–Elizabeth Hutchinson

Wendell Ter Bush (1867-1941) taught Philosophy at Columbia for thirty-three years, beginning as soon as he completed his doctorate in 1905.  His work was focused on the sociology of religion and, like his Columbia colleague John Dewey and his own teacher William James, he was committed to empiricism.  Bush was particularly interested in what artifacts could communicate about religious experience and he routinely brought pieces collected during his travels into the classroom.  In 1935, he donated a collection of what he saw as ceremonial objects–including reproductions of Navajo sand paintings, African sculpture and an entire Shinto shrine from the Tokugawa period (1603-1867)–to the university so that they might be put on display in Low Library for the edification of students.  Along with these artifacts, he also gave thousands of photographs, lantern slides and audio recordings (as well as a slide projector and a victrola) to illustrate the cultures from which the objects came.

While he had strong beliefs about the aesthetic quality, Bush, like many intellectuals of his generation, was catholic in his taste.  As he wrote, “Wherever beauty is, something must be beautiful, either nature-made or man-made.  A Navajo bridle with silver mountings, some neckties, many old candlesticks, many advertisements are works of art.” (Bush 1933b 231)  For Bush, art cultivated a universal human spirit by sharing something of the maker’s judgement and skill with a viewer through an encounter with an object.  “The world of aisthesis has at least one characteristic;” he wrote, “it is always now.”  (Bush 1933a 200)  By this he did not mean to describe aesthetic experience as autonomous.  Rather, he felt it was essentially empirical.

Bush’s definition of art encompassed objects from around the globe and he believed that a viewer who recognized her experience of being moved by the intrinsic meaning of an object from her own culture could be reminded of that experience by seeing a powerful work from another culture and thus feel a sense of connection.  This did not mean he supported cultural relativism, however.  He was well-versed in the scholarship of his colleagues in Columbia’s Anthropology Department (he was particularly fond of Ruth Bunzel) and he was a regular visitor to the American Museum of Natural History as well as a voracious reader of books on past and current civilizations and his book reviews criticize studies of art that did not ground their claims in the social and cultural context.

Bush’s understanding of what he called “primitive” societies was problematic, as he saw non-Western communities as more authentic and spiritual than his own.  The Bush Collection of Religion and Culture includes many objects that would not today be categorized as “religious.”  Nevertheless, in assembling this material, he sought out well-made and well-designed objects that continue to arrest viewers in a perpetual “now.”  While Bush did not know much about Inupiat culture, it is worth considering the applicability of his description of artistic pleasure to the makers of the drawings in this exhibition.  Do they invite a shared appreciation of “our own competence, of really finishing a task, of making something the way it ought to be made”?  (Bush 1933b 236)

 

sources for this page:

Wendell Ter Bush, “The Obvious in Esthetics. I,” Journal of Philiosophy 30:8 (April 13, 1933), 197-212

. . . . . . .”The Obvious in Esthetics.  II”  Journal of Philosophy 31:9 (April 27, 1933), 225-242.