Back to Art H 280 table of contents
Lecture 1 Introduction
A Course Mechanics
B Art History Surveys
C Our Texts
D What are you and I doing here?
5-60 Aphrodite of Knidos, Praxiteles, Roman marble copy after original
of c. 350-340 BCE
*5-83 Venus de Milo, (Alexandros of Antioch-on-Meander’s Aphrodite), c
150-125 BCE
* Venus de Milo, in the Louvre, observed by tourists.
*13-21 Selimiye (Mosque of Selim II), Edirne, Turkey, 1568-75.
*13-27 Taj Mahal (Tomb of Shah Jahan), Agra, India, 1632-47.
A Course Mechanics Lectures by Gary Michael Tartakov
Design Center Auditorium 383 Design Center
Tuesday & Thursday 12:40 - 2:00 294-9306
Office Hours: Thursday 2:00 - 4:00, and by appointment <tart@iasate.edu>
If I am not in my office, I will likely be in the Visual Resources Collection,
Rm. 116
or with students in the Design Center Atrium. I look forward to talking with
students outside of class, and that is one of the things that the office hours
are for. They are also there so students can talk with me both about the content
of the course and any administrative problems they may be having. If these hours
don’t fit into your schedule, I will be happy to find another time during
the week that does. Don’t hesitate to make an appointment with me by phone
or after class. If I don’t answer the phone, leave a message and number
where I can contact you. You can also contact me by e-mail, though I do not
attend to e-mail quickly. And don’t expect a very useful response from
me just before class, when I am trying to remember what I am doing.
The Course
Twice a week lectures for 75 minutes
based upon Gardner’s Art Through the Ages
I will be selective in my use of Gardner,
but stick almost entirely to issues and objects discussed and illustrated there.
I will cover twenty to twenty-five pages per lecture in Gardner.
But be relatively selective in my choices of images and issues to engage.
And I will regularly offer information that contrasts with Gardner
by shifting emphasis or developing issues that Gardner finds less important
or even by outright disagreement.
To this I will add the material in Slatkin that will allow
us to have a bit of perspective on the hegemonic view and to include the largest
lacuna in Gardner, the half of the human family that created you and me, among
other things.
And to this I will add a particular emphasis on the imagery of each
period that I have had my most personal familiarity with. For most
of what we will cover I will be, as most of you, thoroughly beholding to the
research of others for my understanding. This is hardly limiting, since so many
careful scholars and artists have carefully prepared this view. But shifting
to works I have personal familiarity with give me the opportunity to share with
you what I have learned from the survey and from every historians second most
important act: checking the evidence to see how it holds up?
Is there actually anything very special about that giant piles of rocks we call
the pyramids? Anything mystically compelling about Gothic cathedrals? Is Greek
sculpture truly “a miracle”?
5-60 Aphrodite of Knidos, Praxiteles, Roman marble copy after original
of c. 350-340 BCE
*5-83 Venus de Milo, (Alexandros of Antioch-on-Meander’s
Aphrodite), c 150-125 BCE
Gardner’s says, about the Venus de Milo:
Bold steps in redefining the nature of Greek statuary had already been taken in the fourth century B.C. in different ways by Praxiteles, Skopas and Lysippos...Hellenistic sculptors went beyond Late Classical masters and openly explored the nude female form’s eroticism The famous Venus de Milo (fig. 5-83) is a larger-than-life-size marble statue of Aphrodite fond on Melos together with its inscribed base (now lost) signed by the sculptor, Alexandros of Antioch-on-Meander. In this statue the goddess of love is more modestly draped than the Aphrodite of Knidos (fig. 5-60) but more overtly sexual. Her left hand (separately preserved) holds the apple Paris awarded her when he judged her as the most beautiful goddess of all. Her right hand may have lightly grasped the edge of her drapery near the left hip in a halfhearted attempt to keep it from slipping farther down her body. The sculptor intentionally designed the work to tease the spectator. By so doing he imbued his partially draped Aphrodite with a sexuality that is not present in Praxitiles’ entirely nude image of the goddess. (pp 154-5)
Slatkin tells us that this is a conventional
way to think about the female nude in ancient Greek art.
It is not until the fourth century B.C.., outside of the culture of classical Athens, that the female nude first appears as an appropriate subject for sculpture. That extremely special case can be pinpointed to the work of the sculptor Praxiteles, who created two cult statues of the goddess of love, Aphrodite...Aphrodite was depicted as a bather. Female nudity was believed to have “aphrodisiac” powers, that is, the ability to arouse sexual feelings in the viewer deriving from the power of the goddess of love. (pp. 41-2)
P’s C Venus de Milo, in the Louvre, observed by tourists
And what did I find when I looked myself? Given today’s standards calling
either of these classical sculptures erotic seems worth questioning. Can such
refined esthetic creations be sexually stimulating? Is it art if it is sexually
stimulating rather than esthetically stimulating? Just having nudes in art books
and classes seems to deny this. And then there is all the much more explicit
and realistic photography and video surrounding us in advertisements and other
pornography. So? How do we go back to see what things were like in the centuries
before the modern era?
What we do with study of any evidence is we check what we can see ourselves
against what we have heard or read, to see if it rings true to us.
This cuts dialectically in two directions. On one hand we see if we understand
what we have read and refine our understanding. On the other we see if what
we have read checks out with the evidence.
Normally we can begin trusting our previous sources. You can trust Gardner
and Slatkin. Unlike what you can find on the internet, these books
comes to you with the recommendation of a professor vetted by the state. It
has a reasonable pedigree. That doesn’t mean you should accept them without
questioning altogether, but it does mean you can give them an initial acceptance.
(Unless you find the state or me untrustworthy as a rule.)
I accepted the texts I had read. But then, I have wanted to understand more,
or at least whether the work fit the categories I was offered. For instance,
this is one of the world’s most famous works of art. As such bourgeois
culture claims that it should offer a highly moving esthetic experience.
One result was going to see the image the first time I had the chance to see
if that was true. Its exactly like your going to any popular film. You can see
if it is as good as it is supposed to be. And, we get both dialectical opportunities.
Is it good enough to move me? And, am I good enough to see how good it is? [This
is the continual testing of ourselves and the definitions of our society that
I go through wondering about the basic ideology of our society. We will talk
about it as we go along. Suffice it to say at this point, I was not disappointed
in either my own reactions or, for that reason, in what I had been told to expect.
It is stunning!]
What else was I able to see specifically about what I was told to be important?
I read the image carefully expecting details to emerge. From the front we can
see a handsome woman’s body. And, however broken, it is a revealing and
sexualized image. But then what image of a human bodies without clothes is not.
Indeed what image of people of either sex in most sorts of clothing is not somewhat
sexualized? Certainly you don’t have to be from Saudi Arabia to find a
good number of the women or men in our class relatively sexualized in their
dress. [Isn’t that one of the fears your parents had sending you here?
That you would be distracted by some gender or other?]
In person I found the official view of the image both attractive and sexual.
That is the view from the front, the same one in every book. But since it was
away from the wall, and since I could walk up to it, I was able to test it more
closely. I approached to see if anything changed from different angles. I walked
around the figure. Classical sculpture—I had learned in a class like this
one—is usually made to be seen from a limited number of angles, but this
one was sculpture in the round so I could see if there was more information
or more art from others. As I did I found the artist’s attempt to sexualize
her became more distinct and insistent. What the famous image from its most
famous view lacked, because I was so used to it, I found enhanced as I was able
to see more. From the back we see how Alexandros has emphasized the garment’s
slippage. The robe doesn’t cover her lower body by accident, but by the
fact that it is on its way off. The artist is calling attention to more sexualized
nakedness that is about to emerge. She isn’t just a nude, she is a woman
in the process of a strip-tease. Erotic issues have a place in out discussions
here. (We can talk another time about how appropriate that may be for either
art or an art history courses.)
I took this picture to remind myself of what I learned and to be able to show
it to you.
I get two more points from the picture, that I want to share
with you. They are important because they bring us back from the reality
of the image to the reality of our lives from which we study the image.
The first is to remember that most of what you see here is fragmentary,
not the full work of art designed and executed long ago. We must not
fetishize it, by treating it as if all it is is what we want to use
it for. This isn’t just a piece of beauty to be admired for its beauty.
A work’s most important meaning is in its fit into its context, not in
our manipulation of it. However much we enjoy what’s left, there was more
intended, and to understand the work we need help, like that provided in the
full quote by our textbook. Read your texts with care. They are very carefully
composed and have been refined over many years by careful scholars. I can not
say this about most of what you will find in the chaos of the internet. In fact
we find the opposite there.
Second, we see the work as it is today, a trophy exhibited in the museum, and
we notice that we are in the picture ourselves. We should be careful never to
idealize any work of art out of the reality in which we find ourselves with
it. If its deepest meaning is in its relation to its original context, its next
most important meaning for us is in how we connect it to our context. It is
not a piece of beauty or a picture of a woman floating in space for us to contemplate
if we happen to bump into it. This is a museum exhibit, a modern symbol of beauty,
a work of art, something we are supposed to admire. It is a piece of our human
history we are supposed to admire. We must not fetishize our ourselves
or our own processes.
Our society has gone to great length to capture and preserve this historical
trophy evidence. They’ve preserved it and brought it from the Greek island
of Melos to the Louvre. They display it there with care. They have set me here
to teach you about it. And they’ve charged you a good deal of money for
the opportunity. Why? To make you cultured? To make you a better citizen? To
entertain you? This too is worth our continuing consideration.
Or take another example of my research. Here are two of the most important examples in our book from further away than most of you are ever likely to go: the Taj Mahal of 1632-47 (13-27) and the Selimiye, the mosque of Salim II, 1568-75 (13-21/22). Some historians have supposed that the Turkish, Selimiye, one of the rare mosques in history to have four minars, is a possible source for the four minars at the Taj, which was built a half century later, and supposedly had a Turkish mason design its dome.
*13-21 Selimiye (Mosque of Selim II), Edirne, Turkey, 1568-75.
*13-27 Taj Mahal (Tomb of Shah Jahan), Agra, India, 1632-47.
How do we believe the history we read? By how well it checks out when we test
it. As a student of the survey, I have checked out various things to gauge it.
I’ll show you the results of my search of both, as a model of
the approach to the history that I am attempting to teach you: study with care
what our predecessors have left us, and measure it against
the best evidence you have in creating your own understanding.
This course has three purposes. The first is to familiarize
you with a representative selection of the most admired works of the
“Western” tradition and its sources, up through the thirteenth century
of the common era. The second is to offer you a spare outline of the
history that is their context. Added together these make up the survey
of “Western” art.
As you already understand intuitively, but may have spent little time considering
consciously, history has two somewhat different main meanings.
The first and most basic is what happened.; the second is our record
of what happened. Though we usually begin by thinking of these as more or less
the same thing—and pretty much teach them that way up through grade school—in
our advanced study we recognize that what happened and our record of it are
quite different things. And, though our goal is to make our records as cogent
as possible, representations of the events they portray, they can never be more
than careful interpretations. There is no possibility of an objective
record. The best we can do is as accurate and sensitive as record as current
research and analysis allow. Our goal remains accuracy and objective clarity,
but our accomplishment will always be an interpretation.
The result is that we come away with three coordinated histories rather than
the one we thought we would find, in our youth. These are 1) a collection of
more or less objective facts (the objects themselves in art history); 2) the
historical narrative and conceptualizations we fit them into; and 3) our syntheses
of the two.
My third purpose in this course is to give you some of the critical tools with which to understand and evaluate the more or less official, hegemonic history. This official version can found in our basic text, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages.. I will do this in two ways. First by having you read a second text, Wendy Slatkin’s Women in Art and History, which is a much briefer, view of the same historical sweep from a feminist perspective. Gardner is a very popular and well-respected survey, containing a most conventional American vision, taught throughout the United States. The slightly different angle of the two works will allow you a more critical perspective and so a more refined interpretation. The second way will be by offering you my own experience and interpretation along with these two.
So, if you hoped to learn the “history of art,” we will not disappoint
you, but we will be reminding you from the very beginning that it is interpretations
that you are studying and an interpretation you will come out with. There is
no correct or simple view. Though there are better and worse ones.
(And why is “Western” in quotation marks here?
Because, despite our constant use of the concept in our daily speech, there
is no such place, and so no such thing! There is a concept we are able to use
freely, like love and patriotism and god, but which careful thought reveals
to hold far more various meanings for everyone than we normally acknowledge,
too many to allow us to be speaking of the particular thing we may think we
are referring to. But I wont hold you up with this one at this point, only warn
you about it, and leave it to the course to develop.)
This is the first half of a two semester sequence that will be continued next
semester, from the Renaissance up to the present, with a different professor
and probably a different text, or set of texts, as well.
Grading
Your grade in this course will be based on three exams. In
each you will be asked to identify and discuss a selection of around forty images
drawn from those considered in the course. A list of the images chosen for each
exam will be handed out prior to the exam. You ought to be able to identify
each image on the list by:
1 title
2 artist(s)
3 provenance (source culture)
4 style
5 style’s period dates
As provenance we will be considering national culture of manufacture. For works of architecture this will include the local site. And, when it is known what larger structure a fragment of sculpture, painting, mosaic, etcetera, comes from, then that encompassing monument should be mentioned as well. These facts will all be limited to those that appear on the list of images to be considered for the exam, or comparable information added in class.
Besides this minimum identification you should be able to offer a simple discussion
of the art historical significance of each work, as Gardner, Slatkin
and I present it. That is, an account of how the work’s form and meaning
fit it into the historical period and cultural style within which it was created.
Since Gardner, Slatkin and I will offer different accounts in some
cases, it is particularly important that you follow the lectures attentively
to know where and how we differ. I will make a particular point of these differences
in class. when they exist. I wont expect you to guess about this.
Your tests will contain three sorts of questions: (1) straight image identification,
(2) comparison of images for their art historical significance, and (3) short
essays on historical trends and issues developed in the lectures. The essays
will be composed at home on subjects presented earlier. Make-up exams will be
penalized fifteen percent, unless your absence is the result of a documented
emergency. The final will take place on the date in the university’s Final
Schedule.
Save all you papers. Because of the bureaucratic difficulty of keeping track
of 250 students, it is absolutely necessary for you to pick up and retain all
things we hand back, if you are to guarantee that you get proper credit for
your work.
There will also be a one-paged analysis of a work of art viewed first
hand. You will notice the date on our schedule of Tuesday,
October 28. On that day there will be a field trip to the
Kansas City Museum, which will give you the opportunity see and consider works
first hand. Please begin now to plan on having that day free from 6 AM to 8
PM or so, to do some first hand looking and testing of this material.
B Art History Surveys
Studying History
My goal is to have you learn both the hegemonic tradition and how to interpret
it. The official, or standard, version of “Western” art
history is presented quite effectively in Gardner's Art Through the Ages.
Alternative interpretations will be modeled by Slatkin and me. It is
your job here to develop and refine your own version. The point of a university
education, and the difference between higher education and most earlier education,
is that here we face the world in a progressively more complex and ambiguous
vision of reality and learn how to cope with that reality, rather than accepting
one particular abridgment of that reality as if it were simply true.
We develop our understandings and expectations of history as we pass from primary
into secondary education. George Washington may never tell a lie the first time
we hear of him, and he may throw a silver dollar across the Potomac. By the
end of secondary school, however, we learn that there were no silver dollars
in Washington’s time and we may even develop the suspicion that he may
have been less than a perfect human being in some ways. On more serious consideration—after
deeper reading and more careful thinking—we have to acknowledge that although
he was one of the great men in the founding of our democratic tradition, he
and his motives were more complex, and in some ways problematic, than our childhood
myths. Washington was not a disinterested gentleman of anti-monarchical sympathies,
but the wealthiest man in the Thirteen Colonies, and so one with a great financial,
as well as political, interest in the outcome of the Revolutionary War. He was
also a slave master, who bought, tortured, and sold men, women, and children—including,
quite likely, some of his own.
Should looking past the official idealization into the fuller complexity of
Washington's reality devalue his importance as one of our founding fathers?
No. No more than its original acceptance of slavery invalidates the Constitution.
It does, however, show us how important have been the steps, like the Bill of
Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, that have produced the level of democracy
we have today. It should leads us to value the fuller record of what has happened,
to make us the people we are. For only with the most fully developed understandings
can we know how to move wisely and effectively toward the goals we have for
the future.
Your essays will focus on the problem of who our history is written about and
for. We will consider the two most important divisions of our humanity in this
regard, the division between the genders and the division between who is “Western”
(or as it is also understood: European) and who is not. Are women part
of the mankind discussed here? If so what part? And what is the deeper
meaning of “Western”? Could it be a code for another, more clearly
volcanic concept, “race”? A careful study of its usage in our official
histories and in our personal versions of history has much to teach us about
not only our past, but our personal stakes in the future.
Art History? History is a tree of many branches. Some
are defined by periods or national focuses, others by the sort of evidence they
focus upon. Art history is the branch that focuses upon the most prestigeous
material artifacts. There is a problem with this, in that the category of art
is notoriously ambiguous, and we therefore treat things that often have little
to do with each other as if they were part of some sort of Platonic form: art
objects. The other major problem with this focus is that it tends to leave out
of the scene the quotidian imagery (the everyday stuff) that best explains the
prestige imagery.
So why study the history through a focus on prestigeous objects? Because ambiguous
as the category may be, the conventional contents found there includes many
of the most richly meaningful objects to survive from the past. More time and
carefully conceived human effort has gone into composing these things than almost
anything else of human creation. So, incoherent as the category may be, many
of the items contained within it are quite more pregnant with information than
just about any other surviving materials.
Ambiguous and potentially misleading as the subject of art may be,
there is an established set of studies built around an established canon here
and we can study this body of elitelore as well as any other body of historical
documents and analysis. Just because astrology and alchemy aren’t as scientific
as astronomy doesn’t mean the history of either is not of interest to
us. At the very least we have all the model we need in the history of literature
and the history of religion. Whether particular writing is good or bad writing,
we can still consider any document for what it tells about those who created
it and their situation in the world. It may also occur to us that if any of
our better-known world religions is actually correct, then the rest are not.
But this does not keep us from studying those other than our own, in hopes of
better understanding those who follow them and their world views.
The main defense to keep up during our investigation, the protection we have
against the bourgeois (ideological) religious element in the category art, is
to remember that these items are interesting and richly endowed with many wonderful
characteristics, but that they are not mystical, magical, or metaphysical. They
are merely wonderfully conceived and executed artifacts. They are not even the
“most finely crafted” or “most brilliantly conceived”
or any other nonpareil that prestige has labeled them. They are the current
set of most sought after artifacts in the art category. But this is
a bourgeois market convention, not a cosmic.
C The Texts
The course will follow the eleventh edition of Gardner's Art Through
the Ages. I will lecture from material covered in that book, following
the schedule listed in this syllabus. You will be expected to read the first-half
of Gardner (volume 1 of the paperback split) and learn what you can
of the information found there. This is a conventional, hegemonic history, the
official story as the elite of this society would like you to understand it.
Indeed Gardner is one of the two most respected and widely used texts
ever produced on this subject. You don’t need to bring it to class. If
you are not a weight lifter, I positively recommend that you don’t.
We will also do some reading in Wendy Slatkin’s Women Artists
in History, from Antiquity to the Present,
(fourth ed.). This is a more critical history, focused upon the contribution
and situation of women during the same period, an area of interest in which
hegemonic history is relatively weak. The contrast between the two approaches
is included in the course to establish a model of the critical viewpoint necessary
for a mature historical reading.
We will also be using Plato’s Cave, the college’s
in-house web site for viewing images used in our courses. I may or may not use
it for showing material illustrated in your texts, but will definitely use if
for visual material I want to develop more thoroughly, but not found in your
texts.
I will lecture largely within the framework provided by these two texts, expanding
on some examples, omitting some and adding some alternative works and viewpoints.
The course will be based upon a combination of my lectures and the two texts.
I will expect you to learn the images that are used in the lectures and to be
able to discuss the major developments of the traditions they exemplify, in
relation to (1) their formal stylistic characteristics, (2) their subject matter
and (3) their historical contexts, as interpreted in Gardner, Slatkin and
Tartakov. The examinations will be based upon materials discussed in the
lectures. Since these will regularly deviate from the texts, attending the lectures
is an essential part of the course. The essay questions for the exams and the
list of particular works to be considered on the exams will be distributed in
class a week or so before the exams. Material, such as this syllabus, will be
regularly adjusted by discussions in the lectures. Even the list of slides to
be considered for the exams may be altered in lecture after it has been handed
out.
Though I will not be taking roll, it is necessary to attend each meeting of
the course to follow it effectively. The take-home essay sections of the exams
are particularly dependent on the discussion in class. So careful consideration
of the lectures is a necessity, if you intend to get the most out of the course.
Gardner’s Art Through the Ages
Helen Gardner wrote her survey in 1926, 2nd ed. ‘36, 3rd ‘48.
Yale University’s Art History Dept., rewrote it in 1959.
that was my survey, 40 years ago.
The 5th ed., and every one since has been by Tansey, Delacroix and others.
It is a first rate standard text, one of the two most popular
in American Univs.
This is a hegemonic history: an official view, which like most
of today’s academic textbooks and teachers is a relatively conservative
official view
I encourage to purchase a new copy of it and to keep it for your future cultural
development
This is not a history of all the world’s art, but of a NATO-based selection. That is it is the English language version of the history of what has been interesting to the North Atlantic Europeans of the 20th century, and most particularly the most powerful of those people, the North American public of the United States. That is, the US plus England, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. The book also covers the ancient societies who seem to have contributed to that development. And it has been expanded to include chapters on what these cultures have found collectable in the most powerful other cultures, of India, Japan, China, Africa, and Pre-Columbian America.
D What are you and I doing here?
Though the overwhelming mass of material included in the course comes from the texts, the point of the course is found in the lectures. Like any other history, the actuality of this one is far more complex and the evidence far more contradictory than any single narrative is able to reveal. Thus our third theme, which is developed in my dialog with the printed texts and your potential dialogues with me. By having a live historian in the room, offering a somewhat different view from that in the texts, you will be able to see the history with a bit more of the transparency and perspective necessary to get you functionally into working with your own history.
I am here to exemplify how history is done and to testify as to what I have
l earned in my own pursuit of understanding. Having spent some four decades
seriously studying these objects and their histories, and teaching across this
survey, I am in a position to help you get at them more authentically than any
book alone can. I have read at much greater depth in the cultures we will cover
than our comprehensive book has opportunity to present. In fact many of you
have deeper particular knowledge of some of these cultures. Gardner may aver
to the “democracy” of ancient Athens, in contrast to the theological
monarchy of ancient Egypt. Slatkin will offer us the deeper understanding of
Athens’s democracy, in her explanation of the severely restricted role
of women in that culture. I will add a consideration of the fact that the slaves
there outnumbered the citizens. As you develop your history, I will be showing
you have been developing mine.
Because of my own fascination with the full sweep of human history and with
the “Western” canon (the conventional survey selection
of most prestigeous examples), I have visited with a good number of the objects
and places first hand; so I have a developed idea about how much they do or
don’t resemble their representation in the books (verbal and photographic)
and about aspects that don’t appear in the usual views. I have studied
some of the cultures involved in detail, so I can guide you more richly around
their contexts. And I have written some art history, so I have an insider’s
understanding about how some of the conclusions are reached. Most important,
you can ask me questions, and I can do my best to direct you toward the answers
you seek.
I don’t mean to imply that I have the last word on the history of art
survey, only that I have a developed professional and personal view and that
I intend to use it here to help you in the development of you own. Ultimately
it is that view that will be most important to you. The fact is, you already
have one and you use it in your thinking about the world around you in important
ways. You use it already, in your unavoidable efforts to understand your own
place in society and the world. You even use it in your daily reading of the
news. Iraq is not the first place our armies have invaded and our air force
bombed, and it will not be the last. When you read of items lost from its museums
or destroyed in the war, you will understand the situation better to know that
the British Museum is filled with trophies, such as the magnificent and poignant
dying lioness (2-25), that the British took out of the region when they were
in control of it earlier, or that the giant, human-headed, winged bulls (2-21)
found in the Louvre are rare survivors of a large set that the British lost
by accident in the Persian Gulf at the same time. The Bull-headed lyre (2-9
& 10) in the museum of the University of Pennsylvania is our part of the
booty. Which is not to suggest that there was anything illegal these acquisitions.
Our ultimate goal here is to develop our ability to interpret, and so understand,
our history. As a practicing professional I am here to help you develop the
image you already have a little further. It will be up to you how much further.
You will have the rest of your life to go on from there, but this will be one
of the few times, you will get to do this in a formal setting. I hope you will
take full advantage of it.