INTERESTING TIMES: THE CANON

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTERESTING TIMES

 

THE CANON

Columbia University has a core curriculum. That means that students have to take certain courses in Western civilization in their entering years, as a basis for further study. The courses include Contemporary Civilization, Literature Humanities, Music Humanities, and Art Humanities. These courses are largely great books and great works in the Western tradition. The idea is that history, philosophy, literature, art, and music reinforce each other. The courses focus on the Western tradition, because it is felt that this is the origin and basis of American values. This program has been in place since about the 1940s.

The courses are not taught in large lectures but in small sections. Faculty, as well as many graduate students called “preceptors,” make each section a discussion session. The method of approach is to be “Socratic” — i.e. the instructor asks leading questions and gets the students to “discover” the salient points on their own. It is assumed that students will understand it, because it is their heritage already.

Art Humanities was not supposed to be a historical sequence, but a series of separate and self-contained units discussed in some depth. They could be done in any order. The list includes the Parthenon, Gothic Cathedrals, Renaissance, Michelangelo, Raphael, Breughel, Rembrandt, St. Peter’s Basilica, Monet, Impressionism, Picasso. Sometimes it has included El Greco or Goya, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, and more recently, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. Small changes have been made in the course, but this is supposed to be the canon — the greatest hits of Western art. Faculty specialists teach the instructors in how to approach and present the Art Humanities course, since most instructors are not trained in all of it. Teachers and students, everybody loves this course.

In the early 70s, I was asked to develop a new unit for Art Humanities, on African art. This was because Columbia underwent nationally significant racial protests in 1968. The overall issues had to do with the Vietnam War, but the local issue was a gymnasium. Columbia planned to build a new gymnasium in Morningside Park, which is technically a part of Harlem. Harlem residents were to get their own back entrance in return. The protesters argued that the gymnasium was racist. Various faculty wanted to do something positive for the Afro-American cause. The Art Humanities committee decided on an African unit. (In the end, the gymnasium was not built in Morningside Park, but underground on campus. There is no special door for the Harlem community.)

The African unit was to be placed, more or less, next to the Picasso unit, since Picasso was so instrumental in recognizing these sculptures as art. I chose the masks of the Bamana, a rural tribe in Mali. The Bamana have various masks and headdresses of greater and lesser importance in a hierarchy — boys’ initiation masks in the form of hyenas and other animals, agricultural headdresses in the form of antelopes for young men, and composite animal masks for the most serious religious and juridical purposes for elders. All these masks were recognizable but of elegantly abstracted form. They made several points, among them the use of art for social cohesion, necessary for communication, history, and identity in small societies. Of particular interest was the fact that the most serious and powerful masks were not the most beautiful, because their power lay in various additions, such as cloth, metal, and libations. That is, beauty and power were different things.

Not wanting to discuss African art only as the masks of rural villages, I thought students should also be exposed to the sophisticated bronze and ivory arts of the Ife and Benin royal courts in Nigeria. This mostly naturalistic tradition began in the thirteenth century and lasted at Benin until the nineteenth century.

I prepared the unit, ordered slides, wrote descriptions, gave presentations. The unit was voluntary. The long and the short of it is that no one else taught it. I did, because I had created it. The reasons for not teaching it were many: scholars of European art did not feel comfortable teaching African art; they felt they did not know enough about the subject in general; it was alien. After a while, it disappeared from the list of units altogether.

A dozen years or more later, another Art Humanities committee asked me to prepare a new unit for Art Humanities, on the Maya of Ancient America. I didn’t want to do it. I said, “Not on your life!” “I don’t want to prepare another unit that nobody will teach. Try Japanese prints or something else.” They cajoled me by saying that this time the unit will be mandatory, and everybody will have to teach it. They also said that the beauty of Maya art was closer to Western art. I did not really believe them either way, but reluctantly I accepted the challenge.

I chose the site of Palenque in Mexico that has the most beautiful art in stone and stucco, from the Western point of view. These Maya figures look something like Greek art. I chose the pyramid temple with the burial vault of the first major ruler of Palenque, Pacal. His un-looted sarcophagus shows him descending to the underworld, accompanied by images of his ancestors. The Palenque unit was to go somewhere near the discussions of the Parthenon and Amiens cathedral. It was to represent Ancient American royal art with cosmological symbols.

As I expected, having to teach it led again to endless complaints — pretty much the same ones that had greeted the African unit. No one felt comfortable teaching it; they did not feel they knew enough and did not want to study it; it didn’t belong there. First the senior faculty abandoned it, then after a while the junior faculty followed suit, until I was the only one teaching it. No Western specialist could cope with non-Western art.

I did learn one thing out of the experience: while the faculty could not cope with Palenque, amazingly the students took it in stride. To them, it was no more strange than the Parthenon or Amiens Cathedral. They had no idea where Palenque was, but also they had no idea where Amiens was. To them it was all the same! On the tests, they came up with surprising parallels between Palenque and the European monuments. For one, they compared the Jesse Tree stained glass window and its genealogy of Christ to the genealogy of the ancestors surrounding Pacal in his tomb. Terrific! That proved to me that if non-Western art is properly taught, students are ready for it.

Of course, the Palenque unit was eventually abandoned. It does not take a genius to figure out that you cannot take a random non-Western unit and stick it into the cohesive European canon. Those were laudable attempts by my colleagues to maintain the canon and yet put something non-Western in it. In those days, I often wondered what I would do. I came up with the idea of a global course that took something from every major culture and every continent. I figured it was too revolutionary for Columbia and did not propose it.

Here was my list:

Masks from Africa such as the Bamana; the royal tomb of Palenque from Ancient America; the Renaissance in Europe including the revival of Antiquity; Michelangelo; the Taj Mahal, Indian and Islamic at once; Chinese landscape painting, Sung (?); Japanese prints of society; Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol from the US. I felt that the most iconic of European art was the Renaissance and chose that.

This list is probably not workable and probably lacks intellectual cohesion. But something like this is needed for the United States, where people come from all over the world and have a non-European heritage. It was also my desire to put Europe within the rest of the world and not separate from it.

In 2018, the BBC aired a much heralded series entitled Civilizations that was to be a global account of art. The series was thematic, but did go from Cave painting to the present. I was curious to see how they responded to the challenge of combining Western and non-Western art. The core of the nine segments was always one way or another focused on the West. As in Art Humanities, the high points were Greek Art, Gothic Cathedrals, the Renaissance and Michelangelo, St. Peter’s, Rembrandt, Impressionism, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and included both El Greco and Goya, too. (Plus many others mentioned briefly.) The non-Western subjects were fitted in at certain times, as cameos of various sizes. Islamic mosques, the Taj Mahal, Japanese prints. The continuous story was Western, the non-Western story was in pieces. In some ways, this is right — if Western civilization won out and the victors tell the story.

The most curious chapter entitled, “Encounters,” aimed to tell the initial contact of Europeans with “exotic” peoples, with the Portuguese and Dutch in Africa and Asia, which were not yet conquests but commercial and cultural interactions, in which both sides were said to have benefited. This well-meaning theme of course did not emphasize that the ships, the commerce, and the desire to “contact” sometimes-unwilling others were all onesidedly European. (The Japanese did not sail to Paris.) And right there, in the middle of the sixteenth century, was the similar European discovery of the “New World” with disastrous consequences for its native cultures.

The gasmasks of World War I and the later concentration camps of the Nazis are presented as a sudden “return” to barbarism, whereas they are also clearly a part of Western civilization, as the Crusades, the inquisitions, slavery, colonialism, and the atom bomb are a part of its science, ideology, competition and will to power. Maybe it is just as important to tell the story of the West, including its barbaric dark side, as it is to tell the story of the non-West. By all means, let’s keep the canon, but let’s put it into context.