Art history's anxiety attack.

In its Summer 1996 issue (no. 77) the editors of October, led by Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, published responses to a"Questionnaire on Visual Culture" that was sent to an unspecified "range" of scholars, critics and artists during the previous winter. This issue occasioned two articles by reporter Scott Heller: "Visual Images Replace Text as Focal Point for Many Scholars" in The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 19, 1996) and "What Are They Doing To Art History?" in ARTnews (January 1997). Heller's articles, among other things, emphasized the apprehensions of the October editors, surveyed the diverse opinions of the survey's respondents and displayed the reactions of many "disciplinarians" of art history.

The October editors and many of the respondents to the questionnaire appear threatened by a loose grouping of presumably misguided scholars, whom they never explicitly name, that has rejected the tried and true rigors of academic art history for the so-called trendy and gullible field of visual and cultural studies. This disciplinary policing is at times analogous to U.S. conservatives' fixation on the national borders, imagined to be under siege by various "outsiders," and the Christian Coalition's cultural offensive to buttress the malignant traditions that have historically regulated boundaries between cultures, genders and sexualities. October's characterization of the relationship between art history and visual studies resonates with the sound-bytes of cultural and political conservatives - this is quite evident in the severe language that detractors use to discount visual studies' critical commitments.

Consider the example of Bruce Cole, Professor of Art History at Indiana University and founding member of the Association for Art History, an organization that was founded in protest of the broadening purview of the national College Art Association (CAA) and as a supposed ideology-free alternative to what some consider to be the increasing politicization of CAA. As Heller quotes Cole: "We don't see art solely as social illustration or ideological fodder. . . There has to be a basis on which one builds, a factual basis that uses evidence and standards. Art historians can do things sociologists can't." Equally akin to the discourse of cultural reactionaries is the following complaint from Krauss, now Professor of Art History at Columbia University. She told Heller that: "Students in art history graduate programs don't know how to read a work of art. . . They're getting visual studies instead - a lot of paranoid scenarios about what happens under patriarchy or under imperialism."

In all fairness, the academic media attention paid to the October questionnaire also uncovered opposing voices that were equally reactionary in their dismissal of art history as a legitimate and vital discipline. Heller quotes Anne Higgonet from Wellesley College as saying: "I see a defunct and useless field collapsing, and a much stronger, much more important field emerging." Within the media frame that the October questionnaire generated, nevertheless, the supposed shortcomings of scholarship in visual studies were emphasized, while the institutionally privileged activities of the discipline of art history were posited as irreproachable. Foster, another longtime editor of October, who now teaches in the art history department at Princeton University, is quoted as saying: "Cultural studies doesn't have much philosophically to offer. It sneaks in a loose, anthropological notion of culture, and a loose, psychoanalytic notion of the image . . . Visual culture is a passport that can lead to fairly touristic travel from discipline to discipline." Foster's attacks on visual and cultural studies do not even make gestures toward acknowledging the problematic philosophical, cultural and theoretical frameworks that the discipline of art history "sneaks" into analyses of visual objects. The result of such partisanship is the construction of an unnecessary competition: visual studies vs. art history.

Rather than attempt to provide an alternative questionnaire that would be more representative of the range of opinions about the study of art and visual culture, I have solicited comments from two individuals, Coco Fusco and Douglas Crimp, whose work in cultural history and art criticism has contributed greatly to both art history and visual studies. Their productive analyses of "The Questionnaire on Visual Culture" clarify the problematic nature of the art history vs. visual studies debate as it has been represented and constructed by the editors of October.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and critic who currently teaches at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. During her prolific career Fusco has produced numerous essays, videos and performance installations that have been essential to the emerging field of visual studies - her book English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) traces the trajectory of her influence. Douglas Crimp, Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester (where I am a doctoral candidate in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies), also apparently fell beyond the scope of the questionnaire. Crimp was a co-editor of October for 12 years until he resigned from his post due to his fellow editors' refusal to publish (as they had previously promised) the full proceedings of a groundbreaking conference on queer film and video. The conference material was finally published in its entirety in a book, How Do I Look? (1992), which has become an indispensable collection for any inquiry into the emergent field of queer theory. Crimp's many books and essays on post-modernist art and theory, and on the related cultural politics of HIV/AIDS, have impacted an entire generation of scholars, artists and critics.

I asked Crimp and Fusco about the form and dissemination of the October questionnaire itself, the polemics of visual and cultural studies that the survey invoked and the supposed antagonism between art history and visual studies. Fusco began by stating that she includes both Krauss and Foster on her syllabi and acknowledges and affirms the historical importance of their work in contemporary art criticism and theory. She, however, questions the editors' motivations in conceptualizing the survey, challenges the methodologies employed in the construction of the questionnaire and disagrees with the dubious attacks on interdisciplinary visual studies. She is surprised that many of the attacks on interdisciplinarity are coming from scholars who were some of the first to introduce social theory, psychoanalysis and poststructuralist theory into art history: Foster, Krauss and other members of the October circle.

Fusco also argues that interdisciplinarity is by no means new to art criticism; artists and art historians have always looked to music, film, theater, performance and other cultural forms to enrich and engage their own work throughout the twentieth century. She is most puzzled by the accusations that Krauss and Foster have made against their unnamed opponents. There is, of course, some poor scholarship presented under the rubric of visual studies - work that is pseudo-anthropological and vacuous in its cultural relativism - but there is also a good deal of art historical work that is lacking in scholarly rigor and theoretical reflexivity. Fusco points out that "[a]s Norman Bryson notes, art history as a discipline has been most resistant to sociological and ideological analysis because of its closeness to the art market, which demands fetishization of the art object to enhance art's commercial value." She also asserts that the majority of academic work done in visual and cultural studies (and in the largely British "New Art History," for that matter) is rigorous and productive. She says:

The best work combines sociological, semiological and formal analysis - efforts in this direction outweigh the negative impact of poor scholarship. Also, I don't think that graduate students are the problem. It's superstar academics who try to flit around from one discipline to another to keep a high profile - mostly literary scholars who have moved into the study of visual and popular culture - who create problems for the rest of us.

Crimp began by defining visual studies as a part, the visual component, of cultural studies, which he believes will "sharpen, amplify, make more productive" the study of the visual arts. Like Fusco, Crimp reasonably challenges the totalizing charges that Krauss, Foster and others have made against visual studies. He is also puzzled by the October editors' surprising defense of art history against the "clusters of the professoriat" that they say have proclaimed themselves an avant-garde:

The editors of October have always thought of themselves as the vanguard, and they were often (and still are) responded to as such by "artists and critics, art schools and museums." I can only speculate that the editors feel that their position is being usurped as a greater number of intellectuals in the academy are paid attention to. There is, however, a significant difference between the October editors and many other important intellectuals in the academy, often those associated with cultural studies. The latter group has included in its self-reflexivity a critique of vanguardism. Thus, it is difficult to imagine almost anyone but the October editors proclaiming themselves as an avant-garde.

In response to Foster's attacks against visual studies, Crimp refuses to correspondingly impugn the entire discipline of art history:

I am not arguing for a priority of cultural studies over art history as two competing disciplines. If there is an advantage to cultural studies, it is that it is not a discipline. Neither in my estimation is it simply interdisciplinary or antidisciplinary. Rather, the value of cultural studies is that it is a developing, contested practice, where "models" and "notions" are proved in the efficacy of their employment, not because they inherently belong to the discipline.

Both Crimp and Fusco query the form and methodology of October's questionnaire. Fusco thinks that the editors should have plainly named the objects of their disparagement - the specific institutions, publications and people - instead of making thinly veiled and vague attacks on those "clusters of the professoriat" who advocate visual studies. She also points to the exclusionary tactics that accompanied the questionnaire's distribution - "if you want to discuss the state of the field of art history, you should engage with those who you feel are impinging on that field," she says. Her point is particularly poignant considering that some respondents, important scholars in the field whose views on the debate differed from those of the editors, actually had to request that copies of the questionnaire be sent to them after word began circulating of its existence. Crimp, who did not receive or request a questionnaire, says that "October clearly had an agenda. You can read it in the questions, each of which begins, 'It has been suggested that . . . To which I want to reply, 'By whom?'"

Both Fusco and Crimp also question the rationale for the questionnaire, as it assumes, without pointing to specific examples, that scholars in visual studies disparage formal analysis. Crimp says:

Clearly the best readers of art are able to read formal characteristics as the very means by which artworks are able to make, or make in spite of themselves, the meanings - contextual, social, political, ideological - that they make. In other words, it's simply not a question of an ability to read a work as against 'what happens under patriarchy or imperialism,' for example, but rather to read a work carefully, perhaps for that very purpose. I am simply astonished by the extent to which the detractors of visual studies return us to outmoded notions of the autonomy of the work of art.

As Crimp envisions visual studies, formalism continues to be important: knowing how an idea can make itself manifest in different forms and how to analyze specific media and their distinct histories of production and consumption. However, it is also important, both he and Fusco remind us, to combine a concern with the specificities of form with sociological and semiotic analysis. "Meditating on the historical power relations that affect, and often proscribe our attempts at analysis," Fusco says, "is not 'paranoid.'"

Both Crimp and Fusco believe that the interdisciplinary approaches that visual studies cultivate should not dismiss the demands for formal analysis that visual objects make on their interlocutors, but neither do they feel that these formal considerations should outweigh the non-visual aspects, the politically loaded functions that cannot be cleaved from the objects' signifying processes. Certain cultural forms are, after all, best served by an interdisciplinary approach and, as Fusco suggests, interdisciplinarity is now a pedagogic necessity - students live interdisciplinarity, as their experience is inseparable from the postmodern collapsing of facile distinctions between representational media. To dispel the plethora of valid reasons for engaging visual objects with an interdisciplinary approach, as the editors of October seem to do, is to overlook the ever-changing character of visual communication in the cybernetic age.

"There is a dangerous notion in these attacks, however, that rigor belongs properly to disciplines, and looseness to what opposes disciplinarity," a notion that Crimp implicitly equates with a fear of difference - "Foster's brief against anthropology as a model is a disguise for a brief against the attention that cultural studies pays to difference." He continues: "[T]heir whole enterprise opposes visual studies precisely because visual studies (or cultural studies, which is my preferred name) has attempted, though of course not always successfully, to take account of difference." Fusco recognizes that it is often unproductive to reduce everything to identity positions, but she insists that it is even more detrimental to deny that aesthetic positions themselves are inescapably imbricated by the politics of identity - she paraphrases Stuart Hall and insists that "there still are differences that make a difference."

I myself was surprised by the most bizarre assertion that the October editors make, that the emergence of visual studies is "forced - a helpless (or, worse, opportunistic) result of changes in the wider field of political economy." The editors go on to suggest that "visual studies is helping, in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital." This reminds me of similar claims that have historically been used in attempts to consolidate the Left in the West. The vulgar Marxist argument that dispersions of interest, proliferations of knowledges and an expansion of political concerns will unwittingly and inevitably nourish the global grip of capitalist ideology has been continuously rehashed - these arguments function to protect the privilege accorded to those who have an interest in regulating knowledge for their own political ends. The disavowed political interests of the October editors, however, are betrayed by their condescension toward critical identity politics. Maybe I am "paranoid," but I wonder if October's anxiety about visual studies has more to do with loss of privilege than loss of scholarly rigor - could this be art history's last, well-versed gasp to further naturalize, again reify and now defend its disciplinary location within the supposedly unmarked Western epistemology of normative white heterosexuality?