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The Erotics of Looking: Materiality, Solicitation and Netherlandish Visual Culture

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-8365.2012.00928.x

1467-8365

Angela Vanhaelen, Bronwen Wilson,

Historical Influence and Diplomacy

Detail from Gerrit Dou, Woman Peeling Carrot, mid-seventeenth century (plate 1). Interrupted from her task by our presence before the window, the woman inside looks out in response (plate 1). Daylight reflects from the curve of her head, echoing the luminosity of surface effects in the foreground. A tour de force of painted correspondences between diverse material things – metal ewer, striated vegetables, feathery fowl – intensified by the restrained palette and play of scale, the picture elicits our sensual involvement in the process of making associations between, for instance, her face with its downy tendrils and the adjacent and startlingly erotic cabbage, a transaction prolonged by Gerrit Dou's spirited play between inside and outside. Sexually charged to be sure, even baldly so, but the scene cannot easily be reduced to mere pleasures of the flesh given the ambiguity, for example, of her arrested gesture, wide eyes and parted lips. Is she looking up or returning to her labour? Do her eyes convey surprise, enticement, reticence or self-reflection? Is she soliciting us or we her? Photo: © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York Early modern Netherlandish artists did not write all that much about their practice and what little they did write has long frustrated art historians with its seeming refusal to divulge information about what the pictures actually mean. While art treatises devote much attention to the mechanics of art making, they contain no instructions about how to interpret the enigmatic visual motifs that recur especially in the ostensibly descriptive genres such as still life, landscape and genre scenes.11 See Eric Jan Sluijter, ‘Didactic and disguised meanings?’, in Wayne Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, Cambridge, 1997, 78–87, 213–20. Instead, the treatises repeatedly describe both the making and viewing of art in explicitly erotic language.22 Key treatises that use erotic language to describe the relationship between artwork and beholder include: Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilderboek (1603–1604), trans. and ed. Hessel Miedema, Doornspijk, 1994; Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst, 1678, Doornspijk, 1969; Philips Angel, ‘Praise of painting’, trans. Michael Hoyle, intro. and ed. Hessel Miedema, Simiolus, 24: 2–3, 1996, 227–58, addresses the work of Gerrit Dou especially. While these sources may not say much about what artworks mean, they do explain how pictures operate. Seventeenth-century commentators called painting a ‘seductress of sight’.33 See especially the important essay by Eric Jan Sluijter, ‘Introduction: “With the power of the seemingly real we must conquer and capture the eyes of art lovers”’, Seductress of Sight. Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age, trans. Jennifer Kilian and Katy Kist, Zwolle, 2000, 13. ‘Seductress of sight’ was coined as a derogatory term by a strict Calvinist who disparaged the pleasures of painting. They consistently asserted that the alluring surfaces of artworks that captured the world with ‘sweet-flowing naturalness’ were designed to attract the eager and desiring eyes of art lovers.44 Angel, ‘Praise of painting’, 243. As in Dou's painting, the implication is that pictures were prostitutes or wares that offered pleasure for money. By stimulating the lustful urges of beholders to penetrate paintings with their probing eyes, visual depictions of the visible world would simultaneously gratify artists’ own desires for success and renown.55 For commentary on these treatises, see especially Thijs Weststeijn, The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten's Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam, 2009; Walter Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander's Schilder-boeck, Chicago, IL, 1991, 8; Eric Jan Sluijter, Seductress of Sight; and Celeste Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten, Chicago, IL, 1995, 232. The rhetoric and modes of address deployed by artists in their writings about art also engage in a process of solicitation that asks readers to be attentive viewers (and buyers), fully aware of the pleasurably seductive powers of visual imagery. The title of this issue, The Erotics of Looking, evokes the intercourse engendered by the material qualities of Netherlandish artworks. The emphasis of the essays is on the methodological implications of paying close attention to sensual encounters with pictures. Challenging familiar interpretive models of iconography, verisimilitude and social art history especially, the essays together aim to shift the focus away from the fraught question of how to determine the meanings of pictures by turning instead to an investigation of how descriptive works announce themselves, to how they actively solicit the beholder's engagement with them. How pictures make their advances varies – sometimes brazenly, other times prudently – but what many of them share, through the suppression of narrative in favour of pictorial and material effects, is their appeal to viewers, urging them to be aware of the complex dynamics involved in looking at art. The term intercourse, especially its early uses, suggests these dynamics with its multiple evocations of commerce, intercommunication, conversation, sexuality, intervention, and communion.66 See the definition of intercourse in the Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.oed.com/. The essays in this issue explore visual forms that grapple with the material history and transformed conditions of images in the early modern period. The authors apprehend Netherlandish pictures as theoretical objects – ‘self-aware images’, to borrow Victor Stoichita's term77 Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-painting, Cambridge and New York, 1996. – that pointedly draw attention to the image's own potential to reconstitute the significance of visual representation itself. The essays accordingly engage with an important historical shift, tracing the changing status of the visual image in the post-Reformation context of religious diversity, global mercantile capitalism and medical and scientific experimentation, all of which prompted new claims for imagery and new pictorial strategies that importuned beholders in persuasive, seductive and sometimes unpredictable ways. Important to this issue is an emphasis on the loosening of the picture's ties with the central institutions of religion and politics, and a concomitant turn to close observation of the world and everyday life. In this process, as many of the authors emphasize, the concept of art itself is redefined. This orientation to the visible world is apparent in Rose Marie San Juan's suggestive analysis of anatomical illustrations. San Juan makes us see how the skull – the traditional vanitas signifier of memento mori – turns in the late sixteenth century and begins to point in a different direction – towards empirical knowledge of this life, and observation of the actual human body. By focusing on the visible material world of the here and now, rather than offering moral warnings about an invisible afterlife, the skull of the anatomical treatise reconstitutes the relationship between a traditional allegorical pictorial motif and the new kinds of meanings it could convey. These new meanings are anything but clear and controlled, however. As San Juan insists, the new image points to its own limitations, to the inaccessibility of sure knowledge and to the limits of visual experience. The interconnected and uncertain processes of making, viewing and interpretation are at the crux of each of these papers. Christopher Heuer closely examines the material facture of Hercules Segers’ idiosyncratic landscape etchings – works that forcefully draw attention to the process of their own production rather than to mimesis. He argues that the artist's manipulation of his medium – the cutting, scratching and erosion of the copper plate – materializes the slow movement of geological matter, making a claim to being of nature instead of a depiction of it. As in the case of San Juan's skull, the picture distances itself from allegory and insists on the materiality of earthly things. Craft, facture, active experimentation and practice are foregrounded; making comes before meaning here. The value of highly experimental works of art is derived in large part from the inventive process of art making. In her important contribution on still life, Joanna Woodall reminds us of extensive criticisms of a genre seen by scholars to betray Dutch ambivalence toward mercantile and colonial wealth. Shifting the focus away from the ideological meanings concealed by the sensuous surfaces of still life to the surfaces themselves, she shows how the works extend the process of interpretation to a network of images and spaces. Still-life paintings are agents instead of objects, petitioning viewers to recognize the strategic reuse of signature artefacts, lemon peels and knives that also bring the pictorial space into consideration with the beholder's experiences of everyday life. Like Heuer, Woodall resists the notion that Dutch art merely attempts to describe or duplicate the visible world. She argues that in the wake of iconoclasm, works of art must be approached in terms of their human production, as things in themselves rather than representations of a reality – material or divine – that is situated elsewhere. Materiality and ingenuity are similarly crucial for Celeste Brusati's suggestive analysis of ‘perspectives’. Radically different from pictures in which one-point perspective is used to arrest the viewer's movement, Dutch ‘perspectives’ of domestic, civic and commercial spaces deploy multiple vanishing points to enlist the viewer's mobility and thereby to stimulate visual interest, mobilize the eye and prolong the act of looking itself. As in Woodall's analysis, new modes of address appeal to the embodied experience of the beholder and encourage sustained attention. This allows us to see how inventive forms like the peep box orchestrated novel visual experiences. By depicting the visible world as variable and in flux, such experimental works prompt somatic awareness of the conundrums of vision. The interpretative possibilities that technically innovative works present cannot be separated out from their material qualities and sensory involvements, which urge the beholder to look, to move, to question and to look again. The viewers of such works, faced with crafted surfaces rather than symbolic depths, accordingly have to experiment with the crafting of interpretations. Bret Rothstein evocatively calls the reciprocal encounter between the artist, the viewer and the artwork an ‘erotics of interpretation’. In an important methodological move, Rothstein refuses to attribute text-based didactic and moralizing meanings to religious paintings. Instead, he characterizes Jan van Hemessen's sexually charged picture of the Prodigal Son story in terms of the visual sparring that occurs in complicated exchanges between the wit of the artist, the aesthetics of the work and the skills of the painting's beholders. This dynamic image, he argues, eschews straightforward moralizing religious instruction and must be understood in terms of the astonishing sexual content and aesthetic impact it had on its viewers. Again we see a turn from the imposition of familiar didactic messages to a more open-ended understanding of meaning itself as a complex and collaborative process of making. Woodall makes a similar claim in her essay on still-life painting, eloquently describing the status of these works as intense, fabricated visual experiences. The canvas is a table; the picture is a meal. Both Rothstein and Woodall describe interpretation as intercourse – a charged conversation between the generic figure of the artist and beholders who could simultaneously delight in, and experience a degree of anxiety about, the pleasures offered at the table of representation. This insistence on an intensely sensuous engagement with the picture seems a far cry from Vanhaelen's argument, which analyses a series of texts that strategically situate Dutch descriptive art at the threshold of boredom. Working from Joshua Reynolds’ and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's remarks on the boredom of Dutch painting and their influence on subsequent commentaries, Vanhaelen assesses how the apparent meaninglessness of the pictures themselves has prompted this interpretative rhetoric of boredom. Key to this rhetoric is the idea that the very emptiness of boredom can open up space for new critical and interpretative possibilities – possibilities that the structural qualities of descriptive art also provoke. This is a claim that resonates throughout the collection of essays. All of the contributions explore how, in a turn to materiality and worldliness, images self-consciously struggle with and often stage their potential to elicit a search for meaning in the face of imprecise and ambiguous information. It is this very loss of certainty – art's own self-consciousness of the growing gap between form and content – that provokes the equivocal response that Woodall characterizes as anxious pleasure, Rothstein discusses as intentional distraction, Heuer calls entropy, San Juan describes as a tension between the clarity and inaccessibility of visual knowledge, Brusati considers in terms of the conundrums and contingencies of what is seen, and Vanhaelen recognizes as a vacillation between attentiveness and boredom. Indeed, all of the authors insist on the open potential of visual images that – as in an erotic encounter – seek to complete themselves in a series of creative and potentially generative exchanges. Artists, pictures and viewers together engender various potential meanings in a manner that is focused more on the pleasures of the process itself than on the procreative end-game of arriving at a single, sanctioned meaning. Not anything goes, however. The eroticized dynamics of looking potentially generated both licit and illicit pleasures, and each of the essays acknowledges the concomitant tensions, anxieties and paradoxes involved. As Rothstein emphasizes, Hemessen transmutes the moral lesson of the Prodigal Son story adumbrated in the background, and thus the expectations of narrative painting, into the viewer's experience of the tavern by simultaneously courting and thwarting the desire to see. There were stakes in producing and consuming works of art, and those investments and desires were set into relief through debates about meanings that are played out in the images themselves, and through discourse between interested amateurs in the artist's studio, around the display table of the collector's cabinet, or in the household. The gendered dynamics of engagement with Dutch pictures has long been theorized as an inherently ambiguous process, as Vanhaelen argues in her essay. Striking in this regard is Lawrence Gowing's description of ambivalent encounters depicted within, and with, paintings in explicitly erotic terms that echo those in seventeenth-century treatises: ‘The attention of man to woman is finally identified with the attention of a painter to his subject.’88 Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer, London, 1997, 54. Such attention, he implies, can be open, respectful and selfless, or possessive, domineering and exploitative. Woodall similarly concludes that still-life painting must be situated within the eroticized and potentially exploitative framework of human consumption, which sustains, reproduces and enhances life but also destroys it. San Juan reminds us that death haunts the skull as it migrates from the table of the anatomy theatre, into the printed anatomy treatise, and onto the tables of still life even as it appeals to the viewer to animate it. Brusati argues that Dutch perspectives call attention to the self-consciousness that reflexive looking engenders, prompting the mobile and desiring eye to peer and probe into painted interiors only to encounter the paradoxes of pictorial representation endemic to both vision and painting. And in Heuer's analysis, Segers’ material facture frustrates the ideal of landscape as a well-illuminated vista laid out accommodatingly for a possessive beholder. Here, the artwork and its subject matter have independent agency that eludes the expectations and controls of artist or viewer. The essays together thus explore how, as theoretical objects invested in their own material history, artworks themselves insist on the performative and sensual dynamics involved in making and engaging with the world. By displacing the work of making meaning onto the viewer, and by resisting the distinction between painted and visible worlds, descriptive pictures implicate viewers, prompting prolonged engagement, speculation and ethical questions about their interconnectedness with material things. To encourage further conversation, the essays are followed by four responses that open up historiographical and methodological considerations in other contexts.99 The responses were solicited from colleagues with diverse interests who participated in the symposium at the Vancouver Art Gallery. They were invited to explore questions raised by the essays in order to open up conversations across fields. Larry Silver highlights ways in which the individual essays, and the erotics of looking as a conceptual framework, intervene in wide-ranging debates in the scholarship on Netherlandish art. For Benjamin Schmidt, the work of Svetlana Alpers provides a departure point for analysis of modes of address in early modern Flemish and Dutch maps of America. In contrast to Alpers’ emphasis on the optical character of maps and their commensurability with a descriptive mode of painting, Schmidt emphasizes how pictorial forms such as cartouches and strapwork assert their three-dimensional origins as crafted objects on the surface of the cartographic page. Contrasting the mobile viewer predicated by multiple vantage points in Dutch pictures with the fixed spectator that characterizes single-point perspective, Lyle Massey draws out differences between Dutch and Italian perspective systems and their concomitant conceptions of time. Bronwen Wilson instead highlights similarities in the effects of realism and ambiguity in some Italian paintings, and how interpretive demands created by the interplay of pictorial forms foster thinking about social roles. Art mattered, as the authors observe, because the assembly of things in pictures gathered people together for intercourse. An important methodological inference of these conclusions is the integration of the study of early modern visual culture with a recent turn to materiality.1010 See for example Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality, Durham, NC, 2005. This next section of the introductory essay aims to develop some of the larger implications of this integration. In particular, the manner in which the essays bring forward the complex interrelations between making, viewing and things presses for an assessment of how such processes contributed to new forms of association. The types of collaborative exchanges that the essays describe are activated in large part by the agency of the material world. As Bruno Latour and others have argued, things are inextricable from the networks of people, spaces, institutions and technologies that are brought together in their material forms. In contrast to objects that subjects posit in the world, things solicit our involvement with them. They appeal to us, providing a ground for thinking. Things encourage engagement with them in specific ways through their rhetorical strategies, modes of address and configurations. In this way they gather people together, creating and responding to shared interests, while also stimulating discussion, debate and argument.1111 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Karlsruhe, 2005. Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin, eds, Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, London, 2010. What makes the artworks in the essays things, instead of objects, is in part their striking material complexity and how that sustains viewers’ involvement with them. Attending to why these artworks matter requires being open to their appeal, to how they assemble the social world and to how they engage with different points of view. Precisely because the images explored in the essays interrogate existing forms of knowledge and expectations, and create interpretative challenges, they resist prescriptive and predictable statements and instead surprise the viewer, opening up fresh possibilities for self-reflection, for imagining choices, for interrogating established social positions and forging new ones. These insights prompt a significant expansion of Svetlana Alpers’ vital assertion that visual culture was central to the life of Dutch society. Alpers importantly shifted the study of descriptive art away from iconography, which probes beneath crafted surfaces to decipher hidden depths of didactic and ideological meaning. Seeking to redress the impoverished status of northern pictures when described according to terms of reference used for Italian art, she argued for ‘a certain cultural space that was occupied by Dutch images’.1212 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago, IL, 1983, 8. Instead of perspective, style and ‘imitations of significant human actions’, Dutch pictures are like maps or mirrors that display a taste for surfaces and objective description that went hand in hand with ‘an assumed identity between seeing and the artifice of drawing that is realized in the artist's image’.1313 Alpers, Art of Describing, 8. Alpers thus argued that for the Dutch, visual experience was a predominant way to gain knowledge about the world and the self: ‘In Holland the visual culture was central to the life of the society. One might say that the eye was a central means of self-representation and visual experience a central mode of self-consciousness.’1414 Alpers, Art of Describing, xxv. Few studies have received more scrutiny than The Art of Describing, and yet its proposition that seeing the world and pictures of it were coextensive remains a productive metaphor for what we might understand as a particular manner of being attuned to the world.1515 For a recent reassessment of Alpers that explores relations between representations of landscape and maps see Tanja Michalsky, Projektion und Imagination: Die niederländische Landschaft der Frühen Neuzeit im Diskurs von Geographie und Malerei, Munich, 2012. An important early review is Anthony Grafton and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, ‘Holland without Huizinga: Dutch visual culture in the seventeenth century: The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century by Svetlana Alpers’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 16: 2, Autumn 1985, 255–65; and see the recent review by Mariët Westermann, ‘Art history reviewed XIV: Svetlana Alpers's The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century’, 1983, Burlington Magazine, 153: 1301, August 2011, 532–6. Pressing further with Alpers’ conclusions, we argue that the apparent refusal of descriptive pictures to make overt moral and political statements, or to render an istoria transparent, facilitates new forms of association and networks of interaction between artworks, their makers and beholders. As this introduction has argued thus far, the very open-endedness of the non-narrative, descriptive visual mode turns interpretation itself into a contingent process of making. This process has the potential to generate inventive narratives that are not imposed by external authorities, but emerge instead from the sorts of collaborative exchanges that these essays describe. Visual and material forms of culture were central to the life of society largely because of the active and critical part they played in the creation of connections between people that were not predetermined by hierarchies of status, kinship, or vocation. While such traditional social groupings certainly continued in this period, there also emerged innovative kinds of voluntary and self-organizing assemblies of diverse individuals: publics or counter-publics that coalesced through the dynamic uptake of visual and material artefacts that fostered shared responses, interests, tastes, commitments and desires.1616 See Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge, Baltimore, MD, 2005; and Wilson and Yachnin, eds, Making Publics. As matters for intercourse, these artworks are social things. This issue of Art History accordingly seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of processes of early modern public making at a time when the social structure itself was increasingly understood, not as something imposed from above, but as emerging from discussions and debates generated by the circulation of various media in everyday life.1717 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, MA, 1994. While Jürgen Habermas privileges the role of rational critical debate among private persons in his seminal work on historical transformations of the public sphere, this collection of essays highlights the equally important and often overlooked roles that materiality, visuality and sensuality play in the changing impulses of social organization. As Thijs Weststeijn's important reading of Dutch art treatises indicates, highly illusionistic works of art were designed to strike viewers speechless. Initial reactions to descriptive pictures were embodied and pre-rational, eliciting sensual responses and becoming meaningful through discussion, interpretation or rational critical debate.1818 Weststeijn, The Visible World, esp. 154–8. It is this combined aspect of public making that we emphasize here – the constitutive relation between individual pre-discursive experiences of artworks and the conversations they foster. The appeal of realism in works of art overlapped with wide dissemination of innovative forms of visual culture that provided an avenue for the increasing involvement of private people in public life. Alpers and others have observed that visual imagery proliferated everywhere in Dutch society – printed on single sheets or in books, woven into curtains, tapestries and table linens, painted and carved on musical instruments and furniture, decorating maps, tiles, metalwork and porcelain ware.1919 Alpers, Art of Describing, xxv. Also, Johan H. Huizinga, Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century and Other Essays, selected by Pieter Geyl and F. W. N. Hugenholz, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans, London, 1968, 57. It is impossible to make hard and fast distinctions between art, visual culture and the material world in this context. The ubiquity of visual imagery allowed it to speak to most sectors of society, beyond the group with the means to purchase. Cultural historians Willem Frijhoff and Marieke Spies have importantly characterized the social dynamics of the Dutch cities in terms of the lively ‘culture of discussion’ generated by the widespread diffusion of diverse media, including visual imagery, to a broad sector of the population.2020 Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, 1650: Hard-Won Unity, vol. 1, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, Assen and New York, 2004, especially 49–50, 220–5. This view informs the approach of this issue, for it indicates how the unprecedented mass circulation of new visual forms challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding the resources of public life for ordinary people. In this manner, we explore the notion that the interactions of people with material things constitute public life. Hannah Arendt has argued that things occupy the spaces between people. From these in-between spaces of engagement, they compel practices of speech and action. While Arendt positions speech and action at the centre of her definition of public life, she insists that these are ephemeral and momentary practices, and that human accomplishments are only made durable and lasting in the creation of human-made things, like works of art.2121 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, reprint, Chicago, IL, 1971, especially 136–9, 167–74. As the essays by San Juan, Heuer, Rothstein and Woodall all demonstrate, Netherlandish art obsessively works the themes of vanitas and memento mori, contrasting the transience of worldly human endeavours with the enduring qualities of well-crafted artworks. As Vanhaelen highlights in her essay, this tension between the fleeting and the permanent is at the crux of Hegel's influential assertion that the central aim of Dutch realism is to capture the ephemeral materiality of daily life in order to create heightened awareness in its viewers. As Hegel states: ‘to grasp this most transitory and fugitive material, and to give it permanence for our contemplation in the fullness of its life, is the hard task of art at this stage.’2222 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1975, I: 599. Hegel's list of the transitory matter that Dutch art grasps includes both material things and physical expressions of human communication – light shining on metal, the sun vanishing behind a cloud, the reflective surfaces of fruit, as well as human movements, postures, and facial expressions. By capturing this fugitive materiality in meticulously crafted works, this art publicizes physical matter, holding it up for viewers to consider self-consciously their own interconnectedness with it. Consequentl