Work
Stephen Bann's work has been influential in focusing scholarly attention toward connections between the history of art and visual culture. The Clothing of Clio (1984), The Inventions of History (1990) and Romanticism and the Rise of History (1995) are concerned in particular with the deepening consciousness of history particular to the 19th Century. The examples that Bann takes are explained by him not from a reductive art historical perspective, but through acknowledgement of such examples' location in a broader, metahistorical network. Visual sources, sometimes even unlikely or fragmentary ones, are valued by the author as still points of reference: “a visual example provides a support for the exegesis that the reader (spectator) can follow in a directly participatory way. Its very self-contained nature (as opposed to an extract from a text) enables it to generate cross-references as well as to provide a field for practical analysis” (Romanticism and the Rise of History).
Bann's notion of 'historical-mindedness' as originating in the 19th Century and particularly in Paris is unique in the addition of the concept of 'the poetics of the museum'. Here, the subjectivity of the author of a museum or collection is established as significant in determining how particular representations of the past are structured, specifically in terms of tendencies toward synecdoche (empathetic recreation) and/or metonymy (mechanical and sequential display).
Bann's interest in semiotics, the capacity of images to bear significance, is exemplified in Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness (1994), which comments on the peculiar history and status of a 17th Century cabinet of curiosity as an aid in the self-definition of the collector. Themes of travel and acquisition are brought together on these grounds to detect meaning. Similarly, in writing on the history of gardens, Bann has found cause to cite the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, amongst others indicative of a contemporary imaginative predisposition.
In Ways Around Modernism (2006), Bann affirms his approach of appreciating commentaries or histories as themselves change- and epoch-making. The argument is completed with an assessment of Post-Modernism in connection with “the historical phenomenon of 'curiosity'” which, for Bann, “has resurfaced as a widespread and noteworthy feature of present-day art”. By implication, Post-Modernism may thus reveal overlooked qualities in Modernism. An insistence upon the importance of looking and unstinting attentiveness, in addition to inter-disciplinary openness, is characteristic and influential in his writing.
Bann has also depicted modernity through architectural study, particularly in his article for the Burlington Magazine, Architecture: A modern analysis of system and discourse. The article led Hamish Proto of The Tablet to remark,'this discourse adds to our translation of modernity through an empirical approach to viewing system and building together on the one stand'.
Bann's book Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (Yale University Press, 2001) was awarded the 2003 R. H. Gapper Book Prize by the UK Society for French Studies. This prize recognises the work as the best book published by a scholar working in Britain or Ireland in French studies in 2001.
In 2006, the American academic journal, Grande Fromage named Bann as one of the leading thinkers on modernity, stating "Stephen Bann has done much to explain the abstract and make the subject of modernity fresh and alive."
Stephen Bann has also contributed translations of Roland Barthes's The Discourse of History and Julia Kristeva's Proust and the Sense of Time (1993).
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