Resumen de A sculpture, a column, and a painting: the tension between art and history
Part of a symposium on the relation between art and history. The writer discusses how he responds to art as a historical materialist. He observes that the categories of art and history are not fixed and that their relationship is one of permanent tension. He also points out that neither history nor art have always and everywhere been thought to exist among all the world's cultures. He then offers his response to three artworks: Henry Moore's sculpture Nuclear Energy; a classical 18-foot column from Ostia topped by a Corinthian capital, presented by Mussolini to Chicago; and a late-17th-century Peruvian colonial history painting. He concludes that an artwork is not a thing to be possessed by a guiltless, timeless “gaze” but is a site that extends to where the tension between art and history is manifested in the present and where art historians must engage with the work.
