WINOGRAND: FIGMENTS FROM THE REAL WORLD by John SzarkowskiReview by: Kathy J. AndersonArt Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 7, No. 4(Winter 1988), pp. 171-172Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27947982 .

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Art Documentation, Winter 1988 171

historians who discuss some of the specific new approaches and the pragmatic consequences of implementing them in a traditional educational environment. While most essays pro mote and encourage the new methods and ideas, others do not.

Rees and Borzello set the context for the essays in their introduction as they define the new art history as "a ca pacious and convenient title that sums up the impact of femi nist, marxist, structuralist, psychoanalytic, and social-political ideas on a discipline notorious for its conservative taste in art and its orthodoxy in research" (p. 2). Their discussion of the origins of the new art history should prove useful to li brarians and others interested in its historiography. The edi tors note the early writings and events important to the new art history, topics that reappear in some of the essays that follow, including the formation and importance of the maga zine Block; Perry Anderson's "call to arms" essay in New Left Review; and the appearance of Screen, ostensibly a film and media journal which has also published important articles on art historical topics by T. J. Clark and others. Rees and Borzello note accurately that the two most significant trends of the new art history are research into social developments surrounding the production of art, and the growing interest in theoretical approaches, often utilizing literary meth odologies applied to the study of art objects.

The essays are arranged not by topic as might be ex pected, but by author's name, apparently reflecting the edi tors' desire to remain impartial in the presentation of the varied opinions. Some essayists question the validity and usefulness of new art historical approaches, such as Victor Burgin in his article on the limitations of applying theory to the study of photography, or the essay by Stephen Bann in

which he asks "how revolutionary is the new art history," and answers "not very." Other essays focus on specific kinds of approaches. Margaret Iversen discusses the use of semio tics in "Saussure versus Peirce," in which she examines the complexities (and sometimes failure) of linguistic theories when applied to art; Lynda Nead explains how feminism works (or doesn't work) in art history, warning that feminism should not become a mere subset of the very traditional discipline of art history.

Nead also touches on the harsh realities of teaching new methodologies at conservative institutions, as do Mary Gor mally and Pamela Gerrish Nunn in their essay "Teaching and Learning," where they express bitterness toward an old fashioned system unwilling to accept new ideas. Marcia Pointon deals with similar issues in her essay on undergradu ate art history education, and argues that Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan should be a part of it.

All essays perform the task of informing the reader of ma jor concerns surrounding recent developments in art history. Despite their British orientation, they should prove equally useful to American readers. As an introduction to the various methodologies now being applied to art history, and to the reality of applying them to a discipline rooted in tradition, The New Art History is a great success. Because of its ob vious value, it is unfortunate that only a paperback edition has been produced. While the essayists in The New Art History examine what

constitutes the new approaches to the discipline, the authors in Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France actually perform the new art history. Although all 11 essays have been published elsewhere, four appear here in English for the first time. Norman Bryson, known for several outstanding books (the latest being Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix, 1984), has compiled a diverse group of articles by some very distinguished authors.

Much less accessible than The New Art History, the articles in Calligram present extremely complex, sometimes very thick, arguments rooted strongly in structuralist and semiotic theory. Bryson's intelligent introduction serves as a unifying element for these writings which discuss very divergent top ics, and explains features unique to French new art history.

He cites three dominant characteristics: the first is that major French intellectuals, unlike their counterparts in England and elsewhere, are unabashed about crossing disciplines and often concern themselves with art in their discussions; the

second unique feature of French writing is that there is less distinction made between art history and art criticism; and third, there is an awareness among writers of broader intel lectual debates, and a subsequent utilization of them in art historical argument. The remainder of Bryson's essay reveals his emphasis on sign and perception as a key to understand ing art, and the limitations he sees in Marxist and other social-political approaches to art history.

The essays in Calligram display an impressive breadth of topics. With the exception of Jan Mukarovsky's "Art as Semi ological Fact," written in 1934, which sets the linguistic groundwork common to most of the essays that follow, the remaining articles are written more recently and are, in most cases, concerned with particular subjects found within works of art.

Examples of these include Yves Bonnefoy's essay on the appearance of time and timelessness in quattrocento paint ing, particularly in the work of Piero della Francesca. Julia Kristeva, in an essay entitled "Giotto's Joy," presents a com plicated formula for the study of color in the work of the Italian painter. Barthes, during his lifetime the major figure in French semiology, has contributed two essays, the first dis cussing the meaning of objects within Dutch paintings (or the lack of them, in the case of Saenredam's work), the second taking a close reading of the paintings of Cy Twombly based on the concept of "painting as stage," complete with tradi tional Greek dramatic elements: fact, coincidence, outcome, surprise, and action. Foucault's masterful reading of Vel z quez's Las Meninas, reprinted from the collection of his es says in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Species (1970), retains it powerful impact nearly two decades after it first appeared in English.

As the content of these essays indicate, Calligram should prove useful to all libraries concerned with the history of art. It offers a convenient collection of important essays on a

variety of topics that all share a very complex, semiological approach to art history. As semiotics becomes a growng force in the discipline of art history, the importance of these early essays will become even more apparent.

James H. Carmin University of Oregon

WINOGRAND: FIGMENTS FROM THE REAL WORLD / John Szarkowski. New York: Museum of Modern Art in associa tion with Little, Brown and Company, 1988. ISBN 0-87070-640-3 (cl); 0-87070-640-1 (pa); LC 87-62855: $45.00 (cl); $25.00 (pa).

Garry Winogrand did not produce "easy" photographs. His images, philosophy, and technical style still provoke debate over the nature of the photographic process; his casual ap proach often stirring up those of a more formal or technical bent.

Nurtured on the photojournalism of the 1950s and 1960s, Winogrand relied on quick reflexes, available light, and gut responses. As John Szarkowski notes in his excellent intro ductory essay, out of these conditions "came a new attitude toward conventional ideas of photographic quality. The goal of the work was not clarity but authenticity. It did not so much describe its subject as allude to it" (p. 12). Winogrand placed great importance on the use of his "intuition." Winogrand absorbed the tragic grandeur of Walker Evans'

view of American life and added a jittery, frantic, questioning rhythm. Some of his best photographs embody a sense of their time, a time of Kerouac's "madroads and madmen," Robert Frank's The Americans, and the upheaval of the sixties.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Winogrand's photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, the book is comprised of 260 pages, including the above mentioned essay by John Szarkowski (director of photogra phy at the museum), 208 halftone plates, a chronology, notes and a selected bibliography. Some rarely seen images from the Winogrand archive at the Center for Creative Photogra phy at the University of Arizona have been included. Szarkow

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172 Art Documentation, Winter 1988

ski's essay is informative, insightful and greatly enhances one's appreciation of the complexities of both the images and the man.

The reproductions of Winogrand's photographs are divided into nine sections, organized by themes such as "Eisenhower

Years," "Women," and "The Street." The last of these sec

tions, entitled "Unfinished Work," is a collection of images selected by Szarkowski and printed by Thomas Consilvio (Winogrand's printer) from the massive body of work left either unprocessed and/or unedited at the time of

Winogrand's death in 1984. The technical production of the clothbound edition of the

book is of very high quality. Having had the opportunity to view the MoMA exhibition, I found that the book's halftone reproductions by Robert J. Hennessey retain the impact of the "silver" richness, detail, and contrast of the originals.

If there were a "best-buy" category in photography books published in 1988, Winogrand: Figments From the Real World would be at the top of the list. Both in quality and overall significance to the history of photography, this monograph may prove to be one of the better photography books of the 1980s, if not an eventual classic. It is an essential purchase for both public and academic libraries.

Kathy J. Anderson Onondaga County Public Library

OTHER REVIEWS THE MANDE BLACKSMITHS: KNOWLEDGE, POWER, AND ART IN WEST AFRICA / Patrick R. McNaughton. (Traditional Arts of Africa series) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. 241 p.: ill. ISBN 0-253-33683-X; LC 86-46347: $37.50.

A study of blacksmiths does not sound like an art book, but Mande Blacksmiths is indeed about art. It is also about so ciety, its beliefs and its rituals: the Bamana (Bamb ra), a Mande-speaking people, living in Mali, West Africa. The Bamana are renowned for their sculptural art which is well represented in museums in the West. One of the first major

African art exhibitions in the United States, curated by Robert Goldwater in 1960 at the Museum of Primitive Art, was Barn bara Sculpture from the Western Sudan. What is now made clear by McNaughton is that the creators of this remarkable art are the blacksmiths, who hold the knowledge and the power associated with these objects.

Mande blacksmiths not only produce iron implements that one associates with forging, but they also make ritual objects, such as figurative iron staffs and sacred oil-burning lamps. More surprisingly, they are the wood carvers, creating the wide range of Mande masks and figures, heddle pulleys, door locks. Thus, they work in two very different media requiring different kinds of skills and technical mastery. In these en deavors, they hold exclusive rights, while wives of black smiths are exclusively designated as potters. Moreover, Mande blacksmiths are ritual specialists both feared and respected for their role in healing, divining and in performing rites of initiation. Yet, paradoxically, blacksmiths are a group apart, separate, a sort of "untouchable" caste.

This complex and ambivalent nature of blacksmiths is the central theme of McNaughtor s study. He examines why in Mande society so much responsibility and power are clus tered on the blacksmiths and how they are "facilitators, artic ulators, and transformers" in both the physical and super natural worlds. He wrestles with the contradiction of the blacksmith's position in society: that those who are so powerful and so central to Mande society are so set apart and viewed with distrust and even contempt a position sim ilar to that of or/ois/bards among the Wolof. McNaughton first went to Mali in 1972 and has continued

his study of Mande blacksmiths ever since. Although his study is centered on Bamana blacksmiths in southwestern Mali, he expands his frame of reference to what he calls the

Mande diaspora, which reaches from the Gambia on the At lantic Ocean across the Western Sudan into Ghana. This

work, originally a doctoral dissertation, is based on extensive fieldwork and an undistinguished (by his own admission) but enlightening apprenticeship with blacksmiths in Mali which gave him unique insight into iron-working techniques and training.

His central chapter, "The Blacksmith's Sculpture," exam ines oil-burning lamps made of iron, spear blades, equestrian figures and female figures of iron which are staff tops, and komo wooden masks. The discussion of these komo helmet masks, used by the powerful komo association and owned by blacksmiths, is an important fresh look at a major West African masking tradition.

He also addresses Mande aesthetics: how they view ob jects, how the visual is linked with spiritual force and with performance (in the case of masks), and how the act of crea tion itself is a potent, highly controlled spiritual undertaking.

McNaughton writes in the first-person singular, in a light narrative style, at times conversational, at other times, im

pressionistic (using terms like "visual energy," "assembled power" or "the shape of civilizing space"). He introduces indigenous categories and terms without overwhelming the reader with a wholly foreign vocabulary. Yet there is no ques tion that his study is one of serious scholarship directed to

ward an academic audience. Though drawing on earlier work of French ethnographers and others, McNaughton breaks new ground in focusing so directly and intensively on the blacksmiths. His book demonstrates again the inseparability of "art" and society in Africa. (This is why many substantive books on African art will be classed in DT rather than in the Library of Congress classification.)

Indiana University Press has chosen to go with 77 black and-white photographs and 8 colored plates all quite small and rather poorly reproduced which on the whole do not do justice to the subject; nor are they integrated in the text, but are kept in separate illustrated sections. Many of the illustrations are the author's field photographs.

The Mande Blacksmiths is recommended for all academic libraries building African art collections, as are other titles in the "Traditional Arts of Africa" series.

Janet L. Stanley National Museum of African Art Library

HAGIA SOPHIA: ARCHITECTURE, STRUCTURE AND LITURGY OF JUSTINIAN'S GREAT CHURCH / Rowland J. Mainstone. New York: Thames and Hudson, distributed by W. W. Norton, 1988. 288 p.: ill. ISBN 0-500-34098-6; LC 86-50969: $50.00.

It has now been 21 years since Heinz Kahler's Hagia Sophia with a chapter on the mosaics by Cyril Mango (London, Zwemmer, 1967) appeared in English. Kahler only wanted to describe Hagia Sophia and discuss some of the controversies of scholarship surrounding the building. Mainstone has the much more ambitious goal of summarizing scholarship to date and providing his own insights on the building and con troversies of scholarship after "a long familiarity with it and almost thirty years of questioning."

Mainstone's text is divided into ten chapters. The first chap ter is a lengthy introduction to the building and its impor tance. The second and third chapters discuss the present state of the church, its exterior, interior, materials and struc tural systems. The fourth chapter examines the evidence for the changes that have taken place since the church was first completed. The fifth chapter investigates churches on the site before the present building was erected. The sixth chap ter discusses Justinian's objectives in rebuilding the church and the architectural brief for the rebuilding. The seventh and eighth chapters examine the initial stages and further de velopment of the design as well as the construction and first partial reconstruction. The ninth chapter investigates the lit urgical furnishings and the liturgy of Constantinople in the sixth century as well as the patriarchal liturgy and imperial participation in the liturgy. The last chapter discusses the achievement of Hagia Sophia and its sequels and influence.

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