Our Beautiful Dry and Distant Texts Art History as Writing by James Elkins
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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75.one (2001) 185-186
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Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis
James Elkins. Pictures of the Body: Hurting and Metamorphosis. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Academy Press, 1999. xvii + 347 pp. Ill. $65.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paperbound).
James Elkins of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago is the "hot" young art historian writing today. His books--such as What Painting Is (1998), Our Beautiful, Dry out, and Distant Texts (1998), Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? (1999), and the forthcoming How to Utilize Your Centres--are all serious disquisitional attempts to bridge the gap between academic (read: postmodern) art theory and public art criticism. His Pictures of the Trunk: Hurting and Metamorphosis presents a continuation of a tradition within contemporary art history pioneered by colleagues such as Barbara Stafford (to whom the volume is dedicated). Using a mix of medical and "artistic" images (high, mass, and popular art), Elkins successfully answers the problem of earlier studies that were clearly attempts to examine specific and limited problems in representing the trunk. (No text is ameliorate titled than the three-volume Fragments for a History of the Human Body edited by Michael Feher in 1989.)
The question that Elkins addresses in the present book is: Does the history of the representation of the torso reflect some gear up of overarching human categories, or (pace Foucault) are nosotros looking at national or regional or cultural (read: religious/medical) traditions that we detect fascinating precisely because of their uniqueness?
Elkins chooses two cardinal images. The outset is the paradigm of the body in hurting, with direct acquittance of the groundbreaking work of Elaine Scarry; the 2d is the prototype of metamorphosis. Both themes class the basis for an examination of the fine art practice developed to represent the human body in these two states. For each he selects judiciously from the visual tape, running (thus in 2 pages of his chapter on the cut body) from Sumerian Sippor to Hollywood and John Carpenter in the late 1990s. Covering areas from the representation of the destroyed body to the geometric theories used by artists and anatomists "accurately" to represent the body, Elkins explores these as the universals through which we represent the torso. These truths, as Elkins comes to debate, may well be "universal" only within a Western tradition. He self-consciously brings in no non-Western examples from whatever tradition where in that location is a circuitous theory of representation. Even his Sumerian example uses the epic of Gilgamesh as a lens for examining the monstrous. Clearly the textual basis of Sumerian physiognomy might well have offered farther proof, or some visible distortion of the weight of [Finish Folio 185] seeing the monstrous body and face up. Literary texts do not provide the crude explanations for their ain imagery, as Elkins himself comments when he asks how something in a literary text could actually have been done (p. 110). The use of the "scientific" tape of Sumeria would at least have offered a parallel set up of explanations for how it was imagined that it could have been washed.Elkins's argument is powerful. His examples, particularly his visual ones, are extraordinary in their juxtapositions. His claim that there are even Western universals, however, still needs to be proven. Perchance in his adjacent foray into this realm he will expand his material to include the visual and textual traditions of non-Western art. Then the question of how we as human beings imagine and stand for the body in pain, and its transformation, may well have a further stage of explanation. At that point the question of how by and large we have to look in lodge to find universals may well receive an reply.
Sander L. Gilman
Academy of Illinois, Chicago
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Source: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/4612
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