way this is implicated in the numerous transformations and pastiches of the painting that have been created by contemporary artists. Postmodern art used to have a predilection for referring to the works of the Italian Mannerist and Baroque artists, and still does. Caravaggio’s production has been the object of an unusually wide range of quotes. It fascinated also Pignon-Ernest in his project Naples (1988–1995), which we mentioned in the first part of our text. On the other hand, the mainstream modernists on their part were inspired by historical artists such as Piero della Francesca, Nicolas Poussin, Jacques-Louis David and Paul Cézanne. In this context there was never any question of irony or parody, but the visual compositional solutions of these masters were appreciated and treated with an aura of respect. In this way they were accepted as part of the history of formalist modernism, as its imaginary pre-stages. Among the most evident examples of this are the numerous paintings called hommage à in the art of the 20th century. The art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that reinterprets the past, is in fact quite intellectual and analytical. In this way, it approaches conceptual art, but at the same time, it also approaches the learned literary symbolism stemming from Renaissance art, a perspective once condemned by modernism stressing the autonomous and mute visuality of art. The Renaissance artist, however, believed in the reality of symbols in quite a different way from that of the contemporary artist using a traditional catalogue today. In more recent times, we have grown quite conscious of the continuous changes in signification occurring in different reading situations, and more generally, of the instability and oscillations of linguistic signification. It was exactly this process of creating signification that started to fascinate artists a few decades ago. This has turned art into something to a great extent self-analysing and self-reflecting. Making this kind of art is in fact like doing research. It’s interesting to study how significations are born and die in the creative re-use of the art tradition. When you repeat a picture or a linguistic phrase, the content is never the same in the new environment. When you borrow and combine pictures, let them sink into each other, cut and glue them, stratified fields of signification are born, that usually remain ambiguous as to their messages. The radiance of the borrowed elements and quotations results exactly from the continuous transformations and oscillations of the significations. The works demand to be “read”, but their hieroglyphic language remains so untransparent that we only perceive fragments of it, while the whole picture remains subject to interpretation. It’s also interesting to ponder the question: What idea of history lies behind the kind of art that uses a historical
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material? By turning to history, postmodernism attacked the way historyless modernist art worshipped pure visuality. At the same time, it criticized the modern optimistic idea of progress, by stressing the nature of history as something haphazard lacking a finality, its absurdity, drawing our attention to the catastrophes of civilization. The general interest in historical culture has also grown lately. Instead of a strict analysis of the processes of forming signification, the affective position inherent in popular culture has had as its result that in the different fields of art and popular culture there have been aspirations rather to come to touch with the past, to make it come alive here and now. This has been achieved with all kinds of cultural heritage destinations, games, historical novels, epochal films, retrominded photo art and reminiscence culture in general. This general turn towards history and memory has also influenced the art field. The Dutch cultural researcher and art historian Mieke Bal is of the opinion that, however, in the final analysis what we are most interested in is our own time, and that we tend to turn our gaze to the kind of historical epoch that we somehow identify ourselves with in the name of “shared time” (Quoting Caravaggio. Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999). During the last few decades, the European Baroque has been precisely this kind of art epoch, and Bal ascribes the numerous references made in contemporary art to that of Caravaggio to this very phenomenon. According to Bal, the era in question was analogous to ours, in the same way self-analysing and critical of given truths, and in this way its art serves as the perfect base for pondering on our own problematic. In the relationship of the art of the last few decades to history, you can actually perceive several contradictory tendencies. Many people who consider themselves critically minded eagerly judge the open fascination with past phenomena or epochs as politically conservative nostalgia, or as a market-oriented and eclectic way of using history. As a counterweight, critical historicism is said to be subversive in a positive way, an orientation that problematizes the great narratives of history, as well as displaying the different counterhistories stemming from the experiences of repressed and persecuted groups. In art there are also numerous examples of this, in which parody often walks hand in hand with a serious political agenda. However, these two opposite ways of facing history – and using it as material for art – are not the only possibilities. Some cultural researchers who have analysed nostalgia – for example Susan Stewart and Svetlana Boym – talk about the positive sides of an affective relationship to history that strives to revivify the past, and don’t necessarily consider it as in any way escapist or politically questionable (Susan