Looking for Nothing

The essay examines “evenly suspended attention” as a complement to—even an alternative for—the “close looking” often advocated as the ideal of art-historical attentiveness, as recommended by many art historians to their students and to the public. After considering the introspective psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and natural and social histories of “selective attention,” it contrasts the psychoanalytic recommendation actively to suspend it. In this regard, the work of two influential artwriters exemplifies some of the possibilities and results: what the essay describes as the philosopher Richard Wollheim’s “divided attention” and the art historian T. J. Clark’s “distributed attention.” The author also evaluates the continuum of attention—from selective to suspended—in his own practice. Beyond individual procedures, there is a good theoretical rationale for suspended attention as a productive mode of art-historical interpretation: in surfacing networks of association to visual form, it potentially matches the actual social and psychic constitution of a visual culture and of the artworks generated within it.