Angkor Wat in Bloomington: Rubbings Rediscovered

Area Studies librarians—those of us who work not in specific academic subjects, but with an interdisciplinary focus on a particular world region—are burdened with questions of capacity and choice, inclusion and omission, and the idea that we have to create a microcosm of our area (itself a contested notion) to exist in a completely different context. A butterfly mounted in a frame, ready for examination and explication, in service of the advancement of particular knowledges for particular people. That is to say, the collections we manage are not a simple broad representative sample of materials from a particular place; rather they are the legacy of all the structures of power that have brought them here. So a key question underlies the work we do: why should this be here?

I began my position as IU Bloomington’s South and Southeast Asian Librarian in January of 2023. My first day in my office I took stock of the contents of my office: a few dozen gift books that were waiting to be processed, some random stationary, and then, leaning casually in the office corner, seven large cherry-red tubes. The embossed gold lettering on them glinted in the fluorescent light, neat capitals reading: _{ANGKOR WAT RUBBINGS}. Over the next months, and then a year, the tubes stayed in the corner as I got busy with other tasks, until one day I happened to mention them to a few colleagues who agreed to take a look. We wandered out into the stacks with a few of the tubes and found a large table to unroll them on. The cap of the first tube came off with a dusty puff and with some gentle tugging, a bundle of paper and creamy muslin slid out. Gently unrolling the first one, we were greeted with a striking face: strong features, wearing a heavy crown, in a posture both serene and powerful. Later I would discover that the face starting back at us was none other than Suryavarman II, the Khmer emperor who had been responsible for the construction of Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat is the largest religious structure in the world, a Hindu temple complex built in 12^th century Cambodia at the height of the Khmer empire. The site it was built on is part of a larger city, Angkor Thom, which at its height was the largest preindustrial city in the world. (Evans et al 2009), with a population of nearly a million. This at a time when the population of Paris was only around 100,000. For reasons that are still debated by scholars, the empire collapsed and the city was more or less abandoned within just a few hundred years of its peak, left to gradual decay and jungle overgrowth. During the French colonial expansion into Southeast Asia, the site was “rediscovered” and archaeological excavation and preservation work began to be done. Angkor Wat became one of the key symbolic treasures of the French colonial regime in Cambodia, and an enormous replica was even built for the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition. However rather than being taken as proof that non-Europeans too had the capacity for architectural genius, contemporary French accounts took the view that “The temples of Angor [sic] symbolize not so much a unified and indivisible Indo-China… as a dead civilization killed by the worst sort of native violence, a civilization which France is attempting to revive today.” (Chandler 1990:95) Despite this paternalistic and racist attitude, Angkor had by this time become a very popular tourist site, and with this popularity came the practice of producing rubbings as souvenirs.

The tubes contained 19 rubbings in all, roughly three feet in size, made of blotted ink on rice paper mounted onto muslin. One after another, we unrolled them all and I stood on a ladder to take reference photographs. The rubbings depict scenes from Hindu epics and Khmer history: the battle at Kurukshetra from the Mahabharata, the confrontation of the god Rama with the demon Ravana, processions of soldiers, monks, and sages. Beautiful and sensual celestial beings known as apsaras who dwell in the realm of the gods, and the god Vishnu using the snake Vasuki to churn the sea of milk—filled with fish, squid, and crocodiles—in order to obtain the nectar of immortality.

After describing them to several colleagues, it was suggested I talk to colleagues at the Lilly library and at IU’s Art Museum. With their help, I was able to piece together the following details: the rubbings were donated to the Art Museum by a professor named Walter Laves in around 1960, who purchased them from the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. They had been deaccessioned by the Art Museum in 1971 under then-director Tom Solley. At some point they had been offered to the Libraries, and had ended up in my office, with the exception of four of them which were sent to the Lilly Library. This still didn’t fully answer my question: why should this be here?

Walter H. C. Laves was a prominent professor of political science who before his time at IU had also been involved in the formation of UNESCO. Although his own research does not appear to have taken him to Southeast Asia, a glance through the University Archives, which holds his papers, turned up photographs of him meeting the prime minister of Thailand with Herman B. Wells in 1955. A key piece of Wells’ legacy at IU were his efforts towards internationalization, and as part of this effort Laves had traveled with him to Thailand to help administer a grant from the State Department’s Foreign Operations Administration (a precursor to USAID) to help set up teacher education programs and formalize relationships between IU and Thammasat University (more about this history here). Essentially, the FOA was investing millions of dollars in such programs as part of Cold War-era soft diplomacy, working to increase positive relations and US influence in Southeast Asia against the perceived threat of communism. Perhaps it was these connections with Thailand, in addition to his work on cultural heritage with UNESCO, that had drawn Laves to purchase the rubbings for IU.

The purchase itself is also significant; the rubbings were acquired from the Weyhe Gallery and Bookshop, one of the most important art galleries in Manhattan during its long existence, from 1919 to 2003. A stone’s throw from the MOMA, the gallery exhibited such notable 20th century artists as Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, and Alexander Calder. Of the gallery Anna Jozefacka writes, “During its existence it was considered an institution within the New York art world and served as a meeting place for art dealers and collectors interested in modern art.” Why was such an important center of modern Western art selling tourist souvenirs from Cambodia? The answer is perhaps twofold: first was the emphasis of Weyhe Gallery on prints, cultivated by one of its key early curators Carl Zigrosser (coincidentally a Hoosier himself, whose architect father built several notable Indianapolis landmarks).

The second, and perhaps more critical, was the fascination of midcentury modern artists with “exotica.” Erhard Weyhe’s New York Times obituary even notes that “the art gallery upstairs might contain Renaissance drawings, African masks, and Aztec jade jewelry.” Western art’s fascination with an exotic Other was certainly nothing new, but with the rise of air travel and the rapid pace of globalization in the 20^th century, artist movements such as cubism and primitivism took direct inspiration from the art of the Global South. Similar to the Renaissance Wunderkammer, by the mid-20^th century, the display of decorative pieces from Asia, Africa, and from Indigenous cultures worldwide became an increasingly accessible way to perform a worldly aesthetic sophistication.

At the same time as they are sought after for home decor, such pieces have typically been sold at lower prices and without crediting the names of their creators, and are often thought of as “handicrafts” rather than fine art. Although rice-paper ink rubbing is a meticulous and difficult technique (see a Chinese example from the Field Museum), and the fascinating detail of the rubbings shows a keen understanding and careful selection of exactly which section of which particular bas reliefs should be transferred, artists like the two men in the image shown above remain nameless and uncredited. The Angkor Wat rubbings have largely been considered to be an artifact, a copy of original, a tourist souvenir, and not artwork in and of themselves. They are also no longer made; the practice was banned in the 1960s due to fears of damage to the reliefs. Paradoxically, although the practice of making rubbings was seen as potentially risky in this regard, they provide a partial snapshot of Angkor Wat before the damage it suffered during the Cambodian Civil War (although relatively minimal compared to other Cambodian monuments) and the ongoing impacts of heavy tourism. (Miura 2013)

After dealing with the issues of these rubbings’ preservation and description, they are no longer an invisible, hidden collection. They are searchable in the library catalog and have already been used for instruction; I recently took them to show a class of students working on the Ramayana and am excited for opportunities on the horizon to share them with scholars and students. Their presence not only represents a step to diversifying our collections, in line with the Libraries’ DEI goals, but also can be used as a tool for teaching and research on Southeast Asian history and culture, religious studies, and art and art history, but also about the history of colonialism and empire, and how it shapes academic institutions and disciplines. There are many questions that these rubbings pose—what they depict, how they were made, what can they tell us about Hindu religious art or the history and culture of the Khmer empire—but for me the most intriguing question remains how did this get here in the first place? Why should this be here?

This blog post is part of an ongoing series drawing attention to library collections related to marginalized or underrepresented populations, communities, and individuals.

References

Chandler, Arthur. 1990. Empire of the Republic: The Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris 1931. Contemporary French Civilization 14(1): 89-99. doi: 10.3828/cfc.1990.14.1.00.

Erhard Weyhe, Art-book Dealer: Founder of Bookstore and Gallery Here Dies at 89. New York Times, July 13, 1972, p. 38.

Evans D, Pottier C, Fletcher R, Hensley S, Tapley I, Milne A, Barbetti M. 2007. A comprehensive archaeological map of the world’s largest preindustrial settlement complex at Angkor, Cambodia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(36):14277-82. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0702525104.

Jozefacka, Anna, “Weyhe Gallery,” The Modern Art Index Project (January 2015), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. doi: 10.57011/IVWS1351.

Miura, Keiko. 2006. A note on the current impact of tourism on Angkor and its environs. Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites, 8(3), 132–135. doi: 10.1179/175355206×265841

U.S. Foreign Operations Administration. “Herman Wells with the prime minister of Thailand.” May 3, 1955. Indiana University Archives Photograph Collection, http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/archives/photos/P0077297.