The Brooklyn Rail

“Always historicize!” exclaims Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, although to tell the truth I actually tracked down where the quote came from on his Wikipedia page.¹ It sounds definitive, determinative, orthodoxly Marxist, until one reads the book carefully and realizes that he is in fact suggesting the opposite: that at the end of this process of “historicization” we will discover what it is about the work of art that cannot be historicized, cannot be explained by history, that remains outside of its designated time and place.

In an essay for a book on art in the 1960s and ’70s, a time when the teleological Greenbergian narrative of modernism is said to have come to an end, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe appears to be arguing the opposite. “A little formalism drives history from the work, but a lot brings it right back in,” he quotes Roland Barthes saying in Ends of Painting: Art in the 1960s and 1970s.² But here too we might say that, although formalism and historicism at first appear opposed, then as in Greenberg are understood to be inseparable, it is exactly through the attempt to historicize the work—and this is Gilbert-Rolfe’s own position—that we can see those “formal” qualities that cannot be historicized.

Altogether we might say that historicism is structured by the logic of the universal and its exception: everything can be historicized except the act of historicization. But then we would also want to suggest that this exception arouses the very desire to historicize. That is, in a paradoxical manner, with art we can historicize everything except the actual work of art we are attempting to historicize. A great or significant work of art allows us endlessly to identify and contextualize the social conditions that produced it, and even the artist who made it, but it cannot definitively be explained and understood itself.

We could take, like everybody else, Walter Benjamin’s remarks about Paul Klee in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” as evidence of this, but for my part I would prefer Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “Kafka and His Precursors.”³ The essay is, of course, famous for its conclusion that “each writer creates his precursors,” but much more profound is Borges’s suggestion that, although all of the authors he points to have something in common with Kafka, they do not all have something in common with each other. In Borges’s brilliant and enigmatic words: “If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other.”⁴ That is, Kafka here is something like that “nothing in common” that allows us to identify a literary history or tradition that has something in common. If the various authors Borges identifies can all be seen to be retrospectively influenced by Kafka, Kafka is not at all influenced by them.

And if I had to pick an artistic exemplification of this, I would choose the great New Zealand artist Colin McCahon and his last painting, I Considered All the Acts of Oppression (1981). McCahon is often called a “religious” painter—Thomas Crow has written a wonderful book entitled No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art on this—but the “religious” in McCahon is fundamentally a way of him thinking through the complex questions of artistic influence and inheritance. One of McCahon’s greatest paintings, You are Witnesses (Elias series) (1959), is about that extraordinary moment when Elias witnesses the doubting Christ on the cross cry “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” or “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?”, mishears it, and believing that Christ was appealing to him and not to God goes on to become one of the founders of Christianity. And similarly in I Considered All the Acts of Oppression, for all of the religious predestination of its Biblical text, in that empty space to the right it opens up somewhere for the spectator to insert themselves and make of it what they will.

Everything we say about the painting, just as everything we say about God, is foreseen by it, but only after us. Our act of interpretation, which is always in a way to historicize, is at once predestined, the will of God or the artist, and absolutely unprecedented and unpredictable, a miracle. The very statement “Always historicize!”, after all, is also to indicate that the act of historicization must always be renewed, comes out of no prior logic or history, and is not always successful. It is only the greatest works of art that are historicized, that is, remembered, and it is precisely these greatest works of art that can never be historicized.

1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1981, p. 9; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson
2. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “Circa 1970,” in David Homewood and Paris Lettau (eds), Ends of Painting: Art in the 1960s and 1970s, Power Publications, Sydney, 2022, p. 189.
3. For Benjamin on Klee, see “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Schocken Books, New York, 19698, p. 257.
4. Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka and His Precursors,” in Collected Fictions, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1998, p. 365.