Art, history, and vision

• Autores: Richard J. Powell
• Localización: Art bulletin, ISSN 0004-3079, Vol. 77, Nº 3, 1995, págs. 379-382
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Part of a symposium on the relation between art and history. The writer contends that what makes the art historian's role so intrinsic in the humanities is the ability to interpret a work largely on its own, pictographic, intravisual, transverbal terms. He discusses The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, the work of Washington D.C. artist and itinerant preacher James Hampton, which was discovered in a rented garage after the artist's death. Describing Hampton's work as a dazzling testament to modern art assemblage, spiritual enthronement, and “vision,” he argues that art history, like Hampton's work, continues to be the enterprise of the visionary. He concludes that at a time when cultural history is faced with methodological doubts and apparent incursions from all sides of the intellectual spectrum, it may be beneficial for art historians not to lose sight of the discipline's capacity to be a site of assembly, accountability, and potential.