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06.01.04, Kenaan-Kedar and Ovadiah, eds., The Metamorphosis of Marginal Images

06.01.04, Kenaan-Kedar and Ovadiah, eds., The Metamorphosis of Marginal Images


I was relieved to see an acknowledgment of Michael Camille--albeit well along in this book--in Cécile Fouquet's contribution, "Le problème de l'illustration marginale à l'époque romane" (83). It may have occurred earlier and I missed it. But it was not in the prefatory remarks where it should have been. The conference enshrined in this publication proceeds from a notion of marginality in the visual arts that was formulated, by more than anything else in recent years, by Camille in his slender volume, Image on the Edge. The Margins of Medieval Art, Cambridge MA, 1992. And with it this book also shares some of the limitations of this formulation.

Camille's contribution lay in no small part in the synthesis he effected between two previously quite separate modes of thinking about the marginal: the semiotic, as embodied, for instance, in Meyer Schapiro's essay, "On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art. Field and Vehicle in Image-Sign" (Simiolus, 6, 1972-73, 9-19); and the social, as expressed in the work of, among others, Mikhail Bakhtin. In drawing upon and interweaving these trains of thought, Camille's discourse gained an exuberance and an open-endedness that made his study seem like a series of exciting leaps. But he also relinquished something important in the focus of each, and with this, some sense of historical necessity and rationale. Camille's margins flowed, in a few short pages, from manuscripts and church portals to the streets of towns and the hierarchies of institutions, all of which, on the surface of it, might strike us as eminently reasonable from our contemporary historical and methodological points of view. But they raise an issue that seems to me key and that is at the heart of the project under review here: how do we determine just what it is that constitutes an edge and hence a center in any given work of the past? Just as one man's meat is another man's poison, so one man's edge could be another man's center. This uncertainty has an overarching relevance that extends from physical form to social significance. Such exquisite attention was paid to capitals, archivolts and jambs in Romanesque and Gothic churches that it flies in the face of reason to call them marginal, and an anachronism to boot, however much they may seem so to us today with our completely different architectural frame of reference. In the introduction to this volume an even larger dichotomy is proposed between official and marginal art, in which "a compositional model that is hierarchical, and symmetrically oppositional--based on contrasting parallels such as high and low, good and evil, light and dark" (official) is set against "a category of artistic imagery intentionally meant to question, and to test, the official artistic criteria" (marginal). In such a conceptualization of difference the project of this book falls into line with Camille's train of thought, where marginalia often carry the burden of subversion. Subversion, of course, is a behavior or attitude that entails consequences (even if they are not the ones intended). But here, as elsewhere in "marginal" studies, consequences are hard to discern.

This volume is the result of a conference organized by Nurith Kenaan-Kedar and Asher Ovadiah in 1999 at Tel-Aviv University that ranged through the history of art. One of the initial points of interest for the organizers was the "inhabited scroll" of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, to which the first section of the book is devoted (Asher Ovadiah, Talila Michaeli, Christine B. Verzar and José Maria Blazquez). The last embraces studies of Bosch (Yona Pinson), Giacometti (Ruth Markus) and Photography (Meir Wigoder). In between are essays devoted to ancient, Islamic, Romanesque and Gothic art. Beyond the roughly chronological ordering of the contributions there is nothing here to suggest a sequence or development in argument or even a connection from moment to moment. The intellectual strategy is more in the manner of an encyclopedia, whose efficacy as a narrative derives from the disparateness of its points of view.

At the same time the contributions function on two different levels: as collecting points and catalogues of information, or as essays and interpretations. In the case of the former are the chapters of Ovidiah, Michaeli and Blazquez on inhabited scrolls, Esther Grabiner on the elbow column, and Valentino Pace on south Italian sculpture. With regard to the latter, mention may be made of Verzar's suggestive interpretation of Wiligelmo's door frames on the west façade of Modena Cathedral in light of Roman scrollwork, particularly from Old St. Peter's; Rivka Gersht's probing dissection of a set of emblematic pavement panels from Hadrian's villa in Tivoli; Fouquet's impressive overview of marginal images in illuminated manuscripts of the Romanesque period; Anja Grebe's nuanced reading of page design in manuscripts of the Ghent-Bruges School, with some skepticism, overdue I believe, voiced about the role of memory; Susan Nashman Fraiman's equally nuanced analysis of the Darmstadt Haggadah in the context of Ashkenazi Jewry; and Meir Wigoder's poetic evocation of the meaning of shadowy figures and shadows in contemporary and near contemporary photography.

Are there any generalizations to be drawn from such an endeavor? Probably none that would hold across the board. But I was struck by the straightforwardness and disarming simplicity of the conclusion reached by one of the authors, Hana Taragan, who, at the end of a lengthy and learned disquisition on the reliefs of the female figures at Khirbat al-Mafjar that threaded its way through the peregrinations of prior scholarship (in which the figures were "interpreted as maenads, bacchantes, celestial dancers or, alternatively, as palace girls"), arrived at the truth that they were there "because of their femininity" (77). Sometimes the answer is right on the surface.