Naomi Hume

As she talks about art, professor Naomi Hume's steely glasses frame the curiosity and passion in her eyes.

"Visual material is a specific type of material, it's not like a text. That's part of what's difficult about it and part of what's interesting about it," said Hume. "Visual images are this particular kind of hermetic object that fascinates us, that have more information in them than we can possibly uncover or be certain about. There's always going to be some kind of ambiguity in interpreting an image."

Hume is particularly enthralled with Central and Eastern European modernism. Her article, "Context and Controversy around Prague's Art Monthly: Umělecký Měsíčník, 1911-1914," is featured in the Faculty New Works exhibit in The Kinsey Gallery (in the Admissions Building) on 12th and Marion. In her article, she examines a group of obscure cubist artists in Prague.

"Ultimately, the way this episode in the history of art has been approached is to say that these artists didn't understand cubism because their subject matter is different…my approach is to say that they are contemporary viewers of cubism and this is what they understood it to mean. It's interesting for us to find out what that is and to figure out why their context and their intellectual background lead them to these conclusions."

Hume discovered through her research that Prague cubism contained themes of Bohemian nationalism. She speculated that these artists turned to Paris for a cultural model as opposed to Vienna, in an attempt to assert a breakaway from the Austrian Empire.

"I look at artistic production as something that can tell us about the way people saw the world around them," she said. "I'm interested not just in works that are now considered masterpieces, but I look at things that reveal information about a culture and people's interactions, and I'm always interested by the narratives that these images can lead us to tell or to think about."

Hume is one of two tenure track art history professors at Seattle University and she insists that art history is more exciting than it sounds.

"I don't know if it's a caricature or just a stereotype of thinking about art history as a class where you just look at a lot of images and memorize their names and dates."

Instead, the art history program emphasizes the examination of art in its social and historical context. Seattle U allows her and professor Ken Allan, the other tenure track professor, to shape their curriculum as they see fit.

"We can really change the way that things are done here," Hume said. "We have a lot of freedom that way. I think it's something that's really positive about art history [at Seattle U]."

Hume is also listed as a professor of the fledgling film studies program, though she hasn't technically taught a film studies class yet. She gets excited when she talks about her use of film in her seminar class on avant-garde art of the 1920s and ‘30s called "Robots, Machines and the Body."

"We look at the film Metropolis—among others— and think about the construction of fantasies and fears about machines and technology and their merging of the body. We also watch excerpts from Wall-E," she said.

Apparently the Pixar film isn't just about cute robots. Hume insists that "Wall-E" is an example of how the fantasy and fears surrounding sentient machines continue today.

Hume's article and methodology provide a thought-provoking approach to art history that isn't just about a group of famous dead guys who created masterpieces. 

Ken Allan

Ken Allan is a professor of art history in Seattle University's department of Fine Arts, but literature is his first love.

He received his undergraduate degree in English with an art history minor and decided to pursue a graduate degree in art history after finding himself fascinated with the ways that literary theory could be applied to art criticism.

Allan described the method as, "The puzzle of how to speak about a visual experience, to capture the powerful aesthetic experience through words."

The professor tries to get his own students fascinated by this puzzle.

"I stress discussion skills in my classes, talking about what we're seeing and its historical context."

Although Allan is exclusively a professor of art history, he teaches an interdisciplinary literature class that deals with novels, short stories and the power of images in traumatic time periods such as the Holocaust and the Cold War.

"It's going back to the things I loved about literature," said Allan.

Allan's favorite books are "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace and "This Portrait of a Lady" by Henry James. He says that engaging narratives that involve him in the storyline, characters with psychological nuances, and unique writing style are the characteristics of books that he enjoys. Allan also thinks about books in the context of the experience of the reader.

"I think a certain interest in doing something different with the medium makes me think about what the author is doing."

For example, in "Infinite Jest," Wallace utilizes footnotes that deliver expanded exposition and explanations at points in the narrative, requiring the reader to flip back and forth between the main text and the endnotes.

"The book made you think ‘What makes it a book?' and it's the same with a work of art."

In fact, "What makes it a work of art?" is a central question in the discussion of pop art, Allan's area of research.

"Are comic strips art? The logo of Spam? Is that legitimate?" he asked.

The logo of Spam that Allan is referring to is called "Actual Size," in which a true-to-size can of Spam is depicted soaring across a 67" by 72" canvas under bold yellow letters that read "SPAM." It is the work of Los Angeles pop artist Ed Ruscha, the artist of focus in Allan's article "Ed Ruscha, Pop Art and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles," on display in the Faculty New Works exhibit.

The article addresses the viewer's encounter with Ruscha's art and argues that the experience gives the viewer a new approach to the city of Los Angeles.

Ruscha experimented in the medium of photography, his subject was Los Angeles and he published his work in small-format, mass-produced books. Similarly to Wallace's "Infinite Jest," Ruscha's photography books challenge the reader to experience the medium in a unique way that makes the viewer think about what the artist is doing. In "Every Building on the Sunset Strip," a series of photos of the landscape of the famous LA street is accordion-folded into the book.

Allan explains the experience of this book for the reader: "To use the book the viewer can adopt a number of different strategies, such as turning it upside down and right side up to see both sides of the street in succession or by unfolding only a small portion at a time. The visual scanning of one strip of images always involves the simultaneous awareness of the unexamined parallel strip of images in the opposite orientation, generating a sense of abstract symmetry and interpretative disjunction at the same time."

Allan declares that, "The artistic potential of Ruscha's books is realized…in the reader's projection of the visual ‘lessons' of Ruscha's books back onto their source: the difficult and absurd reality of Los Angeles."

The rest of Allan's article can be read at the New Faculty Works exhibit in the Kinsey Gallery.

Rosalie may be reached at rcabison@su-spectator.com