Postcritical or Acritical? Twelve Steps for Art History Writing in the Anthropocene

Looking at both critique and postcritique in relation to art history, in general, and art historiography, in particular, this article suggests that art history’s critical heritage runs longer and deeper than a “hermeneutics of suspicion” signals, and that this state of affairs is therefore a deeper and wider problem than how to overcome and replace critique. The latter term, for art history, is of a piece with the modernity/modernism/avant-gardism of this discipline, which–despite declarations to the contrary–is not over, and which therefore makes today’s critical (in the sense of dangerous and urgent) situation of imminent climate disaster even harder to come to terms with. What our discipline is arguably in need of in the epoch of the Anthropocene–save for contributing to saving the world–is a new way of composing histories of art. In search of such a more unbiassed model I will discuss temporal conceptions, including the Anthropocene itself as well as Francois Hartog’s ideas on “presentism”, and draw on Piotr Piotrowski’s attempt to construct a spatially extended “horizontal art history”, as opposed to the hierarchical West-centered one, in order, finally, to propose the outlines of an alternative, inspired by Bruno Latour–a twelve-step sketch that is horizontal in a more neutral and material sense, and which responds to the keywords anachronic, amodern and acritical