Multiple contextualizations - mission of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities - Money, Power, and the History of Art

As a historian who had concentrated on the history of philosophy and the theory of history, I was more than a little surprised when in 1994 I received an invitation to be a resident scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. As I learned more about the Scholars Program, however, it seemed to be an ideal environment in which to spend an academic year concentrating on my project on the conceptualization of memory disorders in nineteenth-century France. Since the other scholars and fellows in residence that year were also working on memory, I anticipated a rich exchange of ideas and research. At the time, I wasn't thinking about how my own work was related to "the history of art," nor about how it might contribute to the intellectual mission of the Getty. I was going on sabbatical, and my chief concern was to get my work done.

Sabbaticals rarely go as expected, of course, and mine took a sharp turn after I completed a section of my project on hysteria, memory, and trauma. About midway through the year, I accepted an invitation to become the curator for an exhibition on Freud and psychoanalysis at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and still later, in the spring, became a candidate for a position as assistant director at the Getty Research Institute. The Freud exhibit provoked an extraordinary amount of controversy and publicity in its early planning stages, to say nothing of the enormous conceptual and design problems of mounting a compelling, accessible show on complex ideas. After a year of teaching cultural studies and defending the legitimacy of the planned exhibition on Freud (now scheduled to open in Washington in the fall of 1998), I returned to the Getty a few months ago as head of the Scholars and Seminars Program. The invitation from Nancy Troy to say something about how that program might contribute to the field of art history thus comes at a good time. Now I am very concerned with how my projects connect to the Getty's, and with how the Research Institute's intellectual mission might shape work in the history of art and the humanities.

It may strike some as odd (if not perverse) that someone from the Getty should be asked to contribute a piece to a "Critical Perspectives" discussion dealing with money and power. Money and power are associated with the institution, but critical perspectives on them? I have learned in my short time at the Research Institute that the Getty has a reputation among some in the discipline of not being critical enough, of using its money and power to support those established members of the discipline who need it least. In part, this reputation stems from the rather mysterious selection procedure of the Scholars Program. Art historians often wonder how they can be invited to participate in it. Applications are accepted for the predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships, but, with the exception of this past year, there has been no application process for senior scholars. In an effort to widen the selection process, an application procedure was used for the 1996-97 program, a year devoted to the theme "Perspectives on Los Angeles." However, among those now in residence there is almost no representation from the discipline of art history, and little from countries outside the United States. Our goal in the future is to bring together a diverse yet focused group of scholars, be it by our own research and invitations, or by applications. However, given the small number of scholarly grants available, there will always be questions and complaints about accessibility.

As I see it, the primary task of the Getty Research Institute is to use its enormous resources to foster work that produces critical perspectives on the discipline of art history and, more generally, on the ways different cultures make sense of objects that often get called "art." Can it do so? For some, the answer is clearly "no": a rich institute is that against which critical perspectives must be employed and cannot generate those perspectives without coopting them. If "The Getty" is the establishment, can parts of it pursue intellectual strategies aimed at undermining established ways of relating to (this includes but is not limited to judging and buying) objects that get called art? In my brief remarks here I want to sketch some of the ways I hope the Scholars and Seminars Program can facilitate the production of innovative research that may indeed put pressure on our conventions for thinking about the history of art and the humanities.

I emphasize the conjunction between art history and the humanities because the Research Institute has a commitment to the creative possibilities that can be realized by opening the former to the most powerful conceptual and empirical developments in the human sciences while confronting the latter with specific strategies for understanding visual culture and the ways objects acquire meaning over time. The Scholars and Seminars Program attempts to create new modes of articulating art history and the humanities. When our programs began in 1983, we described this as an interdisciplinary approach to art and artifacts, examining art objects in the full field of social relations. This was an important agenda, and it has been accepted (at least in principle) by the mainstream of academia. "Interdisciplinarity" is now the equivalent of "being good"; some interesting people enjoy being against it (at least, they refuse to wear its badge on their sleeves), but there is not the same need to set interdisciplinarity as a goal now that even conventional scholarship regularly crosses disciplinary borders. Indeed, the rush to the interdisciplinary has often fostered a blindness to the problematic of the disciplines: how the construction of disciplines has created objects of knowledge by pushing other objects beyond the borders of academic research.

The Scholars and Seminars Program aims to foster experimental, problems-oriented inquiry into the ways in which cultural productions have been given significance in the multiple contexts of their creation, reception, and (re)appropriation. It creates an active forum for the comparison of methodologies from different parts of the world and from different historical periods. The intellectual thrust of the Research Institute generally is to develop critical strategies for understanding diverse legacies from the past, which in turn can be used to create a richer consciousness of potentialities and constraints in the present.

The Getty Research Institute works toward these goals in all its programs by:

1. Creating research collections (including manuscripts, archives, visual materials, and some 750,000 volumes of books, serials, and auction catalogues), which enable scholars to pursue new interpretations based on a critical study of sources and their reception.

2. Supporting a scholars and seminars program that facilitates the production of individual, problems-oriented research and stimulates collaborative study, which explores how work on particular issues may lead to the creation of new research agendas in the humanities.

3. Promoting studies in local and comparative culture, which connect the most interesting forms of humanistic scholarship with the broad concerns of diverse communities.

4. Supporting a publications and exhibitions program that disseminates original work done at the institute to both academic audiences and a larger public.

In its early years, the primary goal of the Scholars and Seminars Program was to give our invitees the freedom to do their own work and the resources to help them get it done. The founding director, Kurt Forster, described the program as a secular monastery. A year of uninterrupted research and writing was (and is) a great benefit, and in recent years we have been attempting to complement this aspect of our invitations by creating structured forms of intellectual exchange among our scholars in residence. Each year we invite intellectuals and artists who work on a specific theme (such as "Memory," "Collecting," "Representing the Passions"), and starting this year all are participating in a regular seminar. The seminar should lead to collaborative research projects, publications, and plans for public colloquiums and performances. The focus, as Director Salvatore Settis has stressed, is collaboration on shared problems - not shared beliefs or methodologies. Indeed, it is the very diversity of beliefs and methodologies that makes collaboration exciting and productive.

The themes we choose and the programs we sponsor give particular importance to the role of art, artifacts, and cultural heritage in creating value, constructing meaning, and making history. Art and artifacts that are divorced from cultural contexts are essentially mute. Making them speak - hearing what they have said in the past, listening to what they can say to us now - this is what the Research Institute can do well. This means making unexpected connections among images, artifacts, and objects that are (and have been) in dynamic interaction with texts, discursive traditions, and social practices. And this means, among other things, thinking about these connections and interactions in relation to contemporary artistic practices. These practices often create new contexts for understanding the genealogy of our own time and the construction of history most generally.

The Getty Research Institute is devoted to inquiry into how the past is mined for meanings that have relevance for the present and the future. Our goal is the critical comprehension of cultural heritage, making a diversity of traditions available for creative work in the present. We seek to achieve this goal by stimulating new questions and by developing new protocols for advanced research, or strategies of investigation that imaginatively combine methodologies in ways that might lead to new paradigms of understanding. As Settis has stressed, specific problems-oriented research can generate novel research protocols, which in turn help redefine intellectual paradigms. These protocols are often created by the productive tension between disciplines: by bringing together an anthropologist, an art historian, and a sociologist in relation to a specific problem, we hope to generate new ways of conceptualizing what is at stake in how disciplines conceptualize issues and modes of understanding. We want to change the ways that researchers pay attention to those working in related fields: provoking them to care about approaches to a problem that had previously seemed irrelevant.

The Getty Research Institute has a commitment to the multiple possibilities of contextualization. There is no royal road to the authentic, originary context of a cultural artifact. We contextualize an object from our own position in the present, and we do so for specific purposes. By bringing researchers together from different fields around specific problems, we want scholars to contextualize their own methodologies, even their own ways of framing problems. And we also want to pay attention with them to the place from which we conduct this research, contemporary Los Angeles, so as to raise the question of how the setting in which work is done affects that work. The Research Institute fosters such reflexivity with a variety of projects in contemporary local and comparative research. These projects engage diverse communities in Los Angeles and elsewhere to discover how problems related to public culture, aesthetics, and politics are conceptualized and addressed. Our residential scholars program is built not only around a fine library but within a city that has generated, as Deputy Director Tom Reese has put it, "new paradigms of research about urban phenomena with farreaching significance for scholarship and human understanding." The Scholars and Seminars Program no longer invites those who wish to get away from it all, but rather those whose projects will be enhanced by their understanding of the context in which they do their work. These projects will be disseminated to a variety of audiences through publications, exhibitions, colloquiums, and joint ventures with other institutes around the world.

The Scholars and Seminars Program can have a significant impact on an individual's contribution to the history of art and the humanities. Of course, by providing research resources, time off from teaching, and good conversation, the Getty helps people get work done that they might not finish otherwise. Each year, between fifteen and twenty people benefit from this program in a substantial way, and it is crucial that we develop application procedures and conduct the research necessary to make "unexpected connections" among scholars rather than reinforce the traditional profile of the "distinguished art historian." However, this is a small number of people, and the attempt to choose them is always plagued by the possibility of reproducing scholarly or social elites rather than exploring undetected potential. In any case, the impact on individual scholars is not, in my view, the most significant aspect of the Research Institute's contribution to the history of art and the humanities. By encouraging the sort of multiple contextualization that I have briefly described here, and by provoking people to rethink their conceptualization of problems in light of (and often with) the work of other disciplines and other sources of knowledge, the Research Institute can play an important role in stimulating the creation of new research strategies that will inform critical perspectives on key issues, including the use of money and power by established cultural institutions (like the Getty). Within art history, these strategies should animate new modes of addressing the issues of judgment and legitimation and creative ways of understanding how objects acquire and lose significance over time. Stimulating new modes of understanding artifacts should facilitate the work of non-art historians working on subjects important to the history of art, as they reveal what is at stake in how we frame the aesthetic in relation to other ways of creating value. I have found that my own work on the representation of pathological memory and on exhibiting cultural history has been considerably enriched by the exploratory research protocols and reflexive provocations that are a regular part of the intellectual life of the Scholars and Seminars Program. Ultimately, the projects cultivated by the Getty Research Institute should facilitate the development of critical paradigms for understanding the role of cultural legacies in attempts to create a more meaningful present and future. These paradigms are not produced merely by the exercise of power through money; they can be used to understand and perhaps change how diverse forms of power make history and the representations that allow us to make sense of it.

Michael S. Roth has written on how people, disciplines, and institutions make sense of (or fail to make sense of) their pasts. His most recent books are The Ironist's Cage: Memory, Trauma and the Construction of History (1995) and the edited volume in honor of Carl E. Schorske, Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics and the Psyche (1994), Scholars and Seminars Program, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 401 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, Calif. 90401].

COPYRIGHT 1997 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group