Writing about the art of looking: The Sight of Death and Roof Life

This article proposes a comparative reading of T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death (2006) and Svetlana Alpers’s Roof Life (2013). Written by renowned art historians, both books are strange, hybrid objects – non-fictional works that consciously blur the line between art criticism, diary, and autobiography, while reflecting on the worth and limits of «looking» and «describing» as critical practices and human experiences. The author acknowledges Clark’s and Alpers’s extreme self-awareness as writers and the consequent need to address their writing as writing in the first place, by analysing their use of structures, returning motifs, tropes, and photographic reproductions. Their most valuable contribution to the ongoing debate on ekphrasis, on the role of description in art history, and on visual culture more generally, seems to stem precisely from what has proven more divisive in their reception. In particular, the author argues that the unusual prominence given by both Clark and Alpers to their own voice and persona is what allowed them to explore most effectively the limits of sight and description, fully embracing the non-neutrality of any possible attempt at translating pictures into words. While advocating the importance of «looking» and the amount of «thought» that happens through purely visual means, both books paradoxically restate the heuristic potential of writing.