Post-Vanitas Era: When Did Art History Become Explainable?

 

When Did Art History Become Explainable?

The question we open today is this:
When did art history become something that must be explainable?

This question is not neutral.
It is already a critique, and a declaration of position.

Art did not originally demand explanation.
At the very least, explanation was not a prerequisite for its existence.
Explanation came later—
it was not a passport that allowed a work to exist.

At some point, however,
we began to ask different questions in front of artworks.

Why is it important?
What does it say?
Where does it belong?

These questions appear harmless,
yet they share a single assumption:
that the work must be explainable.

The moment art history becomes an explainable system,
the artwork shifts from an event to a document.
Experience is no longer a site of thought,
but is reduced to information.

This transformation was not sudden.
After the war, art multiplied.
Its forms, media, and claims expanded rapidly,
and language was summoned to organize the excess.
Explanation initially functioned as an aid to understanding,
but gradually it became a criterion of permission—
a condition for existence.
From that point on,
the artwork was expected to speak first,
and silence came to be misread as incompetence.

This is the point at which I feel uneasy.

In an era saturated with explanation,
we do not understand more—
we simply consume faster.
Explanation does not protect the work;
it authorizes speed.

So I ask:
Is an unexplained state truly incomplete?
Or is it evidence that something has not yet been consumed?

When art history is fixed into an explainable language,
we learn how to ask questions.
But we lose the ability to sustain them.

What I seek in my work is not understanding,
but suspension.
Not agreement expressed through a nod,
but the moment in which language briefly fails.
Explanation can always be added later.
But once silence disappears,
it cannot be restored.

For this reason,
I am less interested in explaining art history
than in rendering it unstable again.

This text is not a conclusion.
It is a marker of position.

I stand outside an explainable art history,
seeking to keep certain questions
from becoming too easily articulated.

Having written this far, I recognize that this question
also turns toward myself, without exception.
For a long time, I explained.
I articulated context,
clarified references,
and delivered meaning in advance.
This was both defense and survival.
I worked within a structure
where what was not explained risked disappearance.
This text is not an attempt to disavow that past.
That period was necessary.
Explanation protected my work;
it allowed it time to endure.
But I have reached a point
where I no longer need to sustain that role.
Beginning in 2026,
I will deliberately reduce explanations of the works themselves.

Instead, I intend to dwell more deeply
within aesthetic thought—
within questions that remain unnamed,
and within trajectories of thinking that resist final articulation.

This is not a declaration of silence.
Nor is it a rejection of language
or a contempt for explanation.
It is a decision to reposition speech.

Explanation will no longer precede the work.
The work will exist first;
explanation will follow later,
only when necessary.

For this reason, this text is not a contradiction,
but a record of movement.

I have worked within an explainable art history,
and I am now moving toward a position
that seeks to sustain questions rather than resolve them.

I stand outside an explainable art history,
seeking to keep certain questions
from being articulated again.

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