DOI issue:
Zwrot kinematograficzny w praktyce i teorii sztuki / The Cinematic Turn in Art Practice and Theory
DOI article:Lipiński, Filip: Cinematic art (history) and Mieke Bal's thinking in film
Citation link:https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/artium_quaestiones2020/0019
Cinematic Art (History) and Mieke Bal's Thinking in Film 13
cept of an image in motion to a multifaceted analysis broadening its heuristic,
conceptually productive potential.
Another example of resorting to the cinema/the cinematic as a vehicle
of thinking about art history but also a telling contrast to cinema as what
I consider an emancipatory force for art historical narratives proposed, for
instance, by Michaud, and as I will demonstrate, Bal, could be Donald Prezi-
osi's 1989 book Rethinking Art History. Even though cinema is just one of
many references in his study, Preziosi noted that "... it could be argued that
in the twentieth century all of the traditional pictorial arts have been sub-
sumed into the discursive frame of the cinematic apparatus. The academic
discipline of art history has never, or only rarely, dealt with the cinema ... ,"24
He used the notion of cinema as a metaphor for the formative structure of
art historical discourse, which, in his view, had always been cinematic, by
virtue of the central role of slide projection and the structuring of art his-
torical discourse around sequences of images. In this sense, the cinema as
a technological and epistemological apparatus is nothing new to art history
but has always informed it. The cinematic metaphor, however, serves to re-
veal the technological and ideological formation of art history, the "cinemat-
ic panopticon," rather than disrupt the recognized paradigms:
... the entire disciplinary apparatus as it exists in the twentieth century would be
unthinkable without a correlative technology - that of the cinema. In a number
of important respects, modern art history has been a supremely cinematic prac-
tice, concerned with the orchestration of historical narratives and the display of
genealogy by filmic means. In short, the modern discipline has been grounded in
metaphors of cinematic practice to the extent that in nearly all of its facets, art
history could be said to continually refer to and to implicate the discursive logic or
realist cinema. The art history slide is always orchestrated as a still in a historical
movie.25
A slide in an art history lecture, like a still from a movie or a photogram
taken out of its visual and auditory context by virtue of its fragmentary nature,
requires complementation, a verbal commentary which embalms (and, par-
adoxically anchors) it, pretending to locate it within a missing movie. In his
project of archeological rethinking of art history Preziosi tries to demytholo-
gize the discipline, reveal its constructedness and political premises, as opposed
to the allegedly solid, objective and disinterested knowledge grounded in the
24 D. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History. Meditations on a Coy Science, New Haven-Lon-
don 1989, ft. 69. p. 207.
25 Ibidem, p. 73.
cept of an image in motion to a multifaceted analysis broadening its heuristic,
conceptually productive potential.
Another example of resorting to the cinema/the cinematic as a vehicle
of thinking about art history but also a telling contrast to cinema as what
I consider an emancipatory force for art historical narratives proposed, for
instance, by Michaud, and as I will demonstrate, Bal, could be Donald Prezi-
osi's 1989 book Rethinking Art History. Even though cinema is just one of
many references in his study, Preziosi noted that "... it could be argued that
in the twentieth century all of the traditional pictorial arts have been sub-
sumed into the discursive frame of the cinematic apparatus. The academic
discipline of art history has never, or only rarely, dealt with the cinema ... ,"24
He used the notion of cinema as a metaphor for the formative structure of
art historical discourse, which, in his view, had always been cinematic, by
virtue of the central role of slide projection and the structuring of art his-
torical discourse around sequences of images. In this sense, the cinema as
a technological and epistemological apparatus is nothing new to art history
but has always informed it. The cinematic metaphor, however, serves to re-
veal the technological and ideological formation of art history, the "cinemat-
ic panopticon," rather than disrupt the recognized paradigms:
... the entire disciplinary apparatus as it exists in the twentieth century would be
unthinkable without a correlative technology - that of the cinema. In a number
of important respects, modern art history has been a supremely cinematic prac-
tice, concerned with the orchestration of historical narratives and the display of
genealogy by filmic means. In short, the modern discipline has been grounded in
metaphors of cinematic practice to the extent that in nearly all of its facets, art
history could be said to continually refer to and to implicate the discursive logic or
realist cinema. The art history slide is always orchestrated as a still in a historical
movie.25
A slide in an art history lecture, like a still from a movie or a photogram
taken out of its visual and auditory context by virtue of its fragmentary nature,
requires complementation, a verbal commentary which embalms (and, par-
adoxically anchors) it, pretending to locate it within a missing movie. In his
project of archeological rethinking of art history Preziosi tries to demytholo-
gize the discipline, reveal its constructedness and political premises, as opposed
to the allegedly solid, objective and disinterested knowledge grounded in the
24 D. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History. Meditations on a Coy Science, New Haven-Lon-
don 1989, ft. 69. p. 207.
25 Ibidem, p. 73.