Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? Some Thoughts on Writing Excessively

Abstract

I'd like to ask a question of pictures, and the texts that get written about them. What does it mean, I'd like to know, that in the late twentieth century pictures have come to require so much more explanation than they have called for in any previous century? Why do art historians, art critics, and others involved with images find it necessary to write at such length? Why, in the metaphor of my title, have pictures so recently become so puzzling? In a sense this question cannot be asked within art history, since art history's ways of answering it would necessarily have to do with what would be taken to be the fact that pictures are complex, and that the words are merely fitted to their objects. Instead the exponential increases in art history and criticism are probably symptoms and the cause lies elsewhere?ultimately, I will argue, in the general outlines of what pictures have come to mean in the late twentieth century. In a sense, art history's recent interest in self-reflection is not much help here, because historiographie self-criticism leads to emphasis on the differences between rival historical approaches. The question I want to pursue can only make sense if it abandons those differences, and treats essays that would ordinarily be thought to be distant from one another as forms of a single tendency. To guide that synthetic project, I will be making use of an extended comparison between writing about pictures and solving puzzles. It's a deceptive metaphor, not least because it can seem to solve the problem before it is properly posed?as if the answer were to be that pictures have come to need lengthy interpretations because late twentieth-century writers enjoy solving puzzles?but it is useful in large measure because it corresponds to some important ways art historians describe their own methods. The puzzle metaphor helps make it clear how much modernist and postmodernist writers are bedeviled by pictures: how pictures seem to make extravagant demands on the faculties of criticism itself. And that, in turn, helps me toward the conclusion I propose at the end, that the need to see pictures as a kind of object requiring a tremendous effort of interpretation can only be the sign of a concerted resistance to the nonlinguistic nature of pictures.