The graduate student symposium “Contexts of Buddhist Art” took place at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts on November 10 and 11, 2011. This four-session symposium was organized by Phillip E. Bloom, Ph.D. candidate in art history at Harvard University and Pulitzer Foundation graduate student research assistant. Each session was held within a different gallery space and featured three student presenters plus a faculty discussant. Presenters spoke for ten minutes apiece about an object in the exhibition and raised questions about the object’s religious, social, historical, and art historical contexts. In addition, presenters reflected on their own processes of contextualization. Upon completion of the presentations, one of the discussants—Stanley Abe from Duke University; Catherine Becker from the University of Illinois at Chicago; Marsha Haufler from the University of Kansas; and Yukio Lippit from Harvard University—provided comments and opened up the discussion to the entire group.
The range of topics was broad, the discussion lively. Several recurring themes emerged. Participants spent considerable time reflecting on and reaffirming the fundamental need for art historians to maintain a constant, productive tension between past and present. That such a need was expressed is unsurprising given the nature of the exhibition, which places pre-modern religious artworks in a decidedly modernist museum space. This unusual display highlights unexpected aesthetic connections among these disparate art objects.
Participants commented positively on the underlying exhibition concept, which foregrounds the visual qualities of the exhibited works at the expense of didactic narration. More generally, students showed great interest in the formal and stylistic qualities of the artworks—and in seeing those qualities as important clues when resituating the works within their historical and geographic contexts of production.
Given the fragmented or fragmentary nature of many of the works on display, numerous presenters historicized various conceptions of the fragment and the usefulness of such conceptions in understanding the different stages of an object’s life. The participants discussed at length the Romantic construction of the fragment as an object of aesthetic contemplation, as well as the Surrealist valorization of the fragment as fetish—two taste-defining paradigms that had direct bearing on Western interest in Buddhist art during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Finally, many presenters reflected on the value of iconographic analysis, one of the fundamental tools in any pre-modern art historian’s toolkit for contextualizing works of art. They suggested that while iconographic analysis can be helpful in identifying deities and in determining the textual or doctrinal context within which a particular work might be situated, there are limits to its usefulness. Several presentations specifically pointed to the ways in which seemingly universal iconographies of particular deities have been given uniquely local inflections at various moments throughout history.
