foucault and las meninas
Foucault 's Las Meninas and art-historical methods.
Michel Foucault 's study of Velazquez 's Las Meninas (1) was first published in the volume Les Mots et les choses in 1966 which was followed, in 1970, by the English translation titled The Order of Things. In "Las Meninas", which is the title of the opening chapter of The Order of Things, Foucault focused on the artwork itself as though it were before him, describing in extraordinary detail what he saw. His seemingly unobtrusive actions--looking and describing--elicited observations that, when positioned within the context of contemporary art-historical practice, were unprecedented. His examination of the painting is neither prescribed by, nor filtered through the various texts of art-historical investigation. For example, the artist 's biography is absent and there is no declaration of technical virtuosity and genius. Neither is there an acknowledgement of sources and influences, nor an exploration of questions of style and iconography. Nor is there interpretation, through the selection and interpretation of archival documents, of the relation between the painting, the artist 's social context and his relationship with his patrons. In one instance, Foucault comments on the art-historical practice of identifying the subjects represented: "These proper names would form useful landmarks and avoid ambiguous designations; they would tell us in any case what the painter is looking at, and the majority of the characters in the picture along with him" (2002: 10). But the convenience of the proper name, in this particular context, is "merely an artifice: it gives us a finger to point with, in other words, to pass surreptitiously from the space where one speaks to the space where one looks; in other words to fold over the other as though they were equivalents" (p. 10). Foucault proposes a different relation of language to painting:
[T]he relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not
Michel Foucault 's study of Velazquez 's Las Meninas (1) was first published in the volume Les Mots et les choses in 1966 which was followed, in 1970, by the English translation titled The Order of Things. In "Las Meninas", which is the title of the opening chapter of The Order of Things, Foucault focused on the artwork itself as though it were before him, describing in extraordinary detail what he saw. His seemingly unobtrusive actions--looking and describing--elicited observations that, when positioned within the context of contemporary art-historical practice, were unprecedented. His examination of the painting is neither prescribed by, nor filtered through the various texts of art-historical investigation. For example, the artist 's biography is absent and there is no declaration of technical virtuosity and genius. Neither is there an acknowledgement of sources and influences, nor an exploration of questions of style and iconography. Nor is there interpretation, through the selection and interpretation of archival documents, of the relation between the painting, the artist 's social context and his relationship with his patrons. In one instance, Foucault comments on the art-historical practice of identifying the subjects represented: "These proper names would form useful landmarks and avoid ambiguous designations; they would tell us in any case what the painter is looking at, and the majority of the characters in the picture along with him" (2002: 10). But the convenience of the proper name, in this particular context, is "merely an artifice: it gives us a finger to point with, in other words, to pass surreptitiously from the space where one speaks to the space where one looks; in other words to fold over the other as though they were equivalents" (p. 10). Foucault proposes a different relation of language to painting:
[T]he relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not
References: Alpers, S. 1995 Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas. In: Fernie, E. (ed.) Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology. Phaidon: London. Bryson, N Clark, K. 1960 Looking at Pictures. London: John Murray. Fernie, E Foucault, M. 2002 The Order of Things. London & New York: Routledge. Schmitter, A.M Searle, J.R. 1980 Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation. Critical Inquiry 6(3): 477-489 Snyder, J West, S. 2004 Portraiture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1.) Las Meninas was painted in 1656 by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez for his patron Phillip IV of Spain.