Absence, silence, invisibility. Given the vibrant exchanges that took place at HECAA@30, representing many of the important dialogues happening across eighteenth-century art histories, it feels strange to center an essay on absence. Yet, the recuperative possibilities of art history, visual culture studies, and material culture studies, necessitate that scholars of eighteenth-century art and architecture begin to holistically address absence with the same creativity, care, and attention we have brought to what survives.
Reading the collective wisdom encapsulated in the “Reflections on HECAA at 25: A Roundtable discussion,” and published in Journal18, I was struck by the sense of evidentiary abundance. That conference corresponded with a larger shift to expand art history’s traditional Eurocentric geographies of study, alongside a burgeoning interest in understudied visual and material forms. When coupled with increased attention to the visual and material workings of imperialism, colonialism, gender, racial capitalism, and global circulation, a sense of the opening of new possibilities was palpable.
Those generative avenues of inquiry continued at HECAA@30 with greater emphasis on the uneven and contested nature of political claims. Panelists dwelt on cross-cultural encounters, surfaced embodied knowledges and emancipatory possibilities, and traced material trajectories that acknowledged the skilled labor of Indigenous and African Diasporic makers. The eco-critical proved another destabilizing force cutting across settler colonial claims to account for the harms perpetuated against humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans, suggesting alternative coordinates to understand world-making.
It is a testament to the vitality of this work that it can be difficult to think about absence. What is missing? What artworks and artifacts were destroyed or not preserved? Which artworks were unable to be produced? How do silences hold specific historical meanings? While some scholars have studied the fugitive—ephemeral objects, performances, or landscapes—art history as a discipline is inherently positivist; we generally study what we encounter, that which survives. The bedrock of analysis remains a sensory engagement that we translate into a description of an artwork’s material and formal qualities. Art historians do not typically hold ourselves responsible for missing images or artifacts, those works that could not be made as a result of attempted cultural genocide or anti-Black racism, and those works that did not survive due to ongoing settler colonialism, the legacies of enslavement, and the privileging of elite white histories. What would it mean for art historians of the eighteenth-century to take responsibility for lost, unmade, or silenced artworks?
My thoughts about absence formed initially in relation to a book project about enslaved African Americans as producers and viewers of portraits in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. I confronted portraits, unlocatable in any library or museum, which nevertheless held profound importance for many enslaved and free African Americans as they formed an immaterial archive that anti-slavery advocate Frederick Douglass poetically termed a “picture gallery” of the “soul.”[1] The works of Saidiya Hartman and Marisa Fuentes proved profound in encouraging me to view absence not as a stopping point but an active site for making meaning. Absence is an invitation to read archives against one another to creatively and ethically address silences.[2] The tools of art history—the ability to observe closely and to attend to artifacts’ affective and subversive power—can, and must be, mobilized to reimagine the absent.
Absence also encourages us to view abundance differently. Paying attention to absences that reappear across archives, or forms of cultural expression, renders the ideological positions of those who created silences, a violent act, more visible. Absence helps art historians to recognize colonialism’s repeated formats and compositions that simultaneously sought to make certain groups invisible through omission of their names, words, or self-created images, and yet also make them hyper-visible, whether obscured behind racist stereotypes or through seizure and redeployment of their cultural heritage. When framed in this way, archival abundance is perceivable as the labor required for white supremacist attempts to render power structures invisible and to perpetuate ideas about “lost” histories or “missing” peoples. Reorienting around absence aids recuperative art histories because it enables the telling of long understudied stories and encourages scholars to engage differently with that which remains.[3]
It is here that my work as a scholar and my service as HECAA’s president coincide. One of HECAA’s strengths is our uniting of scholars who focus on different geographies, media, and empires, which inherently challenges nationally-based art histories and destabilizes assumptions within sub-fields about which art matters. Thinking together trans-archivally and trans-geographically about absence, what strategies for dismantling or counteracting archival abundance will emerge? What models for recovery and redress coalesce? I am excited to see what a collective accounting for absences in the eighteenth century can engender.
I am also eager to think about absence not only in our scholarship but in our relationships. Who was not present at HECAA@30? Who claims the art and items we study? Who do we want to learn together with, and how can we do so most ethically?[4] For me, some of the most notable absences at HECAA@30 were emerging scholars active at HECAA@25 who have since left the academy and cultural heritage sector due to the lack of job opportunities or whose contingent employment does not provide the time or funds required for conference attendance. How can we as an organization better care for them and support the humanities to minimize such future absences? As we move forward, I see absence as a call to inclusive action, a means of holding ourselves accountable, and an arena for working toward justice and redress. I look forward to continuing to be in conversation about absence as we think ahead to where we want our organization and our scholarship to be when we meet again at HECAA@35.
Jennifer Van Horn is Professor of Art History and History at the University of Delaware in Newark, DE and President of HECAA (2023—)
[1] Jennifer Van Horn, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 209-10.
[2] Saidiya Hartman’s, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26.12.2 (June 2008): 1-14; and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019); Marisa J. Fuentes’s, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and “Historical Care and the (Re)Writing of Sexual Violence in the Colonial Americas,” The William and Mary Quarterly 80:4 (October 2023): 693-700.
[3] These thoughts crystallized during a 2024 summer seminar at the American Antiquarian Society, “Disability Histories in the Visual Archive: Redress, Protest, and Justice.”
[4] I am indebted to conversations with many collaborators and scholars inside and outside of HECAA, especially Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 14-34; and Susan Burch, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship In and Beyond Institutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), and “Disability History Association Podcast,” December 2021: https://dishist.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Susan-Burch-Transcript-FINAL.pdf
Cite this note as: Jennifer Van Horn, “Absence and Abundance: Thinking Ahead From HECAA@30” Journal18 (October 2024), https://www.journal18.org/7432.
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