Episode 143 - Claudia Brittenham: "Objects keep me honest."

Professor Claudia Brittenham is from the Department of Art History and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. She is also the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies. In this episode of The Course, she talks about why she so enjoys the study of objects, the many alternatives she considered as she honed in on her area of focus, and how she transitioned from being an art curator to a University of Chicago professor.

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Claudia Brittenham. Professor Brittenham is a member of both the Department of Art History and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, she's also the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies.

She is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Unseen Art, Making Vision and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica. She's here today to talk about why she so enjoys the study of objects, the many alternatives she considered as she honed in on her area of focus, and how she became a University of Chicago professor

Professor Brittenham, welcome to The Course. How are you doing this evening? 

Claudia 00:38
Very well indeed. I'm so glad to be here. 

Stephen 00:40
Could you just quickly tell me what your position is at the university and just a little bit in layman's terms about what you study?

Claudia 00:47
So my title right now, I'm a professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. And right now I'm also director of the Center for Latin American Studies. So my research focuses on the art of the ancient Americas and particularly the region that we now call Mezzoamerica, which corresponds to modern day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and El Salvador. In the millennia before and in the century or so after the Spanish invasion. 

Stephen 01:16
Okay. So thank you. Yes, you are our first guest, I believe from the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity. So before we get into your own personal history, could you just tell our listeners a little bit about the focus of that department? 

Claudia 01:29
Yeah. Well, I'm not surprised because the department has really only been in existence for about two or three years. I think it's one of the most recent academic units to be formed at the university. 

It's one of the newest departments or academic units in the university, and it's grown out of years of really thinking about how the University of Chicago wanted to study these intertwined questions. It grew out of things like the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and out of a campaign that took place in the fall of 2012. Sort of around the time of the pandemic called more than diversity, thinking about really what the university could do that maybe other institutions couldn't. And so we settled on this formation that's really not, no, there's no other department of race, diaspora and indigeneity anywhere in the world, as far as I know. 

And one of the ideas was to think how these three terms define each other and mutually inform each other, right? You know, none of these are really stable and fixed things, right? Race comes into being as a process of racialization that comes into being at the same time, I have to say as the invasion of the Americas, which is a moment of an encounter with indigeneity, which causes huge movements of people, displacements, diasporas.

That's not the only moment when these three concepts intersect, so we have, we've colleagues working on a whole bunch of different topics from a bunch of different, you know, from a lot of different disciplines around these questions of race, diaspora, and indigeneity in the United States and beyond. 

And we're hoping to make a bunch of new hires and really continue to grow the department in interesting ways over the next few years.

Stephen 03:13
When did the stuff that you study now first appear on your radar? I mean assuming that you were not, you know, as an elementary schooler, talking with all your friends about indignities or what have you. Do you kind of remember when you, you know, caught the spark, like the bug of like what you've spent your life studying? 

Claudia 03:34
Well, it depends on which bug you mean or which spark you mean, right? Which is to say that I can tell you pretty precisely when I became interested in the art of the ancient Americas, okay, I can't remember which one precisely, fall or the spring of my junior year in college, but I took a class.

Yes, I took a class with a professor named Mary Miller at Yale University and well, in retrospect, it changed my life. I had no idea that it was going to change my life at the time, but I remember just coming home from that class every day and going to my college roommates and being like, did you know this thing about the Aztec Empire? Isn't this the coolest thing you've ever heard? Did you know? Did you know any of these things? 

Because it's true that now a lot of students in come across the art of the ancient Americas or the cultures of the ancient Americas at various different times in their educational trajectory. But that wasn't the case when I was in elementary school or middle school or high school. And so for me, this was one of those moments of like, oh my goodness, why did nobody tell me about this when I finally came here in college? 

It wasn't until, in fact, very recently, probably during the pandemic, that I started really reading in the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. It wasn't a field that existed when I was in graduate school. I graduated from, from my PhD the same year, or I got my PhD the same year that the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association was founded, which is 2008. 

One of the things then in retrospect, that's sort of shocking to me is how much what I study has been separated from this new field that we call Native American and Indigenous Studies, and that has a lot to do with different histories of colonization and the ways that, the, you know, the British colonized what's now the United States and Canada versus the way that the Habsburg Empire colonized what's now Mexico. But and one of the things I'm doing in my current research is really trying to think these two histories back together again a little bit, because these are completely artificial distinctions, you know, there was, I find it very important to say these days, there was never a wall separating what is the United States from what is now Mexico. 

And in fact, you know, if you went back to 1847, a lot of what is now the United States would have been Mexico. And if you go back to, you know, 1519, there were certainly people who were walking the length of what is now Mexico coming up into the United States. There was a lot of exchange back and forth.

It's really interesting to try to imagine what a world would have been like before borders.

Stephen 06:17
Okay. So you take this amazing class. At what point did you think, okay, this is actually something I need to go and study at the graduate level. Like, was there a moment or anything or anyone in particular that, that was kind of gave you that push?

Claudia 06:32
Apocryphally, my parents say that you know, at about the age that you start studying, saving for college, my parents started saving for graduate school. Which is to say that they looked at me really early on and said that is a child who has, you know, who cannot drive outside the ivory tower. I don't know what they were thinking.

But I had no idea what I was doing. I came to college as a French major because I had studied French for eight years and I was, I loved speaking French. It was gonna be fun. I, you know, it's been a summer in France I loved the cheese. It was gonna be fantastic. 

Turned out that what had been excellent French in Cleveland, Ohio did not quite cut it on the international stage. And so, then I said, okay, well, but I'm really good at learning languages. And so, okay. So French isn't going to do it, but let me become a linguistics major. Right. 

Then it became clear that being good at learning languages was not the same as being good at analyzing languages. And in fact, the kind of flexibility that allows you to learn multiple languages makes it hard to do particular kinds of syntactic analysis of your own native language in a way that was very much in vogue when I was, when I was an undergraduate. And so at a point in the middle of my third year, I reached a crisis, which was that I really did not want to be a linguistics major anymore. I was, I had talked my way into a graduate seminar on historical morphology, which is how, you know, noun and verb forms change over time. And I was the only undergraduate in the class, and I simply could not imagine a world in which I wrote the final research paper for this class. 

You know, and when I went in to tell the professor that I was dropping the class, he was like, no, you've got a great idea. It's going to be fine. But I just could not imagine how writing this paper on the, it's a thing in Spanish that we call the, a personal, like if you say, you know, I'm going to talk to somebody, but, you know, you say I was going to study the development of this in Sardinian and Catalan, neither of which are languages that I actually speak. 

And so here I am, it must have been the spring of my junior year, being like, what am I going to do with my life? How am I going to graduate from college? What even is my major? And so I was sitting and I looked at my transcript. And it turned out that, so my first semester in college, I had taken, you know, the classes that I thought were required of me as if I were a high school student just continuing on. So I took my French class, that ended so well.

I took math, I took science, I took English. And then for my fifth class, I took the most useless, the most gloriously useless thing I could imagine, which was a class on African art history. And that was another moment when I came back every day to my roommates being like, did you know? Why did nobody teach us about this?

Why did I not know about all of the amazing art that was created on this continent? How is it that I have, you know, I thought of myself as an educated person, and yet this had not been part of my education.

I just, I'd been taking all the classes that I thought I should be taking, making progress towards my unsuccessful majors. And taking one art history class is a treat. And so that then when I reached this crisis about the art personnel in the middle of my junior year, I had in fact already amassed an art history major without really noticing. 

I went to Mary Miller, who'd been teaching this amazing class on Mesoamerican art, and I said, you know, I sort of, flumped on in and said, you know, I don't really want to be here, but I guess I might as well write my senior thesis on Mesoamerica and she's helped me find funding so I could go travel and for a summer and look at art. And I looked at art and I loved it and I came back and I wrote my senior essay on the Central Acropolis, which was the royal palace at the Maya city of Tikal.

It was my first experience working with archaeological evidence where, you know, like what you know is limited by what made it through the last 1300 years and how that got excavated.

And I, you know, I learned later on that the dissertation I read about the subject had been written by somebody who was trying to hide as much information from his dissertation advisors as possible, which explained a lot about the struggles I went through to unfold it. But it was an amazing research project and I loved it. And so I knew that I wanted to be an art historian, but I didn't know what continent I wanted to study. 

And so I talked my way into a job at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., which at that time was divided into Eastern Hemisphere Collections and Western Hemisphere Collections. Because the original collector, George Hewitt Myers, was a cheapskate, he didn't collect European or American art because it was too expensive.

And so he built this amazing collection of art from everywhere else around the world. So I found my way in there as the curatorial assistant for Eastern Hemisphere Collections, which is basically to say the department secretary and I talked my way into that job and I feel it's very important for college students who are despairing about what do they want to do with their lives. I feel it's very important for them to know that I was offered this job the day I graduated. I went all the way through senior week and all of these other festivities having no idea where I was going to end up next. I had a backup plan involving my mother's basement and I am really glad I didn't have to use it. 

But I, so I got offered this job as curatorial assistant because I spoke Japanese and I thought I was studying African art. And those were the two major holes in their curatorial coverage. And so they thought, Oh, well, this was just perfect. And so, you know, there are moments where I look at you know, I look at my transcript and sort of despair about how, you know, everything. You know, every, you know, I can tell you how I got to every decision I got to, but it's a little bit all over the place. And, yet it was precisely that all over the placeness that allowed me to get this job. And then after a year there, I got promoted to assistant curator and spent two more years as assistant curator.

I curated a couple of different exhibitions. And then I got to a point where I knew that I needed to either commit to about five years doing major research for a major exhibition that would sort of take up the whole museum, or I needed to get out of the way so that somebody else could do that. You know, I'd been doing sort of like little shows or, you know, sort of supporting other curators, but they really needed curators who would do major research exhibitions and I didn't feel like I had the tools to do that work. 

And so then I agonized and I was indecisive and I talked the ear off anyone who was willing to listen for months about what did I want to study? Did I want to study Africa, even though I wasn't really sure I wanted to be anthropological? Did I want to study China, even though I would have to have to learn Chinese? What did I want to do? 

And everybody in my life was really incredibly tired of hearing about this topic. And I was incredibly tired of thinking about this topic. And then one night I woke up in the middle of the night and I said, what if I just studied Mesoamerica? And then it was almost Thanksgiving. And so over Thanksgiving, I sat outside and I made lists of the pros and cons of each continent that I could, or each region that I could conceivably study. And I started with things like, how do I feel about the art?

Yes, no, do I like it? Do I not like it? And then moved on to you know, whose work do I admire? Who would I like to study with? Thinking about what kind of evidence would I be dealing with? And what kinds of, like, what would research look like? And then thinking about things that feel sort of petty, but are like extremely important.

Like, how do you feel about the food? How's the weather? How much would a plane ticket cost? And much to my surprise, Mesoamerica came out on top three days in a row. And so I applied to exactly one graduate program. I went right back to where I'd done my undergraduate to work with the same professor. In retrospect, I should have applied to more than one program, but it didn't occur to me at the time. And I haven't regretted it for a moment since. 

Stephen 15:37
Just in the pre interview that we sent over before this, you said, I love looking closely at deliberately made things. 

Claudia 15:45
So what I love most about being an art historian is that objects keep you honest. Or at least I've found that objects keep me honest. That one can often, you know, you can spin beautiful theories. And then you have to go back and look at the thing that you've been writing about and make sure that what you're saying actually bears some resemblance to what's happening on that thing.

I never felt quite so grounded when I was analyzing text, you know, but with objects, I often do this myself. And I tell my students that if by any chance they can read what they've written in front of a work of art in front of that work, you know, like I will take my essay that I'm writing and I'll sit in the place I'm writing about and I'll just read it and I'll look around and I'll be like, is this true? You know, does, are the words that I've chosen words that I feel comfortable applying now that I'm in the presence of this thing? So that's one part of it. 

Thing number two is that they, the works that we study are things that their makers created made with intention. They made with deliberation. Things that we now call works of art are incredibly, eloquent documents about the people and the, cultures that made them. And one of the things that I find so powerful about being an art historian and teaching art history is that the barrier to encountering and understanding these works can be so very low.

And obviously there are things that are, there are kinds of cultural information that you, we can't recover often for archaeological cultures, or we have to work really hard to understand, but we are still bipedal human beings, just like the makers of these works were. And so that there are ways that you can imagine or experience what it would be like to interact with the work, and that is like what it would be like for someone else, for the makers, right? 

You know, was the, would this have been heavy in your hands? Would it have been smooth? Would it have been cool? How would you have, would you have been uncomfortable as you tried to look up at the sculpture? And so that there are these kinds of ways that you can, even with no background at all, reason your way or imagine your way into art, all of these incredibly rich ways that these deliberately made things tell us about what mattered to their makers. 

Now, the third thing, and you might have noticed, is that I've been somewhat deliberately avoiding using the word art. And I mean, and I work in a discipline called art history, so this is, this is something I wrestle with a lot. But I'm increasingly aware of the way that art is kind of a colonial concept. You know, because if I say art, think of an art, at least, you know, a generation ago, you know, what everyone would have thought of was probably an oil painting on canvas, right? And so that you have this kind of hierarchy where, you know, the European art form par excellence is at the top. 

And then, you know, there are these other things that other people in colonized regions make, but they never quite measure up to that standard. And this is the way that sort of colonialism always stacks the deck so that the colonizers come up, come out on top.

You know, it's not to say that close looking, the fundamental tool that all art historians share, you know, I think I still believe in it because there are always people who have looked, you know, in order to make a work, at the very least, the artist needs to look closely. And sometimes the patron or some ritual specialists or other people need to look closely as well. But in my most recent book, I found myself asking that question, well, who could look closely and thinking about works of art where not everybody, or works, you know, not works of art, works of three dimensional works that we might want to call sculpture, works where not everybody could have seen them in it, or could not have seen them well in their original context. 

And then, in fact, using that question of who could see and under what circumstances as a way for thinking about the work that these objects was, were performing. There's this really famous feather work, called the Penacho de Moctezuma, that is, it was, we think it was an early gift from, you know, from Moctezuma, the last Aztec emperor that was then taken over as part of the royal fifth, then, you know, given to Charles V of Spain, and then ended up in Vienna, and it's made out of iridescent quetzal feathers and one of my colleagues has written about how different it is to see this as an object that's just under glass in a case versus how it would have been to see somebody wearing it because the feathers are iridescent and so they catch the light in different ways. And you know it would have seemed to breathe and exude solar energy as the person wearing it was breathing and moving. And so there's such a difference sometimes between the ways that we encounter things now and the ways that they were meant to be used. 

You know, another way that we could talk about this is like one of the other fictions about art. You know, once again, with the European stuff on the top of the hierarchy is, you know, it doesn't have a purpose, right? Whereas that other stuff that's utilitarian, right? This is nonsense. You know, even that canvas painting that we're thinking about as our prototypical example of a work of art, it has a purpose. Its purpose is to sit on the wall behind your couch and show what a person of taste and discernment you are.

But there's so many things that, you know, we could think about having these other kinds of categories. They are objects of personal adornment, they're objects of devotion, there are containers, there are all kinds of things that get stripped of their functions and put into museums. And it doesn't just happen to things from, you know, the non-West or, you know, colonized places. It also happens to premodern things, even things from what's now Europe. 

Stephen 21:53
What are you interested in at the moment? Are the things that you are looking at and saying, I hope that I get to do this in the near future? Like what, what do you think is on the horizon?

Claudia 22:01
So right now I found that I've taken a little bit of a historiographical turn, which is to say that while I am, I continue to be really interested in objects from the ancient American past and I look forward to doing a lot of different work thinking about these kinds of objects in many different ways.

I found that I really need to pause for a moment and understand how it is that we've come to study this work on the terms that we have. Which is to say how concepts that we take for granted now, like Mesoamerica, or the Aztecs, or the Maya, even came into being in the first place. Because many of them are more recent and more colonial than you might think.

And this has then also gotten me thinking about this world before borders. This world where Mesoamerica was always interconnected, where the ancient Americas were always interconnected, where we know that there was trade and exchange of ideas between what's now Mesoamerica and what's now South America and between Mesoamerica and what's now the United States. 

And thinking about the ways that the model of the modern nation states that is somehow implicitly behind every way that we think about the ancient past is actually a terrible model for understanding the world before the 19th or 20th century. 

And another big piece of this is really reading deeply in Native American and Indigenous studies and being informed by Indigenous intellectuals about the ways that they characterize the world, and also the ways that they that they understand these questions of belonging and territory and relation to place, and using all of this then to think about this question of, you know, there are these really different experiences of colonization and these really different literatures of, you know, bodies of scholarship about the places that Britain are that England colonized and the places that the Habsburg Empire colonized. But there are also real shared commonalities of indigeneity throughout the hemisphere. 

And so thinking about how, what we can, what commonalities we can find, what differences are significant. And I'm really aware that this isn't also a project just for me to do. This is a project that needs to be done in collaboration involving as many indigenous scholars as possible.

So that's what's on the proximate horizon. But I do look forward to getting back to something more like art history. Although, you know, the thing is too that I think, you know, we're always transformed by the scholarship that we're doing and it takes us sometimes in really unexpected ways. And so, you know, I don't necessarily think I'll be exactly the same scholar at the end of this project as I was at the beginning of it, just like I'm not the same scholar that started writing Unseen Art a decade ago.

I thought I was going to solve something and instead I've just opened up more questions, but that's the joy of what it is that we get to do. 

Stephen 25:17
I Think you have already said a couple of things that would count as very good advice. But just to close this out. I'm really curious to hear what you would say to someone who was interested in following in your path. And I don't necessarily mean into your exact area, although, you know, maybe, but just people who are considering an academic career in general.

Claudia 25:37
I've thought about this in a couple of different ways, but so one of the pieces of advice that I have about if you're asking whether you should go back for a PhD or not.

At the start of my career, several recessions ago, I used to say, don't go in, don't go back to graduate school, don't get a PhD. If there's anything else that you could conceivably imagine doing, go and do it. And by all means, go out and have some experience, have a job live in the working world before you make that decision of whether you want to go back to graduate school for another six to seven or even eight years. 

I'm aware of the tremendous privilege that I have in having given that advice, you know, both in a completely different economic climate than the climate that we live in now and in a climate where I could waltz into a curatorial assistant job with just a bachelor's degree. When I left the museum, they were hiring people with PhDs to replace me. 

And so now I feel somewhat differently about this question of whether you should get a PhD or not. I think that, you know, we fully fund all of our graduate students. And to be told you've got at the University of Chicago, up to nine years of guaranteed funding, it's hard to think of other places in this economy where people have that kind of job security.

We don't think people should take nine years to finish their PhDs, by the way. It's a stage, it's not an identity. You know, like, better to, and it gets better on the other side, so like, get in and out of that program as quickly as you can, is one set of things. 

But do really, it's so easy if you're a good student to just keep on being a student because that's familiar, but that only carries you a certain amount of the way through a PhD program. And so really knowing why you're in the program is, and really sort of committing to it in a very it in a defined, determined way. I think that's really important. 

But what I would say to people who are thinking about academia already on this path, is that there's no experience is wasted. No time is wasted.

You should do the things that are interesting to you and not worry too much about where they take you. Because when you are interested in something, you will do it well, and it will open up more doors and make, you know, create more interesting opportunities. And so, you know, in retrospect, my career looks as if all was predetermined, but in most of it, until I got to graduate school, I was kind of ping ponging from one place to another, not really knowing what I was doing, but at every step along the way, something that I had beaten myself up for being, Oh, Claudia, how could you be so indecisive? You couldn't even pick a continent. The fact that I couldn't pick a continent when I came to interview for my job here at the University of Chicago and confessed that if I had studied Chinese art, which I had seriously thought about doing, I would have wanted to work with Wu Hong here at the University of Chicago. That was the thing that the department chair used to introduce me to the entire department. And so that that thing that I had been like, Oh my goodness, what was that detour along my life? It turned out to be incredibly relevant to what I'm doing now, and I get to work with my hero, Wu Hong, and that's amazing too.

It's not wasted time. Sometimes it's fallow time. It's time where your brain is working on something behind the scenes so many of the questions that I ask now, as a scholar of Mesoamerican art, are questions that were shaped by my continental indecision and by questions, things that I learned about African art, things that I learned about Chinese art, things that I learned about Eastern Hemisphere, textiles, all of them shape the work that I do now.

Stephen 29:35
Thank you, Professor Brittenham, for your time today, and Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu, or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening!