Art History as Performance Art by Karen Kleinfelder, Department of Art

"The humanities . . . are not faced with the task of arresting what might otherwise slip away, but of enlivening what might otherwise remain dead."

--Erwin Panofsky, Art History as a Humanistic Discipline

Christopher Knight, the L.A. critic, recently pointed out there is a whole new generation of art students growing up right now who do not know that painting is dead. If we do our jobs as teachers right, maybe they will never have to know because we can help them see what is still alive and kicking in that history. Of course, it is often those unjaded students who show us a thing or two about how history can be re-visioned (and revisioned). Teaching works two ways, and I constantly find myself learning as much from my students' questions as they learn from my answers. But then, my answers more often than not take the form of more questions, and so the process starts right back up in an open-ended way that pursues the dynamics of an ongoing dialogue more than too tidy a point of closure. When it works, my students learn that art history, far from being dead, is an active part of making art.

I actually think of myself as an artist whose medium happens to be art history. The wall that I show my slides on is my canvas; I spend much time deciding which slide goes on the left and which on the right. In other words, I compose my points visually, making the slides act out my narrative. It is a kind of tango, and I am never sure at any moment whether my words or my images are taking the lead. In a sense, teaching has become a form of performance art for me.
As an historian of 20th century art, I find myself in the peculiar position of teaching modernism, which defined itself precisely by breaking away from history, as history, and post-modernism, which defines itself chiefly through revisioning history, as a contemporary scene in which we have little if any historical distance. My solution is to approach both, and the issue of history, too, through theory. I deconstruct, reconstruct, psychoanalyze, and hystericize any master discourse that presumes to be the final word. Trained by Dr. Rudolf Arnheim, I also have a thorough grounding in gestalt psychology as it applies to perception and the visual arts. My schooling at the University of Michigan, thus, focused on developing both a keen eye for visual analysis and a sharp mind for critical thinking and theory. In addition, I taught a Freshman Composition writing course for eight years in the interdisciplinary "Arts & Ideas" program at the University of Michigan's Residential College. Whatever subject we are teaching or studying, it seems to me that our shared goal is to exercise creative critical thinking by questioning not only the answers but the questions themselves.

Picasso was against theory; "painting remains painting because it eludes such investigation," he would claim. I am sure he would not approve of the way I use structuralist and post-structuralist theories to explain his pictures, but then, again, he might enjoy the fact that I do so precisely to keep the work open-ended and eluding closure of interpretation. My work is based on seeing art both as a concrete, physical object and as a text of multiple perspectives and possible meanings that cannot be closed off or contained by any singular, master discourse. Hence, I use theory, but resist being a card-carrying proponent of any one school of theory. The work of art itself is always kept primary. In art history, however, theory usually means "no slides." Contrary to form, I am known as the art historian who choreographs her presentations so that the slides act out my logic and put theory into practice. I am also known as the art historian who sees postmodern stirrings at work everywhere in modernism. With one foot in each end of the twentieth century, I straddle the divide by using current theories to open up new readings of early modern art. Picasso should be pleased; in my writings he remains cutting-edge in terms of postmodern pluralism and deconstructive practices.

It was never my intent to become a Picasso specialist, but once you start up with an artist of Picasso's scale and reputation, it is hard to break it off; one thing keeps leading to another. Having done my Honors undergraduate thesis on Picasso's Guernica, my Masters on his variations of Velázquez's Las Meninas, and my dissertation (which later became a book) on the theme of the artist and model in his late graphics, I have much invested in Picasso. As I often say, I have given the best years of my life to that dead artist. In many ways, though, he is not a dead artist for me; his art, with a little help from contemporary theory, keeps as alive and open-ended as ever. Picasso, I believe, would be pleased about that.
What has occupied me for some time now, since winning a National Endowment for the Humanities research grant in 1994-95, is a new study that looks at Picasso from a skewed point of view: that of Dora Maar, an artist in her own right, but better known as Picasso's mistress. After ten years with Picasso, she had a nervous breakdown and became none other than the patient of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (who Picasso at that time used as his own personal physician). Dora Maar is still an obscure figure and her story may seem marginal, but it is precisely her story that weaves a new, tangled web of a tale in which Picasso's myth and Lacan's theories cross, along with that of the Surrealists and Georges Bataille, with whom she also had her adventures. On the surface, it would seem that Dora Maar's story has all the makings of a Hollywood script: a dark, mysterious beauty; friend and model of the Surrealists; mistress of Picasso; hysterical patient of Dr. Lacan; and mystic, who turns from Surrealism to Catholicism in the end. But rather than sensationalize her personal story, I am more interested in contextualizing it in order to better bring out its fuller complex: the interweaving of her story with Picasso's legend; with the love-hate story that the Surrealists unfold whenever women are concerned; with the tale of Lacan's own desire and pursuit of female jouissance; with the cult of hysteria that posited a new relation between madness and creative expression, and thus a new role for the female artist to "act out"; with the political story of a world at war, acting out its own hysteria; and with the mystical search Maar subsequently undertook in an attempt to heal herself. This is not simply the story of yet another woman victimized; Maar not only gained her independence in the end, in many ways she never lost it or her connection to art and creativity. The "weeping woman's smile" (the book's working title) is thus meant to underscore contradictions in the stating of the enigma, and to point to an unsuspected supplement: the woman's story that cuts through the Picasso myth and all that goes with it.

For the last eight years, CSULB has been where my own story unfolded and where it continues to be shaped. The school has been a good fit for me, offering creative possibilities I would not have in a more narrowly defined art history department. Few schools still have art history connected with the studio program; I consider the kinds of shared spaces and exchanges we have between the studio areas and art history to be the best of both worlds. It is precisely art history's connection with studio here at CSULB that gives us a cutting-edge: we not only know the difference between iconography and iconology, we also know the language of the crit. Each fall the students in my seminar, who are always a mix of both studio and art history majors, collaborate by curating an exhibition on topics such as Surrealism and gender or performing Bataille's formless. I spend nearly as much time in the studio doing crits as I do in the slide room. The line between art history and studio begins to blur as one begins to feel equally at home in both arenas. My students and colleagues have been extraordinarily supportive, recognizing that a strong art history program is going to benefit studio output and enhance the reputation of the department as a whole. Art history is anything but dead here at CSULB; it is a vital part of a living tradition, actively contributing to the making of art and its history.