The sadness of art history

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The Melancholy Art, 2013.

By Michael Ann Holly

The Melancholy Art is the latest book from Michael Ann Holly and continues her longstanding commitment to examining the foundations of art history as a discipline. Over the years she has, with acute critical sensitivity, sought to comprehend how the discipline is possible, through which historical circumstances and philosophical arguments it has come about, and the nature of the relationship between art historian and artwork. This relationship is marked by the attempted dialogue between the visual and the verbal as well as seeking to form a bridge between the present and the past.

Made up of essays written in the last 15 years, however, The Melancholy Art represents something of a sea-change in Holly’s broader project. As the title suggests, the concept of melancholy is at the forefront of her analysis, serving as the thread that sews the chapters together but also as the thread that would guide us through the history and present life of art history. The key theme is that art history is anchored by an ultimately inescapable melancholy: the artworks that are the objects of the art historian’s writerly activity are never fully embodied by that writing, and the distance between past and present continues to grow, meaning that the art historian is ever increasingly separated from the original world of the artwork. Art historians thus write about artworks, but the works they write about will forever continue to slip from their disciplinary grasp.

Hence Holly identifies the disciplinary ‘soul’ of art history as a melancholic one and, because they originate in historical and social contexts different from our own, artworks are ‘orphans’. Distance is fundamental here: whereas art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) once asserted that a distance of ‘60 to 80 years’ needs to come between artwork and art historian in order to have an objective viewpoint of it, for Holly, it’s through this distance that we ‘lose’ the artwork. Paradoxically, the artwork remains present and may even occupy the same space as us, but it has departed, our distance is absolute.

For art history and art criticism both it is impossible ever to reach the artwork. Perhaps one way to appreciate that this is something of a turn in Holly’s approach is to contrast the present book to her 1996 Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetorics of Pictures. In that book, Holly explores how artworks actively prefigure their art-historical interpretations. That book is about connections made, historical distances spanned, and something like a productive convertibility between the brute visuality of artworks and the textual dimension of art history. To my mind, there is no easy way to reconcile the two books; the claims of one contest the other.

In a deeply personal and honest preface, Holly shares with the reader that her exploration of melancholy and her understanding of it as the ‘soul’ of art history was a response to heartrendingly tragic circumstances within her own family. To that degree, The Melancholy Art perhaps stands within art historiography in much the way that Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida stands within photography theory. And, like that book, it is a beautifully written meditation upon time, history, and our empathic connections to cultural objects.

While I very strongly disagree with Holly’s central thesis, I nonetheless find myself drawn to her book, to the stories it relates and her desire to rescue our fascination with art –whether it be from the past or present – from the arguably drier, seemingly more bureaucratic or instrumentalized notions of research that increasingly govern universities through Research Exercise Frameworks and the pressure to publish. Even if deeply problematic in its discussion, Holly’s The Melancholy Art remains an engaging and valuable study.

The Melancholy Art by Michael Ann Holly is published by Princeton University Press 2013. 224 pp. ISBN978-0691139340