{"title":"Didi-Huberman and the Image","authors":"Giles Fielke","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2021.1992728","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The sovereignty of the idea is a defining principle for art history, yet today it appears as one amongst a more generalised set of concepts for the so-called New Art History. Resisting the post-modern compulsion to ‘pluralise the term: new art histories’, as Bill Readings admitted during a symposium on the topic at the Mus ee d’Art contemporain de Montreal in 1994, meant the discipline again asked the related question: what is history? The idea was ascribed to the nineteenth-century emergence of the discipline in continental Europe. It is supposed to have reached its apotheosis with the arrival of the German art historian, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), to Princeton in 1935. If only things were so straight-forward. George Didi-Huberman (b. 1953), whose work begins with this rupture, is subject to an intensive study by Chari Larsson. Against both the Platonic and neoKantian modes of art history, the French philosopher of art has carefully arranged his post-structural method upon the topology of psychoanalytic symptom. This approach could be seen as the direct result of his academic coming-of-age in the 1970s and 80 s, perhaps. Yet Didi-Huberman has also worked tirelessly to reintroduce figures from Art History’s own history—in particular, the idiosyncratic wanderings of Aby Warburg (1866–1929). This focus means that the naïve utopianism of the 1990s (as the end of history) is key for understanding Didi-Huberman’s emergence as a spokesperson for the discipline. The companion to his breakthrough work from 1990, Confronting Images, appeared as Devant le Temps in 2000. Larsson’s analysis of an exhaustive set of Didi-Huberman’s published work, mostly in French, shows the importance of Natural History by Pliny the Elder (AD23/4-79), for example, in the 2000 study yet to appear in an English translation. Two years later Didi-Huberman’s book on Warburg—the founder of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg in 1926, an eccentric research library that was inaugurated by Ernst Cassirer—saw its publication in the context of the appearance of Warburg’s collected manuscripts under the title The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (1999), a project realised by the Getty Research Center in LA. It is obvious why this latter study has since been translated into English, while others by Didi-Huberman, such as Devant le Temps, are yet to be. Warburg’s collected writings had originally appeared posthumously in German in 1932. Of course, this nexus of German and French theory and its influence on English Art History still engulfs the discipline today, dwarfing its Florentine origins.","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2021.1992728","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ART","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The sovereignty of the idea is a defining principle for art history, yet today it appears as one amongst a more generalised set of concepts for the so-called New Art History. Resisting the post-modern compulsion to ‘pluralise the term: new art histories’, as Bill Readings admitted during a symposium on the topic at the Mus ee d’Art contemporain de Montreal in 1994, meant the discipline again asked the related question: what is history? The idea was ascribed to the nineteenth-century emergence of the discipline in continental Europe. It is supposed to have reached its apotheosis with the arrival of the German art historian, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), to Princeton in 1935. If only things were so straight-forward. George Didi-Huberman (b. 1953), whose work begins with this rupture, is subject to an intensive study by Chari Larsson. Against both the Platonic and neoKantian modes of art history, the French philosopher of art has carefully arranged his post-structural method upon the topology of psychoanalytic symptom. This approach could be seen as the direct result of his academic coming-of-age in the 1970s and 80 s, perhaps. Yet Didi-Huberman has also worked tirelessly to reintroduce figures from Art History’s own history—in particular, the idiosyncratic wanderings of Aby Warburg (1866–1929). This focus means that the naïve utopianism of the 1990s (as the end of history) is key for understanding Didi-Huberman’s emergence as a spokesperson for the discipline. The companion to his breakthrough work from 1990, Confronting Images, appeared as Devant le Temps in 2000. Larsson’s analysis of an exhaustive set of Didi-Huberman’s published work, mostly in French, shows the importance of Natural History by Pliny the Elder (AD23/4-79), for example, in the 2000 study yet to appear in an English translation. Two years later Didi-Huberman’s book on Warburg—the founder of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg in 1926, an eccentric research library that was inaugurated by Ernst Cassirer—saw its publication in the context of the appearance of Warburg’s collected manuscripts under the title The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (1999), a project realised by the Getty Research Center in LA. It is obvious why this latter study has since been translated into English, while others by Didi-Huberman, such as Devant le Temps, are yet to be. Warburg’s collected writings had originally appeared posthumously in German in 1932. Of course, this nexus of German and French theory and its influence on English Art History still engulfs the discipline today, dwarfing its Florentine origins.
思想的主权是艺术史的一个定义原则,但今天它似乎是所谓的新艺术史的一套更广义的概念之一。1994年,比尔·雷丁斯在蒙特利尔当代艺术馆的一次研讨会上承认,抵制后现代主义对“多元化术语:新艺术史”的强迫,意味着这门学科再次提出了相关的问题:什么是历史?这个想法被归因于19世纪在欧洲大陆出现的这门学科。1935年,随着德国艺术史学家欧文·帕诺夫斯基(Erwin Panofsky, 1892-1968)来到普林斯顿,它被认为达到了顶峰。要是事情这么直接就好了。乔治·迪迪-休伯曼(生于1953年)的工作从这种断裂开始,查理·拉尔森对他进行了深入研究。反对柏拉图主义和新康德主义的艺术史模式,这位法国艺术哲学家在精神分析症状的拓扑结构上精心安排了他的后结构方法。也许,这种方法可以看作是他在20世纪70年代和80年代学术成熟的直接结果。然而,迪迪-休伯曼也孜孜不倦地重新引入艺术史自身历史中的人物,特别是艾比·沃伯格(1866-1929)的独特流浪。这种关注意味着,20世纪90年代的naïve乌托邦主义(作为历史的终结)是理解迪迪-休伯曼作为该学科发言人出现的关键。他1990年的突破性作品《直面影像》于2000年问世,名为《Devant le Temps》。拉尔森对迪迪-胡伯曼(Didi-Huberman)出版的一套详尽的作品(主要是法语)进行了分析,显示了老普林尼(Pliny the Elder,公元23/4-79年)的《自然史》(Natural History)的重要性,例如,在2000年的一项研究中,尚未出现英文译本。两年后,迪迪-休伯曼关于沃伯格的书——1926年在汉堡建立了沃伯格文化图书馆,这是一个由恩斯特·卡西尔主持落成的古怪的研究图书馆——在沃伯格手稿集以《异教古代的复兴》(1999年)为名出现的背景下出版,这是洛杉矶盖蒂研究中心实施的一个项目。很明显,后一项研究后来被翻译成英语,而迪迪-休伯曼的其他研究,如Devant le Temps,还没有被翻译成英语。华宝的文集最初于1932年在他死后以德语出版。当然,这种德国和法国理论的联系及其对英国艺术史的影响今天仍然吞没着这门学科,使其佛罗伦萨起源相形见绌。