What is Baroque?

AH500

“Baroque” often refers to the cultural strategies of political Absolutism, to the Counter-Reformation art of a globalizing Church, to the imposition of a colonizing order, and to mass technological diffusion and the overwhelming ubiquity of screen images and information in our contemporary media age. And, yet, to the extent that baroque aesthetics are also characterized by mixed emotion, complexity, and contradiction, the baroque has also been developed as a space of potential subversion, as a marginal, subcultural tactics of otherness in, for instance, the representational practices of queer camp or counter-colonial resistance in appropriations and recastings called “neo-Baroque,” “the Baroque of the Americas,” and “marvelous realism.”

What is baroque? French philosopher Gilles Deleuze asks this question in order to develop a way of understanding difference beyond binary opposition in his book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. In her book Baroque Reason, French feminist theorist Christine Buci-Glucksmann elaborates the baroque as another form of reason, a way of thinking and feeling from the place of the “Other.” To compile a list of provocative work on the baroque or what we might call baroque aesthetics is to enumerate a veritable roll call of figures and works which have influenced the theoretical turn in art history over the last two decades. The very texts which have catalyzed transformations in the discipline of art history take up monuments or motifs from early modern culture. For instance, we will see how mannerist and baroque frames are deployed in French philosopher Jacques Derrida's The Truth in Painting to question our assumptions about what makes up the work of art and what is deemed to be outside or superfluous.

We will consider how French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his book The Order of Things, opens his demonstration of how effects of power are produced through the construction of knowledge with an analysis of Spanish Golden Age court artist Diego Velázquez's painting Las Meninas. We will take a cue from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s description of his own work as “baroque” in terms of how it affects us as readers. Thus, we will also look at these texts as artifacts in their own right. We will note not only how these texts reimagine monuments and motifs of Baroque art (for instance, how Lacan turns Italian artist Gianlorenzo Bernini’s sculpture of Saint Theresa in Ecstasy into an icon of knowledge beyond reason). We will also think about how these texts endeavor to rival the ways, for instance, the total art of the baroque may dazzle and overwhelm and, hence, move us from our everyday habits. Curiously, though these texts have had wide influence, their impact has not brought about an equally extensive resurgence of historical interest in the so-called baroque period of art and architecture. Rather, revisionary uses of baroque aesthetics have a relatively unacknowledged but central place in current understanding not of the late sixteenth through eighteenth centuries but of postmodernism and especially cultural production since the late 1960s. This seminar has been organized around consideration of this central paradox as a way into the questions of why the baroque and to what ends. Our work for the seminar will focus on diverse interpretations and quotations of baroque painting and architecture in Europe and the Americas, the citation and reinvention of the baroque in contemporary art works, and the construction and deployment of the baroque in various works of theory—including feminist, queer, and postcolonial criticism. Guiding issues for the seminar will be the relevance of our interpretations of the past for the present and the future, how our locations in the present shape our sense of the past, how we assign value, and the politics of aesthetics in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and power. No prior familiarity with Baroque art and architecture or with works of philosophy and criticism that have come to be known as “poststructuralism” is assumed or required.