Whither Art History?

To do them justice we must challenge the misrepresentations to which the brute "killing"-of-the-past mentality has given rise because such distortions make invisible what we might call the necessary working through of the event-itself traumatic in its shock to the system-its contradictions and its continuing potentialities as an emancipatory and critical project.1 On the other hand, we will not come to grasp what has in fact occurred if we fail to understand the complex relays between any kind of thinking practice and the social and historical conditions that determine it, compliantly or as resistance. Insulating the problem inside the academy or museum world betrays both the simplistic view of art and its discourses as indexical of culture's refracting of history and the more complex view of art's serious working through of that which bathes it and gives it its materials, shocks, and challenges. The discipline of Art History manufactures a specific, separate history for art as a formal succession of styles, shifting iconographies, self-defining movements, periods, and institutions (for example, training, patronage, display, trade, collection). During a Clark Art Institute symposium convened by Judith Rodenbeck entitled "Feminism after the Waves" in May 2012, I was introduced by a younger feminist art historian, Jaleli Mansoor, to the work of Sylvia Federici, an Italian feminist political theorist, and her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.1 As a historian, Federici traverses historical territory similar to that covered by Schade, in order to argue that the violent depropriation of women-namely, their forced domestication and the ex