The Sovereignty of the Object

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Symposia 2011-2012 University Campus as Museum

"Basic Study on Utilization of the Art Resources at University"

[Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research 2011-2013;

Representative: Prof. Dr. OMUKA Toshiharu, University of Tsukuba]

OMUKA Toshiharu, Faculty of Art & Design, University of Tsukuba

March2013

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THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE OBJECT

Charles W. Haxthausen

I begin with a story. The time is the late middle ages. The

place is a castle in a dense forest somewhere in Europe. The

castle offers shelter to travelers "overtaken by night on their

journey: Lords and ladies, royalty and their retinue, humble

wayfarers." As they gather at table they discover that,

mysteriously, they have lost their ability to speak. They could

merely look at one another, as the narrator tells us, "with the

torment of not being able to exchange the many experiences

each of us had to communicate." At this point "the man who

seemed the lord of the castle set a pack of playing cards on

the table." They were tarot cards. Since the guests at the

castle have become mute and yet urgently desire to tell their

respective stories, they must use the images of the tarot cards

for this purpose, investing the tarots with narrative meanings

by the sequence in which they set them down, in either

vertical or horizontal rows, and by their own facial and bodily

expressions as they do so.

A tarot pack consists of seventy-eight cards: four suits of

numeral cards consisting of ten cards each: Cups, Clubs,

Swords, and Coins. Associated with these each of these four

suits are four court cards: a King, Queen, Knight, and Page.

And finally the pack is completed with twenty-two unique

cards known as Arcana. These include, for example: The Sun,

The Hermit, Death, the Fool, Temperance, Strength, The High

Priestess, and The Magician. A particular deck of tarot cards,

painted in the mid-15th century by Bonifacio Bembo for the

Dukes of Milan, was used to create the story I have been

recounting. It is from n castella dei destini incrociati by the

Italian author Italo Calvino.1

To give you an idea of how the guests in the castle tell their

silent tales, let me take as an example the first story. A young

man begins by putting down the Knight of Cups. The

narrator of the written story describes it thus: "a pink and

blond youth displaying a sun shaped cloak radiant with

embroidery, and offering with outstretched hand a gift .. . Our

fellow guest probably wishes to inform us of his wealthy

station, his inclination toward luxury and prodigality, and

also~showing himself on horseback-his spirit of

adventure." "The handsome youth . . . then began his silent

tale, arranging three cards in a row on the table: the King of Coins, the Ten of Coins, and the Nine of Qubs. The mournful

expression with which he set down the first of these cards,

and the joyous look with which he showed the next one,

seemed to want to tell us that, his father having died( ... ) he

had come into possession of a considerable fortune and had

immediately set forth on his travels." This, the narrator tells

us, they deduced from the Nine of Clubs, "which-with the

tangle if boughs extended over a sparse growth of leaves and

little wild flowers-reminded us of the forest through which

we had recently passed." The next card the youth puts down

is Strength. The narrator continues: "In our tarot pack this

Arcanum was represented by an armed brute, whose evil

intentions were unequivocally indicated by his cruel

expression, by the club swung in the air, and by his violence

in striking a lion to the ground with a single sharp blow, as

one might kill a rabbit. The story was, alas, clear: in the heart

of the forest the knight was ambushed by a fierce brigand."2

Eventually the guests at the castle use all these cards to tell

their respective stories; when they are done the result

resembles a crossword puzzle, in which one can read three

double-file stories horizontally and three vertically, and in

addition each of these sequences can also be 'read' in reverse,

as another tale. Thus we have a total of twelve stories. The

same cards, the narrator tells us, presented in a different

order, "often change their meaning."3 Although the tarot is a

fixed iconographic system with the figures following well

established conventions, the individual tarot cards assume a

new signification as they are used for the telling of each story.

Indeed, the same card can be interpreted differently in each

sequence. For example the two of Swords in the first of the

tales in a vertical column signifies a battle; in the horizontal

sequence it represents two armed guards.'

As Calvino described it, his book "is made first of

pictures-the tarot playing cards-and secondly of written

words. Through the sequence of the pictures stories are told,

which the written word tries to reconstruct and interpret."'

Calvino writes that he published this book "to be free of it: it

has obsessed me for years. I began by trying to line up tarots

at random, to see if I could read a story in them. I realized the

tarots were a machine for constructing stories; I thought of a

book, and imagined its frame: the mute narrators, the forest,

the inn; I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up

all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck."6

I think Calvino's story might also be read as an allegory of

art history-this at any rate is how I have come to see it, and

for many years I have assigned it to students in the seminar I

regularly teach on art-historical methods. Artworks, created

for certain purposes according to certain codes and

conventions like the cards of the tarot, are selected by art

historians and arranged in narratives we tell about the

history of art, a larger narrative that, like the tales in The

Castle of Crossed Destinies, goes beyond the actual

signification of the artworks themselves-stories of stylistic

evolution, of function, of social history, and so forth. Or one

might think of a museum collection as a tarot pack,

containing many stories. Indeed, this very idea occurred to

&lvino. In the latter part of Tl?p Cettle of Crossed Desfinies,

the fictive narrator makes an interesting assertion: "The kick

of arranging some tarots in a line and making stories emerge

fiom them is something I could perform also with paintings

in museums: putting for example, a Saint Jerome in the place

of the Hermit, a Saint George in the place of the Knight of

Swords, to see what comes out."7 What happens, he wonders,

what kind of narrative could be generated by placing these

two saints together? This goes to the heart of why I find this

such a wonderful text for art historians. We, too, are engaged

in selecting and arranging images in sequences and telling

stories about them.

A colleague of mine at Williams College, Marc Simpson,

was inspired by Calvino's novel to rethink the form of the

exhibition installation. He took this analogy between

Calvino's tarot tales and the museum collection to heart and

applied the principle in an exhibition he organized in

conjunction with a graduate seminar he was teaching. The

subject was the nineteenth-century American painter,

Winslow Homer, who is extraordinarily well represented in

the collection of the Clark Art Institute, also located in

Williamstown and an indispensable r€source for the teaching

of art history at Williams College. The title of the exhibition

was "Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History." Homer,

besides being one of the greatest nineteenth-century

American painters and watercolorists was an exceptionally

sccessful illustator in American magazines of the 1860s and

1870s. Professor Simpson installed this wall of wood

engravings like a crossword puzzle (Fig. 1), and as in

Calvino's tale of the tarot, a single image could be part of two

narratives. Across the top, designating vertical columns of

themes, there are the categories: "Economics and Class,"uMusic and Dancing," "Women," and "Work." Yet, some

images in those categories, like Calvino's tarots, are also part

of other thematic groups. On the left end of the wall we see,

for example, "The Civil War," and we find that prints in the

, categories of "Economics and Class," "Music and Dancing,"

and'TVomen," also fall into that category. The point is that

our looking at the image would be influenced by whether we

saw it as part of one column or another. In teaching his

sfudents about Homer, Professor Simpson was also teaching

them about art-historical narrative, about the multiple

meanings that can be read into images; the different stories

that can be told.

By this point the reader may be wondering why I am

hlking so much about narrative. But my point is not about

narrative; it is precisely about objects, about artworks and

how they can be used in the teaching of art history. I see a

paradox in Calvino's story, a dialectic _emphasizing the

multiple narratives that can be constructed out of a single

image has the effect, I believe, of relativizing not the image

but the stories we tell with and about images; it is to pry the

image apart from the text, to pry the artwork away from the

discursive apparatus of art history to recognize in the richest

artworks their multiplicity of references, associations, their

surplus of meanings. Such an approach reaffirms the

sovereignty of the object.

As I see it, recognizing the sovereignty of the object does

not mean embracing that clichd that "the artwork speaks for

itself," nor must it lead to a narrow aestheticism. It is to

recognize the sheer fecundity of the object, its capacity

through time to inspire ever new engagement with it from

multiple perspectives. The German art historian Hans

Belting has said that the artwork discloses "its own particular

huth or message, and always according to what the historian

is asking of it."8 The artwork endures in time; it is ourquestions that are ever-changing, emerging from our

experience in historical time. To be an art historian is not only

to appreciate art aesthetically, it is not only to know its origins

and context: it is also to understand the historicalcontingency, the historicity of our own discourse in relation to

these artworks. And repeated encounters with original art

objects can open up new ways of thinking about then,

challenging the models of interpretation with which we

approach them.

I shall offer some examples of how I have tried to activate

this process in my students. I begin with by describing two

teaching approaches I have adopted, and conclude by

discussing the recent reinstallation of the Williams College

Museum of Art, a project that owes some of its inspiration to

Calvino's TIu Castle of Crossed Destinies.

Before I continue, I should relate something of my own

background and how that has influenced my teaching with

original artworks. I came to art history through the practice

of painting. Before completing university I interrupted my

studies for three years, which I spent in Europe-in London,

Munich, and Berlin, studying to be a painter. I had had little

formal training in art history at the time; my primary

education in the field that was to become my profession came

through frequent visits to the great museums in these cities,

which I supplemented with my own, unsystematic reading.

When I did finally decided to study art history and to enter a

doctoral program I found that the best education I had was

from the many hours I had spent looking at original art works

in European museums and galleries. One might say that I

Symposia 2011-2012 University Campus as Museum 17

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learned to look at paintings outside of textual narratives, and

many of the ideas that I developed later as a teacher and

scholar of art history have come from these encounters. This

has strongly influenced my approach to the teaching of art

history.

This approach was reinforced by the first job I had after

receiving my doctorate. I had a joint appointment as an

assistant curator and assistant professor at Harvard

University, which has the world's greatest teaching

collections. During my eight years there I had sole curatorial

responsibility for the Busch-Reisinger Museum, a collection

with its greatest strength in twentieth-century German art.

For all of the courses I taught I organized exhibitions out of

our permanent collection and long term loans; on German

nineteenth and early twentieth-century art, on Klee and

Kandinsky, and on cubism and its influence. After leaving

Harvard, I used the collections at other institutions, at the

Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Art when I

taught at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and

since coming to Williams College in 1993 I have used the

collections of the Clark Art Institute and the Williams College

Museum of Art.

The most common way in which art history teachers in

America use the original art object is by requiring students

to write papers of visual description and analysis. The

purpose of this is to develop in students the skills for looking

at works of art-"teaching them how to see," we call it-and

to instill an aesthetic appreciation of them. These are

important exercises and worthy goals, and I make such

assignments a standard part of my own undergraduate

teaching.

But in teaching undergraduate and, especially, graduate

students specializing in art history I believe it is not enough

to teach them merely how to look and describe works of art.

In this view I have been profoundly influenced by the

scholarship of Michael Baxandall, whose book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, published in 1972 and

in a japanese translation in 1989, introduced the notion of

cognitive style to the discipline.9 Heinrich Wolfflin, in his

fundamental Principles of Art History, published in 1915, had

declared the history of art to be a history of human vision,

that painting was evidence of how people saw in a given

culture at a given historical moment. "Vision itself has a

history," Wolfflin wrote, "and the revelation of these visual

strata must be regarded as the primary task of art history."10

But in stressing the historicity of vision Wolffiin neglected to

recognize that this principle also applied to himself, to his

own seeing. He seemed to assume that the vision of the art

historian was neutral, unfiltered, unaffected by his historical

contingency and his own visual experience.

With the concept of cognitive style Baxandall developed the

notion that perception is historically relative, and this extends

to the perceptions of art historians. "The fifteenth-century

experience of a painting," he writes, "was not the painting we

see now so much as a marriage between the painting and

beholder's previous visualizing activity."11 No matter how

conscientious and thorough we are as scholars, Baxandall

insists, we shall never be able to view a Renaissance painting

with the eyes of a person of that era, we cannot erase our own

historically determined visual experience, which includes all

the painting of the past five-hundred years as well

photography, cinema, television and now the internet.

Baxandall himself concedes: "There is no question of fully

possessing oneself of another culture's cognitive style"; and

yet, he argues, "the profit [that comes from such an attempt] is

real: one tests and modifies one's perception of the art, one

enriches one's general visual repertory, and one gets at least

some intimation of another culture's visual experience and

disposition."~2 And, I would add: we learn that our own visual

equipment, and consequently our own seeing, is historically

determined.

In an attempt to sensitize my students to this historical

approach, I performed the following experiment. They were

to write a formal analysis of a work by the painter, architect,

and father of Western Art History Giorgio Vasari, on view in

the local museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (I was

then teaching at the University of Minnesota).13 Rather than

simply offering their own analysis, they were instructed to

write two descriptions, each based on a different historical

model, or, one could say, on a different cognitive style, on a

different template of perception. The first model was that of

the creator of the painting, Giorgio Vasari, namely his five

attributes of a good work of art or architecture discussed in

the prefaces to parts two and three of his own Lives of the Artists (1568}--good rule, order, proportion, design, and style.

The second model of analysis was Heinrich Wolfflin's five

characteristics of linear style-emphasized contours, planar

articulation of space, closed form, multiplicity (an emphasis

on the individual parts of the composition), and absolute

clarity of the subject represented." The student's task in this

exercise was not merely to apply these two models but to

assess how these two different sets of patterns and categories

served to structure their own perception of the work, how

each brought out different qualities of the painting- in the

case of Vasari, things that were clearly of value to him and his

period but which found no place in Wolfflin's system. The

intention of the exercise was to denaturalize their own

perceptions, to make them realize how ways of seeing are also

culturally and historically determined. This seems to me

essential to being an art historian. We must recognize that we

are ourselves part of the historical process that we are

studying, that we, too, are historical subjects.

The second example I will offer comes from a graduate

seminar on cubism that I have twice taught at Williams

College. The goal of my seminar, entitled "Cubism and its

Interpretations," was twofold: to gain an intimate knowledge

of cubist artworks and to study the evolving interpretations

of this complex art from the earliest criticism to the most

recent scholarship. Cubism is the modern Western art

movement that has received more scholarly attention than

any other, so in studying the critical and scholarly literature

on cubism we were also studying the historiography of art

historical writing on modernism through the 20th and into the

21" century.

Because there were extremely limited resources on campus

and in the immediate region, we began the seminar with a

two-day excursion. The Museum of Modern Art in New York

has an unrivalled collection of this art and is only three hours

away, but it is always too crowded with tourists for

conducting a class. For this reason I chose the Philadelphia

Museum of Art, some 400 kilometers from my college, which

has one of the best collections of cubism to be found

anywhere. I instructed the students to read nothing on cubism

in preparation for the visit; the less prior knowledge of

cubism they had, the better. I wanted them to begin the course

with an encounter with the paintings themselves, an

encounter unfiltered, as much as possible, through any critical

or art-historical interpretation. Historically, the pictures had

come first, and only then came the words, and this is the

chronological sequence that we retraced in the seminar. Each

student was asked to choose a painting to talk about and I

gave the group an hour to look at the works and prepare

remarks. By looking at these works in chronological

order-beginning with the pre-cubist Picasso self-portrait of

1906, and various works by him that followed it, concluding

with a work of 1914 not shown here, they were to develop

their own interpretation, their own narrative account, based

on a close examination and analysis of the works they had

. seen, of the evolution of cubist pictorial practice.

Only after this initial immersion, in which the students

spent about six hours spread over two days examining and

\Jiscussing these paintings, did we begin, at our next class

meeting back at Williams College, to read the literature on

cubism, starting with the earliest criticism. My intention was

that my students, having studied the original art objects and

having sought to analyze their various features, would then

be able to take a critical position toward everything they

would read about this art. Rather than viewing these complex

paintings through the filter of words, they would evaluate the

words against their own knowledge of the paintings that the

words sought to explain and interpret. The students could

now see how, in the later literature, critics and scholars were

often as strongly, even more strongly influenced by what had

been written before than by the works themselves, while

ignoring whole aspects of this art, such as the evolution of the

material surface of cubist painting.

I will devote the remainder of this essay to describing a

project that I think may be the most useful as a model for

departments of art history that have their own teaching

collections, but which also has applications for professors

working with art collections outside their own institutions.

My example is the recent reinstallation of the permanent

collection of the Williams College Museum of Art. The

catalyst for this initiative was a proposal by the Yale

University Art Gallery, an American university museum with

a collection second only to Harvard's, to offer works from its

collection on long-term loan to the galleries and museums of

other colleges in the area. The need to integrate these

objects-there were fifty of them-into our galleries led us to

reinstall the entire collection and in so doing to rethink its

teaching function. This reinstallation, which bore the title

"Reflections on a Museum"(Fig. 2), was not only a lively

display of 450 artworks of many cultures and periods, it was

also a self-examination by the museum of its own practices.

Here, again, the goal was a kind of transparency that allowed

students and visitors to see not only the artworks but also to

be made conscious of the apparatus of their selection,

presentation, and interpretation. The theme of this exhibition

could therefore be said to have been the art museum itself and

its role on a college or university campus.

One of the eight reinstalled galleries took its inspiration

from Calvina's Castle of Crossed Destinies. It was called,

appropriately enough, the "Gallery of Crossed Destinies." It

was the site of a series of four exhibitions, each with a

separate curator, none of whom is an art historian or

otherwise affiliated with the museum. They were: the owner

of a local flower shop; a ninth-grade high school class,

averaging fourteen years of age; a theater producer; and the

Williams College football coach. Each curator was given the

task of mounting an exhibition from a group of twenty-five

objects-this functioned as the "tarot pack"-encompassing


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a wide range of media, cultures, and epochs. They included

an abstract painting by the American Robert Motherwell; a

sandstone head of a religious worshipper from Central India

dating from the tenth to eleventh century; a portrait by the

seventeenth-century Spanish painter Francisco Pacheco (best

known as the father-in-law of Diego Velazquez); a mixed

media piece by the American contemporary artist Lorna

Simpson, titled Stack of Diaries, consisting of a photograph

printed on linen and a steel shelf-like structure holding sheets

of glass; an ancient Greek wreath of olive leaves made of gold;

a painting by the mid-20'" century American artist Edward

Hopper; and an Ancient Egyptian bronze sculpture of an

ibis."

The curators did not have to use all the objects, but they

did have to find a coherent theme for the exhibition they

mounted from within this group of artworks, to design the

installation and write wall text to accompany the exhibition.

The piece by Lorna Simpson was one of the few works chosen

for all four exhibitions; the painting by Pacheco was the least

popular work of the entire group of twenty-five, being used in

only one installation. As with Calvina's tarots, different

aspects of each object were brought out by the theme of each

installation (Figs. 3--6). At the entrance to each exhibition was a curator's

statement, explaining the theme. Here is the florist:

As a plants man, I know that light is essential to

placement. In a north-facing window, geraniums grow

long and leggy quickly. Given a southern exposure, they

will delight with abundant blooms and a bushy habit.

However, violets, ferns, and shade-loving plants will

burn and die in such light. Even cut flowers respond to

light. At home, arrange a vase of tulips perfectly. They

will bend and grow toward light, arranging themselves

as they must. So light affects. The objects you see are all reflections of light. Some

literally: the morning light glinting upon the gold of the

olive leaf wreath ....

Edward Hopper casts his nude woman in the

seemingly harsh light of Morning in a City. Her weary

face looks out the window, into the daylight. The far-off

horizon of [nineteenth-century American landscape

painter] George Inness's Twilight is bathed in warm

tones of pink, orange, and yellow, setting a serene scene.

This land would look dissimilar at noon, for it would be

bright green and blue.

If the florist's exhibition concept was based on a visual

theme of light as represented in the image or manifested in

the object's display, the high-school students focused on the

experience of the viewer. They explained their theme like this:

"Rather than identify intrinsic factors such as genre or media

by which to group the pieces, we focused on the effect that the

art has on the viewer. Therefore, the art is arranged by our

interpretation of the emotional response elicited by each

piece." The George Inness landscape, for example, was

chosen to represent the emotional effect of "serenity."

This was only one of the eight galleries of the museum's

reinstallation project. Yet as the museum describes it, The Gallery of Crossed Destinies is a microcosm of the entire

collection reinstallation, which was designed to make the

visitor aware of the process by which objects are arranged

and exhibited in a museum setting and the different stories

they can tell. Each of the seven other installations examined

some aspect of museum practice.

A gallery with the title "The Medium and the Message"

(Figs. 7-8) asked the question: How does the material shape

the message that the artwork communicates? How does the

museum's presentation further influence the way we interpret

the artwork?

A third gallery (Figs. 9--10) was concerned with how the

presentation of a museum's collection can address myths

about the nation-in this case the American nation-and now

it served to shape national identity of some while excluding

others. It was also concerned with American responses to

European modernism.

The gallery ·~t re art" (Fig. 11), art about art, took as its

subject the work of artists whose work responds to previous

artworks or to already existing images.

The first gallery in our reinstallation (Fig. 12), located

nearest to the entrance of the museum, addressed the

fundamental question, what is art? One has entered an art

museum; all of the objects presented here are valued by our

culture as artworks. What is it that defines them as art? The

objects chosen were intended to show just how complicated

this question is. This wall text addresses the question:

When do coins, chairs, doors, or pots become works of

art? Does it begin with the intent of the maker or the

object's presentation in the museum?

Despite their aesthetic or art historical significance

today, many of the objects in this section were not

regarded as "Art" by their makers. Objects such as

ancient Egyptian pots and Sumerian cuneiform tablets

were created for everyday use and not for aesthetic

enjoyment.

By pairing ancient and modern objects across cultures

and media, this section invites you to contemplate

definitions of art and function over time.

On the top shelf of the glass display case, for example, are

a small Henry Moore sculpture, but every other object (Fig.

13) -they come from Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece,

Ancient Roman-Syria, Costa Rica, Pre-Hispanic Mexico,

eighteenth-century England, among other places-was

created for some utilitarian purpose. The Egyptian Shawabti

figurines (Fig. 14) at the front of the vitrine-small ceramic

objects that were placed in tombs to perform manual labor on

behalf of the deceased in the afterlife-have a particular

· resonance in the collection of a museum, for indeed they

function in an afterlife, an aesthetic afterlife, something quite

different from the afterlife for which they were intended. As

such they are paradigmatic for all utilitarian objects that

come to serve as examples of "art" in a museum.

One wall of this same gallery makes for a particularly

interesting group in terms of the variety of objects united

under the concept of "art"-two chairs and two doors (Figs.

15-16). The chair on the left, known as a Windsor chair, was

made in America between 1780 and 1820 and was based on a

design developed in England. It is a purely utilitarian object,

pleasant to behold but not in the least luxurious; certainly no

one at the time would have thought of it as a work of art, of

something to be looked at rather than sat upon. The chair

beside it, titled Bridge Chair with Shadow, in which the chair's

shadow is made palpable, was designed by the American

theater director and designer Robert Wilson. Of the four

objects on the wall, it is the only one that was made with a

primarily aesthetic purpose, as an element in a theatrical

performance. After it had served that purpose Wilson

donated it to the museum. To its right we have a different

case: a plain, utterly banal wooden door, completely devoid of

any aesthetic interest in itself, a found object, which becomes

a work of art because it was appropriated and painted black

by the famed American painter Jim Dine. Through the visual

interest of the textured brushwork of its monochrome surface,

Dine has turned the door into a kind of painting. Finally, on

the right we have a granary door, also functional, made by the

Dogon people in Mali in Africa. This is the only one of these

objects that includes a representation-horizontal rows of

tiny abstract figures that fill out the surface. Yet this was not

r- made as a work of art. Unlike the other three objects on this

wall, it serves both a utilitarian and symbolic function. It is in

an art museum because, in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, European artists and anthropologists

began to value such African objects as art.

This gallery suggests that every work of art in our

museum has a story to tell. I am not speaking here of the

story told by the narrative subject matter of a painting,

sculpture, or print; what I am referring to is the story of the

object itself, of its travel through time and space; most objects

have passed through many hands, have been transported to

different locations, often far from their place of origin, and in

so doing have acquired multiple layers of meaning. The

German critic Walter Benjamin wrote that for a true collector

"The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former

ownership-.. . the whole background of an item adds up to a

magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his

object." As he holds an object in his hands , Benjamin

continues, he seems to be seeing through it into its distant

past."16 The museum usually suppresses these stories in

favor of a unified presentation in which everything exists in

the here and now of the installation.

To reveal this historical dimension of the object, to tell only

one of the stories that each object in the collection could tell,

the museum chose to make visible to visitors the tale of two

objects- two of the oldest in the museum. These were

Assyrian bas-reliefs that came to Williams College in 1851,

before there was an art collection, before even the study of art

history had been institutionalized in the United States.17 This

gallery is called "A collection of histories." In this case, the

installation, using documents, photographs and a computer

simulation of the reliefs' original setting and appearance,

traced the history of these works. Created in the ninth century

BCE, they lined the walls of the palace of Ashurnasirpal II in

Kalhu, what is today Nimrud, lraq.18 They were intended to

ward off evil and as propaganda for the king: their cuneiform

inscriptions proclaim his royal ancestry, his feats as a heroic

warrior, and the splendor of the royal palace in which they

were placed.

And there the reliefs remained for 2,600 years, as the palace

and its surroundings fell into ruin, until in 1845 a British

amateur archaeologist, Sir Austen Henry Layard, excavated

Nimrud with permission from the government of the Ottoman

Empire. An American Christian missionary, Dwight Whitney

Marsh, who had graduated from Williams College in 1842,

saw the many reliefs that Layard had excavated at Nimrud

and asked the archaeologist for two examples to be given to

Williams. His intent, as he expressed it in a letter to the

President of Williams College (a document included in the

exhibition), was primarily religious- to provide

archaeological evidence from biblical times. The installation


r

includes much more information about the reliefs-their

preparation for shipment to America by cutting them to one

quarter of their original thickness and then breaking up each

relief into three sections to allow for crating and transport.

They were transported by a caravan of camels from Nimrud

to Beirut, Lebanon, where they were loaded onto a ship and

brought across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. These

were the first Assyrian reliefs to come to America. It was not

until the 1920s, when the Williams Museum of Art was

founded, that these sculptures were displayed as works of art.

By means of a wall text, the installation uses this detailed

history to pose some questions that have become topical

today:

Created for an ancient Assyrian ruler, the reliefs may

seem jarring in a teaching museum in Williamstown,

Massachusetts. Their journey across space and time

raises ethical questions about removing objects from

their original context and reflects changes in museum

and archaeological practices. The past is not static, and

even the original context has changed in its geographical

boundaries, politics, and religious beliefs. Kalhu, the

capital of the Assyrian Empire, was part of the Ottoman

Empire at the time of the excavation, and today is a city

in Iraq. Objects such as these offer us the opportunity to

reinterpret and revisit the past, but they also complicate

the question of who owns the past.

When an object is removed from its context, does it

lose meaning? Does moving an object to a museum add

meaning? Is one context or interpretation more valid

than another? We invite you to consider these questions

as you examine the reliefs in different chapters through

time.

I should add that these reliefs have been used not only for

art history courses. They have also been used for archaeology

courses on ancient civilizations, for a literature course on The Epic of Gilgamesh, and history courses on colonialism and

imperialism.

I have now come to the end of my own story, a story about

the sovereignty of the art object. I hope it has been

informative and, more important, useful. I have tried to show

that working with collections of original artworks has

enormous potential for enriching the work that we do as

teachers of art history; and that for curators, too, the museum

collection has the potential for as many stories as Calvina's

pack of tarot cards.

The great German-American scholar Erwin Panofsky is

alleged to have complained: "Those damned originals! They

spoil all of one's ideas!" To which I say, yes, they do indeed,

and that is all to the good!

1 Italo Calvino, II castella dei destini incrociati (Turin: Giulio

Enaudi editore, 1973). Here and elsewhere I am quoting

from the American translation, The Castle Of Crossed

Destinies, translated by William Weaver (New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 3-48. Images of thirty

five of the cards can be seen online at

http://www.artres.com, keyword: "Visconti-Sforza tarot

cards." Twenty-two others are at

http:/ /www.tarocchi.net/en/upload/0201137 4804.jpg

2 Calvino, Castle of Crossed Destinies, 7-8.

3 Ibid., 41.

4 Ibid., 12-13, 19.

5 Ibid, 123.

6 Ibid., 126.

7 Ibid., 105.

8 Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? translated

by Christopher S. Wood (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1987), 63.

9 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

10 Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, translated by M.

D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 11.

11 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 45.

12 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1980), 143.

13 The painting is Vasari's Six Tuscan Poets, 1544, which

can be accessed online at

http:/ /images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-

5/six-tuscan-poets-giorgio-vasari.jpg. Accessed on 10

March2013.

14 Wolfflin, Principles of Art History, 14-16.

15 Images of all twenty-five works can be accessed at

http :/ /web . williams.edu/wcma/mod ules/ crossed

destinies/explore/

16 Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," in

Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York:

Schocken, 1969), 60--£1.

17 Images can be accessed at the Williams College Museum

of Art's website:

http:/ /emuseum. williams.edu:8080/emuseurn!

includes much more information about the reliefs-their

preparation for shipment to America by cutting them to one

quarter of their original thickness and then breaking up each

relief into three sections to allow for crating and transport.

They were transported by a caravan of camels from Nimrud

to Beirut, Lebanon, where they were loaded onto a ship and

brought across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. These

were the first Assyrian reliefs to come to America. It was not

until the 1920s, when the Williams Museum of Art was

founded, that these sculptures were displayed as works of art.

By means of a wall text, the installation uses this detailed

history to pose some questions that have become topical

today:

Created for an ancient Assyrian ruler, the reliefs may

seem jarring in a teaching museum in Williamstown,

Massachusetts. Their journey across space and time

raises ethical questions about removing objects from

their original context and reflects changes in museum

and archaeological practices. The past is not static, and

even the original context has changed in its geographical

boundaries, politics, and religious beliefs. Kalhu, the

capital of the Assyrian Empire, was part of the Ottoman

Empire at the time of the excavation, and today is a city

in Iraq. Objects such as these offer us the opportunity to

reinterpret and revisit the past, but they also complicate

the question of who owns the past.

When an object is removed from its context, does it

lose meaning? Does moving an object to a museum add

meaning? Is one context or interpretation more valid

than another? We invite you to consider these questions

as you examine the reliefs in different chapters through

time.

I should add that these reliefs have been used not only for

art history courses. They have also been used for archaeology

courses on ancient civilizations, for a literature course on The Epic of Gilgamesh, and history courses on colonialism and

imperialism.

I have now come to the end of my own story, a story about

the sovereignty of the art object . I hope it has been

informative and, more important, useful. I have tried to show

that working with collections of original artworks has

enormous potential for enriching the work that we do as

teachers of art history; and that for curators, too, the museum

collection has the potential for as many stories as Calvina's

pack of tarot cards.

The great German-American scholar Erwin Panofsky is

alleged to have complained: "Those damned originals! They

spoil all of one's ideas!" To which I say, yes, they do indeed,

and that is all to the good!

1 Italo Calvino, Il castella dei destini incrociati (Turin: Giulio

Enaudi editore, 1973). Here and elsewhere I am quoting

from the American translation, The Castle Of Crossed

Destinies, translated by William Weaver (New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 3-48. Images of thirty

five of the cards can be seen online at

http://www.artres.com, keyword: "Visconti-Sforza tarot

cards." Twenty-two others are at

http:/ /www.tarocchi.net/en/upload/0201137 4804.jpg

2 Calvino, Castle of Crossed Destinies, 7-8.

3 Ibid., 41.

4 Ibid., 12-13, 19.

5 Ibid, 123.

6 Ibid., 126.

7 Ibid., 105.

8 Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? translated

by Christopher S. Wood (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1987), 63.

9 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

10 Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, translated by M.

D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 11.

11 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 45.

12 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1980), 143.

13 The painting is Vasari's Six Tuscan Poets, 1544, which

can be accessed online at

http:/ /images.fineartamerica.cornlimages-medium-large-

5/six-tuscan-poets-giorgio-vasari.jpg. Accessed on 10

March2013.

14 Wolfflin, Principles of Art History, 14-16.

15 Images of all twenty-five works can be accessed at

http:/ /we b. williams.edu/wcma/mod ules/ crossed

destinies/explore/

16 Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," in

Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York:

Schocken, 1969), 60-61.

17 Images can be accessed at the Williams College Museum

of Art's website:

http:/ /emuseum. williams.edu:8080/emuseum/

18 A fragment from the same palace is in the collection of the Miho Museum in japan:

http://www.miho.or.jp/englishlcollect/tpmbd.htm

Symposia 2011- 2012 University Campus as Museum 23

Fig. 1 Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, fall 2005

Fig. 2: Exhibition Brochure: Reflections on a Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, spring 2011. Photograph by Arthur Evans.

Fig. 3 "The Gallery of Crossed Destinies, " Florist's Installation, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011 . Photograph by Arthur Evans.

Fig. 4 "The Gallery of Crossed Destinies," Mount Grey lock High School Students' Installation, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011. Photograph by Arthur Evans

Symposia 2011 - 2012 Un iversity Campus as Museum 25

Fig. 5 "The Gallery of Crossed Destinies," Florist's installation, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011 Photograph by Arthur Evans.

Fig. 6 "The Gallery of Crossed Destinies," High school students' installation, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011. Photograph by Arthur Evans.

Fig. 7 Gallery Installation: "The Medium and the Message," Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011. Photograph by Arthur Evans.

Fig . 8 Gallery Installation: "The Medium and the Message," Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011 . Photograph by Arthur Evans.

Symposia 2011 -201 2 University Campus as Museum 27

Fig . 9 Gallery Installation: "Don't Fence Me In," Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011. Photograph by Arthur Evans.

Fig. 10 Gallery Installation: "Don't Fence Me In," Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011 . Photograph by Arthur Evans

ate n'Cont!!xtua li?e

Fig. 11 Gallery Installation: "Art re Art," Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011. Photograph by Arthur Evans.

Fig. 12 Gallery Installation: "The Object of Art," Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011. Photograph by Richard Miller.


Fig . 13 Ancient Egyptian Shawabti Figurines, Gallery Installation "The Object of Art," Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011. Photograph by Charles W. Haxthausen.

Fig . 14 Gallery Installation: "The Object of Art," Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011. Photograph by Richard Miller.

Fig. 15 Gallery Installation: "The Object of Art," Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011. Photograph by Richard Miller.

Fig. 16 Gallery Installation: "The Object of Art," Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2011 . Photograph by Richard Miller.


The Sovereignty of the Object

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