Dialogue with the Director Archives Dialogue with the Director
July | August 2005
During the 2004-05 school year, the Spencer did not have a curator of Asian art on campus. However, the museum was privileged to have Hillary Pedersen as its Carpenter Foundation intern in Asian art. Together with the typical duties of graduate student and intern, Hillary served in a curatorial role with respect to organizing exhibitions in the Asian Gallery, corresponding with donors and responding to the myriad questions and requests that typically come through the curator's office.
SRH: You've had a really exciting year because you stepped in when the Asian curator wasn't here and you've served in both a learning mode and also a leadership mode in the Asian gallery. Tell me how that has been.
HP: It's been an incredible learning experience. A lot of people have asked me how I'm doing this, and I'm just trying to make myself open to anything I can learn because this may lead into a career in my future and I want to be prepared for it. But it has not been easy at all. Especially still being a student, where I have to take classes and write papers. Going from a student mode into a sort of leadership role is very different, having to shift gears like that.
SRH: We've had several conversations in which you've talked about the balance between curatorial work and scholarship. Can you express to me some of the pleasures of both?
HP: With academic work, you get to embark on a really in-depth exploration of a certain field, and the more you know about the field the deeper you're able to go and the more you realize you actually don't know about it, the more curious you are. With that knowledge you can talk with other people in your field about similar things--like, I work with Japanese sculpture, and I can talk about the same issues with Chinese sculpture. The past two semesters I took classes that dealt with Asian scholarship but looking at it from a Western scholarship perspective--like, we used an Italian Renaissance textbook in one of the classes. So it's interesting to sort of cross areas within academia. I think it's important to do that.
SRH: Why do you think crossing those areas is so important?
HP: Because art relates to the human experience and it relates humans to each other. And if you isolate it in your own country or your own geographic area, it's hard to relate to humans in other parts of the field. Drawing connections between, for example, Western and Asian art history, you can get some really diverse understandings about things like religion, for one thing, Buddhism versus Christianity, or large-scale monumental cave sculpture in China and a statue patronized by the Medici family in Renaissance Italy. Things on the surface may seem very isolated but if you can delve deeper and find the connections between those things you can learn more about the human experience, how humans are connected, and what values are important to them.
SRH: It's really interesting that you bring up the cross-disciplinary work because as you know I'm very interested in the intersections among things. It seems to me one of the privileges of working in a university art museum is that you have the opportunity to express to a very broad audience, which we normally call "the public," and also an audience that has specialized interests. And those two challenges together seem to me to be part of what can make the Spencer very special. And maybe that unique capability is something you've felt, almost in a very rarified way this year as you stepped into three roles--the role of a student, the role of a curator and the role of an intern. So I imagine that this moment has taught you a lot about what you like.
HP: It has. It has. I really enjoy putting together the exhibitions, and especially working with a theme rather than one particular artist. Working with a theme you're able to take an idea and apply it to prints, to paintings, to three-dimensional objects. In taking a theme like travel, which is the theme of the summer show, you're able to see how travel is experienced by those in Japan or China, and in what ways travel shows up in the art, either by artists traveling or ideas crossing borders, things like that. I've also liked working with the public. I like working with a curious public who wants to know why a certain thing looks a certain way. I like working as part of a team in the museum, and I think the Spencer is unique in that we have a good sense of teamwork and a good sense of respect among the staff. That's been a really enjoyable part of the job.
SRH: What's a hallmark of respect among jobs?
HP: Understanding your colleagues' needs in terms of when things need to get done or how much preparation you need to put into your own work in order for them to get their stuff done on time, and to a certain standard.
SRH: You are a person who has very high standards in many ways. You like to meet your deadlines. You like to do things in a thoughtful way. And sometimes those two things can come into conflict with one another because there's always a better idea. So in establishing standards as a curator, and folding the public into that, has this taught you anything new about what a standard is, and who you are trying to please?
HP: Your standards can and should shift when you're putting an exhibition together. You can't have in mind that this is going to be a part of an art historical symposium. You have people coming in who maybe haven't seen things like this before, but you know that they are curious and want to be educated about it. One of the things that especially this year I'm feeling is the tension between the academic and the museum worlds. And I think you have to have a different set of goals when you're working in either field. Not necessarily that one set of goals is higher than the other, but the goals are just different. And I think if you keep in mind that they are different and they both have a sophisticated working system, then you're able to reach both.
SRH: An exhibition is very different from a book. And I think sometimes in museums that dialogue is something we need to consciously consider: the kinds of learning you experience from an exhibition and the kinds of learning you experience from reading a book. So is there something that you think about that way as you've been installing exhibitions?
HP: I think about, when I read a museum catalogue for an exhibition, what the author is trying to teach me without me getting too confused. I think clarity is really important.
SRH: In a gallery you often have three or four people wandering around, and they don't always following the same path. There is a unique narrative that the person creates as he or she walks through the space. Sometimes in a book it's more sequential, more linear. Neither is better or worse, particularly, but I'm wondering if you're thinking about that movement of body in space as a reading or more as a choreography of experience.
HP: I imagine a person entering the gallery and what they see, what their eyes will be drawn to. Then you sort of have to coordinate that with the space, with how many walls you have, with how much room you have, and also the sort of psychological question of where a person will go. But the goal in an exhibition, I think, is to have a certain path. The fact that people won't necessarily follow it is something you have to take into account when you write your labels. You can't say, "number 31 relates to what you saw in number 24." You can't count on them taking a path like that.
SRH: We have a lot of people who walk into the Asian gallery who know a great deal about the culture, and then we have others who come in and want to learn more. What kind of advice would you give someone who is coming new to Asian art. How would you invite them to see the gallery? What would you tell them to do?
HP: I would tell them to begin thinking about archaeology, very early things, and what kind of things had been discovered from 2500 B.C. in China or 300 A.D. in Japan. Pre-historical things. And then I would want to introduce the concept of religion and how different religions manifested themselves within Asia--Buddhism, Daoism, Shintoism, things like that. It's sort of tempting in art history to delve into the history of things, which is important, but in art history you have to have a balance between historical facts and the actual object, and society and religion, things like that. Then I'd tell them to go to Japan [laughs]. I would also suggest looking at a map but not depending on the lines that are drawn on the map. I would want them to recognize the fluidity of Asian art, how it's not isolated in any way. There are things that are native to certain countries, but it's amazing the amount of flow that exists.
SRH: I'm curious when you mention the idea of fluidity. Are you meaning fluidity of both time and space?
HP: Stylistically, conceptually, it's not isolated.
SRH: So does culture loop?
HP: Yes, I think it does. I think it has to in order for it to survive and evolve--evolving in different ways, not as one monumental thing. It pops up in different places, like a root system.
SRH: Because you've had a lot of experiences in our galleries, I'm really interested in what work of art relates to your research, your thinking and your work.
HP: Well, initially thinking about that question, I'm thinking about the Standing Amida Buddha , which is one of the central permanent components to the Asian Gallery. But when I think about it a little more, I think the Haniwa relates to my work and my work process. Number one it's sculpture, and I like three-dimensional works in that I share the same space with them and feel that I can connect with them. The Haniwa is good because there are so many questions that come out of that work. Why does it look the way it looks? Who made it? Why did they make it just like that? Why are the eyes hollow? Why is there this blackness inside? What does it show about what the artist thought about a human being? I'm also intrigued by the fact that the Haniwa was put on a tomb as part of a complex burial tradition that we don't really know everything about. And in that way it has a sense of mystery about it. In my work with Japanese Esoteric Buddhist sculpture, I think about how an image, especially a sculpture, relates to a human. What spiritual and religious aspects are going into the creation of the sculpture? Like the Haniwa, for example: What was the thinking behind the creation of that? Looking at other Haniwa , there seems to be a set iconography. They're all very similar in some ways with the hollowed-out eyes and the very basic forms. And in Buddhist art as well, there's a set of iconography that's applied to sculpture. And I think--again relating to the human experience and the spiritual experience for people--that these sculptures are manifesting that in some way, which is an important part of life, of being human. Another aspect that I really like about the Haniwa is the fact that it doesn't try to hide its medium. It's made out of clay and it looks like clay. I like also contemporary art that has that same sort of feel to it; it doesn't try to disguise what it was made out of, what the artist was doing. I like to feel the artist's presence sometimes, and that helps me connect with the sculpture a little bit more.
SRH: Do you feel that that work of art carries with it some of those intangibles like spirituality and religion, that those surround it in some way?
HP: In a way. Taken out of its context, it's certainly stripped of a lot of its original meaning. And we can't really know what its original meaning was. But I do think that in its presence itself, in the fact that it is a human form, and that it's hollow inside, and that it's a guardian and yet it looks very sympathetic....
SRH: What makes it look sympathetic to you?
HP: The fact that the face is so simple, and yet the open mouth and the open eyes, they somehow embody the sculpture with life. They make it look like it has energy. It's not necessarily a replica of a human's face, but it looks like it's energized with something. It's not completely static. Also, the arms, even though they're broken off, you can tell there was in some sort of movement.
SRH: You talked about the material, and that it is overtly what it is. And in particular right now, I think, with the proliferation of images, attention on what something is made of is certainly something we can enjoy in an art museum. That's one of the gifts of an object as opposed to just an image of something. So even as we digitize collections and get to have a look at them, there is something about coming to the museum to actually experience how the object is different from the picture.
HP: Yes. It's drastically different, especially with sculpture because it's three-dimensional. And I think in order to really understand what the art is doing, what it was made for, you have to have some sort of conversation with it, you have to let it talk to you. You have to notice its details. You have to notice its size. You have to notice, I mean, sometimes I even notice the smell when I walk into a gallery--I smell the old paint and the old paper, and that's an amazing kind of sensory experience. I definitely think there's a world of difference in coming to the museum than in just looking at something in a book or online.
SRH: And I think sometimes we don't pay enough attention to what the viewer needs to do. Not so much what the viewer needs to know but what the viewer needs to do. What kind of frame of mind is required to listen to a work of art? For you, how does that work? What's your best frame of mind?
HP: I think it's best to have kind of a blank slate when you first walk in. I think that's one reason why I chose the Haniwa because when I deal with Esoteric Japanese Buddhist sculpture I get very intense into the scholarship and reading this very complicated text. Then I have to step away to get refreshed. And I'll look at the Haniwa and then I can delve into something deeper. So I think going in with sort of a blank state, then getting a first emotional reaction to a work, whether it's a painting, a sculpture or a print, if it makes you happy, if it makes you sad, if you think it's disgusting, if you think it shouldn't be called art, shouldn't be in a museum--any kind of emotional, visceral reaction is valuable. Each person may have a different response, but that response, taken with the work's background, I think those two things--the technical information plus the emotional reaction--can help a viewer go in and try to understand things.
SRH: But you're suggesting that you can come in, just with yourself, and start.
HP: Yes. Definitely. Definitely. And I think a museum should be a place that should welcome that sort of things. Museums shouldn't expect people to know things, but also they shouldn't expect people to not know things. That sounds like a contradictory statement, but I think that's one of the balances you have to take into account.
SRH: Is there anything else you want to say?
HP: Just that I'm excited to see where the museum is going. I came in at a time of transition, and my whole time here has been sort of an unstable time, but I feel like it's going somewhere that it hasn't gone before. And I think that's really exciting.
SRH: And where would that be, if you could have that dream for the Spencer?
HP: Reaching more people. Having people know that we're here and knowing that people will have some sort of important experience here.
