Over five weeks, the Cornell Chronicle is examining the place of humanities studies at Cornell. In this week's edition, we look at visual studies and art history and at the teaching and study of critical theory on campus.
From its inception, Cornell has encouraged innovative scholarship and interdisciplinary discourse among its faculty. This intellectual cross-fertilization in the humanities has historically provided an especially rich academic environment for the arts and sciences undergraduate. Cloistered among the 14 humanities departments at Cornell is an array of academic programs. Some, like American Studies, offer a major. Others, such as the Latino Studies Program, offer a concentration in the field. These programs were created to meet the intellectual demands of a rapidly changing student population, by scholarly discovery, by changes driven by transformations in demographics in the economy and, increasingly, by the proliferation of image and image-reproducing technologies in the arts. From cinema to cyber-art to video and television, modern life is saturated with images that are not only affecting our cultural identities but how we define knowledge and exchange information. The adage that a picture is worth a thousand words has never been more apt; images are an integral part of our cultural and political world.
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| Rebecca Schneider, standing, assistant professor of theater arts and of history of art, listens while Ashleigh Nankivell '03, seated left, and Megan Auster-Rosen '02, right, discuss techniques of early 20th century Soviet theater during Schneider's class at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. The course is cross-listed in visual studies, and both Nankivell and Auster-Rosen have concentrations in that program. Robert Barker/University Photography |
Last spring, more than 50 undergraduate students signed up for a course called Introduction to Visual Studies taught by English Professor Timothy Murray. That's not news, per se. Independent study in visual studies or its corollary, visual culture, have been scattered across the Arts Quad and beyond since 1985. But Murray's class marked the first core course offered as part of a concentration in visual studies at Cornell. After years of discussion and debate, in fall 2000 a Visual Studies Program for undergraduates was a visible, if free-floating, entity. The concentration is designed to provide a wide-ranging approach to visual art, media -- including digital works -- performance and perception. Courses are taught by an interdisciplinary cast of faculty and draw on history of art, film, literary studies, psychology, theater and political theory, among other disciplines. Requirements for the concentration include a core course that introduces students to critical thinking about visual studies as well as close textual analysis in social and historical contexts. In addition, students choose four Cornell courses from among the different categories offered in the concentration. One of those courses must include a hands-on project that demonstrates knowledge of the subject.
"The driving force for the concentration is the students themselves," says Murray. "There's a real imperative coming from students for training in visual literacy. A growing number of undergraduates are coming to Cornell who are incredibly literate in multimedia and are seeking a match and an academic context that increases their critical skills and their vision. They have a wide array of visual materials at their fingertips. Our task is to make this flood of visual information critically advantageous to them."
After a start-up year in which visual studies offered a substantial curriculum but had to manage with a spare budget and a bare minimum of faculty oversight, the Department of History of Art has begun to furnish administrative support for the program. The transition coincided with the appointment, by Philip Lewis, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, of a new department chair, Salah Hassan, an art historian and highly regarded curator and critic in African and African Diaspora art history. Hassan, associate professor of Africana studies, is excited about the opportunity to help guide an art history department that not only offers the best of a traditional discipline but will benefit from its day-to-day interactions with a progressive visual studies program as well.
"My mission, as I understand it, is to revitalize the department," says Hassan. "The emphasis is to move toward comparative, cross-cultural studies that look seriously on both sides of the traditional boundaries of Western and non-Western art, high art versus popular culture, visual and discursive aspects of art and the institutional separation of art, architecture, film, video and new media."
One reason for the trend toward visual studies at Cornell is the need to "look at European art within a larger picture," says Hassan. The recruitment of new scholars whose work bridges traditional boundaries is a priority. A search is under way for an art historian producing "innovative work that is relevant to the latest developments in the field" of visual studies and visual culture," he says.
"For years now traditional definitions of art have come under attack and-or have fallen into historical dissolution," Hassan says. "But that doesn't mean replacing Art History with Visual Studies. Attention has long since widened to other objects in film, mass media and popular culture, in conjunction with new methodological approaches and new social imperatives, such as feminism, gay cultures and multiculturalism."
Art history departments already include a wide variety of objects and approaches and can accommodate more.
Visual studies is an emergent field that is defining itself as it evolves, says Brett de Bary, director of the Visual Studies Program and professor of Asian studies. It covers a lot of territory and doesn't fit neatly into a traditional academic framework, she says.
"The concentration draws on many practice- and production-oriented courses engaging visuality at Cornell, while maintaining the emphasis on reflection, criticism and historical and cultural interpretation that is at the heart of a liberal arts education," says de Bary. "Studies of multimedia art forms -- from the medieval illuminated manuscripts to television, web-cam and cyber dance, for example, require collaboration across a range of disciplines, as do attempts to combine a practical mastery of information technologies with an understanding of their social and cultural impacts."
Professor of German studies David Bathrick, who also chairs Cornell's Department of Theatre, Film and Dance, and Marilyn Rivchin, a senior lecturer in that department, were some of the first on campus to discuss visual studies in the mid-1980s. Bathrick says he has incorporated visual studies into his teaching because it "helps students think about the formal structures of visual representation and how they operate beyond the mere communication of a particular content or subject matter."
"Teaching courses on culture and politics, I have increasingly come to stress the importance of students being able to read images as a way of understanding how societies organize their needs and articulate power beyond the medium of written or spoken texts," says Bathrick, who specializes in literary theory, modern drama and literature, film theory and history of German social thought. "For instance," he says, "my courses on the Third Reich and the Holocaust have focused on the subtle ways that images serve to confirm or question values and thereby create political consensus. The study of the visual is not limited to specific disciplines [film, painting, architecture] but seeks to grasp principles of visuality that are common to many areas."
Rivchin says the visual studies concentration is a reasoned effort to meet the needs of students who would like to build their studies of the visual around two or more established fields of study. Those fields might include film, art history, theater design, computer imaging, the psychology of perception, architecture, etc., including both theory and practice across such disciplines.
"Although filmmaking and video production courses have always been in high demand here, there are many undergraduates for whom an interdisciplinary visual studies approach makes sense," said Rivchin, who teaches filmmaking and digital video production. In addition she regularly co-teaches an interdisciplinary course called "Media Studio" that emphasizes collaborative work by advanced students across electronic and digital media, with faculty members from the departments of Architecture, Art and Music. "For these students, and for the faculty that teach them, the value of the visual studies concentration lies in the mutual knowledge that the study and creation of visual representations surrounding us in culture, and that we contribute to culture, have meanings, ideologies and impacts that are complex and overlapping. They are not easily contained within existing and arbitrary borders of academic study and need."
But the emergence of visual studies is problematic for some traditional art historians who perceive visual studies as an academic rival.
"Undeniably, work that is called "visual studies" today does represent a contestation of certain aspects of art history," says de Bary. "The arts of painting and sculpture, for example, have been at the center of research and scholarship in the history of art. Film has only recently come to be recognized as an object for study for art historians, while television is generally studied in fields such as communications. This is one of the reasons why visual studies entails new approaches."
But de Bary sees the debate as a positive influence that is necessary for intellectual inquiry to remain vibrant. "Personally, I'd like to think that at Cornell we can encourage debate, engagement and even controversy without animosity," she says.
For an example, she refers to the complementary relationship that developed when visual studies merged with the art history department at the University of Rochester, invigorating both.
In 1939 the Department of Fine Arts was created at Cornell by Frederick O. Waage. The Department of History of Art officially was created in 1961, and its first doctorate was conferred in 1965. A separate Department of Art, in which the practice of fine arts is pursued, resides in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. The College of Arts and Sciences' 1996 master plan calls for placing the Department of History of Art in White Hall with the Visual Studies Program office adjacent to it, once renovations in that building are completed, says Arts and Sciences Dean Lewis. This will bring art history and visual studies into proximity with the Department of Art in Tjaden Hall and with the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
"The hope is that visual studies will provide an intellectual context for more varied and intensive interaction and-or integration of the two departments," says Lewis.
The Department of History of Art, currently located across the Arts Quad on the ground floor of Goldwin Smith Hall, has eight full-time and several adjunct faculty as well as cross-field related faculty and instructors; and it is as interdisciplinary as any department.
"Art history draws on and combines the general topics of many other disciplines -- politics, economics, history, religion -- to understand and explain why a work of art or any artifact, be it expensive or cheap, simple or complicated, looks the way it does," says Andrew Ramage, professor of history of art and archaeology. "The non-major of any variety will have the advantage of this synthesis, but will not have experienced all the detailed arguments to create it."
The department's mission is to provide an understanding of the way objects, from coins and potsherds to paintings and cathedrals, convey meaning in diverse chronological and geographic settings. Within a historical context, art history students ask how objects are produced, seen, interpreted and consumed. Ancient art, for example, can yield clues to the politics, history, economics and religion of the people whose works "outlived" them.
"One certainly does not have to be an art historian -- or aspire to be -- to profit from a knowledge of, and sensitivity for, cultures, their interactions and their places in historical time and space," says Laura Meixner, associate professor of art history. "Additionally, art history offers a complete integration of allied fields in humanities -- history, literature, music among others. Those inclined toward the sciences find that they are well served by the analytic skills and theoretical reasoning accrued in history of art courses.
Professor Robert Calkins is a noted expert on medieval architecture and illuminated manuscripts. He is passionate about his calling.
"If I can get my clutches on students, I tell them: 'Art history is about the best major you can have,'" he says. "In order to truly 'see' a 19th century painting or sculpture, you need to understand everything that went into it -- the literature, philosophy, history and other art of that time. Art history gives you that. I tell students that years from now, when you're done stamping letters of credit or you've finished operating on a kidney, you can go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and see a Van Gogh and say, 'I know that painting. I love it and I'm going to sit here and enjoy it.' That's something you will have and can live on for the rest of your life, and the same applies to music, history and literature."
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| Orlando Soria '04, left, from architecture, art and planning, joins in the African cinema course taught by Salah Hassan, right, chair of the Department of History of Art, at the Africana Studies and Research Center. Charles Harrington/University Photography |
Traditionally, art history focused predominantly on the critical study of European painting and sculpture from the pre-modern period to the 20th century. At Cornell, things are a little different. Key periods here include ancient, medieval, Renaissance and modern art, with particular attention to Africa, China, Europe, Japan, North America and Southeast Asia.
When Kaja McGowan wants to demonstrate the kinesthetic dynamics of authentic Southeast Asian art to her students, for example, she dons a ceremonial Balinese costume and dances for them. That's art history "in motion," she says. Several of McGowan's students have learned traditional Balinese dance and have performed for an appreciative audiences at a corresponding Southeast Asian exhibits in Cornell's Johnson Museum.
Teachers like McGowan, assistant professor of Southeast Asian art, help to globalize a discipline that has been criticized for its narrow, Eurocentric borders. Art history is no longer just about using objects to train museum curators, critics and connoisseurs.
"Art history has rightfully come under attack as an antiquated disciplinary boundary," said McGowan, director of undergraduate studies in art history. "Southeast Asian art in motion is not just about me donning the dance costume but also the importance placed upon using actual objects in the class as 'sites of experience.' Exploring the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation and culture helps to cast a critical ethnographic light on the art worlds of the West and the way they have given value to cultural forms."
In her course work, McGowan encourages students to "destabilize what has traditionally been the binary relationship of the East-West encounter" in art history and to "shift the parameters of the field itself," through critical examination of the history of art history itself.
Ramage is a traditionalist, but his work relies on modern technologies and new ways of thinking about art history that orbit outside the box. He is associate director of the Sardis expedition in Turkey where, in 1968, his archaeological detective work led to a one-of-a-kind discovery: a gold refinery that belonged to legendary Lydian emperor King Croesus, the world's first "millionaire." In 2000 Ramage's findings were published in a book titled King Croesus's Gold: Excavations at Sardis and the History of Gold Refining. Co-authored with Paul T. Craddock, a metallurgist with the British Museum, it was hardly ancient history to the editors of The New York Times, who ran it on the front page of the science section in August of last year. In large part, what makes Ramage's collaboration with Craddock a modern affair is technology.
"The tools for scientific analysis have been developed enormously in the last 30-plus years," says Ramage. "So we have been in a position to find out a great deal more about the various artifacts and materials than we could then."
Traditionalist or not, art history faculty and affiliates at Cornell have presented a range of methods and interpretive strategies from cultural anthropology to dendrochronology to social history.
One of the common strategies in visual studies, and one that some art historians object to, is its appropriation of post-structuralist, postmodern and Marxist theories.
"Yes," says Brett de Bary, "theory is integral to visual studies." But, she adds, "Visual studies is not wedded to any single theoretical school. But, insofar as visual studies turns its attention to new media -- even to the very challenging question of how these new forms and practices can be defined, how they may transform our notions of art and culture and how they involve new kinds of audiences, spectatorship and contexts of interaction -- theoretical discussions are necessary."
Professor of history Michael Steinberg concurs. Steinberg, who offers two courses cross-listed with the visual studies concentration, doesn't see visual studies as having to be attached to any agenda.
"The emphasis on culture and politics as contexts for visual experience may suggest a common denominator with Marxism and postmodernism, as the former argues for an economic and political context for thinking and creating, and the latter for a cultural context," says Steinberg. "But neither Marxism nor postmodernism is a necessary context."
Calkins is concerned about losing what he calls "the art historical rigor" -- the principles of investigation developed over time into an established discipline -- to an as yet undefined course of study.
"As far as I'm concerned, it's a quibble over semantics: art history is visual studies," Calkins says. "It's an add-on to what we already do. I have nothing against that. But if the traditional discipline gets supplanted, how are students ever going to look at a work of art and understand the how and why and the context of it before analyzing it in other ways?"
Hassan says that "a revitalized art history department with a strong visual studies component could provide the intellectual forum for debate on these complex matters.
"Cornell, more than any other institution is well positioned to meet the goal of building an interdisciplinary program of study that creates synergy between departments, scholars and students of visual culture across campus," Hassan says. "The Department of History of Art will provide the central organizational space for this initiative. It will provide, through seminars and thematically focused workshops, the intellectual climate to explore this emerging field of study with its great potential for growth."
One such venue already is in place: the weekly visual culture colloquiums held Mondays at 5 p.m. in the History of Art gallery space in Goldwin Smith Hall. The colloquium provides an informal forum for interdisciplinary discussion about the arts, media and material culture in general.
Nourishing innovation while preserving valuable traditions is the challenge Cornell's faculty expect to meet.
Index to the Chronicle's series on the Humanities
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