Staff Journeys: Professor Tamar Garb

As part of our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, we have appointed three student journalists to create compelling content which links Art History and EDI. In this article, student Andrea Petit speaks to Professor Tamar Garb.

Andrea Petit [AP]: What pushed you to become an Art Historian and what journey brought you to become a professor at UCL? 

Tamar Garb [TG]: I started out as an art student at the university of Cape Town, at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and did Art History as a subsidiary subject. My original intention was to become an art teacher. I did a PGCE after my Fine Arts degree with some Art History background; but even during teacher training I found myself in classrooms in South Africa always bringing an Art Historical perspective into things. At that point, I didn’t have the confidence to think of myself as an Art Historian, writer or a scholar in that way. 

After I left South Africa, I was unable to return to live there for personal and political reasons for many years. I had to reinvent myself far away from South Africa and find a new way of thinking and being in the world. I taught in schools here [in the UK], I did a Master's degree in Art Education and then decided to study Art History. I became very involved in the Women’s movement in the early 1980s, discovered feminist Art History and the challenge it posed to traditional art history. Through the 80s and the 90s, for a good 20 odd years, my work was really powered by feminist politics, and my interest in European modernism and its gendered underpinnings - thinking about the ‘woman artist’, the body and sexuality. 

It wasn’t until the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994 that I began to be able to go back on holidays there. And it was only ten years later in the 2000s that I became professionally engaged in what was going on in the art world in South Africa. The opening up of the global and the international art world to South African practices after the end of the cultural boycott was crucial. In the 90s, South Africa became part of the global contemporary art world. I sort of re-learned my craft in relation to South African visual practices after democracy. 

AP: Do you believe there is interconnectivity in your various research interests? 

TG: Yes. My teaching has always emerged from my research. The first class I was brought in to teach at UCL was a class on the History of Women Artists. It was the first class about this subject at UCL, women artists simply did not exist on the curriculum. My teaching then started growing around questions of gender and sexuality, I wrote my book Bodies of Modernity looking at gender issues, while I taught courses that focussed on related issues. I have always been interested in questions of identity - and race came into it as well. I got interested in questions of the politics of identity in terms of ethnicity and race as well as in relation to gender. 

Having come from South Africa, questions of race were at the forefront of one’s mind - my life has been so over-determined by questions of race - it has always been of interest to me. When I started engaging with South African practices, a lot of these broader questions on gender and sexuality and race obviously permeated my thinking. I first started teaching the SA material in a master’s course called ‘Race-Place Exotic-Erotic.’ It had one term on 19th century French practices which opened up all sorts of methodological and historiographical questions around identity, race and politics. Those questions were explored in relation to South African art practices [during the Second Term] through many different mediums. When I returned to undergraduate teaching last year, I decided to create a new course devoting a whole 20 weeks to just thinking about South African photography; particularly thinking about one medium, in one place, with one particular set of historical circumstances and debates. That would allow me to go quite deep into a field as well as exposing a new generation of students to a geography and a political/aesthetic landscape with which they were probably unfamiliar. I had been working on SA photography as a curator - I curated an exhibition at the V&A in 2011 called ‘Figures and Fictions’ and another in New York and Ulm called ‘Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive’ - so I wanted to use the research that underpinned my curatorial work in my teaching. 

AP: What were your proudest moments as an academic and as a person in the field of History of Art?

TG: Each one of my books has been, for me, a huge achievement. I do not find the practice of writing easy, I find it quite exhausting and difficult. So every time I manage to finish a piece of writing I get a sense of huge relief and pride. And then, the big exhibitions that I have curated, and the work that I have done with other contemporary artists. Part of my work in recent years has been to develop relationships with contemporary artists like William Kentridge, Santu Mofokeng, David Goldblatt, Vivienne Koorland and Berni Searle. The curatorial work with all of them involved deep connections and long conversations. The thing that I love is when you can work with an artist to realise a project that both you and they feel resolves something. 

AP: What do you wish students/the general History of Art discipline could take away from your work? 

TG: I hope that I’ve opened people’s eyes to a region of the world with which they would not have been familiar, that they come to understand it in its historical complexity, realising that there are many points of origin in the world from which we can think and move away from a very limited Eurocentric map of the world. That the whole world is entangled and enmeshed in complicated ways, and that seeing it from different geospatial locations helps one to understand the complexity of the world we inhabit, its history and the extraordinary intelligence, energy and creativity that art just brings to our understanding of the world. 

I think the very limited space offered to thinking and work from and in Africa is a real gap, a real hole - and I hope that African-based thinking, making and scholarship can enter the global conversation of History of Art in ways that are more rigorous and more sustained.