The Artist as Historian

They say that the first ever art historian was an artist.  It is true that, in 16th C. Florence, Italian painter and architect Vasari did not limit himself to writing the “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects” of the Italian Renaissance; he also authored the “Libro de’Disegni,” knowledgably and descriptively incorporating masterful drawings in the work. Time passed, and in the Royal Academies it was yet again the artists themselves who most often addressed the art of the past and wrote about it.  Equally, painters, among them Velasquez, assembled collections the likes of which we can see today at the Prado. But it was always more about defining the rules, not about making history. What happened, then, in the 20th C., when art proper became the subject matter of a historical narrative? And when the space-time scale of this narrative was stretched out, until it encompassed the world and time as we’ve known it since the dawn of time? What happened when the material facts of history became easier to reproduce – and thus impossible to constrain – within the boundaries of permanent categories?

Beginning with historical vanguards and until now, artists have essentially responded by appropriating new disciplines as they expand, both in terms of space and time. They take over the new discipline’s images and words, its visual devices, its material and rhetorical technologies, its habits, mediums and discourse. Above all, artists, by increasingly blurring the differences between their works and their practices, do not seek to recover that which historians have deprived them of, or consolidate their autonomy; rather they attempt to increase and intensify their own resources. Artists think of how their means relate to the knowledge they accrue and to their own political ideas.