Seeing
High & Low. Representing Social Conflict
in American Visual Culture
by Patricia Johnston, Editor
University of California Press, Berkeley,
Los Angeles & London, 2006
317 pp., illus. 120 b/w. Trade, $65.00;
paper, $29.95
ISBN: 0-520-24187-8; ISBN: 0-520-24188-6.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
KU Leuven, Faculty of Arts
Leuven, Belgium
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
This collection of essays is great reading.
Carefully edited by Patricia Johnston,
author of a seminal and much praised and
prized work on the career of Edward Steichen,
Seeing High & Low opens new
ground for the study of a subject that
seems slightly out of date given the innumerable
discussions of the seventies and eighties
on what was seen as one of the major characteristics
of postmodern culture. Yet what Seeing
High & Low achieves is nothing
less than a challenging redefinition of
the scope of this topic. Instead of linking
it with discussions on the status of Art
with capital A and of identifying it with
the more or less contemporary refusal
of High Modernism, the essays gathered
in this volume take a completely different
stance.
In a wonderful introductory essay, Patricia
Johnston accomplishes a triple break with
much current scholarship on the high and
low topic in art. First of all, she proposes
very usefully to enlarge the scope of
the study to the whole of "visual
studies" (a multilayered term whose
meaning is in fact much broader than just
the merger of art history and cultural
studies and that implies for the contributors
to this volume a strong emphasis on history
as well as on the interaction between
the social and the technological). The
advantage of this shift is to withdraw
the discussion on high & low from
the mere field of art and to tackle it
as a basic feature of any modern, i.e.
technologically mediated society. Second,
she makes also very illuminating suggestions
for a more precise definition of what
"high" and "low" actually
are, for the meaning of these terms does
not depend on a certain type of object
or a certain type of practice but on a
wide range of accompanying features that
determine the artistic, cultural, and
social scale we use to qualify them: subject
matter, the choice of a specific medium,
quality judgments by various groups of
people (connoisseurs, amateurs, consumers,
etc.), audience groups (publics and patrons),
and finally use or functions. Certainly
in the case of the "low", this
approach is extremely refreshing, for
it enables us to analyze the relationships
of high and low not from the viewpoint
of the high as it is contested, challenged,
renewed, transformed, or revolutionized
by its clash with the low, but from the
viewpoint of the mutual shaping and the
inevitable overlap of both categories
(in other words: high and low cannot be
analyzed separately, it is on the contrary
the larger context in which they always
intermingle). Third, Johnston comes back
on what is or should be at stake when
we study this interaction of the high
and the low. The aim of such a study is
not to produce a better insight in the
evolution of art-historical categories
or shifts in taste and manners but to
get a sharper understanding of the historical
conditions in which art is being produced.
Here too, the focus is put on the historical
context, but not to such an extent that
artistic practices (commissioning, making,
disseminating, selling, reviewing, rejecting,
ignoring, etc. art) are denied their own
specific logic and mechanisms. In Johnstons
approach, art is never reduced to an illustration
of historical processes, both are brought
together are, at a different level, high
and low.
The 15 essays gathered in the book cover
a wide range of genres and artists. However,
the overall unity of the collection is
exceptional, thanks to the well-balanced
historical line that has been followed
and that brings us from the early Republic
to the Reagan Era. Each of the essays,
in which we feel the strong editorial
hand of the editor who has managed to
impose a unity of tone and structure to
the texts without deleting the personal
tone of the various contributors (all
specialists in the field of American studies
and American cultural history), foregrounds
a specific period and the sum of these
periods as well as the sum of the chosen
media and works give a more than excellent
survey of the high & low issue in
America. It is a great pleasure to say
that there are no flaws or minor contributions
in this collection, even if some are more
astounding and innovative than others.
Given the fact that high and low have
been heavily (and harshly!) discussed
in the case of 20th Century
art, it will not come as a surprise that
the studies on older material are sometimes
more pioneering than those on more recent
material. An exemplary study in this regard
is Patricia N. Burhams essay on
F. Otto Beckers "Custers
Last Fight", a lithograph commissioned
by the Anheuser Busch Brewing Company
to be used as a nationwide decoration
for Budweiser bars. Burham scrutinizes
the form and content of this engraving,
comparing it with the oil that it "copied"
and the many other variations of the theme
that circulated till the sixties when
television ads took over this type advertisements
and the Vietnam war prepared a critical
rereading of the Custer myth, as she examines
the critical and uncritical reception
by all types of audiences (ranging from
sophisticated art critics to uneducated
tourists leaving the bus to take a refreshment)
and the native representation of the same
historical event in Sioux and Cheyenne
art (often but wrongly discarded as folk
art).
Yet in a certain sense, all the essays
of this book (some of them on "high
art" like OKeeffe and Stieglitz,
others on vernacular "non-art"
like home decorations and popular journal
cartoons) achieve the same accomplishment.
All of them manage to link in a fluent,
intelligent, and innovative way the creative
tension between high and low, following
the various criteria and perspectives
sketched in Johnstons introduction.
In short, a must-read for all those interested
in the breaking-down of the boundaries
between art, culture, history, and technology,
in a way that maintains and even heightens
all the scientific standards of art-historical
research.