Machine generated contents note: ch. 1 Not a longer history, a different history -- The eighteenth century is still effectively the horizon of accounts of modern art -- The modern/postmodern divide is less relevant than it once was -- Developments within medieval and Renaissance studies have released earlier material from old historiographic models -- Recent assemblages of the medieval and the modern -- Before the emergence of the picture gallery in the eighteenth century, installation art was the norm -- The twentieth-century preference for the index over the icon is a revival of medieval practice, as was the championing of seriality and replication -- Collage was a primary modality of medieval art -- Conceptual art as one episode in a long history of Christian debates over idolatry -- ch. 2 Learning to live without artistic periods -- Eisenstein's premodern montages -- Comparisons between medieval and modern will bring out differences more than affinities -- Cases where there is active recourse to medieval models will be accompanied by staged collisions between the two -- "Medieval" in this book really means premodern, ranging from the advent of Christianity through Bernini -- What makes twentieth-century medievalism different from nineteenth-century medievalizing movements, such as the pre-Raphaelites and the Nazarenes? -- Why it is impossible for this book to follow a chronological presentation -- ch. 3 If you go far back enough, the West is not "Europe" -- A set of cultural practices preceding a Eurocentric world view -- Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon incorporates African and Oceanic references, but its organizing structure derives from altarpieces -- Emergence of a notion of Europe in the sixteenth century -- To inhabit the Western Middle Ages is to inhabit a decentered and decentralized culture -- Orientations of Christian medieval art -- The framework proposed here destabilizes the terms "Western art" and "modernism" -- ch. 4 Airplanes and altarpieces -- "Who could do anything better than this propeller?" -- Apollinaire compares Bleriot's airplane to a celebrated Madonna by Cimabue -- Panels before framed pictures -- Cimabue's Louvre altarpiece as a spaceship -- "Jesus is my air plane" -- Breton compares Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to Cimabue's "sacred image" -- ch. 5 Works become environments and environments become works -- The opposition between the framed picture and the site-specific work is a modernist myth -- Late medieval art reveals instead a pattern of commutation between objects and their environments -- The history of the modern museum is only one episode in this larger pattern -- Museums as chapels and chapels as museums -- Marinetti and Kandinsky on the museum -- Pictures were not detached from multimedia environments so much as they internalized them -- ch. 6 The history of the museum is the history of modern art -- The material and conceptual boundaries of the easel picture turn out never to have been very stable -- The critique of the museum originated with its inception -- Quatremere de Quincy and the artistic "ensemble" -- How Quatremere's polemic is caught up in the logic he is protesting -- Art under the conditions of "speculation" -- Anticipations of modernist and postmodernist critiques -- Works of art as relics -- ch. 7 Painting as second-order observation -- Re-entry of work of art and environment -- Painting as the master medium of re-entry -- Gentile da Fabriano's The Crippled and the Sick Cured at the Tomb of Saint Nicholas as an anthropological picture -- Painting is well suited to the task of blending places and times -- Kinaesthetic experiences of artistic ensembles came into conceptual focus as an effect of pictorial visualizations -- ch. 8 The debate over idolatry persists -- In Michelangelo's Medici Chapel, the space of altarpieces Is retranslated, into three dimensions, which is thus a space of art -- Comparison to Minimalist installations by Flavin and Morris -- The work includes the beholder -- In the thick of an ancient dispute over idolatry and iconoclasm -- Both Fried and his opponents believed they were offering an answer to idolatry -- The Medici Chapel as a post-pictorial reaction -- Installation art and painting as phases of one another -- ch. 9 Topographical instability -- Why Heiner Friedrich found inspiration for the Dia Art Foundation in Giotto's Arena Chapel -- What is a Christian chapel? -- How Jerusalem can take place in Rome -- Topographical destabilization reveals space and time to be malleable -- Buildings on holy sites are not merely commemoration, but proof that these were never merely historical sites -- Striated and smooth space -- Premodern ecclesiastical environments are difficult to recover after the clean-up of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation -- Relics and their containers -- Soil as a formless reliquary -- How the Jerusalem Chapel went from being a spatio-temporal wrinkle to a sited space -- ch. 10 Non-site-specificity -- Smithson brings Franklin, New jersey, to New York -- Christian topographical reliquaries -- "The distance between the Site and the Non-site could be called anti-travel" -- "How can you be in two places at once when you are nowhere at all?": the art gallery as de-territorialized site -- The Non-site as a tool for thinking about Christian chapels -- Smithson applies the logic of the Non-site to the Holy Land and then withdraws from the idea -- ch. 11 The Mannerist inhuman -- Smithson on Worringer and Hulme -- Mannerism crystallizes an alternative to anthropomorphism -- Mannerist polyhedrons -- Smithson on Brecht on Brueghel -- "Cool" Smithson versus "hot" Smithson -- Ice seething with activity -- Smithson on Parmigianino -- Sculpture in the expanded field placed in a theological framework -- ch. 12 The year 1962: Mosaic resonance -- Three medievalists -- Eco, Steinberg, and McLuhan -- intervene in contemporary culture -- The Gutenberg Galaxy informs its readers that we are entering a new Middle Ages -- Why mosaic is the modality of the electronic media -- McLuhan photographed in "acoustic space" -- The link between Bauhaus and McLuhan passes through medieval tactility -- Photography as the medium of its own expansion -- ch. 13 The year 1962: "Aux frontieres de l'illimite et de l'avenir" -- The hinge between Eco's Opera aperta and his Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale -- Joyce and the Summa of chaos -- The embrace of chance and indeterminacy in the "open work" are connected to the search for a world-involving integration -- Eco throws up barriers between the open work and medieval modalities of multiple reading, but they are dismantled by Battisti -- Cage's Fontana Mix -- ch. 14 Environments, flatbeds, and other forms of receivership -- Kaprow announces that Pollock leaves us at the threshold of the Middle Ages -- Steinberg on Johns as the "end of the line" -- "Let the world in again" -- Art before the easel picture is the unstated term in Steinberg's schema -- Altarpieces as flatbeds -- Why Caravaggio is Johns's historical alter ego -- ch. 15 Inside and out -- Various versions of the three-era model of medievalism, whereby an intervening period is put to an end by contemporary developments that bring into relevance the earlier, medieval art -- Ways of throwing this model into question -- Prints offered a new plane for the circulation and reception of images, well before the gallery picture and the museum -- Watteau makes a sign for the outside of the picture shop -- Royal-sacred art sold and crated -- The commodity is both object and phantasm -- The old paintings prefigure their eventual use -- Watteau's Enseigne and Johns's Flag -- ch. 16 Limits of the diaphane -- The index resurfaces in twentieth-century art -- The twentieth century pits the index against the optical image, whereas in medieval art icon and index are not so easily separated, as Duchamp understood -- Camillo and painting as one phase of the distributed body -- Pound explains Cavalcanti to the age of the lightbulb and the "current hidden in air and in wire" -- The diaphane of Cavalcanti and Dante in Pound and Joyce -- Duchamp's Large Glass as a diaphane -- An element of medieval anachronism made Pound and Duchamp contemporary to each other in the 1920s -- ch. 17 Relics and reproducibles -- And yet the boundary between index and icon is at issue in Christian art -- Grounds of the religious image -- The technological reproducibility of the icon -- The revival of the idea of the multiple in modernism -- Images as relic: another prototype of the work of art -- The logic of the sample -- Devotion and the abject -- Consecration of the ordinary -- Why the relic is not the same as the readymade and yet is necessary to understanding it -- The afterlife of the relic in twentieth-century art -- The readymade beyond institutional critique -- ch. 18 Cathedral thinking -- The Gothic cathedral as Bauhaus emblem -- Collective production and distributed display in the "new building of the future" -- Behne and the return of art to the spiritual integration of the Middle Ages -- Pervasiveness of spiritual rhetoric in avant-garde writings of the 1910s -- Glass architecture -- Feininger's fractal structures connect image, user, and environment -- ch. 19 Instead of cathedrals, machines for living -- "Turn away from Utopia" -- Worringer declares Expressionism dead -- Behne: from Heiligenbild to Kunst to Gestaltung -- El Lissitzky against the "painted coffin for our living bodies" -- Stained glass and dynamic color construction -- "The static god will become a dynamic god" -- Pinder and medieval kinaesthetic proprioception -- "What we used to call art begins at a distance of two meters from the body" -- The medieval roots of Benjamin's concept of receptivity in a state of distraction -- ch. 20 Cathedral of Erotic Suffering -- Schwitters from collage to Merzarchitektur -- "Cathedrals are made out of wood" --
Note continued: "The absorption in art comes very close to the divine liturgy"
An archeology of display practices from a post-museum future
Neither museum nor cathedral but a dismantling of both
We are only now beginning to apply the lessons of the Merzbau.
