13.Art History: Making the Visible Legible 13

This might be the placc to iden tify the 'object of desire,'as such, that
VibramWi nck- clmann loses. Here we would need to situate Winckelmann s'beautiful young men'—the Classical Greek athletes naked in the Gymnasium whose loss she' witnesses while relaxing with Italian bovs but to whom 'he'ean allude in the History of Classical art chronicling what she lias lost. The resulting divisions would require us to trace Winckelmanns inability to reconcile the time of the 'beautiful'with the time of'freedom'; or to admit the placc of'imitation' within the unfolding of Classical art itself; or to conccivc a Grcccc Discount MBT outside its afterimaging Rome, or its forerunning Egypt and sidetracking Etruria; or to conceive Classical art outside an imprint,copy, or fragment in the first place. In each context, the object of desire is the lost historical object toward which the historian moves in his allusions and the subjective object from which his very witness of loss proceeds—in this case, neither Classical Greek art as such, merely a cold and lifeless fossil, nor beautiful Italian boys as such, merely available embraces, but the image of their identity, an object in consciousness which neither real sculpture nor real boy can do anything but copy MBT Shoes Clearance because they arc always found only in the move awav from or back to it.1" (Of

course,MBT Shoes Sale, this object-in-consciousness or subjective object is, itself, a repetition. But I will not pursue any particular model for this relation; it is sufficient to remind ourselves that the constitution of the object is defensive and occurs in 'defensive process' [/lbv}ebrvorgang\.) To excavate Winckebnanns object Discount MBT Shoes of desire, whatever it might be, would also be to rccogni/x his History as a great and exemplar)' work, for it comes close, I think, to finding an objective subject that almost satisfies its subjective object—the bust of a faun gracing his apartment in the Villa Albani, an object which, I believe, integrates his subjective erotic and objective scholarly inquiries. But this identification, although it deserves further exploration, takes me in directions too particular, and perhaps too literal, for the final observations I want to make.
Instead I want to generalize beyond the identification of any particular historians particular loss. Such losses constitute the discipline of art history just because they are the objects for its subjectivity—not the artefacts in themselves, fossils with nointrinsic statu s,but rather the ways Vibram Five Fingers of thcirdepart- ings from art historians.'IhusT. J. Clark, for example, mourns his loss—the 'rendezvous between artistic practice and...alternative meanings to those of capital,'*' here and there or once upon a time, he imagines, actually realized— like the tradition, community, democratic socictv, undiluted jouissame, truth, MBT Shoes Sale or gender equality: in  any case, a particular subjective loss made out to be the objective reality of history.