Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum

Jane Chin Davidson, Sandra Esslinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138656826
• eBook ISBN: 9781317220800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum provides new thinking on exhibitions of global art and world art in relation to university museums.Taking The Fowler Museum at UCLA, USA, as its central subject, this edited collection traces how university museum practices have expanded the understanding of the 'art object' in recent years. It is argued that the meaning of cultural objects infused with the heritage and identity of 'global culture' has been developed substantially through the innovative approaches of university scholars, museum curators, and administrators since the latter part of the twentieth century. Through exploring the ways in which universities and their museums have overseen changes in the global context for art, this edited collection initiates a larger dialogue and inquiry into the value and contribution of the empirical model.The volume includes a full-colour photo essay by Marla C. Berns on the Fowler Museum's 'Fowler at Fifty' project, as well as contributions from Donald Preziosi, Catherine M. Cole, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Claire Farago, Selma Holo, and Gemma Rodrigues. It is important reading for professionals, scholars and advanced students alike.

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1 Fowler at Fifty

Looking back, looking forward

Marla C. Berns

In October 2013 the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, launched its fiftieth-anniversary year with an expansive project titled Fowler at Fifty. Filling two of the museum’s large galleries, it consisted of a suite of eight small exhibitions. The project brought together nearly one thousand objects from the museum’s permanent collections to celebrate the depth, scope, and diversity of our holdings—which today number more than 120,000 examples of art and material culture from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the indigenous Americas.

If the greatness of a museum tends to be measured in large part by the quality and quantity of its collections, as is undoubtedly true for the Fowler, what an institution does with these collections is of equal if not greater significance. The fiftieth-anniversary milestone was an opportunity to underscore the museum’s long-held premise that works of art are not static in meaning or value, whether to us, to their original owners, or to their future custodians. They are instead dynamic “living” resources, subject to reevaluation, reinterpretation, and reengagement over time. The varied histories of how objects have entered the Fowler’s collections—as products of the colonial encounter, acquisition in the course of scholarly field research, or the generosity of individuals who have donated their personal collections or provided funding for museum purchases—have impacted the nature and extent of our holdings and our access to knowledge about them.

Over the past fifty years, the Fowler’s self-defined hybridity has meant that we are not an art museum nor an anthropology museum but rather a university museum with the freedom to break new ground with new and unfamiliar subjects, artistic genres of all types, and experimental interpretive approaches. This refusal to fit neatly into one museum paradigm makes us an activist institution, long committed to opening new pathways for experiencing and learning about global arts and humanities, past and present. Our goal has been to stimulate curiosity in and respect for cultural difference and artistic diversity, and to be receptive to all forms of expressive culture regardless of the ways other institutions may categorize, prioritize, or perceive them. Moreover, many Fowler projects, even those that have focused on “tradition-based arts” (those that were studied and/or collected in the field and associated with indigenous makers and ethnographic contexts of use and meaning), have also purposefully included works by living artists whose heritages tie them to these traditional contexts, as well as to ongoing connections of shared religious beliefs, social values, or new forms of cultural expression. Because the Fowler has long been committed to demonstrating that culture is never static but rather always on the move, our relatively recent focus on today’s artists also has brought the museum into direct dialogue with discourses around the global contemporary.

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This chapter embeds discussion of the eight individual exhibitions that constituted Fowler at Fifty within a recounting of our institutional history and a deeper explanation of our programmatic and intellectual priorities than those summarized above. Using pioneering approaches that have come to typify Fowler exhibitions, Fowler at Fifty contributed to global knowledge and cross-cultural understanding at the same time that it attested to the power of multiple voices and viewpoints and to the richness and diversity of world arts and cultures.

A new museum for UCLA

No account of the Fowler’s development could fail to acknowledge the significance of our location within a major research university and the distinct opportunities and circumstances that it has offered. The museum was established in 1963 by UCLA Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy, and it represented a major policy decision on his part to create a dedicated research unit in support of a “rapidly growing program in anthropology, archaeology, ethnology, and those appropriate aspects of art history.”¹ Seeking to support research in these fields, the university gave the new museum a largely non-Western mandate, although the vernacular arts of Europe and the Near East also found a place in early programming.

The museum formed part of Murphy’s interdisciplinary and international aspirations for the university, which were also embodied in the newly formed Latin American, Near Eastern, European, and African Studies Centers. By the end of the 1960s UCLA had also established a series of Ethnic Studies Centers (Afro-American Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, etc.), which reflected a push toward diversity and inclusivity that would mirror the multicultural growth of Los Angeles. It is telling that the new campus museum was initially christened the “Laboratory of Ethnic Arts and Technology,” underscoring its exceptional position as a place for experimentation and for the integration of the arts and the sciences. The laboratory began as a clearinghouse for ethnological and archaeological objects that faculty brought back to UCLA from their respective sites of field research and investigations into various aspects of human creativity and technology.

During the 1960s, art history was part of UCLA’s large art department, which also encompassed studio practice and design. It offered a single general course on non-Western art, which had been introduced in 1956 and was taught by Ralph Altman. Altman owned one of the earliest galleries in Los Angeles to feature “ethnic arts,” and in his UCLA lectures he emphasized their relationship to culture, denounced the notion that their makers were “primitive,” and insisted that their creators be credited for their independent aesthetic achievement.² Chancellor Murphy, who had a personal passion for pre-Columbian and other arts of the Americas, had frequented Altman’s gallery and recognized his progressive thinking. Murphy appointed Altman the first chief curator of the new laboratory, a position he held until his death in 1967. That same year the university hired Arnold Rubin to teach African and Oceanic art history, making UCLA’s art department one of only a few in the country to open its curriculum to the arts of Africa and the Pacific. Rubin espoused an “art as technology” approach, emphasizing how art both shapes and is shaped by the cultural system that produces it.³ UCLA had therefore taken a “global turn”—not only decades before this concept became fashionable but also prior to the moment when the academy began to reflect critically on its own methods and language for addressing divergent cultural and artistic practices.⁴

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A brief history of collecting

Chancellor Murphy exerted his considerable influence in the building of a noteworthy collection for the new laboratory, understanding that this would constitute the foundation of its research mission. He facilitated the purchase of the Katharane Mershon Collection of Indonesian art in 1961 (133 objects) and of the Jean-Pierre Hallet Collection of Congolese art in 1963 (more than 3,500 objects). The large size of these early acquisitions set the stage for the museum’s future collections, which were intended to serve the interests of interdisciplinary research by being comprehensive and varied.

In 1964 Dr. F.N.L. Poynter, Trustee of the Sir Henry Wellcome Trust and Director of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in London, came to the university to deliver a lecture. When Chancellor Murphy introduced Dr. Poynter to the Laboratory of Ethnic Arts and Technology, Poynter was struck by the similarities between its mission and Sir Henry Wellcome’s own stated objectives for a museum to house his collections. Not unlike the major European museums that were established in the late nineteenth century as repositories for the collecting enterprises of explorers, colonial officers, missionaries, and others, Sir Henry Wellcome had the wealth and the impetus to collect voraciously and globally. He and his agents collected nearly a million objects during the early decades of the twentieth century.⁵ Wellcome was particularly driven by a fascination with indigenous healing practices and “the history of medicine and mankind from evolutionary perspectives.”⁶ He died in 1936, however, before he could realize the museum he had envisioned to house his objects permanently, and his trustees sought to disperse much of the collection.⁷

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The British Museum received the largest gift, but due to Chancellor Murphy’s persuasive case, the Laboratory of Ethnic Arts and Technology received a remarkable and transformational gift of 30,000 objects from the Wellcome Collection. The significance of this acquisition cannot be overstated. It gave the university’s new research unit an unparalleled resource that could never be duplicated (despite the limited documentation that accompanied most of the objects). The scope, early provenance, and rarity of the Wellcome Collection put UCLA on the map and the museum in the top tier of American anthropology museums holding especially African and Pacific arts.⁸

With the arrival of the Wellcome Collection objects on campus between 1965 and 1967, the name of the museum was aptly changed to “Museum and Laboratories of Ethnic Arts and Technology.” The gift served as a powerful catalyst for the exponential growth of the Fowler’s collections and has helped guide the trajectories of research, exhibitions, and publications over the intervening decades. Today, the museum’s collections continue to be employed...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum
• Routledge Research in Museum Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: A Critical Conversation—Global/World Art and the University Museum
• 1 Fowler at Fifty: Looking Back, Looking Forward
• 2 In the Light of the Fowler: Art, History, Museology, And . . .
• 3 Global Art and World Art: An Update on Art and Anthropology in the University Museum
• 4 African Art and Art History’s Global Turn
• 5 East Asian Art History at Ucla: Its Development and Current Challenges
• 6 Imagining Art History Otherwise
• 7 Time Slip: Fiat Lux Redux/Remix as University Museum Social Practice
• 8 Public Trust: The Museum and the University
• 9 Other Possible Worlds: The Global University Museum and Its Subjects
• Select Bibliography
• Index