Visual Cultures - Softcover

James Elkins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184150307X ISBN 13: 9781841503073

Publisher: Intellect, 2010

Synopsis

Visual Cultures is the first study of the place of visuality and literacy in specific nations around the world, and includes authoritative, insightful essays on the value accorded to the visual and the verbal in Japan, Poland, China, Russia, Ireland and Slovenia. The content is not only analytic, but also historical, tracing changes in the significance of visual and verbal literacy in each nation. Visual Cultures also raises and explores issues of national identity, and provides a wealth of information for future research. Visual Cultures will appeal to those with an interest in visual studies, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, area studies, subaltern studies, political theory, art history and art criticism.

About this title

About the Author

James Elkins teaches in the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. A recent book is What Heaven Looks Like, which ponders a mysterious eighteenth-century manuscript as if it were a contemporary artwork. Since Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, he has been at work on an experimental novel – something that takes longer than a monograph to complete.

Contact: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 36 S Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL 60603, USA.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Visual Cultures

By James Elkins

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2010 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-307-3

Contents

Introduction, 
Slovenia: Visuality and Literarity In Slovene Culture Andrej Smrekar, 
Japan: Lost In Translation, or Nothing To See but Everything Sunil Manghani, 
Ireland: Words Upon the Windowpane: Image, Text, and Irish Culture Luke Gibbons, 
Poland: A Visually-Oriented Literary Culture? Kris Van Heuckelom, 
China: Verbal Above Visual: A Chinese Perspective Ding Ning, 
Russia: To Read, To Look: Teaching Visual Studies In Moscow Viktoria Musvik, 
Critical Response Esther Sánchez-Pardo, 
Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

Visuality and Literarity in Slovene Culture

Andrej Smrekar

I cannot assess from this standpoint whether the relationship between literarity and visuality in Slovene cultural history carries any outstanding peculiarities. If you ask a Slovene what constituted his identity, the answer would be unequivocal: language, writing, the book, Protestantism, and France Prešeren (1800–1849), whose verses were adopted for our modern anthem a century and a half later. At the accession to the European Union in May 2004, the National and University Library showed four of our earliest manuscripts — fragments of Slovene language between the tenth and fifteenth centuries — under the title "The Birth Certificate of Slovene Culture" (National and University Library 2004). They were the objects of a national pilgrimage. Slovene cultural history has been burdened by the heritage of Romantic nationalism, effectuated and distributed through literature. Literature has always been considered the nation-building art par excellence, whereas visual art has only been accorded such status since 1900. The literary historian Janko Kos put it succinctly as late as 1996: "As in all former periods (before World War II), the main art through which Slovene spiritual history could spell out the truth about itself was literature, above all poetry (Kos 1996)." At this point it was only a question of higher priority, because he held the visual arts of the twentieth century in high esteem — second only to poetry.

Literature and the visual arts have not been treated as competitors in Slovenian history, yet for a long time it was taken for granted that literature was the only art the Slovenes had. The Modernist exaltation of the visual was inaugurated at the end of the nineteenth century by the question of whether Slovene art existed at all. A response was expected from the Slovene Art Association, which had been founded, as it were, for this purpose. Furthermore, the discovery of Slovene art in 1904 by the Viennese critics was perceived as an important step toward Slovenian self-realization as a nation. The visual arts joined literature to become the liberal arts in truest sense (Brejc 1982). The artist Rihard Jakopic (1869–1943) initially believed that Slovene painting did not exist prior to his generation, although he himself contributed a reconstruction of the artistic tradition in the Slovene territories stretching back to the beginning of the century (Rihard Jakopic, 1910). As Francè Stelè (1886–1972) noted in the introduction to his Outline of History of Art in Slovene Territories in 1924, Jakopic insisted that Slovene art before 1800 did not exist (Stelè 1924). Slovene art history proved him wrong by revealing a rich artistic heritage in the Slovene territories from the late twentieth century onward.

The reasons for that belated recognition of the visual were manifold and complex. The central issue in Slovene culture of the nineteenth century was the question of identity. As with most nations — and particularly with small ones — it was based on the language that was the province of men of letters and native linguists. We can identify the adjective Slovene in the Protestant literature, but it is impossible to distinguish it from the meaning "Slavic". The brief Napoleonic occupation (1809–1813) and the creation of the Illyrian provinces, which cut Austria off from the sea, proved that political options other than the Austrian Empire were possible for a nation located within the smashed Crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The poet Valentin Vodnik (1758–1819) greeted the French as liberators from an enslavement by Germans. In such ways, Slovenes grew aware of their Slavic identity.

Jernej Kopitar published a grammar book of Slavic language in Carniolia, Carinthia, and in southern Styria in 1809 (Kopitar 1809). However, he perceived Slavs as a single nation, with a language composed of a variety of dialects, and accordingly envisioned Slavic culture as the third constituency of the empire. Prešeren engaged in a dispute with Kopitar in favor of a distinct Slovene identity and refused the reinvention of the script proposed under Kopitar's influence by Franc Serafin Metelko and Peter Dajnko in 1824 and 1825. The conflict was resolved in the 1830s, and a decade later Prešeren refuted the Illyric movement that strove to amalgamate the Slovene and Croat people through language to create a stronger nation. His claim to a particularly Slovene cultural identity has never been seriously challenged, although various forms of Pan-Slavism outlived the century. Unification under the Serbian crown after the World War I made the national trinity (Serbian–Croat–Slovene) a political requirement. Janko Kos extended this threat to identity to communist rule because the nation was then supposed to melt back into the international proletaria through "brotherhood and unity" (Kos 1996, p. 18).

The enlightened, centralized absolutist state implemented the first program of general education to increase literacy, improve on the agrarian economy, and expand the pool for recruitment into the imperial administration apparatus. The introduction of the first public school system (by imperial decree in 1774) enjoining the use of the local language mapped the national territory and created the audience for and the followers of Romantic nationalist ideas. The actual mass movement could start only after the abolition of land bondage in 1848 and the improvement of the transportation infrastructure. The political leaders were the literati. Only at the time of the so-called camps between 1868 and 1871 — political gatherings that brought together tens of thousands of participants — was the political mission gradually transferred onto professional politicians. The moral authority remained with writers such as Fran Levstik (1831–1887) and Josip Stritar (1836–1923).

The difficulty of identification was aggravated by the notion of the purity and unity of the nation. Throughout the century, the idiom "Slovene people" described only the peasant folk: the natural, authentic, good, and morally invincible people patronized by its social and cultural elites, united in common resistance to the foreign (German) assimilation. Fran Levstik still insisted on this vision of the people. Because language had become the principal criterion of identification, anything else was strange (and, under the threat of Germanization, even hostile), making it impossible to integrate cultural diversity, current cultural production, and cultural heritage. For instance, the imperial regulation of construction in the nineteenth century spread the work of Vienna-based architects throughout the empire, which unified the look of public edifices. That phenomenon could never constitute a part of the Slovene identity; it remained "the other." When critics and writers referred to Vienna after the successful 1904 Slovene impressionist exhibition at Galerie Miethke, they claimed that the painters were recognized "abroad."

The criterion for distinguishing "the strange from ours" was language. The German communities in towns dominated the region economically. They created their institutions much earlier than Slovenes. By the end of the century, cultural institutions in the Slovene territories counted four community centers with ballrooms and two theaters in Ljubljana, with one of each in the Styrian towns of Celje and Maribor. The Styrian and the Carniolan edifices followed picturesque medievalist German examples as well as modern Secessionist style for German institutions (such as the German House in Celje, or the German theater in Ljubljana with its unusual Art Nouveau recasting of picturesque motifs), whereas Neo-Renaissance and Baroque styles (including the Slovene theater, which is today the opera house; the community center in Ljubljana (Narodni dom); and both community centers in Celje and Maribor) were pitched against German romanticized picturesque medievalism to demarcate the Slovene institutions. (Fig. 1) As a rule, Czech architects were chosen to design buildings for Slovene investors. A local, exclusive appropriation of the two styles signified the Slovene and the German — or "ours" and "the strange," respectively — in the construction of public institutions and even private villas.

Similarly, the Impressionists were described as "strangers" in attacks on their role in the Art Association exhibition in 1902. They "estranged themselves from the nation," and their art was "strange to our culture" (Malovrh 1902). The whole of Slovene history was understood as people ruled and exploited by "strangers" — that is, Germans. There were tendencies toward particularly "Slovene" forms in Art Nouveau, but they were mainly limited to ornament and decoration. The most daring and somewhat belated proposals came from Ivan Vurnik during the early 1920s, but Janez Jager had worked in this direction in interior decoration before the turn of the century (Zgonik 2002, pp. 35–46). Needless to say, such forms had to be invented, and the exceptional presence of the style of the Secession — or Art Nouveau — in the 1920s can be attributed to the delay caused by the first, albeit ambiguous, national emancipation after the World War I.

Literature also had a greater appeal among the people. National interpellation was met by subscriptions to book series and magazines (Zizek 1987, 1980). Reading was promoted, and it became fashionable to attend social occasions where popular plays were performed, and there was poetry and music. The places or halls where recitals took place were called "reading rooms" [italnice], and the term for the events was adopted from the Czech language: they were called béseda, a word associated with "the word" in Slovene.

Slovene was introduced as the official language in elementary schools in 1873, whereas in secondary schools that happened only after 1908, when demands for a national university were already a habitual topic in the imperial parliament. The visual was limited to the theater and to the national costume, which was obligatory at reading-room functions and parades. National costume meant peasant costume — the fashion of the people — although it was actually a modified version of wealthy peasant attire of the early nineteenth century, itself modeled on Baroque fashions and varied according to provincial tastes.

Socioeconomic reasons were equally important in accounting for the complications and ambiguities of identification, and consequently for the domination of literature. Slovenes were agrarian people throughout their history. The Middle Ages knew the agrarian middle class, called kosezi, a libertine peasant population that played an important role in the investiture of dukes, which was performed for the last time in Carinthia in 1414 in the Slovene language. The libertine class disappeared in the fifteenth century, having been integrated either into the lower ranks of the gentry or the enslaved. The towns were small and statistically insignificant in relation to "the people," and the population of towns played no major political role because it was ethnically divided. Abolition of bondage by imperial decree in 1848 opened up the possibility of expansion and the eventual turn of the town population ratio in favor of Slovenes.

The growth of the urban population was further slowed by the economic deprivation of the region. During the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie were excluded from the constituents of the nation for two reasons: ethnic differences and ethical suspicions. The town was considered to be a place of exploitation and moral corruption. As such, it was strange to the Slovene Catholic identity. The Church thus played perhaps the most significant role in Slovene culture and did not hesitate to engage in political life. Its close surveillance effected a sort of censorship, aimed at protecting the people's moral composure from the seductive provocation of modernization. On the same grounds, the Church reacted against the heralds of modern art.

The middle class structured the political organization in the second half of the nineteenth century, but it never succeeded in controlling Slovene politics because of its own internal divisions. It was divided into the Slovene People's Party, which was impregnated by clericalism and loyalty to the Serbian crown, and the National Progressive Party, which was liberal, Pan-Slavic, and above all — anticlerical. Their constituencies were relatively balanced, so they had to compromise with the German constituency for political advantage. That situation complicated their relation to the people when the political rostrum declared itself as the people's elite. Confrontations between the two parties were seldom productive, because instead of forging and internalizing a vision of the stratified and diversified nation, they struggled to exert hegemony over the people.

With the rise of competent art criticism and with the introduction of art history as an intellectual discipline, the old perspective on the hierarchy of arts was seriously challenged. Not only did art historical research conducted by the National Gallery (at the University of Ljubljana and the Slovene Art History Society) reconstruct the patrimony, it sought out and identified indigenous forms and decorative systems. The first significant conclusion was that the cultural borders did not coincide with the ethnic ones. In short — culture is shared. Second, the new art historical research defined Slovene ethnic territory as transitional and peripheral — Slovenian culture became a place where the cultures of Italy and the Germanic North met and produced their distinct, as well as hybrid, forms. The distinction of high and low art was understood as a dynamic interaction whereby social elites mediated the influence of European centers, whereas local traditions regulated the adaptation and perpetuation of received forms. This integrative effort revealed the important role of the visual culture that reached its peak in the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.

For example, as early as the second half of the fourteenth century, a standardized iconographic program of the Church as a whole and the altar vault, known as the Carniolan Presbytery, can be identified (Stelè 1969, pp. 38–49). The first eminent scholar of Slovene Gothic fresco painting, France Stelè, emphasized how the style integrated the architectural frame with the iconographic program, giving special attention to decorative details. Stelè noted the significance of decorative elements in the little isolated narratives that are marginal to the large scenes, such as the Procession of the Magi, and even in the decorative frames used to structure the narrative sequence or to organize the painted ceiling of the nave (Stelè 1969, 52–62). Another distinct regional form was Holy Sunday (e. g. Crngrob, fresco, pilgrimage church, ca. 1440–1445) — a representation of the Eucharistic Christ and the work not to be performed on Sunday. Four exceptional compositions of the Holy Sunday have been preserved, and in several other locations the Holy Sunday can be identified either through fragments or archival evidence. The type is also known in the broader region — in Tirol and Friuli, besides central Slovenia. On the basis of the Imago Pietatis, it first extended the Arma Christi by including tools of everyday use, setting them beside the arms that injured Christ. In the mid-fifteenth century, the tools were replaced by the representation of labors. The structure is open, a parataxis: scenes spread in horizontal bands around the full figure of Christ pointing at his wounds. It touches on folklore, and comparative material can be found in the humorous scenes and fables, such as the decoration of beehives, which are peculiar to the folk culture of the Slovene territories even today.

Imaging the nation called for political incentives to stimulate visual production. As a consequence, the Slovene Artists' Association was founded in 1899 with the support of the literati and politicians. The first exhibition a year later was a success; special trains were organized for visitors from Trieste and Celje, and tourists were greeted in Ljubljana by a brass band. At the fiasco of the second exhibition of the association two years later, one of the critics in his final punchline commented on what he could not find there: "We want grand, ideal, elevated, national programmatic Slovene art. Give it to us!" That call was answered in 1903 by the painting titled Slovenia Paying Tribute to Ljubljana (oil on canvas, 1903, Assembly room, City Hall, Ljubljana), made for the City Hall of Ljubljana. Ivana Kobilca (1863–1926) labored over the commission, which she had received from the Slavophile mayor of Ljubljana, Ivan Hribar. The healthy, happy, beautiful, exotic, unified nation is shown gathering around the throne, which is occupied by a young, fairylike woman — the allegory of Ljubljana. It is important to notice that there is no religious symbol in sight.

This masquerade of the national reading-room costumes is the liberal vision of the nation venerating its capital, here identified with the National Progressive Party; it may be a response to an image painted by Ivan Grohar (1867–1911). Grohar's talent, because he lacked education, at first earned him the most prestigious church commissions. The recently invested bishop of Ljubljana, Anton Bonaventura Jegli, dedicated the Slovene people to The Holy Heart of Jesus in 1899 and commissioned this painting for it celebration (oil on canvas, The Diocesan Palace, Ljubljana). The humble folk here are under the tutorship of the Virgin and Margaret of Alacoque (a family with red, white, and blue shared between the parents, and girls in modern dress), while the left side is held by a beggar, an elderly clergyman (?), a girl, and a woman in national costume. This is not the nation: this is the Slovene people, marked by their Catholic piety, hard labor, and modesty. Notice that the bourgeoisie are excluded from the image, which brings the vision within the ideological horizon of Christian Socialism.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 184150307X
• ISBN 13: 9781841503073
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160