A Center in Search of a Program

THE Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts offers very little novelty in its program--only two unprecedented new courses. Yet, in its concept, it is revolutionary and may well be revolutionary in its effect. According to its coordinator of studies, Ed-hard F. Sekler, the center is intended to overcome "visual illiteracy" at Harvard, to make "visual experience, visual exploration, and visual creation there in education a relevant place with verbal experience, investigation, and creation."

Because of its central position in the University and because of its physical impressiveness, the Center promises to focus considerable attention on the importance of visual communications. But finding out how this attention will be used--how the Visual Arts Center hill operate--is about as difficult as ending out last spring, when the Center as still a hole in the ground, what it should look like. At that time, representatives from most College publications ran through the usual gamut of Administration and School of Design Resources and, receiving no concrete formation, gave up.

The editor of one journal, however, decided as a last hope to ask the foreman of the work crew how the building would look. The foreman just rugged and answered, "Damned if I now. First time I ever built a building with no plans."

Today, if one asks those involved with the Center what the approach of the Center is and what kind of courses will be taught there, one comes away with a composite response which, when shorn of the verbal ornamentation, virtually duplicates the foreman's . The fact is that no one knows here the Visual Arts Center is headed. There are still no clear plans and it seems unlikely that there will be any for a long time.

The concentrated thought over the past nine years on the subject of the visual arts at Harvard has prompted a sometimes rather bitter controversy at the University. One cannot simply count out two sides to this dispute since opinions cover a broad spectrum. At the extremes, though, one finds those who believe that Harvard is a purely academic institution where studies of visual matters should extend only to art history and the scientific investigation of the cognitive process, opposed by those who believe that the University gains a great deal by having a number of people around who are interested almost exclusively in artistic creation.

President Pusey opened the issue shortly after his arrival at the University by appointing a committee headed by John Nicholas Brown '22, a former Overseer, to study the current situation in the visual arts and recommend changes. The committee's report, returned in 1956, expressed the conviction that although the study of visual communications was of the utmost importance, Harvard was severely deficient in the area.

IT went on to make some specific proposals that must have brought about a severe case of shudders in any number of Faculty members. Its primary administrative recommendation was that the Fine Arts Department (to be called History of Art), the Department of Design, and the Harvard theatre, should be subordinated to a Division of the Visual Arts. As Sidney Freedberg, current chairman of the Fine Arts Department, has expressed it, the Faculty "brayed this suggestion." The committee also recommended that students in the History of Art be required to take at least one course in the history of design and participate in "labs" appended to History of Art courses in which, a la Wellesley, students would experiment in various media to learn the problems faced by artists they were studying. Perhaps the most revolutionary suggestion however mildly and equivocally expressed was that the University might play some role in turning out an occasional professional artist.

It is the committee's basic assumption, though, that bears greatest relevance to the Visual Arts Center as it now stands. The goal of study in the visual arts is appreciation, "the ultimate perception of quality," the Brown committee wrote. "To this end there are many avenues of approach. For some, history of art is the way. Others find their solutions in the theory of art, in the analysis of color and the formulae of design. Still others need the practice of art, the actual manual process of painting and drawing, of making sculpture and of constructing model buildings and fashioning decors for the theatre.

"It is the conclusion of the committee, after hearing many points of view and giving many hours to discussion, that all three methods of approach are valid, and that for most people no one method is enough."

The curriculum for next year will include courses that exemplify each of these methods and combine them to various extents. In addition, it will include at least one course in a fourth category, to be called visual communications, which will concentrate primarily on the visual aspects of learning.

Only three of these methods will be followed in the VAC itself--visual communications, design theory, and creative activity. These three approaches will go by the general name, visual studies, and will merge to some unascertainable extent. Dean Arthur D. Trottenberg, chairman of the Executive Committee of the larger Committee on the Practice of Visual Arts, (C.P.V.A.), goes so far as to say that the three cannot be separated.

The history of art (exclusive of architecture) continues to be taught by the Fine Arts Department which, as Freedberg emphasizes, is entirely distinct from the Visual Arts Center and has no direct liason with it. This insistence on the separation of the Fine Arts Department from the Center can be explained by what Freedberg considers to be a consensus of opinion in the Fine Arts Department that "courses in practice or involving theoretical considerations of design are not actually necessary to the full understanding of the history of art or indeed the nature of artistic design. They may be a help but they are not a necessity. Our attitude is that of European universities, that the history of art is an intellectual discipline." The Fine Arts Department, therefore, will not in any way encourage its concentrators to take courses offered in the VAC, but will consider them "an option that is always open for the student."

If Prof. Freedberg's statements express the opinion of a majority of the Fine Arts Department, they by no means represent the opinion of all the Department's members. Three members, in fact, belong to the C.P.V.A. (Professors Coolidge, Ackerman and Slive) and one (Prof. Slive) is a member of its Executive Committee.

The Faculty will meet to approve new courses on May 27, but there is little doubt that courses in drawing, graphics, filming, still photography, and individual supervised studies will go through. In the individual studies course--"Vis Stud's" equivalent to tutorial--the student might conceivably work in anything from pure theory to creative activity as much divorced from theory as possible without completely eliminating the mind.

The core course will be the already existing Arch. Sci. 124, a half course on design in the visual arts which includes study of design theory, some study of the cognitive process as it applies to vision, and development of students' aesthetic sensitivity. Taught by Sekler, and guest lecturers, it may be supplemented next year by a complementary half course, Arch. Sci. 125.

The other existing theoretical course, Prof. I. A. Richards' Vis. Com. 105, taught for the first time this semester, places somewhat greater emphasis on variations in perception than on aesthetics. As Richards describes it, the course considers "illusion, individual differences in visual imagery, apprehension and interpretation; relative legibility and intelligibility of visual presentations; cultural differences in conventions of representation and decoration, and in the articulation of space; structural analysis of signfields; codification; the dimensions of meaning; visual analogues to logic, grammar and rhetoric; visual metonymy and metaphor; symbolization and iconography; valuation; tradition; distinctive characters of mass media (magazine, radio, film, TV); the roles of visual presentation in the design of instruction."

In addition to the proposed workshop courses already mentioned, the Arch. Sci. Department's five courses in studio practice (Arch. Sci. 20, 21, 30, 31, and 40) will be taught from now on in the Visual Arts Center. These courses teach such things as texture, color, form, and manual dexterity, through practice and experiment.

According to Dean Trottenberg, the program as outlined above is only a beginning. "We aren't springing into existence full-blown," says Trottenberg. "We expect to grow into many areas." Just where this growth will occur is anyone's guess. It may come about in the form of links with other departments.

Dean Franklin L. Ford considers it "possible" that visual studies courses may eventually count for concentration in Fine Arts, thus encouraging Fine Arts concentrators to take courses at the VAC. Dean Trottenberg expresses enthusiasm about the possibility of using the facilities of the VAC for scenery and lighting design for the Loeb Theater.

And Sekler states that, in view of the VAC's interest in furthering the visual arts as a means of communication, "the departments of anthropology, government, psychology, social relations, the graduate school of education, and the centers for urban and cognitive studies may be expected to have an obvious interest in the new venture." Mention has been made even of the possibility of working with television channel 2, Boston's educational TV station.

The growth of the VAC will undoubtedly involve new courses and new activities. There is no way of knowing what future courses may form on whether any particular approach to visual studies may come to receive greater emphasis. The future activities that are spoken of include fairly definite plans for an extensive program of exhibitions in the third floor exhibit room and strong hopes for a series of visiting artists who might use the fifth-floor studio. The visiting artists would normally remain at the Center for six months to a year, and would quite likely be permitted to arrange courses and activities largely as their own discretion. As envisioned by Ford, the program for visiting artists might include artists from a wide variety of areas from painting to filming and television.

The Committee on the Practice on the Visual Arts has agreed that extra curricular work should generally be discouraged at the Center, yet it possible that some supervised individuals and groups may work at the VAC. Several people, particularly Dean Trottenberg, Sekler, and Robert G. Garner Coordinator of the Light and Communications Center, are anxious to start a collection of historically important photographs and exhibit them regularly.

Growth could conceivably even come in the form of the establishment of a concentration in visual arts. According to Dean Ford, this suggestion "has come up but is not being pushed strongly." He notes, however, that it "will no doubt come up more often in the future."

Perhaps an ever bigger question than the direction in which the VAC will grow is the question of how much the artist, as opposed to the person taking creative courses for the sake of improving his understanding of visual experiences, will be encouraged. Here, statements by people involved with the Center have not been altogether consistent.

Peter D. Schultz, executive secretary of the Center, emphasizes the intellectual content of the courses, which he feels are primarily concerned with the "analysis of elements of visual or artistic experience." The program, he says, should "teach students to learn to see rather than to become great artists."

Sekler, on the other hand, suggests that one aspect of the program will be "creative activity" for its own sake. In his statement on the Program of Visual Studies, he writes: "Naturally the same search for quality applies in visual studies that prevails in scholarly and scientific fields throughout the University. On their highest levels these studies may reach the domain of art, but it seems a wise humility not to set out on a program that is restricted to the highest possible achievement only. Instead creative activity will be encouraged in the manipulation of forms to an end without aspiring to the production of works of art--though hopefully not excluding that possibility."

Dean Ford seems to have rather strong hopes that particularly talented student artists will work directly with the artists in residence. He also states that the studio courses will not be primarily service courses for academic fields, though this may be of "incidental value." They will be courses for people "interested in the creative arts." An indication of this policy is the fact that the man nominated for appointment to teach drawing and graphics is not just a teacher but an active artist. It seems likely that the degree of emphasis on creativity may depend not so much on policy (apparently rather flexible) as on the number of especially creative students who work at the Center and on how much time they can spend at their art.

Clarity of purpose is obviously not one of the centers hallmarks. Some degree of uncertainty in a new program of such broad scope as the Visual Arts Center is, of course, inevitable. But that this uncertainty might grow into complete aimlessness represents a danger which, hopefully, the C.P.V.A. will carefully guard against.

The building itself was designed to accomodate the uncertain intentions as to how it would be used. In fact, says Sekler, "the program for the Visual Arts Center rests partly on the inspiration aroused by the building. Le Corbusier's commission was to create an inspirational building." The University made very few precise requirements. Among them were that studio space be flexible so that it could be used for other purposes or partioned off into smaller areas, that there be a minimum of offices in order, as Sekler says, to avoid the atmosphere of a "bureaucratic hydrocephalus," and that there be a multipurpose large lecture hall adjoining the light and communications area.

Other facilities that have been included in the Center include, in addition to three large studios for architectural courses, a room on the second floor containing kilns, molds, etc., for experimental use, and half of the fourth floor whose use has not been designated.

In designing the building, a major effort was made both to bring students from various courses within the building into contact with each other, and to draw people from other parts of the University into contact with the activity of the VAC.

To those ends, Corbusier made the building singularly inviting from the outside by establishing a close inter-relationship between inside and out: the ramp, for example, arrives at the top of a platform which seems to be inside but is actually unenclosed; the outdoor patio on the ground level gives the impression of being enclosed; and the bay windows give those inside a close connection with the outside. He also created a large lobby and patio on the ground level with benches where people can meet.

Whatever its architectural advantages, the building unquestionably also has several drawbacks. The fact that the University was unwilling to spend $10,000 or so for heating coils underneath the ramp, makes the ramp useless for some four months of winter each year. The colors on many of the brise-soleil, however attractive, modify the light in several areas of the studios making working in color extremely difficult. And, for those who find the building intriguing in such respects as its constantly changing appearance as one walks past it, there are probably as many who feel that its style fits poorly with the buildings around it, that the third floor studio looks from Oxford St. like a hunchback on stilts, or that the large lecture room resembles a multi-colored gas chamber.

If the aesthetic complaints are signs of poor taste, perhaps the activities of the Center will educate their adherents out of their current views. As to the complaints regarding usefulness, Sekler ticalities are the price you pay for says quite simply that "certain imprac-having the work of a genius."

The concentrated thought over the past nine years on the subject of the visual arts at Harvard has prompted a sometimes rather bitter controversy at the University. One cannot simply count out two sides to this dispute since opinions cover a broad spectrum. At the extremes, though, one finds those who believe that Harvard is a purely academic institution where studies of visual matters should extend only to art history and the scientific investigation of the cognitive process, opposed by those who believe that the University gains a great deal by having a number of people around who are interested almost exclusively in artistic creation.

President Pusey opened the issue shortly after his arrival at the University by appointing a committee headed by John Nicholas Brown '22, a former Overseer, to study the current situation in the visual arts and recommend changes. The committee's report, returned in 1956, expressed the conviction that although the study of visual communications was of the utmost importance, Harvard was severely deficient in the area.

IT went on to make some specific proposals that must have brought about a severe case of shudders in any number of Faculty members. Its primary administrative recommendation was that the Fine Arts Department (to be called History of Art), the Department of Design, and the Harvard theatre, should be subordinated to a Division of the Visual Arts. As Sidney Freedberg, current chairman of the Fine Arts Department, has expressed it, the Faculty "brayed this suggestion." The committee also recommended that students in the History of Art be required to take at least one course in the history of design and participate in "labs" appended to History of Art courses in which, a la Wellesley, students would experiment in various media to learn the problems faced by artists they were studying. Perhaps the most revolutionary suggestion however mildly and equivocally expressed was that the University might play some role in turning out an occasional professional artist.

It is the committee's basic assumption, though, that bears greatest relevance to the Visual Arts Center as it now stands. The goal of study in the visual arts is appreciation, "the ultimate perception of quality," the Brown committee wrote. "To this end there are many avenues of approach. For some, history of art is the way. Others find their solutions in the theory of art, in the analysis of color and the formulae of design. Still others need the practice of art, the actual manual process of painting and drawing, of making sculpture and of constructing model buildings and fashioning decors for the theatre.

"It is the conclusion of the committee, after hearing many points of view and giving many hours to discussion, that all three methods of approach are valid, and that for most people no one method is enough."

The curriculum for next year will include courses that exemplify each of these methods and combine them to various extents. In addition, it will include at least one course in a fourth category, to be called visual communications, which will concentrate primarily on the visual aspects of learning.

Only three of these methods will be followed in the VAC itself--visual communications, design theory, and creative activity. These three approaches will go by the general name, visual studies, and will merge to some unascertainable extent. Dean Arthur D. Trottenberg, chairman of the Executive Committee of the larger Committee on the Practice of Visual Arts, (C.P.V.A.), goes so far as to say that the three cannot be separated.

The history of art (exclusive of architecture) continues to be taught by the Fine Arts Department which, as Freedberg emphasizes, is entirely distinct from the Visual Arts Center and has no direct liason with it. This insistence on the separation of the Fine Arts Department from the Center can be explained by what Freedberg considers to be a consensus of opinion in the Fine Arts Department that "courses in practice or involving theoretical considerations of design are not actually necessary to the full understanding of the history of art or indeed the nature of artistic design. They may be a help but they are not a necessity. Our attitude is that of European universities, that the history of art is an intellectual discipline." The Fine Arts Department, therefore, will not in any way encourage its concentrators to take courses offered in the VAC, but will consider them "an option that is always open for the student."

If Prof. Freedberg's statements express the opinion of a majority of the Fine Arts Department, they by no means represent the opinion of all the Department's members. Three members, in fact, belong to the C.P.V.A. (Professors Coolidge, Ackerman and Slive) and one (Prof. Slive) is a member of its Executive Committee.

The Faculty will meet to approve new courses on May 27, but there is little doubt that courses in drawing, graphics, filming, still photography, and individual supervised studies will go through. In the individual studies course--"Vis Stud's" equivalent to tutorial--the student might conceivably work in anything from pure theory to creative activity as much divorced from theory as possible without completely eliminating the mind.

The core course will be the already existing Arch. Sci. 124, a half course on design in the visual arts which includes study of design theory, some study of the cognitive process as it applies to vision, and development of students' aesthetic sensitivity. Taught by Sekler, and guest lecturers, it may be supplemented next year by a complementary half course, Arch. Sci. 125.

The other existing theoretical course, Prof. I. A. Richards' Vis. Com. 105, taught for the first time this semester, places somewhat greater emphasis on variations in perception than on aesthetics. As Richards describes it, the course considers "illusion, individual differences in visual imagery, apprehension and interpretation; relative legibility and intelligibility of visual presentations; cultural differences in conventions of representation and decoration, and in the articulation of space; structural analysis of signfields; codification; the dimensions of meaning; visual analogues to logic, grammar and rhetoric; visual metonymy and metaphor; symbolization and iconography; valuation; tradition; distinctive characters of mass media (magazine, radio, film, TV); the roles of visual presentation in the design of instruction."

In addition to the proposed workshop courses already mentioned, the Arch. Sci. Department's five courses in studio practice (Arch. Sci. 20, 21, 30, 31, and 40) will be taught from now on in the Visual Arts Center. These courses teach such things as texture, color, form, and manual dexterity, through practice and experiment.

According to Dean Trottenberg, the program as outlined above is only a beginning. "We aren't springing into existence full-blown," says Trottenberg. "We expect to grow into many areas." Just where this growth will occur is anyone's guess. It may come about in the form of links with other departments.

Dean Franklin L. Ford considers it "possible" that visual studies courses may eventually count for concentration in Fine Arts, thus encouraging Fine Arts concentrators to take courses at the VAC. Dean Trottenberg expresses enthusiasm about the possibility of using the facilities of the VAC for scenery and lighting design for the Loeb Theater.

And Sekler states that, in view of the VAC's interest in furthering the visual arts as a means of communication, "the departments of anthropology, government, psychology, social relations, the graduate school of education, and the centers for urban and cognitive studies may be expected to have an obvious interest in the new venture." Mention has been made even of the possibility of working with television channel 2, Boston's educational TV station.

The growth of the VAC will undoubtedly involve new courses and new activities. There is no way of knowing what future courses may form on whether any particular approach to visual studies may come to receive greater emphasis. The future activities that are spoken of include fairly definite plans for an extensive program of exhibitions in the third floor exhibit room and strong hopes for a series of visiting artists who might use the fifth-floor studio. The visiting artists would normally remain at the Center for six months to a year, and would quite likely be permitted to arrange courses and activities largely as their own discretion. As envisioned by Ford, the program for visiting artists might include artists from a wide variety of areas from painting to filming and television.

The Committee on the Practice on the Visual Arts has agreed that extra curricular work should generally be discouraged at the Center, yet it possible that some supervised individuals and groups may work at the VAC. Several people, particularly Dean Trottenberg, Sekler, and Robert G. Garner Coordinator of the Light and Communications Center, are anxious to start a collection of historically important photographs and exhibit them regularly.

Growth could conceivably even come in the form of the establishment of a concentration in visual arts. According to Dean Ford, this suggestion "has come up but is not being pushed strongly." He notes, however, that it "will no doubt come up more often in the future."

Perhaps an ever bigger question than the direction in which the VAC will grow is the question of how much the artist, as opposed to the person taking creative courses for the sake of improving his understanding of visual experiences, will be encouraged. Here, statements by people involved with the Center have not been altogether consistent.

Peter D. Schultz, executive secretary of the Center, emphasizes the intellectual content of the courses, which he feels are primarily concerned with the "analysis of elements of visual or artistic experience." The program, he says, should "teach students to learn to see rather than to become great artists."

Sekler, on the other hand, suggests that one aspect of the program will be "creative activity" for its own sake. In his statement on the Program of Visual Studies, he writes: "Naturally the same search for quality applies in visual studies that prevails in scholarly and scientific fields throughout the University. On their highest levels these studies may reach the domain of art, but it seems a wise humility not to set out on a program that is restricted to the highest possible achievement only. Instead creative activity will be encouraged in the manipulation of forms to an end without aspiring to the production of works of art--though hopefully not excluding that possibility."

Dean Ford seems to have rather strong hopes that particularly talented student artists will work directly with the artists in residence. He also states that the studio courses will not be primarily service courses for academic fields, though this may be of "incidental value." They will be courses for people "interested in the creative arts." An indication of this policy is the fact that the man nominated for appointment to teach drawing and graphics is not just a teacher but an active artist. It seems likely that the degree of emphasis on creativity may depend not so much on policy (apparently rather flexible) as on the number of especially creative students who work at the Center and on how much time they can spend at their art.

Clarity of purpose is obviously not one of the centers hallmarks. Some degree of uncertainty in a new program of such broad scope as the Visual Arts Center is, of course, inevitable. But that this uncertainty might grow into complete aimlessness represents a danger which, hopefully, the C.P.V.A. will carefully guard against.

The building itself was designed to accomodate the uncertain intentions as to how it would be used. In fact, says Sekler, "the program for the Visual Arts Center rests partly on the inspiration aroused by the building. Le Corbusier's commission was to create an inspirational building." The University made very few precise requirements. Among them were that studio space be flexible so that it could be used for other purposes or partioned off into smaller areas, that there be a minimum of offices in order, as Sekler says, to avoid the atmosphere of a "bureaucratic hydrocephalus," and that there be a multipurpose large lecture hall adjoining the light and communications area.

Other facilities that have been included in the Center include, in addition to three large studios for architectural courses, a room on the second floor containing kilns, molds, etc., for experimental use, and half of the fourth floor whose use has not been designated.

In designing the building, a major effort was made both to bring students from various courses within the building into contact with each other, and to draw people from other parts of the University into contact with the activity of the VAC.

To those ends, Corbusier made the building singularly inviting from the outside by establishing a close inter-relationship between inside and out: the ramp, for example, arrives at the top of a platform which seems to be inside but is actually unenclosed; the outdoor patio on the ground level gives the impression of being enclosed; and the bay windows give those inside a close connection with the outside. He also created a large lobby and patio on the ground level with benches where people can meet.

Whatever its architectural advantages, the building unquestionably also has several drawbacks. The fact that the University was unwilling to spend $10,000 or so for heating coils underneath the ramp, makes the ramp useless for some four months of winter each year. The colors on many of the brise-soleil, however attractive, modify the light in several areas of the studios making working in color extremely difficult. And, for those who find the building intriguing in such respects as its constantly changing appearance as one walks past it, there are probably as many who feel that its style fits poorly with the buildings around it, that the third floor studio looks from Oxford St. like a hunchback on stilts, or that the large lecture room resembles a multi-colored gas chamber.

If the aesthetic complaints are signs of poor taste, perhaps the activities of the Center will educate their adherents out of their current views. As to the complaints regarding usefulness, Sekler ticalities are the price you pay for says quite simply that "certain imprac-having the work of a genius."