The Problem of Classicism: Ideology and Power

Abstract

For all justifiable attacks on use of stylistic labels like mannerist and baroque, art historians, like architects, continue to use term abundantly. But they have ceased to try to define it quite as desperately as they once did. This set of essays-and symposium on which it is based'-did not set out to define it either. They were not planned as an effort of revival (although in architectural circles subject may have seemed to be fashionable or prescient). Rather, they were conceived as an attempt to assess what residual interest and ideological implications of term might be-however exhausted it may have seemed. The issue, of course, also involves related notions of and (classicizing seems less problematic). As soon as one tries to define relations-or distinctions-between them, ground turns out to be even swampier than expected. Every field has a host of writers who have sought to find or to define it; but their interests have rarely been interrogated. There are even classic texts-the fundamental ones-which are generally acknowledged to have refined term most effectively or to have provided most definitive and thoroughgoing evaluations of classic periods, classic ages, and classic styles. No one, any longer, can doubt laxity of conventional and traditional usage of terms like classic, classical, and classicism. Everyone acknowledges some sort of link between two forms of usage-that is, between qualitative use and hierarchical use, where is used as somehow equivalent to highest or most superior degree in canon or hierarchy. The problem of assessing connections between formal qualitites called and authoritative or normative aspect of what we call will emerge with some acuteness in essays presented here.2 There are, of course, some art historians who persist in seeking or even in attempting to define it, and who do so unreflectively and unaware of ideological burdens both of descriptive a tempt and of very forms they wish to describe. The symposium now presented in pages of this issue of Art Journal was conceived in hope that such pitfalls might be avoided, and that ideology might be more plain than obscure. For all this, there seems to have been some recognition of advantages of a less radical and more complaisant position. Say one simply admitted hypostatized status of classicism, on grounds that it served useful terminological and classificatory possibilities. Such a position-in other words, heuristic one-would justify a rather coarser use of term than one might otherwise be inclined to allow. Of all papers printed here, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn's most strongly exemplifies benefits of this stance, although most of others share it to a somewhat lesser degree. John Hay remains skeptic in group, at any rate with regard to his insistence on fundamental cosmological differences between Western values based on morphologies of order and Chinese ones based on change and becoming. Henri Zerner insists most strongly on ideological basis of classicism and proposes extent to which power attributed to it is and has to be rooted in nature. By concentrating on particular examples, Natalie Boymel Kampen and Martin Powers demonstrate ideological dimension and political uses of what is taken to be classic or classical or both. Powers makes an eloquent case for social and political purposes of classical revivals in China, while Kampen develops a view that makes ideological point most trenchantly of all: view that classical modes are used to reinforce masculinist norms of morality and to persuade Other, notably female Other, to become like Self. Hay, in demonstrating difficulty of assessing problem of classicism in nonWestern traditions, concludes that the dialectic of order and nature is quintessentially Western and lies at root of many of our greatest achievements; but William Childs's analysis of sculpture of what is unanimously regarded as quintessentially classic period in W stern art subverts even this seemingly unexceptionable view. He asserts t at what we now conventionally assume to be characteristic features of classical sculpture can by no means be taken for granted, and should be critically reconsidered; in short, instead of qualities of idealism and abstraction generally associated with it, Childs insists on its descriptiveness and its eminent realism. We seem, once more, to be on brink of reopening box of definitions; but at same time Childs's revelation of straitjacket of traditional view of fifth-century Phidian art poses ideological question yet again. By time reader has done with this set of essays he or she may feel that at least one question has been settled: and that is that any transhistorical view (and by