Let me begin by quoting, not for the first time, something that my colleague Michael Baxandall wrote in 1978. The debate over methodology that was then going on among art historians seemed, he said, “oddly hortatory and peremptory: I dislike being admonished. On the other hand, what I do like is there being a manifold plurality of differing art histories, and when some art historians start telling other art historians what to do, and particularly what they are to be interested in, my instinct is to scuttle away and existentially measure a plinth or reattribute a statuette.”
I am in profound agreement with his desire to leave methodological room open for a “plurality of differing art histories,” and would only add to his dislike of being admonished about what to do, an even stronger dislike of being admonished about what we are not to do, what has now been identified as somehow illegitimate or outmoded art history. No one can fault those colleagues who follow through in their writings their personal convictions, such as that the only issues worth addressing today are race (or ethnicity), class, and gender (a formulation I learned from our graduate students in Berkeley), or that too close an engagement with individual works of art can leave one sullied, since it unavoidably enhances their commercial value and so implicates one, however unwillingly, in the marketing of art. We can respect those positions without quite crediting their claim to occupy a moral high-ground. Nor is there any problem with adopting new theoretical and methodological positions of other kinds, assuming again that it is real conviction, not a desire to join the self-designated “cutting edge” of the discipline, that motivates the adoption.
Problems arise only when taking up new positions implies a claim that they discredit and supplant older ones, and, most seriously, when it has the effect of inhibiting healthy, even necessary pursuits within our field. I argued in a recent lecture, for instance, that the great project of constructing a coherent style-history for early Chinese painting comparable to what has been done (over a much longer period, to be sure) for European and American painting, a project begun by the generation before mine which should have been carried much further than it has been by mine, is now even less likely to go forward, since younger specialists are mostly uninterested in so-called diachronic or developmental approaches, or in style generally. The project has in effect been discredited before it has been accomplished. It's as though, I said, we had abandoned the practice of architecture before we had built our city. I don't, of course, mean that style-history should again become a central concern of Chinese painting studies, only that someone should continue doing it, along with other things, and that the project should not be branded as hopelessly backward. The predictable question “Why do we need to have a style history anyway?” is disingenuous and easily answered: because insecurities and boobytraps of a kind long left behind in Western art studies, or at least rendered infrequent, will continue to plague our field until we do. We should, for instance, be able to resolve and agree on, more easily than we have, questions such as whether a certain painting dates from the tenth century or the twentieth. The application of new methodologies in Western art studies is carried out on a relatively firm foundation of more or less securely placed works of art, about which there is far more agreement among specialists than with us. I hold myself as responsible as others for this situation, having made the move from heavily stylistic studies following on Max Loehr into later writings that take a more contextual approach, for which the principal model was Michael Baxandall’s variety of social art history and his inferential criticism, although I certainly don’t claim to have produced anything that would satisfy his rigorous criteria.
Having opened my commentary in this oldster’s cautionary, view-with-alarm way, I can go on to congratulate the paper presenters in this session and in the symposium as a whole for representing collectively a healthy diversity of art-historical methodologies.
Masaaki Itakura’s paper on the “Second Ode on the Red Cliff” scroll by Ch’iao Chung-ch’ang is a strong example of the contextualizing mode of art history. His situating of both the ode itself and the painted scroll illustrating it in the specific historical and political circumstances surrounding Su Shih and his circle of admirers is enlightening, expertly done, and entirely convincing. It is helped by Itakura’s discovery, in a Tanyû shukuzu copy, of the now-missing opening section of the scroll in which Su’s residence, the Lin-kao Pavilion, was depicted. (That discovery was announced already in a related article that Itakura published in Kokka last year.) His concept of “a layering of images,” with pictorial styles, poetic resonances, and literary and political associations overlaid onto visual experience of the natural landscape, is a valuable formulation, and tempers our disappointment on learning, by way of the poet Lu Yu’s first-hand account of a visit to the place, that the real Red Cliff of Su Shih’s ode “was nothing more than a reed-covered knoll.” Itakura’s contextualization of the scroll is correspondingly multi-layered; his treatment of the style of the painting is also contextual, relating it to works associated with Li Kung-lin, as well as Su Shih himself and his son Su Kuo.
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