James ElkinsKirja-arvosteluja

I found What Heaven Looks Like — James Elkins’ commentary on a 17th-century book of unknown origins held in the University of Glasgow’s “collection of alchemical manuscripts” — among the jilted review copies at a magazine where I fact checked six years ago. It’s a natural resting place for a work about a painter best taxonomized as a hermit and mystic, outside and far, but not utterly remote, from any establishment and tradition. And yet, having disinterred and reburied the book among my others until recently, I can’t help but wish that more people would discover the fifty-two paintings within, conjured up by a solitary, wandering mind’s encounters with fifty-two (or fewer) imperfect wooden circles.

The number fifty-two seems like it should be significant, as do plenty of the images in the book, the painter’s many references to Christian figures, Greek gods, and contemporaneous guides to alchemy. Elkins observes that no subject ever reaches a point of finality, where we might comfortably claim there is some sense to it. “Nothing is unwelcome, unless she recognizes it,” he writes. (He has decided, quite plausibly, that the artist is a woman.) “I would like to think she lost interest in her project when she began to feel at home in the contours of her imagination.” Elkins wants to avoid meaning and its inevitable outgrowth, narrative, in the work. He seems to struggle against the same impulse in his writing, a form where it is even more difficult to evade, and is aided by a self-imposed limit — a single page of commentary for each painting.

Through his commentary, I found myself led, but not strong-armed, into noticing the many features I had missed about the paintings. His brief explanations of historical context are also helpful. One place of disagreement comes in his thoughts on the title page; he is mildly skeptical of the idea that the inscription might be by the artist herself. In particular, though, the description in these few lines of the painter as an “Ape of Nature” appeals to me — it reminds me of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” in which an ape named Red Peter explains the method by which, after his capture and transportation to Europe, he fashioned himself into a human. In his novel Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee has the eponymous writer deliver a lecture in which she notes that “Red Peter took it upon himself to make the arduous descent from the silence of the beasts to the gabble of reason.” I sometimes think this painter must have tried to climb in the opposite direction, journeying into muteness and effecting, as Elkins notes, a certain forlorn distance from the rest of humanity.

It's difficult to find really interesting books on photography other than the "usual names" (Benjamin, Barthes, Sontag and a very few others). Elkins bravely decided to write a direct confrontation with Barthes' Camera Lucida and constructed a strange and fascinating book which has both merits and downsides. Elkins definitely knows what he's talking about (even from the technical point of view) and some of his reflections will definitely leave a mark in photography theoretical discourse. Everyone interested in the nature of photography should read it.

Fascinating- but overwhelming.

Not what I expected so I decided not to worry about it

I very much enjoyed the essays by David Morgan, the Elkins excerpt is best read in the context of his great On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, and the rest of the book was a bit of an academic free-for-all with decidedly mixed results.

Not a definitive overview of the place of religion in contemporary art, but an intelligent (and entertaining!) starting point for further thought.

Almost what I'm looking for. Each short essay was interesting in its own right - but *for me* it would have been better if the bits I was especially interested in were expanded. I suck at crystals, x-rays, and some others... but other essays really enhanced my appreciation of, for example, sand. Large trade pb book with bright clear photos, drawings, and reproductions of antique images.

Visualization... is not a subject, as some psychologists take it to be. It is a skill that depend narrowly and precisely on what is there to be seen."

Boy do I agree with that. The chapter on grass was *easy* for me... because I grew up weeding quack grass and others from the gardens at the farm, laying in the lawn playing with the grass both there and at home in town, studying prairie grasses in preserved patches in Minnesota....

Using your eyes more effectively is not, however, simply a matter of looking more carefully & closely. It's having some actually understanding of the subject, and some vocabulary to help articulate the thoughts. In the chapter on Linear B, Elkins teaches us how to look at unknown scripts: "If there are only about 25 (unique signs), then the script has an alphabet, like English. If there are around 100, it may be a syllabary, like Linear B. If you lose count entirely, it must be an ideographic script, like Chinese."

It's also having an understanding of alternative theories. Schoolchildren learn the primary colors as red, blue, yellow. Our computer printers use cyan, magenta, and yellow. Turns out there are at least a dozen other ways to think of 'basic' or 'pure' colors. There is no right answer.

I do recommend this, with the caveat that we don't expect you to love every chapter in it."½

In CLAN are three others by Elkins that look even more interesting.

Way too *A*cademic for me. I am capable of deciphering it, but have insufficient motivation... Glancing through, it seems over-engineered. Of course modern cultures are more visual, as we have more means of transmitting images, so of course students should be offered more visual modes of transmission of knowledge - not just text/ words. There must be more here... for those ivory tower types, anyway.

Okay I am finally kicking this off my "Currently reading" shelf because I returned this book to the library several months ago and I'm not getting it back anytime soon. "Abandoned," sadly.

So here we have an interesting book about people crying in front of paintings. It's been several months since I looked at this book, so I can't give any real specifics. I got the feeling that the author couldn't really find THAT much to say about the subject, but I can't say why now. There are some really cool and engaging personal anecdotes, and there is a whole section in the back devoted to the letters people wrote Elkins describing these experiences. The last chapter I read was about people's changing tastes in art and how one painting that made people cry when it first premiered no longer has the same effect on people today. The first chapter, about Rothko's chapel, left the best impression on me. There was also an interesting chapter about people fainting and falling ill while looking at paintings. That's all I got. Not a bad book, and if I had more time I would have gladly finished it. Maybe one day.

MOST IMPORTANTLY FOR AN ART BOOK YOU HAD LIKE FIVE PICTURES. COME ON.

Disappointing. I was expecting a book that taught you how to see what was in front of you, how to get past what you think you see to really notice all the important details. Instead, what we get is a list of things the author is interested in, presented in a rather boring manner. Either the material is rather anecdotal and doesn't tell you much other than the author thinks it's interesting, or the level of detail is textbook, with long lists of names and diagrams. The former is interesting in a down to earth way, and the latter could be really useful if you are actually drawing a shoulder blade or the face, which is to say the book isn't a write-off in terms of quality. The book is half illustrations and photographs, and is quite beautiful. I even share many of Elkins' interests. Yet the total is just deadly dull instead of fascinating, tedious rather than informative. And no where was my hope met, except for the oft repeated finding that naming a feature will help you notice it and reproduce it better.
I would've given it 3 or 3.5 stars, except it gets a major knock down for his expressed desire to not have certain phenomenon explained to him, or ever to be explained at all! Just romantically inane.
2.5 stars on oc½

So, a book about people who have cried in front of different paintings throughout history? Sign me up please! I'd never heard of this writer before, but the unconventional treatment of art history was right up my alley. I love writing that explores the area between the academic (art/painting) and the non-academic (crying).



Though the author, Elkins, is a respected professor of art history, he was still able to remain open-minded to other ways of approaching art, never ruling out anything as 'invalid', but considering them all in the spectrum of different human reactions to art. Not so his colleagues. When beginning his project, he sent out a letter to many people, both art historians and regular art admirers, with a survey asking if they had ever cried in front of a painting before.

The vast majority of art historians either did not write back, or wrote back to say they had not--and did not think that crying was very professional. Many of the ones who did admit to crying wished to remain anonymous. The author says that we currently live in one of the most tearless eras of art history ever, and that it was not always this way.

The most interesting letters/surveys that came back were from non-art historians, just regular museum goers who had a special experience to share.



The book starts off with two chapters about the Rothko chapel (above), which I found especially interesting since I visited it just a year ago, knowing only Rothko’s more colorful output. I was oddly unmoved by these vast dark pieces, whereas Rothko’s lozenge-like color fields have been some of the paintings closest to moving me to tears in the past. But it was nice to read what others had felt in front of these paintings that I had not.

"Some tears were mysteries even to the person who cried them. ("Tears, a liquid embrace") They came from nowhere, and in a minute they evaporate, like a dream that can hardly be remembered. What can be said about tears like that? I want to spend awhile now considering tears of all sorts, just to see how few of them make sense."

People cry in front of paintings for many different reasons. Some I found more useful than others, and sometimes--I have to be honest--I thought the author was a little too open-minded, whereas reading the accounts myself, I felt that the crying had more to do with the person than the painting.

Elkins himself admits that he has not cried in front of a painting before, but I got a sense that he deeply wishes to be able to; all his knowledge prevents him from returning to that state.



Throughout the book, Elkins wrestles with the two approaches: emotional investment vs. intellectual distance. He shows you how throughout history, there have been periods of lots of crying and periods of sober intellectual distance. We are in one of the most sober periods in art. Elkins reminds us that modernism and postmodernism came about as a reaction against the high emotion, the carried-away-ness of romanticism. We live under the illusion that art does not need to move us, we walk from painting to painting in a museum as if consuming chicken nuggets.

But I don't know if it's so clear cut as that. We can be moved by highly modern and even post-modern works, like the woman who wrote letter #6 in the appendix (he collects some of his responses in the back) where she describes being moved to tears by the colors, the paint, and even the nails that hold the canvas to the stretcher. In fact, I think the most successful paintings for me are the ones that manage to create that illusion of Modernism's self-aware distance, yet still communicate strong human emotions--paintings that embody both intellect AND emotion.

"In a subject like this, no matter how dusty a theory is, it might help, and a very dusty theory might fit best. I say that because I hope it's true: at least I know there is no hope for a well-behaved, legitimate-sounding theory where things are so wild."

Response to p.124-129

I understand Elkins is trying to play devil’s advocate here, but his analysis is too simple. After giving us all the great reasons why we don’t cry over a late 18th century Greuze painting (below), namely: cultural/generational differences that affect how we look at painting, and at ideas like nobility, patriotism, love, etc. and how we don’t see things as black & white but as more complicated shades of gray, as well as how we look at things that are overly sentimental as manipulative, he goes on to say that nevertheless we cry at sentimental Disney movies and Dick and Jane books, etc. Then he says:

“There must be some other reason why Greuze is so powerless to move us. The answer, I think, lies in our fear of crying.”

Well I find that completely absurd, given what he’s just told us. If we fear crying, why don't we fear crying at Disney movies and Dick and Jane books, as he JUST told us? No, we don’t cry at Greuze paintings anymore for the same reason (most of us) don’t find 20’s comedies funny anymore--because attitudes about what’s sad/funny/etc. change within the span of decades, and even faster now. I agree with Elkin’s point that we should free up our tear glands more often when it comes to art appreciation... and I agree that fear of crying is probably one of the many factors for why we don’t cry at more paintings... but fear of crying is NOT the reason we don’t cry at THIS Greuze painting, in particular.



In other words, just because we should cry doesn’t mean we should still be crying over the same things we cried over in 1785! That’s absurd... if we’re to cry today, it will have to be something that makes OUR generation cry--something that speaks to us, like Rothko did in Chapter 1. How can such a simple point elude Elkin, when he pretty much outlines it right there earlier in the chapter? I feel like he willfully misses this obvious point towards the end of the chapter. But why?

About Museums

I think what he says about museums being a busy, brightly lit area seems to be one of the strongest reasons for not crying. And in fact I wonder why he doesn’t harp on this point more. Maybe because he thinks the museum experience may just be a symptom of our attitudes towards art rather than the cause. The chicken or the egg? Hmm...

He talks about how much more conducive to emotional reactions it would be if museums would dedicate each room to just one painting, where the light is dimmed and a soft light is cast on the painting.

Although I think this is a good idea, I can see why we don't do it this way, i.e. the presentation of the art can easily become manipulative, tainting the 'pure' experience of the artwork with the museum's interpretation. But isn’t that inevitable anyway? Crowding many art pieces into a brightly lit room is also influencing our way of viewing it, but this way doesn’t serve the painting at all. Perhaps every painting should be thought of as installation art, and museums should think more about individualizing the presentation of each to fit the art.

A Review of the Actual Writing Itself

Despite some gaps in the logic and some rather repetitive portions towards the middle, it was generally engaging; personal, yet backed up by evidence, and not shying away from the occasional inexplicable mystery. But there were times when I thought he did not delve far enough with some of his conclusions.

A Survey of My Own

I would like to know what paintings you have cried in front of, if any, and (if you can put it into words:) why did you cry?

And if none, then what paintings have moved you closest to tears? And if still none, then what sculptures, photographs, or otherwise non-filmic visual medium has moved you to tears? Please respond in the comments section.

The topic is fascinating, and when Elkins talks about specific works of art he is great. Unfortunately, when he talks about emotions he doesn't say much and he repeats his few points insufferably; a good editor would have trimmed this book by a quarter. That said, Elkins' position that we are poorer for having forgotten how to engage with paintings emotionally - and the role that museums and art historians play in this development - will stay with you and affect the way you look at art in the future.

Elkins is ultimately commenting on the uncertainty of the critique process, on how it's really more about collecting a bushel of opinions, letting them ferment in a vat for forty-five minutes, and then distilling some form of educational beverage from them. It's an inexact process that he tries unsuccessfully to understand. He does manage to provoke thought about the whole venture, which he contends is ultimately what critiques themselves are supposed to do. Also, yes, as another reviewer has pointed out, there are some humorous moments. In particular, I enjoyed the suggestion that the student arrange his work in reverse-chronological order and try to convince the panel that he had progressed from newest to oldest over time, or to have someone else stand in place of the artist to uncover the biases of the panel. Surreptitious stuff.

Interesting -- I will have to read this one again. I think I missed alot of what was written.
Thank you for the opportunity.

If you browsed the New York Review of Books around 1999, you may have noticed a small classified ad that read something like this: “Wanted: if you have ever cried in front of a painting, please contact me.”

The ad was placed by James Elkins, professor in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Elkins received hundreds of responses to his query, which he also posted on the Internet and in a variety of other publications. The responses, along with historical research and contacts with a wide range of individuals, form the basis of his book.

Elkins argues that being moved to tears by a work of art is not kooky or deranged, but a valid and important reaction—a response that was relatively common in the past, but has become increasingly rare in our time. He laments this state of affairs and expresses frustration at his own inability to weep, even when viewing paintings that have played a special role in his career and life.

To read the full review:
http://www.resnicowschroeder.com/aboutUs.asp?P=3&A=1&opedId=169

A strange and at times funny discussion about photography. A group of very learned and scholarly hobby-philosophers attempting to "conceptualize" photography. This would probably have worked out better if the people involved had stopped to consider why they thought such an exercise is necessary.

For anyone in art school - undergraduate or graduate - READ THIS BOOK. A refreshing look at how art has been "taught" over the years and some really humorous commentary on the critique process; for example speculation on what a Rembrandt critique might have sounded like - hilarious!. This book helps to put it all in perspective and not take it *too seriously.

From the Introduction:
"Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism."

This is an axiom of how I see and think.
(john)½

Stepping into the debates over visual culture’s purported interdisciplinarity, Elkins accounts for two main positions. First, he argues, there is the largely ‘uninteresting’ attempt at interdisciplinarity. Here he draws our attention to three key models: (i) a magpie theory that simply ‘cobbles methods, subjects, and texts from various disciplines’ (p. 27); (ii) a more dynamic trans- disciplinary mingling of disciplines, out of which all sorts of trouble spots emerge; and (iii) W.J.T. Mitchell’s notion of a ‘de-disciplinary’ operation whereby visual culture ducks out of the realm of disciplines to discover what is usually passed over or bracketed out. The suggested problem with any of these modes is that ‘as long as you know what you’re doing, you are likely to be operating in a way that can be described as disciplinary, even if it is a rogue disciplinarity’ (p. 29). However, it should not then follow that the achievements of ‘rogue disciplinarity’ are necessarily so ‘uninteresting’.

Second, there is the ‘interesting’ kind of interdisciplinary visual culture that ‘does not know its subjects but finds them through its preoccupations’ (p. 30). In this case, disciplines are largely to be ignored; instead, you are prompted to follow your nose. And so for Elkins, although it is predominant- ly art history that provides the initial base from which he claims to be able to go elsewhere, the underlying principle is to break out of the strictures that the ‘codification of knowledge’ enforce.

FULL REVIEW:
Review: James Elkins' 'A Skeptical Introduction to Visual Studies'in Journal of Visual Culture, 2004, Vol 3, no. 2, pp.373-377
http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/3/3/373

The 'review' I wrote on Amazon, to support the book, which was not advertised or distributed:

I'm the editor, so I'm giving it five stars. (Wouldn't be ethical to do anything else.)

The studio-art PhD, or practice-based doctorate, is a hot topic in art instruction in the US. Other countries have had these degrees for several decades; in the UK there are up to 2,000 students currently enrolled in such programs, and there will soon be 10 universities in Australia that offer the degree. At the moment there are about 10 programs in the US and Canada, and another dozen more under development. It appears that the PhD in studio art will become the next MFA--that is, the expected terminal degree for artists who want to get jobs teaching. In twenty or thirty years' time, it is likely that every major art school and department will offer the PhD. The degree is controversial wherever it exists, and there is a fair amount of resistance to it: there have been some stormy sessions on the subject at conferences. Most of the formative issues, from grading to accreditation, remain unresolved.

This book is the first of its kind in the US. It is meant as a resource to help artists, teachers, administrators, and students assess and compare the new programs. Part I is a selection of essays by the best-informed people on both sides of the Atlantic, including most of the principal players and institutions. Part II is a selection of excerpts of the PhD dissertations written by people who have graduated from such programs, so people can see the kind of art and scholarship the programs produce.

Here are the contents of Part I:
1: Judith Mottram, 'Researching Research in Art and Design'
2: Timothy Emlyn Jones, 'Research Degrees in Art and Design'
3: Henk Slager, 'Art and Method'
4: Mick Wilson, 'Four Theses Attempting to Revise the Terms of a Debate'
5: Victor Burgin, 'Thoughts on 'Research' Degrees in Visual Arts Departments'
6: Timothy Emlyn Jones, 'The Studio Art Doctorate in America'
7: George Smith, 'The Non-Studio PhD for Visual Artists'
8: Hilde Van Gelder and Jan Baetens, 'The Future of the Doctorate in the Arts'
9: James Elkins, 'On Beyond Research and New Knowledge'
10: Charles Harrison, 'When Management Speaks...'
11: James Elkins, ''The Three Configurations of Studio-Art PhDs'

Most of the literature justifying and defining these programs was written in the UK, although the programs can now be found around the world. This book has a double purpose: the selection of authors and artists is intended to span a wide range, showing how the PhD is implemented in different places; my own contributions are meant as polemics, because I am unconvinced by the rhetoric of 'research' and 'new knowledge' that continue to frame discussions on the subject. It seems to me there is an opportunity to reconfigure discussion in the US, and to remake these programs in a new mold.

New Academia Publishing is a peer-reviewed, print-on-demand initiative; the books may not show up in bookstores, but they are always quickly available through Amazon and other outlets.

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