Marjorie Garber, Chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental
Studies (VES) and Kenan Professor of English and American Literature
and Language, talked this week to The Crimson about the structure and
direction of the department and her own roundabout journey to VES
Chair.The following is a transcript of highlights of the conversation,
with slight emendations for the sake of clarity.
The Harvard Crimson: Have there been any serious initiatives in VES recently to make any kind of significant policy changes?
Marjorie Garber: Well, I don’t know if “policy” is the right way of looking at it…
Over the last few years, we’ve added six assistant professors
and two tenured professors. This is a big jump in the number of faculty
that we have in this department, and we’d love to make more such
continuing appointments...
We are working closely with GSAS Dean Theda Skocpol to design
a PhD program in film and visual studies. We will offer graduate
courses starting next fall, moving towards what we hope would be a PhD
program.
THC: Would the purpose of additional faculty be to offer VES
students a broader variety of courses, or to offer non-concentrators
the opportunity to take these classes?
MG: There’s a kind of expectation that you have to be a
concentrator in order to get into those courses, but actually that’s
not at all true. We take freshmen very regularly, faculty are free to
admit any person that they like into an enrollment course, and they try
to build an interesting class. So it’s not an exclusive activity. I
think a lot of people don’t apply to these courses simply because they
assume that they can’t get in, but in fact there’s often space…
We’d also like to increase the number of courses given that
are lecture courses, that would make the kinds of work that we do in
VES available to all the students in the faculty of arts and sciences.
THC: How do tangentially related departments and schools like
the History of Art and Architecture department or the School of Design
relate to VES? Is there a sense of competition, or some kind of
dialogue?
MG: Yes, there’s a very rich dialogue—they’re our arts
partners. I think of Quincy Street as the arts corridor of Harvard and
we have strong connections with the art museums, with the history of
art department, with the school of design. We’re talking to people from
these places all the time, and there are incoming projects that we have
done and are planning to do, so we’re all connected to the business of
trying to make art and art-making more central to the Harvard
experience.
VES as a department is fairly atypical —the general flavor is
unlike most other spots on campus. Is there any sense that a department
within Harvard should conform to a kind of liberal arts mindset that
VES may or may not precisely fit?
Well, I think that the closer you get to the courses we give
and the faculty who teach them, the less atypical we really look. The
analogy shouldn’t really be with the humanities courses but with the
sciences. A lot of studio courses are like lab courses—they’re
intensive, materials-based, results-producing, experimental,
high-intensity, work-in-a-group kinds of events… There’s a creative
component, but there’s a creative component in science, too.
THC: I’m curious about your story, becoming the head of VES.
How were you selected, and how did you make the decision to accept? I
think many people still perceive you as a scholar of English, and that
kind of cross-over is certainly different.
MG: As its name implies, “Visual and Environmental Studies” is
an interdisciplinary department. Remember that most of our junior
faculty are joint-appointed, teaching concurrently in departments such
as History of Art and Architecture, Anthropology, English, and
Comparative Literature. Many of our senior faculty these days are joint
appointed, as well, with departments such as German and Romance
Languages and English…
I was a member of a VES search committee some years ago
before joining the faculty here, and so I had some knowledge of the
department and its members. I also have a longstanding interest both in
contemporary art and in film, and I wrote some things on these topics.
A lot of my work reaches across these categories—I’m extremely
interested in visuality, and I can say that I have enormously enjoyed
working with the department. It’s been a terrific place to be.
THC: Any talk about outgrowing Carpenter entirely?
MG: It’s just a gorgeous building, it’s a landmark building,
and it’s one that was built for artisans, artists – all these windows
are designed to see through, so you can look across and see people who
are making sculpture, making paintings. But in the future, when there’s
Allston, we’re hoping that there may be a theater space there, maybe a
studio space… We think an arts complex there is really essential, and
we’re hoping to have some classes and some studios in that space.
THC: What was your initial vision when you became the chair of
the department? Is it different than what it was now? Did you have a
specific vision in mind?
We’d like to expand our public programming. The Carpenter
Center for the Visual Arts presents a major lecture series each year,
bringing major artists to CCVA to show and discuss their work. This
past fall we have had Ed Ruscha, Maya Lin, and Jane and Louise Wilson.
In the spring we will host Laura Mulvey, Wayne Guyton and Kelley
Walker, and Julie Mehretu. This is an extraordinary opportunity for our
students to meet, hear, and talk with these established artists.
We have five exhibitions a year in the CCVA gallery—two
external exhibitions, two student shows, and a show of new and visiting
faculty work. We consider our students to be contemporary artists,
critics, and theorists, and support them as such.
—Staff writer Laura E. Kolbe can be reached at lkolbe@fas.harvard.edu.
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