The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept.

The aim of Catherine Soussloff's book is to locate the artist, as cultural figure, in "the discourse of history," an ambition motivated, its author writes, "by the obvious lack of critical discussion about the concept of the artist in exactly the literature where one might expect to find it." The literature in question is art history, which, in the author's view, has been concerned almost entirely with the object pole of what she refers to as the "artist-object binary." "Most questions asked by historians of art since the beginning of this century remain concerned with the object," she writes, which "allows art history to avoid its own history and the politics embedded in it." For example, art history "has barely been provoked by the alternatives to traditional views of authorship provided by the idea of the death of the author/subject and the birth of the reader in the work of Barthes and Foucault." The visual artist "was undertheorized in those debates." And "This omission perpetuated the mythologized status of [the] artist." It did so because "the preeminent genre in which the artist has been textualized, the biography of the artist, has been minimized." In paraphrase, there really hasn't been an art history of the artist's biography as a representational form through which people outside art history think of artists and artists think of themselves.

Indeed, in Soussloff's mind, it is very much as if the category of the artist as defined by a certain kind of biography has been repressed. The agenda of the book, accordingly, is to retrieve the artist for art-historical consciousness, and then - I surmise - undertake, through discourse analysis (rather than psychoanalysis), a critique of the concept along the lines of recent literary theory. The myth of the artist "remains intact because it was not identified in debates about the representation of [the artist] in texts." One gets a whiff of the author's program when she identifies, near the beginning of her book, certain features of the "discourse": (1) the artist can be separated from other categories of human beings, and (2) the artist is always gendered male unless called "the woman artist." For these certainly are not politically innocent givens.

The first illustration in the book, set as a census questionnaire, is a "schematic structure of the artist's biography" - a sort of form to be filled in by the biographer, who will look for "portents, dreams, and signs in nature of an unusual type" under the heading of "Prebirth"; the "signs of early promise in drawing or modeling" under "Youth"; "Descriptions of late works in terms of the artist's spirituality," under "Old Age." And, above all, there are lots of spaces for the inevitable anecdotes: how the artist duped the birds, won the contest, baffled his enemies. Whenever "we encounter the artist and the works discussed together," we also encounter a fully formed discourse for that discussion, the genre of the biography of the artist, in which the works and the artist are intertwined." The "absolute artist" of the book's title, so far as I can determine, is the artist as defined by the biographical schematism, which, like a platonic form, a narrative a priori, structures our conception of the lives of individual artists. This kind of ideal type, with Vasari's Life of Michelangelo as historical paradigm, is what "separates the artist from other categories of human beings" and brackets him with saviors and heroes. And, because the schematism defines "a pre-existing idea of who and what the artist is," we perpetuate in our practices the conception of the artist as a locus of mythic attributes.

This "intertwining" is not an innocent metaphor. It implies, between artist and work, the kind of internal relationship Soussloff cites Kant as having in mind between genius and original work in his Critique of Judgment (1790): genius is "a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given; it is not a mere aptitude for what can be learned by a rule." Originality belongs with genius in the respect that no product of genius can have come about in any other way, e.g., by following rules prescribing reliable results, as in baking bread. The genius, in Kant's powerfully dislocating analysis, "does not know how he has come by his ideas." And this analysis has certainly penetrated artistic self-consciousness enough to harmonize with (anciently) the idea of inspiration through the muses and (romantically) as rising from the guts. In a culture where the artist is inscrutable even to himself, "knowing excludes the creator at the deepest of theoretical levels," leaving only the object.

The "representation of this figure in biography" has "essentialized the cultural category 'artist,' because the category itself and its representations have been absolute, unexamined, and uninterpreted." The author hopes that in making the myth of the artist salient, she will have contributed "in a substantive way" to the transformation of the discipline, moving it toward "response criticism, the construction of a text from other texts, the notion of a common langue, and so on." Cartes sur table, Soussloff concedes her desire "to make the activities of the interpreter actively participant in a political reality," and "to contribute to the advancement of the criticism of culture in the political reality of today."

The death of the artist - in the sense of the death of the "discourse" of the artist - means the birth of the interpreter. It is uncertain what transformative effect on art history these will have, since, by the author's admission, the discourse plays no direct role in the object-oriented practices of that discipline. But the discourse of the artist certainly plays a role in cultural life: "The way that any individual artist views himself must rely in some way(s) on the concept that the culture holds of the category of 'artist.'" And, to the degree that there is an internal connection between the artist's life and its anecdotes, to which Soussloff assigns a central importance, the discourse may after all play an indirect role in art history since no discipline is "more replete with anecdotality than art history." If this is true, then the myth is perpetuated by art history since we can understand "every anecdote to mean the secret political narrative within the larger historical narrative." That is, each anecdote further sets the artist apart from common humanity.

Soussloff's book is driven by subversive ambitions. The "discourse of the artist," however, is a subgenre of the discourse of the hero. Anecdotes abound in the biographies of athletes, soldiers, scientists, philosophers, chefs, couturiers, politicians, our own morns and pops. It is how we memorialize and celebrate the lives of those we admire, or monumentally hate, and keep them somehow alive. Our discourses are the substance of lived cultural life, and the most we can hope for is to replace one discourse with another. But what culture would be like, and in particular what art would be like under the auspices of alternative discourses is for this reason difficult to imagine, since art has no substance outside its discourses either.

Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation.