“It’s Like You’re Working Backwards!” : Learning to Not Get Ahead of Myself When Writing Art History
I come to you from the future…the end of this blog post. The point in time in which I have already written it. I am the writer, so I get to do that. Initially, I was writing this blog post as a counterpoint to the previous one I wrote, in which I talked about how in my visual art, not knowing the end point allowed me to work within my sensibilities and follow the medium. I thought that this post was going to be about how art history is something in which you need to know the end point. However, in writing this, I realized that quite the opposite is true.
From 2020 - 2022, I was getting a Masters in Art History from the University of Delaware. Doing so revealed just how little experience I had writing in proper art historical methodology. I must say this was a surprise to me, and took me a while to realize. That sounds strange, and it certainly was.
Before going to grad school, I had a lot of experience in fine art, but not a ton of experience with art history methodology, strictly speaking. I took art history classes in college, but I skipped over Art history 101 because I made a good case to the art history profs that I had enough analytical chops from my French work that I didn’t need to take 101. I was lucky in that I got to skip over the arduous intro task of memorizing artists names, movements, and lifespans, etc. (a horribly dry task that I think repels many students from an otherwise lively and delightful discipline). However, I imagine I would have gotten important fundamentals about the methodology. I think that’s where a lot of students get the very important information like:
How do you construct an argument?
What is historical methodology?
What is art historical methodology?
Are they the same?
What does an undergraduate art history paper look like?
What is the methodology of the works we are reading in class?
Am I supposed to write something that looks like what we are reading in class?
These things sound really basic, but they are the core questions that enable you to envision the end product of your work — what the methodology is supposed to look like in its applied form.
Looking back, I think I did well in undergraduate art history classes because I had really strong ideas and was able to link things together well — I did not do much primary source research or proper art historical methodology. I inadvertently leaned on a strength, and since it was undergrad and no one was expected to be perfect, I got good grades. However, at times I did struggle to get my ideas to cohere and struggling to take them form idea to execution.
One professor did say at one point, when she saw I was struggling to put together a paper “You can’t just say a bunch of smart things and expect it to be enough. You have to put in the work.” It was interesting — she meant it as a criticism, because I think she thought I was unprepared because I was lazy. This wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last time, that someone had made an observation about my working style or behavior that identified a core issue with some accuracy, but assigned an incorrect motivation to it. If she had approached me with curiosity instead of frustration, perhaps the conversation could have gone differently. No one is perfect, and everyone deals with frustration or cynicism, but it would have made a world of difference if she had said “I notice you say a lot of smart things in class, but are having trouble getting organized? What’s going on?” Instead of assuming a moral failing, she could have gone in with positivity, assuming I wanted to do well and was having a tough time.
When I went to graduate school, this issue didn’t go away. Again, I think that the strength of my ideas got me into the program. I think there was this assumption that because I had all of these good ideas, I naturally could do the art history part. I can’t know for sure, because I am not a mind reader, but it does track with the kinds of assumptions that people make about how a brain works. (Neurotypical people kind of assume that if you are good at conceptual thinking, you’ll be good at procedural thinking, and if you can’t do procedural thinking, you won’t be good at conceptual thinking, because they tend to think of procedural thinking as easier and conceptual thinking as harder — this couldn’t be farther from the truth for someone with ADHD, and I think holds a lot of people with ADHD back in their careers and life. This could be its own blog post.)
It’s funny — in my master’s program, they didn’t ever actually teach us how to do art history, ie., how to write a paper using art historical methodology. I think they assumed we either already knew how to do it, or it was self-evident. However, they regularly admit people who do not have bachelor degrees in art history, so, I don’t imagine I was the first person to come in with a hole in my knowledge. I’m not sure how this has gone for others. I’d be curious to know.
In most of my classes, the works we read were mostly not art history. Art history is an interdisciplinary field, which is part of what makes it so fun — it draws from history (the context in which the work was made), studio art knowledge (thinking about the technique used to make the work), science (this comes into play when you are considering how the work has aged over time, or how the materials used are working together, for example), philosophy (to understand the concepts an artist is exploring), economic theory (to understand how and why a piece of art has value, and how that value changes in different contexts), and more.
This has always been part of the methodology. However, it doesn’t just stop there. Art history programs, scholars, and the discipline in general is embracing inter-disciplinary methodology. This is done for a number of reasons, one main one is that it enables the discipline to bring new voices (both historical and contemporary) into a field that has been very white and western-dominated. This is very exciting, and is important work. Thanks to these two factors, I got to read lots of different kinds of work in my courses — not just art history but art criticism; primary sources from a range of time periods; literary criticism; American studies pieces; works from Indigenous theorists examining Indigenous versus western conceptions of time, knowledge, and thought; scientific conservation reports of works of art; and many other kinds of works. All of these kinds of pieces are written using different methodologies.
Across all of my graduate seminars, after months of reading these diverse, fascinating, creative, analytical, and innovative pieces, we were told “ok, now as your big project at the end of the semester, write a paper.” I, as a person who did not have a strong grounding in art historical methodology, went “oh wow, all of these papers I have read are so exciting — now I guess now I am supposed to write something like that.” No, that was not the case. They wanted us to write an art historical paper of approximately 15 pages. They just never explicitly said that. At no point did anyone say “remember all of that cool interdisciplinary stuff? Don’t do that. Do this instead.” So, I, with my lack of historical methodology and strength in generating ideas and synthesizing info, went a little wild.
After one conversation with a prof my first semester in which I proposed an impossibly broad topic, I did get clarity that it was best if the paper focused on one work of art. That was very helpful. However, my piece on one work of art attempted to engage all of the works I had read in that class — which were diverse in methodology, time period, geography, etc.
Incorporating all of these various papers was not appropriate for an art historical paper. An art historical paper is one whose argument is what I call a Sherlock Holmes argument — a what happened when and where argument. The goal of the discipline is to make an argument about something that you think happened or something that you think you can observe given the historical context of the work.
That argument must be bolstered by making the smallest steps possible from what has already been established to what you are trying to establish — that is how you build legitimacy in the eyes of art history — tight links are built by bringing in information that has very precise temporal, topical, logical, and physical proximity to what you are trying to say. Basically, writing an art historical paper is built like a brick house — house is stable because the bricks that build it are placed closely and tightly together.
Here is the kicker: the art historical, Sherlock Holmes-type argument is very different from what brought me into the field, and very different from how my brain likes to work naturally. Artists, who I would link very closely to theorists and philosophers, explore a theoretical idea through their practice. This is the thing that I do well — make conceptual explorations through creative processes. If art historians say: “who what when where and why,” artists say “what if.” The “what if” tends to be a creative process, where as the “who what when where and why” is an analytical one. (I know I am making a lot of generalizations here, but bear with me.)
What drew me to art history was my love of abstract expressionism and organic architecture — two movements that are inherently driven by process and observation rather than by having a specific idea in mind and then executing them. (Maybe I can share more about this in another blog post.) As I discussed in my last blog post, an improvisational approach to art really allowed me to get in touch with my sensibilities. Since my first art history class was Art Since 1945, these disciplines and this kind of thinking was front and center. So, in graduate school, I was kind of disappointed that what we were supposed to do was write these very strict historical papers. I think I expected to find a lot of the energy that drew me to the field, but that was the territory of artists, not historians, it seemed.
However, taking a really close look at what I was struggling with and what I was doing well allowed me to train myself in a new methodology, and find new ways to meld these kinds of thinking. I discovered that I had an easier time implementing strict historical methodology when I was less confident in the topic I was studying. When I think I know a bit about something, that’s when my brain really starts going. I can get ahead of my skis quickly. So, I had a really hard time when I was working on modern and contemporary topics, because I came in with more knowledge, more ideas, and thus, more opportunities to trip myself up. Even just by virtue of being closer to the topic through lived experience let me think I could link them to ideas I had already started thinking about in my own context. This was dangerous for me.
My advisor was an architectural historian whose focus is on 20th century architecture. I had worked with him on a couple of modern and contemporary topics, and he had observed my tendency to generate a lot of ideas but never really flesh an idea out fully. I could sense he was a bit worried about my capacity in art history, so I really wanted to use my qualifying paper to show him I could really nail art historical methodology. I chose to write my masters qualifying paper in Carolingian architectural history — a topic that I had had success with in another professor’s class. He and many others thought this seemed like an odd choice for someone who came into the program wanting to research contemporary architecture and didn’t love the historical side of things.
However, in a couple of classes, I had had a much easier time writing an art historical paper about medieval art. I knew so little going in that I literally couldn’t generate ideas before I had really done my historical research. I could do nothing but read very carefully and put one foot in front of the other. I had no choice but to make only very small logical leaps — the ones that make up art historical methodology — because my mind wasn’t leaping to conclusions. Effectively, I had found a way to shut down the idea generating side of my mind so that the Sherlock Holmes side could develop. When writing my qualifying paper, this meant I could really just practice the art historical methodology. As I like to do in my visual art, I was able to isolate the variable I am very proud to say that I did really well on that paper. My advisor even called it a “virtuoso performance.”
Like I said at the beginning of this post, I thought that this post was going to be about how art history is something in which you need to know the end point. As I write this, I realize that that’s really only the case when it comes to knowing the parameters of what success looks like — to do a good job on an assignment, you need to know what the professor wants. There are a lot times in which a professor assumes you know this, and sometimes, you don’t even know that there is a gap in your knowledge when you start. Sometimes, like I did, you discover you are lacking a really basic piece of information only by getting into the process and really struggling.
In writing this blog post, I have yet again stumbled upon a very key piece of knowledge: I realize now that though you need to know what art historical methodology looks like, in an art history paper, you can’t know the end point going in. You have to keep your nose to the ground and follow the evidence where it leads you. You have to not get ahead of yourself and make assumptions that lead you away from the truth. I probably should realized this sooner — one grad school professor expressed frustration at my tendency to generate ideas before beginning to research by saying “it’s like you’re working backwards!” Oh, well. I got there in the end.