Picturing Performance: The Iconography of the Performing Arts in Concept and Practice (review)

Picturing Performance. The Iconography Of The Performing Arts In Concept And Practice. Edited by Thomas F. Heck. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1999; pp. xii + 257. $59.95.

Thomas F. Heck has assembled an impressive collection of informative essays which aim "to raise consciousness within the profession . . . of the opportunities that lie at hand to seek, to find, and to use in appropriate ways the pictorial materials that relate to the performing art we call theatre" as well as to music and dance (138; emphasis added). This collection is both long overdue and extremely timely. As many examples clarify beyond doubt, too many scholars have taken pictorial documents at face value, without duly considering the various constraints that influence the conception and realization of a painting, statue, etching, or a photograph or video. Concurrently, new technology makes it increasingly easy to view and study pictures on a computer screen in a manner that, only ten years ago, required solid knowledge of art collections around the world, the desire to view these depictions first hand, and considerable travel funds. Heck has assembled a vademecum for performance, music, and dance scholars to use in theoretical and practical ways in researching and assessing visual documentation.

Heck's most important caveat, in his concise introduction and detailed first chapter, concerns the tendency to take depictions at face value far more readily than written texts. Whether this situation arises from a word-based culture, or from other concurring factors, Heck contends, performance scholars have limited their analyses of visual documents to a superficial level. Lyckle de Vries's essay, for example, "Iconography and Iconology in Art History: Panofsky's Prescriptive Definitions and Some Art-Historical Responses to Them," re-asserts the centrality of the German art historian's concepts while offering some "emendations" aimed at freeing them from a "fixed order in which iconological research should proceed" (62). Additionally, he brings to the attention of English speakers the crucial contributions of two Dutch art historians, Henri van de Waal and Christian Tümpel, who complicate Erwin Panofsky's methodology by considering form, content, and function in one case, and traditional art historical subject matter in the other.

Chapter three, "Discourses in Applied Iconography: Traditions, Techniques, and Trends," is divided into four parts. Each part is built around a historical introduction, followed by practical advice on how to utilize pictorial documents effectively in studying performance, and then by some emerging trends in the latest technological developments. The first essay, by M.A. Katritzky, concentrates on "Performing-Arts Iconography," defined as including "musical spectacles and entertainments . . . popular entertainment . . . and performances presented via the mass media of radio, film, television, and video" (68). Katritzky points at Aby Warburg's and Max Herrmann's pioneering roles in the field and then moves on to a concrete example of how the superficial analysis of a painting led to erroneous historical conclusions on a specific performative tradition. Visual documents must be interpreted along with other testimonies, in order to avoid fanciful and unsupported generalizations.

In the section devoted to "Musical Iconography" Thomas Heck proposes a slightly different categorization, built around subject-matters: "(a) portraiture . . . (b) the history and development of musical instruments, (c) the manner in which earlier performances of music took place . . . and (d) the role and place of music in cultural history and society" (92). Heck also underscores the double impact of the visual realm on music, since notation is musicians' effort to make the aural printable, that is, visual. Lab annotation fulfills the same role in the realm of dance, as A. William Smith points out in the section devoted to "Dance Iconography." His tripartite classification of dance depictions resembles Katritzky's in that it underscores the production of the visual document rather than its subject-matter. He also briefly considers the distinct theoretical challenge posed by moving pictures.

Lastly, Robert Erenstein's concise essay devoted to "Theatre Iconography" justifies...