In this part we will look at how the academic disciplines of art, media and design have developed in relation to the emergence of various methodologies, or systems or methods used in particular areas of study. We will be thinking about verbal discourses and their relationship to visual images.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

In earlier periods, verbal discussions of visual artefacts were largely motivated by the practical necessity of providing descriptions. Often, paintings, sculptures, textiles, ceramics and so on were themselves not readily accessible, and, before mass reproduction of images was made possible through printing, and when travel was difficult, there was a demand for substitute or surrogate written texts that provided a record of what these visual artefacts looked like. The need arose to produce verbal equivalents or translations. These were often organised in relation to the biographies of individuals and the evolution of styles. They were eulogistic (formally expressing praise). Special status was granted to the making of art, and artworks were seen as reflections of the preconceptions, innovations or state of mind of the maker. As a result, art tended to be isolated from broader social contexts.

In the late nineteenth century, the academic discipline of art history emerged as a field of study. This discipline sought to align itself with the emerging field of the social sciences. The focus shifted to the study of visual artefacts with a wide range of linguistic and cultural references, and art-historical studies aimed to embed or locate objects within a wider awareness of how society works. Furthermore, approaches developed that claimed to be scientific – to offer a kind of ‘scientific seeing’ – and focused not so much on individual artists but on underlying principles or laws of style. The ideal was to attain value-free, culturally unbiased, objective, more or less scientific and apolitical access to visual artefacts. The viewer of a visual artefact, it was claimed, must go beyond a ‘gut feeling’ approach – that is, ‘I like it, but I can’t tell you why’ – and also beyond a focus on the life story of the artist, or questions of style and expertise. As the influential art historian Erwin Panofsky pointed out, while one cannot hope to identify completely with distant cultures because they are just too ‘far off’ and obscure, one can nevertheless make an effort to achieve what he called a ‘more “objective” appraisal’. This, Panofsky continued, meant making oneself familiar with ‘the social, religious and philosophical attitudes of other periods and countries, in order to correct subjective feeling for content’ (Panofsky 1995: 193).

Academic art history claimed that appreciation and understanding of visual artefacts is not about whether one likes something or not, or who the artist or designer is. Instead, it demanded the questioning of such immediate responses and their supplementation by a more reflective and reflexive attitude that placed thinking within a cultural matrix or network. For instance, one could reflect on how the image of a mother and child takes on different symbolic meanings in different places and at different times, or how the symbol of the rose has been used. One could also expand the breadth of this approach to look, for example, at how the work of a non-Western artist compares to that produced in the West in the same period, and how such an artist absorbed or rejected Western influences.

The general assumption behind these approaches was that, in order to provide a sense of the arts as structured and stable fields that could be communicable and quantifiable and also testable within an academic framework, it was necessary to provide a continuous line traceable back into the past. This was understood to function within a linear structure that displayed a clear evolutionary pattern that, despite certain periods of relapse (of ‘decadence’), has a progressive purpose or goal (a teleology). Essentially, this meant assuming that, culturally speaking, visual artefacts got more sophisticated and more ‘enlightened’ over time.

MODERNISM

Modernism as a tendency in the arts gathered pace from about 1850, and sought to self-consciously reject the past as a model for the art of the present. Key aspects of modernism were the exploration of subjective experience and the clarification and simplification of structure. These tendencies were often underpinned by belief in progress. The concept of the ‘avant-garde’ emerged, in which it was argued that art should be ahead of its time, even in conflict with its time. Artists began to take their feeling of alienation – of being outside society, misunderstood and rejected – as necessary for the production of authentic art. Modernism thus proposed new forms of art on the grounds that these were more appropriate to the contemporary times. It was characterised by constant innovation.

Emphasis on self-expression and subjectivity led to an increasing exploration of primitivism, with artists making a clear commitment to an aesthetic in which the art of the margins – which, for Westerners, often meant the art produced outside Europe and America – was preferred because of its greater ‘authenticity’ compared to the familiar or canonical Western art of the museums. Thus, the art and artefacts of Africa and other areas undergoing Western colonization became increasingly prominent in the public consciousness because of their perceived reaching after original or basic human needs and goals.

At the same time, the pressures of communication, transportation and more rapid scientific development began to have an impact on culture through stimulating the search for more efficient and simple forms that were often modelled on machines and technology rather than on natural forms. The development of modern media technology also had the effect of confusing and narrowing the gap between ‘high’ or ‘elite’ art and popular or ‘low’ art and design, so that artists and designers often chose to adopt techniques and subjects that had previously been considered inappropriate for serious art.

Modernism was closely associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress, and was therefore often driven by utopian social and political agendas. Constructivism, for example, had a clearly political agenda and was embraced for a time by the newly established Bolshevik communist regime in Russia, although quite quickly the leaders turned against such radicalism and advocated socialist realism instead – which was characterised by idealised figurative art used for propaganda purposes. Such easy-to-understand art also appealed to the fascist regimes of the mid-twentieth century. Thus, from the 1920s, Western art was inevitably understood in relation to the ideologies of the political right and left, with abstract and non-realistic modernism proclaimed as the true art forms of the ‘free’ and individualistic world. Culture produced within the context of such approaches inevitably considered it very important to challenge social norms and world-views, to break with cultural stereotypes and the ‘art of the museums’ and to aim at the transformation of society.

Expressionist paintings done at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth centuries are distorted in shape and colour, but it is still possible for most people to quite easily see and recognise what is represented by comparing the painting to other visual representations from the past, and also to their own experience of perceiving the world. But Cubist paintings done around 1911, or abstract paintings from around 1920, are clearly something else. The artists who made such works were no longer showing us a recognisable world that we believe we all share. So what were they doing? And even more difficult is the work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who no longer made paintings but instead presented ordinary objects as his artworks. How do Duchamp’s ‘ready-made’ objects have any relationship with the ‘art’ we see in the pages of art history books and in museums, or with the idea of art as an imitation of the visual world? Aesthetics – or concern with the nature and appreciation of beauty – was no longer the principal goal of art. And this transformation in the goals of art was just the beginning.

As a result of such cultural transformations, by the mid-twentieth century, ten academic methodologies had developed in relation to the study of art and design.

First, the connoisseurship methodology was based on the visual observation of artefacts in isolation from wider social issues. It provided assessments of the overall appearance of works in relation to style, date of production, attribution to a specific maker or school, formal conception and material qualities (including analysis of materials and techniques employed), trade practices, function, provenance (who commissioned it, and who subsequently owned it) and overall present condition. This kind of expert would often also be required to make an appraisal or evaluation of the work’s market worth. He or she was someone who possessed a ‘good eye’ but who was also supposed to be objective. For example, in Italian Painters (1900; originally 1890), Giovanni Morelli argued the connoisseurship methodology had a scientific basis by claiming it was grounded in empirical observation.

Second, the iconological (‘icon’ means ‘image’ in Greek) approach looked at visual artefacts in relation to ‘prototypes’ (a first or preliminary model of something from which other forms are developed or copied) that serve as models for subsequent artistic evolution. This methodology involved exploring how key symbols and ideas evolved through time and in different forms. It examined visual artefacts as objects grounded in a complex context made up of other artefacts and cultural forms that might include literature, music, religion, politics, patronage and so on. By so doing, this approach intended to describe how such artefacts function as complex carriers of symbolic cultural meanings. For example, see Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology (1972; originally 1939).

Third, the expressionist approach aimed to counter both the scientific bias of art-historical methodologies and also an excessive preoccupation with iconology by stressing that art was primarily about feeling and emotion. Emphasis was placed on visual artefacts as the expression of the imaginative life. Analysis shifted to discuss concepts such as sincerity and authenticity. Thus the focus returned to the artist rather than style. See R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art (1938).

Fourth, the psychological approach drew on developments in the understanding of the complexities of human consciousness, in particular on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, which exposed the degree to which conscious life is often overwhelmed by powerful drives or desires coming from the unconscious, and on Carl Jung’s work with the relationship between symbols and the ‘collective unconscious’. Art, it was claimed, is closely connected to such unconscious forces, and therefore must be understood as often having meanings and consequences far beyond those consciously intended. For example, see Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1989; originally 1910).

Fifth, the phenomenological approach stressed the idea that visual artefacts are the expression of intentions. It focused on the subjective process of thinking, on consciousness and on how visual artefacts allow access to the deepest levels of experience and thought, such as conscience, fear and the awareness of death. This approach therefore stressed the importance of the imagination and the body in any interpretation of visual artefacts. Humanity, this methodology stressed, possesses an embodied consciousness, and so, rather than primarily dominating the world through the cognitive capacity for reason, visual artefacts reveal that human culture is actually far more ambiguous and obscure. Art is part of a wider quest for existential authenticity and a new ‘horizon’ of possibilities. For example, see José Ortega y Gasset’s Phenomenology and Art (1975).

Sixth, the spiritual or metaphysical approach treated visual artefacts as in one way or another linked to religion, religious experience, the sacred and the spiritual. For most of its history, image-making has been inextricably bound up with religion. After all, religious institutions were the main patrons. Some artists were even members of religious groups – the fifteenth-century Italian artist Fra Angelico, for example, was a Dominican monk. While progressive Western art became largely secular, the bond between art and religion was not cut with the advent of modernism. Instead, it went underground and continued as a more diffuse and less clearly defined ‘spirituality’. Approaches to art were therefore sought that could do justice to a spiritual dimension even as the traditional forms of religion were judged outdated and irrelevant to modern society. For example, see Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1997; originally 1908).

Seventh, the formalist approach argued for the autonomy or self-sufficiency of art, and focused on the analysis and evolution of styles. This approach should also be seen within the context of the development of modernism in the arts – that is, the movement away from the idea of art as either imitation of the ‘real’ or of a prototype, and towards style as the expression of a timeless ‘aesthetic sensibility’. At its most extreme, formalism suggested that the essence of a visual artefact is its reflexive preoccupation with its own medium, understood in terms of specific formal or material characteristics. For example, see Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History (1950; originally 1915).

Eighth, the technological approach also argued that the focus of attention should be on the evolution of the medium itself. Artists and designers were understood to be involved in an ongoing project that was essentially directed at technical problem-solving. For example, in Western art, a major problem was how to produce more and more lifelike imitations of the visual world through the techniques of realism. Artworks expose the quest for a deeper understanding of visual perception and its relationship to consciousness. For example, see Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art (1950).

Ninth, the Marxist approach denied the validity of analysing art in relation to expressive, metaphysical, technical, iconological or formal criteria, and argued that visual artefacts must primarily be recognised as functioning within the limited and limiting conditions of the material world. Marx’s economic conception divided society into two layers or levels: base and superstructure. Visual artefacts were therefore understood to mirror, express and often affirm the ideology of the ruling elite, while at the same time in their more progressive forms they served as a critique of the economic inequalities of society. Marxist-inspired art theory and historical analysis stated that art is essentially a visual ideology, a ‘false consciousness’, and that therefore the goal must be to look for the concealed or hidden economic, political and social processes influencing cultural production. For example, see Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art (1970; German original 1959).

Finally, the sociological approach developed under the influence of Marxist thought. Culture was understood primarily as the products of a particular social class and in relation to the economic base as a whole. This meant visual artefacts were analysed as social constructions, and the focus of such approaches was on the artefact’s status as a ‘product’. There are three versions of the sociological approach: (1) art expresses some cultural value or crisis; (2) art is an illustration of wider social concerns; and (3) while there may not be a direct connection between an art or design object and material or social circumstances, there is a parallelism, or a mirroring. It is this third approach that has become a dominant way of thinking about and understanding art. In this perspective, visual artefacts are not so much the solution to a problem (the creation of something beautiful or useful) as potentially part of the problem (the products used by one social group to exploit another). For example, see Arnold Hauser’s The Philosophy of Art History (1985; originally 1959).

Together, these methodologies have sought to define the purpose of culture as being part of the wider question of the enormous transformations occurring within modern Western society. The task was to closely connect the history of art with the often tumultuous processes that relate to modernity.

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism is a reflection of deep changes within the socio-economic structure of contemporary society. In particular, it seeks to respond to the impact of globalisation, transformations in information technology and the shift in the West’s economic base away from earlier models of production based on heavy industry towards new means of production, such as those depending on cybertechnology.

As a style within the arts, postmodernism developed in the 1960s and signalled a reaction against these earlier modernist principles. For example, artists reintroduced traditional or classical elements of style or carried modernist styles or practices to extremes. Postmodernism further confused distinctions between high and low art through the use of industrial materials and pop culture imagery. Postmodernism rejects the notion of advancement or progress in art, and so aims to overturn the central belief of the modernist avant-garde, and disrupts conventions by using collisions of style, collage and fragmentation. The artist often holds that all beliefs are unstable and insincere, and therefore that irony, parody and humour are the only positions that cannot be overturned by critique or revision. Pluralism and diversity are other defining features. Postmodernism also often promotes socially engaged kinds of art practice intended to encourage participation in socially useful activities. Today, it is quite normal for artists to make things that seem deliberately beyond the general public’s comprehension, and that are shocking, ugly or just bland, and that seem more concerned with ideas than with beauty. It is therefore not surprising that most people give up in confusion, or even in disgust.

Broadly speaking, postmodernism had an impact on art-historical methodologies in two ways: it led to the critique of methodologies claiming scientific objectivity, and it led to the critique of methodologies that analysed artefacts as things detached from wider social concerns. In Section V you will find outlines of key thinkers and concepts that are often employed in the contemporary study of art, media and design.