Books

CDs

Events/Exhibits

Film/Video

By Jonathan Gilmore.
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A., 2000.
157 pp., illus.
ISBN:0-8014-3695-8
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell, University College Wales, Newport, Caerleon Campus, Newport, NP18 3YH, U.K. E-mail: pepperell@cwcom.net


How to begin to talk about a book that deals largely with beginnings? Perhaps at the end. The last few pages of The Life of a Style are devoted to a defence of Arthur C Danto's "End of Art" thesis which, simply put, is that art history itself has reached a kind of terminus. This is not the "Death of Art" (there is too much money at stake for that) but the conclusion of six hundred years of stylistic development. It is the story of a drive towards "naturalism" from Giotto through to the impressionists, and initiated by Vasari, followed by a self-effacing drive towards "aesthetic materialism", epitomised by Greenberg, and ending with pop art. Once art had ostensibly defined itself, and made itself indistinct from everything around it, its internal limit had been reached and no further development could occur. This closing defence confirms, for me, the underlying purpose of Gilmore's book. It is to expound various theoretical strands of Danto's project on the history of art (to which the book and author are deeply indebted) and to distinguish them from those of his rivals such as Gombrich, whose essay "Psychology and the Riddle of Style" in Art & Illusion seems to kick-off much of what is tackled here. The questions are inherently interesting: How and why do artistic styles emerge and then decay? Why does art have a history and how might it be explained? Yet the philosophical and art historical labyrinth into which Gilmore draws using order to try and answer them is less interesting, certainly to one like myself who has no personal investment in this particular academic maze.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of recent theorisation about notions of beginnings and endings in historical, and particularly art historical, writings. Surveying the problem of narrative in the ordering and interpretation of events Gilmore identifies two main (and largely contradictory) tendencies. These are between what he terms the "narrative constructionists" and the "narrative realists". Crudely described, the constructionists tend to regard all forms of narrativisation as being more or less imposed on selected events in order to make sense of them, whereas the realists tend to accept that narratives are fundamental constituents of human experience and, therefore, cannot be isolated from the events of which they are a part. What this amounts to, for the purposes of the>Gilmore's argument, is a conceptual schism between those relativists who regard all histories as essentially falsified appearance and those critical historians who seek explanations of historical change from some intrinsic nature or facts. The book becomes immediately more interesting in the next chapter as Gilmore moves from abstract philosophical argument to an examination of specific cases, particularly introducing Renaissance perspective and Cubism as paradigmatic artistic movements. He argues that in each case there are inherent limitations to the movement that are apparent in its beginnings and ultimately lead to its demise. These "natural limits", as Gilmore calls them, at once make possible the specific character of the style or development whilst at the same time restricting growth beyond a certain point. To make his case Gilmore here introduces what, for him, is the pivotal concept of the "brief", borrowed from Michael Baxandall, which is essentially the artists' understanding of the problem they face in making work. Much of the following theorisation hinges on this concept which I, as a practising artist, found bore little relation to my own creative process. Although the tours through Cubism and Renaissance perspective that follow are not without interest, one is left unclear as to the real explanatory value of all the analysis. Chapter three moves again onto (philosophically) abstract ground where Gilmore, in trying to summarise, is occasionally forced to state the obvious: "Or, since each style is internally related to a particular brief, we can say, more simply, it is a movement's style in which its identity and limits consist." (p.84). Put even more simply we could say, "A movement is defined by its style" - and we would not have learned a great deal. The attempt to define artistic style which then proceeds at some length succeeds only in reinforcing what is unsurprising: that trying to define artistic style is very awkward, not to say impossible, given the twists and turns, subtleties, inter-referentialities and paradoxes of artistic practice. Leaving the question (to my mind) unresolved, Gilmore moves to an analysis of historical accounts of the beginning of Cubism which, as he rightly points out, has been dated anywhere between 1906 and 1912 depending on which critic one chooses to read. Gilmore accounts for this by arguing that each critic might offer a different explanation of what Cubism eventually became and search back for the first evidence of that explanation. The rest of the chapter continues with further iteration of the main thesis and the final chapter proceeds as already described.

Given the erudition of the author and the breadth of examples he utilises, one is left unconvinced by the usefulness of Gilmore's central thesis, perhaps because it tends towards meta-history of particularly specialised kind. Although there are welcome insights, many of the deeper art historical problems he describes seem no nearer any sort of illumination. At best one is more aware of the dimness of our understanding. To return to the beginning, I was more surprised by what I learned at the end: that serious scholars still see the bulk of six hundred years of art history as an inevitable drive toward realism and mimesis. In contrast to this, what I see when I look at much of the Western art of the past six centuries is almost the opposite. What appears to have intrigued the most enduring artists is the power art affords to transform and mutate reality, and our perceptions of it, into something fantastic, divine or unearthly. Once this is understood the formalist concerns of such books as The Life of a Style become largely academic.

top