Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing

by James Elkins

How do psychoanalytic, semiotic, deconstructive, and other interpretations represent works of art? What can they see, and what must they miss? In Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts , Elkins suggests that the philosophic problems posed by these questions are essentially insuperable because philosophy makes demands of visual artifacts that they can answer only by becoming mirror images of philosophic discourse. Elkins argues that writing is what art historians produce, and, whether such writing is a transparent vehicle for the transmission of facts or an embattled forum for the rehearsal of institutional relations and constructions of history, it is an expressive medium, with the capacity for emotion and reflection. Therefore, it needs to be taken seriously for its own it is the testament of art history and of individual historians, and it is only weakened and slighted by versions of history that imagine it either as uncontrolled dissemination or objective discovery and reporting. Elkins's investigation is not a prescription for opening art history to new influences or for focusing it on particular problems. It is a plea for circumspection in the entire endeavor of trying to force images into words, and in the curious vocation of writing the history of art.

Genres: Art

312 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 1997

About the author

James Elkins (1955 – present) is an art historian and art critic. He is E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also coordinates the Stone Summer Theory Institute, a short term school on contemporary art history based at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Reviews

[Anne]

I know, dispiriting title, right? I had hoped it would be something like a "primer on style" for writing about art, to answer the question: "who are we who spend our lives looking at pictures and producing dry monographs in response" (xi). Indeed! Actually, it was a rather philosophical thing that required a trudge back to Socrates, and not to deconstruct in an inspiring way. I get it that he doesn't like recent (as of 1998) accounts of contempo art history (Carrier, Preziosi) because of their "distance" (xii). But is the answer sentences like these?: "What we desire, in effect, is to continue writing in a certain way--in a conceptually uniform manner that I call sameness" (xii). Who is "we"? When Ch 3 wanted to "cast doubt on the entire notion of close reading," I wanted to throw this book out the big-picture window. I did like the argument that art writing is more intricate than it may appear to be (OK, I'm sure art historians know more about art than I do, so I could hope so!). But I found that this account presupposed a "we" that was alienating from the get-go, and presumed that I had to learn its trudge in order to UNLEARN something that I already feel little loyalty to--pure theory. All in all, a rousing piece of what I call evidence for what playwright-filmmaker Terayama Shuji enjoins: "throw away your books, and go out into the streest!"