Leseprobe

23 displays concern many kinds of human activity: from commercial displays of goods; to displays for religious purposes; to assertions of power or vainglory through structures in the built environment; or a determination to perpetuate a social memory by means of conspicuous monuments, often incorporating statuary. Humans engage in displays for more numerous reasons than other animals, and displays, both static and performative, or both, frequently jostle within a few yards of each other. Clearly, not every display con- trived by humans concerns art, but it is with some among that relatively small group of things displayed as art—art in the European manner—that I shall begin. 3 2 Inside Consider The Geographer by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer. Art historians usually point out that this painting is likely one of a pair, the other work being The Astronomer , for they are recorded together a number of times between 1713 and 1797 when they were separated at an auction sale. Their pairing is far easier to accomplish in reproduction than in actuality, for the Geographer is in Frankfurt, and the Astronomer is in Paris (Fig. 1). These things cannot simply be hung side by side on a whim, although they have been brought together several times, including in an exhibition in Frankfurt in 1997 to mark the 200 th anniversary of their separation. 4 Instead of discussing further an art historical arrangement that defies the usual state of affairs in which the Geographer exists, I want to attend to that current existence. The Geographer is displayed in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt. Standing in front of it, a viewer might like to try to attend to it as a single thing, but she faces insuperable difficulties. She might try to exclude the surroundings fromher peripheral vision by approaching the painting as close as possible without provoking the disapproval of a gallery attendant. She might try to focus on details, such as the dividers the geographer holds in his right hand. While it is true that a viewer—especially a prac- ticed viewer—can mentally focus on such a detail (or on an entire single work to the exclusion of others beside it) by exercising a cognitive skill that temporarily excludes adjacent features frommental consideration, it is nonetheless the case that perceptually, however hard a viewer tries, she can never see those dividers unreservedly in isolation. 5 They form part of a greater whole. That whole is the entire painted surface. But neither is Theory , 2005; for Gell, see: Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory , 1998.  3  I acknowledge that, whereas display is pancultural, all my examples concern art and artefacts in the European manner. Certain strategies of framing for display are culturally specific—including the physical enclosure of a rectangular pictorial field—whereas others—such as the deliberate setting of a thing within a specific environment—need not be.  4 Maek-Gérard (ed.), Johannes Vermeer , 1997. 5  I amgrateful to Dario Gam- boni for pointing out that viewers can concentrate on details with some success in spite of the inevita- ble presence of other things in the field of vision. Steven Lubar points out the invention of the ‘sciascope’ in the early twentieth century by Benjamin Ives Gilman, secretary of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston between 1893 and 1925. This device was designed to narrow the field of vision to enforce attentive look- ing at individual works or their details: Lubar, Inside the Lost Museum , 2017, pp. 171 –172.