Oral Art History

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Why should students of art history talk to individuals from the field of artistic production and what kind of methodologies can we resort to? While artist talks and panel discussions have been established in the field of contemporary art criticism for a long time, the use of interviews as an acquirement of research information is relatively new in the study of art history. Contemporary art, as opposed to historical art, benefits from the possibility of questioning alive artists. Frequently, an interview is one of the few opportunities to gather any kind of information on a specific work of art. In addition, this methodology has the advantage to obtain “insider” information or coherent narratives that might not be available in print. This leads to the assumption that a work of contemporary art is not a secluded object: the discussion with artists, curators, gallerists, critics, and scholars brings to mind that a work of contemporary art is a processual, social debate. For the establishment of an Oral Art History, we can turn towards methodologies from the fields of anthropology and history. There, the spoken word acts as an integral part of the research in order to shift away from allegedly objective facts stemming from books. Instead, the focus on questioning and listening to people talking about their point of view is a much more democratic method. It opens up discourses on micro-histories as opposed to hegemonic narratives provided by institutions. Additionally, many non-Western cultures have long traditions of Oral History, which have been taken into account by Western academia only recently. The circumstance that information obtained from an interview is purely subjective should be undeterred, since historical sources are always subjective, even when written down. But why else should art historians and students be concerned with interviewing? Many times, interviews serve as one of the few opportunities to implement previously acquired knowledge and gather practical experience. Moreover, modernist and formalist schools of art history still propagate the singularity and completeness of a work of art. This often culminates in genius narratives attached to certain artists in order to explain and venerate their vocation. However, by talking about artistic production, we can step away from the materiality of an object and put an emphasis on its processuality. Therefore, I will argue that an Oral Art History is not only valuable for gathering information, but also for understanding and experiencing the production of art on a democratic and decolonized level.

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