Department Head Garber Discusses the Future of VES

Marjorie Garber, Chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) and Kenan Professor of English and American Literature and Language, talked this week to The Crimson about the structure and direction of the department and her own roundabout journey to VES Chair.The following is a transcript of highlights of the conversation, with slight emendations for the sake of clarity.



The Harvard Crimson: Have there been any serious initiatives in VES recently to make any kind of significant policy changes?

Marjorie Garber: Well, I don’t know if “policy” is the right way of looking at it…

Over the last few years, we’ve added six assistant professors and two tenured professors. This is a big jump in the number of faculty that we have in this department, and we’d love to make more such continuing appointments...

We are working closely with GSAS Dean Theda Skocpol to design a PhD program in film and visual studies. We will offer graduate courses starting next fall, moving towards what we hope would be a PhD program.

THC: Would the purpose of additional faculty be to offer VES students a broader variety of courses, or to offer non-concentrators the opportunity to take these classes?

MG: There’s a kind of expectation that you have to be a concentrator in order to get into those courses, but actually that’s not at all true. We take freshmen very regularly, faculty are free to admit any person that they like into an enrollment course, and they try to build an interesting class. So it’s not an exclusive activity. I think a lot of people don’t apply to these courses simply because they assume that they can’t get in, but in fact there’s often space…

We’d also like to increase the number of courses given that are lecture courses, that would make the kinds of work that we do in VES available to all the students in the faculty of arts and sciences.

THC: How do tangentially related departments and schools like the History of Art and Architecture department or the School of Design relate to VES? Is there a sense of competition, or some kind of dialogue?

MG: Yes, there’s a very rich dialogue—they’re our arts partners. I think of Quincy Street as the arts corridor of Harvard and we have strong connections with the art museums, with the history of art department, with the school of design. We’re talking to people from these places all the time, and there are incoming projects that we have done and are planning to do, so we’re all connected to the business of trying to make art and art-making more central to the Harvard experience.

VES as a department is fairly atypical —the general flavor is unlike most other spots on campus. Is there any sense that a department within Harvard should conform to a kind of liberal arts mindset that VES may or may not precisely fit?

Well, I think that the closer you get to the courses we give and the faculty who teach them, the less atypical we really look. The analogy shouldn’t really be with the humanities courses but with the sciences. A lot of studio courses are like lab courses—they’re intensive, materials-based, results-producing, experimental, high-intensity, work-in-a-group kinds of events… There’s a creative component, but there’s a creative component in science, too.

THC: I’m curious about your story, becoming the head of VES. How were you selected, and how did you make the decision to accept? I think many people still perceive you as a scholar of English, and that kind of cross-over is certainly different.

MG: As its name implies, “Visual and Environmental Studies” is an interdisciplinary department. Remember that most of our junior faculty are joint-appointed, teaching concurrently in departments such as History of Art and Architecture, Anthropology, English, and Comparative Literature. Many of our senior faculty these days are joint appointed, as well, with departments such as German and Romance Languages and English…

I was a member of a VES search committee some years ago before joining the faculty here, and so I had some knowledge of the department and its members. I also have a longstanding interest both in contemporary art and in film, and I wrote some things on these topics. A lot of my work reaches across these categories—I’m extremely interested in visuality, and I can say that I have enormously enjoyed working with the department. It’s been a terrific place to be.

THC: Any talk about outgrowing Carpenter entirely?

MG: It’s just a gorgeous building, it’s a landmark building, and it’s one that was built for artisans, artists – all these windows are designed to see through, so you can look across and see people who are making sculpture, making paintings. But in the future, when there’s Allston, we’re hoping that there may be a theater space there, maybe a studio space… We think an arts complex there is really essential, and we’re hoping to have some classes and some studios in that space.

THC: What was your initial vision when you became the chair of the department? Is it different than what it was now? Did you have a specific vision in mind?

We’d like to expand our public programming. The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts presents a major lecture series each year, bringing major artists to CCVA to show and discuss their work. This past fall we have had Ed Ruscha, Maya Lin, and Jane and Louise Wilson. In the spring we will host Laura Mulvey, Wayne Guyton and Kelley Walker, and Julie Mehretu. This is an extraordinary opportunity for our students to meet, hear, and talk with these established artists.

We have five exhibitions a year in the CCVA gallery—two external exhibitions, two student shows, and a show of new and visiting faculty work. We consider our students to be contemporary artists, critics, and theorists, and support them as such.

—Staff writer Laura E. Kolbe can be reached at lkolbe@fas.harvard.edu.