held the nec-
essary position of the realm of the symbol against which the
so-called true sign might emerge. We have seen little change
here with the new methods of the twenty-first century. We
therefore need a larger discussion of image studies and art
historical methodologies that goes far beyond the current
methods in order to consider that larger theoretical appara-
tus of the study of the image or the artwork today. The
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current methods still collapse image into picture, so leave

little space for thinking otherwise; to look at things as mean-
ings, for example. Images in the ancient Near East are not
simply a medium that carries a preexisting meaning, whether
that meaning is factually accurate or distorted by ideology.
They are themselves constitutive of meaning. They are par-
ticipant and circulate in an entire larger symbolic order of
reality, a reality that is understood as a representational phe-
nomenon. More specifically, regarding the ontology of the
image in Near Eastern antiquity, the image inscribes and
performs presence into the real, a claim that I have sup-
ported with extensive textual evidence from antiquity. Images
had meaning and were valued well beyond their original 1 Statue of Ur-Ningirsu, Son of Gudea, Mesopotamia, probably
context and first use. This is why monuments and artworks Tello (ancient Girsu), ca. 2100 BCE, chlorite. Head: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1947,
were made in Near Eastern antiquity as a form of continuing
47.100.86; body: lent by the Musée du Louvre, Paris,
presence in the image that counters time and breaks through Département des Antiquités Orientales, 47.100.86⫹L.2006.29
the boundaries of the real and representation. (artwork in the public domain; photograph © The Metro-
politan Museum of Art)

Zainab Bahrani is the Edith Porada Professor of Art History and
Archaeology, Columbia University. Her most recent book, The Infi-
nite Image: Art and Ontology in Antiquity (London: Reaktion,
2014), is based on her 2011 Slade Lectures at Oxford [Department
of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, Schermerhorn
Hall, New York, N.Y. 10027, zb2101@columbia.edu].
Notes
1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans.
T. M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 303.
2. Z. Bahrani, “Assault and Abduction: The Fate of the Royal Image in the
Ancient Near East,” Art History 18, no. 3 (1995): 363– 83; and idem, The
Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
3. In this respect, the work of W. J. T. Mitchell and Anglophone visual cul-
ture studies are quite different from Bildwissenschaft (or from the current
Francophone image theory) because they are extremely thoughtful self-
reflexive approaches that are critical of the normative disciplinary struc-
ture, even if they are primarily concerned with modern and contempo-
rary images. In art history, the large narrative of world art, which
encompasses and subsumes the ancient East and Egypt, does so without
any thought for the way in which it uses such fields as a foil, or why it
blithely dismisses these fields as not belonging in art history, as is the
case in art history departments across Europe.