Visual Time: The Image in History by Keith Moxey (review)

Keith Moxey’s Visual Time: The Image in History is an exploration of the concept of time and how it relates to art. The book is in line with Moxey’s other theory-based scholarship, including the influential Practice of Persuasion: Paradox & Power In Art History (2001) and The Practice of Theory (1994). Visual Time is strikingly ambitious in its goals. The introduction presents a long string of questions that set the stage for an interrogation of both the concept of time and the accepted theoretical framework of art history. These questions range from the general (“When and where is the time of the history of art?”) to the specific (“If modernism has come to an end, how is the history of art to deal with heterochronicity …?), while typically addressing issues of chronology and geography.

The book is split into two parts, and further divided into seven chapters. Such divisions allow the author to more carefully structure his highly theoretical arguments. Entitled “Time,” Part I focuses on heterochronic aspects of art history, while specifically analyzing postcolonial scenarios. The first chapter is devoted to exploring the idea of multiple modernities. It explains how the evolutionary conception of chronology within art history is necessarily biased, and it seeks to reconceptualize our understanding of time in order to account for works of art and artistic movements outside of the traditional narrative.

With the provocative titled, “Do We Still Need a Renaissance?” the second chapter questions art historical periodization. The author highlights the values of, and drawbacks to, the accepted understanding of various epochs in art history. Moxey, however, is not the first scholar to question the legitimacy and meaning of the Renaissance as a distinct period, thus he devotes much of the chapter to analyzing earlier scholarship. “Contemporaneity’s Heterochronicity,” the final chapter in Part I, deals with the slippery idea of the present. The author dissects the contemporary period and the concept of contemporaneity, while further questioning periodization.

Part II, “History,” focuses on anachronic aspects of objects while providing an analysis of the visual experience. The author asserts that works of art can create their own form of time that is linked to perception and aesthetics. “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” the first chapter in Part II, deals with issues of presence and agency as related to art objects. Moxey pits semiotics and other Anglo-American-based approaches against phenomenology and Franco-Germanic-based theories. The next chapter is centered on the works of a specific artist, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Clearly laying out his goals, the author declares that the chapter is intended to be a “thought experiment.” He acknowledges that art history traditionally deals with the historical period in which an object was created, but he aims for an alternative approach that would find meaning in works of art in the present moment.

“Mimesis and Iconoclasm,” the penultimate chapter, probes the concepts of illusion and verisimilitude. The author focuses on reception rather than production, and his primary visual examples are Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) and the “hyperrealistic” photographs of Thomas Demand, a contemporary photographer. Returning to the book’s titular theme, he concludes that the “time” of the artwork is the present, that is, the moment during which the “miracle of mimesis” captures the viewer’s attention. The final chapter deals with the historiography of Albrecht Dürer and Matthias Grünewald. The author discusses historical distance and its relation to German national identity during the first half of the twentieth century. He investigates Erwin Panofsky’s arguments about historical distance and the construction of the Renaissance, and he links this to the concept of memory and history’s role in the present.

Each chapter is relatively concise, with the longest featuring just over twenty pages of text. Moxey’s arguments are dense, abstract, and theoretical, but their brevity allows readers to digest the content. The final product is essentially a series of short essays neatly bound by a few common themes that are clearly...