Conversation with James Watt

By Michael Martin

Michael R. Martin: You have worked in museums and universities. How would you compare the two as working environments?

At an ancient mosque in Ningxia

James C.Y. Watt: I much prefer working in museums. In a museum, it is very much easier to have direct contact with the works of art, rather than just reading or writing about them. That is the real advantage of museum work for an art historian. In universities, by contrast, there is an unhelpful kind of protectionism which has evolved among too many academics who attempt to elevate their profession to a higher status and subject everything to technical jargon and high-sounding theories which are understandable only to themselves. The rhetoric and theory replace direct contact with the subject. This is happening with many fields, of course, but it is devastating for art history.

MM: Are you thinking mainly of the `cultural studies' movement and the theory of deconstructionism?

JW: Yes. Deconstructionism is really a very simple set of theories which, once you have learned the jargon, you can apply to almost any subject. In that way, you do not have to know anything specific about those subjects.You become tremendously versatile, because it does not matter which subject you are supposed to be studying, you still use the same sort of language rules and vocabulary.

MM: Not all of us in universities practise deconstructionism and the new literary theories. Analytical philosophy, for example, adopts quite a different approach and tries to build up explanations using clear and simple language. Of course, comparativists in cultural studies complain that analytical philosophers are too narrow and miss some of the main themes uniting music, art, philosophy, history and so on. Whatever the validity of these complaints, I have the sense that deconstruction as a theory, or set of theories, is fading in influence and popularity, although it is still used in some quarters, especially in literary circles.

JW: The sad thing about art historians is that they are usually the last ones to catch on to any kind of intellectual fad, and then they desperately try to catch up. If you have to talk to people in other disciplines and everybody is talking that language, you do not want to look and feel unsound, as if you were ignorant of what engages everyone's attention. There has been a lot of pressure at universities for art historians to catch up with the literature people who rely on theory.

MM: Should museums and art history departments in universities not be brought closer together? Most good universities have a museum of one sort or another, although these are not always associated directly with an art history department. The trend seems to be to keep the two units separate.

JW: Yes. I remember in the early 1980s when I was working at the Boston Museum, a younger colleague, who was still doing graduate work at Harvard, came back and told me her professors were saying it is no longer necessary to go to museums to do art history! To think of museums as irrelevant to art history is absolutely astonishing to me, yet today you have art historians who focus more on theory than on art objects themselves. The so-called `cultural studies movement' has, in my view, nothing to do with culture. It rises above culture. Theoretical writing which is applicable to every possible discipline cannot begin to address anything concrete, because it becomes a kind of transcendental meditation on humanistic studies. I hope this trend can be reversed. Art history must focus on art objects. It really makes nonsense of the discipline if you take it away from the actual works of art, which are supposed to be the subject of study, and remove it from museums, which is the place where works of art are kept, displayed and cared for. I have always been extremely grateful that when I go to work every day, I am surrounded by wonderful works of art, which for me represent some of the greatest achievements of human civilization.

MM: Can you elaborate on the kind of scholarship you think is most required in art history?

JW: Scholarship should increase one's appreciation on the visual and aesthetic levels, as well as intellectually. When we look at an object, we often take too many things for granted and do not question what we are looking at. If an art historian can connect the object, or even some aspect of it, to an idea or to an earlier society in a way that illuminates its cultural significance without resorting to highly theoretical claims, then that can contribute to true scholarship. Late 19th and early 20th century art historians worked in that way, whereas art history in recent years, especially in the United States, has gone off on a limb. With few exceptions, only conservation students remain interested in the actual object, and then for the most part only as an object for physical examination.

MM: What role do you see in art history and art appreciation for aesthetic reactions and emotional responses which come from looking at works of art?

JW: Human responses can be very important to understanding and appreciating art. In following a theory, you end up adhering to a certain set of rules and applying those rules to the analysis of the works of art. You decide which is phase one, which is phase two, and so on. Looking at art thus becomes a mechanical process leaving out the human response. Here, theory can again be a hindrance because the work of art arose from a human response in the person who made it in the first place, and of course that person never thought of it as some kind of progression from a previous phase. The artist created the object naturally as the spirit moved him. If you do not enter the spirit, or at least intellectually have an approach to understanding that spirit through the study of the whole cultural environment of the time, you may miss out. For instance, many people love Song dynasty pots but are not always conscious of why they took a certain shape or feature rather than another. Why would a particular mark be left visible on a pot, for example, when it could easily have been smoothed out? There can be many explanations. One might be that the maker wished to leave the material alone, to impart as little human interference as possible in order to allow the material to express itself to the greatest extent possible. That is an idea which resurfaces in the West in the 20th century, of letting the material express itself. Awareness of that may increase one's appreciation and also add to intellectual understanding. Knowledge of art history may not be required to love a work of art, but it can be tremendously helpful to understanding art in different ways and on different levels.

MM: As a teacher I wish I could make art alive in the hearts and minds of students and other people I come in contact with, colleagues and members of the wider public who may not have much feel for it. When I go to a museum or a home where there are beautiful works of art, sometimes I am amazed to see people there who seem completely oblivious to the treasures around them. They seem to have no reaction at all, as if art were just some sort of decoration or triviality of no importance.

JW: That happens to famous art historians as well. If they are bronze specialists, when confronted with a great painting they may have no reaction at all. If they are painting specialists, they may not react to porcelain, no matter how wonderful it is. This is an unfortunate trend. There is a unity to art which we seem to be losing sight of nowadays.

MM: Some people think the study of art is important for an appreciation of beauty, while others think beauty exists only `in the eye of the beholder' and therefore is an incoherent concept not worth thinking about. I understand that beauty is not talked about much in art history.

JW: Art historians do not use the word beauty much nowadays. Modern discussions of beauty come more from philosophy, and I gave up reading in that area because most of the writers seemed to me to present overly subjective interpretations. I think there has to be some kind of universal standard of beauty that we all can ascribe to irrespective of culture and theory. Otherwise, you are negating the possibility of human communication and any kind of universality in human emotions. Contemporary China, for example, is so vastly different from Elizabethan England, yet people in China can still be moved by Shakespeare's plays translated into Chinese. Similarly, some of the great Song landscape paintings can move almost anyone, whether they understand Chinese landscape painting intellectually or not. On the other hand, there may be some ideas of beauty that are culture specific. If we look at people who deform certain parts of the body because they think it becomes more beautiful that way, that may not necessarily be what everyone else thinks.

MM: I worry that people in modern society are losing their sense of beauty. Just look around the city, not just Hong Kong but many other cities as well. We seem to be surrounded by ugly things - bad designs, pipes and wires sticking out here and there, and ever so little good landscaping.

JW: I have had those thoughts, too. The interesting thing is that many of what we call works of art, which we see in the museum, are everyday objects from a past civilization. Those objects embody the aesthetic sensibility of the people of that time. That is why we can appreciate them not only for their formal beauty but also because they help us analyze the society we are looking at. In contrast, there has been a great divide between art and utilitarian objects in the 20th century, like this microphone we are using here in the recording studio. If we look around this room, I think there is nothing that in a few centuries people would wish to look at or study as a work of art. Perhaps some design historian would look back at things here as examples of design, or how not to design. I do not know whether we can ever recover the connection between art and design. Our modern education fragments human culture, and I don't know whether we can recover the unity.

MM: Higher education has become somewhat fragmented itself, I think, and that might be part of the problem. When I was an undergraduate thirty years ago, art, history, philosophy, literature, languages and so on figured centrally in most top degree programmes. Even science students would be expected to study some expository writing, literature, a foreign language, and so on. Now we are swept over by the new vocationalism. At HKU one of the most popular programmes, which attracts some of the most gifted students, is actuarial science. I have trouble attracting the very best students to the Arts Faculty, though fortunately we still get some.

JW: This is very unfortunate and again shows the failure of education at every level. I do not know whether the trend can be reversed. Education used to introduce academic disciplines but also provided enrichment, even an inculcation of sorts into certain value systems, say by studying the classics, which were once taught both in China and in the West. Now the value systems are no longer taught, except the idea that we are all equal. That's fine and very important, but it does not go far enough to support the arts and cultural values more generally conceived. We end up with an overemphasis on monetary values and that makes students want to join the professions that yield higher financial rewards.

MM: Fortunately, a good number of museums are flourishing and are reaching an ever wider public with impressive exhibitions and catalogues. With the reopening of China in recent decades there has been internationally a resurgence of interest in Chinese art, in particular, stimulated by major exhibitions in most of the big American museums and many leading European museums as well. Much new excavated material has come to light, and this has added to the interest worldwide. Yet there seems to be a shortage of top-level art historians working in the field of Chinese art.

JW: Yes. There are several reasons why this shortage has arisen, but the most immediate cause has been the failure of the last generation of teachers. Many of the scholars now retiring were taught by academics who came out of the German tradition or studied art history only in America. They were deeply learned in their way and had a tremendous grounding in the humanities in all its great breadth. They did so much to establish the discipline of art history in the leading universities, but, without the benefit of contact with the culture, the object of study was very much confined to what one could learn from books or static collections. For much of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, China was closed to the outside world and that whole generation of art historians was effectively cut off from China. The study of Chinese culture was removed from the living culture itself. Even though art history was never really an established discipline in China and only recently has begun to get started there, there is an approach to Chinese works of art which one can acquire only from meeting Chinese people who are collectors or connoisseurs and somehow have that special feel for the works of art. You acquire by osmosis, by being with these people and observing and absorbing a particular sensibility or appreciation of art. That experience was lost to that generation and did tremendous damage to the field.

MM: What about Laurence Sickman?

JW: Sickman was the one exception. He was in China, not for a very long time, perhaps just a few years, but that was enough for him to develop a special feel for Chinese art which the generation and a half following him never had. Sickman collected brilliantly in all areas. He bought wonderful paintings, but also sculpture, jade and ceramics. He even bought cricket boxes, utensils and things of that sort. He did brilliantly, but the others suffered by being cut off from China.

MM: What about the younger generation of scholars who can travel in China now quite easily? Are there enough connoisseurs left for them to talk to or has the thread been broken now and sadly lost?

JW: Only a few of the great collectors and connoisseurs in China are still alive. It helps to talk to them, although they do not have a comparative approach and therefore are not conscious of having a different perspective from a Westerner who studies Chinese art history. On the other hand, if one can talk to them easily or on their own terms, then something will come through. There are just not many of them. They are all getting on and the younger people are not picking up the thread because the social atmosphere is often not there any more.

MM: How do you see the future of art history in China?

JW: A discipline of art history will develop naturally within China, but it has not happened yet as far as I can see. At Beijing University, for example, very senior archaeologists have objected to the establishment of a department of art history as too insubstantial and unscientific. They think of art history as part of the literati tradition in which collectors sat around drinking tea or wine, looking at a painting and talking about the elegance of this or that brushstroke, which to them was just meaningless chatter, even though some of them had grown up in the literati tradition themselves. Unfortunately, art history in China has been relegated to the art academies, where people still talk about the four masters of the Ming, the six masters of the early Qing, the four masters of the late Yuan and so on. These categories centre around cliches and are hopeless for any kind of serious study. In that way the old archaeology professors have a point, but they have not realized that it is possible to build up art history as a legitimate academic discipline. Ironically, the publications of some of the most brilliant of them were much like what we now think of as art history.

MM: What about the future of art history in Taiwan and the United States?

JW: The situation is somewhat better in Taiwan than mainland China. At the Taiwan National University they are doing well in training formal art historians. However, at the National Palace Museum, where there are objects in the antiquities department, something more interesting is happening. The young people in the department are going well beyond stylistic analyses and writing very interesting articles on jade and bamboo and other objects based on a broad understanding of the material, history and culture. But the greatest pity is that politics spoil everything. Nowadays anybody not born in Taiwan cannot hold any kind of senior position. In America we still have not quite started to address some of the fundamental issues in Chinese art and move beyond the confines of traditional Chinese art history and Western art-historical methods. In looking at a Chinese landscape, for example, one needs to acquire an understanding of how early Chinese artists conceived of space and how they expressed it. I do not mean that one cannot be moved by a Chinese painting without this knowledge, but to study as an art historian you need an expanded intellectual approach.

MM: We have touched upon the roles of collectors, connoisseurs and art historians in understanding and appreciating art. What about dealers?

JW: The dealers I learned so much from in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 70s had come down from Beijing and Shanghai, and many of them had tremendous knowledge. Because there were no business conflicts between us, they taught me what might be called trade secrets about how to tell genuine Ming lacquer and porcelain from fake, how to produce fake patination on jade, and so on. They had the knowledge that comes from great appreciation and a long, long tradition of connoisseurship handed down from one generation to the next.

MM: The trade is much brisker now than in those days, is it not? In the late 1980s and 90s Hong Kong became a major conduit for excavated materials, including some very important and unusual pieces, along with fakes and lesser pieces, of course. Many new dealerships sprang up, keen competition broke out among collectors, and new collections came quickly into being. Some of these have already been published and I wonder if the scholarship has really been able to keep pace.

JW: The speed with which the material has been flooding out has made it difficult for the right nexus to develop between scholars, curators, dealers and collectors. In the early 1900s, you had great collectors like Freer and Sonnenschein who debated easily and freely with scholars and curators, whereas the recent collectors in the States tend to follow more the advice of their dealers. In Hong Kong now you have collectors who are so satisfied with their knowledge that they go to print with books of their own. There are benefits and disadvantages to such publications. Publication of new material is always good in the sense of sharing knowledge of the new material. On the other hand, if wrong information or wrong interpretations are presented, the misinformation can get quoted and then embedded in the minds of the public. Wrong ideas are often difficult to correct. There is no longer quite the dialogue between scholars, collectors, connoisseurs and dealers there once was, and the speed with which some of the recent collections have been put together and published, well before scholars have had the opportunity to examine the pieces and contribute their views, let alone reach a consensus as to date, identification, interpretation and so on, has resulted in many misrepresentations.

MM: Archaeologists have begun mounting an increasingly aggressive assault on the antiquities trade. For example, in his book Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership, Lord Colin Renfrew, who holds the Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge, seems to argue that private collecting, and even museum collecting, should be curtailed significantly and in some cases even brought to a halt in order to protect the world's archaeological heritage.

JW: It goes without saying that it is better to have a modern scientific excavation than an unscientific one. However, field archaeology as a discipline can provide only limited information and often provides little beyond placing an object within a certain place, culture and time. Except in prehistoric archaeology, you need other disciplines, particularly history and philology, to provide a full account of an artefact. I am not in favour of illegal digging, but it is not something that can be stopped. In the first place, every time a farmer tills his field or a worker lays the foundation for a building, there is a chance they might uncover another ancient burial ground. Secondly, the economic situation in China is such that the material gain from finding just one little minor antiquity is so great in relation to the earnings of the typical worker that the temptations are too great to stop. Excavations in China have gone on since at least the second century BCE. Records show that one of the sons of Han Wudi sent people out from the imperial palace to dig up the tombs of the Eastern Zhou rulers in order to get objects which he wanted to collect. In the sixth century, in Luoyang, the Northern Wei capital, records show people buying houses not to live in, but to dig in. If the house was once the property of an important person there would be some chance of treasure buried there. In the eleventh century, a great renaissance occurred in Chinese culture, in part because of digging, which rekindled a love of early bronzes. But I think archaeologists overestimate the contribution their discipline can make to the study of human culture. The many antiquities that have been studied since the Renaissance in Europe have given us a wonderful idea of the classical Greek and Roman world without the benefit of modern archaeology. Similarly, without all the recent scientific excavations in China of the Bronze Age cultures, we would still have the great studies done in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries; that already gives us a wonderful idea of Shang and Zhou history. How much information do the recent scientific excavations give us in the context of our total understanding of Shang culture? Very little. The recent work has given us some interesting insights into the study of jade and shown that perhaps already in the Shang period somebody was collecting Neolithic objects, and it gives us some knowledge about the beginning of certain styles of carving. Archaeologists have overemphasized their own importance and used the present political and social atmosphere to behave in a way that is extremely damaging. They should not be given a monopoly on the study of culture and antiquities.

MM: There is another aspect of the antiquities trade which relates to ideas of ownership and territoriality, if I can put it that way. Throughout China one sees little local museums, built up as if to pronounce that the contents are ours, our own local treasures. On the other hand, works of art are still passing through Hong Kong and other conduits and landing up in all parts of the world. Some people are saying that excavated works of art should stay where they were found, so the world can see them in situ, and that the local people of a particular area are not only the moral inheritors of the pieces found in their territory but also have a special responsibility to guard and preserve them. On the other hand, there is the counter-view which says that humanity has but one world now and therefore all artefacts are the common property of all mankind. The arguments go on and on. One cannot but be impressed, I think, by how much appreciation of Chinese culture has arisen in America and Europe as a result of the exhibitions and collections of Chinese art that have been built up there in the last ten or twenty years. Despite this, an increasing number of governments are signing agreements such as the UNESCO Convention and UNIDROIT which, rightly or wrongly, will make it very difficult for cultural property to move from one country to another.

JW: While I do not believe in unscientific excavations and illegal export of antiquities, I do believe in the free movement of art objects. There is no reason why things should not move about. Without being able to see something from another culture we would never be able to learn anything. Whether you like it or not, there is globalization, and we cannot always be trying to go somewhere else to study another culture. There is enough travelling in the world already. It is tremendously important to study other people's cultures but we cannot do that if every place holds on to whatever happens to be discovered there. Even if you go there, you may not get a good idea of what the place was like. Take Datong in Shanxi province, for example, it used to be the capital of the Northern Wei. That dynasty was big and important and ruled all of northern China in the 5th century. Datong was the place which was visited by merchants from all over Central Asia. Even now, there are finds of very interesting silver which originated from Central Asia in the Middle Ages. Remains of a huge ceremonial complex - very important to the conception of the capital and the empire - have recently been found, but the area cannot be excavated in its entirety because of the enormous housing blocks constructed there now. I went there in great excitement but gained nothing. I stood in the middle of an enormous housing estate and saw that only a tiny corner of it had been excavated, because that was all the archaeologists could gain access to. Rather than keep things in situ, it makes much more sense to place them in an institution like the History Museum in Beijing, which has representative examples of every major type of antiquity from every area and period. Central depositories of that type can provide wonderful insights into the cultural history of China. People who want to retain whatever they have in their own community are wanting that for local pride and for economic reasons. They think tourists will come if they have their own museum. So much of what is happening results from economic rather than cultural considerations, and the archaeologists are paying no attention to this reality. They are only looking at things from the point of view of their own discipline. They claim they are scientific, but from my point of view archaeology is no more exact than any other study of humanities.

MM: Conservation is another big problem where agreement seems very difficult to achieve. You have people saying they know what is best for Angkor Wat, say. They go about conserving it in what they say is a scientific way, yet when the dark stones start coming out pink, people complain vociferously and say something terrible has gone wrong.

JW: Yes. Conservation is a very, very big problem. I honestly do not think we will ever find the perfect answer to the question of whether to conserve or not, or how best to do it. So much depends on each particular situation. On the whole a good rule is: when you do not have to do something, then do not do it. In the case of something which is in physical danger of collapse or when the surface is being destroyed by acid rain, then I think conservation is justified. As for rebuilding a temple stone by stone, that also, I think, is justified in some cases, if it gives people the idea of what the whole thing looked like. Computer simulations can go only so far and it is something quite different if you are actually there in the physical space. But it is so hard to formulate precise rules in this regard. Take as an example Ta Prohm, the temple at Angkor which has been so wonderfully overgrown by the roots of banyan trees. I find that so impressive. I hope it can remain that way, because it is such a wonderful example of how nature takes over. Every country is now getting into the act of conservation. In Cambodia alone there are many teams from many countries, each doing something different - that is not necessarily a good thing. I do not know why there is a Chinese team there, that was done probably more for political reasons than for anything else. There are so many sites in China which need desperate conservation work, sites in real danger of collapse or disappearance. Conservation will always be a tough call.