00:00:00PHILLIPS, QUITMAN EUGENE "GENE" (19-)
UW Art History at 100
At UW:
Interviewed: Quitman Eugene "Gene" Phillips
Interviewer: Gioia Spatafora
Index by:
Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen
Length: 3 hours, 47 minutes
First Interview Session (March 29, 2019): Digital File
[00:00:00]
GS:Hello. It is March twenty-ninth. My name is Gioia Spatafora. And I am
interviewing Professor Gene Phillips as part of the Art History at 100 Oral
History Project. Would you mind starting by telling us a little bit about your
life and career before you decided to join academia?
GP:Okay. I grew up in the deep southwest corner of Georgia, although I was
actually born in Newport, Rhode Island, because my dad was in the navy and
stationed there. And so, and actually he was stationed there twice. So I spent
probably a total of four years of my early childhood in Rhode Island. But
whenever anybody asks me where I'm from, I always say from Georgia. So, yeah.
My family was not in deep poverty, but we were pretty poor. I had my first job
when I was eight years old, hoeing peanuts in a peanut field for three dollars a
day. Things moved up from there. So anyway, I won't go through everything that
happened in high school and all that. But I grew up in Georgia, in a rural area.
And I actually grew up in the time when I guess you would call it Jim Crow laws
were still in effect. You had white and colored water fountains in the county
courthouse and all of that sort of thing. So, yeah. That was a lot of stuff I
was happy to leave behind when I went away. And to see, huh, has changed, though
not as much as one would like.
Anyway, moving along. When it came time to apply to go to college, you know, I
wasn't really planning to apply to any place outside of the South. I was
applying to some good small schools. Southwestern at Memphis. Some others. But
at a special summer program with people from all over Georgia, there were, that
I attended one summer, there was somebody there talking about Harvard. And so I
don't know, on a whim, almost, I sent in for the application. And was kind of
filling it out at the dining room table and making jokes with my mother about
the whole thing, because it seemed so crazy.
So, it's actually a little bit funny. Because I worked in a drugstore in high
school. And they also sold money orders in this drugstore. And I was
00:03:00actually just about to get the money order to send to Southwestern at Memphis to
put the down payment on my whatever you call it, my fees for housing and so
forth, when a phone call comes for me. And my mom asked, "Have you sent that off
yet?" I said no. And she said, "Well, maybe you better wait." She said, "There's
a big fat envelope here from Harvard."
And I said, "Well, what does it say?"
She says, "It's your letter."
I said, "Open it." Anyway, it turned out that I was accepted and pretty much
everything was paid for. Because, I mean, this is Harvard. It doesn't mean, the
more money you get, it doesn't mean the smarter you are. It means the poorer you
are. So, yeah. So, that was that. So it was kind of crazy. I wasn't expecting it.
And so I went to Harvard thinking, actually, I was going to do classics Greek
literature. But you know, when I was in that area and I was taking Greek, I
realized how far behind all these kids who went to prep schools and kids from
England were, who'd been studying Greek and Latin from the time they were
probably twelve years old, if not sooner. And I realized, this just wasn't going
to work out unless I did something radical.
So I switched over to English lit. And then I went on, got to senior year and
said, oh my God, I really don't want to go to graduate school in English lit.
And I'm not really trained to do anything else. So, I just started going through
all the possibilities, including even joining the navy. And finally I decided
well, I would just get a job. And then I said well, you know, I've never really
been that many places. So I'll try and look for a job abroad. And I said well,
Europe, nah, everybody goes to Europe. I'll go east.
So I applied for jobs in Japan and Taiwan, since that seemed to be the easier
places to get jobs. And the way it worked out, I wound up in Japan. Teaching at
a school. Basically the primary students were people working for large
companies. And they would send their students to our school for four-week
sessions. And they would have classes almost all day. And they were expected,
though I know they cheated, to only use English while they were there. So, yeah.
I was going to stay there one year while I figured out what I was
00:06:00going to do, and wound up staying five and a half. Got married, had a child,
etcetera, etcetera.
So then came back to, finally decided I'd never been an adult in my own country.
And my wife, who's Japanese, and I, agreed to come back. Or for me to come back
with her coming. And so then I vastly overestimated, because I'd been a teacher
of English as a second language for five and a half years. But I vastly
overestimated my qualifications to get a job. Because I didn't have credentials.
I mean, I didn't have whatever it's called, the master's degree in this sort of
thing. So we had some financial struggles. I did get a job but it wasn't super
well-paying. On and on, you know. Sayoko worked and we didn't do too badly.
I finally actually got convinced by one of my colleagues at the school I was
teaching at, in the private language school in Seattle, that hey, why don't you
try for graduate school? So I said, well, okay. So I had a passion that I had
developed in Japan for Japanese ceramics. But I also thought well, maybe I
should look into graduate programs in things like educational administration or
something. Even though I'd never darkened the doorway of an education class
before. But I had never darkened the doorway of an art history class before, either.
So what I did was I got applications for education programs and East Asian
studies, thinking that would be my stepping stone into an art history program.
So I sent those things, I sent all the ones off for East Asian studies/art
history and wound up never sending off the ones to education. Because, you know,
everybody said Gene, it's clear that's not what you really want to do.
So I got some acceptances from good schools in East Asian studies. But I'd
gotten a letter from Berkeley saying, "It seems pretty clear to us your real
interest is art history, so we're sending this to the art history department."
And I got in. And, you know, I can weave that story out more. But I got into the
art history program at Berkeley. And that's the way things went. And finished in
eight years, which wasn't bad for a field like Japanese art history.
00:09:00Didn't wind up specializing in ceramics, though it's still a large part of my
interest. But did late medieval painting. It was just, at the time it was a
field richer in conversations, let's say, interesting conversations. And that
was interesting. So, that was that.
And then I, when it came time to apply for jobs, I applied to a number of
places. I got, I can't remember, three job offers? One was here. One was at
University of Kansas, which in some ways would have been really nice because the
art history department at Kansas is highly respected by their dean, or was at
the time. Whereas here, art history was you know, you didn't have the kind of
respect that the history department or the English department had.
The problem with that job was it was 50% faculty, 50% curator. So, and those
things can be problematic. Because they may be actually expecting you to do
80/80. Or worse. And when it comes time to go in for tenure, you know, are you
actually going to be treated as someone who is 50% faculty? In other words, the
exhibition work and all of that that you do for the museum, how seriously are
they going to take it? And plus, Lawrence just wasn't as nice as Madison. So.
GS:Did you have any curatorial experience at that point?
GP:That wasn't the way I worked. (laughs) I mean, no. I'd spent a lot of time
visiting museums. But at Berkeley, I would say a shortcoming to some degree of
that program, though it's changed some now, I think, is there was this kind of
divide. There were exceptions. But there wasn't the kind of collegial
interaction with the museum there that there should have been. But one of the
exceptions was the Chinese art historian who I worked with as well as
00:12:00my mentor in Japanese art history. And he actually collected art himself. Both
Chinese and some Japanese. And it was on long-term loan to that museums. And we
would go over there occasionally to look at things in that collection. And the
contemporary art historian also did things with him. But by and large, it was
not a very, it was like two different worlds. And I think that's always a missed
opportunity in a graduate program. Unless, and maybe that's the thing with
Berkeley, you're just not interested in producing anything except PhDs to go
into academia. And that's true at major programs. You know, everybody wants to
reproduce in some fashion or another. So what they're most interested in is
reproducing themselves. That is, producing scholars. Because that gives them
more luster, and so forth and so on.
That is changing over time as the job market has gotten hideous in the
humanities, including art history, for academic positons. There are a lot of
PhDs coming out in the humanities who will never, never get jobs. And this is
true all over the world. It's true in Japan. It's true in Korea. Places I know.
Oh, and in Europe it's been bad for a long time.
But one of the places, or one of the advantages art history has if we take
advantage of that, really, is that, unlike history, students can pursue an MA
with focusing on exhibition practice, or art librarianship or something else
like that. And even people getting PhDs can try to get experience in museum
work. And so there are those pathways that aren't typically open. Or at least
the people I've talked to in history don't think that much of them. So, I mean,
there are history museums and so forth. But art museums seem to be a better pathway.
GS:Was the museum's relationship with the department at Wisconsin something that
attracted you to this position?
GP:You know, it certainly wasn't a detraction. I didn't think about it all that
hard. I certainly when I was here for my on-site interview, you know, I had
meetings with the art librarian. I had the meetings and was shown art
00:15:00over on the museum side. Talked with.
So I think without it being so specific, it certainly was very welcoming. And I
don't think I thought it through all that much. But I think it certainly was a
positive. And certainly my first couple of years, I became more and more--well,
the beginning of my career here, I certainly became more and more engaged.
Because there's that huge print collection.
And so, and I became really good friends, and he's still one of my best friends,
with the print curator. And we did, I did a couple of class exhibitions. And I
would sometimes consult with him if he was doing a Japanese print exhibition. So
I've spent some very happy times doing that. And also, I fairly often take my
students up to the, well, what I will always call the print room, but I think
it's the works on paper or whatever, whatever, to look at a selection of
Japanese prints. And that's, you know, it's really nice to have objects to look at.
I would say that's another thing. My training in graduate school was not very
object-oriented. Even though--I should pull that back. Training at Berkeley
isn't very contact with the object-oriented. Though in the East Asia side, we
were much more so. I actually took one seminar where we traveled up and down the
west coast visiting museums. Going into storage to look at objects of a certain
type, paintings of a certain type. And doing measurements and all this kind of
technical analysis. And that's really fun. It's really fun.
And then when I went to, at some point, maybe the year before my final year, I
don't know. I was a research graduate student at Tokyo University. And almost
right from the beginning, they were involved in a big KanĹŤ painting project.
And you know, I went down with them to Kyoto. We were in temples in various
places, with the sliding door paintings. Measuring and doing all, taking notes
and so forth and studying them intently. So, yeah. Yeah, it's fun. You know, and
it's needed work. Somebody has to do it. And I'm a strong believer in
00:18:00contributing to the whole project of art history. Not just sort of being oh,
it's not important for me to be in there until it's the interpretation part.
GS:Do you think that your prior experience working in Japan made you better
suited for graduate studies there? Because you were familiar with the nation?
GP:Oh, undoubtedly. Yeah. I mean, I'm very comfortable in Japan. It's sort of my
second home. It's problematic sometimes when like the World Cup, the women's
World's Cup in particular is going on and it's US versus Japan. Because usually
Japan is the underdog. So whichever one is the underdog in the particular event
is the one I tend to root for. But, yeah. Madison is now one of my places I feel
like is in my collections of homes. It's Georgia, Japan, and now Madison.
GS:So, Berkeley and Madison have a similar, or maybe a dovetailed history of
student protests and the anti-Vietnam protests. Was there any sort of
similarities between Berkeley and Madison that drew you to Madison?
GP:(laughs) You mean Berzerkly and Madtown? Well, you know, there are
similarities. But honestly what drew me most to Madison was well, A, it was a
Research 1 university, respected. But I didn't know much about it. But it was
the location that sold it to me in a big way. Especially if you compare it to
Lawrence. Which is a perfectly nice city. But it's smaller. You know, it's just
not as rich. And the, you know, I'm a kayaker, bird watcher. And this place is
great for that sort of thing. And you know, at the time I had a young family.
And Madison's a really great, it was clear it was a really great place to raise
a family.
So, one of the jobs that I was, I ultimately wasn't offered the job. But I was
actually a strong contender for the position at Harvard at the time. Old
stomping grounds, and you know, oodles of money and all of this. But that was
one thing I thought about a lot was would I, if I got both offers, would I
actually go to Harvard? Because it would be a great stepping stone,
00:21:00you know. You don't go take a position at Harvard unless you have a lot of super
confidence. You don't go there thinking oh, I'm going to go to Harvard, get
tenure and be a professor. It's changed some. But back in the day, you know,
most people who were assistant professors at Harvard didn't go on to get tenure.
But you stay there four years, you have fabulous resources. You set yourself up
to go somewhere else. But on the other hand, I just couldn't see bringing my
family to that Boston area, to there. Madison's just much, much nicer. And it
just felt to me more like a place I belonged.
GS:Has Madison changed very much since you came here in the early mid-'90s?
GP:It's just gotten bigger and bigger. More and more traffic. You know, I don't
know that the fundamental character has changed, to my mind. You know, I think
there's probably a bit more crime and so forth. But it's not such that I walk
down the street worrying about it, or anything like that. I don't feel--well, I
would say the natural environment of the Madison area has been degrading. If you
spend a lot of time on or near the lakes, the algae, the pollution. I mean, even
when I got here, there were problems. But I think it's gotten, you know, just
steadily gets a bit worse. And just all, you know, more cars and more cars. You
know, things just naturally get degraded a bit.
Around the campus area, or my part of the campus area, along University Avenue,
of course, more and more taller buildings are being built. So the availability
of sunlight in some areas has gone down. And the buildings are pathetically
dull. I mean, this--ugh. Right where I am, well, those buildings were there
before me. But you know, next door we have the Inhumanities Building. And across
the street we have the, what is it, whatever that building is called. The one
where Comm Arts and so forth is housed. It's hideous. But the other buildings,
it's not so much they're hideous as they're just dull. And I probably
00:24:00shouldn't say anything about this, but the new music school building is
atrocious to my mind. Atrocious. I think a real opportunity has been missed.
Because eventually the Inhumanities--the Humanities building, of course--will be
torn down and something else built there. But you know, you could have had like
a really nice stretch of buildings.
I mean, not that our buildings for the museum are that special. They're much
better on the interior. But they're okay on the exterior. They're not offensive.
But you could have complemented that much better than is being done. And to me,
it's just a lack of vision. So, anyway. We'll see. Maybe that building will turn
out to be okay. But so far, so bad. (laughter)
GS:So when you came to UW as a young professor, were there any expectations,
since you were in a new field of study, for this art history department?
GP:Well it wasn't actually a new field. Before me, and before my colleague Julia
Murray in Chinese art history, there was someone hired whose name is slipping my
mind, but it doesn't really matter. So a position in East Asian art history was
originally created with seed money from the Japan Foundation. So the first
holder of a position in East Asian art history that I know of, though I think
somebody else might have taught some in the past, was a Japanese art historian.
So when you take that seed money from the Japan Foundation, you are obligated to
keep the position going. So somehow when he didn't get tenure and moved away,
this got lost on my department. And they went out and hired a Chinese art
historian. And a bit later, folks in East Asian studies and Japan studies looked
around and said, "Wait a minute." Or maybe the Japan Foundation folks looked
around and said, so then it was clear they had to hire a Japanese art historian
on top of a Chinese art historian. So that's how I came to be here.
So, I mean, it actually worked out great. So now we regularly have a Chinese art
historian and a Japanese art historian. And my position is protected, because a
professor, a main professorship is now in Japanese art history. So
00:27:00it's great.
But to go back to your original question, I would say no. I mean, there are
things anybody faces. Which is, I looked at the roster of courses that my
Japanese art history predecessor has put together, and I didn't like them. I
mean, there's one I kept, but I had to develop some new courses. I mean, that
wasn't a huge strain. Most people have to do it. Because generations changed.
Focuses are different. And you know, there was just a lot of things like
ordering new slides made. But almost everybody spends quite a bit of time doing
that. And of course then, there wasn't all that much material available online.
So you actually had to get the books out of the library, flip through them, fill
out slips. You know, to have the slide. So it took quite a bit of time.
And I think what was kind of interesting, I think within the dean's offices
there was at least a hope that I would take advantage of the print collection.
Because well, it's a, at the time it was actually a college resource. It's now
under the provost's office. It used to be, for the longest time it was under the
College of Letters & Science. That only changed a couple of years ago, or even
one year ago. So, but the department didn't care if I chose not to use it beyond
sort of taking my students up there to see prints once in a while.
But in fact, when you have a major resource, they don't have a great, they don't
have, they have very, very, very few Japanese paintings. Or the other things
that I was most passionate about studying. But you have this great print
collection. It's there. So I was naturally attracted o using it with my
students. It's fun. Objects. And you know, you learn things from looking at
objects, no matter what they are, that you just can't learn--I mean, you can
tell them. But that process of discovery from looking is much better. The
quality of the paper, what that means for the ultimate appearance of the work
and etcetera, etcetera.
I think in some ways art history, for good in some ways, but also for bad,
has sometimes gotten so far away from the actual works that it's
00:30:00problematic. You know, a lot of people, or a lot of museums kind of complain
that people just aren't trained to deal with objects, or to really look closely
at objects. But you know, I think that's kind of being remedied along the way.
The downturn in--so what you've had over the years is the growth of more and
more PhD programs in art history and the other humanities. But in the meantime,
you've had this downturn in jobs. So it's really ridiculous. There are far too
many PhD programs in various humanities. And really, you could do with half as
many. But it's kind of tied to a competition for, what shall I say? People with
PhDs who are passionate about their field, they naturally want to nurture other
people passionate about things. So it's very rewarding to have graduate
students, to see them do well. But on the other hand, it's also prestige. It's
prestige wars. If you don't have a PhD program, then you're lower in the
prestige scale. And so you have a kind of, you know, let's say fifty years ago
there were ten. But as their PhD students moved elsewhere, you know, there was
just this natural proliferation. But with the downturn in the job market, it
becomes problematic.
Again, art history is a little bit insulated because of the art museum position
job market. I don't really remember how I got to that point. You asked me some
question or other.
GS:Do you think that the University of Wisconsin is able to attract competitive
PhD students?
GP:Competitive in what sense?
GS:As far as being able to be employed afterwards, and being students who come
with expectation to write interesting theses?
GP:Oh, I think it's quite, quite varied. We are not going to be able to compete
in most fields for what you might call the sure bet. The student who has really
fabulous preparation linguistically, art historically, and so forth.
00:33:00And those really top students preparation-wise, they're going to get bigger
offers at more prestigious universities. Like in my field, which is kind of
medieval Japanese painting, you know, the top people probably won't even apply.
Because they'll apply to Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, maybe another school or
two. Which have, you know, guaranteed five-year, some money, and all kinds of
things that we can't offer. So, I would say, on the other hand, you know, we
have some faculty members who have attracted some very, very good students
because of their reputation. And we also have a kind of reputation of somehow
getting our best students funded and through. Sometimes it's a bit more of a struggle.
So, I want to answer that question with caution. It's not that I think we only
get second-rate students. I think sometimes we have to go for students with
maybe less preparation but lots of promise. So, and you know, let me qualify
that. Few of our students get jobs right out after they finish, or a year out,
at, in a tenure-track position at a major university. We had a student in
African and sort of postmodern art who got a position at UW Milwaukee. And then
he has gone out to a very good liberal arts school whose name is escaping me.
But anyway, we have another student who recently got a tenure-track job at
something in the University of South Carolina system. Not the main campus. So,
yeah. But we have, our PhD students have, by and large, most of them gotten
jobs. University, art museum, somewhere. But you know, we're not going to place
them at a major research university.
With, there's always exceptions. You know, the brilliant student for some reason
or another just really wants to work with this professor. But you
00:36:00know, there's always a kind of, even in the hiring process, when you're sitting
on a hiring committee, oh, that person's from Harvard, that person's from Yale,
whatever. So.
GS:Do you think that the art history department has been able to attract
different types of students since you've been here, for undergrad and graduate
students? Or if the type of student taking classes has changed at all?
GP:That's a good question. I mean, the number of students taking art history
classes has declined fairly dramatically. Again, that's true across the board in
the humanities. Certainly the classes that I had that regularly had forty or
more now probably have twenty. Or fewer. And honestly, if it wasn't for the big
influx of students from China, my classes would be quite small. (laughs) So I
would say anywhere from a third sometimes to half of my students are Chinese.
Bless them. I'm grateful. And many of them are really good students. So I would
say the ethnic mix has definitely changed because of that.
My classes will also have probably more, they're not the majority, but they're a
higher percentage of men than, let's say, 19th century French class. I mean, art
history has come to be predominantly female. You know, I mean, there are
exceptions. And there are very conservative programs where the majority of the
faculty are still men. I don't know if that's true in Princeton, but that would
be one that popped into my mind. But certainly the majority of our faculty are
women, which is great. But the reason I think I have more men is, you know,
samurai, anime, gaming. You know, all those things. Geeky guys.
And I also get, like in my history of Japanese ceramics course, I will often get
like artists. People who do, there's a pretty vibrant ceramics program here. And
I'll get men and women from that program.
GS:Do you incorporate those components into your classes?
GP:What?
GS:Samurai--
GP:Oh, I mean, I do a little. I tell them, I kind of warn them at the
00:39:00beginning, we're not really going to be talking about anime in this class. But
it doesn't hurt to have a solid foundation in the culture and the previous art,
etcetera, etcetera. So in my--but yeah. I mean, samurai, the warrior class,
comes up. But I don't go out of my way to like look at, "Okay, let's look at
swords today." I never do that. Because it's boring. To me. Or armor. But yeah,
we'll look at arts that were promoted and commissioned by the warrior class. And
we'll see some paintings with warriors in them. But yeah, I don't cater to it.
With the exception of my FIG class, my freshman interest group class, which is
Monstrosity and the Supernatural in Japanese Visual Culture. And there I just
completely indulge my love of imagery and so forth of the supernatural and
monsters. And it attracts students who also have those kinds of interests. Of
which there are many. So you know, so I have students writing their final papers
on anime or whatever. Some of them do more standard art historical things or
historical things. But there are a fair number that are either on films or anime films.
GS:Is teaching how you've been able to reincorporate ceramics and your interest
in ceramics?
GP:I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. I have two 400-level courses. And so when we hired
someone who was, her field is basically American material culture and she was
starting up a material culture program, and I love Japanese ceramics. So I sort
of said well, okay. Since there's a program starting up, why don't I do a course
that could kind of satisfy one of their requirements, fit into their program. I
might get students that way. I was a little bit cautious about history of
Japanese ceramics and allied arts. Would it attract anybody? But interestingly,
even as that material culture program has sort of foundered a bit, though it
will pick up again, I've still had a decent-sized group of students. I'm
teaching it this year. So, yeah. It's sort of a combination of okay,
00:42:00now I can do it. It's a chance to do that. I've even made some pots since I've
been here. A now retired professor of ceramics in the art department I became
friendly with encouraged me to, yeah, why don't you come over? So I made a few
pots. But nothing very much. But I might do it when I retire. So, yeah. So that
was one of the courses.
The other thing was, I became, I've always been sort of interested in this
intersection of religious practice and art as well. So at a certain point, I
decided to do, what are they called? They're called Mellon seminar--no, I can't
remember what it's called. But anyway, you get a fairly modest amount of money
and you can use it for programming and you can form a group, any
interdisciplinary group. So I decided to propose one on art and the afterlife.
And I got connected up with Chuck Cohen, who's in religious studies. He was the
director of religious studies. And we had a small group and we talked about
various arts of various cultures. Everything from illustrations of Don (Day?) to
Incan mummies to the stuff I do in the Japanese ideas of the afterlife. It was a
fun group.
Anyway, so then I got, I became a member of, an affiliate of religious studies.
I actually became director. So that encouraged me to develop another course,
which is art in religious practice in medieval Japan. Which was other stuff I
really was interested in. So.
So I think I've responded to my connections across campus in developing courses,
you know. Okay, if I'm going to be part of religious studies, I should actually
have a course that sort of fits in. And it's stuff I'm interested in anyway, so
that's why I developed it.
GS:How different are the teaching styles in other departments?
GP:How different are the teaching styles in other--
GS:Are there different expectations or how students interact with material?
GP:Well, you know, art history's always going to be a little different. And we
like to say that although lots of specialists in different
departments will claim them work with art or visual material, they don't do it
00:45:00the way we would in the sense of deeply engaging it as a source of
understanding. They use it more as sort of confirmation or illustration of ideas
they're gathering from literature or historical text. It's just a different
mode. It's not that it's a bad mode. It's just, it can get mildly irritating
when you hear somebody, "Oh, we do that, too." No, you don't.
GS:Has interacting with other departments changed your teaching style? Or has
your teaching style changed since you started?
GP:Has my teaching style changed since I started?
GS:You said that the sizes of your classes have changed a little.
GP:Yeah. I mean, I've always enjoyed interaction with students, and trying to
integrate conversation. So I mean, there may be some level of difference. But
the differences are more between like a larger class and something that's set up
as a seminar. So no, I don't think my style's changed all that much. Though God
knows, somebody who's observed me may think differently. I don't think so.
GS:You also mentioned the use of slides. Has technology and how material is
presented visually in class changed?
GP:I think it's done more so for other people than me, to a degree. I mean, one
of the huge differences when you go from physical slides to PowerPoint slides,
for example, is that you can put text up on the screen. You can label your
images. Whereas with the old slides, it's just the slides. And maybe you print
out lists for the students to have. So I would say, I'm really conservative on
this in that I have colleagues who like you know, if a slide is yay big, then
they will fill up at least half of that slide with text. And the image will be
small. Which I'm against. To me, yeah, now I label my slides, that's fine. But I
kind of do it with minimal space so that the image is as big as it possibly can
be. And I get actually really irritated when I see one of my colleagues doing a
presentation or something, and they're showing this great thing. And they're
burying it within text. It just seems wrong. So, I would say except
00:48:00for the labeling, I tend to either have no text or I put the text on another
slide. If you know what I mean. So that the object they're seeing--I mean, part
of what you want to do is engage them with the, I don't know what the right word
is, but the excitement, even though it's not the object itself, if you have a
really good slide that's big, you know, like in my Japanese ceramics, you can
see the textural quality of the pot, rather than just the form. You can see a
lot of subtlety.
And so, I think this is part of what maybe has changed in art history as well.
At one extreme, you can have sort of the ooh ah school of art history. Which is,
"Isn't it wonderful? Look at that. It's so beautiful." You know, you focus on
the kind of splendidness of the object. And at the other extreme, you can have
what's most important is the verbiage we surround the object with. And how this
object helps me talk about some ideas I have developed from reading French
critical theory and so forth. Or you're basically talking about political
history and the object is sort of there.
I love the middle road. So, yeah. I mean, it's a difficult thing. I think one of
the things that's happened in art history, in the field, is you know, in some
ways, like the people who taught classics or English lit half a century ago,
there was an aura about the things we study. Oh, it's Shakespeare. Oh, it's
Picasso. Etcetera, etcetera. And so these are things that people have a certain
awe about. You know. It's almost like mildly religious approach to them. Like
these are transcendent things. And we would have been the high priests. I mean,
I'm exaggerating this comparison. So over the last couple of decades in
particular, over the course of my career, and starting before, there's been more
and more of a move to sort of de- what is the word? To de-sanctify
00:51:00the objects, you know. To not think in terms of the transcendent artist, the
genius producing the transcendent object. And I completely agree with that, you
know? If you're just going to do, okay, we're going to look at these famous,
people who became famous, mostly men, and we're going to go ooh ah over their
genius, and look how we see it in this object, that's stupid art history, too.
On the other hand, I worry about reducing the object to text. So that's just,
and it's something to struggle with. Because you know, either way, too far for
me is bad.
GS:Do you think that's related to access? And how materials are more accessible online?
GP:I think this began before online accessibility began. It was more of an
academic term. And it happened in literature to a degree as well. You know, at
one time, if you were doing English lit, you wouldn't think of doing texts that
weren't part of or close to the canon. You know, that were sort of legitimate.
You wouldn't do like science fiction novels from the '40s. Nowadays, you will
definitely find in English departments courses on science fiction novels of the
'40s, or something like that. Or you know, just any kind of writing you can
imagine, almost. And in our, I was just at a very good talk yesterday by a
visiting faculty member. It wasn't great art at all, it was medical
illustrations from the seventeenth century. And it was fascinating and
interesting and good work. So I'm not belittling that in any way. But I'm just
saying, the variety of things we look at has radically changed.
GS:Using this teaching style and the courses that you've been able to design,
are there ones that you teach time and time again? Or do you mostly create new courses?
GP:Oh, no. Creating new courses is a huge undertaking if you want to do it well.
I haven't created a new course in quite a while. Well, actually, that's not
true. I think I'm on my third iteration of Art History 205 Global Arts. I won't
tell the whole story of that. But it was actually, we decided as a department
this would be a good thing to do. Somebody else took the lead in
00:54:00proposing the course and getting it through the system. But then she said, "Oh,
well, I have these opportunities to take a leave," blah, blah, blah, blah, "I
can't do it."
And so I decided, I said, "Okay, I'll do it." But in fact, I couldn't do it the
way she had done it at all, she had proposed it, at all. So I had to sort of
recreate it and develop it. So that's probably the most recent one. But
otherwise, no, I just teach within the roster of courses. And then I have some
seminar topics I would do. But you know, I have a variety of those. And students
come and students go. So what you do is actually change the courses a little bit
to new readings, new interpretations, whatever the course, new materials that
come out. But developing a whole new course, you know, I'm not that far from
retirement, so there's no way I'm going to do that. They'd have to like pay me
lots of money to do that.
GS:Is it difficult re-teaching the same course?
GP:No. No. No. Not if you pay attention. It's much easier teaching the same
course. My one-semester survey of Japanese art history I used to teach, until I
got into some administrative positions and didn't teach a full course load, I
would just teach it every fall. And there were enough students so that I could
do that and offer it every fall. You know, regularly having thirty-five, forty
students, which was good for that kind of course. It's actually harder if you
have a course on the books and you've taught it and then for one reason or
another you don't teach it for two or three years. Then you have to come back to
it and things have changed. It's a lot more effort. And of course, over the
course of my career, we've made the transition from physical slides to digital
slides. So that's an effort to make that transition. And then I had to, then we
have to adapt to Learn at UW, which I still haven't completely done. I don't do
my grading on it or anything like that. But I do use it for basic things for the
course. And of course, Learn at UW we switched from whatever it was now to
Canvas. So there are these series of changes that even if it's a course you've
taught again and again, there's new work you have to do. But what
00:57:00happens is, as you're doing this new work, you kind of rethink things a bit,
too. You know, it kind of causes you to pause and not just walk in with your
notes or whatever from previous years. But okay, you know, if I'm going to be
redoing this and this, why don't I think about changing the course a little bit, too?
GS:Has your course load changed very much since you started?
GP:Only when I've taken on positions where there's a course load. But no, my
basic course load has always been two/two. Let me take that back. When I first
came, so somebody like the history department, their course load has always
been, or it was for a long time, two/two. Art history, right before I came, the
deans allowed it to go from three/two to two/two. But we had to offer a fourth
credit in our classes. We had to offer some way for the students to get a fourth
credit. Like have extra meetings with those students. So it was a pain. If you
were teaching two courses, and any student in either of those courses had to be
able to get a fourth credit. And then a lot of extra, it's almost better to
teach three courses.
On the other hand, it allowed for some creative opportunities. For example, one
of these small exhibitions I did with the Chazen, I did with the fourth credit
students. That was how they got their fourth credit. But that just kind of fell
away. That sort of fourth credit thing. There were no fourth credit police, and
we just kind of slowly dropped it off.
And the reason, I think, art history had been three/two, and we may be getting
into territory to talk about tomorrow, was we had been, we weren't as much of a
publishing powerhouse as, say--
GS:Within the department's focus, or within the school's focus?
GP:Us compared to, like, for example, history. If you look at the amount of
scholarship, the number of graduate students, etcetera, etcetera. We can talk
about this more tomorrow. But let's say we were, I think we were considered more
sort of service department, rather than, you know, high-level scholarly department.
GS:When you came to UW, was there an expressed expectation for you to focus on
one or the other?
GP:Oh, it was clear. If you wanted to get tenure, you had to publish. I mean, it
was, I don't think teaching was overly stressed, although I was
01:00:00certainly observed throughout my time as a probationary faculty member. And you
know, you were expected to do both, and do a bit of service. Although not too
much as a junior faculty member.
GS:Had you taught before?
GP:I actually had. I'd been a TA at Berkeley. But then my professor in Japanese
art history didn't get tenure. And so I taught, I honestly can't remember, but I
taught at least one of her courses each semester my last year at Berkeley. And I
taught a summer course, too, on my own. So I had, you know. And she was very
organized. So I had the benefit of all her slide lists. So, you know, it was
much easier than walking in with nothing. I could really make use of what she
had done. So I started out with just, you know, her list of objects to show in
the survey of Japanese art history.
The problem with that was, students were gradually becoming less and less
tolerant of tons of memorization. So over the years, I have reduced and reduced
the number of objects that I expected people to be conversant with.
GS:How do they vocalize that?
GP:Oh, easily. On course evaluations. Just, you know, and I get to know my
students pretty well. Also you would hear complaints, for example, around that,
oh, art history classes is all memorization. Because the exams, we were still
when I came here, the exams were very sort of memorization-oriented. You show
the slide of the Arch of Titus and they have to identify it. They have to say
when it was made. They have to say something about the context. So it was what I
call sort of flashcard test. You know, testing of people to see how good they
were with flashcards. And then the sort of more interpretive part would come
through in papers. But this idea that people should memorize lots and lots of
names and dates. And especially in my field, or China's. You know, a bunch of
Midwestern kids who have to memorize a bunch of Chinese or Japanese names, it's
hard. I have complete sympathy for them. Not just Midwestern kids.
01:03:00But you know, people who don't have a lot of contact with other cultures.
And our survey of Asian art is even worse, where one day you're doing something
with lots of Sanskrit names and words. Another, next week you're doing Chinese,
you know what I mean? I can see why it's kind of off-putting. And I also don't
know that it's such a good thing.
So this is another issue that over the course of my career been there is like
you can go too far and say, well, students don't really need to know any, they
don't need to memorize anything because they've got iPhones and they've got
Google and so forth. But you really want to teach them the processing skills.
But I think you have to admit that you just can't have nothing in your brain to
practice processing with. I mean, you need some kind of general erudition. On
the other hand, I don't stress it at all anymore. I give my exams in my
400-level classes, the slides are labeled when I do the exam. And I sort of,
I'll give them unknowns and I will give them what I call juxtapositions. Things
that require them to think as much as I can do that.
So you know, all of us in the humanities claim as we fill out those reports on
learning objectives, we're teaching them how to read and write and think
critically. So, if you're not testing for that, then you're lying. Right?
Because even if you think you are teaching, it doesn't they're learning it. But
if they know after the midterm, oh my God, I have to actually do some critical
thinking to make that juxtaposition. Or at least a higher level of sort of
bringing in those things I've remembered from the course. So I think, so that
gain, you know, it's a kind of, there are, I give open-notebook exams. Because
if they do note processing, if they just bring in their notes during a
fifty-minute exam, they're doomed, I tell them this. You're doomed. You have to
read it. You have to, if you do nothing else, you have to put sticky notes on
things. You have to process all that material. You can't just bring in your
notebook. So it can be a curse if you don't do it right.
GS:Has there been anything else that students have really pushed for change?
01:06:00
GP:(laughs) Well, we have a problem now and it's kind of a temporary one. It's
more a matter of fields. So right now, because of budget cuts and this and that,
we don't have a modern art historian, we don't have a contemporary art
historian. And that's ridiculous. All these students, potential students in the
art department and our department and other programs on campus, they really want
to have contemporary art history. So next year we'll be using short-term
staffing to bring in more. But hopefully--my colleague in African art history is
just announced he's retiring within a semester. I can't, I'm going to retire in
two years, but I will be replaced by a Japanese art historian. So it may be that
we can get a modernist/contemporary person. And some of my colleagues, like
Nancy Marshall, who's really a Victorianist, will do, though, a course on modern
painting. Mostly British and American, I think. Or even contemporary. She
actually does a contemporary art course. But it would be better to have a real
specialist. And we had one of those, but things happened and he's no longer with
us. So it would be good to have a--yeah, we really, really need to do this. And
until we get somebody, we really have to use short-term staffing, visitors and
so forth in an effective way.
GS:Do you find it difficult to balance research and teaching? Or does the
department support the two equally?
GP:I think, I think we support both. I don't know how equal it is. I think you
have to think about the department versus the divisional committees. So if you
had a department that overstressed teaching to the detriment of research and
scholarship, then potentially it would be a disaster for junior faculty members
who have to be, you know, they have to go through the tenuring process, which is
the most important step is beyond the department. But anyway, that being said,
we're much more attentive with our junior faculty members to being
01:09:00sure that they're doing the right things in scholarship for their career.
On the other hand, if someone, we wouldn't keep somebody who's a terrible
teacher. But I think you can go a lot further into academia by being a mediocre
teacher and a great scholar than you can by being a great scholar, I mean, a
great teacher and a mediocre scholar. It's just the nature of the beast. And if
you're at a Research 1 university, that's just the nature of things. And to sort
of--and, you know, Madison is a Research 1 university. But outside of maybe the
sciences and a few social sciences and so forth, you know, it's not really top,
top tier. So you can't have the same expectations that you're going to have at
Harvard, for example. But they're pretty rigorous. I've been on the divisional
committee, I've chaired the divisional committee. They're pretty rigorous.
But, yeah, I mean, we observe our junior faculty teaching. We write up reports.
We try to ensure that we don't have a dud. (laughs) You know, it would be tough
if we had somebody who was really sort of borderline, but was a brilliant
scholar. It would be difficult. Really difficult. But you often find that, for
example, maybe someone's not the greatest classroom teacher in a lecture class.
But is really strong in doing seminars and mentoring graduate students and even
undergraduates in sort of their senior theses and things. So there are different
balances. Different balances.
GS:Are you able to use your research as a way of bringing students out of the
classroom? Or is it primarily for your publishing? And your--
GP:That's a good question. In my particular case, it's almost all for my
publishing. Yeah. You know, if I worked on Japanese prints, it would be a
different matter. But there would be too much travel involved to get them deeply
engaged in what I do. I mean, the closest, I do, you know, I have, I integrate
into one of my courses material that I just published on, if that's what you
mean. But you said outside the classroom. So, not so much. Unless you think
about going up to the print room and looking at prints. But that's not really
related to my research.
01:12:00
GS:Could you describe your research a little bit, and how it's changed while at Madison?
GP:Sure. So, it actually hasn't changed tremendously. So when I came here, I had
written a dissertation on certain aspects of the career and art of one of
Japan's most famous late medieval painters named KanĹŤ Motonobu. Anyway, so I
got here and I relatively quickly published a couple of articles related to that
kind of thing. And then I started working on my book. But I kind of knew my
dissertation couldn't easily be made into a book. So I thought okay, I'm going
to take half my dissertation and wrap it up and turn it into a book. But then I
wasn't happy with that. Because I really felt to understand the situation of
Motonobu, I had to understand the situation of his father. So, to make a long
story short, my first book, which actually turned out to be my only book so far,
was completely different from my dissertation. Which is not the wisest thing for
a junior faculty member to do.
GS:Why is that?
GP:You're just rolling the dice in a big way. Will you get it done in time? It's
a short book. It had to be, to get it done in time. But I was lucky that one of
my Japanese colleagues had been working on a big project. And they had actually
collated a lot of the original source documents together that I used. So at
least I didn't have to spend infinite number of hours going through archives to
find things. There was a lot of help there. So that was what encouraged me and
said okay, this is possible. And I just focused on a 25-year period, which also
made it possible.
So anyway, to make a long story short, I'm still, I've stuck with the KanĹŤ
school more or less throughout my career. I got more engaged with their Buddhist
art, their art related to Buddhist practices. So I've published on that. And
most recently, I went back to one of my very first loves, which is illustrations
of a tale of vanquishing woman-devouring demons. Women stolen from
01:15:00the capital. It's an illustrated hand scroll. So I finally brought some closure
to that after God knows how many years.
So no, I have not been terribly productive. I tend to get too focused on
whatever is in front of me. And rather quickly after I got tenure, I became
chair of the department and stayed at that for five years. And then only stopped
at that because visual, not visual culture, religious studies was in kind of a
crisis and somebody had to take over the reins of being director, so I did that
for two years. Somewhere in there I was on the divisional committee and chaired
that. So I spent a lot of time, and I think I got way, way too much in the weeds
of those kind of things, and sort of let my research and scholarship slide. You
know, it's just what it was. You know, if I'd been one of those people
completely devoted to my scholarship, I wouldn't have let this happen. But I
tend to be, you know, what's in front of me and how can I do it as best I can.
So I did it to myself. So there you go.
GS:Does the use of sabbaticals kind of change that balance?
GP:Well, sabbaticals are great. But it's very hard, you know, if you let things
slide. Especially if you're in a field like mine and you don't really use all
the skills you've worked so hard to develop. You know, reading sixteenth-century
Japanese texts and all of that. You just kind of let that slide. It atrophies
pretty fast. So the first part of your sabbatical or whatever, first three
months or so, you're just getting yourself back up to speed again. It's not very
efficient. And that's been a problem with me. I mean, I got things done. I got
things published from it. But it was never sort of, I should have done it better.
GS:Did you use your sabbatical primarily to write, or to conduct research in Japan?
GP:Oh, not to write. Hardly at all. You just don't have time. If you start, I
mean, you write notes. You compile notes. But as far as effective writing, yeah,
no. I mean, the exception is, if you have a project you need to finish up, which
is my last sabbatical. While I was doing the research and so forth
01:18:00for the current project, I submitted another project and had to do revisions.
So, yeah, I guess I do some writing and editing of older things. That's
inevitable. But as far as, some people can do it, I guess. But as I said,
there's also ways to solve the problem of sort of getting really back up to
speed in your skill set. And as you get older, that gets harder. So, yeah. Just
being honest, I'd say that's been sort of a bit of a problem I gave myself is
that sort of okay, I'm doing this now and I'm really going to focus on this. You
know, there's the teaching, too, at the same time.
GS:So, teaching, research and then service is another big component of being a
professor. And I think within art history, that usually ends up being done
through exhibitions.
GP:No.
GS:No?
GP:No. Service is primarily service to the department.
GS:Ah.
GP:Plus service to whatever entities you are affiliated with.
GS:So, exhibitions would be a completely different component.
GP:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is, if we get involved in exhibitions, we count that
as outreach. Which is not without merit in the eyes of deans and so forth. You
know, because they get to say to the governor, "Oh, look. We do care about the
community and the fine citizens of the state of Wisconsin."
One of the big problems in a department--and the smaller the department, the
bigger this can be--is the unequal sharing of the administrative burden of the
department. Because of budget cuts over the years, staffing in the colleges and
so forth, support staffing, has been cut back. Which means more has been put
onto the departments. Which means there's just more service burdens, I think.
And you can have almost as many service burdens in a department of twelve as you
can in a department of thirty. Because you still have to have a curriculum
committee, you still have to have an admissions committee. Now granted, you will
have many fewer applicants in a smaller department, just by the nature of
things. But still, it's not like the service burden is relative to
01:21:00the size of the faculty. And let's face it, there are some faculty who are just
selfish and will only do what they're absolutely forced to do. And then there
are other people who think we really have to do this, so I guess I'll do this.
And I think in our department, there's a very unequal distribution and we all
know it. But you know, it's not rare. I was a reviewer for the art history
department at the University of Pittsburgh. It was virtually a mirror image.
There were six people out of, I don't know, eighteen, who did all the work. I
mean, virtually all the work. The other people were on the committees, but
really didn't stain themselves to do any of the work.
GS:Have you seen that change over time, especially as new hires get added to the department?
GP:Um--
GS:Or has the pattern stayed pretty consistent?
GP:I just think the service burden has gotten greater over the years. There are
more demands for things like doing assessments, writing up assessment plans. All
of these things, you know, in the new environment of accountability. So in the
old days, you kind of took accountability for granted. You're teaching your
courses, you're giving your exams, you're having them write papers, you're doing
your work. You're accountable. But now it's like okay, what are your learning
goals for this course? How are you assessing those learning goals? Which is not
a bad thing in theory, but there's a lot of sort of paperwork that has to go
with that. And a lot of stuff. Budgets, things like that. So (laughs) especially
having been chair in the not too distant past again for my second time, the
difference between when I was chair the first time and when I was chair the
second time was monstrously different.
GS:For the expectation of the chair?
GP:Yes. And having to have, well, part of the problem was, we had a fabulous
long-term administrator of the department the first time I became chair. And
basically, Sandi said, "Gene, you have to do this." "Okay. I'll do it."
The second time, we were in upheaval in our staff. And I didn't get a good staff
member, a good administrator during that period who knew the budgets, who
understood stuff, and etcetera, etcetera. So it fell on me to do
01:24:00that. But at the same time, the college's expectations, the budget decisions and
so forth were put much more on the departments. There were just a lot of things
that I felt like I don't remember having to do this in the past. And I can't
completely sort out whether that was the wonderfulness of Sandi that was
missing. But my colleagues all say oh, no, no, the job of being chair has become
much more onerous. So if the chair's job is onerous, then the chair has to
depend on fellow faculty members to really be on top of some other things,
rather than sort of saying okay, I've had a chance to look at this, can you guys
talk about it and execute it the best way you can? You have to depend on them to
really get into the weeds and really be in charge of it.
GS:Has that impacted who wants to be chair and for how long?
GP:Oh, God, yes. It's also in our department a problem of, let's say,
personality difficulties and personality differences and different attitudes. So
we are actually, there are several, a few people who might, it might be their
time to be chair. But just won't do it. And probably can't. Not because they're
not smart or talented, but just on a kind of interpersonal difficulty level and
so forth. Their, you know, emotional level. So it's a problem. It's a big
problem. That's why we have an outside chair right now. And we will have one for
the next three years after this. Hopefully by that time, we'll have gotten our
act together. I'll be retired. They will have gotten their act together. But,
you know, you couldn't pay me enough money to be chair. Well, you could pay me
enough money. But being chair again, no. I did it for a total of eight years. Is enough.
GS:Was that four and four? Or?
GP:Five the first time and three the next. Yeah.
GS:Do you think that's how long you need to be chair for you to be an active
chair who understands what the expectations are for multiple years of three to five?
GP:It's a really good question. My colleague Tom Dale was chair the first time
for six years. Did he become chair again after that? I don't think so. It used
to be the expectation you would be chair for three years and you'd step down.
And that was the general expectation. But things just became more
01:27:00complex. And more and more, the college would prefer somebody be there for four
years or even five years. But certainly I think as long as you stay for three,
you're not considered to be deserting the ship. But it's hard. You spend one, if
you've never been chair before, you spend a year figuring out what the heck is
going on. So it really makes sense for somebody to be at least four, if not five
years. Depending on how good they are at it. Some people are terrible. So, yeah.
You know, I would never recommend it to somebody. "Oh, you should be chair, it's
such a great thing." (laughs) But you know, I was marked in my department by the
time I'd been here for three years as chair material, somebody who should grow
up and be chair. So--
GS:Why was that?
GP:I just, I guess I showed that I cared about the department and could get
along with everybody. You know, even the people who hated each other. Well,
extremely disliked each other. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was--anyway, I think
about my fourth or fifth year I was saying this to somebody outside the
department. I was like, "Yeah, my department seems to like be thinking I should
be chair after I get tenure, and I'm going, whoa." And then I said something
else about, oh, I was complaining about the way the college had treated the
department in a certain thing.
He said, "Oh, yeah. You should be chair." (laughs)
GS:Do you think that impacted your tenure review?
GP:No. No, no. You know, tenure reviews are kind of tricky things. I think the
fact that I was, I think the fact that I was very willing to do service and do
it well and thoughtfully, it certainly didn't hurt me. Nobody, you know, there's
no antipathy in the department towards me. But the main thing was my teaching
record was good. I actually had a book under contract. Not just under contract,
but scheduled for production. So it was an actual contract, not one of those
preliminary things. With good preliminary reader reviews and so forth. You know,
that's the main thing. I had another project sort of that I, in hand.
And that book was a new book. I mean, it wasn't like a perfected dissertation.
01:30:00So those are the things that made it, yeah, you never get, you never get voted
in for tenure on your service. Never, never, never. (laughs) You don't even get,
if the scholarship, if the scholarly production isn't there, you just don't get
it. But did it help? I guess. In a way. (laughs) So I think, yeah, that's the
way it works.
I took my first sabbatical right after I got tenure. Because it's every seven
years. And then they wanted me to be chair right away when I came back. But
bless her, my friend Julie Murray, who was a Chinese art historian says, "No,
no. You can't do that. Give him a year to actually process his work and maybe
start writing and do stuff." So I think it was two years after I got tenure I
became chair as an associate professor. Which the college frowns upon nowadays.
Because you still have another step to go, and you need to be productive, etcetera.
Now in my day, and I don't know if it's still true, the requirements for being,
for getting tenure are pretty, I wouldn't say they're standard. Different
departments will have somewhat different standards. And of course art or music
will have very different standards. But you know, in the humanities, there's
generally, okay, you need to have a book already published or it needs to be in
production, really. And you also need to have some other publications. And the
other teaching and service records to be okay. And you also need to have some
sense that there's another project in the wings. So it's pretty standard.
The standard for going from associate professor to full professor can actually
be quite different in different departments. So, for example, they may have an
absolute requirement that you have a second book before you can become a full
professor. Our department was different, and the college accepts difference.
Whereas I primarily became a full professor on the basis of my service to the
department as chair. In fact, the associate dean, I think it was of the graduate
school in the humanities at the time, we had lunch. And she says,
01:33:00"Gene, if your department wants you to be chair, you should demand that they put
you up for full professor." So I think there's a sense that the service roles
here are so critical to the health of departments that extraordinary service you
can get full professor. Which I actually think is fair. But it varies. And I'm
not sure, but I think maybe the tendency has been more towards having to have a
second book. I know I have a couple of colleagues who are still associate
professors in other departments who I think have done a lot of service work, but
still haven't been put up.
GS:Do you think the--
GP:They're younger than me, of course, so times change.
GS:Do you think the art history department's flexibility on how they promote
people to full professor works in their favor? Or in the favor of the actual professors?
GP:Well, the easy answer is it works in the, to the benefit of the actual
professors. You make more money. You have more status. On the other hand, it's
to the benefit of the department because people are more willing to do that
necessary service. So what crazy person is going to become chair as a less than
full professor if it means nothing? I mean, at the time, I didn't actually think
it did. It was only when I talked with this associate dean. And I went oh, okay.
I mean, that's how stupid I am. I just said, "Oh, okay. I'll be chair." Because
it was a challenge and I knew I'd be good at it and I wanted to do it. And I
underestimated in my own mind how big a distraction this would be from my scholarship.
I mean, I know people who manage to keep their scholarly output going. Not in a
big way, as if they're not chair. But yeah, there are people who do it. They're
just better at doing two things at once than I am. Or, you know, dividing their focus.
GS:So were you able to take a second sabbatical after that term as chair?
GP:No. This is where I was really stupid. You know, I actually had--okay, let me
go over the history of this a little bit in my mind. So I actually had, before
my first sabbatical, I actually had a year off with the Japan Foundation.
GS:When would this have been?
GP:Fourth year? I applied for an outside grant with the Japan Foundation and I
got it. And so I had sort of, I had an extra year's leave to work on
01:36:00my material. Thank God. I wouldn't have made it if I hadn't. Fourth or fifth
year. I don't know. But anyway, but then, okay, so when the time came up for my
next sabbatical, I'd been chair--I'd delayed it to be chair of art history. And
then religious studies was so desperate a situation that I delayed it again. So
I missed almost a whole cycle. And so I sort of, and they'll never give you an
extra one. If you know what I mean. So my second sabbatical was rather delayed.
I think, it was nine years later, rather than six. Stupid. Really, really
stupid. But it just shows that I just got way too wrapped up in this sort of
investment in helping out the programs I was affiliated with. But then I went
back into a regular cycle of sabbaticals. Actually had delayed this most recent
one because of when my plans were to retire. Because I'm not going to get
another one, so it didn't matter when I took it.
GS:Do you think the rest of your department follows the more typical trajectory
or timeline spacing?
GP:Oh, if they have any sense at all they do. I think they all do. Sure. Again,
you know, this is something the public doesn't understand, or that state
legislatures don't understand, is you know, they will complain oh, they have too
much time off, they have sabbaticals, they only teach two courses. Most of us
put a lot of effort into our teaching. Plus, we advise students. And there's
graduate students to advise if you have many. There's a lot that goes into the
teaching program beyond those, you know, three fifty-minute periods or two
seventy-five minute periods for each course, two courses per semester.
But the other thing is, is we're judged primarily by scholarly output. It's what
gives us prestige, what gives the department prestige, what gives the college
prestige, what gives the university prestige. And so all of that prestige
actually translates to having benefit for the students who get degrees from
here. So a degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison means more than
a degree from University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. Not to pick on them.
01:39:00Perfectly good school. But you know that's true. And partly is because of the
prestige, where they rank in, the departments rank, the universities rank. And
that's based primarily on publishing. And scholarly production, research. So, yeah.
So I think personally in the humanities, I'm not sure that scholarship maybe
should be quite as emphasized. I mean, we're not curing cancer. We're not
getting big federal grants. But if you don't stress it enough, you're not going
to have, be able to attract those best minds to be faculty to mentor students.
So you know what I mean? It all kind of, it's all interrelated. The mentoring of
students, the prestige of the degree that students get. It's still, I'd say
fairly heavily dependent on scholarly and, you know, research output. If that
makes sense.
GS:What would you recommend for a new professor coming into your department for
how to strike that balance?
GP:I think almost everybody kind of does it quite naturally. And we certainly
keep an eye on them. You want to be a good teacher. But you can't get too
wrapped up in--I would say develop as few new courses as possible. Wait until
you have tenure to do that. And you know, focus on publishing, other than that.
You know, inevitably, people's situations change lanes, though. For example, my
colleague Yuhang Li, she just got involved with all sorts of things. And she
wound up doing a fairly large service burden. Not for us, but for the museum,
for East Asian studies, and so forth, because of her skillsets, really, and her
willingness to do it. But she got everything else done as well, so there you go.
You know, and I think, not in Yuhang's case, but I think sometimes women of
color can have a bit larger burden placed on them because you want diversity of
representation on various committees beyond the department level. I
01:42:00think this may be--so in other words, if you're an African American woman,
you're maybe a bit more likely to be asked to be on certain committees that
other junior faculty wouldn't be. Because the university has such a paucity of,
you know, diversity is not our strength. You know, and I don't have any hard
evidence that this is true. But it seems like this could be, and has been, an issue.
But everybody, if you get a job as an assistant professor at a major research
university and you don't understand okay, you have to publish that book. You
have to do good scholarship. Then you have no business being here. You know, so
I'm getting a little bit--you know, there's "Oh, we have to mentor our junior
faculty members, make sure they--" Well, yes. And I enjoy doing that. But on the
other hand, if they don't know when they walk in the door the basics of what
they have to do, they're either not very bright or they're just self-deceptive
or something. You know what I mean? You just know. You've known it. If you've
gone through a graduate program and you kept your eyes open at all, you know.
And they tell you this in the new faculty meetings. It's very clear what you
need to do.
Now, that being said, people can still get a bit off track. They can lose sight
of that. I mean, in a way, I almost did. My department used to have meetings
with your mentoring committee, and you would sit there with them. And I remember
Narciso Menocal, one of my mentors on my mentoring committee, saying, "Okay,
what are your plans for next year?"
And I think I was coming up on my third year. I said, "Well, I have a couple of
articles I want to work on."
He says, "No. You'll work on a book. And think about it."
And he just like--I'm going oh, wait. He's right. This is coming up the third
year and I haven't really given serious thought to the book yet. So I mean, I
don't know. But I remember that moment vividly. And I'm very grateful for that.
Because even though I knew exactly what I needed to do, we can all
procrastinate, or we can get involved in the current project and say okay, well,
a soon as this gets done. So, I'm not saying mentoring is useless. (laughs) It
helped me. But at the same time, it's pretty clear what you have to do.
GS:I think that's a really lovely place to stop for today.
01:45:00
GP:Okay.
GS:Thank you so much.
GP:Sure.
End First Interview Session (March 29, 2019)
Second Interview Session (April 9, 2019)
GS:Hello. It is April ninth. My name is Gioia Spatafora. And this is the second
interview with Professor Gene Phillips as part of the Art History at 100 Oral
History Project. Would you mind starting out by speaking a little bit about the
relationship between the department and the museum?
GP:Sure. I think it's had its ups and downs. And right now, I think it is at a
high point and has really great potential for the future. And part of that has
to do with the change in director and their approach to the relationship with
the department. The previous director, I guess one could say he was much more,
things have to be my way. And sort of--so, it wasn't that things didn't happen
between the department and the museum. It's just that it was much more a sort
of, you know, Russell saying, "I want this. And do you want to do it?" Rather
than sitting down, exchanging ideas, etcetera, etcetera. And he also had very
strong ideas about what was okay for the museum to do and what was not okay for
the museum to do. So, as you might imagine, for an academic department, you
know, we might have tended to want to be more experimental and controversial in
things. And for a variety of reasons, some of which are probably good, Russell
really strongly shied away from that. And even once sort of entered into a
pitched battle against something. Which could create, and did create, some bad feelings.
On the other hand, I know the department could be kind of, what is the word,
unreasonable sometimes. Or to push for something and then not follow through.
For example, one of my now retired--well, anyway, one of my former colleagues
really pushed to buy a collection of some modernist designed chairs. And Russell
went along with it. And then after ten years, they were never used in any
teaching or anything. So you know, I don't want to be one-sided about it. There
were issues.
But on the other hand, all in all, I have been happy with my ability to work
with the museum. Partly because it's a very large print collection
01:48:00and nobody on the museum staff has real expertise in Japan. Though the former
print curator was amazingly knowledgeable and very good on the connoisseurship
of those prints because it was his job and he was dedicated to doing a
really--and he'd learned to love them. But on the other hand, he didn't read
Japanese, you know. He didn't have all of the deeper cultural background. So he
and I cooperated in a variety of ways very well and became very close friends.
But you know, those kinds of relationships help things. And those kinds of
factors. But I think now, going forward, we have, there's just a lot of
potential for collegial development.
You know, one of the really interesting changes, any class-generated exhibitions
would be relegated to the Elvehjem building in the small Mayer Gallery. Which
was fine, in its way. But now, the new director wants them to be over in the new
building in the, I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of the gallery, but it's
the one that they especially often show prints and drawings in. Which is a
larger gallery. And because it's in the new building, it's a bit more
integrated. And so I think that's another thing is having a sense that, of
collective ownership of things that are generated primarily by the department.
Now, I'm not saying we won't at some time run into some conflict because of what
we might want to do and what the museum decides isn't really in their best
interest. But so far, so good. So all in all, I think there's a really
productive future in store.
GS:Has the museum ever pushed for a specific class to be taught because of how
popular a certain exhibit is?
GP:No, I would say not. Not so far. They don't typically do that at all. I mean,
they may ask us to give a talk, which most of us are very happy to do. And of
course if we're behind organizing the exhibition, we're sort of obligated and
happy to do talks or to help with programming and such as that. I would say it's
been sort of more the opposite, where we might have classes where we want to
involve students in curatorial activities, like designing an
01:51:00exhibition. And then we are requesting their staff members, who have expertise
we, of course, don't have, to come and speak to our class or work with them. And
we now have a kind of curatorial studies class and we do, you know, request that
staff members be able to do that, to be able to do that, to be able to come over
and speak. And the only impediment to that, no matter who was director, has been
they're really short staffed. So staff time is really valuable. But still, for
the most part, you know, people have come and spoken to our group.
I think a real potential for the future is if staffing can go up in the museum
and people aren't just being driven crazy by the demands on them, to have a more
sort of integrated curatorial studies program or body of activities more heavily
involving or integrating faculty and museum staff. Because, I mean, some of my
colleagues have had a lot of experience in organizing exhibitions, being deeply
involved in it. But most of us haven't. And you know, we don't know 100% what
the different jobs, I mean, deep down, what the different responsibilities are
for different parts of things. So, yeah. I have a lot of hopes for that. And
yeah, I honestly, I could hardly be happier with the way things are going now at
the museum. You know, so far, so good.
GS:Could you talk a little bit about that print collection, and how it came to
be at UW?
GP:(laughs) Well, that print collection famously, probably the largest portion,
well, definitely the largest portion of it, came through the hands of Frank
Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright, as you may know, is famous all over the world,
but especially in this area of the country as an architect. But he had a lot of
interest in Japan. And he had a lot of, he traveled there a lot. But he also was
virtually a Japanese print dealer. You know, he needed to support his activities
and he wasn't always sort of sound in his management of money and so forth. And
so, yeah. I think a lot of the prints around the Midwest that are in American
collections in the Midwest, actually went through his hands.
But this particular collection, the Van Vleck collection, the story
01:54:00is, and everybody says it's true, is that at a certain point, Frank Lloyd Wright
put his current collection of Japanese prints up as collateral to a bank for a
loan. Defaulted. The bank got the prints. And then Professor Van Vleck--there
are several Van Vlecks in the story--but anyway, Professor Van Vleck and his
sister collected Japanese prints and had a small collection. But saw this
opportunity and bought them from the bank. And then later, I think it was his
son who donated them to the museum here. So, yeah, Frank Lloyd Wright to the Van
Vlecks to here.
Now, the collection has continued to grow, because Professor Van Vleck actually
left, or his heirs left a very sizable sum to--I mean, the wording, I don't know
exact wording, but basically to support that collection. And that has been
interpreted in various ways over time. Buying more prints, restoring prints. You
know, all sorts of things. Or even to buy Japanese art of the same period that
the prints were done. You know, the wording in these things can sometimes be
flexible enough that if you don't abuse it, you have a range of things you can
do. So the print collection has continued to grow until it's over four thousand.
So. But still, I think the sizable majority of those are still from the hands of
Frank Lloyd Wright.
GS:Do you think that's one of the original collections that's specifically East
Asian? Or as far as the basis for collecting East Asian art within the Chazen?
GP:That's actually a really interesting question that I don't know the answer
of. It's certainly by far the most prominent collection. You know, there's all
kinds of collections, like Chinese export porcelains. You know, but those are
much more minor collections in terms of number and value and all of that. So,
the Chazen, until fairly recent, outside of prints and some other things in
small numbers, hasn't been that active in the collection of East Asian art. You
know, museums of the size of the Chazen are often dependent on bequests of
collectors. They leave their collections. Like the fabulous Lane collection
of modern sculpture and drawings by sculptors. It was a bequest. So
whenever I'm sort of going through the museum with students, one of the
01:57:00questions I ask, I say, "Well, why do you think we have so much of this, and
almost none or none of that?" And more sophisticated students will know the
answer. But often, you know, you go into a museum and you think oh, they really
like this and they don't like that. Because otherwise, they would collect it.
No. Unless you're the Metropolitan or something and have lots and lots of money.
Your collections are largely formed by bequests of collections. Not exclusively
by a wide margin. But you know, that's the way it goes.
GS:Have there been any more recent ones that you've been called in to look at?
GP:Well, up to a point. I mean, I was called in earlier on in my career to look
at like a screen, Japanese screen painting. In fact, I helped buy one when I was
in New York going to a dealer and checking it out. But for the most part, not so
much. I mean, I've certainly always been welcomed to look at things that they
were considering and to offer my opinion. But if you're dealing with really
reputable dealers and you kind of know what you're interested in, that's okay.
But yeah, Drew, the former print curator, we would often look at the catalogs
from print dealers and chat about what seemed the most interesting.
But you know, he has a much clearer understanding of what the whole collection
is like. He's spent much, much more time than I have. So he would know where
there's a gap or what would fit in with aspects of the collection. But still,
yeah. I mean, my input was not law by any stretch of the imagination, but it was welcome.
Something that happened more recently is the museum under the former director
started collecting contemporary Japanese ceramics. And I'm a ceramics guy. Up to
a point, though I do historical ceramics more. So, I've been more taking
pleasure in that than being really involved. Partly because those, those
ceramics are coming through a dealer in New York who is a member of
02:00:00the Chazen Council who is the benefactor of my professorship. And sort of, the
way it kind of works, she deals, is sort of like buy one, gift one. So the
museum gets a really good deal, so to speak. And you get a lot of, as she says,
Japanese clay art right now is really big. And she's selling, or she likes to
say placing pieces in the Met, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, major collections
around the country. Because she loves clay art. She loves Japanese ceramics and
knows all the really famous contemporary Japanese ceramicists. And nobody is in
a better position to sort of help guide the museum in its collection. So you
know, it's an interesting relationship. It's partly financial, but she also
supports the museum and the department financially, and gives art as well as
money. But they also occasionally buy things from her that they really want.
GS:And when you take students into the print collection to look at material, is
there also a component of familiarizing students within a museum space for
comfort? For trying more different types of students into a space that might
historically have seemed somewhat sterile or unwelcoming?
GP:Well, up to a point. This is, with my, you know, ordinary class students,
this is probably not so big an issue. Though definitely there are many who've
probably hardly ever been into an art museum, in the lower level classes. They
don't particularly feel uncomfortable being there. That's much more true with my
Odyssey students that, I work with the Odyssey program. And these are adult
students who sort of missed out on going to college, or went to college for one
year and had to drop out. Mostly, the great, great majority are minority
students. And many of them, when we take them to the museum, it's the very first
time they've been in a museum. And I've heard comments like, "Well, I
02:03:00just didn't think it was for me." Not in the sense of not my taste, but it was
for, you know it was for white people. It was for the well to do. It wasn't for
poor minority people. And, you know, museums can easily feel that way. And most,
and more and more responsible museum directors and other staff are working hard
to combat this. I know Russell made efforts. And I think the new director, Amy,
is making even more efforts in this direction by putting African American art
more regularly on display. And just in general trying to be more welcoming and
reaching out.
But working with the Odyssey program reminds me, you know, I don't come from a
privileged background. I come from, I think I might have told you last time, a
poor country background. So it kind of reminds me that, you know, I was
certainly not on any road towards becoming an art historian. Even by the time I
graduated from college. And you know, art has been made for rich people.
Historically. The rich and the powerful. And museums are filled with things made
for the rich and the powerful. That's not exclusively true, but largely true. So
how do you sort of deal with that? And wanting to serve underserved populations
and be an art historian. You know, it's a tricky bit.
GS:How did you get involved with the Odyssey program?
GP:Kind of kicking and screaming. When it was first being formed--
GS:Is it a national program, or just at Madison?
GP:No. No. It's, there's a complicated history there that I won't go into. But
it was formed, let me think for a minute. The proper nouns are just like fleeing
from my head right now. But it was formed under the leadership of Emily
Auerbach, who was in continuing studies and has a professorship in the English
department. And there was something called the Clemente program,
which I don't know completely the ins and outs of. And I apologize to her, but
02:06:00one of the radio hosts on WNPR was very stimulated by this. And she and Emily
got together and Emily became the director. So they wanted to include art
history. This is a humanities program. And one of my colleagues, who shall
remain nameless, decided he wanted to be involved. But he didn't want to be so
involved that he went too often. So he tried to organize it so one of us went
each month. And I was a bit reluctant to do it but I said well, okay.
And then, as things will happen, the person who was supposed to be taking the
lead in art history got busy. Some other things came up. You know, somebody else
is going to have to take the lead. And I think I was chair at the time. And I
went, oh (groans). And I took over the lead. And we started with that sort of
rotation. And it was terrible. I just, you need consistency for people. I mean,
not that my colleagues did a bad job, though some of them did much better jobs
than others. It was just very clear to me after three months, this was just not
the way to go. So I decided to do all the classes. And have been doing them ever
since. And am very grateful to my colleague who left me holding the bag that he
did, because it's a very, very rewarding experience. And I'm very happy to be
involved. So, yeah. Yeah.
GS:It does seem like a program that would rely on a lot of relationship-building
to build trust between people, too.
GP:Yes. But you know, after it's been going on a while, you have cousins and
even, by this time, children of former students. You have a kind of broader
community. You also have lots of people who have no experience with it. But I
think there's been a trust in Emily, who's really wonderful, and just the
program as a whole, that that's not really quite so big a deal. But yes, you do
have to sort of go in and be willing to open up and share your story. But it
hasn't been that hard, really. Partly because of all the groundwork
02:09:00that's been laid over the years. The first one, you know, I hardly even remember
now. But I'm sure it was a little bit more difficult. But you know, it worked
really well. It was wonderful.
GS:About how many students do you interact with a year?
GP:In the Odyssey program there? There are, the class is limited to thirty. So
it's thirty a year. And usually they all make it through. Occasionally they'll
have to drop out. You know, these are people who can have problems. You know.
Some of them, very bad. So one of the things I like about it is you take chances
on people. Up to a point. You know. If someone has a very serious drug problem
and can't give it up, then they have to go. But that happens much more seldom
than you would think. But you know, somebody's cousin may get shot. Things might
happen to people. But the students are really devoted to doing what they need to
do in this class. Because it's been proven such a benefit to them.
GS:Are there components of that class, of the Odyssey program, that you've
brought back to the Chazen, or even to your undergrad or grad students?
GP:You know, that's a good question. And off the top of my head, I would say not
really. But on the other hand, it has made me more aware of what my usual
classrooms are like. And I certainly have tried occasionally with like a FIG
class or something to offer a topic that sort of seems to be more welcoming to a
broader population.
GS:Could you describe an exhibition experience at the Chazen that you found to
be especially memorable?
GP:Yeah. I mean, probably the one I remember, actually, best was the first one.
And I had a, it was called Paper Women. And it was images of women in Japanese
woodblock prints. It was for a graduate seminar at a time when we had really way
too many graduate students to be practical, but it was really nice having a good
large group of graduate students. And the majority of the graduate students were
women, so this seemed to be like a good idea. And Drew, the former print
curator, was really super helpful. And so we met as a class and we
02:12:00talked about issues. And it was generated largely through this give and take
with the students and what they thought was really most interesting. And you
could do this with graduate students because they already tended to have a body
of feminist theory and ideas that you could move forward without having to lay a
lot of groundwork for that. So we can just proceed into thinking about our
objectives. But you know, there's so many prints. A lot of it is just, it's not
just what you want to do; it's like, what do the prints lend themselves to doing?
So that was actually my first experience at all in working to put together an
exhibition. And you realize how little you know about the mechanics of it all,
and how much you need your colleagues in the museum. But also how rewarding it
is to have the students sort of make the ultimate decisions.
And it's always a question, you know. Because of time constraints. If you only
have one semester, it's difficult if you want to do some dense sort of topic and
bring all the students together with you up to speed on that topic. And also
organize the exhibition. It's kind of impossible. So, it's always a matter of
there's not enough time to do it right. So often these things lead into that if
you, like if you do the class in the fall, then over the summer, you know,
you're going to have to pay some of the students to be student hourlies, to sort
of carry through. You just can't do the whole thing in a semester. Unless you
sort of pre-picked out the objects. Which you know, that seems to be sort of the
missing part of the learning experience for the students. But if you have, for
example, four thousand Japanese prints, you can't, say okay, look at every
Japanese print. That's just not going to work. So you have to sort of find a
balance between over-streamlining what they get to do, or the part that goes
into their participation and just having it too vague.
So I think something that maybe even works better is when you have a small
collection, like my colleague Tom Dale, used the icons and
02:15:00photographs taken on Mount Athos, that Frank Horlbeck owned the icons and took
the photographs and did a Mount Athos exhibition. And so, the objects, in other
words, you didn't have a big assortment of objects that you had to sift through.
They were what they were. You had a lot, a lot of photographs. And so he did a
lot of preliminary work in sort of sifting out and, you know, having a much
smaller selection for the students to deal with. And then they could really
concentrate on the activity of researching the objects and doing the write up
and intellectual part. So.
GS:Have you done any digital exhibits, or digitization of the prints to promote
on a digital platform?
GP:You know, I've worked with small, small groups of like an honors class of
students on a kind of Omeka digital exhibition. But you know, it doesn't give me
great pleasure. There's no objects involved. Which to me is half the exercise.
And so I'll never be, you know, a fan of doing digital exhibitions. I understand
their value 100%. It's just I personally, someone who loves objects and likes to
get students engaged with the actual objects, have very little interest in doing
it. So there. Yeah.
GS:Are there any other uses of technology, though, that you think the department
has really needed to promote? Or to work on or develop?
GP:(laughs) Well, you know, it's an ongoing struggle with how to provide the
students with high-quality images to study. I don't know if you ever darkened
the doorway of an art history class in your young days, your youngest days.
You're still so young. Even in your young days, it was probably already digital,
wasn't it? Yes. So, when I was in graduate school, oh so many years ago, how did
you provide study images? Well, the way most places did it was you cut up books
with big pictures, color pictures in them. You mounted them somehow. And you put
them up physically somewhere.
At Berkeley, where I went to graduate school, it was down in the lowest level of
the undergraduate library. There were kind of niches where you basically pinned
them to the wall. And something like that was done here. I don't know exactly
what was done. But, yeah. You actually physically cut up big picture
02:18:00books and mounted these things to the wall.
So, once the worldwide web came around, which was, I think, just one or two
years, it started before that, but it actually impinged on people's
consciousness, and the whole idea of digital images being made available for
students. So when my colleague Nick Cahill was hired, and we had Tom Gombar as
our visual resources curator, who was very interested in the digitization of
images and making them available online. And Nick had been working on the
Perseus Project, which was a big project to put classical art and texts, to
digitize them and make them available online.
So I mean we were at the point, so I decided hey, why don't we form this
committee? And I said, "Tom, why don't you be," I wasn't chair, but I was, you
know, I said, "We've got you two guys. Why don't we do this? And Tom, you be the
head of the instructional technology and space committee."
And so we did. And that's how we got our first website up with the, I, less than
the two of them, but still contributing. We actually did the coding ourselves in
HTML 1, which was dead simple. And is completely, now it's a different world.
You can't even begin to put together a website. But yeah, that's what we did.
And images started getting digitized. And we were, I think in the humanities,
one of the very first in the country to have a departmental website. And it was
even mentioned once in the New York Times about, you know, just got a little
mention along the way. So, you know. And over the years, it's really grown.
The thing is, is the options. So here comes the issue with this. And this gets
kind of dry and tedious. But when you're putting together a database, you have
to have the database behind it. So how rigorous a database do you want it to be?
So if you want to do a good artwork image database, you know, you have to have a
whole bunch of fields that you have to meticulously enter. Artist, place, time.
And that can be really complicated. Like if you're talking about
02:21:00time, to what degree do you incorporate period times? To what degree do you only
use dates? And what date range do you work with? Really tedious stuff. And so,
if you have to digitize a lot of images and to expand the database, you need a
certain pace to do this. Then it means really, really a lot of work in keeping
that database up.
And Tom was amazing in doing this. And I found out much later how much time he
spent at home after work doing this. But the problem is, in the long-term, it's
unsustainable. In the long-term. As the images multiply. And you can't expect
people down the road to be so dedicated that they spend sixty, seventy hours a
week doing this and not getting paid for it. I mean, for any more than forty
hours a week. So, it's not sustainable. And that's what we're facing now. And
that database is, the library has been supporting it and it won't do it anymore.
Plus we're in a different age in terms of images. Because there's Google images,
there's Getty images, there's Artstor. So there's a wide range of images, which
are often free.
And the other thing that's happened is our old scanned images were done so long
ago, they're no longer of sufficient quality. They're perfectly okay for the
kinds of digital projectors and screens we had back in the day. They're not
anymore. So you have to think about re-scanning things to make them of
sufficient quality. Or, you know, so it's just--it was very important and useful
for a while. But over the long-term, you know, you have to kind of say well, you
can't sustain it. And resources have to go elsewhere. Especially when, honestly,
it's really quite easy to get a lot of the images I need from sources online.
And those I can't, I have a lot of, you know, I can scan them myself fairly
easily. Or even photograph them with my iPhone and still get a better image than
I have in the database among the earlier ones.
So, the changes in technology are just, it's just changed completely from when
we first done that. And, to a large degree, for the better. Easier
02:24:00access to images. And less need for sort of a central database controlling
things, or keeping things orderly. Though I don't know how, you know, we may pay
for that in the longer-term.
GS:Does UW support the department by paying for a subscription to some of these
larger national databases?
GP:They do. The Artstor, they pay for that. A lot of them, you don't have to pay
for. We don't go pay for Getty Images. The big one we pay for is Artstor. You
know, even Wikimedia has a bunch of stuff. And a lot of us over the years have
photographed things ourselves. Or we have catalogs sitting on our bookshelves
that we can quick scan if we need to ourselves. So, you know, but yeah. I mean,
yeah. So, yes. They do.
GS:Do you have to advocate for that especially hard? For that use of money? Or
is it fairly simple to convince the university for the need?
GP:Oh, no. It's difficult. Our art librarian, Lynn, has been really good at
advocating. And I once actually really did something wrong when she had
advocated really hard for Artstor. And Tom Gombar and I found out how much it
cost. And I made the comment to somebody in the library system, "Well, you know,
if you gave us that much money, we could put together a fabulous image base
really suited to our needs." And this was after Lynn had worked really hard to
advocate for it. And so I had to like wind up going to her in abject apology for
muddying waters after she had worked so hard. Anyway, I managed to redeem
myself. But it was a lesson in don't step in somewhere where you don't know
what's been done before, where the groundwork's been laid, and how important it
is. And of course, Artstor wasn't that good at the time. It had a lot of crappy
images that they had digitized just, you know, one collection in one university
and many of the images were poor. But of course, that was just the beginnings.
And it's improved dramatically over time in many ways and expanded. So the
proportion of good to mediocre or not so good images, it's gotten
02:27:00much, much better. So, you know. You have to think towards the future, too.
Getting in, you're paying a lot of money to get, I don't remember the amount,
but it just seemed astronomical to me. But that was sort of your ticket in. It
was only going to get more expensive. And it did improve a lot over time. So, yeah.
GS:Are there other kind of large price tag things that the department has really
had to advocate for as far as facilities or specific positions or focuses?
GP:Well, I mean, the big thing used to always be advocating for faculty
positions. You know, somebody from another department, somewhere in print,
referred to it as the gold standard of success was getting another faculty line.
GS:Do you agree with that?
GP:No. Not at all. I think, you know, it's just a kind of academic reflex is to
cover as much, many of the bases, and to be competing with the Ivy Leagues or
somewhere. You know, like okay, they have a fourteenth, fifteenth century
Italian historian. We need one, too. To compete. We want to be at the level. And
you can't sustain that with a state university with budget cuts, etcetera,
etcetera. And everybody has come to realize that. So, you know, with all of our
downsizing and rightsizing, as they call it. You know, the terrain has just been
transformed. Plus I think, and this comes to the issue of what is your most
important concern breadth of coverage or depth of coverage in certain areas.
Because almost nobody, with a few exceptions, can kind of do both. So, is it
critical, if you lose your Italian Renaissance art historian and your northern
Renaissance art historian, is it critical to replace them both? Or do you look
for somebody who does one primarily but is more than willing to teach both? And
that way, not endanger another line in some other area.
And you know, like right now, our department doesn't have a dedicated
02:30:00modernist or a dedicated contemporary person, which is insane. It's absolutely
insane. But the question is, how do we get them? What do we give up? You know,
we have, and I believe in this, we have gone for a certain breadth in Asia and
Africa. Though our Africanist is about to retire. And because of budgets, we
won't be able to replace him anytime soon. But you know, we have an Islamic art
historian. We have a Chinese art historian. We, at least now, have an African
art historian, Japanese art historian. But no modernist. Or European modernist
or contemporary person. And that just has to change. I mean, can we change it in
the next couple of years? No. Some things have to sort of work themselves out.
Because, you know, the dean is an economist. The chancellor's an economist. And
their budget models now--
You know, it used to be you'd go to the dean and argue your case for a line. Now
it's much more, "Okay, here's your tally sheet," as they call it. "These are
your financial resources. This is how much you're in the red or in the black in
terms of what you're allotted for financial resources." And so unless you can
keep sort of out of the red over the long term, they're not going to let you
hire. So it's a very--I mean, what else can they do? You know, unless budgets
really get much better.
So, anyway. To make a long story short, you have to commit to what you want. But
you have to play the long game. And that's all you can do. But you know, we have
to make priorities for our next hire. And those priorities, the priority, I
think, has to be either a modernist or a contemporary person. Or maybe a
modernist/contemporary person combined. I mean, how can we serve the great
number of students in the art department and elsewhere without one? Not in our department.
So anyway, that's, so in terms of resources and our having to advocate for them,
you know, we control our own classrooms. We're not in the general assignment
classrooms. That means we're responsible for all that equipment in
02:33:00them. And who maintains the equipment? We do on our budget. Who, bulbs, even,
are really expensive. So we're responsible for all that. But we don't want to
give those up to general assignment. You know, they're perfect for us. They have
the wide screens for showing two works of art at the same time. The lighting,
not perfect, but, so anyway, so we do ask for support sometimes in being able to
hire student hourlies or whatever, to help with maintaining the equipment or
helping in emergencies when a professor goes down to start the lecture and the
projector won't work for some reason.
So, and that's probably our biggest anguish right now is the technical side of
things. And who's going to do it. In the old days, Tom Gombar used to do it all.
And then his successor, Jacob Esselstrom was very good at doing everything. In
the end, though, he retired, resigned, whatever, because he was just too
frustrated. He wanted to do the cataloging. He wanted to do what a visual
resources curator's main job should be. And he had less and less and less time
to do it. Because his time was just being eaten up by being our techie IT
person. And so since he left, it's been a struggle. And so, you know, finding a
solution to that is going to be difficult.
And if you look at our proportion of faculty to support staff, many people would
look at that and say wow, you have many more staff than any other department in
the humanities your size. So, in other words, and we have more project
assistants helping out with things. And you know, I don't know how to answer
that. Part of that is just historical, things that have happened over time. But
you know, it's hard for us to look at a configuration where, you know, we can
say, "Oh, yeah, we can do without that person." So, I don't know. That's going
to be a struggle is if one of our staff members leave, do we replace that
person? We're not going to get more money. And are they going to let us use our
money to replace a staff person? It's just really, you know, once you
02:36:00get beyond the department administrators, like you're going to have to think,
what do you do? So it's hard for me to blame L&S or the deans and say oh, well,
they're not giving us what we need. But yeah, we would like more. And we
advocate for it. And sometimes we get it.
But you know, a lot of what we have been able to do has been through, have been
through, what is it, class and laboratory modernization grants. They're grant
systems. So one of the ways we got our classrooms digitized were through those.
Because they're not general assignment classrooms. They're more classified as
laboratories, like a chem lab or something. And we are really low-budget,
compared to chem labs, if you can imagine. So, laboratory modernization grants
and so forth. So, these competitive grants, where you--and that's a lot of work,
too, putting in proposals. Tom Gombar used to do it. Jacob Esselstrom used to do
it. I mean, taking the lead. So that's another thing, who takes the lead in the
future grant proposals? So. Yeah, my colleagues, I'm retiring in two years, but
my colleagues have some, I think some rough waters ahead in dealing with all of this.
GS:Have you seen a change in the establishment of endowed professorships, too?
GP:Yeah, well, well sure. We had one endowed professorship when I came. That was
the Africanist position with Henry Drewal. He's Evjue-Bascom professor. Now, the
Evjue-Bascom is controlled by the college. Or maybe the provost. Higher up than
we are. So at a certain point in time before I came, the department was granted
one of these to hire somebody. To help get somebody really good. And they chose
to do African. Or maybe they said, "Hey, can we get money to get an Africanist?"
And they did. So he came as an Evjue-Bascom professor.
When he retires, that money goes back to the college. We don't keep an
Evjue-Bascom professorship. Now, more recently, the Morgridge matches, I don't
know if you know what those are. Well, the Morgridges, very, very rich people
who've given a lot of money to the university, they gave--okay, I'm not going to
remember this correctly. Let's say a hundred million. And they said,
02:39:00"This money will be used to match any gifts towards a professorship, a chairship
or a distinguished chairship." And the professorships were a million together
with, so, if somebody put up five hundred thousand, out of their money would
come five hundred thousand for the million, and so on. So it was like one
million, two million, three million. So, our department was lucky enough to have
some really good supporters. So, Joan Mirviss and her husband were able to do a
professorship in Japanese art history, which I hold now. And those stay with the
department forever. And the Chazens, who gave the vast majority of the money for
building the museum, gave enough money for a distinguished chair. Which stays
with our department, but is not committed to one certain position in the
department. So, yeah, that's a huge change.
Now, that didn't mean we got to add faculty. The rules were that it was an
enhancement, not an addition. And the college takes half of the earnings. So,
just, it's not quite 5% that it earns every year. But so, for example, out of
the million for the Joan B. Mirviss professorship, let's say it's 5%, just for
easy math. That's $50,000 a year, of which the department gets twenty-five. And
25,000 goes to the college to offset part of my salary and benefits. So the
college benefits from reducing what they have to pay for my salary and benefits.
And the holder, same thing, even bigger with the holder of the Chazen
distinguished chair. That still benefits us in our tally sheet, but we won't
talk--it still helps us in the tally sheet and our balance of resources used and
resources allotted.
So, the rest of the money, the money, the half that goes to the department,
there are various ways to do it. Most programs give the entire amount as
research funds to the faculty member who holds the position. Our department
decided to give them half of the half, a quarter of the whole, for,
you know, research funds. And the department would use the other half for
02:42:00various things. Which is the way we decided to do it.
GS:Is that how some graduate positions are supported financially, then?
GP:We have used, we have used those monies fairly regularly to support graduate
student travel. It's not enough to support a fellowship. We do have a couple of
fellowships that were funded under a previous program. The distinguished fellow
program. Where, again, donors could put in half, and WARF would put in the other
half. That's the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. And so we got two of
those. One in East Asian and one in decorative arts. So.
No, we've done well. We've had good donors and generous donors. And maybe that's
because we're an art history department. And people really interested in art are
often people with a lot of money to collect it and so forth. Bless them.
GS:This sounds like a somewhat intricate system, though. How familiar were you
with how money interacts with academia before you became a professor? And how
did that understanding change as you were the chair?
GP:Yeah, that's another good question. I think my lessons started fairly early.
Because my very position, and I think I might have talked about this last time,
was funded originally by seed money from the Japan Foundation. And I had gotten
a Japan Foundation grant to do research when I was a graduate student. So I kind
of always, and I went to Harvard as an undergraduate, where everything is, even
a water fountain or two is named after somebody. So the connection between
wealth and academe, you know, I think I always knew that, and I was always aware
of it.
On the other hand, I think shortly after I came, we went through a series of
budget cuts. So, yeah. And also for reasons that are a little bit bewildering to
me and could never happen now, I think my second year, there was something
called the Gender Equity Pay Adjustment Program, to, you know, all departments
had to look at how men and women were being compensated relative to their
productivity, blah, blah, blah, blah. Good stuff. I don't mean the "blah, blah,
blah" to be a bad thing. So, I was actually put on that committee as
02:45:00a junior faculty member, which I think is technically wrong. But so then I
suddenly was seeing, because we had to have comparisons also with other
departments, other programs in different universities. I saw salary figures I
never expected to see, you know. So I got sort of involved for one reason or
another with budgets and salaries and things from a fairly early time.
But that still didn't prepare me for being chair. Where, you know, budgets, you
just realize wow, this is crazy. And especially our department, which his not
only the 101 budget, the money from campus to fund our salaries and supplies and
expenses and some other basic things. There's also the foundation accounts, our
gift monies. There's also something called trust funds that were set up before
the foundation was set up. And we had, thankfully, we had quite a few of those.
And we had ones for very specialized purposes. Some for much looser purposes.
And how much, you know. So, getting access to our foundation accounts, and
learning the ins and outs of those. And I still realized, because I had such a
great department administrator, who oversaw those things, I realized later when
I became chair again without that terrific person, wow, there are things you did
not learn, because she protected you from it. Bless Sandy. But, yeah. You just learn.
It was really, really difficult my second time as chair as far as dealing with
budgets. Because it came to be, I felt I understood them better than anybody
else in the department. Which was scary, because I didn't feel like I had
complete control. And there were things I still didn't understand. And also, the
second time I became chair was just when the latest big budget cuts hit and our
department, I think, was cut by 30% in its 101 budgets. Maybe not quite that
big, but a big chunk.
GS:And this would have been around 2010 kind of area?
GP:Yeah, let's say that. Maybe. Yeah. And that was just at the beginning of my
second round as chair. And that's when they started bringing out things like
tally sheets and all these accountability things. So I really, really had to get
to know the budgets better. It's also the time that these Morgridge
02:48:00matches started to come in. So there was just a variety of budgets and money
things that I just felt I had to be more on top of than I had been before. And
so you asked me earlier did I believe that the gold standard was getting more
faculty. No. The gold standard is when you have the chance to recruit.
Recruiting the right faculty. And that means not only recruiting somebody who's
a brilliant scholar, but someone who's also a great colleague. The smaller your
department, the more pressures there are on a department, the less you can
afford to have the prima donnas and so forth. So I would happily lose out on
some sort of super scholar who was a jerk and a prima donna. No. I wouldn't care
at all. On the other hand, if I had this really good scholar, really very good
scholar who just seemed to be a great colleague and teacher, willing to really
contribute to the greater good in a meaningful way, I would snap that person up
much more quickly. You know, if we were a department with forty people in it, it
would be a different, it would be different.
The other thing is, I used to tell my colleagues, I'd say, "You know, I'd much
rather lose one of you than our best staff member. (laughs) We can replace you,
but I've seen what happens when you lose a great staff member." It's hard. It's
really hard to get a person as good again. And you may almost never. So, I said
it with a smile and a laugh, but I think they understood I was kind of--if
you're chair, you know, who's more important to have, you know? If you ask me to
pick between you and Sandy, get out. (laughs) I mean, I'm joking, sort of. But
sort of not. I just think with all the pressures, budgetary pressures, and all
the other sorts of pressures on departments now, you have to think about what
makes a department function as a unit best, while still not, you know, you don't
turn your back on the quality of scholarship. Because the quality of scholarship
affects everything. You know, are your undergraduates, and especially your
graduate students, being taught by a first-rate scholar? It makes a difference.
People don't often understand that. They say well, anybody, you know, who's
learned enough can teach about Michelangelo, etcetera. But can they
02:51:00teach students to understand how what we know about Michelangelo is shaped by a
lot of other things? Or that knowledge of the past isn't just clear-cut facts?
That knowledge is a construction. And sort of who can teach them how to deal
with the complexity of that. And that's important for everything. It's important
for life today and living in the political world we live in and the construction
of reality. So there's just a lot of things, you know. If all you were doing was
teaching facts, we could do it with computers. But you're also teaching students
the nature of arguments, the nature of subjectivity in the creation of
histories. And just how difficult even it is to interpret visual media. So
there's a lot of things you want in a faculty member besides having a lot of
knowledge. That's kind of, you know, is not the most important thing. It's not
who knows the most about Michelangelo; it's who approaches Michelangelo in the
most sophisticated way, and can teach students to do that. And then has broader
applications in everything they do, I think. Jobs, everything. If we do it right.
GS:How much do new hires and budget cuts and who's department chair dictate the
morale of the department, too?
GP:I mean, it's a really good question. Absolutely budget cuts strongly affected
the morale of our department. I think I talked about this last time, too. Early
in my second time as chair with the big budget cuts, it really, really hurt
morale. And I might have needed to have done things a little bit different in
sort of leading people through the shock of that. And so, yeah. I think if you
have, I know this mostly from rumors of other departments that have had chairs
that have wanted to be too dictatorial or weren't interested in thinking through
decisions, just wanted to get it done. You know, that can really hurt morale. I
don't think we've had chairs in my memory who did that. Most of them,
they really tried hard. They really tried hard. But you know, in a department
02:54:00our size, even one or two faculty, can make problems. And if you have people who
are, for one reason or another, always finding reasons to be disgruntled or
whatever. I don't want to go into too much of that. But yeah, you can have
people who, more than the chair, create climate issues and create morale issues.
You know, but the tighter the budgets get, money does become a bone of
contention. Right now, in fact, later this afternoon I'm chairing a meeting over
a certain resource to support graduate students. And already, even though I told
people do not make comments online, save it for the meeting, somebody did. And
somebody else snapped back. You know. Money is touchy when it's tight. Support
for graduate student money is very touchy. It's almost as touchy as parking.
(laughs) No. Parking is a very touchy issue among faculty, but not between
faculty, because we don't determine anything. Anyway.
GS:Does the university and the department pay attention to mental health, too?
Especially, we're currently coming out of winter. Is there anything your
department does to maintain student and professor mental health?
GP:Not that I know of. No. I mean, I don't even know what we would do. I
confess, that's just sort of alien to my way of thinking about things. I'm not
even sure what we could do, given our resources. We certainly try to make
students aware of what resources are available on campus. But no, I can't
imagine it.
GS:It seems like there's a lot of components about being a professor, in
specifically your case, for balancing publishing and teaching and volunteering
and service. And that's added on to personal life, too. How have you
successfully balanced having a personal life with so much time dedicated to the department?
GP:Well, you go through periods. Sometimes you have more time to spend with your
family. And when my family was younger, there was probably more. In
02:57:00that phase of being a junior faculty member and having to get tenure, and your
children are young and you have to spend a lot of time with them. There's some
tugs and takes. I mean, one of the benefits I've had is we're not really a dual
career family. My wife has worked, mostly for financial necessity from time to
time. But I think it's much harder for my colleagues who are trying to deal with
both having fulltime careers. And small children. But people do it all the time.
So in my case, but I have to say, and I'll honestly say, push comes to shove,
family comes first. And always has for me. Getting married wasn't an
afterthought. I was married long before I became an academic. I had children
before I became an academic. That's not quite true. My son was born while I was
in graduate school. But anyway, yeah, so for me it wasn't like, okay, do I deny
these responsibilities in my career to benefit my children? Well, my career
benefits my family. And so you just figure out the balances there. So, no, I
feel I've been luckier than a lot of people. There are so many people who have
dual careers. And, you know, who's going to be responsible for what? And a kid
gets sick, and who stays home or how do you find somebody to take--yeah, I mean,
we had a little of that when I was younger. But I just can't imagine it,
honestly. I really respect and admire those people who manage to deal with that.
Yeah. So.
GS:Was your family able to go with you on your sabbaticals?
GP:Oh, always. Yeah. I wouldn't go without them. Especially since my wife's
Japanese and the sabbaticals are spent in Japan. That would be really--(laughs)
I'm not sure we would still be married if I had done that. No. I mean, it was
never a question for me whether we would do that or not. And fortunately, we've
always had just enough money to make it all work and not go too far into debt.
And you know, so, yeah. I don't think I have any really interesting answers to
this, because it's been fairly straightforward for me. I mean, yeah, there were
times when you say okay, I can't go see my daughter play volleyball because I
really have to go to this talk or something. But you know, they're
academic kids. They understand this by the time they're in high school or something.
03:00:00
And fortunately, my kids are also the kind that aren't very needy, you know. As
long as her friends were there, my daughter was pretty happy. I mean, yeah, she
wanted us there sometimes. But, yeah.
GS:Shifting a little bit back to the time that you were chair twice, you've
talked a little bit about how the two instances had some major differences to
them. Is there anything that stayed pretty consistent?
GP:Well, certainly my colleagues were continuing. And those were known
personalities. And I don't want to make this sound bad, and they were known
problems. As well as known benefits. We all present problems and benefits in an
organization. So, you know, there was continuity in that way, though there were
new faces and new people. And so, yeah. Issues with the museum continued to be
what they were. Maybe slightly exacerbated in a couple of cases. You know, and
just fundamental things like dealing with the classrooms. A whole bunch of
issues remained the same. But you know, mostly there was a lot of change, for
the good as well as the bad. You know, our support from Joan Mirviss and some
other donors had expanded. And we could see some possibilities for the future.
So things on the sort of giving side had had to really gotten better. You know,
and dealing with the deans. That wasn't fundamentally different, even though
people had changed. You had to adjust to different approaches to things. And
just the campus as a whole. You know, the balance between being chair, teaching
your classes, family, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, there were different
nuances. But I don't think they were altogether different. Yeah. I can't say
that I feel that things were completely different. But they were very different,
for any number of reasons. Either dramatically or in nuance.
GS:Is there anything you're especially proud about your times as chair?
Something you facilitated?
GP:No. You know, I just felt like, I felt like I did the job well my
03:03:00first time as chair. I felt like we had had some issues before I was chair. The
chair before me was good. But there still remained issues. And I think I did
sort of try to change the culture a bit. And I actually have the personality
whereby I can kind of, I don't want to say diffuse, but sort of cause tension to
go down a bit. I mean, I was even said to be at one point the Xanax of the
department. In other words, I don't react dramatically. And I think that's kind
of important in a chair. You know, if a chair gets too caught up in the emotions
of the moment or the drama of the moment. And I just don't do that. It's not in
my nature. I mean, I may feel it and I may go home and grouse to Sayoko. But
yeah, you know, I don't--and I think the fact that I was in some really tough
times, like with budget cuts and stuff. Really just kind of stay on an even keel
and try to guide my colleagues through understanding what was happening and what
it meant, and not get too caught up in okay, we're just going to sulk or we're
just going to rant about how unfair this is. I'm trying to think if there's
anything. I just don't kind of think of it that way.
I think I did the job well. I think I did the job better my first time through.
And how much of that is because of Sandy as a wonderful administrator, I don't
know. But I think I did it quite well. I think the second time, you know, I did
it because no one else would. Or no one else that you would really want to do it
would do it. And then the budget, got smacked in the face with the budget cuts.
So I was never sure of, it was just like, by the end of the third year, or even
during the third year, I was just, I just cannot wait to get away from this. And
I felt like it was less, I was being less, I just had to be reactive, rather
than progressive and thinking about leading the department into the
03:06:00future. I had five years, too, to do it. And this was more like how can I hold
things together with these budget cuts and the personality conflicts that are
heightened by the tensions of the budget cuts and all of this. So, yeah, I felt
I was just kind of maintaining. And I would tell people by the last year. I
said, you really need to get somebody fresh. Somebody more forward-looking who
isn't kind of just tired of the whole thing.
Would it have been different if we hadn't had those big budget cuts? I think so.
I don't think I did a bad job. But I think by the time I left, I had sort of
seen the department through the crisis. It was time for somebody who was very
positive about promoting the department. You know what I mean? And was really
ready to get in there and be fresh. And to all parties, promote the department
and take it forward.
GS:How do you prepare the next chair when you're leaving, as far as gifting all
of this information you've gained without overwhelming them from the start?
GP:Well, you know, there are kind of two theories on this. And one is that you
get out of town, so you're not sort of looking over their shoulder.
GS:Oh, literally.
GP:Yeah.
GS:Okay.
GP:I mean, yeah. I mean, actually I left the country the second time. So, that's
not quite fair. But yeah, you know, what you try to do is you figure out who's
going to be the next chair. And you try to prepare them for it. If you're in a
bigger department, you have an associate chair. So that's kind of what I tried
to do with a couple of my colleagues who I thought might be chair. And yeah, I
really tried to bring them in and sort of make them associate chair, if not in
real name, in sort of practice. But short of that, it's very, very hard.
And now we come back to, gosh, her ears must be burning. But you know, Sandy. It
wasn't such a big deal, because the administrator provides the continuity.
Chairs would often rotate every three years. So who provides the continuity? A
great administrator. And, yes, the previous chair sort of, you can go to, if
they're in the country. But the chair that followed me, I mean, even though I'm
in Japan, we're all connected still. We talked on the phone. We
03:09:00shared email. We put files up on Box. But unless you start going to some of
these meetings and so forth. And that's the other thing. You invite them to. You
say, look, why don't you come to this meeting of chairs, or that meeting with
the deans. And that's the best way to do it. But you're really asking a lot of a
person. They're usually not being compensated for it. And it can be a big bite
out of your time. But yeah. You know, I mean, it sounds bad, but you can
sometimes know who's going to follow you. Not because you're grooming them and
picking them out; you just know. Especially in a smaller department where
there's usually not a race. It's like who in the heck can we get to do this? And
you do it by in the last year or the last semester, really trying to bring them
onboard. And then maybe over the summer, working much more intensively with them.
GS:Have you sat on any other committees? Or meetings that interact more with the
whole campus?
GP:Oh, God, yes. I was on divisional committee which, as you may know, there's
the humanities division, the science division. And that's for the whole campus.
And that's the main, they do a couple of things. Actually, I don't know if they
any longer review course proposals. They used to, when I was on it. But what
they mostly do is review tenure cases. And I was on that for three years, and
chair of it. So that's kind of eye-opening. But that's really kind of nice,
because you get to see a broad picture of who's coming up into the department,
you know. And you meet people, really interesting people. And smart people. And
you learn where other smart people may be, so you can go hunt them out. No. But
it's an important job. And I did that.
And you know, I've been on a couple of committees for campus-wide scholarships.
I've been on the East Asian studies committee. I was chair of the Center for
East Asian Studies. I was director of religious studies for two years. Right
now, I'm on their executive committee. And probably the hardest, in some ways,
the hardest thing I did, and I'm going to forget what the name of it is, the
Student Misconduct Committee. I served, and you looked at, basically
03:12:00you adjudicated, a team of three people adjudicated accusations of student
misconduct, either academic or nonacademic. And so, academic was okay. You can
figure out fairly clearly from the evidence whether they cheated, they'd
actually cheated or not or whatever, plagiarized. The nonacademic was much
tougher, involving things like drugs or sexual assault and things like that. You
know, but it's important work. And you know, we did our best.
Another thing I worked on was, what was it called? The faculty, I did this quite
often, the Faculty Appeals Committee. Which is students who were going to be not
dismissed, but, what is the word? Forced to take a leave of absence for a
semester or a year, because of their academic record. They can appeal. And they
can explain circumstances and why they should be given another chance, you know.
It might be okay, they bring in documentation on certain tragic things in their
life and how now they're seeing a professional and are ready to go beyond that.
Or it may just be a desperation attempt not to be--what is the word? It's not
expelled, it's just temporary. Anyway.
GS:Did you ever see any overlaps of patterns as far as what types of students
were being brought before the board, especially when you're working with the
Odyssey program for how the university sees different minorities being brought
before these committees in different patterns?
GP:I actually, in the student misconduct arena, I mostly did not, it doesn't
stand out in my mind that I saw a particularly large number of minority
students. You know, maybe just one or two in the time I was serving on it for
three years. In the other committee, the Faculty Appeals Committee, I did, I
think, see just a somewhat larger number of minority students who,
03:15:00you might imagine, many of them come from more difficult circumstances. And
making the adjustment to college was tough. But again, you know, you had to sort
of in the end look at the record. But also look in the reasons for the record.
But just because someone has a good reason is not enough. You have to look at
okay, what are the corrections that are in place for the person to be
successful? And that's what we really looked for. It wasn't that you had a drug
problem. Yeah, right. You had to say, okay, here's my documentation. I've been
sober for six months and I will continue to be sober. I actually don't remember
anything as dramatic as that. But that's just a kind of easy illustration of the issue.
So, but yeah. I mean, it wasn't primarily African American, I don't think. There
were a number of Asian students and Asian-American students who ran into issues.
And I'm still not 100% sure why. Part of it maybe they were much more likely to
appeal. They had more pressure, because of cultural reasons, from their parents.
You know, it would be much worse for them in the eyes of their families to be
dismissed for a semester. What is that word? Anyway. Do you know what I mean?
So, you can't say, okay, more of those kids were getting into academic trouble.
Because it's up to them whether they want to appeal or not. And so there were
some cultural reasons why some students might appeal more than students in a
different group. And, you know, I don't know if there's been a study of that at
all. But it was interesting, I have to say, over the time I was there, I became
less and less easygoing. Because you'd see the same students again. Or you would
get, you know, you'd get, next time you're around then they would tell you how
many students sort of won their appeal and then flunked out. (laughs) So as I
said, the real critical thing became not what was the quality of your excuse,
but what is the quality of the correction?
GS:Was there ever a component of UW taking direct action as far as facilitating
those long-term corrections? Like seeking out, in your little
example, like AA meetings for students. Or going any step that would expect
03:18:00long-term change.
GP:Oh, sure. Any student who went on appeal had to meet regularly with an
advisor. A campus advisor, an L&S advisor. So, yeah, I mean, they were, and, you
know, there were different mechanisms put in place. Didn't always work. But
sometimes it did.
And you know, we sat on these committees. The faculty members really made the
decision. But we also sat in there with a professional advisor, L&S advisor. So
we consulted with them on their experience. We relied on their professional
experience. We didn't have it, so, you know, I think it was, I think it's a
decent system. You know, it's a decent system. I mean, I think you could argue
that you shouldn't even have it, because the students aren't being expelled.
They're being asked to take a year off and get their act together. Or a
semester, and get their act together. But on the other hand, for some students,
even a semester is going to create great problems for them in terms if they're
on a scholarship program or foreign students with visas and issues like that. So
there is a reason to have it. As imperfect as it is. The consequences for at
least some of the students are just so great.
GS:Being on so many different committees and a lot of service to the school and
university, how have you avoided becoming jaded?
GP:(laughs) I think, I think you can become jaded. And I think in certain
things, I have become jaded. Although that's probably too strong a word. There
are a lot of things I'm tired of. But those kinds of committees, I'm not tired
of. I don't do them as much, because I think it's time for other people to do
it. But yeah, if they got desperate and they really wanted me to do it, I would.
There are rewards to that. And when you see students struggling and having
problems, and maybe you can be part of a mechanism for helping them, I'll never
be jaded of that.
What jades me more is people. You know, I'm not going to go into it. But people
who make problem unnecessarily, and having to deal with that. And you know, and
people being just, I want to say, grow up. And that's all I'll say on
03:21:00that. But that has made me tired. Dealing with budgets has made me tired. Even
now, I'm not chair, but I'm head of the budget committee. And our current chair
is from outside. And bless him, but he doesn't know our budgets and he hasn't
dealt with these kinds of budgets before. And our administrator, who seems very
good, our newest one, she's been struggling, quite rightly. There's nothing else
that could have happened except to struggle. Because as much experience as she's
had, she's never dealt with the variety of budgets we have. And you know,
there's a learning curve. So I feel like I'm still tied to budgets. But I won't
be next year. Because it's a rotating position, and I'll rotate off. And so,
that's fine. I'll give a little bit of advice if anybody wants it. But by that
time, our new administrator will be much more on top of things, and it will be
fine. But yeah, you don't get jaded helping people. Especially those who most
need help. I don't. You get jaded--well, you know. (laughs) I would just say,
enough's enough. It's not jaded. It's just like, really? I'm just getting fed up
with this.
Yeah, I mean, if there were, I'm on the executive committee for religious
studies. And it's a great group of people who are basically volunteering to be
on this. Because there is not big, religious studies is a program. It has two
fulltime staff members. But it has a lot of affiliates. And affiliates have been
asked and have been willing to do this. So to be with a bunch of volunteers who
just have the good of the program, that's the only reason they're doing it, I'll
always take pleasure in that, working with groups like that. Especially since
very positive things have been happening for a variety of reasons. And the
director is a wonderful person. So, yeah, I'll never be tired of that.
GS:You've mentioned previously that you plan to retire in the next two or three years?
GP:Two.
GS:Two years. How do you start walking away from some of these things that you
enjoy or don't enjoy, and how do you prepare for retirement?
03:24:00
GP:Oh, I don't see any problem. To me, it's easy. You know, I know my position
will be rehired, because it's a named professorship. That would be my big
regret, if I was going to go away and it wasn't going to be replaced. And you
know, you can't start thinking that the world is going to collapse if you leave.
The university got along without me, and it will get along, before I came, and
it will get along fine when I'm done.
And as far as the things I really like to do, you know, I'll do the Odyssey
program probably as long as I am mentally competent, if they want me. And I
would happily volunteer to do some things for the museum, and so forth. You
know, I think there are ways that I will remain doing things I really like to
do. And I will probably even continue to do some scholarship. Though I think it
will be less what you might call standard scholarship. I'm thinking of a couple
of websites or blogs I would like to put together on things that really interest
me. But I don't want to do the kind of hardcore scholarship needed for academic
publications. There's just a lot of stuff I know or have access to knowledge of
that I would love to see people know much more about. History of Japanese
ceramics, and other things. But I don't want to get so deeply involved in the
sort of academic scholarly side of it. So think of it as kind of like outreach.
I really will enjoy a variety of kind of outreach activities to a broader population.
Because as long as I've been doing this, I confess, I have been a happy fish out
of water. But I've always felt a little bit like a fish out of water. Not in the
sense that I don't belong in a big university. But it's as I said. The kind of
upbringing I had, you know, the idea of being, being an elitist, or being in a
field I think has tinges of elitism, or has been colored by elitism.
03:27:00I wouldn't say it's a big problem for me. But it's a little nagging problem for
me. You know what I mean? So that's partly probably the reason I've been so
willing to become engaged with students with problems or with the Odyssey
program, to serve a broader population. (laughs) So, that's kind of a confession
I probably shouldn't have given, but there it is.
Yeah, no, you know, I've been very happy. But there's a little bit of me that
wants to go in a different direction. Plus, you know, I want to do things like
make pots and God knows what. Do more birdwatching. You know, people kill me
when they say, "Oh, I don't know what I'm going to do in retirement." That's
just pathetic. I've got so many things I want to do. So I don't really think
walking away will be hard, because I won't be completely walking away from the
parts I like best. And I'll still be friends with the people on campus I'm
friends with, and go to events. And I've told one of my colleagues I really
like, I said, "You know, when I retire, and in fact, I already am, I'm old
enough to be a senior guest auditor. And I'm going to haunt your classes."
Because, you know, I think they're really interesting. (laughs) So, yeah, I'm
serious about this. I'm going to take a course on dinosaurs or something.
GS:Have you seen a trend within your own department of people maintaining
relationships? Or has it been mostly once people retire, they kind of just leave?
GP:It has varied a lot. You know, when one of my colleagues retired, even moved
to California, and we basically never saw him again. Although, interestingly,
his granddaughter became a student of mine as an undergraduate. So, anyway. But
yeah, you know, mostly people keep in some touch. I think I mentioned Jim Dennis
before. Did I tell you what I thought about his retirement? He retired at a very
reasonable age, what I think of. Still in his sixties. Maybe sixty-eight, I
don't know. And then he proceeded to do things he wanted to do. He bought a
house in Germany and fixed it up with the help of the government's money there.
He'd bought a Frank Lloyd Wright house here and fixed it up. He wrote another
book. But at his own pace. So I think that Jim Dennis did, he did
03:30:00retirement in a very, I think, positive way. And something to be, to envy,
almost. Not that I would want to do the same things. But, you know.
Other people just waited too long to retire. And sort of just held on and held
on, so by the time they retired, the decline was fairly fast. So they didn't get
to experience, I think, the fullest benefits of retirement. But, you know, we
keep contact. My colleague, Barbara Buenger, Suzy, is around a lot. In fact, we
were birdwatching together over the weekend. So, yeah, there are some I see
quite often. Because they're friends, and you have activities you do together
besides be in a department. And I think others of my colleagues keep much closer
contact with some other retired people. So it's always interesting to speculate
when you know somebody's going to retire, how much will you see them again.
GS:Do you plan on spending more time in Japan? Or staying in Madison?
GP:Yeah. (laughs) If I had enough money, we might retire in Japan. But we don't.
So we'll stay in Madison and go to Japan as much and as often as we can afford
to do, probably. We're not going to be, we're not going to be really well off
when we retire. We won't be poor. But I would have to have--there are
possibilities. There are possibilities. There are things I want to do. I still
have family down in the Deep South. I've thought of contacting Florida State
University and saying, "Hey, look. How would you like a visiting professor for
cheap for a semester?" Then I could spend a spring semester out of Madison in
the snow and have just, get just enough money to make it financially possible.
And then get back up here before the summer hit down there. And so, you know, if
I could figure out ways to go to Japan and be compensated a small amount, it
would make it much easier. But still, we will go to Japan. Just how long can we
afford to sort of live there for a while. That's kind of up in the air till we
see what our financial situation's going to be like.
GS:I thought a good closing question might be as far as where you see the future
of art history. Specifically with this department, but also maybe in
03:33:00the humanities after you retire. What is its trajectory?
GP:I haven't the foggiest notion. I'm not a futurist. As far as the department
goes, though, I think we've just gotten confirmation that someone we want to
hire is willing to come. And you know, we're excited about that. And my two
junior colleagues now, one of them is about to get tenure. Just got voted
positively by the divisional committee. They're both good scholars, wonderful
people, people who want to do right by their students, by the program. And this
new person looks promising in the same way. So I feel very good about the
department over the long term. We've got some humps to get over. So, you know, I
just think we need the renewal of good people.
So what is the future of art history? It's a really interesting question. And
here's where I'm sort of divided. You know, art history has sort of given way to
visual and material culture studies. And for me, to some degree, that's great.
Because you see I have kind of issues on the elitism of art, the elitist aspects
of art and art history.
On the other hand, you know, visual culture and material culture are such
broadly defined things, and can have such a range of disciplinary methodologies.
You know, one of the rallying cries in academe has been for quite a while,
interdisciplinarity, we must be interdisciplinary. Because we don't want
everybody siloed. So my concern has been when does interdisciplinarity become no
discipline? In other words, are we bringing together disciplines, or are we just
sort of taking any sort of sense of rigor that belongs to discipline out of it?
The other worry I have, quite frankly, is rather than true interdisciplinarity,
the sort of taking the strengths of different disciplines, it's sort of all
being subsumed under a kind of, in some cases, critical theory stream
03:36:00where everything is sort of being read in the same way. Or an overly anthropological.
And here comes the kind of, where I contradict myself. One of the deep pleasures
of studying painting, for example, is thinking about it, the painting itself,
and what its meanings are, and what its significances are, and exploring that
really deeply. It probably comes out of my literature background where, you
know, you delve into the poem for all its worth, and then do that kind of
analysis. So, is some of that going to be lost? In other words, I would hate to
see bodies of work becoming just kind of illustrations of a general principle,
rather than things--in other words, are the questions begun by the work of art
and your engagement with it? Or are the questions initiated by an overarching
body of theory to which you apply on top of those works? I'm not saying that the
latter is invalid and that interesting work can't be done that way. I just worry
about if interdisciplinarity as a concept is taken to too far an extreme.
And it hasn't been, in our department. There's a mix. And people are doing good
work in different ways. And I would like to see that continue. I'd really like
to see that continue. Because I like the opening up of things that visual
culture studies and material culture studies does. But I kind of want to see the
variety of approaches, including those of art history more traditionally,
continue to flourish. And the augmenting and augmenting each other rather than
becoming just, I don't know, too homogenized under theoretical structures.
So, where is art history going? It's going to be smaller, in general. You know,
PhD programs are going to have to shrink. And some of them are going to have to
disappear. There are just not enough jobs. And it is criminal to keep convincing
students, or keep, I shouldn't say that. Students, most graduate students are
adults. They make these decisions. But let's say over-encouraging
03:39:00them in pursuing something that is ultimately going to be frustrating. I mean, I
always tell students if you can think of something else you would like to do
besides go to graduate school in art history, you should not go into a graduate
program in art history. But if the opposite is true, if this is what really, you
just feel like you have to do no matter how it turns out, sure, come on, let's
do it. Because you know, you never know where things are going to lead.
My graduate student, I think I can say her name, Laura Mueller. You know, she
came into the program. She had less Japanese training than I had thought, but
that was my own fault for not investigating enough. She struggled. Then she told
me, she said, "You know, Gene, I'm going to sell my car. I'm going to cash in
whatever I can. And I'm going to Japan to the Inter-University Center." And
that's what she did. She borrowed money from her family, she sold her car, she
did all of this. And she went to the Inter-University Center in Japan, which is
the best place to get training in modern Japanese. And she came out of it
completely different. Super Japanese. Very--and that just changes everything.
You can do everything much more efficiently. Reading and talking with people. So
she did that. And she made lots of contacts there. And so, you know, in the end,
she got her PhD. But really, academe was not her strength. Writing a long,
dense, academic book was never going to be her strength. But she had done a very
successful exhibition with the Chazen. So she had lots of talents. She got a job
for a while as the private curator for a wealthy Japanese art collector in New
York, until he lost interest in it. And then she applied for a job as the art
curator for the Portland Japanese Gardens, which has a nice--well, actually, it
does a lot of exhibitions with borrowed material. But is a very responsible
position. So that's where she is now. So could we have imagined in a million
years that this is where Laura would have wound up? No. But that's what she
really wanted to do. She persevered. She made sacrifices.
And so, you know, you always feel like well, I can't say to a student, "Your
03:42:00chances of getting a job are very poor." But you should say, "Well, yeah, if you
don't have something special about you, and if you're not able to get out and be
flexible and promote yourself, you know, yeah, you shouldn't do this. If you can
only be happy getting a job at a fairly big university teaching Japanese art
history or whatever your field is, do not come." And that's just going to get
worse. Well, I don't know. Maybe it's reached its low point in terms of job
opportunities for people with PhDs in art history. I don't know that. But even
now, even if there weren't even fewer jobs in the future, there are too many
people coming out with PhDs.
All those jokes are, to some degree, there's enough truth in them. When I was in
college, it used to be the joke was, "Where do you find somebody with a PhD in
Russian literature? Working at a Russian coffee shop." (laughs) Or tea shop, I
guess, is the stereotype. You know, there's enough truth in those to be painful.
And we have to be cognizant of it. And the university, because of budget cuts,
has been insisting on what they call rightsizing our graduate programs. Letting
in fewer people. Funding them better while they're here so at least they don't
come out in sizable debt. And if we can't do that, I don't think we should have
a graduate program, you know.
GS:How do you balance that with the desire to introduce undergrads to the field
of study?
GP:That's a really good question. I mean, I really enjoy introducing students to
Japanese art history. But partly as a vehicle to introducing them to Japanese
culture and Japan, Japanese history. It's an interesting way for them to get
into that. Or in some cases, students who already know about those things, to
give them an added dimension to it. And I to some degree enjoy getting students
interested in art history as an endeavor. You know, what it's about and what it
does. But I would say the larger part is more like Japan-specific, for me. And I
really enjoy that. I really like that. But I also enjoy teaching them to think
about images. Or to think about objects and what our relationship is to them and
how that has changed. And how to read images. Because that's the world we live
in. It's full of images. I just read a really scary thing about deep fakes. The
fact that you make one person, only experts can tell whether the person speaking
in a digital medium is actually that person. Or they've used these sort of
mask--anyway, there's technology involved so that somebody could do an image of
you online, actually looks very natural, speaking and saying things you would
never say. So, anyway. So, you know, we live in a world where understanding the
potentials and the profit in reading images and understanding images is really,
really important.
GS:Was there anything you wanted to add or comment further on?
GP:I don't think so.
GS:Okay. Well then, thank you so much and good luck with your retirement.
GP:Thank you.
GS:And ceramics, and maybe a few paleontology courses.
GP:Yeah. Not only paleontology. All sorts of things. Philosophy.
GS:Perfect. Thank you so much.
GP:You're welcome.
End Second Interview Session. End Interview.