Vessels of a Transect

See attached booklet here.

 “What is a line? The question is naïve. That is the way it would seem to anyone: simple and credulous, it would not need to be checked in a dictionary. Does not the notion of line brings to mind images and representations that are transparent to the point of not needing explanation? Any speaker knows that a line, real or imaginary, signifies a path, a continuous point, a moving mark. It is from such a perception, that one might invest it in expressions in which it functions as both designation of a reality and its figure… A metaphor, it operates in our everyday life with such efficiency that we come to forget that this simple word not only organizes our spatial perception, but determines our conceptualization of basic rapports between front and back, deep and shallow, in and out, near and far, on and off, up and down, past and present, today and tomorrow, etc. Looked at, from this awareness, one may then move toward what the directionality of the line implies, both the idea of separation and distinction of parts it creates. Our physical geography, the whole domain of our culture, including mental configurations and our relations to nature, are topographies structured by lines.” 

— V.Y. Mudimbe, What is a Line? 

A core tenet of the Harvard Art Museums is its multiplicity. The Museums’ logo consists of a black line, oriented at a forty-five-degree angle separating the word Harvard from its three constituent museums, all named after wealthy donors. These museums are independent, yet united under the Harvard moniker, a transect of the broader institution of Harvard, itself comprised of a diverse group of individuals across interests and what we often call disciplines and modes of inquiry. The line separates, yet unites, guiding disparate objects and ideas towards a particular multiplicity of narratives. 

In the case of art and art history, since the advent of global art history, the multiplicity of those narratives has further expanded. This expansion, often billed as the turn towards a more global form of art history, aims to decenter the nexus on which institutions like Harvard Art were founded. This decentering, aimed to mitigate the oppressive effects of colonial plunder and empire, has attempted to reveal that the asymmetries guiding our master narratives are less asymmetrical than the “Canon” has us believe. While these asymmetries exist, the lines that bound, delineate, and define, are not so rigid and directional.

While the Harvard Art Museums themselves are currently bounded within the institution of Harvard, the objects within this exhibition are contingent artifacts that emerged from the asymmetries that produced this institution in the first place. Wealthy donors, colonial conquerors, and slaveholding national leaders contributed to the repository that is now the Harvard Art Museums, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. This repository is a symptom of a broader temporal and institutional narrative that exudes a certainty and fixity. Harvard retains its reputation because of this stability.

Since the second century, Chinese painters, including Xiao Yuncong featured in this exhibition, have used oblique projection to capture vast planes of urban and rural landscapes. In these works, temporality is often not fixed. A figure could be shown twice in these representations at different periods of time. The lines assert fixity, containment, but the paintings suggest otherwise. The curation of objects within this exhibition follow this method of representation. The works contained are a transect, across the museums’ collections of time periods, media, and geographic locations. From representations of industrial development in North America, South America, and Africa, to Babylonian and Islamic texts, the works featured attempt to highlight the potential affinities between objects (and the cultures they represent) that are framed by hegemonic narratives as disparate. 

These objects are contained within the vessel of Harvard Art Museums, which treats its objects as distinct, taxonomized works to be shown, stored, secured, and insured, as a means of controlling what constitutes the name and the institution of Harvard. However, this exhibition aims to treat these objects less as solid artifacts that define this institution and its history, but rather as drops within a liquid vessel. Included within this vessel of an exhibit are, cheekily enough, other discrete vessels (broken and intact), spanning geographies and time periods. Many have no identified artist. The aggregation of these droplets of artifacts results not in the ability to see these discrete works as individualized parts, but rather as a larger whole, that can be constantly expanded at any time and inextricable into its parts. These transects aim to produce not a cohesive whole, but a larger volume of liquid, that, perhaps one day, will further spill out of the institution that currently contains them.