An Interview with Stanley J. O'connor
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Of Poems in a Recalcitrant Landscape: An Interview with Stanley J. O’Connor Pamela N. Corey, Stanley J. O’connor Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, Volume 1, Number 1, March 2017, pp. 161-183 (Article) Published by NUS Press Pte Ltd DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sen.2017.0005 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/646480 [ Access provided at 30 Sep 2021 14:38 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] Of Poems in a Recalcitrant Landscape: An Interview with Stanley J. O’Connor PAMELA N. COREY | STANLEY J. O’CONNOR Stanley J. O’Connor, 2010. Courtesy of the Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University STANLEY J. O’CONNOR is considered a pioneer in the field of Southeast Asian art history and is credited with having shaped a new school of methods and approaches to the field, particularly in his emphasis on understanding the contexts in which objects have been, and continue to be, entangled in human lives. His former students, including Jan Mrázek, Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Nora A. Taylor, Kaja McGowan, John Miksic, Apinan Poshyananda, Hilda Soemantri and Astri Wright produced creative, ambitious and groundbreaking scholarship on such topics as votive tablets, ceramics, wayang puppets, Southeast of Now Vol. 1 No. 1 (March 2017), pp. 161–83 © Pamela N. Corey 161 162 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia ritual deposit boxes, and modern and contemporary art. As witnessed in an anthology of essays published on the occasion of his retirement, there was no prevalent cultural or material focus among his former doctoral students, no chronological or geographical predilection.1 This is what opened the doors of a sub-discipline that had, since its colonial-era institutionalisation, been cast around the monumental, permanent, epigraphic and iconographic. Centred around O’Connor, at Cornell University, in rural upstate New York, such studies expanded the horizons of a field that, at the time, occupied a place of “discomfort” in art historical studies within the structure of Euro- American academe. Yet, to a certain extent, it was the very context of US relations with Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s that enabled support for area studies programmes at schools like Cornell. Such programmes would create networks of enterprising faculty and students, ultimately establishing international communities striving to deepen and broaden interdisciplinary knowledge about Southeast Asia. As his biography and achievements are detailed in various other texts, I just note here—and he elaborates further in this interview—that it was through this encounter with Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program (SEAP), from 1959–60, when he took a nine-month leave from the Central Intelligence Agency, that O’Connor decided to change his career path from government to art history.2 In the field of art history he would bear a far-reaching influence, publishing texts in books, journals and exhibition catalogues, on topics ranging from archaeology, ceramics, iron working, art connoisseurship and education, and contemporary art.3 At Cornell itself he transformed the art history department, making it a central draw for students from around the world to come to study Southeast Asian art. As Director of the Southeast Asia Program, he also strengthened its scholarly outreach by initiating the Southeast Asia Program Bulletin, a now semi-annual and online compendium of announcements and essays that continues to be followed by SEAP alumni and colleagues around the world. As someone who recently experienced his guidance on a doctoral com- mittee, I can personally attest to the quality of O’Connor’s presence as a scholar-teacher. Much of this impression is owed to his skill in word craft; it is no surprise that he writes poetry.4 This interview was, in large part, driven by the desire to record the history of his relationship with Southeast Asian art in his own words, to allow the pictures he weaves through language to emerge in his own voice. Through his powers of description, O’Connor has been known for his ability to make his students sense what cannot be seen, to see beyond the surface of the images projected on screens or reproduced in the pages of books—that is, when he was not teaching in the museum or overturning bags Of Poems in a Recalcitrant Landscape 163 of potsherds on a classroom table. His survey course on Asian art is imprinted in the memories of former undergraduate students who may have been majors in medieval art or modern art.5 Even former US State Department employees sent to Cornell for Southeast Asian language and area studies training rue having missed the opportunity to take his courses.6 It is with no theatrical excess that some of his former graduate students, now senior scholars in established institutions, point to him saying that this is where it all began, or that they owe their career to him.7 Despite having retired almost 20 years ago, O’Connor continues to serve on doctoral committees and raise acute suggestions, ranging from questions of language and representation to deeper inquiries of a more philosophical nature. He has been known to create shifts both subtle and profound in the very paradigms of his students’ projects. To this day, whether they be foragers Stanley J. O’Connor. Photograph by Sol Goldberg, Cornell University Photography. Courtesy of the Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University 164 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia of ancient beads or sherds or participant-observers of “the contemporary”, O’Connor’s students continue to be inspired by the way he has expressed our enchanted and perplexed relationship with the art we are studying from Southeast Asia. { Pamela N. Corey (PNC): Oliver Wolters has described your undergraduate and graduate studies in government, and your subsequent work as a CIA analyst. Was it this work that first brought you to Southeast Asia? Can you describe the moment that incisively changed your life, in terms of deciding to leave government work in order to pursue a much more tenuous career path in Southeast Asian art history? Stanley J. O’Connor (SJO): When I began graduate study in 1951, there was no course offered on Southeast Asia. It was when I joined the CIA in 1952 that I first began to learn about the region. It would be difficult, now, to imagine how few scholars were doing research within Southeast Asia, how very limited our knowledge base in the US academy actually was. Once the region moved from the periphery of US policy to a central focus with both anti-colonial struggle and the developing military involvement with Vietnam, the situation became quite dire because of an imbalance between a growing national interest and diminished capabilities for assessing policy alternatives. I was given a study leave in 1959 and I elected to spend the academic year at Cornell with its Southeast Asia Program. A few of its Data Papers had crossed my desk, and they offered fundamental studies remarkable for their acuity and which were based on informed encounters in the field. Very little prepared me for the intense, high-energy atmosphere of 102, West Avenue, SEAP’s building for graduate students, which was the centre of its intellectual life. I was soon caught up in the general fever. Aside from the brilliant students who had been drawn to a region that seemed to offer so much to explore, what was remarkable was the way an area and language programme brings people from varied disciplinary perspectives to work alongside each other on what they had in common: fascination with place, things showing up in a seemingly protean physical and social context. There was a present-mindedness about all this, a focus on actions done and actions undergone; an intertwining of the creative energies of the material environment with human wishes and imagination. Of Poems in a Recalcitrant Landscape 165 George McT. Kahin (left) and Stanley J. O’Connor (right), 1980s. Photograph courtesy of the Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University I soon realised that I wanted to be part of this scene and especially to learn how the past of the region had prepared the shape of the present. After returning to Washington for a year to repay my study leave, I returned to Cornell in 1961 as a graduate student. PNC: Who were your teachers? What did each of them bring to bear on your own approach to the material and, later, your own pedagogical methods? SJO: Oliver Wolters was teacher, friend and a formative influence. He developed a constantly evolving and deepening picture of what it might have been to be alive in ancient Southeast Asia. He discriminated patterns of behaviour, of ruling tendencies, patterns that persisted in the region over many centuries. For exam- ple, he developed a subtle form of historical connection, something beyond influence and response, so that in studying the obvious embrace in Southeast Asia of categories of thought shared with India, he would trace the creative employment of these cognitive structures within local realities. We are familiar with this today in the nexus of the global and the local. No one before him had charted, so imaginatively, the contours of his chosen field of study or had employed, to such stunning effect, such a wide range of sources and methods. 166 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia I should add that my own work on the settlements and art of southern Thailand was inspired by his quest for the trading kingdom of Srivijaya and its kind of historical geography, with its sailing charts, Chinese diplomatic reports and inscriptions.