3 - Struktur, History and Determinism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2023
Summary
Evolutionism is dead.
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion.Freedom and compulsion … turn out not to be incompatibles.
Otto Pächt, ‘Alois Riegl’.If Strukturforschung was devoted to the integrity of the work of art it also had a theory of history that, in a sense, was committed to the integrity of history. Jan Bakoš calls this a ‘structural evolutionary conception of art history’. One could say that in this conception the structure of the work of interlocking that moved real history beyond mere ‘genetic’ links of the ‘first’ task of art history. This evolutionism ultimately comes to terms with Riegl’s mysterious notion of the Kunstwollen, which both Sedlmayr and Pächt embrace with qualifications.
In a very provocative way, Sedlmayr ended his essay on Riegl asking us to accept the theoretical premises that his forbear had established for contemporary art history:
The notion that art is not an autonomous,
irreducible, and irreplaceable expressive
possibility of the human mind, but rather an epiphenomenon.
The view that regards individuals as primary
and the only real entities, and sees groups as
merely a sum or the epitome of such individuals,
and for which, therefore, the collective
intellectual formations grounded in these groups
do not constitute real entities, but instead mere nominal fictions.
Quite specifically, the idea of the unity and
immutability of human nature and reason …
The view that the artist is either imitating or stylizing an unchanging nature …
The thesis that the entire movement of history is
only the result of individual forces working blindly
together, a network of individual causal threads.
The argument – made on empirical grounds – is that contemporary theory has validated Riegl. The result of course was an apparent holistic form of determinism, with obvious ominous tones when seen in retrospect.
Of course, both Riegl’s Kunstwollen and the Vienna approach to Strukturforschung hit a major brick wall in Gombrich’s influential critique of both in Art and Illusion.
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- The New Vienna School of Art HistoryFulfilling the Promise of Analytic Holism, pp. 76 - 104Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023