Jacqueline Jung, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture, Yale University Press, July 2020, 340pp
Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture, published in July 2020 by Jacqueline Jung, a scholar of medieval art in Yale University's Art History Department, "Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture" ) is one of the most anticipated new books in The field of European art history since the pandemic. At the time of the book's publication, the new book purchase process in the university library had pressed the pause button, and the author had to wait for the inter-school borrowing system to reopen for nearly a year, and finally obtained a month of precious borrowing time from the University of Montreal in the summer of the following year. After reading and confirming, this is indeed a meticulous work worth recommending to the domestic academic community and reflecting the frontier dynamics of overseas disciplines.
From the "pictorial program" to the "perceptual process"
Eloquence, Jung's second book, like his first post-Ph.D. book, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, focuses on the physical experience and spatiality of sculpture groups in medieval churches. One of Eloquence's bold and groundbreaking disciplinary contributions is a new paradigm of dynamic spatio-temporal analysis of pictorial programming, primarily involving groups of sculptures in an architectural environment. Both of Jung's books place great emphasis on understanding the structure and form of architecture and sculpture at the scene of church space, and the book "Eloquence" can be said to open the empirical perception basis of "in situ", which is the study of art history, with a phenomenological care and recognition, and its focus is no longer just to experience the work and its spatial environment on the spot, but to truly reflect on the gap between this experience and long-term disciplinary practice, and to extract the "dynamic" and "viewing viewpoint" by excavating the blind spots of the latter. and other analytical tools that can be further used to enrich the visual and perceptual evidence of specific works.
With this comes a completely new definition of the pictorial/sculptural program. In the past—especially in iconology—the image program was seen as a static, multi-element structure, and the goal of art history interpretation was to reveal the relationships between the units within this structure, thus completing a dominant interpretation of the overall meaning. An image program based on the extensible field experience in space-time does not regard the whole structure as a static and unchanging whole, but as an environment that occupies a specific physical space, and regards the movement of the viewer from one point to another in this environment as an experiential clue, in which the viewing and perception of the same program at different angles constitute a continuous sequence of impressions, and the viewing and perception in this transformation transforms the program that was originally frozen into a dynamic, A process that unfolds in different aspects. The image program thus gains dynamic and multi-faceted nature, which not only provides a new way of thinking and richer original material for the formal analysis of the sculpture group, but also brings a more open and inclusive gesture of meaning interpretation—the "flexibility" of meaning is repeatedly emphasized by Jung in the book, and this flexibility is due to the dynamics of viewing itself.
In a way, dynamic viewing and the spatiality of sculpture are not new issues in art history, and even in some areas it is a cliché. But Jung's brilliance is that he uses delicate and focused perception to add a novel and systematic depth to this well-known common sense of the discipline. This system and depth is not dogmatic or rigid, but according to the specific analysis case and its spatial characteristics as far as possible to combine different viewing dynamics - multiple viewing angles extracted from the effective viewpoint of the surrounding sculpture, the different forms of the sculpture at different distances and elevation angles, the interrelationships formed by different sculptures in the same space, and so on. At the same time, Jung's analysis places particular emphasis on the physical space occupied by the work and the viewer's body and the viewing experience of the interaction between the two parties, which reflects his deep commitment to phenomenological theory. In the book, she emphasizes the concept of "image" and "image/presence", and if the static program freezes the sculpture into an image, then the sculpture in dynamic perception meets the body of the viewer as a body, and its first attribute is a physical, empirical presence. Before any dissection of its implications, researchers must capture this vivid "sense of presence" in a comprehensive and open manner. This is the method of care that runs through Eloquence.
Corresponding to the sculptural sense of presence is Junger's focus on the perceived experience of the viewer. She not only revives the core concept of "haptic/optic" in art history, emphasizing the dimensions of tactile perception and emotional experience in the statue (such as the gestures, folds of clothing, and facial expressions of the figures), but also highlights two perceptual concepts that have been rediscovered by current sensory research— "proprioception" and "vestibular sense." Proprioception refers to the human body's perception of its own dynamics, actions, and orientation, and the sense of balance is particularly associated with the upward gestures that the viewer often needs to make in medieval churches facing sculptures. It can be said that Jung really opened up an analytical paradigm that treats the moving viewer's body as a perceptual medium for the sculptural environment. At the same time, this new way of perception also means a new paradigm of depiction, and the primary function of the text is to make the sculpture "animate", to tell the visual experience that changes from different angles, rather than to use the style definition of the form description or the motif of the image description to make a conclusive conclusion.
Although the viewing practice in different historical contexts does not necessarily correspond to the framework proposed by Rong ge, and not all types of works emphasize multi-point of view interactive viewing so much, on the basis of clarifying the cultural context of the specific research object, the initiative of this book can constitute a basic strategy and ideological experiment to enrich the visual evidence of the work, which has considerable enlightening significance for all kinds of art history materials that need to be investigated in the field. There are many such materials within the history of Chinese art, ranging from Buddhist statues in specific environments to various pictorial programs with public ritual functions.
Take, for example, a brilliant case from the second chapter of the book, to see how this analysis unfolds. The second chapter of the book focuses on the sculptures at the entrance to the auditorium on the south side of strasbourg Cathedral, consisting mainly of three statues on the pillars and two semicircular frieze reliefs. Jung's early chapter focuses on the niches above the left doorway depicting the Dormition of the Virgin scene, arguably a powerful precursor to the analysis paradigm of the entire book's image programs. Jung draws on and further elaborates on an analysis published in 1927, questioning from the beginning that the early photographic photographs of the relief do not fit the experience of viewing the field. Only when the lens returns to the ground from its elevated suspended state can the design intent of the relief itself be more clearly highlighted:
In this slightly shortened perspective, the spacing between the heads of the main groups of characters is reduced, and the connection between the characters becomes closer; the body of the Virgin rests more naturally on the bed, while Peter's arm provides a certain arc of support rather than supporting the Arm of the Virgin. In addition, the bed's deep undercut edges stand out from this perspective, reinforcing the illusion that the figure occupies a space with depth. (66 pages, Figures I and II)
Fig. 1: Relief of the frieze on the left side of the entrance to the southern ear hall of the Basilica of Our Lady of Strasbourg, the Virgin of the Virgin,1225 (photograph published in 1922 for a flat-angle photograph)
Fig. 2: Relief of the Sleeping Virgin (Ground Elevation 1)
If this 1927 analysis remained statically on-the-spot viewing, Jung quickly thrust his attention into the movement. She first follows the regular route of the faithful into the church and continues towards the entrance, where the overall visual representation of the relief remains at a closer elevation, with the male participants' faces dominating the narrative and the figures' postures more urgent. Jung noted in particular that St. John's face was obscured by his mourning gestures from other points of view, only when the viewer had marched to this position. This turn in the dynamic viewing experience adds a floating element to the emotion embodied by St. John himself, liberating the relationship between gesture and emotion from a one-to-one fixed state, prompting the viewer to adjust to his recognition of his mourning. (Figure 3)
Jung was not even satisfied with viewing the relief from the frontal elevation angle, but continued to analyze it from the left and right sides in reference to the medieval route of march. From the right, the Virgin is mainly surrounded by three figures who have entrusted her, and her body is centered downwards, "locked in the social realm of human mourning"; from the left, a passage to the celestial realm is opened between the Virgin and the open space above the frieze. The very different relationships of the figures presented on both sides mark "the path of the Virgin Mary from sorrow to glory". The flexibility of emotion and meaning expressed in a relief grows in these different but co-existing possibilities. (69 pages, Figures IV and V)
Fig. 3: Relief of the Sleeping Virgin (Ground Elevation II)
Fig. 4: Relief of the Sleeping Virgin (right elevation)
Fig. 5: Relief of the Sleeping Virgin (left elevation)
This analysis encompasses several core elements of Jung's analytical strategy: a firm interest in viewing the elevation of the field, the excavation of different points of view horizontally in the same sculpture, especially the skepticism and deconstruction of the visual message provided by standard photographic photographs handed down from the nineteenth century to the present, and the emphasis on the different emotions and meanings that the same work may exhibit through these more diverse visual evidences. Although Jung attaches great importance to the upward gaze and its cultural and historical implications as a devout gesture from the earthly to the celestial realm, she does not completely replace the head-up that has dominated previous research with the upward look. Although she does not systematically elaborate on this possible contradiction, we can still see that her intention is to complement the existing perspective with a more empirical perspective, in order to correct the possible misleading nature of old photographs. As for those head-up views that are actually impossible to achieve, Jung also does his best to explain, in order to be able to take into account the dual perspectives of the viewer and the producer in the visual experience of the work. After all, the historical maker and the sculpture they have produced have had a heads-up relationship, and abandoning these visual materials that were previously used to infer the ownership and production style of the work is tantamount to creating a new methodological bias and depriving the researcher of important raw materials to understand the creator's design intentions. The originality of his research lies in the fact that other seemingly unconventional viewing experiences are fully incorporated into a very caring and imaginative visual analysis. This constitutes a critique and shift to previous paradigms of art history writing, redefining and greatly expanding the visual experience that is considered valid by the study of this discipline.
Photography and Film: "Remediation" in the Study of Art History
Figure VI: At the entrance to the Cathedral of Magdeburg, the reorganization of facial expressions in the sculpture of the Wise and foolish Virgin, p. 153
As can be deduced from the above, Jung's core strategy is to push the analysis of sculptural programs from dependence on still images to the realm of moving images, which we can describe as a process of "remediation" from photography to film. In fact, Jung did draw a lot of inspiration from media theory in his discourse. Photography as an indispensable visual medium in the modern development of the discipline of art history has been discussed by many scholars; even as early as the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many important art historians (such as Wolflin and Ligel) questioned the visual experience and information provided by photography itself, although Wolflin was more concerned that the sense of light in photography hindered the researchers' reading of the linear design of visual works. The analytical paradigm of Eloquence is to reconstruct the physical view and spatial dimension that has been erased by photography. While deconstructing art history to study the old perceptual medium, Jung introduced a lot of thinking in the field of film research, and discovered a new way of viewing from moving images. But we need to realize that this way of looking is not to find the real experience of the work, but to create a new medium of perception created by the subjective. This is not only reflected in her initiative to introduce concepts such as "montage", "zoomscape", "slowscape" and "haptic engagement" in the viewing experience to rethink the spatial experience of sculpture, but also reflects the high degree of consciousness and creativity in the use of pictures in the work. The book simulates the dynamic viewing process from one point to another by juxtaposing the shooting of different viewpoints within the effective viewing range of the same sculpture several times in succession; in the fourth chapter of the book, Jung also reorders the facial close-ups of ten women in a sculpture group to show the dynamic progress of the facial expressions themselves, and the sculpture group has undergone a second degree of creation in a montage (Figure 6).
This "remediation" at the level of visual presentation in academic research reflects the author's self-conscious observation of the role of images in disciplinary practice. It also marks the special position and mission of art history research as a whole in the field of humanities studies. As amphibious thinkers who constantly shuttle between visual experience and language experience, art historians should be vigilant against the language-centered bias of the academy's discourse, constantly explore and reflect on the epistemological potential of vision and image itself, and feed it back into the thinking of humanistic research. We must not only deeply cultivate the discourse and concept of the discipline, but also maintain a high degree of consciousness, reflection and creativity for the "visual practice" within the discipline.
Fig. 7: Details of Uta's face, portrait of a person from Naumburg Cathedral, 1939
The book discusses many times how photography has influenced interpretation within the discipline in the modern period, and one of the most interesting examples is the statue of A Uta in The Donors' Portraits, Naumberg Cathedral in Chapter 5 (Figure VII). Jung traces back to close-up photographs of Uta's face circulating in the 1920s and 1930s, and the acceptance of this photograph brings in the female figures of the film culture of the same period (such as Bergman in Casablanca). This "Gothic cool" aesthetic was more touted by the emerging Nazi Party as the essence of German national art, which was used to reflect the decay and "degeneration" of modern art. Jung's analysis is intended to break the filters created by photography and modern media culture, shifting her attention from Uta's veiled face to the tactile sense of her gestures and postures, and even more by emphasizing the fleeting disintegration of the overall dynamics of the figures. Utta is not a cool movie actress, but a flesh-and-blood medieval aristocratic woman with great sensual appeal. (pp. 198-200)
It should be pointed out that remediation is not only reflected in the visual presentation and analysis of works, but also profoundly changes the practice of hermeneutics itself. The most emblematic of its success is the two brilliant passages in chapters TWO and IV, both of which, interestingly, include a group of sculptures with a certain opposition — at the entrance to strasbourg Cathedral is a pair of female avatars symbolizing ecclesia and synagogue, and at Magdeburg Cathedral is a group of statues of wise and foolish virgins Foolish Virgins）。 In both sets of materials, Jung's explanatory strategy involves several steps: she first breaks the "static antagonism" between the characters constructed by photographs and moral metaphors; then excavates the complex and changeable material forms and religious meanings of specific human figures through dynamic viewing; and finally, through the dynamic and extended pluralistic meanings, she makes a more human interpretation of the long-term characters in the sculpture group (that is, the human incarnation of the synagogue and the images of the five foolish virgins). This interpretation ultimately settles on the medieval viewer's emotional connection to these negative images, i.e., is it possible for the viewer to develop more constructive feelings other than negative emotions such as rejection and denial in the face of these images that are excluded from Christian orthodoxy or religious salvation? If these figures are also members of the human representatives, can the redeeming faithful develop a momentary empathy, identification with them ("the process of softening of the heart", p. 89), and develop a richer understanding of the doctrine from it? Rong ge is well aware that there have long been cases of using visual culture to create division and hostility between different faith groups in medieval religious art, but through the care of dynamic viewing, she has found a more open and humanistic position, and also provided new visual materials for the emotional concepts embodied in the specific historical situation embodied in religious art.
Fig. VIII: Statue of the embodiment of the Christian Church and synagogue at the entrance to the southern ear hall of Strasbourg Cathedral, heads-up view of the front (published in 1901)
Figure IX: The statue of the personified person in the synagogue, photographed from four angles, 79 pages
Taking it a step further, the statues of the incarnation of the personality at the entrance to strasbourg Cathedral have long been presented side by side in photographs, but in the spatial experience of the field, they are actually arranged on both sides of the church entrance, not only separated by two doorways, but also environmental decorations including niche reliefs and statues of inter-door pillars (fig. 8). Placing the two sculptures back into such an open space, and considering the route and angle of the faithful's march, the sense of certainty of static contrast quickly disintegrated, and the relationship between the two sculptures became more complex and vivid. In his analysis of the image of the synagogue, Jung uses the dynamic dissolution of the traditional iconography of viewing to illustrate the characterization of the attribute of the figure. Using the five-sided base of the statue as a reference for selecting viewpoints, she took several coherent photographs (Figure 9). When you read them in tandem, you will find that the broken spears and the stone slabs with the Law of Moses written on the sides of the statue are no longer static symbols, but structural elements that emerge and fade with the viewing point of view, and in this process of extinction, the relationship between the genus and the character itself is constantly floating. As Jung says at the end of this analysis, "Blindness and carnal desire, broken spears and slabs of law—what we see in this compact set of genera is not one-sided debasement or an overdetermined stack of negative symbols, but a cluster of stars of cause and effect" (p. 78).
Similarly, in his observation of the foolish virgin's multi-point of view, Jung paid particular attention to the most subtle point of the theological doctrine of the ten virgin stories: in the process of the ten virgins' journey to the celebration, it was not their outward deeds that were rejected by divine redemption that ultimately prevented the belated foolish virgins from entering and were rejected by divine redemption, but their inner intentions, and the sculptor's task and difficulty was to convey this inner dimension difference between the ten figures in his creative medium. Her analysis of a pair of the ten statues rests on how the gestures and postures of the figures' clothing and sculptures reflect this inner and outer tension. By delaying the intricate pleats of the two statues, Rongge focuses our attention on the complex dynamics of the arc of the garment opening and closing, sometimes obscuring and sometimes revealing. It is the sculptor's dynamic shaping of the surface of matter that allows these sculptures to fully elucidate the meanings of the virgin story that are more difficult to convey in words at the level of form and spatial experience, and it is also this internal and external tension that prevents the viewer's viewing attitude towards the two teams of virgins from easily falling into the exclusive state of dualistic opposition. They had to see the foolish girl as an equivalent subject, a potential version of human nature, and in the face of these people who were ultimately excluded from the church, the faithful were able to experience a mixture of empathy and pity, the former emphasizing the commonality of the viewer and the viewed, while the latter emphasizing the difference between the two. (Figures 10, 11)
Photo 10: At the entrance to the Cathedral in Magdeburg, the fourth bright virgin, shot from six flat angles, p. 162
Photo 11: At the entrance to the Cathedral of Magdeburg, the fourth foolish virgin, shot from six flat angles, p. 163
The easy dualistic oppositions in hermeneutics are constantly broken by dynamic viewing in the book, culminating in the last two chapters of a lengthy analysis of the group of dedicated statues in Naumburg Cathedral. The two chapters are both independent and progressive. In the previous part, Rong Ge patiently deconstructed the statue and its spatial environment layer by layer, like a video worker, turning the lens sequentially to the gesture posture and facial expression of each statue, and then pushing away from the close-up shot, paying attention to the interrelationship and dialogue between different statues in the space travel, and even the echo between the statue and other decorative media in the space. This chapter, centered on the statue's "presence" and the viewer's spatial experience, provides a comprehensive preparation for the next chapter's interpretation of the "meaning" of the entire group of statues. At the beginning of the next part, Jung fully demonstrates the disciplinary literacy, judgment and creativity of a senior medieval scholar. She boldly wrote a labyrinth of explanatory history of a canonical case in the field into a series of disputatio fictitious arguments that took place in medieval academies, clearly illustrating several core divisions of academic circles about the statues—were these figures symbolic or natural representations of specific figures in history? Does their existence serve a space with a secular civic political function, or does it point to a more transcendent and universal judgment and redemption? Jung again adopted the strategy of the previous chapters, not seeing different interpretations as mutually exclusive, either-or options, but as multiple interpretations that might hold up at different moments. She emphasizes the "multiperspectival" characteristics of the sculpture group: "They open and close to a series of interpretations, just as they open and close to a series of physical points of view. (p. 249)
Perhaps because of the abundance of research on this group of sculptures in naumburg church, there is not much room for scholars to interpret. Jung here is more of an inclusive integration and reorganization of the existing different interpretations. But this also shows the current demand for openness of thought in the study of art history, and the purpose of research and interpretation is no longer to draw a decisive single conclusion, or to put forward a novel and instructive perspective, but to open up a series of spaces for speculation and exploration.
Valberg as a Method: The Aftermath of Historiography
Figure XII: Abbey Val Fort
Figure XIII: A Collection of Goddesses of Memory, a lecture in the Varburg Library in Hamburg, 1927
From the gestural gestures of the statues to the re-examination of the sculptural environment through the medium of moving images, from the conceptual background and visual expression of religious sentiments to the excavation of speculative spaces inherent in the work, one of the decisive influences hidden in Jung's new work is the revival of Aby Warburg, an academic pioneer in the field of European and American art history in the past two decades (Figure XII). Nynef, who loved to dance in Renaissance frescoes, and in his famous Atlas of the Goddess of Memory, he carried out a montage-like reorganization of the motifs of images across time and space, echoing Jung's attempts to open up the study of medieval sculpture with "movement" and "cinematic mediums"; several important concepts of this scholarly predecessor— "Pathosformel" and "Denkraum"—also appear in different passages of the book. The author's remarks place a sharp break with historical contextual information (the study of medieval art from the perspective of religious liturgy has always been a mainstream line of thought, and Jung actually deliberately suppressed the listing and accumulation of such evidence), in favor of emphasizing the phenomenological presence of viewing experience and works, which is also related to The cross-historical psychological resonance of Warburg's retracing of images beyond their specific social contexts in atlas production, as well as his highly personal and eclectic academic thinking. In fact, the revival of Valberg itself is related to the reflection and criticism of external interpretive paradigms such as contextualism and social art history in European and American academic circles, and the creativity, imagination and speculative intuition embodied in the production of atlases also inspire the academic community to jump out of the shackles of rational deduction and rigorous argumentation, and reaffirm the help of perceptual experience and subjective creation to research. (Figure 13)
This shift in disciplinary paradigms reflects both positive and vigilant aspects in Jung's new work. This book is particularly commendable for the fact that the analysis of the four core cases does not adopt a unified model, but refers to the spatial attributes of each case "according to local conditions". The sculptural environment at the entrance to the Cathedral of Strasbourg is a holistic process of combining different sculptural mediums (reliefs, full-body figurines) against the backdrop of the complete building façade (Chapter 2), in which Junger focuses on how the viewer's actions of different routes and angles affect the experience of the different elements; a long column carved with multiple angelic figures that emerges from this entrance is a single structural element that can be viewed from a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle (Chapter 3). The strategy of this chapter shifts to looking at the statues on the columns from different points of view where the faithful can stand; the ten virgins at the entrance to the church in Magdeburg are a complete group of figures neatly arranged at the fixed point of space, where Jung shifts the issue from dynamic viewing to the emotions and moods of the characters, precisely because emotion occupies a central place in the narrative representation of this subject (Chapter 4); the devotees in the Naumburg church are distributed in all corners of an open religious interior space, facing the relationship between such statues and space Jung had to take a "deconstructive" stance, fragmenting the various visual messages and integrating them twice (Chapter 5).
However, in the process of reading, the author inevitably feels that the author has shelved the details that can be corroborated in the historical context, which has led to the messiness and unclearness of some paragraphs. A holistic revision of the book involves a multi-angle view of history. Jung's in-depth reflections on phenomenology certainly give the cases in the book a pleasing perceptual thickness, but the book's presentation of this dynamic view is always based on the assumption that the body of a single viewer is used as a perceptual medium, which actually has a strong modern aesthetic color. Looking back at the specific context of medieval religious art, we can put forward the following opinions: the design of the sculptural environment in the Gothic period takes into account the viewing of multiple viewpoints, perhaps precisely because the viewing of religious art is mostly a group behavior, and the multiple viewpoints in Jung's photographs do not correspond to the "moving image" under the perception of a single viewer, but may be a collection of perceptual impressions obtained by multiple historical viewers present at the same time at different viewpoints.
In addition, the analysis of multiple statues on the column in the third chapter of the book may also show the difficulties and limitations of dynamic viewing and spatial perspective as research paradigms. On the one hand, Junger is well versed in the characteristics of liturgical rituals in specific spaces, so he has selected several "liturgical hotspots" as a basis for observation and analysis. However, reading the discussion, it is inevitable to feel that in the face of this multi-figure statue pillar that needs to be viewed around the week, the viewing point of view is infinite, how to choose, in the specific point of view of the "what to see" is actually extremely difficult to grasp, and the contextual evidence can provide some clearer definitions. Perhaps, the method paradigm proposed by Jung is also needed in future research to try more variety, and can the introduction of more contextual information help researchers further narrow and reasonably limit the volatility and uncertainty of dynamic viewing itself? How else can the empirical description of the analysis be combined with the historical context and how can it be debugged?
Figure XIV: Baxendel, Cover of The German Renaissance Linden Sculptor (1980).
Moreover, in terms of the approach proposed in this book, Junger completely ignores Michael Baxandall's pioneering analysis in The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (Fig. XIV), after all, Baxendel was one of the earliest scholars to emphasize the plurality and flexibility of the mood and meaning of multi-point of view and sculptural works. This neglect is understandable in the context of the Warburg revival. As a scholar of the Valberg Academy who emphasized social context and philological analysis in the later period, Baxendel's interpretation of dynamic viewing was extremely restrained and cautious, and he lacked the imagination and penetration of the Valberg atlas to break through the boundaries of time and space, nor did he actively rely on concepts such as "moving image" and "montage" in his research. In a sense, Jung uses the disciplinary turn brought about by the revival of Valberg to transform the sporadic insights that Bucksendel has not led into a feast of vivid perception. The potential of this research direction has not been fully released for a long time, which is fundamentally due to the overall disciplinary environment and trend of Baksendel's work.
Finally, I would like to use this book as an opportunity to discuss an issue closely related to the development of the discipline of Chinese art history. The importance of Varberg's book to Jung reflects an important phenomenon in the development of disciplines in Europe and the United States: it often takes a long time for historical reflection on historiography to eventually feed back into the practice of the discipline and form a comprehensive and mature method of revaluation and practical innovation. Throughout the development of European and American academic circles in the past fifty years, the relationship between the study of the history of history and the awareness of problems in disciplinary practice has undergone several important turns. If the study of the historiography of the 1970s and 1980s essentially echoed contemporaneous dissatisfaction with established methods such as iconography and the introduction of new critical perspectives, then two other important trends emerged in the new century. First, the rise of historiography as a secondary discipline and even an industry, in recent years, this trend has spread from the framework of the previous European center to other non-Western art fields, echoing the global turn within the discipline; second, the study of history of history has split into two different orientations. The theoretical first is more to project the theoretical vision of the current discipline practice into the understanding of the predecessors, to take the history of historiography as a resource for the current discipline theory, and to use it to make a note for the current discipline. In a sense, the first historical studies of historiography and the early days of the Revival of Valberg had such a tendency to dehistorifize. The other emphasizes critical contextual retrospection, no longer only placing the concept of discipline in a vacuum of thought context to distinguish and analyze, but in connection with the influence of multiple factors such as political ecology and cultural situation in the same period, and excavating various conceptual or ideological motivations behind the disciplinary approach.
In contrast, in the Chinese academic circles, since the reform and opening up, the construction of local art history disciplines has always been in a state of mutual growth with the translation of classic works in Western art history and related historical research, because it is the latter that provides a series of classic tools and core theoretical frameworks for long-term disciplinary practice (Figure 15). In addition to opening a window for local readers to understand the Western art tradition and the background of the discipline concepts of international academic circles, these translation and introduction work also has several key roles for local scholarship: first, local scholars can deeply understand the conceptual sources and prejudices of previous overseas sinology research, and second, the process of adapting these tools to the internal research materials of Chinese art history actually shapes the process of discipline construction itself. However, when the study of historiography and history began to become a prominent science in the domestic academic circles (for example, the Revival of Valberg has had a considerable echo in China in recent years), and researchers have become more and more dependent on the development of related disciplines within the European and American academic circles, there is a core issue that has always been ignored, that is, the recognition of the discipline problems behind these overseas studies, because the awareness of these problems is likely not to correspond to the real needs of local discipline construction. This makes it easier to cause a rupture between the history of Western art historiography and the practice of local disciplines.
Figure 15: The Shape of Art History, edited by Fan Jingzhong, China Academy of Art Press, 2003
In our observation of the European and American academic circles, we need to recognize two points. The first is that the emergence of historiography as a secondary discipline industry also inherently has the problem of disconnection with disciplinary practice, and its practical role is to provide researchers in the field with additional publication and career opportunities, often limited in vision to the European artistic tradition, and does not form a good dialogue relationship with non-Western fields (this closed state is expected to be alleviated and breakthrough due to the global shift of the discipline). The second is that the ultimate purpose of most historical research is still to serve the mainstream research practice within European and American disciplines. Reading a theoretically advanced study must recognize the problem awareness behind it and discern whether this problem awareness is adaptable in indigenous research. In contrast, critical contextual retrospection may be a more reliable reference for a comprehensive understanding of these academic predecessors, whose main intention is to more appropriately assess and examine the classical methods that have emerged within previous disciplines, so that future generations (including other researchers in another cultural context) can clearly understand the risks and conceptual burdens inherent in the tools in their hands when applying these methods, and help discipline practice to achieve a higher level of critical self-awareness. Jung's book is unique in the wave of Warburg's revival, both because she has jumped out of the barriers of historical research itself, but also because she has really launched a bold experiment with how to translate Many of Warburg's ideas into concrete and feasible methods, arguably the most successful and thorough of its kind.
In view of the complex historical context of the domestic art history discipline structure, it is relatively difficult to establish a more organic interactive relationship between the history of Western art historiography and the practice of local disciplines. There are a few ideas for your teachers and friends to refer to, of course, these proposals must be based on in-depth thinking about the core materials of the local discipline and its cultural context. The first is to treat important Western art historians as little as possible as a kind of research and discourse object, because objectification means canceling their initiative to guide practice, but should hold more of a "learning mentality" in reading, so that they can maintain an open transformation channel with us, discipline history and current research at the practical level. Even if it is old and obscure like Ligel, its observation, analysis and description of the visual structure of specific works can still enlighten our viewing and description, and still contains a basic vitality of the discipline's own way of thinking and cognition. The second is that the existing historical research in historiography can help us understand the original intention and conceptual limitations of the tools in the context of European discipline construction, and avoid misuse and misunderstanding and repetition of previous mistakes as much as possible in their application, while maximizing the creative potential of transformation. We must not only continue to cultivate the continuous vitality of the classical methods of the discipline, but also clearly recognize the potential risks of any method and theoretical vision. In addition, our "learning" should start from identifying the shortcomings presented in the development of local disciplines, and should avoid inheriting the problem awareness of overseas research in a state of lack of consideration. The ultimate purpose of all this is to make the study of historiography truly oriented to the practice of local disciplines, so that those classical art historians will not be reduced to the objects of hanging disciplinary discourse.
While "Eloquence" fully explores new perceptual mediums that can be used in disciplinary practice, it also reflects trends that may be difficult to control. Readers familiar with the history of historiography must know that this dialectic of oscillating between potential and chaos is the core trait of Valberg's own governance, and after the publication of this work, it may be urgent for Chinese and foreign scholars to think about how to better make this new dynamic spatio-temporal analysis play its potential in the limit. The last inspiration of this book is also here: our learning from the predecessors of the discipline — a historical reflection that is truly oriented to and ultimately fed back into the practice of the discipline — is bound to be an endless undertaking.
(During the writing process of this article, I have exchanged views with Chen Yunhao, a doctoral student at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, and hereby express my gratitude.) ）