February 2, 2006
Getty awards go to two UW art history profs
The Getty Foundation gives out fewer than 50 grants and fellowships to individual scholars in a year — most to fellows, visiting scholars and scholars in residence at the Getty Center. The awards are considered among the most prestigious in the field of art history, so it’s quite a feather in the cap of the Art History Division in the UW School of Art that not only did two of the awards go to their faculty this year, but both of them are among the minority of awards that allow the researchers to work anywhere. Assistant Professor Margaret Laird won a postdoctoral fellowship, while Assistant Professor Cynthea Bogel snagged a collaborative research grant.
For Laird, the fellowship means she will be freed of teaching for one year so that she can spend the time turning her dissertation into a book examining how public artistic commissions functioned in imperial Roman towns (ca. 27 BCE-250 CE).
“I’m focusing on one social group, the Augustales,” Laird explained. “They’re equivalent to the middle class of ancient Roman towns. There was no real middle class then as we think of it, but many of these people were ex-slaves. I sometimes jokingly compare them to the Elks Club of our day. This group was found all over the western empire and they did a lot of monument making.”
Laird said the group would commission statues atop inscribed bases that praised emperors or local elites, dedicatory altars supplicating the gods, and tombs imploring passersby to remember their deceased patrons.
“What I’m looking at is a select group of monuments that were found in situ or in some kind of documented context,” Laird said. “I hope that they will help us understand how Romans used monuments as part of either group identities or civic identities and how they adapted and used them to suit individual cases.”
Laird’s study is important in art historically, first because the Augustales have never really been studied archaeologically, and second because she is venturing into lesser known towns, including some in Romania and Greece, locations she was able to visit last spring.
Those who study art have not been kind to the Augustales. “Historians are really fascinated with this idea of freedmen (ex-slave) art, that there’s some kind of stylistic marker that allows you to identify what a freedman made,” Laird said. “Like ‘Oh these guys got it wrong, they didn’t have any taste, they were only imitating upper class styles.'”
The work is often described as plebeian or naïve, but Laird said she’s always liked what she jokingly calls “ugly art.”
“I thought going in, oh they’ve already done everything about the Augustales,” she said. “But then I realized that what people say is typical of Augustales is just this tiny little percentage of it and there’s this enormous body of other material that is very varied and is really wonderful and is working in different styles.”
What she’s looking at, Laird said, is how the Augustales’ commissions helped physically cement them in their towns or represented the towns to the outside world.
Bogel’s project is from the other side of the world. She specializes in Japanese art, and recently completed a book about a ninth century Japanese monk named Kûkai (pronounced Koo Kye) who traveled to China, where he studied a type of Buddhism called esotericism that was unknown in Japan.
When Kûkai returned to Japan in 806, he brought with him a variety of materials, including mandala paintings, a sandalwood shrine, ritual implements and robes and Buddhist sutras. He subsequently became the founding father of a new sect of esoteric Buddhism in Japan, and because Buddhists were persecuted in China not long after his visit, Kûkai’s version of what they taught is the one that survives.
“I became fascinated with what Kûkai really saw and did and what we could put back together based on the Chinese archaeological record, what he imported, what survived,” Bogel said. “I became fascinated by that rewriting of history by the esoteric sectarian scholars.”
She decided to do another book specifically on the objects Kûkai brought back with him and on how the esoteric tradition was adapted in Japan. But she knew she couldn’t do it alone. “I thought that working with a very knowledgeable scholar of Chinese art history and a Buddhist scholar who works on the scriptures and the texts of that period would allow us to look at everything — what it was in China, how it was reinterpreted and how it lived on in Japan,” Bogel said.
So Bogel was able to bring in Chinese art historian Eugene Wang from Harvard and Buddhist scholar Ian Astley from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and together they were awarded a collaborative grant from the Getty Foundation. Bogel will be the principal investigator.
The grant includes funding for one trip to China and Japan and one to just Japan, as well as meetings for the three collaborators. Wang will give a lecture on April 13 as part of the UW “Silk Road Seattle” series when he is on campus for one of those meetings. Bogel and Astley began their work in Japan last summer. Bogel will be on leave during fall and winter quarters next year to work on the book.
“Almost all the writing on this in Japan is by esoteric scholars who also happen to be esoteric priests, so almost everything is colored by the knowledge that ‘The great founding father Kûkai brought this,’ Bogel said. “The new book is about what happens when you import ideas and you import objects. It’s about visual culture and material culture both, including the sutras and the scriptures as ideas and as physical objects.”
According to the Getty Foundation, its postdoctoral fellowships go to “outstanding scholars in the early stages of their careers,” while collaborative research grants are for “established scholars who have attained distinction in their fields.” Laird’s award was $40,000, while Bogel’s was $127,400 to be shared by the three scholars.
