An abridged version of this article appeared in the print version of Stanford.
Arts and humanities professor Alexander Nemerov, new chair of the art and art history department, taught at Stanford from 1992 to 2001 and then spent 11 years at Yale before returning in 2012. He sat down with Stanford in late July.
Noted for both his presence in the classroom and his scholarship, Nemerov said his next book, about the early 20th-century child-labor photographs of Lewis Hine, is scheduled to be published next year, when the Cantor Arts Center will feature Hine's work. "There is a past that makes an emotional and ethical claim on us," says Nemerov, adding that he's fervent about helping people "feel the pull of that past."
Do you find any particular contrast in the cultural life at Stanford compared to Yale?
Yes. At Yale, I think many people go on after graduation not to do things in the humanities. They might be bankers, for example, or doctors. But there is a general feeling that the humanities are important, that one is at college to, among other things, become a cultured person. And I do not think that atmosphere is quite the same at Stanford. I think there are significant numbers of undergraduates who see the arts or the humanities more broadly as only an adornment, even a meaningless adornment, to their education. The atmosphere that would say "I come to Stanford to be many things, become many things, and to be a cultured person among them"—that atmosphere really does not exist in a big way.
If we assume that Stanford is driven by an engineering and tech culture, what does that mean either in terms of opportunities or challenges for artists and art historians?
Maybe even more so than at Yale, I get to think of every day I'm on campus as a chance to help transform the culture here—which I do not as a saint or a missionary but, I would like to think, in a more humble sense as simply trying to open people's eyes. Not to what I know, not to what art is, but to who they are. . . . The great mission and vocation and symbolic and actual purpose of being a professor, in my opinion, is to introduce people to who they might be, to help them discover themselves, and of course art or literature, poems, novels, paintings are huge opportunities for that kind of self-invention, that kind of self-discovery.
I do not conceive myself as an expert, as a specialist, or even really as a professor in the sense that that word tends to unfortunately suggest some kind of dryness or distanced expertise. I see myself as trying to find out, for myself as much as for my students, what matters in life and to treat that as an ongoing concern.
Serving as department chair entails administrative burdens, doesn't it? Does it also allow you to pursue a mission and vision?
Well, as someone who has yet to spend a single day on the job, I think I should be cautious about my ambitions. But I would not have taken it if I did not think that I could have a vision and try to perhaps change the culture at Stanford with a better or bigger platform than I could as just a professor. Being an administrator I think is dangerous only if one doesn't always live by some internal light—of a kind of endless imagination and groundedness about what it is I do and why I do it.
I think were I to lose touch with both those kinds of flights of possibility, as well as that kind of almost ethical groundedness in my conception of what I do, then I would be lost; and I probably would succumb to just paper pushing or the electronic equivalent thereof.
How does the new McMurtry Building advance what can be done educationally in art and art history?
In addition to giving us greater prominence on campus and better linking us up with the arts part of campus, I think it gives us a great chance as a department to not only reimagine what we do, but to be inspired by the building's architecture to bring ourselves to greater heights. The building was conceived and planned long before I came to Stanford in 2012. But from what I understand, it's very much of a provocation to everyone at Stanford—but perhaps especially to the people who will work in it and learn in it and teach in it—to not take things for granted. And to move beyond who and what we presently think we are.
Is the building in some way inherently more collegial?
That's the design concept, yes. I feel the department is perfectly collegial already. I might elaborate on that and say that, not necessarily at Stanford but just generally, there's a curious separation between artists and art historians. Again, I do not think that's the case here. But the curiosity is the strangely different vocations of the two related disciplines. You would think they would be more related. But I think if you look around, you see in the world at large that most art history is more about history than it is about art.
How much of an increasing role is technology playing in the arts curriculum, and what's your thinking about the value of that?
As someone who just shows straight PowerPoint lectures and that's it, and who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the PowerPoint era from slides back in 2005, I am not a big fan of the breathless wish to be more tech-oriented. I feel that the main thing I have to offer my students is to train them and me in powers of attention and focus, [with] the minimum of gizmos and pleas for contemporary relevance and answering to the demands of a speeded-up society. I just reject and ignore all that.
Some of the potential with the building involves 3D printers and laser-cutting technology, and so forth.
I don't want to deny that that is an important thing for many people, and will be and should be. And I'm not as chair—any more than I am now—wanting to stand in the way of people who seek that kind of collaboration earnestly and with imagination. That's great, I'm not an arbiter of that. But for myself and the example that I set on campus, it has nothing to do with that.
This past year, just to see for myself if I could do it, I decided to teach a class in Art I about just one painting. I often do teach just one painting, but I'll show different slides to augment it and contextualize it. But in this case, just one painting as in one slide for the whole lecture, with just me talking. And it was great.
So the whole idea that students can't learn unless things are all fancied up and interactive and so on, I just don't agree with that. I don't accept that at all. And going back to your earlier point, I think being as old-fashioned as I can is one of the great opportunities and challenges of being at Stanford.
