Reading List: Dr. Lisa Kirch
Emily Godwin
Issue date: 9/8/05 Section: LifeStyle
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After having family who were affected by Hurricane Katrina, Kirch is using her research skills to help cultural institutions such as museums and libraries in the area.
Libraries especially are overlooked but are essential institutions because they are taking in refugees, giving away books, and providing computers so that people can email friends and family to let them know they are all right.
EG: Why did you become an art historian instead of being a practicing artist?
LK: The most important question is 'why' and that is what art history is all about: why. It is detective work, and some of it involves teaching my students how to do detective work and some of it is my own detective work. I love reading mystery novels, and [art history] is just real life. It is not made up.
EG: What are some of you favorite art history mysteries?
LK: At the end of World War II when the US Army went into Berlin, [it] took a lot of art into 'protective custody' and shipped it back to the States. They showed it at the National Gallery, and it was an absolutely huge show in the sense that hundreds of thousands of people came to see it. You have to imagine that number one, it is paintings by very famous artists, and number two, it is war booty. They eventually ended up taking that show to several museums across the country.
Nobody has ever told the story of that show and the story of the army and the National Gallery. My understanding is that there were people high up in the Army thinking that 'we should just keep this stuff.'
Art is beautiful stuff that most of us think of as being decorative or being pretty or something that does not have any useful function any more. But very often art contains a huge political or ideological sense.
EG: Who are some contemporary artists that are producing that kind of art?
LK: There are people out there [who] are doing or have done work that is unquestionably great and very beautiful. As a rule, they are out doing their own stuff. In Vienna in the late 1800s until the 1900s, art was really run by an establishment called the Academy. There was a break away movement and not just the Impressionists.
In Vienna, they had a building that was their exhibition space, and over the door was "To each time, its own art. To art, its freedom."
Make art of your own time and let it be free. Don't make it abide by old rules. That art may not be good any more. If you have video, why be a painter? Why not work in video?
EG: What is art of our time?
LK: Christo & Jean Claude are wonderful. They are very, very passionate, and they are very smart people. It is art that you cannot buy, but it is art that invites whole communities [and] encourages people to argue back and forth. They cannot do it by themselves. They have to have whole crews that are working with it. Their charm delights me.
William Kentridge, a South African makes video montages of black-and-white drawings that often deal with his country's ugly history. The drawings are very beautiful, and the videos let them jerk back and forth and flow into one another: they're a mix of the old-fashioned - people have always drawn - and the new. This kind of art has been around for less than 40 years.
Watching them, you know he's telling stories, although you're not sure what the stories are: you keep trying to figure that out, and at the same time you're constantly being reminded of the work of other artists, so that there are multiple levels of understanding and thinking that are going on in your head. It is very exciting and hard to explain.
EG: What books do you enjoy reading?
LK: I love to read cookbooks! You tastualize. It's visual, but it is all the other senses too. You are cooking in your imagination. Some books about a food are American Fried and Alice, Let's Eat. Also, Richard Sax's Classic Home Desserts, but old cookbooks are often the best and always the most interesting.
EG: What have been some influential art history books that you have read?
LK: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jakob Burckhardt. It was written in the 1860 and has intrigue, murder, and great art.
The Waning of the Middle Ages is full of color and glitter and gold and people doing strange things. It is about the 14th and 15th centuries in northern Europe. In my field, it is not a book that people really agree with anymore, but you have to think about it. It is the same thing as a cookbook where you see and smell and taste. You are seeing it - it is like having a tapestry moving around inside your head.
- Emily E. Godwin
