“REvisions” is the ongoing series launched with the Research Forum in which faculty and invited contributors are invited to rummage through Bard Graduate Center’s archive of video lectures, published chapters, and print articles and discover new themes and hitherto unexplored connections. The premise is that while all these varied research “outputs” are published with a coherence evident to their conveners and editors in the moment of organization that further connections may become apparent in time. Moreover, institutional intellectual commitments mean that continuities of this sort cannot be dismissed as merely adventitious. “REvisions” therefore offers, also, an opportunity to see the “hive mind” in action: an institution as a thinking, living, collective organism.
REvisions 3: Counter-histories
The late Amos Funkenstein
offered the notion of “counter-history” as an alternative and even mirror-image
narrative whose epistemological value lies precisely in its ability to regroup
material whose coherence was hitherto invisible to the eye. We might see this
operating on the grand scale the way Walter Benjamin’s injunction to brush
history against the grain was aimed at the reading of individual sources.
We argued in the preface to REvisions
1: Decorative and the Antique that every act of revival is
fundamentally antiquarian in that bringing back the past affirms its existence
in the present and “the past as it lives on in the present” is one of the
compelling definitions of the antiquarian. But the historiographical recovery
of the “revival” could be said to constitute a “counter-history” in just
Funkenstein’s sense. Flipping the narrative lets us see the world in a
different way. It is a fundamentally critical act of historiography. On this
definition, we can see that Bard Graduate Center’s exhibition and publishing
program has been engaged in a giant act of counter-historical exposition.
For a major strand of
institutional research has been devoted to what we might describe as “alternate
paths to the present.” Antiquarianism,
Gothic revival, Nordic modernism, Biedermeier, late neo-classical English
design, Dutch empire, votive objects—these steer clear of the Bauhaus or the
Wiener Werkstatte or Macintosh or art nouveau or any of the other time- and space-warping
dominant narratives of art history’s modernity Sending readers and authors and
visitors back to abandoned or just dimly-known corners of the past could seem
antiquarian in the worst way (the past for the past’s sake). But after
twenty-five years of work these pin-pointed research projects begin to
aggregate and the individual spotlights begin to illuminate larger and larger
swaths of learning’s night sky. BGC’s work, looked at this way, is a collective
effort to put other plots on the table, to bring to the attention of visitors
and readers the fact that there are other paths and that some of them are very
interesting. There is contingency in history and unless we’re all Hegelians
that one or another narrative becomes canonical does not necessarily say
anything about the quality or importance of the thing or movement so much as
the conditions in which it was received.
REvisions 3 could be read as a map: charting contours, indicating relief (some
higher than others), highlighting movement. In fact, the entire REvisions project adds up to that map,
both those done and those to come. But
if that’s the case, then REvisions 3
is really the meta-map, a mapping of the way in which counter-histories map. In
that case it is appropriate for it to appear early on in this project since it
will serve as a “legend” to the maps that follow and the larger map to which
they all contribute—the BGC’s intervention in the historiography of its related
disciplines.
