Understanding the Impact of Visual Culture AN INTERVIEW WITH
Elizabeth Hill Boone PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY AND MARTHA AND DONALD ROBERTSON CHAIR IN LATIN AMERICAN ART
Professor Elizabeth Hill Boone has contributed groundbreaking research in the field of art history for more than 40 years. A specialist in Pre-Columbian and early colonial art of Latin America, Boone is a former Director of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and has been awarded Mexico’s Order of the Aztec Eagle, the College Art Association’s Distinguished Scholar, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Mexican Academy of History. This spring, Boone will retire after a 26-year tenure in Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Department. EMILY WILKERSON (EW): wanted to study the history of art?
When did you first realize you
ELIZABETH HILL BOONE (EHB):
I was a sophomore in college. Although I started out in marine biology, I was drawn to art. I found ancient Egyptian and Greek art to be especially compelling because these were expressions of peoples somewhat like us, but also culturally different from us.
EW: What drew you to Pre-Columbian art history, in particular? EHB: My sculpture professor Karl Rosenberg at the College of William & Mary taught a course on ancient sculpture in which he devoted three weeks to Pre-Columbian art. I remember when he showed us the monumental sculpture of a monstrous creature— the Coatlicue sculpture, which was said to be the Aztec’s mother goddess. She was figurally horrific, with her head and hands replaced by great serpents and a skirt of intertwined rattlesnakes. I came to wonder how this could be—what kind of mind has such an image at its mother goddess? I spent some of my early career working toward the answer to that question. EW: How does art history inform our understanding of
life today?
EHB: Art history gives us the skills to see, and to evaluate what we are seeing. It trains us to look, notice difference, and judge critically. Additionally, art history tracks major historical and social movements/trends and reveals them through the visual expressions of that time. We see Egypt not through the texts of papyrus scrolls but through the pyramids, sculptures, and tomb paintings; we see the Italian Renaissance not through written documents but through 8 | TUL A NE SCHO O L O F LIBER A L A RTS M AG A ZIN E
the explorations and achievements—scientific as well as cultural and social—of its artists; and we see the Aztecs through their great sculptures and painted books. Art history is the perfect disciplinary major because it draws on the approaches of history, archaeology, linguistics, literary studies, critical theory, and sociology, among others. It is ecumenical in the way it draws on different approaches to understanding visual culture. Moreover—and this is especially important today in our increasingly visual world—art history teaches us how to evaluate the way images shape our thinking and can manipulate us, for good or bad.
EW:
You’ve published five books in the last ten years on writing and pictography in Mexico, in addition to numerous published articles. How does writing fit into art history—a discipline largely understood as image-based?
EHB: Artists use images to think and express themselves, but most others largely think and express themselves through language. Our expression becomes more permanent when we write it down because writing is a medium that allows discourse across location and time. We write for the future and for others not present at the moment of our writing. And, of course, this includes those who write alphabetically to record spoken languages, but also mathematicians and physicists who use algebraic notation, or composers who write musical scores. My own intellectual project has been to understand and explain the system of Mexican pictography, and particularly how the Aztecs used figural images to record their past history, their present world, and its future possibilities. In a research project, as I begin thinking about the corpus of images I am studying, the practice of writing (and all that goes into it, from outlines to drafts) allows me
