174FOLLOWING MATERIALITYabout realism and the conditions that different notions of realism impose
on human/animal relations.
As argued by James Elkins, art history has traditionally taken interest
in the materiality of works of art on a general and abstract level.^31 This
contingency has predominantly been the result of a reliance on phenom-
enology, especially capitalizing on Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Husserl.^32
But the changing scenery of contemporary artistic production is one in
which the materiality of a work of art can no longer be ignored.^33 For in-
stance, Elkins’s extreme close-up analysis of the painterly surface central
to his book What Painting Is replaced historicity with materiality, ac-
knowledging what usually remains unuttered in art historical discourses.^34
This traditional epistemic modality was inherited from the practices and
theories of neoclassical art that informed artistic production during the
modern age. Ingres’s point of view on painting and materiality, for in-
stance, reflected popular positions on the relationship between the two.
He believed that the painter’s manipulation of materials should be con-
cealed from the viewer’s gaze, allowing the image to surface beyond the
materiality that enables its visibility. “Touch should not be apparent....
Instead of the object represented, it makes you see the painter’s technique;
in the place of thought, it proclaims the hand.”^35 Materiality was thus
muted and paradoxically conceived as a domain irrelevant to art histori-
cal interpretation, as that which belongs to the realm of production, and
therefore inferior. According to Elkins, “there is no account of the materi-
ality of physicality of an artwork that contains an argument about the
limits of historical or critical attention to materiality, and therefore there
is no reason not to press on, taking physicality as seriously as possible,
spending as much time with it as possible, finding as many words for it as
possible.”^36 A greater focus on materiality, he argues, can lead to a sense of
anxiety about what can be said in a professional remit: a nonaffirmative
maneuver that might cost the status quo. As Elkins points out: “[But] it is
a fact, an unpleasant one, that the overwhelming majority of art histori-
ans and critics do not want to explore beyond the point where writing
becomes difficult.”^37 Following this line of thought, it becomes visible that
venturing where writing becomes difficult in the pursuit of materiality
also requires the will to abandon anthropocentric frameworks. Ulti-
mately, the parameters of what we are allowed to see and to say in an art
historical analysis have for centuries been limited by anthropocentric and