INTERESTING TIMES: TEACHING

 

 

 

 

 

INTERESTING TIMES: TEACHING

 

TEACHING

Sometimes, my father introduced me as “my daughter, the schoolteacher.” It was not a compliment. Doctor, lawyer, engineer would have been a compliment. Even though I was a professor at Columbia University, he had no respect for teaching.

Columbia University had not much more respect for teaching, either. Although professors were hired and paid to teach, their actual teaching was of no concern to anybody. You were not paid more or less for the quality of teaching. No one taught you how to teach; you learned on the job. In the beginning, I was so nervous, I wrote out my first lectures by hand and stood in the back of the room by the noisy projectors where I could barely be heard, until eventually I got the courage to stand in front of the class. Students are wonderful in putting up with the behaviors of their instructors.

Once a semester, students filled out an evaluation form on their teachers. Teachers were judged on speaking style, readings, fairness of exams, and general friendliness. (Once, I was said to have a good sense of humor.) This form was filed somewhere in a cabinet in the department office. Most likely, no one ever looked at it. People had anecdotal reputations as good or bad teachers. That alone sufficed for the chairman of department. If you were a good scholar and not that great a teacher, it did not matter. One was not paid on the basis of the quality of teaching.

Teaching is undervalued, perhaps, because everyone teaches sometime or other, and it is no big deal. Parents teach children about knives and forks and to say “thank you.” Every adult is a potential teacher, not just to children but to each other. My seven-year-old twin grandchildren teach their stuffed animals what was learned in school and assign them homework. If you ask what children want to be when they grow up, they say doctors or firemen. Teaching is a natural activity that seems to require no special notice and, alas, no special remuneration. Teachers are underpaid at every level.

I did not want to be a teacher, either; teaching just came with the territory. As an art historian, my options were either museum or auction-house work or teaching. I simply drifted into teaching as the path of least resistance.

Teaching “primitive art” was exciting in the 1970s counterculture atmosphere. Students came already interested in non-Western cultures, having vague ideas about “Eastern religions.” They were ready to applaud non-Western ways and wisdom, in contrast to what they imagined was excessive Western rationalism.

Primitive art, as a category, was discovered around 1900 in Paris by Picasso and other artists who were impressed by the dramatic stylizations of the forms, similar to what they were trying to develop in their own works. The academic study of primitive art was recent — it was taught since the 1940s in the US in only two or three universities. At Columbia it had been pioneered by my teachers, Paul Wingert and Douglas Fraser. As defined by them, primitive art consisted of the art of Sub-Saharan Africa, Aboriginal Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and of the North American Indian. It was exciting to teach something so new and global, which I too was formulating and refining as I went along.

The essential point students were to get from my course was that art in these simple societies was actually a complex communication system in the form of images. Masks and masquerades enacted myths and histories and figures embodied spirits and ancestors. Art was not marginal in society, as it is with us, but essential to the functioning of communities. Students loved that idea. This did not mean that some of these cultures were perfect from our point of view — some customs, such as severe initiation rites and headhunting were barbaric, and those had to be mentioned. One needed to ask the question, Why were there headhunters? American students in the grip of multiculturalism had no problem with it.

One semester, a very black African student from Sierra Leone was taking the class, and when we got to New Guinea, Melanesia, and discussed headhunting, he stood up and objected vociferously. Why did Columbia University have a course discussing something as appalling as headhunting? He wanted to talk only about enlightened practices. Coming from a part of the world that was modernizing, he saw no point in learning about headhunting. This was an interesting moment for American students to see how someone from the Third World saw the “primitive” world idealized by the West.

In the 1970s, relatively intact primitive communities existed in many parts of the world. Feuding that involved headhunting was common in New Guinea, while at the same time museums were already collecting the spectacular carvings made for headhunting ceremonies. Michael, the son of Nelson Rockefeller, was killed and presumably eaten, while on a collecting trip in the Asmat region of New Guinea. While some places were too dangerous for a westerner to go into, everywhere else researchers had filmed many arts, especially masquerades still going on in the field. Artists were still carving for their own communities, not yet for tourists. Researchers could still provide firsthand visual records of life ongoing in primitive communities. Such films greatly enlivened classes in faraway New York. One could, almost literally, take the class into the remote field.

Twenty years later, by the 1990s, this primitive world had disappeared. The reason was globalization and modernization. Cannibalism ended in New Guinea, as did many other violent customs. The community role of art ended, too — artworks were no longer created for local purposes, for local ceremonies. Artworks were still being made, but they were mostly for tourists, for whom the masquerades and other rituals were performed, for cash. Tourist art did not have to be high quality, because tourists could not tell the difference. What was left of the older artworks was pretty much collected and placed in major museums in the West or locally. Primitive art literally disappeared.

At the same time, specialists found the word ”primitive” to be too pejorative and the African, Oceanic, and Native American arts too disparate to be yoked together in one. The fields have now been separated and have only geographic names. The very idea of “primitive art” has ended. I was probably one of the last to have taught It in the 1980s.

By 2000, few students wanted to study traditional African, Oceanic, or North American Indian art. These arts were now sometimes called “extinct,” as they were entombed in museums. Students wanted to study the living, contemporary non-Western art. In almost all areas of the world, enterprising natives encountered modern art and developed hybrid native-modern arts for sale in galleries and museums. Using non-native media, such as painting and sculpture, but sometimes depicting native themes, they were successful financially and in reputation. It took a long time for museums to accept this hybrid as “native art,” but eventually, some did. Because it was alive and happening, students found this art movement fascinating and many applied to study it. At first, we had no one to teach them.

As Columbia, or any other school, did not have a program in contemporary non-Western art, as it was not an academic field at all, some half dozen of us on the faculty decided to teach it together in a team-taught course. We were all specialists in some traditional field, such as Chinese, Middle Eastern, Indian, or African, and boned up on the contemporary scene to teach it. We called it Multiple Modernities. We discovered incredible diversity and creativity as these non-Western artists tackled the modern world and its modern art vocabulary. Not only were they quoting modern art, they were also commenting on it as outsiders. Students loved the course and appreciated its pioneering spirit.

The “field” which we opened up in the early 2000s did not last very long. In a few years, the whole subject became mainstream. Many artists discovered that they could exhibit at prestigious Western venues, such as the Cannes Arts Festival, and acquired successful global reputations seemingly overnight. They received great critical acclaim and were written about even in popular magazines, like Vogue. It can even be said that there was a “vogue” for contemporary non-Western art. There was no need for Columbia to treat it as a special field, since it had become a part of modern art.

The old “primitive art” field never had such broad appreciation. It has remained the esoteric interest of a few. The success of contemporary non-Western art seems to be globalization itself. Its matrix, modern art, is well known, and its foreign aspect is purged of the most bizarre and uncomfortable features. Its ironic aspects, like Anasui’s alcoholic bottlecap creations, are more a gentle ribbing of the West than a frontal attack.

What is the purpose of teaching non-Western art of any kind? There is no way to avoid the fact that Western courses are treated as “us,” while non-Western ones are always “them.” They can be presented as better than us, worse than us, but are always different from us. At a very basic level, it is good to present the nature and existence of the foreign to accord it life and dignity, as well as a mirror on ourselves. It was once a big and amazingly varied world, which is now collapsing into a more uniform one. Both are worth knowing. It has been exciting to teach both primitive art and contemporary non-Western art, even though neither one lasted very long. The times we live in are full of rapid change. No sooner did university catalogues list Primitive Art along with Medieval or Renaissance Art as timeless divisions of learning than it had to be removed. Non-Western contemporary art did not even make the catalogue.