Introduction

Abstract

This Special Issue of the Oxford Art Journal is the outcome of a conference organised by the Editors in conjunction with Tate Britain in October, 2003, to discuss the impact of the writings of Hubert Damisch upon the theorisation and practices of visual analysis and interpretation. In addition to publishing the contributions of the speakers at the conference – Damisch himself in conversation with Stephen Bann, Margaret Iversen, John Goodman, Stephen Melville, and Yve-Alain Bois – we invited further essays from Brendan Prendeville and Anthony Vidler. All the papers, including the discussion between Hubert Damisch and Stephen Bann and the audience, have been revised and edited for this collection, and we are very grateful to all participants for their enthusiastic involvement in this project. Hubert Damisch is the third in the Oxford Art Journal Special Issue series following on from Louise Bourgeois (vol. 22, no. 2, 1999, the Serpentine Gallery and the Courtauld Institute) and On Installation (vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, OAJ and Tate Modern). The idea for the conference arose from discussions within the Editorial Group on the significant contributions made to the discourses of art history and visual theory over the three decades that the journal has been in publication. We also had in mind an earlier Oxford Art Journal that paid tribute to another major contributor to the discipline – the 1994 issue on Meyer Schapiro (vol. 17, no. 1), which included a long interview with Schapiro at his Vermont home. If the papers on Schapiro marked and, to some extent, defined the project of the Oxford Art Journal at that time – the ‘political analysis of visual art and material representation’ – this Damisch collection continues that legacy, but also, we believe, represents the depth and diversity of current scholarship across the expanded field of historical and contemporary critical studies of the visual arts. Indeed, when we first approached Hubert Damisch, he remarked upon the importance of Schapiro and the Oxford Art Journal papers to his own work, and their shared interest in the historical and contemporary image, particularly the body in representation as an object of fantasy and transformation, characterises both publications.