This issue of The Art Bulletin marks the conclusion of my term as editor-in-chief. As such, it brings with it the temptation to look back through the collective voices of past articles in an attempt to chart the field’s dominant strains. Tracking the course of art historical thinking over the past three years of my editorial tenure, my methodological compass has been steadily pointing toward one direction: materiality. Although by no means a novelty in the art historical vocabulary, the notion of “materiality” and its metaphoric cognates, such as “close looking,” “haptic,” “le faire,” “the touch,” or “embodied object”—denoting the increasing concern with the sensory, physical aspects of artifacts seen comprehensively and shorn of hierarchical distinctions—has been part of recent art historical scholarship for some time.1 This material turn has wrought nothing less than a momentous overhaul of our field, dramatically expanding its purview to include, and upgrade the status of, categories of art-related fields once only tangentially acknowledged as art history, such as material culture, design history, connoisseurship, technical art history, conservation, museum studies, fashion, and decorative arts. The discipline’s changing, multifarious profile has been sanctioned by the emergence of interdisciplinary programs in close collaboration with art and art history departments, and by institutional support for a spate of initiatives meant to spark further interest and research in these areas, as noted by Caroline Fowler’s introductory article here, “Technical Art History as Method.”2 According to Peter Miller, a materialist approach to cultural artifacts as a self-conscious scholarly methodology enlisting the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and sociology first emerged in the 1880s, with Aby Warburg as the pioneer figure in its application to art history.3 Its path has proven bumpy, marked by alternate disappearances and revivals. For the anthropologist Ruth Phillips, the material shift in art history may be seen as a reaction to the theoretical and “linguistic” turn of the 1970s and 1980s.4 The advent, in the 1990s, of the disembodied, dematerialized approaches of the “digital-virtual” fad and of “visual culture studies” constituted yet another setback to this course, as Horst Bredekamp and others have argued. This hazardous “overthrow of matter” was happily subverted by the reinstatement of “the sensibility for simple objects . . . and the sense for materiality” at the outset of the twenty-first century,5 a reinstatement Michael Ann Holly has hailed as a reprieve from “digitalization” and as a “rejuvenated fascination with the objectness of the object,” the “thingliness” of things, physicality, and phenomenologically inspired embodied perception. As Holly puts it, “Works of art are wrapped round by their own materiality, to which embodied spectators respond.”6 Materiality builds up the artwork’s physical and signifying totality, Monika Wagner contended, in 2001, in launching her pioneer “Materialikonologie” (the iconography of materials), which proposes an alternative history of modern art based on a fundamental engagement with the materials of art.7 And Ivan Gaskell presses an even more radical idea: doing away with the “hard borders” dividing materials, culture, and history.8 Add “art” into the mix, and these walls have already collapsed. In 2013, under the rubric “Notes from the Field,” The Art Bulletin dedicated several pages to a debate on the meaning of “materiality” involving scholars from across the humanities.9 The survey marked an important step in revealing changing perspectives in art history that rehabilitated, indeed, extolled the idea of materiality as a legitimate component of art historical methodologies, whose expansive, transcultural, interdisciplinary, and diachronic valence extended from mere investigation of the material constitution of an artifact to the more complex quest for its meaning as an “embodied object” in reciprocal phenomenological dialogue with its historical setting, functions, and makers-observers. By engaging a broad range of resources, media, and methodologies, The Art Bulletin exchanges became paradigmatic of a methodological shift in our field marked by a novel egalitarian approach to objects (things) as culturally signifying portents, beyond

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重要性，时代的标志

本期《艺术公报》标志着我担任总编辑的结论。因此，它带来了通过回顾过去文章的集体声音来试图绘制该领域的主要压力的诱惑。在我担任编辑职务的过去三年中，追踪艺术历史思维的过程，我的方法指南针一直稳定地指向一个方向：重要性。尽管绝非艺术史上的词汇新颖，但“物质性”及其隐喻性的概念还是很常见的，例如“近距离观察”，“触觉”，“自由放任”，“接触”或“体现对象” —一段时间以来，人们对艺术品的感官，物理方面和层次分明的区分越来越关注，这已成为近期艺术史研究的一部分。1这种物质上的转变无非是对我们领域的一次重大改革，极大地扩展了其范围，以涵盖和提升与艺术相关的领域的类别，这些领域一旦被切向承认为艺术史，例如物质文化，设计史，鉴赏，技术艺术史，保护，博物馆研究，时装和装饰艺术。与卡罗琳·福勒（Caroline Fowler）指出，与艺术和艺术史部门密切合作，跨学科计划的出现，以及一系列旨在激发人们对该领域进一步兴趣和研究的举措的机构支持，都认可了该学科不断变化的多元化特征。彼得·米勒（Peter Miller）说：物质主义方法作为一种自觉的学术方法论，作为一种文化研究方法，涉足人类学，考古学和社会学领域，始于1880年代，阿比·沃伯格（Aby Warburg）是其将其应用于艺术史的先驱人物。3它的道路被证明是坎bump的，以失踪和复兴为特征。对于人类学家露丝·菲利普斯（Ruth Phillips）而言，艺术史上的物质转变可以看作是对1970年代和1980年代理论和“语言”转变的反应。41990年代，“数字化”的无形，非物质化方法的出现。正如霍斯特·布雷德坎普（Horst Bredekamp）等人指出的那样，“虚拟”时尚和“视觉文化研究”构成了这门课程的又一挫折。恢复“对简单物体的敏感性”这一危险的颠覆性破坏了这种危险的“物质颠覆”。。。和对物质的感觉”在二十一世纪之初5。迈克尔·安·霍利（Michael Ann Holly）的恢复被誉为“数字化”的缓和，以及“对物体的客观性的重新焕发的迷恋”，“物质性”。事物，身体和受现象学启发的体现感知。正如Holly所说：“艺术品被自身的物质性所包裹，观众对此做出了回应。” 6物质性构成了艺术品的物理意义和整体意义，莫妮卡·瓦格纳（Monika Wagner）在2001年提出了自己的先驱者“ Materialikonologie”（ （材料的肖像学），提出了基于对艺术材料的基本参与的现代艺术的替代历史。7伊万·加斯凯（Ivan Gaskell）提出了一个更为激进的想法：消除划分材料，文化，和历史。8在混合中添加“艺术品”，这些墙已经倒塌了。2013年，在《野外笔记》一书的标题下，《艺术简讯》专页讨论了“实质性”的含义，涉及来自全人类的学者。9该调查标志着揭示艺术史上不断变化的观点的重要一步。的确恢复了物质性这一艺术历史方法论的合法组成部分的观念，其广泛，跨文化，跨学科和历时性的价位从仅仅对人工制品的物质构成的研究扩展到了对其意义的更为复杂的追求。在相互的现象学对话中的“体现的对象”及其历史背景，功能和制造者－观察者。通过使用广泛的资源，媒体和方法，