The two brief texts that follow are methodological remarks made in two sessions at the College Art Association's annual meetings: the first, for a session on "New Directions in Chinese Art Studies" organized by Professor Martin Powers and myself for the February 1985 meeting in Los Angeles, and the second for a session on "Chinese Landscape Painting: Content, Context, and Style," organized by Professor Jerome Silbergeld for the February 1986 meeting in New York. I have made a few deletions and additions, but the remarks are essentially as they were delivered on those two occasions.
New Directions in Chinese Painting Studies
Although the proper topic of this session is the innovative directions that are being taken, or might be taken, in studies of Chinese art, my remarks will apply principally to Chinese painting studies.
As many of you know, there was a session at the 1982 College Art Association meeting on style in Chinese painting, organized by Richard Barnhart. I was unable to be there, but I read his opening remarks and heard good reports on the papers and the session as a whole. Today's session, while it is based on a somewhat different viewpoint, is partly intended as a follow-up to that one, in that we hope to consider, among other things, new or alternative ways of understanding style.
By "alternative" I mean: other than the standard ways with which we are familiar, from a great many articles, dissertations, etc.: tracing sources of style, and influences; seeing styles in developmental sequences; writing about the expressive value of a style--that is, what the artist appears to be expressing by creating or adopting this style (always thinking of it as reflecting something the artist is feeling--style as a medium of personal expression). In the purest state of the enterprise, style becomes an element in the closed system we call style history. My teacher Max Loehr does this on the highest level.
To take the stands that I think some of us will take today is not in any sense to renounce this enterprise: it is, however, to turn away from its self-imposed limitations, its exclusivity, its attempts sometimes to discredit the alternatives by suggesting that they aren't really worth doing, or that the time hasn't yet come to do them, and so forth. Loehr has always argued that history and other outside factors, even circumstances in the lives of the artists, were more or less irrelevant to the work of art. It will be no surprise if I say that on that issue I broke with him a long time back, while continuing to have the highest respect for his ideas and his contributions.
Studies of the interrelationship of art and surrounding circumstance in the Western art history field have advanced to the point where we have a symposium at this year's meeting, chaired by Svetlana Alpers, titled "Art or Society: Must We Choose?" How, they are asking, can we get back to a fuller consideration of the formal properties of the work? Have we wandered too far from the work of art? We in Chinese art studies are still a long way from being faced by that danger; we are still struggling with the problem of how to draw the relationships with outside circumstance, for our material.
There have been no lack of writings in which the circumstances surrounding the creation of Chinese works of art have been studied--everybody has done artists' biographies, historical backgrounds, Taoist and Buddhist contexts for religious art, and so forth, in a straightforward way. What have been too rare are thoughtful considerations of what the relationship can be between such factors and works of art--how to avoid simple, misleading notions of causality, or juxtapositions of circumstance and object that imply a relationship without defining it. There haven't been enough studies, that is, that really integrate convincingly the object and the circumstances, instead of simply providing a "background" for the work. I once characterized as "artless studies of art" those studies that stopped on the periphery of the work of art, never really drawing the object itself into the relationship, as we should be doing, despite the difficulty of the project. It is relatively easy, that is, to relate the artist's biography to social history of the time, or art theorizing to intellectual history; what is more difficult is to relate convincingly the stylistic and other properties of the art object itself to outside circumstance. (I went on, in the same article, to downplay the importance of subject matter in later Chinese painting--I wouldn't write in quite the same vein today--I admit this change in my thinking, while continuing to believe that in a great deal of later Chinese painting, it is style more than subject that principally carries the meaning. But I don't mean to raise that issue here.)
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