ART : Looking Afresh at the Visual

Students today “are very keyed up about the visual,” says Sally A. Stein, chairwoman of the art-history department at UC Irvine. Art-history classes at UCI are experiencing only slight dips in enrollment these days, unlike in some other disciplines, Stein says.

Despite UCI’s reputation as a major research institution, however, the university has not been able to offer specialized training in art history for students who already have bachelor’s degrees. The seven-member art-history department isn’t large enough to start a graduate program by itself, and budget cuts keep it from expanding. (Task forces have recommended a $10.8-million cut in UCI’s 1994-95 budget.)

That will be remedied in the fall, when the department launches an innovative interdisciplinary Ph.D program--thanks to a cooperative arrangement with the UCI departments of history, English and comparative literature, and East Asian languages and literatures.

Faculty members affiliated with the new program also include specialists in film studies and comparative culture; in addition, most of the female professors are also active in women’s studies.

Stein, whose area of expertise embraces American art, photography and mass-media and feminist theory, says the program wants its budding art historians to avoid fixing narrowly on art objects.

“We want them to think about other kinds of communicative codes in society. . . . The real task and challenge is to weave together contemporary theoretical debates with the . . . objects--to sacrifice neither to the other.”

*

Back in the days when I spent seven bleary days a week camped out at the UC Berkeley art-history library, graduate students were expected to learn a set of detective skills to come up with plausible theories about the art of the past.

By minutely examining works of art, familiarizing ourselves with literary sources, and researching pertinent historical data, we could speculate about the period of an undated work, the evolution of a regional or individual style, shifts in patronage or the differences between the hand of a master and the style of his (rarely her) student, studio assistant or colleague.

Some of our work followed in the tradition of art-history scholarship, with its zealous attention to stylistic nuance. But the Postmodern tornado had already had begun spinning through our department, turning this narrow focus of attention into a broader look at the culture that produced the art.

While we still paid keen attention to the trajectories of famous artists’ careers, we also learned to investigate what else was going on--from cheap prints sold to the masses to funerary sculptures produced in provincial colonies of sophisticated ancient cities.

We scrutinized works of art for their “hidden” messages about all sorts of things: moral standards of the day, encroaching urbanization, scientific advances, contemporary views of the insane, presentational styles in local theaters.

Yet although a Post-Structuralist revolution swept through the English departments of U.S. universities during the past decade, art-history departments were slow to embrace a non-traditional approach.

Not so at UCI.

“In Southern California, we have (major art museums), but the movie business and advertising are enormous producers of pop culture,” says James Herbert, an associate professor of art history who came to UCI this year USC expressly to help initiate the new Ph.D program.

“These things are taken very seriously by academics at UCI (who study) a wide range of visual artifacts and are not hostage to established categories of high art,” he said.

“One of the most important categories gets left out when you study (only) those privileged artifacts stored in museums. If you take the category of art as a given, you never look at . . . what it means for paintings to be in museums and for Mickey Mouse to be in Disneyland.”

As an example of a UCI faculty member who combines traditional and new approaches, Herbert mentions Margaret Miles, professor of Greek and Roman art and architecture, whose work in classical archeology involves digging up “pot fragments and every other piece of garbage in downtown Athens, not only the most privileged objects in that society.”

Herbert, a specialist in modern European art and critical theory, also points out that art historians are in a particularly good position these days to contribute to intellectual discourse in allied fields.

“Studies in the humanities nationwide have recently taken an interest in visual images” after a decade of emphasis on language, he said. “Art historians have been thinking about pictorial metaphor, how visuality works as a language.”

Asked to elaborate on the trend toward visual thinking, Herbert cited an article by A. J. T. Mitchell, a professor at the University of Chicago, in Artforum magazine (“The Pictorial Turn,” March, 1992).

In essence, Mitchell writes, “the fantasy of . . . a culture totally dominated by images has now become a real technical possibility.”

Ours is a culture, he writes, in which “a supposedly alert, educated population can witness the destruction of an entire Arab society as nothing more than a spectacular television melodrama, complete with a simple narrative of good triumphing over evil.”

Visual culture today, Mitchell concludes, is “too deeply embedded in technologies of desire, domination and violence, too saturated with reminders of neo-fascism and global corporate culture, to be ignored.”

Because it is designed to provide personal faculty attention, the UCI art-history Ph.D program will have only four entering students next fall, selected from about 20 applicants. Stein said those who have been selected are distinguished by “a great deal of initiative in pursuing personal intellectual interests.”

One incoming student is a South Korean woman who said she wants to study the history of photography with Stein. The other three, all from the United States, will focus on ancient art, Chinese art and African American art in the 20th Century.

Actually, the fledgling Ph.D program already has an enrollment of one: Amy Marver, who was a student of Herbert at USC. Marver (the winner of a prestigious Smithsonian Institution Pre-Doctoral Fellowship for study next fall at the National Museum of American History in Washington) is writing a dissertation on “the domestication of the concept of the modern in New York in 1930s,” Herbert said. Her project will discuss the way women decorating their homes were influenced by such varied sources as the design department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the 1939 World’s Fair and department store windows.

The Ph.D program accepts students with either a bachelor’s or master’s degree, but it isn’t set up to grant master’s degrees. Herbert says this is the result of “the shifting nature of professional demands--even teaching (art history) at a community college requires a Ph.D,” as well as the department’s limited resources.

As in most graduate art-history programs, the expectation at UCI is that the emerging Ph.D’s will teach at the college level. When I was at UC Berkeley, in fact, the faculty tended to disparage museum work as a distinctly inferior occupation.

But Stein says she hopes the program will eventually “begin to talk about museum practice and exhibition theory.” Other occupational possibilities for newly minted art historians with doctoral degrees, Stein said, include arts administration and art book publishing.

Speaking of the world outside the academe, UCI’s art-history department--which still needs two innovative younger scholars to fill positions in modern and contemporary Art and Japanese art--has hit on a savvy way to blend the Ph.D program’s personnel needs with community outreach. A series of early evening lectures open to the public will give a diverse group of candidates for the positions the opportunity to strut their stuff.

The program (in Room 130, Humanities Office Building II) begins May 23 at 5 p.m. with Bettina Bergmann, who teaches art at Mount Holyoke College. Her juicy subject is “Marital Trouble in Region Nine: ‘The House of Fatal Love’ in Pompeii.” Next fall, the program resumes with lectures by scholars such as Jane Blocker (author of a forthcoming book on the contemporary Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta) and Aline Brandauer (who is working on a book about the interaction between Mexico and Paris in Surrealist art circles).