Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's Prof.
Cost. I'm delighted to welcome Professor Christopher Reid, who is the terror foundation visiting professor of American art here at Worcester.
Chris, welcome. Thank you. I'm keen to interview Chris this week to find out more about what he's doing as the visiting professor of American art,
but also because he's going to tell us about an event which is taking place in Worcester.
But let's start with Chris's background. Chris, you are a distinguished professor of English and visual culture at Penn State, don't you?
That's exactly right. And tell us what the focus of your own work in research is at Penn.
The the focus of my work has always been on big ideas, modernism, text and image, novels, plays, things that you see,
things that you read, how you imagine visual images when you're reading, how things are illustrated.
So I think exciting ideas around around the experiences that people can have with art and literature.
So I'm very excited to be here.
I'm affiliated, as you know, I'm a fellow of Worcester College, so we're having some events here this term and next term,
and I'm really excited to share those events with the community here and particularly with the students.
So I definitely hope people will come along. Let's come back to what the event is and the study day in a second.
But before we do that, I'm really keen that people understand a little bit more about your background.
You're being very modest. You've published a lot in relation to the work that you've done.
Tell us a little bit about your publications.
Well, I began by studying the Bloomsbury group, which people have probably heard of, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.
Yes, the artists, colleagues and the other writers of the group.
And what I was particularly interested in was the way that they created domestic spaces as spaces in which to be modern people,
so that when anyone walked into the room, including themselves, they felt like they were walking into a matisse.
This was not the Victorian era anymore. And, you know, so it becomes a kind of holistic way of being in the world again through word and image.
And so that was a way of kind of imagining your identity in visual terms.
And I got interested in the way other groups of Europeans and Americans imagined their identity in terms of exotic aesthetics.
And I focussed on Japan in particular, so what I called Japan ism that the French called Japanese for.
But since I call it Japanese, but when it's French people, it was English people or American people,
I call it Japan ism and sort of so using kind of fantasies of Japan to allow for new ways of being in the West.
Now, because I'm interested in, in the whole Bloomsbury thing, A why as an American you were interested in be you know,
they were a very privileged group of people who were able to be artists.
And whether in your view, they succeeded in doing, you know, what you were describing.
Well, they definitely succeeded in creating a subculture that was very interesting and attractive to lots of other people.
I mean, the sort of ironic thing is that they I mean, you're right, they came from I mean, not super affluent families.
None of them was aristocratic. None of them inherited big gobs of money.
They came from sort of upper middle class families. And really, they're the last group that exists outside an academic structure.
But the people in the groups that John Maynard Keynes is an economist and strictly as a historian,
there were the painters like and graffiti, the architects, Clive Bell, Roger Fry.
So they're doing the kinds of things that people do in colleges and universities,
and they kind of forged a path on their own doing that outside of any particular academic structure.
And that gave them certain kinds of freedom that I think maybe academics today are sort of jealous of.
But it's very much a kind of a prototype for what students do when they come to university.
And many of them had gone to the other university, the one east of here.
So that's sort of the that became a model.
But then it was a model that they expanded to relationships with other people,
particularly to the women in the group and to people like Duncan Grant, who hadn't gone to university yet.
So I think it's particularly pertinent and relevant to academics to kind of
study this this model of how to integrate economics with art or literature,
with economics and history, with modernist aesthetics.
And as an American, why were you interested? In that? Well, I don't know that I was interested in it as an American.
I am American and I got interested in it. And Americans, you know, have long been interested in the Bloomsbury group.
I mean, Virginia Woolf was a huge hit as an author in the United States.
John Maynard Keynes is often referred to as kind of, you know, the father of the New Deal.
You know, I certainly wasn't the person who brought them no group to America.
I did actually interview somebody in the Oxford Literary Festival, Rebecca Burrell, who was writing about similar things,
particularly creative spaces that were opened up to women by Bloomsbury and the relationships that previously women had queer relationships,
relationships where marriages had broken down and there was a kind of freedom for women not just to parent children, but also to be artists.
You asked me earlier how I was interested in Bloomsbury as an American, and I sort of said I wasn't interested as an American,
but I would definitely say I was interested in Bloomsbury as at the time a gay man before we said queer.
Now I would say it was a very queer interest in Bloomsbury and I've certainly written a lot about the queerness of Bloomsbury and on those
kinds of themes about how they really pioneered certain kinds of subculture that became very empowering and interesting to people later.
One of the projects that I did was an exhibition, Bloomsbury Art in America,
and so I looked at who had purchased Bloomsbury Art over the years and made collections in the United States.
Interestingly, the economists had the most art because they have more money.
So people who were fans of John Maynard Keynes, but feminists, you know,
lots and lots of feminists had kind of pinched pennies and saved money to come to England and buy some paintings.
And and it was really interesting talking particularly to women who had sort of come of age as feminists in the seventies about how
important the example of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell was to them in developing their own thinking about sort of how to be in the world.
Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Tell us about being the Terra Foundation visiting professor here in Oxford.
To start off with the Terra Foundation, who are they?
The Terror Foundation is based in Chicago, Illinois, and their mission is to promote the appreciation of American art.
They have a big American art collection, which was collected by Daniel Tara, the person for whom the foundation is named and who began it.
That's on long term loan to the Art Institute.
So if you go to the Art Institute of Chicago, many of the American art pieces that you see belong to them,
but they also loan work to other institutions.
There's a group of prints that's on long term loan at the Ashmolean here demonstrating again a range of American artists.
They sponsor exhibitions both in the United States and abroad, and they fund the terror professorship,
which is an annual one year position where people get to come to Oxford and teach American art courses,
both on the master's level and for the undergraduate students.
So tell us about your experiences so far this year in relation to your teaching, engaging with students of the history of art departments.
And yes, I've really I've really enjoyed the teaching, tremendously enjoyed the teaching.
My students are amazing. I have had the master's group in a course on American capitalism, so they're now writing all sorts of interesting papers.
And then next semester in the Trinity, we call them we call them semesters in the New World.
Next term. In the Trinity term,
I'll be teaching a an undergraduate American art history survey with a focus on sort of diversity and debate about what American identity is.
So I'm looking forward to that. And then in addition to that, you have your lecture series.
Yes, there's a lecture series also in the Trinity term for link to lectures, talking about, again, sort of ideas about American Japanese ism.
I'll be looking particularly at the reception of Japanese art because the talks are meant to be linked.
It'll take a kind of historical,
chronological approach where I'll look at the first big collections of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at the Freer Gallery,
which is part of the Smithsonian in Washington.
And talk about the very different kind of conceptions of what Japan should mean to America that influence the collection, the display,
the architecture of the buildings in which they're displayed, the layout of the displays,
the kinds of things they showed in the first half of the 20th century.
Then I'll be. Thinking about the immediate post-war period of the 1940s and fifties and sort of efforts to come to
terms with a very different kind of history of the relationship between the Americans and the Japanese,
including the Japanese-Americans who were interned during the war in the United States.
And then I'll be talking about more recent art by Japanese-Americans.
I think running through it is going to be a focus on how art is not only about what it's a picture of.
It's not only about images, but an art object is a physical object with material qualities and a surface and a heft.
So I want people to think about the way that we can relate to objects.
The term I use is kinaesthetic empathy. So kinaesthetic sort of how we move.
And this idea of if the object or a body, how would it move?
How would we relate to it? But really more importantly, how did the artist make the thing that we're seeing?
What what did that gesture feel like? How were those materials used?
And this idea that people can connect to artists, connect to other people, not only by imagery,
but through the whole sensorium, how we touch, how we hear, you know, how we how we sense space in the world.
I'm quite interested in the link between what you just been talking about and
the materiality and the senses and how you're building that into your lectures,
but also what you're exploring on the study day. Can you tell us where the crossover is and what your focus on Study Day will be?
Yeah, I'm looking forward to the Study Day.
It's built into the Terra professorship to gather scholars together to talk about a topic of mutual interest.
And I tried to cast the net kind of widely, and I hope that this will be a topic that's of interest to lots of people because it does include,
you know, lots of different kind of sensory approaches to art.
So we'll have a session on gesture and trace.
So how are records the kinds of marks that the person making it has made and how those, again, can convey meaning.
Meaning can attract empathy.
There are kind of parallels between, for instance, an artist who makes lots of little dots in a room and sewing or planting or,
you know, other kinds of activities that people do in the world.
And I'll be presenting about an American modernists, late 20th century painter named Warren Rau,
whose work was very much engaged with those kinds of issues,
particularly in relation to agricultural rhythms and creating big paintings that seemed to that seemed to respond and embody agricultural rhythms.
We'll also be having two talks on the colour blue and what I've done is paired American academics and academics from Oxford.
There are just four, fortunately two people who are working on different aspects of the colour blue.
In some ways, the most provocative session is on visualising the non-visual senses.
So representations of smell like what?
We're visual representations of smell, visual representations of heat, visual representations of the sort of tactility of things.
So I think that will be an interesting session.
And then the ASHMOLEAN has been working on a large and COVID delayed exhibition about Victorian colour that will be in the autumn.
And so there'll be a roundtable with some of the curators and scholars who've been involved with that to introduce people to the incredible
innovations that went on in the 19th century over inventions of different kinds of pigments and kind of what you could do with them.
We'll be contextualising all this by having selected artworks by current Worcester students,
students at the Ruskin who are interested in issues of materiality and kind of what
things are made of and how those materials are held together and relate to each other.
So it'll be a sense around the kind of experience.
Great science. Fantastic. So who should come? Everybody should come.
And you needn't come for the whole thing. It's it's 11 to 5 on Friday, on March 3rd.
And people can feel free to stop in and look at the art talk.
Have a biscuit. Go away again. I hope it will be interesting to people here at the college who are around will be
putting posters up so people will be able to see the outline of the day's events.
And I think that's gone out to the college community as well.
So people people have the schedule and plan their day around it.
If people want to find out more, should they come to your lecture series?
I mean, I certainly encourage people to come to the lecture next term.
You know, there's so. Many ways to approach this. And that's one of the that's one of the things that I was just sort of hoping to
kind of capture that richness in the diversity of things that are on the study day.
I mean, the other reason to have this kind of broad set of topics and lots of things going on at once was,
you know, when I was thinking about it, I was thinking, well, how does a community come back together after COVID?
And this is certainly something that we're thinking about in Pennsylvania and we're thinking about it here.
But, you know, to study this, the last few years have all been virtual and very much kind of scholars from all over the place.
But the locals haven't been particularly involved.
They've really been, you know, sort of team conference call kinds of things.
So I thought, let's just have an event where people can have really interesting conversations.
So I think that's what I would encourage people to do, is kind of come and listen and talk and then, you know, pursue their own, their own interests.
And, you know, they get excited by something that they are seeing by one of the students here.
Can I namecheck this to please do. So Casino Barry and Molly Davidson and Abby Aidoo will be their work will be on display.
And Nicole Kingsbury. She's going to write labels and she's an art history student, so she's talking to them.
So, you know, I hope I hope it will create local conversation that that helps the students here to well, no one knows what artists do.
So they that helps help us the other students to kind of see the things that the
that the Ruskin students are so passionate about and doing such interesting work.
As, you know, I'm really keen that we enhance the culture that takes place in the college,
that is created in the college, and that people are able to showcase their work.
But actually more people engage with what we're doing so that we create the kind of community that supports much more artistic endeavour.
So this is a great thing to do in relation to allowing more people to engage.
For me, it's often about how you encourage people over the threshold so they just have to walk into the library.
In this case, they had an excuse.
So Chris, you told us a lot about your lecture series, what it's like being the terror visiting professor and also your study day.
You've been living in Oxford for, what, seven or eight months now.
Tell us what the highlights of living in Oxford have been for you.
My most magical Oxford moment, because it was completely unexpected because I bought a walking guide book to Oxford.
But it doesn't extend beyond the sort of central part of the city or, you know, walked across the Port Meadow and up the Thames.
And when I suddenly came on the ruined Gladstone Abbey, it truly seemed like I had walked into some sort of fantasy film about medieval England.
So that was my that was my prototypical Oxford moment.
I mean, I've been tremendously excited about the things that happen at the Ashmolean.
We did a little workshop for the master's students at the Oxford Printmakers Co-operative,
which was wonderful because it really got into this issue of how does an image get made?
How do what are the pigments look like? What are the techniques? Something that can look very delicate is actually made, you know,
with lots of dangerous acid and scraping with very sharp things so that those resources have been have been really delightful to discover.
And at the end of the professorship, you go back to the US and you resume your normal, humdrum life.
Yes, no. Yes. You go back to teaching and more research.
And do you have any books, plans arising from anything you've been doing here?
I don't know about books. I'm interested in the sensorial and sort of lots of different ideas about how people approach art.
And in some ways, the idea of a book where you march through from start to finish has started to
seem less interesting to me than other kinds of ways of presenting research.
I worked on a big website about war and or the artist I'll be talking about on March 3rd.
So if people are interested in him, there'll be more to find there. And you know, we had poems, we had films.
So poems being read, you could read them and you could listen to people read reading them.
We had films with people talking about various aspects of his life and how to look at his work and different kinds of side essays.
And I like that kind of ability of people to be able to explore the material in some order other than the order that a book would impose.
I've actually just published an article about how people liked to do that in the 19th century and the first photographically illustrated novel,
which is, in case you're wondering, Nathaniel Hawthorne was the marble sun.
But it. Wasn't illustrated by the publishers, the booksellers in Rome, because it's a book about tourists in Rome.
Artists, tourists in Rome. The booksellers there got the idea that they could sell illustrations of the kinds of things tourists could see in Rome,
and the tourists could pick their own and, you know, mix them and match them.
And then the booksellers would bind the books together.
So everyone is different. And this was this became so popular that there are thousands, possibly tens of thousands,
and they're all different know because because people chose different designs and chose different images.
And and I was interested in the way that it sort of pre figures how people leap around on computers.
So I'm I'm interested in,
in encouraging that kind of more and I would argue that's a much more visual way of being in the world because it's like looking around,
you know, you can look up to the left and then over to the right and then you can choose to look more to the right or back to the left.
So when we look around, we have our own agency of exploration,
and I'm interested in trying to figure out ways to encourage that propensity and attract people to kind of chart their own course through materials.
So, Chris, thank you. It's been fascinating to hear about your time here in Oxford.
Well, the Terra Foundation actually makes possible, but in particular, the work that you're doing with master's students.
Your lecture series, give us the dates again. Well, the first event is on March 3rd.
That's the study day and the lecture series in Trinity Term.
It starts the first Wednesday in May and the four in total Wednesdays and the here in the Nazarene show.
Yes, exactly. Great. Well, for everybody listening, if you've been excited by this discussion,
anything that Chris has said or we just like to cross the threshold will be room to explore in the way that Chris has been describing.
Please do pop in and explore and be part of the conversation.
Yes. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us and good luck.
Typical goes well. Me too.