[Note to readers: this was originally published as “On Some Limits of Materiality in Art

History,” 31: Das Magazin des Instituts für Theorie [Zürich] 12 (2008): 25–30. Special issue
Taktilität: Sinneserfahrung als Grenzerfahrung, edited by Stefan Neuner and Julia Gelshorn.
ISSN 1660-2609, ISBN 978-3-906489-10-0.
This version was originally posed on saic.academia.edu/JElkins. If you have any comments,
suggestions, etc., please write: jameselkins@fastmail.fm.
Revised Wednesday, 24 December, 2008, 2:30 PM. This revision has speaking points underlined;
this essay is expanded and critiqued in a Keynote (Powerpoint) presentation, listed on
www.jameselkins.com/html/events.html.]

On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History

James Elkins

Something like the following is a common claim in the current literature:

The optical models of modernism are part of our past. We can understand their ideology
and the desires that produced them, and we can see how they supported a certain kind of
art. But now those optical models are fading. The first decade of visual studies in the
1990s, with its emphasis on disembodied media and digital images, has been supplanted
by a new and more versatile awareness of the real range of images. Clement Greenberg’s
high-modernist trust in eyesight is no longer viable, now that works of visual art are so
often also textual, olfactory, tactile, or auditory. Synesthesia, Einfühlung, empathy and
sympathy, immersion, performance, and embodied encounters are now central to the art
experience. Art history is no longer an archivist’s or iconographer’s paradise, driven by
textual sources: it has become attentive to the physical stuff, the presence, the material of
the artwork, its bulk, its human scale, and even its “base materiality.” Theories of
visuality have abandoned the geometric diagrams of Jacques Lacan in favor of more
somatic accounts of seeing in Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-François Lyotard, and
Deleuze and Guattari. Seeing is embodied, and it should no longer be separated from
touching, feeling, and from the full range of somatic response.

Versions of this claim recur in conferences and in edited volumes. It is explicit in the rejection of
Baudrillard in favor of authors like Lev Manovich, and in studies of modernism such as Caroline
Jones’s Eyesight Alone. The claim is also elaborated in visual studies anthologies, such as Marita
Sturken and Lisa Cartwright’s Practices of Looking or Nicholas Mirzoeff’s original anthology,
Materiality 2

Visual Culture Reader.1 Versions of the claim underwrite studies of recent body-centered
performance and video art by Irit Rogoff, Peggy Phelan, and others. In academic art history, a
version of this claim underwritten by Merleau-Ponty is one of the principal differences between
Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg. In its most abstract form, this claim is a principal self-
description of postmodernism as well as a starting place for current ideas about post-
poststructuralism.
It would not make historical sense to argue against this claim, either in this general
formulation or in its many specific instances, because it is the tenor of the times. But there are
interesting disparities in the conceptualization of the claim in different disciplines. Philosophical
discourse has a great deal to say about the shift from opticality to embodied seeing, from vision
to touch, from the intellectual, imagined, or ideal image to the physical painting, print, or
drawing. Art criticism, too, has a capacious vocabulary for body-oriented work, drawn from
psychoanalytic criticism, feminisms, postcolonial theory, and area studies. Art history has its own
specialized vocabulary, including facture and brushstroke; mark, sign, and trace; matter, form,
materialism (with its Marxist overtones), and “base materiality,” the term used by Rosalind
Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois to describe the surrealists’ interest in avoiding representation. There
is even theological criticism, which employs terms such as incarnation, acheiropoietai,
homoiôsis, homoiôma, and homoousia.
In this essay I will concentrate on just three topics, which I think are crucial for the
coherence of this claim. The first problem is that art history, visual studies, Bildwissenschaft, and
art theory take an interest in materiality provided that the examples of materiality remain at an
abstract or general level. Past a certain point, art history and other fields are not interested in
materiality, but they lack an account of why they should not be more interested. The second
problem is that conceptualizations of materiality are easy to find—as in my last two paragraphs
—but encounters with examples of materiality are difficult to sustain. In less abstract language: it
is relatively easy to build theories about materiality, but relatively difficult to talk about
materiality in front of individual objects. I will name these two problems the fear of materiality
and the slowness of the studio. Behind both of them is the fact that phenomenology, and
phenomenological criticism, inform current writing in all the fields I have mentioned.
Phenomenology sets tacit limits to the specificity of talk about materiality. This is the third
problem, which I will call the limits of phenomenological detail, and I will mention it briefly
before turning to the first and second problems.

1. The limits of the phenomenological detail

In art history and art criticism, phenomenology is not only the best available account of
sense-transcriptions, it is effectively the only one. Some art historians have read turn-of-the-
century German authors such as Theodor Lipps and Robert Vischer, but most invoke Merleau–
Ponty (and more distantly, Sartre and finally Husserl) when it becomes necessary to cite a
theoretical source for observations that are often informal transcriptions of the writer’s own
bodily reactions in front of artworks. To my mind some of the most interesting art history
currently being written is done by writers who are attentive to what their bodies tell them about
artworks (or who are compelled to pay attention, for reasons that would have to be sought
Materiality 3

outside of phenomenology). I am thinking of writers as diverse as Jean-Louis Schefer, Richard

Shiff, Gottfried Boehm, Michael Fried, and Georges Didi-Huberman, and I would interpret the
diversity of the list as an indication of the pervasiveness of art writing informed and even
delimited by phenomenology.
Still, it’s significant that phenomenology is usually kept a little behind the scenes—
Merleau-Ponty is not often cited directly, because he seldom provides direct support for the kinds
of writing that art historians and critics prefer. The description of mixtures of senses, bodily
attractions and analogies, somatic stand-ins for the viewer “in” the paintings, proceed
independently of their ultimately phenomenological foundations. In part the relative absence of
Merleau-Ponty from the footnotes of art history, visual studies, and art criticism is a matter of
habit: writers educated in doctoral programs will have read him when they were students, but—
aside from the ubiquitous essay on Cézanne—he is not often part of current conversations on art.
But there is a deep reason why an attempt to invoke Merleau-Ponty as a theoretical source might
seem unnecessary, and it has to do with the very simple matter of critical vocabulary. Merleau-
Ponty’s work involves words like “sensation,” “horizon,” “body,” “head,” “eye,” “touch,”
“interior,” “exterior,” and “perspective.” Art historical and art critical analyses tend to depend on
much more specific things: the way Cary Grant walks up the stairs in Notorious, the infantile
balloonish forms in Lisa Yuskavage, the annoying pulse of a repetitive video by Bruce Nauman.
This is an old issue in the relation between art history and aesthetics, where it has been said in
several different ways: art history explores the particular, and aesthetics posits the particular, but
art history explores the particular; aesthetics depends on the particular as a counterpart to its
central interest in the universal and the general, but art history depends on the general to create
meaning for its investigations of the particular.2 I do not want to open these questions here,
because the point I am after is much simpler: it is just that Merleau-Ponty does not provide the
vocabulary to describe individual artworks. Even the Cézanne essay is so general that
commentators are left to their own devices if they want to find concrete examples in Cézanne’s
work.
The effects of this disparity are wide-ranging. It has been noted that Judith Butler’s work
is abstracted and generalized in this way, and Barbara Stafford and I have had friendly
disagreements about how embodied contemporary medical imaging and other works of “body
criticism” are. It would be possible to do more work on this. A scholar might compare what
counts as specificity in Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of painting with what counts as specificity in
Michael Fried: that could be a fruitful way of asking exactly how phenomenology informs
Fried’s work. But now I want to leave this question and turn to the two other problems.

2. The fear of materiality

In July 2008, I hosted the second annual Stone Summer Theory Institute, a book series
that will eventually involve over 500 scholars, artists, curators, and others in discussions about
unresolved issues in contemporary art. The topic for July 2008 was the question, “What is an
image?” As I write this, I have just completed the provisional transcription of over 35 hours of
conversations, and my co-editor and I are pondering the way the transcript will appear in the
book. Naturally, given the question “What is an image?” the assembled faculty and students
Materiality 4

spent time on etymology. The German Bild was discussed, and so were Greek, Latin, English,
Spanish, Sanskrit, and Chinese alternates. We agreed, provisionally, in a working distinction
between picture and image, where—following English usage—picture denotes a physical object,
and image denotes a memory, ideal, idea, or notion of a picture. The distinction proved to be
helpful because some of the participants were more interested in images than pictures: W.J.T.
Mitchell, for example, had a lot to say about the ways that images of the Twin Towers in New
York City, or political caricatures, travel across media. In those explorations he was less
concerned with the physical form of the pictures, and more with the things that were said about
them. Other participants, however, were more interested in pictures than images. Gottfried
Boehm returned a number of times to the conditions of the encounter with actual images, and he
was specially concerned with particular objects.
Still, picture and image are only heuristic categories, and in the course of the week-long
event many different kinds of connections were explored. One three-hour session was especially
illuminating: a seminar led by Jacqueline Lichtenstein, on and around the subject of image,
picture, and painting. Throughout the week, the relation of painting to the other two terms was
problematic and unresolved. To some people, it seemed best to speak about painting as an
historically specific practice, associated with the last five centuries in the West. In that way of
thinking, painting has become increasingly marginal, and is not appropriate as an exemplar for
images as a whole. But to others, a painting is the central example of an image, and the discourse
on painting has intimately informed the theorization of images from the middle ages onward. As
a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, Lichtenstein has a special interest in
painting as a way to think about both pictures and images, and she also has an interest in what
makes paintings different from other kinds of pictures and from disembodied images. So for the
duration of her seminar, the group was invited to consider the materiality or physicality of
painting as an indispensable element.
The participants were not agreed on the importance of materiality—that much could be
expected—but they were also far from agreed on what should count as materiality. Lichtenstein
cited detailed descriptions by Huysmans, Diderot, and Baudelaire, emphasizing their interest in
the sometimes illegible detail that paintings offer when they are seen from very close up. She
said that if we consider the texts on painting produced by art history, very few are on what she
would consider painting: the textures, colors, and lines. She asked how we describe spots,
patches, finger marks, and dots, and she observed that the long tradition of ut pictura poesis had
made it easier to write about images than pictures—and by implication, easier to write about
pictures than paintings.3 We then talked for a while about the difference between embodied
marks in painting and disembodied “marks” on a computer screen, and about Jacques Rancière
and whether his writings on painting are an indication that he is theorizing pictures or paintings,
rather than images. On these and other topics our conversation was fluid and fluent, and there
were no major objections: a consensus might have been that art history and visual studies can
become more attentive to materiality, but that the possibility of writing attentively about a
painting’s physical form has been inherent in Western art writing since the generation of Diderot.
Problems began to emerge, however, when the conversation turned to the extent and
limits of art history’s potential attention to materiality. How much materiality can appear in an art
historical text? I mentioned my book What Painting Is, which offers full-page details of portions
Materiality 5

of paintings that are on the order of 70 mm across, and very detailed, mark-by-mark analyses of
them.4 That book is flawed, I said, and it has been rightly criticized, for giving up the history of
oil painting in order to talk in such myopic detail. When you get that close to a painting, and pay
careful attention to each barely visible mark, stray brush hair, fingerprint, and scratch, you find it
is nearly impossible to connect your observations to art historical accounts of the paintings.
Nearly impossible, I said, but not completely impossible. The problem with What Painting Is
isn’t that there is no meaning to very tiny portions of paintings, or that history has to be left
completely behind when you look so closely at oil paintings. The problem is that it becomes
excruciatingly difficult to keep talking or writing when you are looking very closely. And yet it is
never impossible. The ideas come much more slowly—this is the slowness of the studio, which I
will consider below—and they are hard to attach to other people’s meanings (to the whole
history of writing on, say, Monet or Sassetta or Rembrandt). They begin to sound eccentric,
forced, or willful. I think of that book as an extreme case, a limit case, of what Lichtenstein said
about the lack of books on painting.
I draw two conclusions from this episode. First, the interest that art historians and others
have in materiality has no inner logic that prevents it from paying closer and closer attention to a
picture’s materiality. There is no account of the materiality of physicality of an artwork that
contains an argument about the limits of historical or critical attention to materiality, and
therefore there is no reason not to press on, taking physicality as seriously as possible, spending
as much time with it as possible, finding as many words for it as possible. The fact that historians
and others do not do so demonstrates, I think, a fear of materiality. The “purely” or “merely”
physical or material is conceived as a domain that is somehow outside of historical
interpretation, or even outside of rational and critical attention. It is assigned to making, to the
realm of art production, and therefore it is set safely apart from historical, theoretical, and critical
accounts. In the Stone Summer Theory Institute, I proposed that no such gap exists, and in other
conversations we generally agreed it is unhelpful to divide the visual into rational and non-
rational, or linguistic and non-linguistic. And yet our habits of writing and thinking continue to
imply such a divide. The book What Painting Is is deeply flawed for a number of reasons, but it
demonstrates that it is entirely possible to go on seeing, and also speaking about what we see, as
we take the artwork’s materiality more and more into account. We do not do so—and since that
book, I haven’t done so either—but not because of a structural problem in discourse. What stops
us is not a lack of interest, as the seminar’s enthusiastic conversation showed: we are prevented
by an anxiety about what we could say, and an interest in keeping the status quo. In art history, it
is a topos, a commonplace, to assert that the discipline is interested in materiality and physicality.
But it is a fact, a unpleasant one, that the overwhelming majority of art historians and critics do
not want to explore beyond the point where writing becomes difficult.

3. The slowness of the studio

Academia is a very fast place. In the sciences, equations can be written hour after hour as
fast as the instructor can manage. I have been in science classes where a fifty–minute lecture was
enough to fill three fifteen–foot blackboards ten times over with graphs and equations. In the
humanities, thoughts can flash by in blinding succession. A single conversation can stoke a
research project for a year, and a seminar can become a pummeling succession of brilliant
Materiality 6

insights. This speed has consequences for the kinds of questions that can be asked about
materiality.5
The studio, by contrast, can be overwhelmingly slow. Objects get in the way: large things
are difficult to move, viscous substances are hard to control. Artists have two fundamental
choices: either they optimize their methods and media so they can make things more efficiently,
or they stick with what they have and learn to think at its level. The division is not exclusive, but
it cuts deep. My impression is that art historians tend to think that artists regard their studios as
tools, with no more affection than the historians have for their computers. In large measure I
think the art historical opinion is wrongheaded, and it excuses art historians from looking into the
day-to-day workings of the studio, where materiality is encountered in ways that are not always
amenable to the conceptual speed of scholarship.
The challenge for a newcomer to artists’ studios is to try to think at the speed and in the
rhythm that is right for a given medium and purpose. Art historians who are new to the studio
can find their minds racing like the engines of cars stuck in the ice. After a time they may notice
that their thoughts are ill–matched to the objects around them, but it can be difficult to figure out
how to pay attention in a more appropriate manner. Watching an artist, or making art, nothing
may happen for long periods of time, and even when something does take place, it may not be
immediately clear what it was, or whether it might be important.
To some degree the problem occurs in any medium, but the situation may be strongest in
the visual arts. Few people have had the experience of starting to work on a large marble block,
where ten minutes of hard work will only yield a pitiful dent. A dab of paint may cost an artist
several minutes’ work, adjusting the color, the thickness, and the load on the brush—but it may
only represent a few leaves on one tree in a landscape of trees.
To a philosopher, this might not seem to be an issue at all. If ideas come more slowly in
the studio, maybe the thing to do is wait, and collect insights and concepts that have accumulated
over a long interval. Take the sum total of insights gained over a month in the studio, compress
it, and it is ready for analysis. Conceived this way, slowness amounts to nothing more than an
annoying impediment. An hour in the studio would be like an hour with a phlegmatic teacher.
But consider some things that slowness means. Slowness feels like work. For the first few
days, someone used to academic discourse may find studio work stultifying. A typical art history
student, exposed to the studio, wants to try everything, and learn the studio in a day or two, as if
it were a book that could be expertly skimmed and condensed for future use. The experience can
be unpleasant and disappointing in a particular way: it may start to feel like manual labor. It may
begin to attract all the feelings that pervade ordinary work: the materiality of the studio will look
dull, repetitive, dirty, and insufficiently rewarding. Class consciousness also pervades many
people’s first experiences of the studio. It is common to find students imagining that the studio
exists in two modes: either a kind of underpaid work or, in the case of established artists, a
heavenly opportunity for self-expression. Both the utopian and the dystopian readings are
colored by largely inappropriate projections from the world of manual labor. On the other hand,
studio work is labor in many respects, and slowness is one of its principal traits.
Slowness is painful. It follows that the experience causes anguish: nothing, it seems, is
being learned, and no thought can find expression without being dragged through a purgatory of
recalcitrant materials. For the first time in some students’ lives, their hands seem clumsy. In
Materiality 7

effect, a baptism in the studio can be like returning to infancy: the eye sees something it likes
(say, the contour of a model’s neck), but the hand simply cannot follow the shape on paper. The
student sees something graceful, and her hand draws something awful, and it happens over and
over. Like an infant in a crib making wild gestures at a suspended toy, the experience can
become intolerably frustrating. Studio art can become a kind of chronic, low-level pain, where
the mind is continuously chafing against something it cannot have. Academic thinking—the
running equations, the scintillating conversations—aim to be as free of that pain as possible. Our
conversations in the Stone Summer Theory Institute were nearly seamless: nothing interrupted
the flow of words, and when we ran out of ideas on one topic, we quickly shifted to another. It
was automatic and unthinking: but it would not normally be possible in the studio. Materiality is
something that gets in the way of thinking as well as looking. Slow thoughts cannot be sped up,
and thinking slowly is thinking differently.

I have made three claims here regarding materiality.

1. Describing the materiality of artworks demands words that are more specific than the
terms available in phenomenology, and yet phenomenology is the principal theoretical ground
for accounts of the physicality and materiality of art. But what figures in art history as the
materiality of, say, oil painting, is only intermittently related to the generative terms in
phenomenological criticism. The result is that talk about materiality in art history and theory is
effectively detached from the sources on which it depends.
2. It is one of the common self-descriptions of art history that it pays attention to
materiality, to the embodied, physical presence of the artwork. But it only does so in a limited
way. In Lichtenstein’s view, most texts on painting written by art historians treat pictures as
images; and from the point of view I took in What Painting Is, even texts that treat paintings as
pictures still fail to treat them as material objects.
3. It takes time to experience and articulate the materiality of artworks, but academic
discourse prefers its insights to come quickly. Real materiality—meaning the sense of matter and
substance experienced by artists— does not yield many ideas per page or per day. Like other
disciplines, art history and art theory prefer continuous streams of insights and ideas, and so they
consider only general aspects of materiality.
1 Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; second edition forthcoming); also Nicholas Mirzoeff,
An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999); The Visual Culture Reader,
edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1998; second edition, 2002); Visual Culture:
The Reader, edited by Jessica and Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1999); Images: A Reader, edited by
Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons (London: Sage, 2006).

2 These and other formulations are discussed in Art History versus Aesthetics, edited by James
Elkins, in the series The Art Seminar, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2006).
3 I am paraphrasing because as I write this (summer 2008), the transcript has not yet been
reviewed and edited by the participants.
4 Elkins, What Painting Is (New York: Routledge, 1999).
5 In Pictures, And the Words that Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), I
argue that virtually all art historical interpretation moves too quickly. Another book, Our
Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing, second printing, with a new Preface
(New York: Routledge, 2000), is an attempt to draw attention to the qualities of art historical
writing that proceed from overly rapid interpretation.