Daniel Michael Zolli

The American Encounter with Tibetan Art: A Brief History of Tibetan Artifacts in New York

Shortly after the Tibetan diaspora in 1959 an excess of Tibetan cultural artifacts became available to dealers and collectors in the West.  These were works that were carried out of temples, monasteries and private shrines in Tibet, and sold to museums, art dealers and private collections in both Europe and North America.  Many of these pilfered objects were transported to Peking, where they were then dispersed to the voracious art markets of London and New York City.  This episode marks a watershed moment in the American encounter with Tibetan material culture.  Prior to the Tibetan exodus, Tibetan art objects had been relatively inaccessible to the Western collector, with minimal exposure provided from soldiers returning with keepsakes from the World Wars in Asia.  But now that Tibetan thang-ka paintings and bronze statues flooded the New York art market, American interest in these curious and foreign art objects burgeoned.  The ascendant availability of Tibetan objects and concomitant fascination with Tibetan visual culture provided the conditions for what one private collector has appropriately called “the golden age of collecting.” 

Countless private collectors benefited greatly from the inflated Tibetan art market in the 1960’s; it was during this time that some of the first comprehensive collections of Tibetan religious and ritual objects were assembled in New York.  One museum curator recalled that in 1965 “it was wholly possible to buy a thang-ka painting from a street vendor on Fifth Avenue.  I bought a lovely thang-ka of Avalokiteśvara from a young man who had [just returned] from China.”  Donald Rubin, the founder, patron and namesake of the Rubin Museum of Art, offered a similar anecdote in an interview published in 2004 in Orientations.  Mr. Rubin recalls strolling down Madison Avenue with his wife Shelley, “when we wandered into one of that boulevards ubiquitous art galleries and spotted a Tibetan painting of a female Buddhist deity.”

The Roots of Misunderstanding

It would be useful before moving ahead to investigate the ways in which New York art culture – collectors and museums - understood Tibetan art precisely at the time of its inauguration into mainstream museum culture.  While we can presuppose that the collecting frenzy in the 1960’s necessitates a growing interest in Tibetan artifacts, we must dig deeper in order to recognize why collectors were interested in this art.  By examining the prevailing attitudes of art collectors regarding the purchase and subsequent display of Tibetan objects, I hope to identify important strands of misunderstanding regarding the viewers experience with said objects, as well as their pedagogical purpose within museum collections.  This section provides a useful prolegomenon for further inquiry into the proper practices of displaying Tibetan art.  I would like to suggest that the acquisition of Tibetan art and its display in museums was informed – and more often misinformed – by two predominant discourses that characterize the New York City art milieu in the 1960’s.

To begin, a number of the collections amassed in this era were the projects of successful philanthropists descended from an American tradition of finance capitalists that collected art in the late nineteenths century.  An impressive majority of these men collected exactly what the generation before them had.  Many of their acquisitions were informed by established tastes in the Old European Masters, and especially an interest in connoisseurship.  Extensive buying trips to Europe formed a large accumulation of works, one that roundly rejected art outside of the dominant Western European art canon.  For those raised in the tradition of the Old Masters, the peculiar art that inundated the market held the lure of a new intellectual landscape.  Many art collectors found the desire to resist predominant collecting trends to be quite seductive.  These counter cultural impulses come to typify Tibetan art collectors in the 1960’s.  John D. Rockefeller III, founder of the esteemed Asia Society, was one of these men.  While he possessed what he called “innate sensitivity to the aesthetic dimensions of western art,” his interest in Tibetan art began “as an intellectual one.”  These mysterious objects were new terrain for him, and presented an unprecedented opportunity for intellectual rigor and personal pleasure – the very things that the collector strives for.  However, given the relatively recent arrival of Tibetan artifacts in the United States, and the paucity of Tibetan scholars and specialists at the time, the environment was not suited to foster respect for and understanding of Tibetan artifacts.  Time and time again in this period, these religious artifacts are reduced to the status of artistic commodity, fetishized, divorced from the specificities of their historical and social purposes, their functions and meanings.  We can also discern fragments of misunderstanding embedded in the language of that time.  One writer describes the Tibetan painter: “The dry, cold, pure air stimulates the intellect, but isolation from the cities of men and from other nations deprives the Tibetan of subjects on which to feed his brain.  So his mind turns inwards and spends itself on religious contemplation, helped still farther by the monotony of his life and the awe-inspiring scale on which Nature works around him.”  Notice the language of enchantment, the rhetoric of fetishization.  Tibetan art objects become merely visually interesting things, relics that resonate in unusual ways with the Western experience.   Even Donald Rubin, when describing his felicitous encounter with a thang-ka painting portraying Yama in a Chelsea gallery, refers to it as a scene “straight out of Dante’s Inferno.” 

 In an appraisal of museum exhibiting practices in the 1940’s, one critic asked whether “in a museum of fine arts, the labels [were] really more important than the exhibits.”  He went on to stress the need for the art object to “create about [itself] a little world of [its] own, most conducive to [its] understanding.” He scorned the inadequacies of museum installations, emphasizing the need to isolate the objects and bring them nearer to eye level.  He advocated the importance of aesthetic appreciation and silent contemplation, and suggested the removal of any distracting descriptive labels.  This philosophy is part and parcel of a larger intellectual discourse that gained popular support in the late 1950’s that viewed art and museum installation as existing essentially independent from the surrounding popular culture.  High art demanded an appropriate space for the contemplation of higher values, which were only accessible to exceptional people – connoisseurs and those with cultivated visual acumen.  During this period, museums broadly rejected art from popular culture and outside of the Western art canon.  By the early 1960’s, the modernist ideals promulgated by the arts intelligentsia such as critic Clement Greenberg, founding MoMa director Alfred H. Barr and legendary Harvard professor Paul J. Sachs had penetrated major New York museums, and that the receptivity to these intellectual developments was shaping the spaces and conditions in which art was viewed.  Curators eschewed the use of labels and even the voice of the informed docent, in favor of letting the art speak for itself.  Precise accuracy is sacrificed for aesthetic effect, symmetry and overall harmony of hang.  Rooms become secluded spaces for aesthetic contemplation, removed from historical context, an ideal space for engagement with beauty, conditions that were completely adverse to the proper reception of Tibetan art.  

Today, a visit to virtually any large art museum in the United States reveals a wealth of Tibetan Buddhist artifacts, paintings, sculptures and other liturgical accoutrements.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum boast impressive collections of Tibetan works that number in the thousands. Countless galleries exhibit and market Tibetan art.  And it may serve as no surprise, but the roots of ignorance and misunderstanding still exist in many present-day installations.  One visit that I paid to a large public museum generated particularly revealing results.  In the farthest reaches of the second floor of the building, surreptitiously placed in a corner between the “Arts of Korea and Japan,” and “Southeast Asian Art,” is a single display case labeled “Himalayan Art.”  Further investigation reveals that the objects included in the display case represent an assortment of mediums, functions and geographic provenances.  But there are only a handful of cursory object labels to enumerate these differences, and this visitor felt rather uninformed.  Of the approximately forty artifacts that comprise the museum’s permanent holdings under the category “Himalayan Art,” selected from a collection that purportedly numbers well over one thousand objects, only three claim to be from Tibet, small cast statues that stand covertly amidst a smorgasbord of things from Kashmir, Ladakh, Afghanistan and Nepal, representative of the traditions of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.  Later, a visit to the gift shop reveals more postcards of Tibetan artifacts than were on display, as well as an impressive array of coffee-table books on Tibetan art.  The inquisitive mind might seek alternative avenues to learning about the Tibetan artifacts from this particular museum; their website lists only two of these objects under the awkward and contentious designation “masterpieces of Himalayan art.”

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What’s at Stake Now? The Politics of Practices of Exhibiting Tibetan Art in New York City

In 1991, the State Department made a controversial choice when it decided to grant political asylum in the United States to one thousand Tibetans in exile, in what has come to be called the Tibetan Resettlement Project (TRP).  Since the initial surge of Tibetans in 1992, an influx of Tibetan exiles and immigrants has resettled in host cities throughout the United States, creating a unique Tibetan milieu in this country.  According to the Tibetan Demographic Survey conducted in 1998, of the 7,000 Tibetans in the United States, more than half - roughly 4,000 - were resident in the five boroughs of New York City.  Each year, about five hundred more Tibetans seek political asylum in New York, while a slightly lesser number return to Nepal, Tibet and the Indian subcontinent.  The result of these peregrinations is a largely transient community of Tibetans in New York.  One professor that I interviewed noted that these staggering statistics are quite worrisome.  “This immigration policy has the potential to produce hazardous side effects,” he said.  “It threatens to further fracture the exile community, creating a rift between those who remain in Tibet and those who have fled.”  With this in mind, it is increasingly important that major cultural institutions such as museums are duly diligent in respecting the cultural property of minority groups and its attendant meanings.  To do so is to help preserve the integrity and agency of the Tibetans in exile, and to facilitate the diffusion and adaptation of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in America.

To ignore this, however, suppresses Tibetan identity and carries potential for a growing resentment amongst Tibetans with their status in the United States and how their group and its activities are represented in mainstream culture. 

Art museums have become one of our preeminent institutions for learning about other cultures.  As a cultural, historical and material repository, the art museum is of critical importance in defining and maintaining the identities of the public that it serves, which include minority groups such as the Tibetans.  Art museums have a moral responsibility to properly recognize the objects of the cultures that they exhibit.   In a growing consumer culture and with the growth of national tourism, museums need to market themselves as tourist attractions and to relentlessly confront audiences with merchandise to increase their revenues and offset mounting operating costs.  Amidst hyperbolic promotions and huge banners unfurled on the museum’s façade, the presentation of art and realization of education initiatives are not always priorities.  Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Museum, has codified the successful twenty-first century museum experience as “great collections…a great special exhibition, a great second exhibition, two shopping opportunities, a high-tech interface via the Internet, and economies of scale via a global network.”  This seemingly inverted list of priorities threatens to undermine the very respect for the appreciation of cultures that virtually every museum’s mission statement so thoroughly espouses, (i.e. “aim to explore the rich diversity of human culture for the benefit of all”). 

To any Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, the thang-kas and bronzes displayed in art museums are regarded as sacred instruments of invocation and meditation, tools of merit making and enlightenment.  But many descriptive labels and exhibition catalogues in art museums have not even a vague intimation of this theological subtext.  To the American Tibetan Buddhist community, these objects are not just beautiful, but they are meaningful, purposeful and functional to an entire religion.  With such a large Tibetan Diaspora in the United States, properly addressing these issues is an imperative.

The interests of the Tibetan Buddhist community and the art museum seem at first sight to be irreconcilably conflicted on this extremely litigious issue.  While the Tibetan Buddhist community in New York might view this as a wanton misrepresentation of their cultural heritage, asserting that the artifacts are their national property, the museum might argue that through its acquisition and display, the work has been rescued from destruction so that a part of Tibet’s unique and endangered cultural heritage could be preserved.

Such issues are fraught and require exhaustive analysis that I cannot even begin to undertake in this project.  Nevertheless, the time is ripe for studies such as this one.  After all, it has been only relatively recently that museums have been subjected to any rigorous form of criticism.  And modern art history, with its growing repertoire of notions, ideas, terms and tropes, is finally prepared to productively address these loaded issues.  Currently, discourse on multiculturalism and museums is extremely active; noted scholars such as Anne Coombes, Donald Preziosi and Carolyn Dean are critically involved in debates on the roles of museums as arbiters of cultural identity.

With this study, however, I would like to begin to consider how to create the ideal circumstances in which to cultivate co-operation and mutual respect for Tibetan cultural artifacts.  It is my hope that these cogitations and conclusions will lead to a greater cultural awareness and discernment in the discipline of museology and Asian diasporic studies.

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Methodology

While resident in New York City for the months of July and August 2006, I frequented roughly twenty galleries, attended public and private museums in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Newark, New Jersey.  The majority of my research was conducted at the Brooklyn Public Library and the Frick Art Reference Library, while institutions such as the Tibet House, Tibetan Exiles of New York, the Office of Tibet and Shambala were also valuable resources.   In the interest of adding a more personal dimension to my inquiry, I interviewed a range of people: thirteen curators, directors, conservators and museum employees, ten Tibetan Buddhist practitioners in New York City and the Tri State area, as well as three professors led me closer to my proposed solutions. 

Almost all interviews approached the following questions:  Do the hegemonic practices of the art museum act as an instrument of oppression for the Tibetan Buddhist religion in New York and its material culture?  Is it blasphemous to display a thang-ka that was made and consecrated for meditation in a public gallery?  Isn’t this a blatant eradication of Tibet’s religious traditions and institutions?  To what extent are practices of exhibiting art invested in fabricating, sustaining or rejecting dominant ideologies, and/or institutionalizing them?  Is it possible to display non-Western material culture in Western art museums, and still preserve their original meanings?  And if so to whom does this responsibility belong?  Art museums must re-examine their ideals and challenge or modify the current trajectory of art museum practice, but in what ways?  New York is an important piece of the American Tibetan Buddhist landscape, but how can museums make sure it stays that way?

Research yielded six practical solutions, which I offer to provoke and promote conversation about alternative practices to exhibiting Tibetan artifacts in ways that respect the priorities of both museums and the Tibetan people.

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Re-Cognizing Current Practices and Proposing Solutions

Serving the Muse or Serving the Dharma: Preservation and Conservation

The preservation of Tibetan sculpture in museums involves a plethora of complex issues, arising largely in part from the notion that these artifacts were not made as works of art for purely aesthetic purposes but were intended to fulfill a variety of functions within serious religious practices.  And as if to further confuse matters, as one woman says, “the very reason for their presence in the United States is due directly to the looting and destruction of countless Tibetan monasteries.” Of the people that I surveyed about openly displaying, and in some cases treating consecrated bronzes, their opinions were roughly divided into two categories: there were those who felt that museums were places whose priority was at all times to preserve and protect the objects of other cultures, and those who felt that sometimes such practical concerns jeopardized the sacrosanct nature of the objects.  “You can’t just pour chemicals on an image of the Buddha,” one man insisted.

“We face a serious ethical dilemma whenever we choose to treat Tibetan art,” a conservator told me.  One professor that I interviewed echoed this sentiment: “The last thing we would want would be that followers of the religion be offended or upset by the scientists treatment of the religious object.  As long as they are respectful, museums are the proper homes for these objects.  Anyways, we’d hate to see another case like the Pathur Nataraja, right?”  The reference to “Pathur Nataraja” is worth exploring.  The case involved a twelfth-century Hindu bronze statue, and its return to India by a private collector in London in the late 1980’s.  Both parties had a vested interest in the object, but radically different concepts of what was morally right when considering its preservation.  After all, different principles of morality are embedded within certain cultures.  The environment of legal dogmatism surrounding the request for the “Pathur Nataraja” demonstrates that both parties were irreconcilably at odds concerning the morality of the objects return to its country of origin.

On one hand, the repatriation of the bronze statue in 1988 – thanks to UNESCO’s 1970 convention on the Means of Prohibiting the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property - represented an honest triumph for the Indian nation; it preserved Indian cultural heritage, the efficacy of the idol restored when it was ceremonially returned to South India.  From another perspective, it was a moral crime that the statue was placed in a humid, concrete vault, virtually concealed from public devotion, consigned to an inactive life, when it could have been appreciated by so many in another context, like a museum for instance; India did not possess the proper means to safeguard its heritage.

When dealing with the preservation and conservation of religious artifacts within museums, we are treading on dangerous ground.  Making clear-cut choices risks upsetting either party involved, as we saw in the aforementioned case.  There are, however, some practical solutions available for obtaining a better understanding of Tibetan sculptures and for deciding how they are best served in museums.  “Why not ask us first?” one man inquired, and then laughing, “or come to our ceremonies and see what these things really mean.”  Despite the quip, the man’s suggestion could be quite productive for our purposes.  It would be useful for all conservators to consult with local Tibetan communities in New York – there are plenty to consult with – or major Buddhist centers to obtain a better understanding of Tibetan Buddhist artifacts and for how they should best be stored, displayed and handled.  Attending local Buddhist ceremonies could only augment the conservator’s awareness of the meaning of his or her task.   It would help them to develop a sense of respect for the people who made and used the piece that is being worked on, whether or not one agrees with their specific religious beliefs or philosophies.  And when in doubt, it never hurts to ask.

The Preservation of Meaning: Problems with Naming “Art”

While we have focused on the material preservation of Tibetan cultural heritage, we must consider the equally pertinent need to preserve the meanings of these objects. A common topic of conversation amongst those that I spoke with was addressing the issues that derive from what one interviewee called the “problem of the name.”  She went on to elaborate that, “Tibetan images, whether painted or sculpted, are objects of devotion.  They are animated in consecration ceremonies, and are considered to be the absolute embodiment of the deity.  These numinous images are not plausibly “art” by our own standards.”  Exactly what problems does the designation “art” pose to Tibetan artifacts?  In her essay, “The Trouble with (the Term) Art” (Art Journal, Summer 2006, pp. 25-32), Carolyn Dean perspicaciously observes that “when we recognize and name “art” in societies that do not recognize this or similar categories of things, we not only say more about ourselves than about the objects we study, we also supplant indigenous terms and values, suggesting perhaps, that our value system matters more than whatever system that gave rise to the creation of the object in the first place.” In naming “art” as such, we re-create artifacts in the image of the canonized Western definition of art which is not recognized worldwide.  And by superimposing our own aesthetic distinctions and standards, we risk “re-creating societies in the image of the modern West” (Dean, p.30).  

At one point in my visit to a public museum, I am greeted with an area label that reads “Art of Tibet.”  No other piece of writing exists in this expansive corridor to qualify the meanings of these objects.  To me, they become “art,” with all the baggage that this term carries.  In this moment of revelation, the large-scripted label simultaneously imposes and prioritizes a Western reading of these artifacts.  When placed under the unapprised gaze of the museum-going public without the requisite information, these objects lose their ability to be functional liturgical accoutrements.  They become valuable artistic commodities and symbols of the American museum’s rich heritage.  Such practices threaten to erode the dynamic meanings of objects within their respective cultures in favor of an increasingly one-sided view of material culture.

According to one interviewee, there are more profound issues than terminology or nomenclature at stake here.  “The designation [“art”] reinforces what are in fact colonialist perspectives, judgments and rationales,” he said, “and with it, [we must address] museum’s frequent Eurocentrism and intellectual imperialism.” 

For others still, this represents a devaluing of the traditions and dignity of TIbetan culture.  One Tibetan man that I interviewed – at his favorite restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue at 83^rd Street in Manhattan – highlighted the danger that such habits potentially poses to Tibetans in New York: “It’s things like this that might make us misunderstood,” he said, pausing to reflect.  “We are a colorful and spiritual people,” he continued, motioning to the multicolored tapestry on the wall. “Don’t forget that.”

Such statements communicate the decisive role of contemporary museum culture in transmitting the meanings of these Tibetan works to a Western audience.  One curator thought otherwise: “The very act of removing a statue from its proper context and placing it in the art market desecrates it to some extent.  By placing statues in museums, their essential purpose is lost anyway.  We come to art museums to see art.”  Because objects are not only what they were made to be but also what they become – objects accrue new meanings in new contexts - these Tibetan works can still conveniently be considered by museums to be “art.”

I asked one art historian whether he thought it was possible for museums to overcome the prevailing Western conceptions of art; he answered my query largely in the negative, but I disagree.  Despite the acknowledged difficulty of addressing the multiple meanings implanted within Tibetan artifacts, I would argue that simply including descriptive texts to illuminate these issues would be a step in the right direction, and a means of traversing the problems posed by the term “art.”  Museums don’t have to obscure the former uses of Tibetan artifacts.  Rather, they should provide the western viewer with the basis for acknowledging other, more complex, affinities between objects and their meanings.  The labels at the Rubin Museum of Art, for example, are exemplary, meticulously crafted pieces of writing that strive to create authentic explanations of Tibetan artifacts.  And although the term “art” is used in proliferation throughout the space, it is virtually negated by the multiplicity of meanings at hand that elucidate the myriad issues at stake.  In addressing the politics of meaning “The museum must develop an honorable.  Sadly however, in most museums that I visited, these issues are not yet adequately explored.

Community Outreach

We must briefly address the growing role of the art museum in the community.  During one interview, a Tibetan inquired whether it would be possible to schedule events with Tibetan people at art museums.  “Why not bring us to museums?” he asked.  The idea is seductive, and to my knowledge has not been implemented anywhere in museums in New York.  By providing a venue where Tibetans could interact with museum culture, it would both help Tibetans assimilate and adapt to their new host country, and at the same time preserve, retain, and celebrate their cultural heritage.  This concept has a particular resonance with the values of the Rubin family, as disclosed by Shelley Rubin in an interview:  “Donald’s entire family was killed in the Holocaust.  This has given him a particular sense of the notion of people in Diaspora…a people whose culture is under attack…[Donald] wants to help participate, save, preserve, give back.”  Similarly, art museums could schedule collective visits to local Tibetan Buddhist centers and cultural sites in New York City.  This would create cross-cultural exchanges and opportunities to understand and reciprocally appreciate divergent cultures and their beliefs and values.

Display and Labels: Culture in Context

Since museums are our primary experience with art, and they can display their collections content in different ways, our visual experience with art objects is always mediated by them.  The art museum is a storied space, a place where the visitor is given a map to guide them through a constructed universe.  Then in what ways can these spaces be constructed to best promote an understanding of Tibetan artifacts?  The answer, I believe, is found in Carol Duncan’s magisterial studies of art museums and ritual: “The museum’s sequences and arrangements of objects, its lighting and architectural details both provide the stage set and the script, create a context – although not all museums do this with equal effectiveness” (Preziosi, p.480).  In this quotation Duncan surmises that architecture, display and arrangement, and labels are all instrumental in engendering meaning in museums.  We will treat these subjects separately.

The architectural spaces of many museums are not appropriate for the Tibetan artifacts that they house.  Often Tibetan artifacts are an afterthought in planning museum’s spaces.  One curator that I interviewed for a public museum revealed with trepidation that “we were looking for a space for our Himalayan collection about a decade ago, we found this empty corridor, and this is where it has stayed since.”  When placed within the neutral discursive architectural space of this particular museum, these sacred Tibetan works are more likely to lose their intended meaning amidst flurries of easily distracted spectators.  But two museums have been successful in setting the standards for architectural practices in regards to housing Tibetan artifacts.  The Rubin Museum of Art, a six-story brownstone building in the Chelsea district of Lower Manhattan, was built at the behest of Donald and Shelly Rubin.  It is built on the former site of Barney’s department store, an unlikely cultural segue.  Nevertheless, the architectural firm – Beyer Blinder and Belle - sought to create “a serene environment,” one amenable to learning and comprehension.  It has been described as a “mandala arrangement, with the staircase serving as a metaphor for traversing the levels of meaning in Himalayan art” (Doran, p.30). Another sterling example of display is he Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, a private, non-profit museum on Staten Island.  The two buildings are facsimiles of mountain temples in Lhasa, and permanently display Mrs. Marchais’ collection of 1,200 objects.  Upon visiting the site, His Holiness the Dalai Lama is said to have proclaimed “it really feels like you are in Tibet.”  These two ventures represent successful solutions of how to create space conducive to the display of Tibetan art.  This claim deserves a caveat however.  Both museums are the private institutional legacies of energetic enthusiasts of Tibetan visual culture.  The Rubin family supported their museum with $60 million of startup capital.  Such gusto in making spaces that are beautiful and serene, while ideal, is absent from most public museums.  I recommend that they strive to approximate these standards nonetheless.  

Another important factor is the manner in which museums choose to display their collections contents.  During one visit to a particular museum, my companion – a Tibetan man from Queens – remarked that to his dismay, one object was displayed on the ground.  “These statues should be treated with care, not put on the floor,” he said.  “They should be kept in clean areas, kept slightly elevated.  This could be considered [to be] the desecration of a Dharma object.”  In the interest of respecting these wishes, museums should be attentive to how they hang their objects. Again, the Rubin Museum has gone above and beyond in this category.  One niche on the second floor is filled with thang-ka paintings from the twelfth to nineteenth centuries, mounted on a wall opposite an area for sitting.  It encourages visitors to sit down and think about the forms, to meditate and calm their minds.  It urges visitors to transcend the traditional art-viewing experience, reminding us a statement Rubin gave during an interview: “These demons are not just something to confront on a Chelsea Saturday.”  Display cases show the tools and pigments used to make thang-ka paintings.  Maps of the region provide a sense of geography to the viewer.  Even magnifying glasses are featured on every floor.  

With more than one thousand objects – including paintings, sculptures, textiles and ritual accoutrements – the Rubins collection is an impressive cross-section of Tibetan material culture, and an unparalleled opportunity to teach audiences about Tibet.  As if to underscore this objective, Mr. Rubin has remarked,  “we just want to help people understand how these paintings served religion and society.”  That said it is the written labels that adorn the museum that prove to be the decisive factor in achieving this Herculean task.  Labels are instructive; each area label is didactic, treating questions like, Where is [the art] made?  Why is it made? How is it made? What is going on? One particularly masterful label alleges, “some meanings embedded in works of art are intelligible and useful only to initiates to the practices that works of art are made to serve.  Finding meaning in [Tibetan art] is part detective work, part acquired knowledge and part attention to your own responses.  Putting these activities together is the path to appreciation.”  Diacritical marks help visitors pronounce the names of the deities in their original Tibetan language.  In one exercise, visitors are instructed to write their own labels, which are shown in a subsidiary room on the second floor.  The label writing exercise reads: “As you have learned in this exhibition, Himalayan art is created with a purpose.  Part of this purpose is to reach out to, instruct, guide and communicate with viewers.”  These activities put Tibetan culture into context

Technology

With the mushrooming influence of technology and the opportunities it offers, many museums have sought to integrate new multimedia and technological resources into the construction of their spaces.  One employee that I interviewed at a museum said that, “we want the museum to be as user-friendly as it can be…we are focusing on developing audio-visual tools and on building the website.”  In my mind, these ventures can only ameliorate the current conditions in art museums, presenting new opportunities to facilitate learning and growth.  The Rubins, self-described technophiles, have sought to harness these new resources, in the form of tours, educational videos and audio-visual guides.

Education to the Vanguard: Promoting Respect and Understanding

The final imperative that was unanimously addressed by those that I interviewed, Tibetans and museum staff alike, was education.  According to one professor,    “ultimately, it is education [that should] promote respect and understanding of Tibetan art, culture and identity and work to create a protocol for decency [of exhibiting practices].”   He maintains that “if we acknowledge that answers are always culture-specific, and focus less on prescribing restricted solutions and more on exercising care to educate the world at large…many problems might disappear.”  If museums can navigate away from the avoidable issues and focus on more fundamental issues like cultivating respect and teaching understanding for Tibet, the situation can only improve.  In the end, education is the essential issue that all museums interested in displaying Tibetan art must engage with. 

The education movement - whose major thrust came in the 1970’s with the publication of Museums, Imagination and Education by UNESCO (1973) – has infiltrated the agenda of virtually every major art museum in the United States.  It upholds the notion that museums must actively reorganize and utilize their spaces and collections, in order to present themselves as places of learning, of clarity.  Predictably, museums have dealt with education in very different ways and with a range of success.  Regrettably, many of the museums that I visited did not deal explicitly with Tibetan art on their educational schemata.

Again, the Rubin has set the bar.  The Rubin Museum is the educational piece de resistance of Tibetan art museums.  As one employee stated, “the Rubins for many years have been committed advocates for the preservation and dissemination of art as a vital tool for education, cultural understanding and positive social change.”  The museum has carried out impressive educational projects during their two years of existence.  They maintain active programs with local schools bringing museum educators to classrooms three to four days a week.  One such program that was publicized very much during my visits there was “Thinking Through Art,” a twelve-week program held in situ at the Rubin, in which museum educators create curricula for students of all ages, aiming to study Himalayan art in great detail.  Also, thematic tours are given on-site daily. 

The Rubin has also formed productive alliances with two educational organizations.  The Tibetan Buddhist Research Center (TBRC), under the supervision of E. Gene Smith, has had a seminal influence on the development of Tibetan studies in the West.  Mr. Smith has located and made available innumerable sacred Tibetan texts and artifacts for scholarly study.  “Some objects have been scattered in the exodus of refugees from Tibet,” one man said of the endeavor in an interview, “and are now in danger of becoming lost or destroyed.”  The foundation puts “Tibet into a world of context,” says E. Gene Smith.  The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation focuses on supporting efforts to include Tibetan art in the mainstream of scholarship and museum display.  In their mission statement, the foundation contends that “in particular, [we] are interested in the collection, care, preservation, study and public display of the ancient art of the Himalayas, with the related goals of exploring the relationships between this art and that of other cultures.”  These two associations provide unprecedented resources for the education of New York at large about Tibetan art.

In order to develop sensitivities to the multiplicity of meanings that define Tibetan artifacts and represent Tibetan identities in New York and abroad, museums must seek understanding through logical and well-defined education programs.

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This paper intends to create the conditions for true dialogue, which cannot happen of course without conflicting ideas or interests.  And it is a precarious path indeed, but I believe that critical attention and thought to these issues might render a better understanding of a remedy, one that respects the needs and wants of both the Tibetan Diaspora community and art museums in New York.  I hope this text represents a step in the right direction.

Frequently Used Sources

Dean, Carolyn.  “The Trouble with (the Term) Art,” in Art Journal (Summer 2006), pp. 25-32.
Doran, Valerie C. “Displaying Benevolence: The Rubin Museum of Art, ” in Orientations (April 2004), pp. 30-39.
Lopez, Donald S., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Preziosi, Donald, ed.  The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.