On Roland Recht’s new book Believing and Seeing
by sensuscommunist
As someone with an interest, but no training in Art History–as well as only an amateur’s knowledge of the aesthetic practices of the Middle Ages–I approached Roland Recht’s Believing and Seeing with interest and nervousness. While any student must learn the skills of auto-didacticism through the reading of texts on new subjects, one finds two main issues in these texts: 1) an inability to evaluate archival and historical facts beyond the level of whether they make sense (though, many genuine historical facts seem to make little sense); 2) a difficulty to distinguish between arguments and repetitions of common knowledge within the field. My unfamiliarity with the field manifested itself in a certain haphazard underlining throughout the text, as I was trying desperately to follow a complex argument developed through a close reading of an history with which I have little familiarity. The text reduced me, in the end, to a semi-Heideggerian situation in which I tried to abstractly analyze the philosophical concepts deployed without being entangled in the concrete historical situation (despite the imminent character of Recht’s philosophical conceptualization).
It seems that Roland Recht has a dual purpose of the book. While the main text of the book is a close reading of gothic art–where he develops a theory that gothic art was meant to direct a way of seeing. The text also presents a theory of artistic change, trying at once to explain the transition from Romanesque to Gothic and from Gothic to the Renaissance (Notwithstanding all the over-laps and regional variations on both sides). While both of these arguments are interesting, the second seems to be more complex and argued with much greater finesse. Recht’s biggest issue seems to be that he must start at with Romanesque art, which did not place much emphasis on the individual, subjective artist who would tend to remain anonymous). To the Renaissance, a period seemingly dominated by strong, artistic personalities.
Recht begins his argument with an analogy to the contemporary situation when a museum director hires and architect to build a museum. Fifty years ago, they would agree on a plan and the architect would essentially set out to accomplish the designs as agreed. Now, Recht writes, many architects see a museum as their key to immortal fame, and a future museum’s board of directors has little hope to quell the architects lust for glory and postmodernism. Recht thinks this analogy holds to the development of Gothic art as well. While initially the analogy lies at the level of assertion rather than argument, Recht begins to put a fascinatingly materialistic spin on his reading. He states that which should be obvious: architecture is heavily influenced by the material conditions of the society which generates it. New methods of construction involved individual architects into a larger portion of the creation of the cathedral. This point is further developed on the level of artisans and the creation of new kinds of sculpture.
Recht’s arguments are fascinating, and quite convincing as well. What is most striking is his materialistic theory of artistic change which resists most every vulgarity at all. Recht grounds the creation of art in its social and material context. This is fascinatingly exemplified with the development of reliquaries. Originally relatively non-decorative–serving the purpose of merely holding relics–reliquaries developed to be able to reveal the relic, in a manner which kept it out of the hands of thieves. This forced the artisans who made them to be more creative, and this resulted in reliquaries which place more emphasis on design than relics. Artistic change elaborated in this manner resists any traditional idealism, while being able to account for the genuine way in which social ideas did influence art (for instance, Papal bulls).
