In The Melancholy Art, Michael Ann Holly has provided a strikingly poignant articulation of some of the more trenchant conundrums of what in modernity has come to be fabricated as the discipline of art history—an academic field whose distinctiveness, in her words, “generated by the physical nearness of its objects . . . can quicken certain reflections on the psychic undercurrents of the historical temperament” (xii). But how might melancholy help art historians to come to terms with the nature of its disciplinary transactions with the past? That is, literally, their mournful interactions and reckonings with what is staged or fielded in the present as its precursor(s) and precedents. As Holly puts it, “works of art that seem so present are actually absent; they look back at you, but whose gaze is it? It is the estrangement embedded in this ambiguity that both haunts and animates art historians’ activities” (xii).

Where, why, and how are (what are conventionally distinguished as) past and present actually related to each other? As Michel de Certeau observed in a masterful and much-lauded (though in recent years often forgotten) 1978 essay, two strategies of time and memory are confronted in modernity. One, associated with history-writing (historiography), is based on the artifice of a clean break between present and past, situating them side by side; the other, associated with psychoanalysis, recognizes the past in the present, by imbrication (one in place of the other), in repetition (one reproduces the other in another form), and the quid pro quo (one taking the place of another which is repressed). Memory is the arena of conflict, in de Certeau’s words, between two contrary operations: “forgetting, which is not something passive, a loss, but an action directed against the past; and the mnemic trace, the return of what was forgotten, in other words, an action by a past that is now forced to disguise itself” (Michel de Certeau, “Psychoanalysis and its History,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 3).

So melancholy with respect to the lost vibrancy of past art, artistry, artwork, or artifice is in fact much more than a one-dimensional trope. Holly’s book is divided into five finely illustrated chapters, of which the first (“The Melancholy Art”) and the last (“Mourning and Method”) are of more than parochial disciplinary interest, and all of which have appeared previously in various journals and anthologies between 1998 and 2008. Chapter 2, “Viennese Ghosts,” uses Vienna “to emblematize a particular state of melancholy—the nagging sensation that something is irretrievably gone at the same time that the fear of what is to come is too uncertain, too bewildering, too indeterminate—is almost too simple, the sometimes violent confrontation between the certainties of the past and the experiments of the bohemian present too exposed, in the culture at large” (50).

Chapter 3, “Stones of Solace,” is a discussion of the work of early twentieth-century British artist Adrian Stokes and his contemporary Martin Heidegger with respect to their engagements with ancient Greek monuments and landscape. In chapter 4, “Patterns in the Shadows,” addressing some of the work of Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and Michael Baxandall, Holly notes the latter’s comment on the “perfidy of language and the inevitable melancholy in which it is cloaked” (88)—without, however, engaging in the core problematic of semiosis or signification in any medium, specifically, the alternations and oscillations in given instances between determinacy and indeterminacy of signification. Perhaps the most telling comment in Holly’s The Melancholy Art is an observation concluding chapter 5 (“Mourning and Method”): “Positivistic art history . . . may be based on loss, but it has also lost the capacity for pain. . . . As both Heidegger and Derrida recognized, the aesthetic capacity of a work of art to wound, to pierce, has been anesthetized by the pursuit of origins, the confidence in endings” (119; emphasis in original). To wit, the daily business of academic art historicizing more often than not entails a genuinely mournful postponing of fuller critical attention to fundamental presuppositions and motivations. The attention to systemic and structural critique kicked ever further down the road, so to speak.

The Melancholy Art is both an apt embodiment of contemporary disciplinary conundrums and a deeply moving account of one art historian’s personal attempt to reckon with the impossibility—the futility—of “closing the gap between words and images” (98). A reckoning in both senses of that English word: a struggling-with and a thinking-through. Holly clearly exemplifies both senses of the term in this memorable and indeed rather haunting text.

What would be the consequences and effects of “closing” the aforementioned “gap”? Who desires such closure, and who would or would not benefit or profit from such an action? What kind of action would such a closing be? And is it not the case that such a gap is itself a theatrical projection—the stagecraft and dramaturgy of distancing the object-to-hand and the lost (past) object, however the latter is articulated?

Despite its genuine thoughtfulness and impressive art-historical erudition, Holly’s book shares with not a few in that discipline, and in particular its Anglophone practitioners, a certain amnesia with respect to the elephant in the room, something well considered in one book that is cited but not considered at any length, namely Peter Schwenger’s very fine The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). This is, to voice one of its aspects, the relationship of the art of art history to the artistry of religiosity. Or, in shorthand, the conundrum of the “gap” between and the inextricable link (the partage, to paraphrase Jacques Rancière) between what are distinguished in Western modernity as art and religion.

That religion (of whatever stripe, valence, or geographical or temporal specificity) is nowhere discussed or even mentioned in a volume on melancholy is surely curious. This is itself remarkable because to provide any definition of art, artistry, artwork, or artifice that insists upon its specificity in contrast to other social practices but without noting the relationality of art—that is, that it exists above all in relation to what is fielded explicitly or implicitly as its purported antithesis or complement—is to instantiate a certain fetishism. A fetish, as noted by observers as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, or for that matter Georges Didi-Huberman, is the embodiment of a fiction, the clinging to which appears to cancel out the full impact of the unbearable truth of death and loss. An object, that Žižek among others, including the present writer, have referred to as that quintessential artwork, the agalma—the lost object-cause of desire (Lacan’s objet petit a). The lively (enlivened) object; the sensate and vibrant artwork. The object which retains its trace of historicity—what MIT materials scientist Cyril Stanley Smith once called the funicity of things (Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art, and History, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981, 327), after the Jorge Luis Borges tale Funes the Memorious, about a man, Ireneo Funes, who could not forget anything. Art historians often seem to be on a search for works that retain what Holly calls “a certain vital agency.” Funeous artworks. That is, objects or artifacts that, in contrast to other objects, are intensely funeous. That bear material traces; traces in their (manu)facture of their precursors. See the remarks above by de Certeau.

But for this to function and be perceptible one must be in the proper place and frame of mind, recalling for this reviewer the words of a book that was ubiquitous in U.S. museum bookshops many years ago, David Finn’s How to Visit a Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), explicitly exhorting the museum visitor to “stay as long or as short a time as you will, but do your best at all times to let the work of art speak directly to you with a minimum of interference or distraction” (10). This is signification of artworks as a function of the enunciative position, orientation, and spatial alignment of the observer/visitor vis-à-vis artworks. Holly’s “restoration of a certain vital agency” to artworks would entail restoring any such agency materially and concretely; not in abstract space-time, nor in the latter’s verbal complement, the art-historical bon mot, whether Berensonian, Warburgian, or Benjaminian, but in what David Summers once called “real spaces” (David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon Press, 2003) (click here for review).

In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.), Hannah Arendt famously observed that the aggressiveness of totalitarianism lay less in its lust for power and more in an ideologically driven desire to make the world consistent—to make the world orderly, homogeneous, and pure, even if its deconstruction and transformation might entail marginalizing, banishing, expelling, or murdering persons or peoples perceived as impure, whoever and wherever they may be, and on whatever grounds they may be staged as undesirably other. Othernesses, however, are not only external but internal: what in myself I distinguish or bracket out as other. The uncanniness of this is strikingly manifest when reckoning with self-erasures or self-sacrifices, the particular type of tragedy increasingly common in the martyrdoms or acts of witnessing performed in the name of the artifice or artistry of divinity. Such artwork is tragic, in both senses of the word: as lamentable and as the performance, the dramaturgy, of stagecraft.

Holly’s very fine book opened up for me something that goes well beyond the “melancholic” trope or character of art and artistry: namely, its terrors and dangers, what Plato referred to as theios phobos, the divine terror or fear associated with, and endemic to, artistry of any kind. Plato was specifically concerned with the dangers of mimetic or representational artistry (painting, sculpture, theater), which would disturb the souls of citizens. Art is dangerous precisely because it ostensifies or calls attention to the fabricatedness of what is taken and promoted by hegemonic powers as true, natural, or real. Unless, that is, its perception is “guided” or directed by those holding or desiring power: those rulers, priests, or kingly philosophers in sync with the buzz of divinity—with the order of the cosmos, to echo Arendt in another register.

Put simply, art really is dangerous because it makes available to common understanding that what we take to be reality is a work of art: “the fictions of factual representation,” as the historian Hayden White once phrased it; the “artifice of eternity,” as the poet William Butler Yeats called it, “into which we shall all be gathered.” Art is terrifying because it makes it possible for the ordinary citizen to imagine the world otherwise. Other than what their rulers would wish (or command) them to believe as real, natural, fixed, and true. Nothing could be more deeply threatening to those holding or desiring power than these two things: that reality really is a fiction, that is, a work of art; and that any such world might really be changed. The irony of this was well illustrated in the opening words of a 2010 exhibition (Les promesses du passé) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris which said that “the purpose of art is to make the world better,” eliciting, as intended, its apophatic opposite: that art may also make the world worse. Which calls attention to the agencies involved or evoked.

The value of The Melancholy Art is precisely in simultaneously manifesting such a conundrum and in refusing to fall into the fundamentalist trap of either attributing or denying real agency to artworks. All our “art history” books should be so brave.