nf0096: so you know this is the last lecture of this unit er and i really hope 
you will enjoy the other modules and you know that er whenever there's a 
problem with a particular module and you feel you can clarify the problem with 
the the the the tutor the c-, your course tutor then do so if there's a more 
fundamental problem or you feel you can't go to the course tutor please by all 
means come always come back to me i need to know if there's a problem so don't 
have any inhibition come and see me my office hours shall be from ten till 
eleven on Wednesdays from this week onwards so the last lecture let me briefly 
review where we've come from so far if you remember in the first lecture i 
looked at one artist Turner and tried to sort of run the gamut of all the 
different approaches really to show you how different meaning can look from you 
know whatever angle you approach the work of art so i really tried to show you 
the differences of of of meaning 
you generate by just simply the way you approach a work of art and then in the 
last two weeks i gave you an account of art histories from the nineteenth 
century to the twentieth century really and the early twentieth century all of 
which in one way or another tried to give a causal account of er why an artwork 
looks the way it does a causal account which at once is specific to the 
historic time in which the artwork is generated as well as being 
superhistorical so that this cause is also something which determines the way 
we perceive the world nowadays or the way artworks are produced nowadays 
because only when you have that super-, aca-, emphasizing that superhistorical 
point of view did you really have a means of assessing the work of art in the 
past you had a connection to the past a legitimate connection now for Hegel 
that was the world spirit for Wölfflin and Riegl it was the evolution of human 
perception then for Panofsky and 
and iconography it was the way that thoughts throughout human societies always 
try to conceptualize the world the sort of constant which which er Panofsky saw 
as something which constantly stayed in societies and then with Marx it was the 
way that the means of production differently structured the economic societies 
and it was always the means of production which and and the way they were 
distributed which changed over time but stayed you know that as a sort of 
economic base state stable so all of these accounts gave this you know gave you 
in the proper sense an art history one which you could write but you which you 
could write throughout the ages when i came then to weaker form of Marxist 
analysis to social history and to feminism i said that they really don't have 
that any more they can give you a specific account of a w-, a work of art in 
its historic time from a critical viewpoint but they don't claim that they have 
this sort of superhistorical cause 
or have discovered that superhistorical cause which gives you continuity 
throughout the ages now that's for a variety of reason i mean for various of 
reasons particularly Hegel and Panofsky's way of explaining it had just become 
quite suspiciously metaphysical and nobody can really hold to that nowadays now 
Wölfflin and Riegl's account of the evolution of human perception is just 
simply not borne out by psychology so people don't really believe that into in 
that any more and also of course they felt it was just too reductive it was 
just giving an account of the formal changes rather than the content and with 
Marxist of course that you know all yourself i mean people can't really quite 
believe in the Marxist trajectory any more after the wall came down in in in 
Germany and Berlin in eighty-nine because this trajectory of the an evolution 
from er a capitalist society to communism was just simply not borne out so for 
var-, variet-, various 
reasons art historians nowadays feel very suspicious of these sort of 
superhistorical causes and this endeavour to give an account there and they 
have resigned themselves to give quite a specific account of an artwork in its 
specific toci-, society from er a critical viewpoint formulated nowadays and of 
course that aspect that they embed the artwork deeply in its society is really 
what all those accounts all these contemporary approaches which i started with 
last week and i will continue today really share but of course what does it 
mean it means that there's a multiplicity of viewpoints possible because of 
course if you say well we don't really have a authoritative viewpoint any more 
then you have a variety of approaches which are possible but any single one of 
them is really rid of authoritative conviction so you have this multiplicity of 
legitimate approaches coexisting next to each other but not one single one 
which can really claim 
it is the one and exhaustive explanation that i think you have to bear in mind 
when you continue in this course you really again and i come back to that are 
left to choose what you feel is the most plausible to yourself bearing in mind 
this is the most plausible to you and it could be something else could be 
entirely plausible to someone else and you can really construct the history of 
art from your own viewpoint from your own interests from your own approach but 
really can't go as far as claim that that is really the exhaustive explanation 
and you have an authoritative account and can really indeed give an 
authoritative survey course on the history of art 
nf0096: today i will talk about cos-, post-colonial approaches semiotics and 
finish with the psychoanalytic approach it's obvious let me start with the post-
colonial account it's obvious there's that a post-colonial account is er asking 
er or is er er considers the outward is deeply embedded 
and deeply imbricated by what's going on in society and particularly a post-
colonialist er or someone who m-, er adheres to that discourse er would ask 
what does it mean for works of art that societ-, western European societies in 
particular or western societies have continued to absorb and dominate other non-
western societies non-European societies but post-colonial discourse also means 
that it's not just a recuperation into the canon of er er recuperation of non-
western European societies' artefacts into the canon of art but it also tries 
to critically inflect what it means to have this canon what it means to to to m-
, to be er faced with a with a domination by western societies it really post-
colonial approaches in the history of art really took off with two exhibitions 
in the eighties one was staged in the mu-, in the Museum of Modern Art in New 
York in eighti-, in nineteen-eighty-four and what people tried there what set 
out to do there was to show 
that far from er sh-, er from completely developing without any contact with 
other societies western art was deeply influenced by what happened what what 
was produced in other societies and other cultures non-western cultures so in 
the wake of nineteenth century colonialism artefacts from all over the world 
and other cultures reached the western museums and of course as you know from 
the seminars already was studied by artists in particularly by Picasso as we've 
seen in the seminars i'm quite surprised yes here o-, obviously did it wrongly 
here i show you which you probably all recognize by now as a as a as a as a 
picture very closely related to the Demoiselles d'Avignon then he also produced 
the two females nudes were p-, produced in nineteen-o-six now you can see that 
Picasso here has taken or is influenced by the mask which he saw the Iberian 
mask in particular he saw in the museums in in Paris so you have this almond 
the almond-shaped eyes the dark contours and it's sort of propped 
onto those female nudes what he also has taken and this is what the exhibition 
catalogue in the MOMA emphasized that what he'd taken from the artefacts of 
other societies and other cultures particularly African and Iberian cultures 
was that er er that fragmentation of forms so forms didn't have to f-, to like 
the breast of the right nude for example is sort of propped on rather than in a 
sort of continuous plausible three-dimensional space of a female body so they 
really argued that what made Picasso such a hero in contemporary er in in 
twentieth century art the shattering of the three-dimensional in-, 
illusionistic er picture space was really something which he took from other 
cultures from non-western cultures and learned from them but soon after the 
exhibition opened and this characteristically voluminous catalogue was issued 
this exhibition came under heavy criticism from people who were influenced by 
post-colonial discussions they accused the exhibition 
of simply contintinuing the exploitation of non-western cultures in this case 
of simply continuing an account which says look we're going and taking the 
means and resources from other cultures in order to advance our own aims in 
this case twentieth century art history or the twentieth century art the 
shattering of the picture space is something which has significantly happened 
in twentieth century art but it is something which is on the ground on the base 
of er artistic articulations in non-European cultures so they say this is 
really just a continuation of colonization it doesn't give any of those 
cultures proper recognition so another exhibition opened five years later in 
nineteen-eighty-nine in Paris and that exhibition was called La Magicien De La 
Terre the magicians of the earth and in this exhibition modern art was shown 
alongside contemporary achievements by other cultures non-western cultures and 
the aim in this show was to 
show that such productions were not simply a source for western art as it had 
been in the primitivism exhibition but actually equalled western art in the in 
their achievements in the aesthetic beauty they could generate now again this 
exhibition came under heavy fire and criticism because it was argued that not 
only did this exhibition show the work from other cultures completely 
disconnected from their contexts so that decontextualization was heavily 
criticized but they furthermore said these critics of this exhibition said that 
er it is perceived in in a mould aesthetic beauty which is really very very 
intrinsic to western cultures and very very foreign to other cultures and 
therefore it is another sign of an appropriation rather than a proper 
recognition so underlying all those criticisms these two two those exhibitions 
was really what is properly a post-colonial approach and that was influenced by 
a rather wonderful book by the literary critic 
and Palestinian Palestinian Edward Said called Orientalism which came out 
actually ten years ag-, er twenty years ago in nineteen-seventy-eight now Said 
in this book Orientalism has very forcefully argued that western societies not 
only just exploited others' other cultures in their colonial strategies but in 
fact fabricated those societies in their own image other societies became and 
actually took on that character simply by being characterized in opposition to 
western cultures so whatever a western culture isn't er that other culture 
other cultures non-European cultures had to be so for example they were deemed 
to be m-, much purer somehow much more essential more related to nature less 
rational much more emotional so you can see it's all constructed in oppositions 
that was Said's point and he also argued that in fact because of the many many 
years of encounters these societies then took on those characteristics were 
really shaped in those images and we 
really do look in vain for an essential more purer more nature-related society 
elsewhere it is already our own construct now let me illustrate this by looking 
at the work here on your left which was produced by someone called Jimmie 
Durham a contemporary artist in when was it actually it's nineteen-eighty i 
don't have the date i think it's something in th-, in the nineteen-eighties i 
think it's something in the nineteen-eighties sorry i've forgotten the date of 
this er it's called The Cathedral of Saint John and i think if you look at it 
er er let me tell you about Jimmie Durham first a little bit Jimmie Durham is 
what we now would call a Native American artist i mean the they themselves at 
once stage called themselves the First Nation people and Jimmie Durham also was 
the representative for the First Nation people at the United sta-, er United 
Nations in Geneva for some time so what is quite typical here is and it's no no 
accident that i take to 
illustrate that point an artist a contemporary artist because contemporary 
artists and Jimmie Durham is quite a typical example were actually very heavily 
and much more at the forefront of taking up and articulating theoretical con-, 
and critical viewpoints in the eighties much more than any art critic or art 
historian so you can see he he was someone who also had a career as a 
politician apart from being this incredibly famous now contemporary artist and 
very articulate on the reasons why he produced a work of art in the way he did 
however we look at it at first hand it probably seems to you or some of you 
quite raw quite unfinished sort of assembled rather dilettantish perhaps even 
what we note is there's a skull we see some sort of f-, material from remains 
from animals the skull the antlers and i think in the way that it is assembled 
we immediately might think of some sort of totemic figure from non-European 
cultures perhaps also you know using a skull 
using animal remains but also probably in the way that it is painted in this 
rather garish decorative er way the skull is painted there's blue and then the 
sort of points dots er of red and and yellow on top of it and that is probably 
something we do er associate with artefacts now manufactured by er say Native 
Americans for example but we also notice i think that there are quite sort of 
industrially manufactured elements in this in this sculpture the the the the 
boot f-, the m-, er the sawmill produced wood which is roughly bolted together 
er with with nails and big bolts at these places and of course the the the 
metal tubes which form a surrogate antler here at the top another industrial 
produced material and also industrially manufactured in a way that it pu-, it 
is put together here so what we really have with this sculpture is a number of 
oppositions culture nature savagery civilization before after the technical the 
non-technical now if you recall what 
i said before about Edward Said and his account of colonization you realize 
that these kind of oppositions is what he criticized as the West doing when it 
encounters cultures which are foreign to it or European societies did when they 
encountered those rather strange to them strange societies in order to 
understand them they had to shape them in their own image and they gave them 
characteristics s-, which were in opposition to what they were and what they 
understood and so this is really played out here all those oppositions brought 
together in one culture er in one sculpture now Jimmie Durham himself is 
repeatedly emphasizes in his writings that the ease that there was an 
incredible ease with which Native Americans assimilated and used all those 
products and materials er which western societies brought to them when they 
colonized the country America so he p-, he would make a point that if they came 
with rifles and they got hold of rifle rifles 
these guns were immediately incorporated in the artefacts they er they produced 
without really you know obviously giving them their proper use they were just 
incorporated in what was there so that is the first point er which i want to to 
make here that Jimmie Durham says er says look there is there's an incredible 
ease with which our culture Native Americans have always assimilated whatever 
was brought to them and secondly he points out that this thinking in opposition 
is quite foreign to his own culture that in fact and probably that r-, might 
ring true to you that there is a er a that this is a culture Native Americans 
have a culture which is much more characterized by blurred demarcations things 
are not as hard and fast f-, are fastly fixed in oppositions so for example 
there isn't a strict demarcation between animals and humans and this is also 
borne out in the sculpture you see these animals remains the skull and the 
antler but they 
are assembled in a in a rather figurative way in a way that er resembles more 
an upright human he also points out that there is no no clear demarcation 
between death and life so the skull he uses here is really a tribute to death 
as it lives on in the presence and on the basis of all that we can probably 
also see that the character of assemblage here the sort of raw unfinished state 
which might have looked or might look dilettantish to you is something which 
Jimmie Durham does quite consciously in fact he he really does feel that the 
found object what he finds and assembles needs to be left in its own right must 
not be homogenized in a sort of entity which loses where all the individual 
elements u-, loo-, use their lose their own characteristic so he really does 
want an assemblage which looks quite assembled and not really homogenized in a 
unified object because he thinks that would just simply annihilate the 
character of the er of all the individual elements 
in the way that the colonials annihilated the characteristics of the natives 
when they arrived in their country or attempted to furthermore actually Durham 
turns the table on us and he says even our own culture is not as homogenous as 
we imagine it to be as seamless because this odd title this sculpture has The 
Cathedral of Saint John the Divine is actually a church in Manhattan some of 
you might know and it is the biggest and largest Gothic achie-, cathedral on 
Earth except of course that it is not a medieval Gothic church it is it stems 
from the nineteenth century and Durham points out that the stonework which 
gives it the resemblance of the Gothic of er the Gothic style is actually held 
together with steel which is now as you know it's e-, expanding with rust and 
therefore eventually will destroy that magnificent building so i think the 
message here is that Jimmie Durham says there are differences but there is no 
essential character to any one culture every culture is a 
hybridity in one way or another and this is i think very much what the post-
colonial discourse in art history also tries to take on board and give account 
of and this is also something which the second approach today semiotics is very 
clear about that there is actually in this case behind language no essential 
reality that language denotes nothing essential nothing clear but is alwa-, 
what it denotes is already always a construct of the context in which language 
is used 
nf0096: so i come to semiotics now now of course the analysis of our means of 
communications as a system of science is as old as western civilization as 
namex will tell you when it come when when you get to the forth module of this 
course but in the way that semioticians nowadays use the the m-, the er the l-, 
the the language of science and the system of science this really goes back to 
the twenties early twentieth century linguist Ferdinand Saussure who i've 
mentioned before who stated stated this analysis of 
science in in in terms which are still in use so for example he argued that a 
word is a signifier for something and he called the signified which is already 
a mental concept and not a object out in er er in the world something which the 
signifier refers to so there is the signifier and the signified you've heard 
this now before and in the seminars as well and the signified that which is 
denoted by the signifier is already a mental concept and not an objective world 
out there and it is really only in the in the in the context of the whole 
sentence of the society that language or words take on their meaning now what 
does that mean for pictures le-, let's look at this picture here on your on 
your right this is on your right now yes here's a still life by the seventeenth 
century artist Caravaggio who worked in Rome in the seventeenth century now 
first we should note the signifiers what are the signifiers in this picture now 
strictly s-, 
speaking the signifiers in this picture are the brushstrokes so we note the 
sort of rather luminous background in pinkish this is actually a very pinkish 
slide it's not as pinkish as that er but er a sort of greyish rather luminous 
rather cloudy background which at times those brushstroke condemns to some sort 
of figurative assemblage in the foreground which yet is very pushed into the 
two-dimensional realm or or really kept or held back i should better say in the 
two-dimensional realm it seems as if it n-, it's articulated into some three-
dimensional object but if you look very clearly it's not very clear how this 
object or these sorts of condensation of brushstrokes really take place in a 
three-dimensional picture space now these brushstroke and i've tried really 
hard to limit myself to just talking about brushstrokes here because only those 
are the signifiers these brushstroke then take on some meaning for us or we 
might associate them 
with fruit vegetables you know ju-, i think it's just fruit and a basket on a 
table and this is the signified the fruit we we associate with those 
brushstrokes the concept of fruit and basket now there is another semiotician 
called Charles Peirce who called the signified what Saussure called the 
signified an icon and that's been taken on by art historians quite quite 
rapidly the the the word icon because what Peirce said that the icon or the 
signified can have various relations with a known world various relations of 
resemblance with a with a known world so in this case there's a very close 
resemblance with the concept we have of fruit and basket because you know we we 
seem to see a fruit and a basket and it seems to be very close to fruits and 
baskets in our knowledge but there's also a further dime-, it can the icon can 
a-, also be quite er far removed from what we know in the objective world and 
take on much more abstract thoughts and that's actually present 
in this picture as well you might not have thought but if you look very closely 
and now i'm afraid i have to go here you can see that the the apple is worm-
eaten that the the leaves wilt and on the knowledge of er with the knowledge of 
seventeenth century thought we know that this is that actually denotes quite an 
abstract thought I-E it denotes a memento mori a vanitas symbol what it means 
is that even in the midst of beauty there's death we all will decay the vanitas 
symbol a memento mori so this is actually in this picture the signified also i-,
er e-, m-, er it denotes two things one which is very closely related to what 
we think is the objective world and one which is a bit more removed from that 
and takes on abstract thoughts so that is fu-, er fundamental semiotic analysis 
of a picture now you find semioticians like Rosalind Krauss in one of the 
seminar texts who we've encountered one seminar hasn't quite encountered it yet 
who concentrate on 
how this meaning is constituted within the language of the individual picture 
like Saussure really who says meaning is only constituted by the syntax by the 
individual sentence in which a word is found and the sentence in this case is 
the entire picture so Rosalind Krauss if she looked at this picture would point 
out how much actually it is a two-dimensional construct it er Caravaggio 
doesn't actually give us the basket very firmly placed on a three-dimensional 
table in a three-dimensional room it really is very oddly pressed into two 
dimensions and she would take and di-, discuss that as then constructing the 
meaning which of course in the end would come close to the meaning i've just 
discussed the meaning of you know that he obviously wants to not just show us a 
beautiful arrangement of fruits in a basket but generate some further meaning 
that of the memento mori there is death in the midst of beauty however va-, 
after the Second World War another 
analysis of language rapidly spread through Anglo-American world and that was 
one which came from the philosopher the Viennese philosopher who emigrated to 
England er Ludwig Wittgenstein now Wittgenstein's philosophy of language 
emphasized the context the social context in which language emerged now he held 
that language emerges within and transforms our social transactions its 
contents is not some fixed state of affairs in the world but that state of 
affairs is permanated permeated by the life of speech by the way and the 
context it which we utter something now by analogy art might be seen as both to 
emerge out of the context of social activity as well as being irreducible to it 
and that is the really really important characteristic er of semioticians why 
they are so keen on what they are doing because they say what they do is 
different from a social historian or art historian because a social er they 
criticize social art historians as reducing a work 
of art as simply reflecting the states of affair in society while a semiotician 
claims to pay close attention to the irreducible nature of a work of art there 
is something very specific in a work of art as it comes together and a 
semiotician and that's characteristic of semiotics is that it tries to keep the 
balance between the reference to the social society and the context on the one 
hand and the artwork and the nature of the artwork as quite a in quite an quite 
a characteristic being on the other really the best known advocate of this kind 
of art history the semiotic approach in art history is someone called Norman 
Bryson B-R-Y- S-O-N B-R-Y- S-O-N so i'll just give you that name because you 
will find that that person in Preziozi's collection of essays for example now 
let me look at an analysis of a painting by Bryson and i will quote Bryson here 
but i have to give you a little bit more background before i can just launch 
into this into this quote from him 
and i give you two pictures Bryson is really in what i am going to quote to you 
now is really talking about this picture which is called the Gilles and is in 
the Louvre but he also refers to a figure which you will find in this picture 
by the same artist which is this figure and you will see it when i talk about 
it er so he amalgamates er various pictures by Watteau but really only talks 
and elicits the meaning of this one here another point in order to understand 
that quote is that he alludes to something called the fête champêtre and that 
came up in the seminar yesterday and that's really a tradition which goes back 
to Titian but really became very very alive with Watteau in the eighteenth 
century er oh sorry i've given you the name of the artist now i'll come back to 
that but with this artist in the eighteenth century in France this is an 
eighteenth century French artist who placed er aristocratic people parties in 
nature and the point 
here was that that gathering that aristocratic na-, er gathering is as natural 
as nature itself in fact the nature though he places these people in were 
highly highly cultivated but still nature functions as a backdrop for these 
fêtes champêtres the party in the countryside that means er as a sort of 
naturalizing element which naturalizes the coming-together right we've got that 
so let me l-, well first tell you about the artist who Bryson is talking about 
that is Jean-Antoine Watteau an eighteenth century French artist Bryson says in 
Watteau a whole narrative structure insists on meaning but at the same time 
withholds or avoids meaning let us take the example of this characteristic 
theatrical costume in the theatre such clothing is part of a general system of 
conventionalized costumes with exact dramatic and signalling functions the 
diamond-patterned costume signals Arlecchino that's here on on the on the right 
the baggy white ruffed costume 
signals Pedrolino or Gilles here on the left the black cap and gown signals 
doctor but outside the frame of the stage in a fête champêtre such signalling 
costumes lose their semantic charge and having lost that the original meani-, 
meaningfulness take on all the sadness of the depleted sign a sign that insists 
on a signified which is absent disconnected from the present signifier at the 
same time that sign makes the claim for a powerful and attractive signified in 
this case melancholy that is nowhere stated in the pain-, painterly signifier 
explicitly so what's he saying here he's really saying that Bryson that is that 
the meaning of the figures in the picture is at once dependent on the original 
context the theatre yet it's not like Wittgenstein's Life of Speech reducible 
to it but constitutes something other as well and particularly because it is 
depleted of that meaning in the theatre it takes on another meaning in this in 
this picture in 
this case the melancholy melancholy of this picture now here like in all other 
contemporary approaches i think it is which i've discussed so far and will 
continue to discuss here the specific social context of a work of art is 
crucial as you can see Bryson needs to know about the conventions of these 
figures in the theatre the comedians in the theatre and he needs to know about 
Watteau so he needs to know about the social context so that is the same as in 
all other approaches this is also the case and that's perhaps more surprising 
in the last approach i will come to today the psychoanalytical approach 
although here the larger context becomes the psychological development common 
or assumed to be common to all human beings so again because of psychoanalysis 
broader claims for unveiling general human psychological configurations we do 
not stand still with an interpretation of an individual artist and his or her 
work although tha-, 
that would always be the starting point but we are also drawn into how this 
work is conditioned by society in fact how the individual's psychological make-
up is actually conditioned by society 
nf0096: i've very briefly looked at no at this picture last week you remember 
Renoir's the impressionist Renoir's La Loge of eighteen-seventy-four now let me 
here now recast that analysis which i i brought it up in discussion of feminist 
approaches you know the the men are the painters the women are the objects in 
painting now let me recast this here in a psychoanalytical in psychoanalytical 
terms and see what what that will generate for this picture but in order to do 
so i have to tell you a little bit more about Sigmund Freud who i mentioned in 
connection with Turner now Sigmund Freud the psychoanalyst well doctor in 
Vienna at the turn of the century advanced a theory of castration anxiety which 
really lies at the heart of psychoanalytical approaches to the history of art 
now 
that theory states that the infant male the infant boy experiences an 
uninhibited pleas-, er pleasure in his relationship with his mother's body 
until the stage when he realizes that he's actually in competition for it with 
his father now in particular the male infant fears that his father will deprive 
him of the penis that gives him so much pleasure now a thought which is 
actually confirmed according to psychoanalysis in the infant's m-, imagination 
by the appearance of his mother's genitatalia which look to him like a 
castrated version of his own what is more the the father appears to be such a 
powerful figure obviously with a much more developed penis that the infant 
simply according to psychoanalysis sacrifices his own penis er as a source of 
pleasure and tries to found his identity on a substitute for that on some kind 
of what then psychoanalysis calls a phallus that has come an-, up in the 
seminars as well so the phallus is distinct from the 
penis it really is the object which the infant tries to concentrate on an 
object which is completely unviolatable which can't be reached by by by by the 
threat of the father can't be reached by any any violation from the father now 
asserting identity and identifying this phallus can take various forms and a n-,
number of i-, n-, er of objects but its importance lies in it ability to have 
a symbolic value as something that stands for presence like the penis and the 
pleasure the preni-, the penis generated was present and and just there as well 
as power something which can't be hurt can't be taken away by someone else so 
really all that the male's physical otherness from the female first signified 
that had to be this phallus this is often why people or psychoanalysts explain 
why babies or infants actually toddlers i should say acquire language because 
that language actually stems has this kind of symbolic value it is present and 
it has power and the father uses 
it powerfully so it's often explained that children try to identify the with er 
with that and and take that on as a substitute for hi-, for for their own 
former pleasure with er with the female body and their own actual physical 
penis now what does that mean what what consequence does that have for this 
image here now simple argument would simply state that in all men there's a 
residual fear of castration and that was also there in Renoir when he painted 
this painting and renoi-, Renoir's and it inclined Renior n-, Renior to find er 
to find ways of deferring recognition that the female body is in fact a body 
castrated and therefore he painted this rather fetishized female number of them 
female bodies as a sort of perfect image something which can't be hurt 
something which isn't characterized by a lack or by something you know missing 
and er in this c-, sense you know in this psychoanalytical sense in fact the 
female body becomes a phallus a s-, penis 
substitute something which stands for power something s-, which stands for 
perfect unadulterated presence and of course it is v-, and of course in this 
image and this is where feminists have leaped into this the eroticized major 
still hangs on in all f-, all penis substitutes and all phalli according to 
psychoanalysis the that pleasure that initial pleasure the infant experienced 
that still lingers on and so the female body is eroticized on one hand it still 
has that it still stands in for the original penis which gave so much pleasure 
but of course it must never this woman must never become real she m-, she has 
to remain a figment of the m-, the male artist's imagination because as soon as 
she were to become real er the lack would become apparent again the lack the 
non-perfectness of women so this is i think the vu-, er a ru-, rudimentary 
account of psychoanalysis which really underli-, er underlies all 
psychoanalytic accounts and you can 
see very clearly in this account which is my last point here in with regard to 
approaches today er psychoanalytic approach is of course very very conducive to 
feminist appropriation and this is something i didn't mention last week when i 
went through all the different er ways that er all the different approaches 
which feminism or feminists question in art history can take on very often you 
do find feminist art history aligned with a psychoanalytic account for the 
obvious reasons that it helps feminists to explain why male artists have always 
depicted women in the way they have indeed mo-, just most of the contemporary 
approaches can appear in combination with one another and you've seen that in 
the seminars and in v-, variety of the texts there already let me finish today 
by going back to the start of this lecture series and hopefully wrapping this 
one up neatly in er as well and this is by going back to the blackboard which i 
something i did earlier and i 
hope you can read it and something you should recognize [laugh] you think i'm 
bombarding you with German here now [laughter] but no [laugh] [laughter] we are 
here [laugh] this blackboard do you recognize this this is what i wrote up at 
the end of the first lecture all the different approaches i had gone through in 
the course of discussing Turner now what i've produced here in my beautiful 
designer mode [laugh] very clearly laid out i've taken them put them all down 
again and you can now recognize we had we really apart from the biographical 
approach i we i discussed all those approaches in the lectures but i drew a 
very firm line this time between those first four and the last five because as 
i said in the lectures and today again all those last four refuse to accept and 
really highly criticize those approaches for just standing still there what 
they really all all these want to show is that an artwork can't s-, you can't 
stand still with a connoisseurial 
approach you can't sell still with a biographical approach or a formalist 
approach or indeed iconography as such you really have to show how deeply 
embedded the artwork is in society that comes here i'll read it to you in a 
second and you have to investigate it from a critical contemporary viewpoint so 
what i've written here i've made an arrow going up from all of these going up 
there saying they refuse to accept that an analysis of work of art is exhausted 
by these yet and that is important i think it is fair to say that all of these 
still need those approaches somewhat as a base you do need a proper attribution 
to an artist or you n-, in order to really discuss an artwork meaningfulness in 
its place in its society you do need to look at an artwork first of all the way 
that it is painted the way or or sculpted or produced in order to really 
understand its meaning so you do need some kind of formalist appreciation after 
all so this is this sentence 
they do yet they do form these four approaches do form the base for all of 
these but what these add is that art is very very clearly embedded in social 
formations and investigated from a compe-, contemporary critical viewpoint now 
then i have some very confusing arrows here and they really show all the 
combinations possible that er in fact i started off when i thought about this 
this er this er this graphic er outline here that in fact all these four last 
four approaches really do depend i mean and they have to on some kind of social 
art history if they all adhere to the er to to the belief that an artwork has 
is something not divinely ordained on the world but produced by soti-, 
societies so really social history of art not the Marxist one though because 
that as i said initially has become somewhat suspicious in its fundamental 
claims but social art history really feeds in all of these and they can all 
feed into each other and form various and this is why it's sort of then i went 
from this with arrows into 
all three from this er so they're all connected with each other but here at the 
very end and i think one can and and i have to be a bit more careful i think 
it's fair to say that a psychoanalytical approach would always have a h-, have 
a special affinity with a biographical approach you do need to if you start 
from the individual and his or her make-up you do need to have some kind of 
knowledge of the of the not always as my analysis of Renoir showed you can do 
without it if you take it in very general terms but i think it's fair to say 
that they there is a special affinity to the biographical approach and i also 
think that there is a special affinity between the semiotic approach and 
formalists er the formalist approach we saw it with ro-, Rosalind Krauss but if 
you read Norman Bryson you can see that he places a heavy heavy emphasis on the 
way that the artwork is produced and i said it in the lecture a little earlier 
that what is specific about a semiotic 
approach is that it not only shows that the artwork is part of a context but 
also tries to account for what is really non-reducibly arty about an artwork so 
and that's where the formalist sympathy comes in there's and you will see this 
but this will now complicate it a little bit more but you will see it with 
namex there's also a special affinity if if you don't have the special af-, a-, 
a-, affinity with a formalist approach then you might have a special affinity 
with the iconographical approach and i believe that namex in his module will 
take iconography in a m-, non in a in a sort of modified non-Panofsky sense and 
er introduce you er talk about that again and the semiotic approach together so 
there are various special affinities but i hope that sort of neatly wraps it up 
and recalls certain things and brings it together and i'm actually for once 
today we'll finish in time but let me just say er that i've you know having 
come to the end now that none of the 
contemporary approaches has a clear sense and repeat this again of the 
underlying mechanisms which connect us with the past and is at the same time er 
working historically specific to that age or context or artwork under in dev-, 
investigation thus all of them are unable to give you a clear authoritative 
account of the art of the past and how it developed over time now it is however 
possible to give an account from a particular viewpoint be it social history 
feminism semiotics or indeed reception theory and all of that of course you 
will get over the next four modules in this course but of course you also will 
get a much much deeper knowledge of individual periods than i've produced here 
and of course you probably noticed and i greatly relish this that i that my 
account or my use of works of art in these lectures have really stretched right 
across the civilizations from Egyptian artworks to a very contemporary very up 
to date contemporary artist 
Jimmie Durham so if you really think about it you almost had an artwork from 
almost any very well known period of the of the history of art so we had 
Egyptian er we had classic Greek we had late Roman empire i referred to 
medieval cathedrals when i discussed Hegel then we went to the Renaissance with 
Martène Rubens and Rembrandt again when i discussed Wölfflin again the 
Baroque with Caravaggio here the eighteenth century is there with Watteau the 
nineteenth century is there with the with the Impressionists Monet Renoir the 
twentieth century with Picasso and er and the late twentieth century we're 
nearly out of it the late twentieth century we're nearly in the twenty-first 
century that's Jimmie Durham now this is something very unusual i must admit 
that i really really er it's very rare that one gets an opportunity in a 
lecture to have that wide a range and oh i've forgotten there was Dürer as 
well so German Renaissance you had a bit more of the Renaissance and i enjoyed 
it but i hope it will make more sense to you when you do study particular 
periods from a particular angle at more depth in the next module so i hope you 
enjoy it