‘In the (visual) arts the present, future, and past are intimately connected and engaged in an ongoing prologue of mutual enrichment.’

‘Museums that think transhistorically do just that and facilitate a rendezvous between the old and the new, the artist of the past and those of the present, linking heritage and tradition to contemporary art and social questions. IN doing so, they try to break through the separatism that seems inherent in Western European art history with its focus on periods and movements.’

‘Since the turn of this century, we have moreover witnessed a significant expanse in the field of transhistorical exhibition practice in and outside of (museum) institutions: a diverse range of curatorial efforts in which objects and artefacts from various periods and art-historical and cultural context are combined in display, in order to question and expand traditional museological notions such as chronology, linearity, and medium.’

‘The transhistorical museum thus offers us a way to look at the past via the present (or another historical period) and vice versa, and had the potential for new ways of interpreting and learning.’

‘The transhistorical museum thus offers us a way to look at the past via the present (or another historical period) and vice versa, and had the potential for new ways of interpreting and learning.’

‘The artist seems to be the one, as Neo Rauch quite esoterically puts is, that has an inkling or a suspicion that everything coexist simultaneously. They act from that interconnectivity between what once was and what is yet to come.’

‘Can a transhistorical approach produce relevant new insights into the specific qualities of art objects, by manoeuvring them into uncharted context — historically, materially, and ontologically?’

‘Nicola Setari’s opening essay makes an important and useful distinction here, in — what he calls — a negative and a positive concept of transhistoricity. The positive attest the artwork with a surplus value that allows it to form relations across time, whereas the negative is based on the idea that historical artworks need to be activated to become meaningful for an audience. This is most often achieved by way of a juxtaposition with contemporary art. Whereas the positive is attributed to the artwork as such, the negative unfolds in relation to an audience and results in a curatorial project — the histories we tell about an artwork.’

‘Understood theoretically, transhistoricity embodies the positive concept and relates to the purpose of art, to what it can achieve or fulfil beyond, or better, through its historical determinations.’

‘Transhistoricity is often limited to a strategy to reanimate or activate artworks from the past that are perceived as having been buried by history or that run this risk, by associating them whit contemporary artworks or projects, while in the second, transhistoricity is a kind of intrinsic quality of certain artworks or object of interest, which through their historical determination overcome their historicity.’

‘The positive concept does tend to receive less attention because it is informed by humanistic values that do not seem to have much currency in the contemporary art world.’

‘The humanistic values underlying the notion of transhistoricity need to be brought to the foreground to understand what exactly we are dealing with.’

‘Returning to Ricœur’s [Paul Ricœur is een Franse filosoof] reference to Kant, it is worth recalling that the universality of the judgement of taste is inter-subjective and never objective, meaning that the judgement of beauty (or of the sublime) in a subject is always accompanied by the aspiration that this judgement be shared by all other subjects.’

‘The transformation from documentation of the past to possibility for the future, that is transhistoricity.’

‘In other words, transhistoricity is grounded on the idea that the ancient and the modern can dialogue and respectively illuminate each other on the basis of specific questions and that the movement does not necessarily have to follow only one direction.’

‘In his [Paul Crowther in The Transhistorical Image] introduction, he claims that post-structuralism’s critique against formalist approaches to art and in favour of the social history of art produces a sceptical art history that ultimately makes ‘artistic production a means to curatorial production’. Art loses its intrinsic value. (...)And belief in the intrinsic value of art is according to him ‘not based on formal properties per se, but rather on the pictorial image understood as a formative power that expresses constant factors in human experience and cognition.’

‘The distinctive individual features of an artwork should not be confused with the notion of style and its history, something that classical art history is traditionally focused on; instead it refers to the phenomenological quality of the visual representation, its empowering of cognition, in terms of spatial and temporal conceptualizations.’

‘According to Crowther this allows us to overcome that dualism between historical an ahistorical understanding of an artwork, and instead invest it with transhistorical significance.’

‘One could say that the positive concept of transhistoricity or the transhistorical in relation to art can be defined as art’s intrinsic ability to communicate across time. As a phenomenon of human production that escapes the conditions of its production, it establishes fragile human commonalities between artist and between artist and an audience.’

‘In other words, the positive concept of transhistoricity directs us towards asking ourselves what should we, as curators and museum directors, restrain ourselves from doing in order to allow aesthetic experience to occur. The negative concept of transhistoricity instead could be translated as experimenting freely with associations between artworks within a museum display to bring to light transhistorical dialogues between them.’

‘The guiding principle is that the masterpieces from the past need to be freed from the dust and incrustations of history and from codified forms of spectator ship and that contemporary art has the power to achieve this.’

[Hanneke Grootenboer] ‘Artworks do not belong to the period in which they were produced, but live a life in front of constantly changing audiences, This life is something that we, as art historians, should study as much as the historical context that produced it. In light of its biography, an artwork it is as much part of history as it is of out present day.’

[Hanneke Grootenboer] ‘It is, in a way, because my approach goes beyond the idea that a historical paradigm is the one and true way for approaching historical objects. Rather than explaining a work of art by placing it back in its historical context, and asking what meaning it had when it was produced, I am interested in what philosophical or theoretical issues artworks raise, how they shape through, and how they might be able to contribute to contemporary debates, on meaning making, for instance, or on issues related to medium and materiality.’

[Hanneke Grootenboer] ‘Aby Warburg is an interesting case. He believed that visual forms and particular motifs had a life of their own that corresponded to one another within a larger history, and that those forms had their own memories, so to speak. He was looking for visual rhymes and similarities, traces that would us lead to these memories on purely visual terms.’

[Hanneke Grootenboer] ‘I agree with Amy Powell (who teaches at UC Irvine) who propose that artworks do not so much transcend time as transgress our linear conception of it. She argues that medieval art prefigures, upset, and repeats its own historical course. In my work, I suggest that art, past and present, offers us a thought (rather than a meaning, or a narrative), and that it is capable of articulating thought in visuals terms, As such, it incites us to think. Semiotics is a mode of interpretation whereby meaning is not located in work of art, but is produced though the viewer.’

[Hanneke Grootenboer] ‘Meaning is only created at the moment a viewer comes on the spot and interacts whit the work of art. Artworks are made to be looked at, they are made for viewers, and we could say, with Alois Riegl, that an artwork is waiting for us, as viewers, to come and see it, and to complete is, so to speak.’

[Hanneke Grootenboer] ‘Meaning is only created at the moment a viewer comes on the spot and interacts whit the work of art. Artworks are made to be looked at, they are made for viewers, and we could say, with Alois Riegl, that an artwork is waiting for us, as viewers, to come and see it, and to complete is, so to speak.’