![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
This article casts a retrospective glance at the technological continuum from which the art history slide lecture springs. The article focuses specifically on the copy apparatuses widely used to make transparencies for art-historical consumption, circa 1930 to the early 2000s. The ways in which these once prevalent technologies developed to frame and disseminate visual materials by means of light was instrumental in shaping the widespread illusion of epistemological transparency in the world’s art history classrooms. In reference to the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) on technological determinism, the author provides a chronology of slide reproduction technologies in which artworks ultimately appear as self-luminous technological ‘images’, or simulated entities that speak as if beyond history.
Notes
1 – Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
2 – For an authoritative analysis of the art history slide lecture and its modes of knowledge production, see Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); see also Robert S. Nelson, ‘The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Critical Inquiry, 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000), 414–34; and Trevor Fawcett, ‘Visual Facts and the Nineteenth-Century Art Lecture’, Art History, 6, no. 4 (1983), 442–60.
3 – The term ‘technological determinism’ refers to a broad set of theories in which technology – prima facie, a human creation – is thought to shape the human world in non-trivial ways, from sense perception, self-awareness and cognition to social interactions and decision-making processes. For a succinct account, see Andrew Feenberg, ‘From Essentialism to Constructivism: Philosophy of Technology at the Crossroads’, in Technology and the Good Life?, ed. by Eric Higgs, Andrew Light and David Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 294–315.
4 – The following reading is in keeping with a dominant stream in the French reception of Heidegger in which the terms ‘difference’ and ‘being’ are closely related; see for instance Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Système et critique, 2nd edn (Brussels: Ousia, 1992), 30–35.
5 – Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1979); Gérard Wajcman, Fenêtre: Chroniques du regard et de l’intime (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2004); and Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
6 – Both assertions are made in Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Question Concerning Technology’; see Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. By William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3–35.
7 – Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, 72.
8 – Feenberg, ‘From Essentialism to Constructivism’, 296.
9 – For a definition of the concept of grey literature, see Joachim Schöpfel and Dominic J. Farace, ‘Grey Literature’, in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd edn (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2010), 2029–39.
10 – For Heidegger’s initial account of ‘average everydayness’, see Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), § 5.
11 – Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, 3–5.
12 – ‘Das Gestell’ was one in a series of four lectures delivered in Bremen on 1 December 1949, later expanded into ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ presented on 18 November 1955; the published essay is based on the latter version.
13 – See, for instance, Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning Technology’, 17.
14 – Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, 54–79. Preziosi’s argument follows in Heidegger’s footsteps, but is couched in the more familiar terms of Michel Foucault.
15 – There is a vast critical literature on the use of photographic materials in art history for pedagogical and argumentative purposes. Aside from the work of Bohrer, Fawcett, Freitag, Hamber, Nelson and Preziosi, the following sources contain valuable information: Howard B. Leighton, ‘The Lantern Slide and Art History’, History of Photography, 8, no. 2 (April–June 1984), 107–18; Jennifer F. Eisenhauer, ‘Next Slide Please: The Magical, Scientific, and Corporate Discourses of Visual Projection Technologies’, Studies in Art Education, 47, no. 3 (Spring 2006), 198–214; Carla Conrad Freeman, ‘Visual Media in Education: An Informal History’, Visual Resources, 6 (1990), 327–40; and Maryly Snow, ‘The Pedagogical Consequences of Photomechanical Reproduction in the Visual Histories: From Copy Photography to Digital Mnemonics’, Visual Resources, 12, nos 3/4 (1997), 307–31.
16 – See for instance The Early Years of Art History in the United States: Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching, and Scholars, ed. by Craig Hugh Smyth and Peter M. Lukehart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
17 – Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1974).
18 – For an overview of the problems of photographic reproduction in this period, see Emanuel Goldberg, Die Grundlagen der Reproduktionstechnik: In Gemeinverständlicher Darstellung, 2nd edn, Encyclopädie der Photographie, Heft 80 (Halle: Wilhelm Knapp, 1923).
19 – Jantsch submitted an application for his device to the British Patent Office on 27 August 1910 (Patent No. 19,995); the invention is described in Heinrich Jantsch, ‘Ein beachtenswerter Hilfsapparat für Forscher und Ingenieure der chemischen Großindustrie’, Zeitschrift für angewandte Chemie, 28, no. 78 (28 September 1915), 396.
20 – Graffin’s copying machine was first shown at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris but does not seem to have been patented; see the Exposition’s Catalogue général officiel: Tome premier, Groupe I: éducation et enseignement: classes 1 à 6 (Paris: Lemercier, 1900), classe 3, 12. By 1914, reversing prism copy cameras were widely available from a variety of manufacturers, which include in Germany alone: Karl Buchner, Munich; Ernemann, Görlitz; C. P. Goerz, Berlin; Hauberisser, Munich; and Carl Zeiss, Jena.
21 – For a cultural history of the Photostat and similar copy technologies, see Estelle Blaschke, ‘From Microform to the Drawing Bot: The Photographic Image as Data’, Gray Room, 75 (Spring 2019), 60–83.
22 – Jantsch, ‘Ein beachtenswerter Hilfsapparat’, 396.
23 – Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Uber das Rechts und Links im Bilde’ (1928), in Gedanken zur Kunstgeschichte: Gedrucktes und Ungedrucktes, 2nd edn (Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1941), 82–90.
24 – Sebastian Hausmann, Blutenburg bei München und seine Kunstschätze. Mit einem Anhang: Die photographische Aufnahme von alten Kunstwerken (Munich: Otto Perutz Trockenplattenfabrik, 1922), 23. The Anhang was first published in the Berliner Photofreund, Heft 7 (1 April 1921).
25 – Leitz introduced their first ‘Files’ film enlarger in 1926; for technical information on early 35-mm Leica enlarging procedures, see Wie arbeitet man am vorteilhaftesten mit der Leica-Kamera? Liste Photo 2313c (Wetzlar: Ernst Leitz, September 1929), 11.
26 – Quoted in Wolfgang M. Freitag, ‘Art Reproductions in the Library: Notes on Their History and Use’, in The Documented Image: Visions in Art History, ed. by Laurinda S. Dixon and Gabriel Weisberg (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 349–63 (349).
27 – Goldberg, Die Grundladen der Reproduktionstechnik, 7: ‘[Es] ist schon die Zeit nahe, wo unter “Reproduktion” nur noch photographische Reproduktion verstanden werden wird’.
28 – For a comprehensive list of the technologies available in the 1930s written from an institutional perspective, see Robert C. Binkley, Manual on Methods of Reproducing Research Materials (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers, 1936). This Manual is both a sourcebook and a book of samples.
29 – The apparatus was launched in 1939 at the Leipzig Grossdeutsche Photo-Kinomesse; for two eyewitness reports, see Fotografische Rundschau und Mitteilungen, 76, no. 8 (1939), 145; and Karl Richard Schimmrich, ‘Querschnitt durch die Leipziger Photo-Messe’, Camera: Illustrierte Monatsschrift für Freunde der Photographie und Kinematographie, 17 (Luzern und Zürich: C. J. Bucher, 1939), 323.
30 – Morgan’s patent for a ‘Focusing Copy Attachment’ was filed with the US Patent Office on 29 June 1934 and granted on 2 April 1935 (Patent No. 1,996,481); the Fuldy device may have been available as early as 1930.
31 – One recent contribution is worth mentioning: Diarmuid Costello, ‘The Question Concerning Photography’, in The Media of Photography, ed. by Diarmuid Costello and Dominic McIver Lopes (Malden, MA: The American Society for Aesthetics, 2012), 101–13.
32 – Feenberg, ‘From Essentialism to Constructivism’, 296.
33 – Ibid., 295.