Reading George Perec’s “Think/Classify” made me think of a book I received when I was a child, “The Art Book”. Phaidon’s best seller claims to be a great Visual Arts introduction, and so, my parents thought of it as perfect gift for a child interested in the arts. However, at a young age, I was confused with this survey and how it portrayed the visual language history. The book main classification strategy is not by theme, cultural framework, or time in history, but by name. Artists are ordered in alphabetical order, each one receiving one page and one image reproduction.
The alphabet, as Perec points out, it’s quite an arbitrary way to classify elements. Classifications, he explains, expose a way of thinking. They emerge from ideology, from the hierarchy of the world they drawn from. Classifications create a view of the world. I wonder why a book that organizes worldwide (as they claim, although is mainly western) visual production in a detached, almost random way, is so popular? A book that suppresses ideological, historical, or formal histories and connections between artworks. Is it with the aim of forgetting Art History as we know it, and allowing retinal experience of the artworks? Is it with the aim of pursuing an objective perspective? Or does this mode of classification transform Art History into shallow trivia material? Does this arrangement commodify visual history into a coffee table book content?
Great, Liliana. Sounds like you had your first “epistemic rift” (à la Foucault) at a young age 🙂 You were aware, even as a child, of how insufficient this alphabetical ordering system was in structuring subject matter that embodied histories and ideologies and formal resonances and ruptures.