stephen melleville - attachments of art history

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IN[ ]VISIBLE CULTUREAN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL FOR VISUAL STUDIES

Attachments of Art Historyby S tephen Melville

1999

1

I want to start by talking a bit about imaginations of what wetend to call "historical distance," and then to push that talktoward a thought about the forms of objectivity available to thehistory of art. In doing so I hope also to be able to demonstratesomething of one art historical object; it is a part of myargument that there is no imagination of art history or arthistorical method that does not depend upon, does not emergefrom, such demonstration.

Let me begin by simply remarking there is no compellingreason in the nature of things to imagine that what separatesus from the past is best named "distance" nor any particularreason to think that this separation is different in kind fromother ways in which we are separated from one another (wedon't actually know what qualification "historical" is adding to

the notion of a "distance"). This is, of course, not to say that thenotion of historical distance is not native to us, both in generaland more specifically as art historians; it is in fact a notion inwhich we are very much at home.

As concerns art history, much of our, perhaps more or lessspecifically American, dwelling in this notion has beenpowerfully shaped by Erwin Panofsky, so I will start there. I takethe following points to have been more than adequatelyestablished now, largely through the efforts of Michael Podro


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and Michael Ann Holly:

1. Panofsky imagines appropriate distance to be integral to thework of the history of art.

2. The model for such appropriate distance is established first of all in the art of the Italian Renaissance.

3. This appropriate distance is characterized by a cleardistinction between subject and object and thus also a correctunderstanding of the relation between motif and content.

4. The model for such objectivity is given by the practice of rational perspective.

Panofsky works out this position in a series of essays written inGermany in the 1920s. The most important of these arePerspective as Symbolic Form and The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles , butone can also include the 1930 essay on the first page of Vasari's Libro and several further essays on Drer from the 20s.

The essays on perspective and on human proportion are, ineffect, a pair, jointly testifying to the Renaissance adjudicationof subject and object and so structuring discussions of arthistorical method around this polarity.


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Much of this is clearly visible in the major methodologicalstatement Panofsky produces in the U.S., "Iconography and

Iconology," and I will take it as not in need of any further specialremarking. Instead, I want to focus briefly on the examplePanofsky uses to conclude the methodological portion of theessay"a picture by the Venetian seventeenth-century painterFrancesco Maffei, representing a handsome young woman witha sword in her left hand, and in her right a charger on whichrests the head of a beheaded man." 1

The question is whether this is aSalom or a Judith, and Panofskymakes a convincing case forredescribing it as a particularvariant type of Judith with the headof Holofernes. I see no reason toquarrel with this identification, atleast not in any direct way. Whatmostly interests me, for themoment, is the way the examplelayers a moment of decapitation, amoment of rejoining motif andcontent, and a moment of radicaldistinction between Judith andSalom. One might note that while Panofsky's proposed graftingor regrafting of the title Judith and the Head of Holofernes tothe painting has apparently taken, the painting has itself in themeantime been grafted to various other hands, that of Bernardo Strozzi and, more recently, Paolo Pagani. 2 This is wayout of my own scholarly depth, but it seems worth mentioningthat although Strozzi's oeuvre displays, pretty much from thebeginning, a recurrent interest in large plumes and swords,perhaps particularly in the hands of women, "his" Judith wouldseem to belong to a particular period of his art in which heseems above all interested in decapitations, as it wereregardless of the particular agent or victimso we have a run of Davids with the head of Goliath, Saloms with the head of John,and Judiths with Holofernes. It does not seem much of a stretch,at least under this attribution, to argue that the insistence that

Judith and Salom, John and Holofernes remain palpably distinctis one brought to the material by Panofsky, and of uncertain
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force or relevance for Strozzi, in whose hands the distinctionmight be subject to a degree of drift or blurring or might even

be no more than nominal. In this, he might be in some wayssimilar to Caravaggio, who will in fact stand in for him to somedegree later in this paper. Two general points from all this then:First, Panofsky isthis will not be newsconsiderably moreinterested in the meaning of paintings than in their painting,and is particularly closed against the thought that the paintingmight itself override its meaning. 3 Second, and moreinteresting, Panofsky's example here is clearly and grosslyoverdetermined: it is, like so many of his early objects, aconcealed but active allegory of what he proposes as methodand what it shows is a violence at its heart.

Panofsky knows thisor perhaps its better to say that he knew itonce, in 1932 when he wrote, in a text that did not make thepassage to English but was instead supplanted by "Iconographyand Iconology:"

In his book on Kant, Heidegger has some remarkablesentences about the nature of interpretation, sentences

that on their face refer only to the interpretation of philosophical texts but at bottom characterize the problemof any interpretation. "Nevertheless, an interpretationlimited to a recapitulation of what Kant explicitly said cannever be a real explication, if the business of the latter isto bring to light what Kant, over and above his expressformulation, uncovered in the course of his laying of thefoundation. To be sure, Kant himself is no longer able tosay anything concerning this, but what is essential in allphilosophical discourse is not found in the specificpropositions of which it is composed but in that which,although unstated as such, is made evident through thesepropositions . . . . It is true that in order to wrest from theactual words that which these words 'intend to say,' everyinterpretation must necessarily resort to violence." We dowell to recognize that these sentences concern also ourmodest descriptions of painting and the interpretations wegive of their contents to the extent that they do not rest atthe level of simple statement but are already
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interpretations. 4

"Iconography and Iconology" is the developed forgetting orrepression of this position, and its invocation of Salom or Judithis, one might say, the symptomatic return of a violence thatremains both integral to and invisible within the theory andpractice of interpretation advanced to art historical centrality bythat essay.

2

If we turn from Panofsky toward Heidegger, the ground will besufficiently shifted that we cannot expect to find the topic of "historical distance" directly available under this name or someequivalent to it, so I will begin by simply pointing to some of itsmore or less scattered aspects.

The first is the one we have already seen: something of whatPanofsky sets up as "historical distance" now appears as the"distance" (if that is the right word) between thought andunthoughtthat is, it has become internal to the object of interpretation. It no longer appears as "historical distance"because "history," understood as something like the object'scontinuing and transformative presence, is one of its effects.Such distance is something to be more nearly discovered in theobject than a precondition for our approach to it.

A second aspect becomes visible if we turn back to the earlyformulations of distance itself in Being and Time . The analysisof human spatiality is fundamental to Heidegger's account of being-in-the-world and what he calls "the worldliness of theworld." Human being, Dasein , "being-there," is for Heideggerfundamentally characterized by a primordial entanglement orengagement with the world that places itself always beyonditself, thrown into ecstatic projection. Thus:

When we attribute spatiality to Da-sein, this 'being inspace' must evidently be understood in terms of the kindof being of this being. The spatiality of Da-sein, which isessentially not objective presence, can mean neithersomething like being found in a position in 'world space'


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nor being at hand in a place. Both of these are kinds of being belonging to beings encountered in the world. But

Da-sein is 'in' the world in the sense of a familiar andheedful association with the beings encountered in theworld. Thus when spatiality is attributed to it in some way,this is possible only on the basis of this being-in. But thespatiality of being-in shows the character of de-distancingand directionality. . . .

De-distancing means making distance disappear, makingthe being at a distance of something disappear, bringing itnear. Da-sein is essentially de-distancing. As the beingthat it is, it lets beings be encountered in nearness. . . .Only because beings in general are discovered by Da-seinin their remoteness, do distances and intervals amonginnerworldly beings become accessible in relation to otherthings. 5

Our dealings with things are always already an overcoming of distance, and there is no possible reduction to a situation of simple and rationally negotiable distance (things cannot be put

in perspective).6

One useful way to rephrase this is to say thatthe distance we are the overcoming of does not belong to usbut is something like a dimension of objects as such; severanceor distantiation is a condition of our proximity to them (and soalso, contra Panofsky, prejudice is not a barrier to but acondition for interpretation).

This is, in general, the direction in which Heidegger takes thesethoughts in his later writing; in particular, Heidegger'simagination of the work of art seems a particular regatheringand redistribution of these two earlier moments.I will not try to review the whole, rather complex, writing andargument of "The Origin of the Work of Art," but instead simplypick out a few key assertions pertinent to my argument. Thework of art is held to be the origin of things in such a way thatthe "thingliness" both of the work and of the thing is held to be,in effect, an abstraction from the self-secluding of the "earth"within the "world" opened up by the work 7this is, one can say,

the moment of severance or distantiation that appears as such
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only under the condition of de-severance or de-distantiation.Here again Heidegger is concerned to trace the logic of this into

the work itself, so the work appears as, in its inmost structure, a"rift"say, an establishing of distance as the very means of thework's intimacy with itself (what one might call its autonomy). 8 Heidegger's formulations here are difficult and worth hearing:

But as a world opens itself the earth comes to riseup. It stands forth as that which bears all, as thatwhich is sheltered in its own law and always wrappedup in itself. World demands its decisiveness and itsmeasure and lets being attain to the Open of theirpaths . . . . The rift does not let the opponents breakapart; it brings the opposition of measure andboundary into their common outline. 9

Some of what I think needs hearing in this is the way in whichthe passage from what is "sheltered in its own law" to thedemand for "decisiveness" and "measure" is precisely a criticalpassage, a passage into the space of judgment, and one mighthear also the way in which the rift, bringing measure and

boundary together, functions as a limit, as what both containsand opens, defining the dimensions of the work and doing so bymeans of a kind of cutting that both cuts in insofar as it opensthe work and finds the terms of its internal measure, and cutsout insofar as it marks the work off from what is not it.

Within the abstractness of this description one can feel thepressure of various more concrete imagesmost strongly acertain image of sculpture, probably derived in large part fromRilke's writings on Rodin, and, to a lesser degree, an image of painting that can come to a certain focus well beyond, certainly,Heidegger's own ken (one might think, for example, of Pollock).Heidegger himself finds it easiest to render these thoughtsconcrete in dealing with poetry, where he can attach measureto meter (as well as the caesura that interrupts it) and so makemost fully apparent the play between internal articulation andexternal boundary that at various times one will call"composition" or "structure." 10 One way Heidegger phrases thisis as follows:


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The strife that is thus brought into the rift and thusset back into the earth and thus fixed in place isfigure , shape , Gestalt . Createdness of the workmeans: truth's being fixed in place in the figure.Figure is the structure in whose shape the riftcomposes and submits itself. This composed rift isthe fitting or joining of the shining forth of truth.What is here called figure, Gestalt , is always to be bethought in terms of the particular placing ( Stellen )and framing or framework ( Ge-stell ) as which thework occurs when its sets itself up and sets itself forth. 11

But here some important things are beginning to slip inHeidegger's account: the term "Ge-stell," offered as a sort of summary of the work of figuration proper to art and mostespecially to what Heidegger calls its "createdness" (asopposed to its preservation, which would be the giving of thework over to history, thus the fact that its originality does notescape its own effects), this term "Ge-stell" will soon play aleading role in Heidegger's description not of art but of

technology, which in its form as aesthetics amounts to thecovering over or forgetting of art's actual work of origination,something from which Heidegger is actively working in thisessay to wholly separate the work of art. 12 In this passage weglimpse the Ge-stell in its actual supplementarity, naming bothwhat is essential to and completing of the work and what isimposed upon it from the outside that is, in this case, one of itseffects. It is, one might say, the revenge or at least thebecoming explicit of the frame so carefully elided or sublated inthe essay's pivotal encounter with Van Gogh's shoes.

Jean-Luc Nancy, working in the wake of Derrida and within theDerridean recognition of the supplementarity of the Ge-stell, ineffect turns Heidegger's imagination inside out in trying todescribe what he calls "the unimaginable, the gesture of thefirst imager." 13 Nancy thus insists on the primacy of the rift orcut over the presence to which it gives rise. 14 As he puts it, thehand of the first imager

advances into a void, hollowed at that very instance,
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which separates him from himself instead of prolonging his being in his act. But this separation is

the act of his being [in Nancy's French, l'acte de sontre , in which one can also hear l'acte de son natre ,the act of his birth.] Here he is outside of self evenbefore having been his own self, before having beena self. In truth, this hand that advances opens byitself this void, which it does not fill. It opens thegaping hole of a presence that has just absenteditself by advancing its hand. . . .

For the first time, he touches the wall not as asupport, nor as an obstacle or something to lean on[all of which might equally have left prints, none of which will have counted, will have done this workatleast not until this work has been done], but as aplace, if one can touch a place. Only as a place inwhich to let something of interrupted being, of itsestrangement, come about. . . .

The world is as if cut, cut off from itself, and it

assumes a figure on its cutaway section. . . . The line divides and sets out the form: it forms theform. It separates at the same momentwith thesame deftness, with the same drafted linethetracing animal and his gesture . . . .

Not a presence, but its vestige or its birth, itsnascent vestige, its trace, its monster [one will wantto hear in this last "monstrance" and"demonstration"]. 15

These revisions make the history the work effects not a destinybut a drift with no greater or deeper ground than the self-division of the mark that is the very condition of its appearing. 16 Like Heidegger, Nancy sees this as having the force of "purefact," ("factum est," says Heidegger) but this createdness isnow itself already also displacement, given over to bothpreservation and loss, constitutively a vestige. This canshouldbetaken as a reading or revision of Hegel's "Absolute," as also


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of Heidegger's rewriting of it as "Ab-solvent," cut away. And it isa reading of this Absolute that does not let it escape its material

conditions, thus one that grants art its own irreducible historyon the difficult condition that the history be always of a vestige.Historical distance and presence are the two edges of the samecut, and that cut is what we stand before with, for example,Maffei's or Strozzi's or Pagani's Judith or Salom holding thehead of John or Holofernes. These disjunctions are the stuff of the painting's identity, the places in which its meanings areboth caught and adrift, that to which they are answerable.

3

There are a number of ways to describe what's in play as wepass from Panofsky to first Heidegger and then Nancyit's akind of trade-off between history without an object and theemergence of an object in which one's interest is not clearlyhistorical, and in terms of intellectual history this is, among

other things, the exchange at stakein the passage from Kantian toHegelian aesthetics. Since what I am

interested in pursuing here is acertain imagination of objectivity, I'mparticularly interested in saying thatin this passage we witness thereabsorption of "historical distance"into the object from which it firstarose, and that with this we are

returned to the proper ground of questions of objectivity in thehistory of art. The notion of "objectivity" I'm appealing to issomewhat obscure, or at least unusual, so what I'd like to do inthe remainder of this talk is try to sketch out a version of it. Iwant to be clear in advance that my intentions here, although insome sense serious, are also clearly more demonstrative orprovocative than properly scholarly. The sense of objectivity inquestion, I may as well say, is not "scientific"it has essentiallyto do with "having an object," and doing so within a thoroughlyrelational context.

Since I set off from a decapitation, I'd like to stay with that

theme but return from the uncertainties of Maffei and Strozzi


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and Pagani, about whom I know nothing, to Caravaggio, withwhom the theme can be said to gain its hold on their attention

and about whom I know at least alittle, although not much.

There is, unquestionably, a violenceat work in Caravaggio's painting, andone of its most prominentexpressions is clearly to be found inhis various Davids and Saloms and

Judiths. My general claim has been that, faced with suchpaintings, Panofsky can only reduce them to distinct meaningsand has no way of capturing the interest that informs themprecisely as paintings. A cheap way to make the pointthat I donot for all its cheapness take to be completely emptyis to pairthe 1597-98 Judith Beheading Holofernes 17 with a JacksonPollock and then to suggest that Caravaggio is interested in hissubject because it permits him the moment of pure paintthegreat multiple jet of bloodthat is what also interests andinforms everywhere Pollock's painting (the same painting,perhaps, that I earlier suggested might seem well caught by

Heidegger's remarks on rift and line and abyss). I do indeedwant to say something of this kind, but I want to do it along aslightly different trajectory, one for which I can make a slightlymore responsible and expansive case, although I also hope thatI can keep something of the simultaneous dumbness andimprobability of the pairing. So I want to talk loosely aroundanother pairCaravaggio once again, and Christian Bonnefoi, acontemporary French painter in whose work I have beeninterested for several years.

What would make these a pair worth discussing would be apresumed shared interest in cutting. This appears at first asmerely a thematic concern in the Caravaggio, while inBonnefoi's case it is embedded in his practice as a painter inways that arise quite directly out of a fundamental relation tocollage, so this juxtaposition as it stands without any furtherelaboration looks at best metaphorical and willful.

There are at least two relatively recent studies of Caravaggio

that move in my direction: Louis Marin's To Destroy Painting18


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and Michael Fried's "Thoughts onCaravaggio." 19 Neither of these can

be taken as in any way definitiveFried's piece is overtly speculativeand prospective, while Marin's isconsiderably weakened by its shakeyappeal to optics (in part because of its uncritical acceptance of Panofskyon perspective). The two studies alsohave very different theoreticalfoundations and stakesMarin isworking out of a very particular

semiotic model while Fried is continuing to explore a sort of phenomenology of painting closely related to his earlier work onGustave Courbet. Within these limitations one can nonethelesssay that both share a view of Caravaggio's work as containing aviolence integral to it as painting. Both are also inclined toapproach this violence by considering Caravaggio in terms of adeep and generalized engagement with issues of self-portraiture and mirroring; and both understand the logic theyunfold around these issues to crucially involve also a moment of beholding (Fried) or a space of representability (Marin) thatbelongs both to the painting and to its viewera fact of what Iwould call its exposure. Thus, for example, Marin argues at onepoint that the logic of the mirror, especially the convex mirrorimplied in this Medusa, is, in and of itself, "decapitating,"separating head and body, as gaze and hand, thus alsobreaking up the otherwise perfect reversibility that binds seeingand making, gaze and hand, painter and model within the idealself-portrait. Marin's actual argument here seems to me wrongthere is nothing actually decapitating about the mirror as such;it does not impose, although it may invite, any distinction in thehandling of head and body (and this invitation is undoubtedlystronger in curved mirrors than flat ones because such mirrorsdo make the general difference between center and peripherycount. Fried in effect recovers what matters here by focusingmore clearly on the simple studio fact that a practice of self-portraiture always depends upon an arrangement of mirrorsthat is, from the outset, at odds with any "perfect reversibility"that is, there is always one place in which one regards oneself


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and another place in which one represents that self, and theself-portrait is then always a negotiation with the movement

between these two places or moments. Fried argues that inCaravaggio's case, the artist's refusal to follow the then-standard practice of correcting for the mirror's right-leftreversal and the unique dispositif informing this practice resultsin the painting's appearing always as a displacment of itself. Ashe summarizes this particular point:

. . . the logic of this particular mode of mirror-representation . . . is such that the painting appearsto insist on its virtual identity with the absent mirrorwhile at the same time representing itselfitself "orginally," in the process of being paintedasnonidentical with the picture surface. 20

The painting does not stand in theplace of the mirror but shows itself as a mirror displaced from itself.Marin makes a very similar point ininsisting that Caravaggio's painting

"transgresses its own boundarieswithin itself, that is, within thediverse spaces that it bringstogether and encloses." 21 This is tosay that Caravaggio's paintinghappens, in the terms I've usedearlier in this paper, as the finding orsecuring of a limit.

Overall, Fried urges the centrality toCaravaggio's painting of a "double ordivided relationship between painterand paintingat once immersive and

specular, continuous and discontinuous, prior to the act of viewing and thematizing that act with unprecedentedviolence . . . ." 22 Marin's equivalent formulations here stress howfar Caravaggio's Medusa in particular appears as nothing otherthan a rift, cut, or caesura. Both of these analyses can beusefully set along side Jean-Luc Nancy's discussion of

Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin a more informal piece of work


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that finds its repeated point of appeal in the play between therepresented drapery and the canvas itself, a play Nancy

attaches both to the ravishing force of the painting and to itsway of making the painting a pure threshold in whichseparation and adhesion occupy the same problematic place:"From the inside of (the) painting to the outside of (the)painting, there is nothing, no passage. Here, (the) painting isour access to the fact that we do not accedeeither to the insideor to the outside of our selves." 23

Despite the differences in approach that separate Marin andFried, both of their accounts can be called "structural" insofaras they are concerned to find analytical terms that allow bothformal and thematic address to the work and that can show itas generative of specific effects (andhere one can add that both Fried andMarin are deeply interested inCaravaggio's ability to projectinstantaneity as the effect of a morecomplex quasi-temporal structure of "moments" or "aspects").

Christian Bonnefoi's work emergesfrom a relatively continuous postwarFrench tradition that takes paintingas more nearly a material than avisual practicea practice cruciallygrounded in such things as canvas and stretcher and pigment.One can see a distant reflection of this line of work in, forexample, Nancy's noting, in his drapery-driven Caravaggiopiece, the way "the eye touches on the underside of the paint,on its support, its subject, its substance, and its cloth or stuff";and one can see it as well in Derrida's insistence, in his addressto the quarrel between Heidegger and Schapiro, on employing afigure of "lacing" that passes back and forth through the depthof the canvas. More historically aware versions of it inform thewritings of Hubert Damisch and Yve-Alain Bois, with whomBonnefoi for a time collaborated in the French journal Macula .And one final, oddly unanchored reflection is perhaps to befound in Fried's picking up, as part of his dealings with

Caravaggio, on the French term "dispositif" to name the


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particular mirror-logic he sees in the work. The scope andhistory of this term remains a bit obscure to me, but it figures in

both Lyotard and Damisch, has on occasion been used torender Heidegger's "Ge-stell," and is central to Bonnefoi's ownattempts to describe the workings of his paintings. 24 At leastloosely, a dispositif is a set-up exterior to painting that providesa way for painting to happen, something capable of assigningpainting its structure, or, as one might say in a different idiom,discovering its medium. For Caravaggio, on Fried's account, thiswould lie in a particular right-angled arrangement of mirrors; forBonnefoi's painting, it lies in collage, which teaches in its ownway that painting is made up of divisions through which it findsits proper surface. A Bonnefoi painting is made up of a certainplay of cuts or divisions that articulate the pictorial surface thatwe see as a function of its (invisible) material and temporaldepth, and I want, of course, for you to see this as importantlythe same as what Marin and Fried pick out at work inCaravaggioan admission of dividedness as the stuff of paintingitself. And I want you to see this as offering not simply apainterly but also a historical alternative to or complication of Panofsky's way of rendering aesthetic unity and historicaldistance as one another's support and guarantee.

I don't imagine that I have done thework that would secure this visionfor you, but I hope I have doneenough to allow an interest in itsscope and consequence. What I haveperhaps done is indicated two widelyseparated moments of a field inwhich painting shows itself asspecifiably "not collage," that is, as afield of edges describable as cuttings

out, or foldings, to which one might want to add certain kinds of stamping or impressing. If painting can be described as a fieldof what is not collage, this would evidently be not becausecollage is foreign to it but because collage can appear as a wayof making wholly explicit a violence and heterogeneity alreadyat work within it. So I'm offering Caravaggio and Bonnefoi asmoments within the articulation of a concrete theoretical object


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called painting and described in a very particular way. Onemight go on to ask how far Velsquez or Manet participate in

this objector gain their visibility within its field. One might,moving to the limit, ask the same of the work of Frank Stella.

And if one wanted now to pick up on the easy and abandoned juxtaposition of Caravaggio andPollock that I so briefly proposedearlier, it's worth noticing that itwould no longer be matter of something like a moment of purepaint captured in Caravaggio andfreed into itself by Pollock. Rather,one would now have a questionabout an inner working of somethinglike cutting or collage (a rift designperhaps) in Pollock as what enablesan appearance of "pure" paintbutthe underlying logic would begrounded in a work of cutting, of absoluteness or "absolvence," that

one would have been taught to see by Caravaggio. This is ashift in the grammar of certain questions that interests medirectly as someone working with contemporary French andAmerican art. And this is to say that the particular model of objectivityhaving an objectI'm sketching here does not goapart from my own attachment to certain works. 25

I am then proposing a view of art historical objectivity that doesnot depend uponindeed refusesthe mediation of historicaldistance in favor of discovering an internal rhythm of dis-severance or ab-solution that shows what counts as event, ashistorical attachment or detachment, within and among worksbut also between works and their shifting circumstances. Suchobjectivityany objectivity of this general kindcannot happenapart from its objects, which is to say it cannot proclaim itself inadvance of the work it shows, and it cannot claim to showeverything. Its interest in theory is not methodological.

4


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When I say that what I have tried to sketch is a model for howart historical objectivities are constituted, I do not mean that

sketch to stand simply as an alternative to Panofsky'ssettlement of historical distance. It should count also as areading, or a diagnosis, of the actual structure of what Panofskyso successfully made seem a natural way of standing towardsomething called "the past." That is to say, Panofsky engendershis objectivity in ways wholly parallel to those in which I haveconstituted minefastening himself to certain objects and

teasing out of them the terms of theirown historicitybut he does so ina way that systematically forgets orconceals its own foundations,appearing as a mode of detachmentwholly distinct from the attachmentit also is. The working of this deeperlogic nonetheless remains readablewithin Panofskyan objectivity,perhaps above all in or as hisattachment to the work and figure of Albrecht Drer.

There is, after all, a history thatpasses from Northern German St.

Johns-on-a-charger not only throughCarvaggio and such followers as

Strozzi, Pagani, and Maffei, but also through the vera icon interestingly touched upon by Marin in his discussion of Caravaggioand that finds one of its ultimate and pivotalexpressions in the self-portraits of Albrecht Drer, self-portraitsthat are intimately bound up with, among other things, Drer'ssystematization of human proportion, which Panofsky thentakes as evidence of the emergence of a grasp of subjectivityappropriate to the objectivity of the perspective Drer alsoformalizes. The moment here is complexand it is been bothilluminated and evaded by Joseph Koerner in a recent study of Drer and Hans Baldung Grien, that, like this paper, meansultimately to show something of the inner rhythms of historicaldetachment and attachment. 26 A considered account of thatstudy might lead one to further remarks about how Panofsky's


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art historical detachment not only ties itself to a particularnotion of appropriate fit of motif and content but also finds a

crucial prop in Drer's self-attachment, and so also to furtherconsideration how Panofsky's "founding" of modern art historyrepeats Drer's "origination" of Northern art's history. Theselast remarks might then open into a still further consideration of the pairs Panofsky/Drer and Heidegger/Hlderlin that wouldthicken and transform the terms of the field I've tried to sketch.

The theoretical issues that set up this talk have, then, neverstood apart from the objects that support them, because thereis no other place to stand. And because that place is alwaysdivided, art history is pledged to the invention of objectivitiesthat are the consequence and measure of the absoluteness of its objects.

Notes:

1. Erwin Panofsky, "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to theStudy of Renaissance Art," in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City:Doubleday, 1955), 36.

2. It should be noted that Strozzi is one of those to whom Panofskyappeals in establishing a North Italian type of "Judith with a Charger."

3. This paper is shameless in its willingness to trade "meaning" against"painting" for the sake of its argument. But of course in any adequatelyimagined or addressed case, this will not be simply a trade. The corepoint is to conceive meaning always as an effect rather than aprecondition of a practice or structure.

4. "Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken derbildenden Kunst," Logos XXI, 1932, pp. 103-119. As cited fromBallang's translation by Georges Didi-Huberman , Devant L'image:Question pose aux fins d'une histoire de l'art (Paris, ditions deMinuit1990), 126-127.

5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany:State University of New York, 1997), 97. The Macquarrie and Robinson
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translation supplied "dis-severance" for Heidegger's "ent-fernung."

6. This doesn't mean that it may not also be true that things are alwaysin (one or another) perspective. What's at issue is not perspective oreven rational perspective so much as its value, or the terms of itsembeddedness in the world.

7. I don't take the Heideggerean meaning of these terms to be obviousto all readers. They can usefully be taken as what is left of the morestandard "content" and "form" by the time Heidegger has worked hisway through them. One can also plausibly take earth and world to beopposed as something like "sheer stuff" and "significance," with the

proviso that sheer stuff only appears under conditions of significance.8. Heidegger here seems to be revising or radicalizing Kant, makingwhat Derrida picks out as the "coupure pure" still more deeply internalto the work itself.

9. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry,Language, Thought , trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row,1971), 63.

10. Heidegger's primary poetic reference is, of course, to Hlderlin, andhis explorations of meter and measure in this context should beconsidered also negotiations with Hegel's "speculative proposition."

11. Heidegger, "Origin," 64.

12. On this, see Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays , trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row,1977),especially "The Age of the World as Picture."

13. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses , trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press,1996), 74.

14. This is perhaps overstated; outside of the contrast with Heidegger itwould be more accurate to say that Nancy is concerned to register aninterlacing of presence and absence in which neither term has primacy.

15. Nancy, 75-76.

16. Nancy goes on to write of the first painter seeing the approach of "a
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monster who holds out to him the unsuspected reverse side of presence, its displacement, its detachment, or its folding into pure

manifestation, and the manifestation itself as the coming of thestranger, as the birth into the world of what has no place in the world".

17. Galleria Nazionale.

18. Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting , trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1995).

19. Michael Fried, "Thoughts on Caravaggio," Critical Inquiry 24

(Autumn 1997): 13-56.20. Fried, 31.

21. Marin, 123.

22. Fried, 22.

23. Nancy, 61. It should be noted that I have simply dropped the threadof self-representation in favor of the more general question of cutting,limits, and so on. That self-representation can occupy a place of particular privilege within the object I'm sketching is an importantfeature of it.

24. Bonnefoi has been particularly insistent on the priority of techniqueover "form" in his work.

25. If I am unable to know how serious I might be about the wholeCaravaggio-to-Bonnefoi example I'm playing with here, it is one I amnonetheless willing to take seriously the more closely it bears uponquestions of painting in the wake of Manet, and in these terms theinvocation of Stella marks a major crux. The fiddling about with Pollock,"purity," and "absoluteness" is also potentially serious in something likethis way. One might, for example, look again at those moments in whichPollock cuts into his skeins of paint.

26. See Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in GermanRenaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
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stephen melleville - attachments of art history

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