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101ST ANNUAL CO NFERENCE
NEW YORK
FEBRUARY 13–16, 2013
A B S T R AC TS
ABSTRACTS 2013
101st Annual Conference
New York, February 13 –16, 2013
50 Broadway, 21st Floor
New York, NY 10004
www.collegeart.org
Copyright © 2013 College Art Association
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Sessions are listed alphabetically according to the name of the chair.
Abstracts 2013 is produced on a very abbreviated schedule. Although
every effort is made to avoid defects, information in this book is subject
to change. CAA regrets any editorial errors or omissions.
We extend our special thanks to the CAA Annual Conference Committee
members responsible for the 2013 program: Anne Collins Goodyear,
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Vice President for
Annual Conference, chair; Al Acres, Georgetown University; Jacki Apple,
Art Center College of Design; Sharon Matt Atkins, Brooklyn Museum
of Art; Peter Barnet, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Connie Cortez,
Texas Tech University; Jacqueline Francis, California College of Arts;
Sabina Ott, Columbia College Chicago; and Zoe Strother, Columbia
University. Regional Representatives: Susan Grace Galassi, Frick
Collection; Klaus Ottmann, The Phillips Collection; and David Storey,
Fordham University.
Cover: Wildflower field, looking north toward West 29th Street.
Courtesy of Friends of the High Line.
Photo Credit: Iwan Baan, 2011
Design: Ellen Nygaard
C A A 2 0 1 3 FE B RUARY 13– 16
3
Contents
The Proof Is in the Print: Avant-Garde Approaches to
the Historical Materials of Photography’s Avant-Garde
Chairs: Mitra Monir Abbaspour and Lee Ann Daffner,
The Museum of Modern Art
11
National Coalition Against Censorship
Art Institutions Facing Controversy: Fear, Self-Censorship,
and the Commitment to Curatorial and Artistic Freedom
Chair: Carol Becker, Columbia University School of the Arts
19
Art History Open Session
Northern European Art, 1400–1700: Recent Discoveries
through Technical Art History
Chair: Maryan Wynn Ainsworth, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art
11
Italian Art Society
Bad Boys, Hussies, and Villains
Chair: George R. Bent, Washington and Lee University
20
21
The Decorative Arts within Art-Historical Discourse:
Where Is the Dialogue Now, and Where Is It Heading?
Chairs: Christina M. Anderson, University of Oxford;
Catherine L. Futter, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
12
Beyond the Paragone
Chairs: Sarah Betzer, University of Virginia; Laura Weigert,
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
21
The Watercolor: 1400–1750
Chairs: Susan Anderson, Harvard University Art Museums;
Odilia Bonebakker, Harvard University
13
Reframing Painting: A Call for a New Critical Dialogue
Chairs: Brian Bishop, Framingham State University;
Lance Winn, University of Delaware
22
ARTspace
Design as Intermedia Practice
Chair: Jacki Apple, Art Center College of Design
14
Mid America College Art Association
Designing Foundations
Chair: Steven Bleicher, Coastal Carolina University
23
American Institute of Graphic Arts
Collaboration, Interaction, Participation: What Does the
Rise of Participatory Culture Mean for Art and Design
Education and Practice?
Chairs: Helen Armstrong, Miami University; Lee Vander Kooi,
Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis
14
Historians of Islamic Art Association
Between Maker, Agent, Collector, Curator, and
Conservator: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study
of Islamic Tilework
Chairs: Jonathan Bloom, Boston College; Keelan Overton,
Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art
23
Open Session
French Art, 1715–89
Chair: Colin B. Bailey, The Frick Collection
14
Creative Kitchens: Art, Food, and the Domestic
Landscape after World War II
Chairs: Silvia Bottinelli, Tufts University; Margherita D’Ayala
Valva, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
Funktioning with Nothing but the Funk: Black Art
and Design, the Final Frontier in Reconstruction
Chair: Xenobia Bailey, independent artist
15
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
A Two-Way Street: How Academic Museum and Gallery
Programming Can Achieve Curricular Impact
Chair: Leonie Bradbury, Montserrat College of Art Galleries
24
About Face: Looking Beyond the Icon’s Gaze
Chair: Charles Barber, University of Notre Dame
16
24
What Is Yucatecan about Yucatán: Art-Historical
Discourse in Yucatán’s Visual Culture, Precolumbian
through Contemporary
Chairs: Charles Cody Barteet, University of Western Ontario;
Amara Solari, Pennsylvania State University
17
Queer Caucus for Art: The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgender Caucus for Art, Artists, and Historians
Color Adjustment: Revisiting Identity Politics of the 1990s
Chair: Tara Burk, The Graduate Center, City University of
New York
25
Destruction of Cultural Heritage in European Countries
in Transition, 1990–2011
Chair: Rozmeri Basic, University of Oklahoma
18
American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies
The Role of Spanish and Hispanic Art in the Collections
and Exhibitions of New York Museums
Chair: Marcus Bruce Burke, Hispanic Society of America
25
Local Modernisms
Chair: Geoffrey Batchen, Victoria University of Wellington
18
Cultural Negotiations of the Readymade
Chairs: Orianna Cacchione, University of California,
San Diego; Birgit Hopfener, Freie Universität Berlin
National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts
An Overwhelming Trust in Progress: The Artwork
of Dylan J. Beck
Chair: Dylan Beck, Kansas State University
19
Precolumbian Ceramics: Form, Meaning, and Function
Chairs: Michael D. Carrasco, Florida State University;
Maline Werness, Humbolt State University
26
C A A 2 0 1 3 FE B RUARY 13– 16
4
Entering the Spielraum: The Global Grotesque
Chair: Frances S. Connelly, University of Missouri–Kansas City
37
Effects
Chair: Huey Copeland, Northwestern University
38
Association for Latin American Art
Emerging Scholars
Chair: Constance Cortez, Texas Tech University
39
The Photographic Record: Images of and as Objects
Chairs: Catherine Craft, Nasher Sculpture Center; Janine Mileaf,
The Arts Club of Chicago
39
Art and the War on Terror: Ten Years On
Chair: August Jordan Davis, Winchester School of Art,
University of Southampton
40
Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History
Stained Glass Windows: Radiance and Symbolism
Chair: Liana De Girolami Cheney, University of
Massachusetts, Lowell
41
ARTspace
The Artist and the Law: Testing Boundaries,
Challenging Limits
Chair: Blane de St. Croix, Indiana University, Bloomington
41
ARTspace
The Artist as Activist: Art as a Catalyst for Social Change,
a Critical Assessment
42
ARTspace
The Artist as Ethicist: Who Is Responsible? Chair: Blane de St. Croix, Indiana University, Bloomington
43
CAA International Committee
International Collaborative Arts: Conversations on
Practice, Research, and Education
Chairs: Diane Derr and Radha Dalal, Virginia Commonwealth
University in Qatar
43
35
Exhibitor Session
How to Get Published and How to Get Read
Chairs: Loren Diclaudio and Natalie Foster, Routledge
43
Historians of British Art
Parallel Lines Converging: Art, Design, and
Fashion Histories
Chair: Julie Codell, Arizona State University
35
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Issues Surrounding the Online Foundations Experience
Chair: Sara Dismukes, Troy University
43
43
ARTspace
Film and Video as a Social Art: Contemporary Moving
Images and Social Practice
Chairs: Caryn Coleman, independent curator and writer;
Jenny Krasner, independent artist
37
South Asian Encounters: Anthropologies of Travel
and the Visual
Chairs: Renate Dohmen, University of Louisiana at Lafayette;
Natasha Eaton, University College London
44
CAA Committee on Diversity Practices
Diversity and Retention in the Academy
Chair: Kevin C. Concannon, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University
37
Association of Art Museum Curators
The Curatorial Career: Perspectives on the Profession
Chair: Judith F. Dolkart, The Barnes Foundation
Design Studies Forum
Research Informing Design
Chair: Brian Donnelly, Sheridan College
44
Visual Culture Caucus
Life’s Edge: A Thinking-Feeling Lab in the Risks, Powers,
and Possibilities of Forms-of-Life
Chair: Jill H. Casid, University of Wisconsin–Madison
27
Making Art, Making Time
Chairs: Ignaz Cassar, independent artist; Eve Kalyva,
University of Buenos Aires
27
Roman Art History: The Shock of the New
Chairs: Kimberly Cassibry, Wellesley College; James Frakes,
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
28
Society for Photographic Education
Traversing the Void: Synchronized Community Projects
Chair: Shannon Lee Castleman, Nanyang Technological
University
29
From Lesser to Tanya Ury: German-Jewish Artists,
1890–2010, Part I
Chair: Peter Chametzky, University of South Carolina
30
1890–2010, Part II
30
Transmaterialities: Materials, Process, History
Chairs: Richard Checketts, University of Leeds; Marta Ajmar,
Victoria and Albert Museum
31
Art Historians of Southern California
State of the Discipline: The Position of Non-Western Art
in Art History
Chairs: Kristen Chiem and Cynthia S. Colburn, Art Historians
of Southern California
32
Art, Literature, and Music in Symbolism and Decadence
Symbolist Dualities
Chair: Deborah H. Cibelli, Nicholls State University
33
The Modern Interior as Space and Image, Part I
Chairs: Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University; Anca I. Lasc,
Shippensburg University
34
The Modern Interior as Space and Image, Part II
C A A 2 0 1 3 FE B RUARY 13– 16
5
The Darwin Effect: Evolutionary Theory, Art, and
Aesthetic Thought
Chairs: Michael Dorsch, The Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Science and Art; Jean Marie Evans,
The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
45
Online Education in Fine Arts: Helpful Way In or
Easy Way Out?
Chair: Jessica Doyle, Institute for Doctoral Studies
in the Visual Arts
46
Military and the Landscape: Revealing and Reflecting
Chair: Ruth A. Dusseault, independent artist
47
Putting Design in Boxes: The Problem of Taxonomy
Chair: Craig Eliason, University of St. Thomas
Association of Historians of American Art
The Art History of American Periodical Illustration
Chairs: Jaleen Grove, State University of New York at Stony
Brook; Doug B. Dowd, Washington University in St. Louis
58
Making Inroads, Paving the Way: Postwar Architecture,
Design, and the Formation of Jewish-American Identity
Chairs: Kai K. Gutschow, Carnegie Mellon University;
Lynnette Widder, Columbia University
59
Mad “Men” and the Visual Culture of the Long Sixties
Chair: Mona Hadler, Brooklyn College and The Graduate
Center, City University of New York
60
49
Art/History and the Small Liberal Arts College
Chair: Christine Y. Hahn, Kalamazoo College
61
Arts of Transition: Visual Culture, Democracy, and
Disillusionment in Latin America
Chairs: George F. Flaherty, University of Texas at Austin;
Luis M. Castañeda, Syracuse University
49
Material and Narrative Histories: Rethinking the Approach
to Inventories and Catalogues
Chairs: Anne Helmreich, Getty Foundation;
Francesco Freddolini, Luther College, University of Regina
62
Medieval Art and Response, ca. 1300–ca. 1500
Chairs: Theresa Flanigan, The College of Saint Rose;
Holly Flora, Tulane University
50
Sexing Sculpture: New Approaches to Theorizing the Object
Chairs: Jillian Hernandez, Rutgers, The State University of
New Jersey; Susan Richmond, Georgia State University
63
International Center of Medieval Art
Jerusalem: Medieval Art, History, and Sanctity through
the Eyes of Many Faiths
Chair: Cathleen A. Fleck, Saint Louis University
51
Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture
Emerging Scholars
Chair: Keith Holz, Western Illinois University
64
Critiquing Criticality
Chairs: Pamela Lynn Fraser, University of Vermont;
Randall David Szott
52
The Particulars of Postidentity
Chairs: Jessica L. Horton, Center for Advanced Study in the
Visual Arts; Cherise Smith, University of Texas at Austin
64
New Approaches to the Study of Historical Arts in Africa
Chair: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, The City College,
City University of New York
54
Southeastern College Art Conference
The Place of the Viewer, 1950s–1960s
Chair: Kerr Houston, Maryland Institute College of Art
65
66
Design and Business: Strange Bedfellows or Two Sides
of the Same Coin?
Chair: Chris Garvin, The University of the Arts
55
Reconsidering the Nineteenth Century through Asian Art
Chairs: Ellen Chang Huang, University of San Francisco;
Sunglim Kim, Dartmouth College
67
Performativity, the Performative, and Performance
in Contemporary Art
Chair: Robert Gero, State University of New York at
Old Westbury
56
Indigeneity on the Global Stage
Chair: Elizabeth Hutchinson, Barnard College,
Columbia University
68
Italian Art Society
Disegno
Chair: Diana Gisolfi, Pratt Institute-Pratt in Venice
56
Art and Artists in the Field of Cultural Production:
Reception Studies, Part I
Chair: Ruth E. Iskin, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
69
Building for the “Common Good”: Public Works,
Civic Architecture, and Their Representation in
Bourbon Latin America
Chairs: Luis J. Gordo-Peláez, University of Texas at Austin;
Paul B. Niell, Florida State University
57
Reception Studies, Part II
Nordic Modernism at Home and Abroad, 1880–1920
Chairs: Kirsten Jensen, Hudson River Museum; Leslie Anne
Anderson, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
70
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
Art and Product Placement, 1850–1918
Chairs: Gloria Groom, The Art Institute of Chicago;
Martha Tedeschi, The Art Institute of Chicago
57
The Latin American Presence at International Exhibitions,
1855–Present
Chairs: Maya Jiménez, Kingsborough Community
College, City University of New York; Michele Greet,
George Mason University
70
C A A 2 0 1 3 FE B RUARY 13– 16
6
Crossing Continents: Expatriate Histories of Art
in the Twentieth Century
Chair: Geraldine A. Johnson, University of Oxford
71
Photography in Doubt, Part I
Chairs: Sabine Tania Kriebel, University College Cork;
Andres Mario Zervigon, Rutgers, The State University of
New Jersey
82
The Visual Culture of Global Trade: Early American
Interactions with Asia and the Pacific
Chair: Patricia Johnston, College of the Holy Cross
72
Border Crossings: Rethinking Identity Questions
|in Art and Architecture
Chair: Carol Herselle Krinsky, New York University
83
International Association of Word and Image Studies
From the Wall, to the Press, to the Streets
Chairs: Eve Kalyva, University of Buenos Aires; Ignaz Cassar,
independent artist
73
84
American Council for Southern Asian Art
Thinking beyond Royalty: Reassessing Temple Patronage
in Premodern South Asia
Chairs: Katherine E. Kasdorf, Columbia University; Risha Lee,
National University of Singapore
74
Myth and Modernism: New Perspectives on the 1913
Armory Show
Chairs: Marilyn Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt, New-York
Historical Society; Stephanie A. D’Alessandro, The Art
Institute of Chicago
ARTspace
Pieces and Bits: Hybrid Art that Combines Physical
Forms with Internet Components
Chair: Robert Lawrence, University of South Florida
85
CAA Services to Artists Committee
Meta-Mentors: Double Duty
Chairs: Niku Kashef, California State University, Northridge;
Timothy Nolan, independent artist
75
86
Art Worlds in Asia
Chair: Sonal Khullar, University of Washington
75
Questioning Feminisms in Latin America’s Art Histories
Chairs: Aleca Le Blanc, Getty Research Institute,
Harper Montgomery, Hunter College, City University of
New York
87
Interventions into Postcolonialism and Beyond: A Call
for New Sites, Objects, and Times
Chairs: Kivanc Kilinc, Izmir University of Economics;
Saygin Salgirli, Sabanci University
76
Mapping Spaces: Cartographic Practices in Art
and Architecture, Part I
Chair: Min Kyung Lee, Swarthmore College
88
Imagining Creative Teaching Strategies in Art History
Chairs: Lise Kjaer and Marit Dewhurst, The City College of
New York, City University of New York
77
and Architecture, Part II
89
AP Art History and AP Studio Art
Working with the Sketchbook Page
Chairs: Yu Bong Ko, Tappan Zee High School and Dominican
College; Dale Clifford, Savannah College of Art and Design
77
Crossing Oceans: Visual Culture and the History
of Exchange in Colonial Latin America
Chairs: Dana Leibsohn, Smith College; Meha Priyadarshini,
Columbia University
Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change
Chair: Cecelia Levin, Harvard University
90
Leonardo Education and Art Forum
Re/Search: Art, Science, and Information Technology
(ASIT): What Would Leonardo da Vinci Have Thought?
Chair: Joseph S. Lewis, University of California, Irvine
91
How to Make a Living as an Artist: With or
Without a Dealer
Chairs: Sharon Louden, independent artist; Sharon Butler,
Eastern Connecticut State University
91
Midwest Art History Society
Utrecht Caravaggism in the Midwest:
Hendrick ter Brugghen’s St. Sebastian Tended by Irene
Chair: Henry Luttikhuizen, Calvin College
91
Harems Imagined and Real
Chair: Heather Madar, Humboldt State University
92
Olfactory Art
Chairs: Adrian Kohn, Massachusetts College of Art and Design;
Chandler Burr, Museum of Arts and Design
ARTspace
The Imaginary City in the Twenty-First Century
Chairs: Ayse Hazar Koksal, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University;
Ayse Nur Erek, Yeditepe University
78
79
Ancient Greek and Roman Art
Chair: Christine Kondoleon, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
79
Historians of Netherlandish Art
Wood, Glass, Wax, Stone: Beyond Panel Painting
in the Northern Renaissance and Baroque
Chair: Ellen Konowitz, State University of New York at
New Paltz
80
Model Images
Chair: Juliet Koss, Scripps College
81
C A A 2 0 1 3 FE B RUARY 13– 16
7
Arts Council of the African Studies Association
Bodies of Knowledge: Interviews, Interlocutors, and
Art-Historical Narratives
Chairs: Carol Magee, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill; Joanna Grabski, Denison University
93
Multiples in Context: The Early Years
Chairs: Meredith Malone, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum,
Washington University in St. Louis; Bradley Bailey,
Saint Louis University
94
Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association
Collaborative Understanding through Technical
Investigations: Art Scholars, Conservators, and Scientists
Researching in Tandem
Chairs: Steven Manford, independent scholar; Joyce Hill Stoner,
University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum
95
Deterritorializing Design: Rethinking the Relationship
between Theory and Practice
Chair: Betti Marenko, Central Saint Martins, University of the
Arts London
96
Technical Art History and the University Curriculum
Chairs: Michele Marincola, Institute of Fine Arts, New York
University; Charlotte Nichols, Seton Hall University
96
Seeing/Knowing: Image Theory and Learning Strategies
across the University Curriculum
Chair: Natalie R. Marsh, Graham Gund Gallery, Kenyon College
97
The Work of Art Criticism in the Age of Blogs and Ezines
Chairs: Diana Spitzer McClintock, Kennesaw State University;
Susan Todd-Raque, independent curator
98
Pacific Arts Association
The Home, the Museum, and the Gallery: Illuminating
the Nexus between Identity, Materiality, and Visual
Culture in the Pacific
Chairs: Fiona P. McDonald, University College London;
Bronwyn Labrum, Massey University
99
Engagements between Indigenous and Contemporary Art
Chair: Ian McLean, University of Wollongong
99
Not I: The Desire of the Nonsubject Queer
Chairs: Dan Taulapapa McMullin, independent artist;
Clifford Eberly, independent artist
100
Artists, Architects, Libraries, and Books, 1400–1800
Chairs: Sarah McPhee, Emory University; Heather Hyde Minor,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
100
Abstraction and Totality
Chairs: Ara Hagop Merjian, New York University;
Anthony George White, University of Melbourne
101
Interpreting Animals and Animality
Chair: Susan Michelle Merriam, Bard College
102
Beyond Good or Bad: Practice-Derived Epistemologies
of Studio Critique
Chairs: Adelheid Mers, School of the Art Institute of Chicago;
Judith Leemann, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
103
Uneasy Guardians: Ensuring the Future of Intractable
Art Forms
Chairs: Megan Metcalf, University of California, Los Angeles;
Holly Rachel Harrison, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
104
Appraisers Association of America
Today’s Qualified Appraiser: An Essential Ally for Artists,
Museums, and University Galleries
Chair: Anne Frances Moore, AFM-MFM Fine Art
105
Association for Critical Race Art History
Subaltern Rising: Racialization and Visual Culture in
the Wake of Independence
Chairs: José Esteban Muñoz, New York University;
Erica Agyeman, independent curator
105
To What End? Eschatology in Art Historiography
Chair: Jeanne-Marie Musto, Fordham University
106
The Experience of the Studio: Master–Pupil Relationships
in Europe and China, 1400–1700
Chairs: Christina Neilson, Oberlin College; Michele Matteini,
Reed College
107
Art and Medicine: Reciprocal Influence
Chairs: Patricia Olynyk, Washington University in St. Louis;
Adrienne G. Klein, The Graduate Center, City University of
New York
108
Future Directions in Nineteenth-Century Art History
Chair: Morna O’Neill, Wake Forest University
108
Women’s Caucus for Art
Women’s Caucus for Art’s Blockbuster Exhibitions:
Renewal, Activism, and Innovation
Chair: Priscilla Otani, Women’s Caucus for Art
109
Central Europe’s Others in Art and Visual Culture, Part I
Chairs: Elizabeth Otto, University at Buffalo, State University of
New York; Brett Vanhoesen, University of Nevada, Reno
109
Central Europe’s Others in Art and Visual Culture, Part II
New York; Brett Van Hoesen, University of Nevada, Reno
110
Conservator: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the
Study of Islamic Tilework
Chairs: Keelan Overton; Jonathan Bloom, Boston College
111
Representations of “Race” in Iberia and the
Ibero-American World
Chair: Pamela A. Patton, Southern Methodist University
112
C A A 2 0 1 3 FE B RUARY 13– 16
8
Hybrid Practices
Chairs: Vesna Pavlovic, Vanderbilt University; Niku Kashef,
California State University, Northridge
113
Receptions of Antiquity, Receptions of Gender?
Ancient Mythology, Sculpture, and Identity in Art
of the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries
Chairs: Marice Rose, Fairfield University; Alison Poe,
Fairfield University
121
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
Gender and Artistic Practice in Early Modern Europe:
Media, Genres, and Formats
Chairs: Andrea Pearson, American University; Melissa Hyde,
University of Florida
113
“Assembly Instructions Included”: Balancing Structure
and Freedom in Studio-Art Courses
Chairs: Casey Ruble, Fordham University; Lynn Sullivan,
Hunter College, City University of New York
122
Plato’s Dilemma: Unweaving the Threads Binding
Art and Religion
Chair: Donald Preziosi, University of California, Los Angeles
114
Face the Scientists
Chairs: Francesca Gould Samsel, independent artist;
Daniel Keefe, University of Minnesota
122
Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab
World, Iran, and Turkey
A Revolution in Art? The Arab Uprisings and
Artistic Production
Chairs: Dina A. Ramadan, Bard College; Jennifer Pruitt,
Smith College
115
Public Art Dialogue
Time, Transience, Duration
Chair: Norie Sato, independent artist
123
123
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
New Scholars Session: International Artists Working in
Eighteenth-Century Great Britain
Chair: Amelia Rauser, Franklin and Marshall College
116
CAA Committee on Women in the Arts
Gender Politics in the Workplace, Part I
Chair: Claudia Sbrissa, St. John’s University
123
For and Against Homoeroticism: Artists, Authors,
and the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name
Chairs: Christopher Reed, Pennsylvania State University;
Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, University of Louisville
116
CAA Museum Committee
The Position of Academic Programs in Campus
Art Museums: What, Why, Who, and Where To?
Chairs: N. Elizabeth Schlatter, University of Richmond
Museums; Celka Straughn, Spencer Museum of Art,
University of Kansas
123
Reframing Postblack
Chair: Kathleen Reinhardt, Freie Universität Berlin
117
Open Session in Indian Art
Landscapes of Fear and Desire
Chairs: Tamara Sears, Yale University; Molly Emma Aitken,
The City College of New York, City University of New York
CAA Publications Committee
Book Reviews and Beyond: caa.reviews at Fifteen
Chair: Sheryl E. Reiss, University of Southern California
118
124
Art in the Age of Philosophy?
Chair: Hector Reyes, University of California, Los Angeles
118
CAA Education Committee
What We Teach: Perspectives on the Logic, Scope,
and Value of Art Appreciation
Chairs: Brian Seymour, Community College of Philadelphia;
Julia A. Sienkewicz, Duquesne University
124
Radical Art Caucus
Reconsidering Mural Painting, Part II: Working
Walls, Mural Painting, and Labor in the 1930s
Chairs: Sylvia Rhor, Carlow University; Heidi A. Cook,
University of Pittsburgh
119
Photography and Race
Chair: Tanya Sheehan, Rutgers, The State University of
New Jersey
Dystopia: Space, Architecture, and the Filmic Imaginary
Chair: Sadia Shirazi, independent curator and architect
125
125
Art Historians Interested in Pedagogy and Technology
Rock the Pedagogical Boat: Open Mic and Tweet
#caa2013rock
Chairs: Janice Robertson, Pratt Institute; Gale Justin,
Pratt Institute
119
Craft after Deskilling?
Chair: T’ai Smith, University of British Columbia
126
Feminism Meets the Big Exhibition: 2005 Onward
Chair: Hilary Robinson, Middlesex University
120
CAA Student and Emerging Professionals Committee
The Impact of Contingent Faculty: Changing Trends
in Teaching and Tenure
Chairs: Jennifer Laurel Stoneking-Stewart, University of
Tennessee; Amanda Hellman, Emory University
127
Visual Resources Association
Archaeology Archives: Excavating the Record
Chairs: Jenni Rodda, Institute of Fine Arts, New York
University; Trudy Buxton Jacoby, Princeton University
121
ARTspace
On the Practice of Artist Arbiter
Chairs: Shannon Rae Stratton, threewalls and School of the
Art Institute; Duncan Mackenzie, Columbia College Chicago
C A A 2 0 1 3 FE B RUARY 13– 16
9
CAA Committee on Intellectual Property
Developing a Fair Use Code for the Visual Arts
Chair: Christine Leszczynski Sundt, Visual Resources:
An International Journal of Documentation
127
Public Art Dialogue
Reconsidering Mural Painting: New Methodologies
Chair: Sally Webster, Lehman College and The Graduate Center,
City University New York
136
Society of Contemporary Art Historians
The Social, the Relational, and the Participatory:
A Reevaluation
Chairs: John Tain, Getty Research Institute; Kirsten Swenson,
University of Massachusetts Lowell
127
A Renaissance Remnant: The Political Iconography of Justice
Chairs: Ruth Weisberg, University of Southern California;
Judith Resnik, Yale University
137
138
Visual Representations of Success and Crisis: Negative and
Positive Branding of Cities and Urban Spaces
Chair: Lina Tegtmeyer, Freie Universität Berlin
127
Disaster and Creativity
Chairs: Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University; Yoshiaki Shimizu,
Princeton University
139
Northern California Art Historians
The Cult of Beauty: Aestheticism in Late-NineteenthCentury Britain
Chair: Jan Newstrom Thompson, San Jose State University
128
Tapestry and Reproduction
Chairs: K. L. H. Wells, University of Southern California;
Barbara Caen, Universität Zürich
140
International Association of Art Critics
Art Criticism and Social Media
Chair: Phyllis Tuchman, independent critic
129
Committee on Women in the Arts
Take Two: Early Feminist Performance Art in
Contemporary Practice
Chair: Kathleen Wentrack, Queensborough Community College,
141
CAA Professional Practices Committee
Senior Exhibition Requirements for BFA and BA Programs
Chair: Robert Tynes, University of North Carolina at Asheville
129
American Council of Learned Societies
Twenty Years of Scholarship: The Luce/ACLS Dissertation
Fellowships in American Art
Chair: Steven C. Wheatley, American Council of Learned Societies
The Art of the Gift: Theorizing Objects in Early Modern
Cross-Cultural Exchange
Chairs: Nancy Um, Binghamton University; Leah R. Clark,
Saint Michael’s College
130
Art Libraries Society of North America
Artist’s Publications: Beyond Artist’s Books and Zines
Chair: Tony White, Maryland Institute College of Art
142
142
Southern Graphics Council International
Reproducing Authenticity
Chair: Jason Urban, Printeresting.org
131
Cultivating Nature as Art: Dialogues on the Rustic Garden in
the Long Eighteenth-Century and the Contemporary Practice
of Organic Art in the Landscape Post-1960
Chairs: Susan Wilson, independent scholar; Yuen Lai Winnie Chan,
University of Oxford
Studio Art Open Session
The Empathetic Body: Performance and the Blurring
of Private Self in Contemporary Art
Chair: Tricia Van Eck, 6018NORTH
132
143
The Body of the Artist and the Artist as Body in
American Artistic Practice
Chairs: Robin Veder, Pennsylvania State University;
Elizabeth Lee, Dickinson College
132
Civilizing the Midwest
Chairs: Paula Wisotzki, Loyola University Chicago;
Joseph Antenucci Becherer, Aquinas College and
Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park
Building a Legacy for Women Artists
Chair: Barbara A. Wolanin, United States Capitol
Historical Society
144
Rethinking Pacific Art: The Currency of the Object
Chairs: Caroline Vercoe, The University of Auckland;
Nina Tonga, The University of Auckland
133
Association of Art Historians
The Future Role of Art History in Curating Historic Collections
Chair: Alison Yarrington, University of Hull
145
The Changing Complexion of Theory
Chair: Ian Verstegen, independent scholar
134
145
New Media Caucus
Art in the Age of High Security
Chairs: Jenny Vogel, University of North Texas; David Stout,
University of North Texas
135
Gender Politics in the Workplace, Part II: The Next Generation
Chairs: Megan Koza Young, University of Kansas; Anitra Haendel,
California Institute of the Arts
Photography in Doubt, Part II
Chairs: Andres Mario Zervigon, Rutgers, The State University of
New Jersey; Sabine Tania Kriebel, University College Cork
146
Japan Art History Forum
The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art
Chair: Toshio Watanabe, University of the Arts London
136
Revolutions in China’s Printed Image: Print in Modern China
Chairs: Shaoqian Zhang, Oklahoma State University; Sonja Kelley,
Maryland Institute College of Art
146
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
10
The Proof Is in the Print: Avant-Garde Approaches to
the Historical Materials of Photography’s Avant-Garde
Chairs: Mitra Monir Abbaspour and Lee Ann Daffner, The Museum
of Modern Art
prints formerly in his possession transform each into a unique,
historically rich document. They shed light upon the prints’ provenance,
attribution, dating, imagery, and, more broadly, the networks through
which they passed. Tzara’s mark paradoxically identifies these prints
as unique while laying bare the systems through which they were
disseminated and replicated ad infinitum.
The year 2013 marks the centennial of 35mm film’s introduction to
still photography and the development of the prototype for the Leica
camera. After the Leica’s 1925 public debut, this pair of technical
developments significantly increased the photographer’s aesthetic
choices in picture taking and printmaking. Modernist photography
developed at a feverish pace in the 1920s and 1930s, fueled by an
increasing abundance of gelatin silver papers on the market, a rapid
development of photomechanical technologies, a growing cadre of
amateurs, journalists, and avant-garde artists, and a burgeoning of
photo-illustrated journals, photographic exhibitions, and amateur and
avant-garde experimentation with the medium. While the historical
dynamism of this moment has been well studied, this session considers
how the events of this era are manifest in modernist photography
from the perspective of its material artifacts: photographic prints.
Groundbreaking studies by conservators and conservation scientists are
graphing the chemical and material constituents of the photographic
material, altering our fundamental knowledge of this medium. These
practices, already commonplace with old-master paintings, provide
an innovative platform from which to reconsider the history of
photography. Curatorial and scholarly efforts focused on the translation
of historical texts and a consideration of photographs within the context
of their own archival documents engender a history of photography
rooted in its material history.
The Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibition to include photography,
Murals by American Painters and Photographers (1932), presented
the medium as an art of public address. Seeking to move away from
regionalism, the “unprecedented” photo-mural format inaugurated
a demotic, uniquely American contribution to muralism, one whose
mechanical means and vertiginous views of monumental architecture
expressed the machine age. This paper considers the relative
unpopularity of photography as a technique for American murals in the
1930s, despite its auspicious debut. Like the montage they frequently
employ, the photo murals gain meaning in juxtaposition: their technical
adventurousness bears traces of the European avant-garde and its
translation into contemporary advertising imagery, photographic
traditions rejected by the museum in a nationwide embrace of straight
photography. The photo murals illuminate the decisive influence of the
print in articulating a modernist aesthetic in American photography,
where purist approaches renounced the photo murals’ ambivalent
relationship to European and commercial paradigms.
The Platinum and Palladium Initiative: Tools and Strategies
for Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Constance McCabe, National Gallery of Art
“You Have Seen Their Pictures”: Toward a Material History
of New Deal Photography
Stephen Pinson and Erin L. Murphy, The New York Public Library
Platinum and palladium prints are among the most rare and highly
valued photographs in today’s collections, yet their chemical nature
and natural aging are not completely understood. The photograph
conservation program at the National Gallery of Art has initiated a
collaborative investigation of the history, materials, connoisseurship, and
preservation of platinum photography. Standardized methodologies for
gathering, sharing, and coordinating technical research and databases
for documenting historic literature and advertisements are discussed. In
one investigation, carried out with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a
long-forgotten class of platinum prints was rediscovered and identified in
a number of collections. Manufactured by the Platinotype Company of
London between 1906 and 1937, “Japine” papers were favored by Alfred
Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Laura Gilpin, among other photographers.
Understanding these papers offers insight into the working methods and
aesthetic choices of these artists.
In the April 1940 issue of Survey Graphic, Hartley Howe tells the story
of the photographic section of the Farm Security Administration and
describes the ways in which people saw original prints, mostly through
exhibitions and deposits of the photographs in library collections. Roy
Stryker, the head of the FSA photography program, sent thirty-five
thousand of these prints to the New York Public Library, which now
holds the largest group of FSA prints outside the Library of Congress.
This presentation is based on a material analysis of a cross section
of these prints (including variant images that display obvious visible
differences) in the hopes of finding clues about provenance, date,
working methods, and use patterns. If the iconic status of the FSA
photographs today is based largely on reproductions, returning our
attention to the materiality of the physical prints will help us better
understand this seminal project of modern documentary photography.
Failure to Launch: Photography and the Modern American Mural
Kara Fiedorek, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Tzara’s Mark: The Vintage Photographic Print,
Unique and Proliferating
Adrian Sudhalter, Dedalus Foundation
Northern European Art, 1400–1700:
Recent Discoveries through Technical Art History
Tristan Tzara inscribed the photographs of artists and artworks he
received in 1920 and 1921 for his planned publication Dadaglobe with
special numbers on their versos related to their intended reproduction
therein. When Dadaglobe was abandoned, Tzara forwarded many
of these photographs to magazine editors and impresarios of the
avant-garde, resulting in their reproduction in avant-garde and
popular publications worldwide—from De Stijl to Vanity Fair. As a
result, photo-based works by Max Ernst and Man Ray, for example,
proliferated in the print media. Tzara’s inscriptions on the photographic
Object-based art history, especially the technical examination of
artworks in an interdisciplinary context, is not the exclusive domain
of curators, conservators, and scientists in art museums but takes
place increasingly in academic institutions. This session presents
recent research about an artist’s work through close visual analysis
that challenges accepted views. Papers address diverse aspects of the
creation of or later adjustment to the work of art that prompts shifts
in the understanding of attribution, dating, appearance, function,
iconography, and interpretation.
Chair: Maryan Wynn Ainsworth, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
11
The Fishing Party in the Louvre by Jan van Eyck?
Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel, University of Amsterdam
In 2011 technical analysis was carried out on a late medieval drawing
The Fishing Party (Louvre), attributed to Jan van Eyck but also rejected
as a pastiche and too weak to be by the hand of the master. However,
MacroXRF analysis demonstrates that the two groups of figures were
not planned to face each other, and that the landscape in the background
belongs to the original plan. What consequences can the art historian
deduce from these facts? Should the fragments still be regarded as
sixteenth-century copies?
Image Processing for Research on the Ghent Altarpiece
Maximiliaan Martens and Annick Born, University of Ghent
Computer processing of digital images in support of art-historical
research and conservation science is a growing field, bridging several
disciplines such as computer science, mathematics, and engineering
with art history and conservation of works of art. The paper discusses
the methodological aspects of this type of research, illustrated with
the most recent results of the new photographic documentation of
the Ghent Altarpiece. Such an approach can function as a validation
method for stylistic analysis, and in this case as a contribution to the
division of hands in the Ghent Altarpiece.
From the Naked Eye to the Super Computer: New Light on
Dirk Bouts’s Canvas Paintings
Diane Wolfthal, Rice University; and Catherine Metzger,
National Gallery of Art
This paper sheds new light on the five works painted in glue colors
on finely woven linen that have long been attributed to Dirk Bouts
and thought to have originally formed a single ensemble: the
Entombment in London, the Crucifixion in Brussels, the Resurrection
and Annunciation in Los Angeles, and the Adoration of the Magi
in a private European collection. Multilayered evidence, including
iconographic and stylistic analysis, an understanding of how canvas
paintings were displayed in Flanders and in Italy, pigment analysis,
weave matches, and measuring the area within the painted borders
(which differed from the current exposed area), led to the conclusion
that only two of the canvases were produced at the same time.
Reconstructing the So-Called Berlin Sketchbook: New Insights
Resulting from Material Analysis
Ilona van Tuinen, Leiden Gallery
The Berlin Kupferstichkabinett preserves an album containing
fifty-one small, randomly organized sheets originating from the
same sketchbook. As Kurt Steinbart rightly noticed in 1929, this socalled Berlin Sketchbook can be connected to the workshop of the
Amsterdam-based Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (ca. 1470–ca. 1533),
making it the earliest extant Northern Netherlandish sketchbook.
This paper presents the results of material analysis of the watermarks,
catenary lines, original binding perforations, and any idiosyncratic
marks such as those caused by humidity and ink stains. These material
data have enabled a reconstruction of the original sequence of drawings
and provide new insights into the purpose, iconography, and dating of
the sketchbook.
The Adjustments of a Triptych by Pieter Claeissens I:
An Exceptional Situation or Common Practice?
Anne van Oosterwijk, Groeningemuseum and University of Ghent
As Bruges underwent a period of recession in the sixteenth century,
leading artists like members of the Claeissens family employed
innovative strategies to increase the marketability of their paintings.
The technical study of a triptych and the analysis of a contract have
shed new light on the artistic entrepreneurship of Gillis, the eldest
son of Pieter I Claeissens. Gillis made it his aim to adopt his father’s
workshop, not only by securing his father’s clientele but also by using
his painterly skills to rework existing paintings by Pieter I in a hardly
recognizable way. Within the context of the struggling art market, such
evidence might be more important than hitherto thought.
The Decorative Arts within Art-Historical Discourse:
Where Is the Dialogue Now, and Where Is It Heading?
Chairs: Christina M. Anderson, University of Oxford;
Catherine L. Futter, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Within art history, the decorative arts have often been assigned the
status of minor arts in relation to the seemingly more glamorous areas
of painting, sculpture, and architecture. This panel investigates the
status of the decorative arts within art history through the lenses of
a number of different approaches—from material culture to gender
studies to Marxism and semiotics, among others. It asks in which
new directions the discourse is leading the discipline, and whether it
is still appropriate for students to be exposed to the decorative arts
only late in their undergraduate education or in graduate school. Are
museums, rather than the academy, better repositories of scholarship on
the decorative arts? Is the term “decorative arts” even the best choice
for describing art objects, or is it just as limiting as “applied arts,”
“material culture,” “design,” and “craft”?
Not Material Culture but Moveable Culture: A Consideration
of the Decorative Arts
Megan Aldrich, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London
Study of the decorative arts has gradually moved from the realm of the
connoisseur into art-historical discourse; yet American and European
scholarship has tended to position decorative art—as opposed to
fine art—within the categories of material culture, consumption, and
display. The boundaries between fine and decorative art are permeable;
high-end production of furniture and ceramics may be the work of fine
artists who incorporate iconography and meaning into their designs.
The term “material culture” can be too limiting and too reductive under
such circumstances, and it fails to engage with the complex layering of
ideas and cultural associations accumulated by decorative art objects
as they are recontextualized through changing hands and changing
locations over time. The term “moveable culture,” inspired by the
Renaissance legal concept of moveable property, can facilitate a better
understanding of the decorative arts.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
12
Listening to Objects: An Ecological Approach to the
Decorative Arts
Erin Campbell, University of Victoria
Beyond Terminology
Deborah Krohn, Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts,
Design History, Material Culture
To transcend the divisions in art-historical discourse between high art
and decorative art and between art and material culture, and inspired
by the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s call to listen to what the things in
the world are telling us, this paper proposes an ecological approach to
the decorative arts. In particular, with reference to selected examples
of furnishings in the early modern domestic interior, it examines
the concepts of meshwork, assemblage, distributive agency, vital
materiality, and matter as social performance, which appear in the
work of the political scientist Jane Bennett, feminist philosopher Karen
Barad, sociologist Bruno Latour, and Ingold. Such concepts provide a
phenomenological, integrative, and nonhierarchical framework for the
study of the decorative arts within the institutions and practices of art
history—one that allows us to analyze the social and material processes
through which the human and the material are intertwined.
Determining the meaning, status, and future of the term “decorative
arts” is not merely a question of disciplinary boundaries or institutional
practice. The term has both a specific historical meaning and continuing
relevance to terms such as “material culture” and “design history.”
While art history moved away from formalism, responding to social
history and contextual studies, the growth of design history in the
United Kingdom made the study of everyday objects into a new
discipline. Historians of design, fine, and decorative arts have since
embraced the term “material culture,” rejecting hierarchies determined
by the value or collectible qualities of objects. Using as a case study
an upcoming Bard Graduate Center exhibition about the formation
and display of an early-twentieth-century decorative arts collection
from George Hoentschel, this presentation moves the discourse on the
decorative away from the kinds of binary expressions that this session
invokes and that still linger in teaching.
The Decorative and Warhol’s Flower Factory, 1964
Liam Considine, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Andy Warhol’s Flowers (1964) transformed Pop art into decoration and
have often been considered devoid of iconographic content. However,
by recalling the sexual symbolism of Jean Genet’s prison novel Our
Lady of the Flowers, as well as Allen Ginsberg’s antiwar call for
“flower power,” Flowers took on meaning within the counterculture of
the mid-1960s. By soliciting a relationship with contemporary design,
Warhol’s motif extended to decorative objects and patterns such as
Maja Isola’s iconic Unikko print for Marimekko. Decoration often
served as a foil for midcentury articulations of modernist purity such
as Clement Greenberg’s description of decoration as “the specter that
haunts modernist painting” and Harold Rosenberg’s denigration of
failed action painting as “apocalyptic wallpaper.” By 1964 decorative
painting emerged as a subversion of modernist dogma, an interrogation
of the boundaries of fine and applied art, and a mediation of two- and
three-dimensional modes of perception.
Plastering over the Decorative Arts
Conor Lucey, University College Dublin
Decorative plasterwork was one of the most pervasive forms of interior
ornament practiced in early modern Europe. Located somewhat
uneasily between the liberal and mechanical arts, however, it has
arguably suffered most in the pedagogical shift from decorative
arts studies to the disciplines of design history and material culture.
Moreover, as a marginal interest within architectural histories,
plaster decoration has been overlooked in a burgeoning revisionist
literature devoted to the eighteenth-century domestic interior.
Reflecting on issues such as the business of house decoration and
its broader relationship to building culture, the creative autonomy
and financial competence enjoyed by plasterers and stuccoists, as
well as the often overlooked properties of visual delight and creative
improvisation characteristic of the medium, this paper argues that
the study of ornamental plasterwork can both confirm and contradict
our understanding of historic architectural spaces as the material
embodiment of genteel social identities and cultural mores.
The Watercolor: 1400–1750
Chairs: Susan Anderson, Harvard University Art Museums;
Odilia Bonebakker, Harvard University
Art history still tends to view watercolor as a modern phenomenon.
However, the medium (including gouache and distemper) enjoyed
broad-ranging application in a wide spectrum of independent,
finished objects produced before 1750. Neither painting nor drawing,
and practiced by professionals and amateurs, watercolor resisted
contemporary categorization and cohesive analysis during this period of
institutionalizing art and its makers. Despite watercolor’s conspicuous
presence, a thorough discussion of its theory, practice, and collecting
habits from 1400 to 1750 has been wanting. This session places early
watercolors within their own historical, geographical, and cultural
moments.
British Art Theory of Limning from Hilliard to Norgate
Ulrike Kern, Goethe University
Miniature painting enjoyed more popularity in seventeenth-century
England than in any other European country, which is reflected in
the art theory of the period. This paper compares selected British
art treatises, from the first English writings on art at the end of the
sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and explores how artistic
terminology related to techniques of limning was created, defined,
and applied. It discusses how aesthetic criteria were formed to
describe practices of limning, including technical problems such as
transparency of paint, light, drawing, and coloring as well as conceptual
ones such as likeness, portraiture, landscape, and history painting. In
addition to treatises by the miniature painters Nicolas Hilliard and
Edward Norgate, lesser-studied writings, some by nonprofessionals,
are considered. This contribution presents new insights into an early
English art-theoretical vocabulary and how it relates to the production
and perception of miniature painting in Britain.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
13
Watercolor in French Manuscript Painting: The Songe du Pastourel
(Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2556)
Christoph Brachmann, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
American Institute of Graphic Arts
The original text of the Songe du Pastourel (The Dream of the
Young Shepherd) was composed after the Battle of Nancy in 1477
(the Burgundian duke Charles the Bold vs. René II of Lorraine) for
dramatic performance in honor of the victor of the battle, Duke René
II. About thirty years later, after the duke’s death, the play became
too outdated to be performed any longer under his son, Anthony the
Good. Therefore, in about 1515 Anthony directed its transformation
into a more permanent but less public form: a lavishly illustrated
manuscript of considerable size, each page dominated by delicate
watercolor paintings. The then quite unusual technique is remarkable
as is the fact that these paintings present an interesting crossover of
French watercolor works of the mid-fifteenth century and of German
Renaissance art of the early sixteenth century, crafted in the very
same medium.
Chairs: Helen Armstrong, Miami University; Lee Vander Kooi,
Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis
The Artful Evolution of Catherine Perrot’s Career:
Painter, Teacher, Academician, Author
Joanne McKeown, Moravian College
Catherine Perrot (b. 1620), one of only fifteen women in the Académie
Royale de la Peinture et de la Sculpture, art instructor to members of
the royal family, and student of the famed Nicolas Robert, published
watercolor manuals in 1682 and 1695. Largely unknown today,
Perrot’s publications illumined Robert’s work and contributed to the
glorification of Louis XIV, the powerful monarch and patron of the
arts. Calling painting “the language of mutes,” however, Perrot was
arguably equally interested in communicating how to paint flowers,
birds, and other traditional subjects to anyone who could read and
purchase materials. In a comparison of the language and subjects of her
two works and of Claude Boutet’s Escole de la Mignature (1679), the
paper shows a woman who artfully managed her opportunities, work,
and written expression to fashion an exceptional career at court while
offering to others the opportunity for artistic voice.
ARTspace
Design as Intermedia Practice
Chair: Jacki Apple, Art Center College of Design
Design theory, research, and practice are the new avant-garde, bringing
together art, architecture, fashion, products, habitats, communications,
technology, and environments to take a fresh look at the content and
meaning of material culture. This session examines what we make and
why and how it shapes the social, political, and economic landscape on
both a local and global scale. What are the new design prototypes and
strategies, from ideation to realization, for a sustainable environmental
and social culture? How are new technologies being used for a
progressive agenda? Can design thinking be applied to all fields of
endeavor? Collaboration, Interaction, Participation: What Does the
Rise of Participatory Culture Mean for Art and Design
Education and Practice?
Creativity is no longer the sole territory of a separate creative
class. Artists and designers now face an activated public. Today’s
users approach art and design with a growing expectation that they
participate in the generation of content and the shaping of their own
experiences. The burgeoning DIY, open source, and free culture
movements reflect the growing values of participation, openness, and
inclusion. What does this shift toward participation mean to art and
design, and to the classroom? Are there new competencies that art
and design education need to address? Should artists and designers
act as expert leaders of this widespread creative impulse, or should
they stand apart, reinforcing their own credentials? What place do
dialogical and relational aesthetic models have in the discussion? If
the artist/designer–audience divide breaks down, what new modes of
collaboration emerge? How do we prepare students for a climate in
which feedback is instantaneous and for projects often developed and
propagated not just by the artists and designers but also by the people
themselves? How will such a fundamental shift toward bottom-up
creation affect our society, our disciplines, and our classrooms?
Open Session
French Art, 1715–89
Chair: Colin B. Bailey, The Frick Collection
This session sheds new light on individual painters, draftsmen,
printmakers, sculptors, practitioners of the decorative arts, and
architects in the period between the Regency and the end of Louis
XVI’s reign. It also illuminates the range of approaches and
methodologies that have revitalized the study of eighteenth-century
French art in the past two decades.
The Chinese Elephant: Unpacking an Improbable Pachyderm
Judy Sund, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University
of New York
In the early modern era most Europeans in China were confined
to Canton by administrators wary of foreigners. Left to imagine
the interior, Westerners constructed a fictive and fluid “China” that
incorporated aspects of other, more accessible Asian realms. The
“emperor’s elephant”—more common to European chinoiserie than to
contemporaneous Chinese art—is an example. While Johan Nieuhof,
in his illustrated chronicle of travels in China (1665), reported seeing
elephants in the Forbidden City, the most likely inspirations for the
pale-hued and lavishly bedecked imperial elephant of European
chinoiserie were the many verbal and visual accounts of Siam (“Land
of the White Elephant”) occasioned by Franco-Siamese diplomatic
exchanges of the 1680s. The pinkish elephant included in a Beauvais
tapestry depicting the enthroned Chinese emperor (ca. 1690) led the
charge; pallid imperial pachyderms subsequently appeared in painted
chinoiserie by Audran, Effner, and Pillement, and inspired Sèvres tête
d’éléphant vases.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
14
Dogsbodies: Animal Combat Paintings and Human
Hierarchies in Eighteenth-Century France
Amy Freund, Texas Christian University
Below the Radar: Etching and Camaraderie at the
Académie de France in Rome
Perrin Stein, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Animal combat scenes by François Desportes and Jean-Baptiste
Oudry, often dismissed as a minor genre of only antiquarian interest,
intervened in the eighteenth century’s most important political and
aesthetic debates. These ambitious compositions, in which groups
of dogs pursue and attack other animals, are dramatic, violent, and
avowedly masculine—history paintings without humans. Their
rhetorical power hinges on the role of the canine hero. The hunting
dog is a product of careful breeding: beautiful, physically powerful,
disciplined, and fearless. At the same time, the dog is ruled by its senses
and naturally given to violence. In animal combat scenes, royal and
noble viewers saw themselves, in dogs’ bodies, enforcing hierarchies
that were entirely natural but prone to violent reversals. These paintings
evoke both human self-possession and barely restrained animal spirits,
visualizing the problems of privilege, class identity, and political power
under the absolute monarchy.
Printmaking in eighteenth-century France was considered a
reproductive art and not seen as a necessary skill for young painters,
sculptors, or architects being trained within the hierarchical
and structured pedagogy of the Académie Royale. And yet, the
unsanctioned practice of etching flourished among the young
pensionnaires in Rome in the middle decades of the eighteenth century.
This paper explores why an activity outside the official curriculum
and without clear financial benefit would thrive in this setting, and, in
particular, how it was integrated into the social fabric of camaraderie
that existed between the pensionnaires and the French amateurs visiting
and residing in Rome.
Donning the Friar’s Habit: Mademoiselle de Charolais
“en Cordelier”
Melissa Percival, University of Exeter
The philosophies, practices, language, and pedagogy of the aesthetic
of funk deserve more scholarly research and development. The
aesthetic of funk is a mystical rehab culture for dispossessed African
Americans abducted into an industrial/agricultural society. Funk music
has chronicled the existence of the unbroken, unassimilated spirit, of
the “down-home” element of black life in North America since the
Emancipation Proclamation. The culture of funk is the evolution of
black consciousness, designed by and for African Americans for selfdeliverance from harsh conditions through sustainable living, while
“bum-rushing” the message of energy-conductive properties in the
polyrhythm of life in grand style. The aesthetic of funk is the nucleus
of African American culture. Its radical art forms have rationalized,
ritualized, and revitalized a way out of no way. They have established
a sense of nobility from the underbelly of North American culture.
Funk has spiritually supported the black labor forces and fostered the
mainstream. This panel brings together scholars, therapists, artists,
designers, DJs, MCs, students, ultrahip homemakers, funk-a-teers, wiz
kids, and nerds to examine the historical applications and the many
brands of the aesthetic of funk, through music, art, crafts, design, and
digital media.
Charles-Joseph Natoire’s Mademoiselle de Charolais Dressed as a
Franciscan Friar (Versailles, Musée du Château, ca. 1730) irreverently
depicts Louis XIV’s granddaughter in the guise of a humble Franciscan.
This paper investigates the portrait’s multiple crossovers: female to
male; worldly to pious; highborn to poor. It also draws attention to
the broader phenomenon of the portrait historié in religious garb in
early-eighteenth-century France. The risqué disguise in Natoire’s
portrait befits a woman who was more sexually liberated than her
peers: the Franciscan’s rope belt (cordon, from which the French name
“Cordelier” is derived) was overtly sexualized in eighteenth-century
culture. Contrasting with portraits of actual devotion, the portrait of
Charolais subverts the avowed simplicity of the Franciscan order
with its self-conscious role-play. It displays an aristocratic notion of
identity through its nonchalant picking of attires from across the
social spectrum.
Gabriel Huquier (1695–1772), an Archival Portrait
David Pullins, Harvard University
Gabriel Huquier’s printed legacy is enormous: more than two thousand
engravings after the leading artists, ornamentistes, and architects of
the first half of the eighteenth century, including Antoine Watteau,
Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher, Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier, and
Jean-Marie Oppenord. About Huquier himself, however, surprisingly
little has been established. His extensive activities as a collector and
dealer, his workshop structure, and even his biography remain poorly
understood. Rather than focus on Huquier’s often undated prints after
others, this paper addresses alternate sources to which scholars have
not taken sufficient recourse: his after-death inventory, sales catalogues
of his collection and stock, surviving works bearing his collector’s
mark, the journals and letters of his contemporaries, eighteenth-century
guides to Paris, and, finally, original works by Huquier’s own hand,
which previously have not been considered as a group.
Funktioning with Nothing but the Funk: Black Art
and Design, the Final Frontier in Reconstruction
Chair: Xenobia Bailey, independent artist
The Funk of Black Contradictions
Rickey Vincent, University of California, Berkeley, and
City College of San Francisco
This discussion incorporates the universal healing power of the funk
as a means to address two contradictory elements of both black history
and black social life: the Black Power movement of the 1960s, and
expressions of black anger toward the generations of violent oppression
by whites in America. How does one first express and then mediate the
outrage of centuries of savage treatment by fellow American citizens?
How does one transcend without conceding or trivializing? The
discussion involves the process of reconciliation between the slave past
and the post–Civil Rights future for African Americans. How does one
look forward through a black conscious lens toward a future world that
is not burdened by a shameful past or a confused present? What are the
coping mechanisms and skills needed to move forward, with a clear
vision of what was past?
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
15
Spit Do Make Babies: The Long, Black, Inseminating Tongue of the
Dogon, George Clinton, and the God Rakim—A Study of Linguistic
Play, Paganism, and Alchemy in Post-African Griot “Kulcha”
Greg Tate, independant scholar
This paper examines the relationship between North and West African
traditions of verbal improvisation and core African American traditions
of blues, gospel, jazz, funk, reggae, and hip-hop. The title is a play
on a song by George Clinton called ‘‘No Compute (Spit Don’t Make
Babies).” The notion that rhythmatized speech is incantatory and
magical has ancient roots. All of the music under discussion are tranceinducing total art forms; their visual and performance aspects complete
our sensual, spiritual, and intellectual understanding of them.
The Art of Bessie Harvey: African Juju in the Forest
of North America
Brooke Davis Anderson, independent curator
Bessie Harvey (1929–1994) exploited the properties of tree roots by
manipulating their natural aspects to create startling, singular, and
emotive sculptures. For nearly thirty years Harvey proved herself a
master of sculptural economy, making elegant large-scale sculptures
that, the artist declared, freed the spirits and souls captured in
trees. She once remarked, “I have a feeling for Africa. I see African
people in the trees and in the roots. I talk to the trees. There’s souls
in the branches and roots. I frees them.” She was urged to explore
art making while struggling with several life challenges: parenting,
economics, loss, and death. Intuitively indulging in art making as a
therapeutic act, the artist applied practices of modern art therapy with
strategies of ancient African medicine. In many ways Bessie Harvey’s
story may be the quintessential story of the female artist balancing
family with studio practice.
The Art, Design, and the Mojo of the Groove in the Key of Life:
Black Music as a Model for Progressive Design in North America
Xenobia Bailey, independant artist
Since the emancipation of the enslaved Africans in North America in
the 1860s, the aesthetic of funk was the sustainable lifestyle that served
as the crossroads to the industrial world and the world of agriculture
in the neo–African American rural and urban communities. Many
African American households and self-made community business
owners practice this genre of design and management on a daily basis.
This natural lifestyle maintains a connection to the continuum of the
evolution of the human species, a connection to nature, nurturing, and
some form of cultural bond to the very distant and almost forgotten
creativity and trades of Africa. This paper acknowledges many levels
of this very potent aesthetic: the importance of its presence in the
development of design; the revitalization of design practices from the
African American community; and the present cultural shift toward a
neo-funk genre, of raw, free-form design to Minimal/Cubist design on
the grid.
About Face: Looking Beyond the Icon’s Gaze
Chair: Charles Barber, University of Notre Dame
Christ, the Mother of God, and the saints look back at us from their
icons. Each is precisely and recognizably described within the
constraints of a visual tradition. Each confronts us with the promise
of a presence that escapes our gaze. For these are not representations;
the faces we see cannot contain the faces that we desire to see. Rather,
these painted faces call attention to the medium that presents them,
describing its limits in the very precision of the delineations found in
the portraits. The face is present there yet presents nothing other than
itself. Those looking at it cannot compensate for this lack. Instead
they discover a vista of endless desire. It is an experience that may be
overcome only by the eventual and miraculous collapse of painting’s
economy of difference and deferral, when the initial recognition that
opens the portrait’s work lets the unrecognizable in the portrait appear.
This panel on sacred portraits puts recent theoretical perspectives into
conversation with the philosophers, theologians, and objects of the
Byzantine world.
The Anaphoric Icon: The Traveling Virgin of Naupaktos
Anthony Cutler, Pennsylvania State University
The Mother of God of the Naupaktian Women was an icon that,
according to its appended charter, moved from one church to another.
She appears in supplication, her eyes averted from both the spectator
and an arc in an upper corner. This obtrudes not into a place, a room
with a tiled floor, as in the image, but into a zone that, following Michel
de Certeau, is transformed into a space by her presence. The charter too
is a space, occupied by language read by the confraternity’s members.
Textualization is a way of materializing the abstract; transmitting
something in material form is, as Sukanta Chaudhuri points out, to
begin its dispersal. So, too, does the image. Like other icons, the
Naupaktetissa works anaphorically, embodying its devotees’ idea of
the Virgin, just as, conversely, the theological concept of the Mother of
God refers to Mary in her material form.
Asleep and Awake: At the Scene of “Private Devotion”
with the Byzantine Man of Sorrows
Mitchell Merback, Johns Hopkins University
The metaphorical complexity of the Christ icon popularly known as
the “Man of Sorrows” reveals much about the private ritual encounters
it could facilitate. Central to these encounters was the mystagogical
moment of recognition (anagnorsis) of Christ’s salvific identity,
grasped through the simultaneity of life and death. Within this dynamic
the metaphor of divine sleep served to mirror the vigilant wakefulness
that leads the soul to inner quietude (ataraxia) through an examination
of conscience and a catharsis of the passions. Such attention to oneself,
which ancient Stoicism dubbed prosoche, implanted a framework of
ethical inner training within Byzantine private devotions. A whole
domain of therapeutic exercise and expectation was thus mirrored in an
icon type that refused the simple consolations of the gaze.
Face of the Icon, Avatar of the User: The Procedural Rhetoric
of the Byzantine Icon
Roland Betancourt, Yale University
Building on recent work in video-game studies, this paper seizes the
habitus of the avatar in our contemporary computational practices
and unites it with the Byzantine icon via the medium of the face. As
a technology for worship, the icon structures an ethical model that is
emulated by its user. Nevertheless, this emulation occurs not through
the mimesis of another’s form but through mutual union and feedback.
The icon presents a formal dissonance between the user’s face and the
icon’s that is mediated through use. Thus, the icon functions as a virtual
avatar structuring an embodiment of the subject in a realm that is to
be manifested in a then and there. This paper analyzes the procedural
rhetoric of the icon that orients its usability as proxy.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
16
The Nonvisual Face in Levinas and Byzantine Art
Rico Franses, American University of Beirut
Faces in Byzantine art are often strange, unfathomable visual
formations. Whether minutely executed or roughly sketched in, they
rarely strike the modern viewer as having anything like the perspicuity
of a Renaissance portrait. In the work of Levinas, the face also has an
anomalous status. Levinas constructs his entire ethics on the idea of a
face-to-face encounter, but the face of which he speaks is never one that
is accessible to vision; indeed, he is deeply skeptical of vision itself. Yet
what is the face, if not something that is given to vision? And what do
Byzantine faces, precisely in their own lack of clarity, have to say about
what the face is capable of rendering to those who are looking?
What Is Yucatecan about Yucatán: Art-Historical
Discourse in Yucatán’s Visual Culture, Precolumbian
through Contemporary
Chairs: Charles Cody Barteet, University of Western Ontario;
Amara Solari, Pennsylvania State University
In 1843, nearly two years after his expedition into Central America
that introduced North America to the wonders of the ancient Maya,
the amateur American explorer John Lloyd Stephens lamented his
departure from Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula in Incidents of Travel in
Yucatan: “we received vague, but at the same time, reliable intelligence
of the existence of numerous and extensive cities, desolate and in ruins,
which induced us to believe that the country presented a greater field
for antiquarian research and discoveries that any we had yet visited.”
Although Stephens was unable to follow through on these accounts,
over the next century and a half archaeologists and ethnographers have
revealed an astoundingly rich and complex society. This culturally
diverse area of Latin America has been the domain primarily of
the social scientists but has remained at the fringes of art-historical
discourse. The relatively sparse analysis of Yucatán’s visual culture,
however, has revealed an astoundingly complex and multicultural
environment. The panel examines the peninsula’s visual culture across
the Precolumbian, Colonial, modern, and contemporary periods. It
considers what exactly is Yucatecan about Yucatán, and how and why
the Yucatán’s unique identity was fashioned through visual culture.
Painting in the Vernacular: Contextualizing Chichén Itzá
and the Roots of Yucatecan Identity
Victoria Lyall, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The paintings of Chichén Itzá defy the artistic canons governing Classic
Maya art. The shift toward painted narrative histories may have been a
response to the city’s growing multilingual population or its need to be
defined as a powerful, unified community. Chichén Itzá’s membership
in an international trading system, as well as its defeat of larger rivals,
allowed it to become the region’s dominant force. Simultaneously,
Yucatec Mayan became the unmarked language of the northern ruling
elite, precipitating dramatic developments visible in the regional mode
of painting history. The use of Yucatecan in the texts parallels a new
visual emphasis on place, an experimentation with space, and a more
picture-based narrative. This transformation of northern visual language
reflects distancing from southern modes of expression during the
turbulent Terminal Classic, suggesting that the northern Maya asserted
their regional identity by painting in the vernacular.
The Puuc Style of Yucatán: An Architectonic Aesthetic
as an Expression of Regional Sociopolitical Statuses and
Cultural Identities
Jeff Karl Kowalski, Northern Illinois University
The architectonic Puuc style, elements of which appear in various
media, was connected with increasing population and sociopolitical
complexity in Terminal Classic northwestern Yucatán. Embodied at
sites such as Kabah, Sayil, Kiuic, and Uxmal, it signified a distinctive
regional variant of Maya elite culture. The Puuc architectonic aesthetic,
reflecting textile-based designs and also embodied in ceramic media, is
a visible signal of varying types of cultural identities and sociopolitical
statuses, ranging from that of commoners who lived in smaller
perishable dwellings to different levels of local elites who occupied
vaulted structures displaying a range of finer stone-facing masonry and
more complex compositions of geometric mosaic facade sculpture.
The appearance of more fluid and representational (though regionally
distinctive) painting styles in Puuc murals and capstones demonstrates
that the more monumental and geometric architectonic style represents
a deliberate and innovative stylistic emphasis and symbolic statement
by local elites.
The “Yucatecan Vision” of Fernando Castro Pacheco
George Scheper, Johns Hopkins University
The artist Fernando Castro Pacheco, born in Mérida, Yucatán, in
1918, can be viewed as an international modernist, whose work in
sculpture, oil, and watercolor and in graphic work on paper puts him
in meaningful relationship to the more familiar modernist masters.
However, the narrative historical murals Castro Pacheco did for public
government buildings in Mérida (1971–78) and in Querétaro (1978–79)
suggest viewing him as a next-generation Mexican muralist, whose
apparently Mexican subject matter evokes universal human stories
and passions. But his subject matter is not so much Mexican as Maya
Yucatecan, evoking places, peoples, and stories whose Mexican-ness or
Yucatecan-ness is in fact at issue. Castro Pacheco explores moments of
conquest and evangelization, Maya resistance and colonial repression,
the nineteenth-century caste wars, and the dynamics of henequen
cultivation as a source of extravagant wealth for white Yucatecans and
extreme exploitation of Maya field workers.
Time, Tourism, and Politics of Maya Architecture:
Modern Development at Chichén Itzá and Its Relationship to
Yucatán Cultural Identity
Kristin Barry, Pennsylvania State University
Since the inception of modern tourism to Chichén Itzá in the
1970s, visitors have come to experience the ancient Maya site for
religious, spiritual, educational, and leisure purposes. However,
despite its touristic fame, Chichén Itzá has been largely criticized as
historically inauthentic, with a focus toward the commercialization
of the archaeology at the expense of local Maya heritage. Chichén
Itzá is authentically representative of both ancient and modern
Maya populations due to the active participation of Maya residents
in the tourism industry. The interpretation can be thought of as
inherently “Maya” in its emphasis on the past and the evolution of the
architectural complex over time. Although many view architecture and
weathering as linear in concept, what many deem to be overgrooming
at the site can be viewed as approaching archaeology and architecture
from a cyclical perspective, ideologically congruent with ancient Maya
religious beliefs.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Destruction of Cultural Heritage in European Countries
in Transition, 1990–2011
The Neglected Murals of Macedonia with Special Emphasis on
the Holy Mother of God Peribleptos Church, Ohrid, Macedonia
Rolf Achilles, independent art historian
This session explores ongoing destruction of cultural heritage in
European countries (not in the European Union) in transition between
the years of 1990s to present. It is possible to identify three main
reasons of modern iconoclasm: politics, religion, and economics.
The rise of nationalism and religious intolerance, triggered mostly by
political instability, has in turn exacerbated the traditional conflicts
between the Christian and Muslim communities, and between the
Christian denominations. Perpetual conflicts have resulted in the
destruction of churches, monastic sites, mosques, and other religious
institutions across the territory of these countries. Other widespread, yet
less noticeable, reasons for destruction of the cultural heritage are the
overall poor economic status of mainstream populations and the lack of
education and appreciation for culture in general. For these individuals,
public and private memorials made of metal and stone represent only
secondary raw material available for immediate income. How do we,
as a global community, help to prevent further devastation and acts of
vandalism? Is it possible to interfere globally in cultural affairs of one
country?
The decaying murals of the Church of the Peribleptos in Ohrid,
Macedonia, were probably studied by Giotto before he returned to Italy
and founded the Renaissance. The church could also be a poster-child
example of incompetent preservation. With the help of money from the
European Union and the United States, the Macedonian government
has spent generously on its international image as a country shaped
by strong Classical, Byzantine, and Ottoman traditions in the name of
archaeology, history, and, now, heritage tourism. This paper explores
several examples of how politically sanctioned agendas have led to
preservation efforts whose results are a destruction of world significant
historical sites in Macedonia. It is also the story of how a small band of
art and cultural historians supported by media, research, and knowledge
have raised international awareness and financial support to counter
Macedonia’s destructive official Kulturpolitik.
Chair: Rozmeri Basic, University of Oklahoma
Impossible to Silence: Enduring Trauma and the Legacy
of Vernacular Architecture in the Middle Gediz Valley,
Western Turkey, 1900–2011
Christina Luke, Boston University
This paper addresses the history of trauma as it relates to long-term
neglect and recent rehabilitation of cultural heritage in the Gediz Valley
in western Turkey, focusing on the destruction that occurred between
Kula and Izmir/Smyrna from 1919 and 1922 and the slow yet steady
recent interest (since 2005) in gentrification of cultural heritage by
various stakeholders. Cultural policies are explored in the context of
collective memories from not only conflict and relocation programs of
Greek and Muslim populations but also periods of silence by resident
communities, notably Armenian, Jewish, and Levantine.
Transitional Territories and Berlin’s East German
Cultural Heritage
Kristine Nielsen, University of Illinois
This paper examines the transitional spaces of occupation and
resistance associated with two East German monuments, the former
Lenin monument of Berlin Friedrichshain, dismantled and buried in
1991–92, and the recently moved Marx and Engels monument in Berlin
Mitte. From a pre-1989 closed and hierarchical space of territorial
signs to the semiviolent transformations of unification, the monuments
became matter out of place, abominable things to be destroyed literally
or metaphorically. In 2010 city administrators rearranged the Marx
and Engels monument installation, drastically changing its political
message. In 2014 the head of the Lenin monument will be exhibited
in the museum of Berlin’s Unwanted Monuments, focusing on
haptic space that counteracts its former optic dimension. These two
monuments serve as examples of a cultural heritage simultaneously
marginalized and preserved through new, productive spaces of
assemblage and critique that continue to resonate with a history of
iconoclastic gestures.
New Memorials for New Countries: Substituting
Collective Memory for Spite
Rozmeri Basic, University of Oklahoma
Between 1990 and 2000 the country known as Yugoslavia diminished.
As time has passed and new generations have come into power, the
population has decided to abandon collective memory of a once united
country and to look for new heroes that will eventually become part
of the cultural heritage of newly independent states. The result has
been an avalanche of public memorials erected throughout cities to
honor individuals with little or nothing in common with the presentday citizens of these countries. The trend to endorse these works is the
result of a collective spite that has replaced a memory of Yugoslavia
that was respected and had a special role in shaping the history of
nonaligned countries.
Local Modernisms
Chair: Geoffrey Batchen, Victoria University of Wellington
Despite all the talk of a global art history, the history of modernism
continues to be a story told in terms of Europe and the United States.
Modernism is inevitably presented as something that is transmitted
to the provinces from these centers, sometimes quickly, sometimes
more slowly, but always arriving late and secondhand. But what if
we were to see modernity differently—as a dispersed experience
based on exchange rather than transmission, happening everywhere
simultaneously, even if to different degrees and with different effects?
How does this shift the ground of art history? Can we imagine
presenting a history of modernity as a general phenomenon based on
a perspective specific to the provinces? This session reflects on the
nature of art history’s mission through a focus on modernism as a
phenomenon that is simultaneously local and global.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Abstraction as Resistance in 1950s India
Atreyee Gupta, University of California, Berkeley
Given the centrality of abstraction within art history’s metanarratives
of the twentieth century, a reassessment of abstraction from the vantage
point of the margin is critical for a reconfiguration of the topography
of modernism as global. This paper examines the work of India’s early
modernist sculptor Dhanraj Bhagat. Bhagat turned to abstraction in the
1940s, on the eve of India’s independence. After experimenting with
wood and terra cotta, the sculptor began working almost entirely in
reinforced concrete, generating iconographies that sought to negotiate
the new in terms of the old. Reading this transition in the artist’s
language as a symptomatic site that marks the emergence of a postcolonial authorial and spectatorial subjectivity, this paper works toward
a methodological framework with which to approach abstraction as a
global phenomenon, a framework that neither reduces difference to
produce commensurability nor annunciates a reified alterity.
Critiquing the Critique: The Reception of El Anatsui
Sunanda Sanyal, The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University
Long marginalized by twentieth-century modernism, only in recent
years have artists from former colonies had international exposure.
Most critiques of their work, however, have framed it exclusively
within the Euro-American art-historical narrative. In other words, the
“local” in the discourse of the modern is colonized by the inclusive
efforts of a dominant narrative disguised as “global.” This paper
takes to task such approaches to artists working in non-Western sites.
Examining high-profile essays on the Ghanaian-born, Nigeria-based
artist El Anatsui’s monumental wall hangings made from scrap metal,
it argues that most of them gloss over the nuances of Anatsui’s crosscultural borrowing within Ghana as well as his international experience
within the African continent. Such misplaced emphases seriously
undermine the crucial mediating role of Anatsui’s African experiences
in his relation with modernist and postmodernist art. The paper urges a
methodological rethinking of critiques of artists like Anatsui.
Mahmoud Mukhtar: “The First Sculptor in the Land of Sculpture”
Alexandra Dika Seggerman, Yale University
Raised in the Nile Delta but trained in Paris, Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891–
1934) gained notoriety on both sides of the Mediterranean through his
deft blend of pharaonic and peasant imagery with modern formalism.
This paper argues for a dual definition of Mukhtar’s modernism.
First, his work conveys nationalist messages that aim to define an
independent nation of Egypt as a symbiosis of historic civilization
and technological modernization. Second, Mukhtar engages in formal
modernist aesthetic, mainly in his smaller works, where he appropriates
the nationalist symbol of the peasant and deconstructs its form. This
exploration of Mukhtar’s modernism complicates the conventional
center/periphery dichotomy of global modern art, particularly in how
Mukhtar exchanged ideas rather than simply received them. Mukhtar’s
modernism is not a derivative of European modernism but rather
expands our definitions of the modern.
Starting from Mexico: Estridentismo as an Avant-Garde Model
Tatiana Flores, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Actual, which disparaged local art and literature as retardataire and
outlined an aesthetic plan based on models from Futurism and Dada.
As a result of dialogues between artists—including Mexico’s first
generation of mural painters—and writers over the course of the 1920s,
Estridentismo eventually expanded its original proposal, increasingly
embracing socially responsible causes and allying itself with radical
politics. It became emblematic of the complexities of avant-garde
thought in Latin America, torn between formal innovation and social
relevance, cosmopolitan dreams and local concerns. This paper uses the
example of Estridentismo and its offshoot movement ¡30-30! to shift
the geography of modernism, assessing how such movements upset
Eurocentric narratives and force us to recognize the importance of other
locales to the production of knowledge.
National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts
An Overwhelming Trust in Progress: The Artwork
of Dylan J. Beck
Chair: Dylan Beck, Kansas State University
My sculpture explores the phenomenon of suburban sprawl and built
environment. My interests range from land use and automobilecentered planning to the psychological effects of living in the nonplaces
of a supermodern world. Supermodernity has created sites without
relation to their natural environment. These include airports, shopping
malls, and various housing developments. Unmanaged growth,
known as sprawl, has been the cause and/or effect of problems with
transportation, the environment, and the economy. At the same time,
this growth has created new housing and employment opportunities.
I situate my work between criticism and veneration. Likewise,
there is a dichotomy in my aesthetic attraction to aerial images of
suburban landscapes and my feelings toward the issues they illustrate.
I use several tactics to demonstrate this dialectic. My sculptures are
constructed with materials found in the retail and domestic setting
along with those used in home construction. Through the examination
of aerial photography and satellite imagery, I use in my sculptures the
same spatial relationships that are inherent in our built environment.
The similarities of modern industrial/retail architecture and Minimalist
sculpture are incorporated into the forms I create through the use of
subtle form and design.
National Coalition Against Censorship
Art Institutions Facing Controversy: Fear,
Self-Censorship, and the Commitment to Curatorial
and Artistic Freedom
Chair: Carol Becker, Columbia University School of the Arts
In times of economic uncertainty and polarized politics, art institutions
in and outside academia are vulnerable targets. A controversial show
may lead donors to withdraw support and legislators to cut public funds
for an institution. Faced with what appears to be the choice between
their livelihood and curatorial freedom, what are art institutions to
do? The panel addresses the various pressures on programming such
institutions face and the ways they negotiate such pressures. It will also
introduce a new document, “Museums Best Practices for Managing
Controversy”, endorsed by major US arts organizations, including
CAA and AAMG. The document offers an art institution embroiled in
controversy procedures and guidelines to help them prepare for and
deal with controversy.
The avant-garde movement Estridentismo (stridentism) erupted
in 1921, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, with the
distribution of the poet Manuel Maples Arce’s subversive manifesto
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Italian Art Society
Bad Boys, Hussies, and Villains
Chair: George R. Bent, Washington and Lee University
The landscape of Italian history is littered with the refuse of
the damned. From Caligula to Boniface VIII, Lucrezia Borgia,
Caravaggio, Benito Mussolini, Cicciolina, and Silvio Berlusconi, the
louts, criminals, and demons of sunny Italy have inspired titillation,
revulsion, and even military intervention from those they have scorned.
This session places these devils in the context of visual representation
produced either in support of their now-discredited policies and
personalities or in opposition to them.
Repatriating the “Anghiari Faction,” or Brooding over a
Villainous History of Florentine Renaissance Art
Roger Crum, University of Dayton
Much of Florentine Renaissance art and architecture constitutes the
record of individuals who were successful in their lives and confident
in expressing private as well as public commitments and triumphs in
their native city. Yet in addition to the familiar canon of major works
that were produced by and for these people, there was another body of
work—or potential body of work—that merits attention, not because
of what went right in Florence but what continually went wrong in a
culture that actually saw near continual political unrest and gave rise
to official villains of the state, generally called “exiles” or “rebels.”
This paper explores the fuller actuality of Florentine artistic production
(and its suppressed or otherwise overlooked narratives) as a means of
challenging and expanding the conventional understanding of the city’s
art history as an illustration of uniform familial and civic advancement.
Aut Cesar, Aut Nihil: The Visual Staging of Cesare Borgia
Elizabeth Bemis, University of Florida
Few names in history carry the baggage that weighs upon the Borgias.
Celebrated by their contemporaries as iniquitous, their reputation
has only grown, relentlessly tinted by human nature’s love of the
sensational. Cesare Borgia, in particular, has borne the costume of
others’ making. Despite his efforts to project a palatable persona,
rumors continue to be the most striking elements in our perception of
his narrative. Cesare’s construction of self through visual representation
was, and is, in dialogue with the salacious hearsay of others. With an
awareness of the need of a powerful public identity, and a desire not to
negate his menacing reputation but to refine and control it, he employed
the visual rhetoric of Julius Caesar. These elements, both tangible and
ephemeral, are examined together to reveal the ways in which Cesare
tried to mitigate his darkening and often unearned reputation.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun—And Still Go to Heaven:
Reading Courtesans in Renaissance Portraits and Life
Cynthia Stollhans, Saint Louis University
Although portraiture reveals an alluring, beautiful side of courtesans,
some of these women exhibited a more businesslike mind when using
resources as art patrons, such as two famous Romans, Fiammetta and
Imperia, during the sixteenth century. Both acquired property, wealth,
and burial chapels in two very visible Roman churches, locations
that might, ironically, be deemed difficult for any proper woman to
acquire. Fiammetta, the amor of Cesare Borgia, left a detailed will
with instructions for her remains to be interred in her chapel in San
Agostino. The properties and tomb of Imperia—lover of Agostino
Chigi, one of the wealthiest men in Rome—reveal the strong business
instincts of that famous courtesan. This study addresses the question of
whether bad girls or hussies had the same control of their money (and
similar pious motives for patronage) as more noble, acceptable women
of the day.
Damnatio memoriae: Images and Relics of Carlo Borromeo
in Former Humiliati Churches
Julia Miller, California State University, Long Beach
Carlo Borromeo was a much-venerated saint following his canonization
in 1610, but in a certain group of Italian churches and monasteries
the presence of images and even relics of the saint carried a meaning
beyond reverence for his sanctity. Although after 1571 these churches
were under the control of a variety of religious groups, these
institutions were formerly in the hands of the Humiliati order. The
promotion of Carlo Borromeo’s holiness held a pointed message,
for the Humiliati were suppressed due to an attempted assassination
of the young cardinal fomented by a villainous conspiracy of some
of the order’s leaders. The commissioning or placing of altarpieces,
devotional paintings, and relics of Borromeo in churches that had
been built or controlled by the Humiliati served, in part, as continuing
reminders of the singularly evil deed that led to the end of the order.
The Composite Villain: Manzoni’s L’Innominato in
Ottocento Painting
Laura Sommer, Daemen College
Italy had no shortage of villains in 1861, yet the precarious political
situation in many of its regions made the exposure of villainy
through literary and pictorial examples dangerous and impolitic.
The painter Francesco Hayez and author Alessandro Manzoni
were among those who sought to record the power struggles of the
Risorgimento by referencing the developing nation’s “bad guys”
through other means. Hayez’s 1845 depiction of L’Innominato, who
figures in Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, adopted the familiar strategy
of portraying contemporary conflict through political allusion. The
character, left “Unnamed” by Manzoni, was frequently illustrated, but
Hayez’s half-length, posed portrait distinguished itself from the more
customary references to religious conversion or historical personalities.
Rather than merely examine the historic persona as an individual,
Hayez constructed a composite rendering of power, corruption, and
redemption in an era rife with all three.
Divos, Diavolos, and La Dolce Vita: Contemporary
Italian Art between Past and Present
Laura Petican, University of Western Ontario
Contemporary Italian artists work in an environment fraught with the
specters of the past. The national cultural landscape, formed in vestiges
of a golden age marked by moments of both victory and defeat, collides
with an avant-garde expression that simultaneously revels in and
deconstructs the icons of its image. Artists such as Francesco Vezzoli,
Vanessa Beecroft, and Maurizio Cattelan explore the icons of Italy’s
popular cultural identity in multidisciplinary works that take hallmarks
of the Italian aesthetic repertoire as their subject matter, in literal and
conceptual references to the Baroque. Calling upon the monumentality,
bravado, and theatricality of seventeenth-century fountains, churches,
and sculptural groups, notions of space, movement, and vitality
implicate the viewer as an active participant in the works’ unfolding.
Entrenched in the present, they evoke the past in a Baroque-centric
visual language that decenters, disrupts, and confronts the viewer with
their own expectations.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Beyond the Paragone
Chairs: Sarah Betzer, University of Virginia; Laura Weigert, Rutgers,
The State University of New Jersey
Lady Sherman’s Attitudes
Cordula Grewe, Columbia University
Analysis of the paragone has proven an enduring fulcrum for searching
artistic, aesthetic, and historical reflections on art and subjectivity.
Recently, the particular volatility of the relationship between painting
and sculpture in the modern period has been discussed in terms of
changing perspectives on perception. Here, the relative primacy of
painting and sculpture pivoted on their relationship to touch and sight:
the senses upon which each one was seen to have special purchase.
Implicit in this and other reflections on the paragone model are both
a privileging of painting and sculpture and a distinction between the
two representational practices, on the one hand, and between the
senses to which they appeal, on the other. These distinctions preclude
the possibility of a productive dynamic between media and obfuscate
the multisensory experience of artworks. This session challenges,
historicizes, and enriches the paragone debate.
The nexus of appropriation and performativity characterizing Cindy
Sherman’s photographs is a rearticulation of the attitude tradition
pioneered by Lady Hamilton. This proposition takes us back to the
eighteenth century, an era famously obsessed with resolving once
and for all the age-old paragone debate by delineating the nature and
proper borders of the various arts. Yet this aesthetic border work was
challenged by the rise of two para-artistic genres, the attitude and
tableau vivant that were multisensory, multimedia, and precariously
positioned between amateur and avant-garde practice. Acted out in
sequence, often framed by text, and frequently accompanied by music,
the performed sculptures of the attitudes and the staged pictures of the
tableaux vivants eroded the dominant paragone model. Exploring this
erosion, the talk proposes a genealogy from the extended understanding
of media and identity formation in Hamilton’s performances to
Sherman’s postmodern photography.
The Virtual Holy: Gaudenzio’s Stagings at Varallo
Roberta Panzanelli, Polimoda: International Institute of
Fashion Design and Marketing
A Performative Paragone: The Düsseldorf State Art Academy,
ca. 1968
Colin Lang, Virginia Commonwealth University
The New Jerusalem at Varallo was founded in 1486 as a replica of
the holy sites in Palestine. Originally organized as a series of empty
chapels containing movable sculptures, in the early cinquecento
the spaces became elaborate sceneries with architecture, sculpture,
and painting working together to create the impression of living
environments. These open chapels, depicting core events from Christ’s
life, display uncommon strategies of illusionism and suggestive powers
well beyond the traditional boundaries of sculpture and painting. They
contain tableaux of life-size, polychrome sculpture with expressive
faces and exaggerated, dramatic poses; blood is vividly shown, and
hair and clothing are real or rendered with extreme realism. Tableaux
are set against background frescoes that extend the scenes on the walls,
confounding perceptual criteria. Media confines are further blurred with
figures partially modeled and partially painted, their bodies projecting
out of the wall to enhance the illusionism of the “total environments.”
In the well-worn narratives of postwar modernism, the question of
medium is given pride of place, either as guarantor of aesthetic quality
or as the locus of a critical strike against purity and good taste. While
the boundaries of this narrative have been reframed and reevaluated
in recent years, the prevailing influence of the painting/sculpture
paradigm, or its deposition—which has served to reinforce more than
undermine the sovereignty of medium—has overstated the importance
of the paradigm for other practitioners. This paper examines a group
of art students working under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf State Art
Academy in the late 1960s, whose work, while attacking the vitalist
core of their teacher’s practice, nonetheless incorporated Beuys’s
expanded concept of artistic production in order to give primacy to the
performative parameters of their work above and beyond those allied
with the question of medium.
Reframing Painting: A Call for a New Critical Dialogue
Severed Heads: The Aftermath of Violence in Spanish
Still-Life Painting
Krystel Chehab, University of British Columbia
Recent scholarship has elucidated points of convergence between
seventeenth-century Spanish religious painting and polychrome wood
sculpture, encouraging considerations of the two media together rather
than apart. Less attention has been directed to how the migration of
visual forms between media precipitates a striking shift in the viewing
experience. This paper examines paintings of decapitated heads of
saints by Francisco de Herrera (1590–1654) and Sebastián de Llanos
y Valdés (ca. 1605–1677) that skillfully rework the established
polychrome tradition of the severed head on painted canvas. These
paintings approximate sculpture as they register a crucial distance
from it, complicating our understanding of how the boundaries
between media were subject to experimentation in midcentury Seville.
Herrera’s and Llanos y Valdés’s paintings of decapitated heads eschew
violence and forcibly interrogate the possibilities of the medium in
portraying sanctity and death, while they curiously recall contemporary
conventions of still-life painting.
Chairs: Brian Bishop, Framingham State University; Lance Winn,
University of Delaware
This session addresses the long overdue need to reframe the dialogue
surrounding contemporary painting as a way of reflecting current
directions of the discipline without relying on the exhausted critical
approaches of the last half-century. The language of process should
not mirror the modernist function of painting practice or lead
to another closed and reified definition; rather, it could consider
how contemporary painters conceptualize process as an important
narrative component in forming their ideas through a specific set of
practices. While definitions of painting may not freely detach from
the physical object or the painters’ processes, it should be recognized
that any teleological or ontological examination of painting within
contemporary art simply sidesteps the critical analysis of what painting
can speak of and to. How can we talk about this multifaceted imagemaking strategy without relying on the aforementioned approaches
or without rehashing modernist-era endgames, which devolve into a
debate about medium specificity and a fundamentalist definition of
painting and a defense of its value? Painting is an ancient hermetic
and solitary practice bound by tradition; the challenge of defining this
ardently anti-spectacle approach to art making in fresh ways is great.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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This session identifies a novel and historically unburdened manner to
talk about painting as a methodology that some artists use to describe
their world, and to critically engage where the intersection between
material, construction, body, image, and object culminates in something
that speaks to important parts of the human experience.
There Is No Such Thing as Painting
Saul Ostrow, independent critic and Critical Voices/twentyfirstPROJECTS
I do not discuss new media, the market conspiracies, or misguided,
idealist discussions based on a miss-understanding of the terms
“fetishization” and “commodity.” Instead, I focus on some of the
logics that have lead me to write about painting as a system network
consisting of varied practices, discourses, genres, and histories. The
multiplicity that we are talking about employs varied formats, subjects,
and aesthetics. If this description has any relevance, then the object/
subject “painting” we are dealing with exists as no singular act,
practice, or product. Consequently, there is no such thing as “painting”
to reframe.
The “Irrelevance” of Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings
Christina Chang, Minnesota Museum of American Art
The critical literature’s emphasis on the singularity of Robert
Rauschenberg’s White Paintings as a concept for painting has
obscured the crucial fact that the paintings as material objects were,
in Rauschenberg’s mind, interchangeable. He clearly demonstrated
the “irrelevance” of the original White Paintings by recycling them
for new paintings. They were, thus, foundational to the development
of Rauschenberg’s project for a democratized and dehierarchized
painting, enabling him to think of paintings as both “blank” canvases
and finished works, especially given his intention to keep them ever
fresh by repainting them as necessary. The idea that a painting could
be temporary—a finished work one day, a canvas the next—opened
the doors to a whole new realm of inquiry: of finding the same sort of
openness in the materials used to paint.
Not Ready for Bed: Abstraction’s Permanent,
Irreversible Condition
Vittorio Colaizzi, Old Dominion University
Three exhibitions survey the problematics of abstract painting at given
moments. Barbara Rose’s American Painting: The Eighties, Katy
Siegel and David Reed’s High Times Hard Times: New York Painting
1967–1975, and Chris Chatterson and Vince Contarino’s The Working
Title all show the recurrence of certain visual issues, chief among them,
what to paint? Shall forms be subjectively invented or quasi-objectively
derived from mechanical factors and processes? The latter, fairly
ubiquitous strategy demonstrates what Bob Nickas calls abstraction’s
“found state” as a “permanent, irreversible condition.” Conversely,
Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of the “figural” and George DidiHuberman’s pan each agitate against painting as transparently
discursive, seeming to call for abstraction as if it had not already
existed. These theoretical models illuminate the efforts of certain
painters in The Working Title, who hijack and recondition the visual
cues of foundness, possibly preserving abstraction as an operation
rather than a mere stylistic option.
Mid America College Art Association
Designing Foundations
Chair: Steven Bleicher, Coastal Carolina University
Should studio art and design majors have the same foundations
program? This question rears its head on a regular basis. With the
importance of digital technology in the design fields and the traditional
nature of most foundation programs, it has sparked renewed dialogue.
The first question that needs to be answered is what do we expect
students to know after they have completed their foundations program?
Since both share the same set of design principles and elements, where
is the knowledge base lacking for either studio art or design? Is there
really a need for separate foundation programs? What does one area
require that is extraneous to the other? Or have some majors become
so course-specific that a basic overview of principles and elements
is being overlooked? Are these real pedagogic needs or is this really
a symptom of the factionalization and evidence of the departmental
political struggles between the two areas? This session will be an open
forum exploring the question from all sides of the issue.
What Is the Value of an Art and Design Education?
Chris Kienke, Savannah College of Art and Design
What is the value of an art and design school education? I have a
firm belief that students starting out in art and design fields need to
become active learners and be taught the ability to acquire new skill
sets, materials, and techniques. They need to learn how to develop
independent concepts, be able to communicate content to a range
of audiences, and understand the context of their work in relation to
the tradition and expanding canon of creative practice. These skills,
abilities, and knowledge bases are paramount to success in any creative
field. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden: New Directions in
Fine Craft Foundations
Jeffrey Adams, The Kentucky School of Craft
In a theory of craft, Howard Risatti states “For craft to achieve genuine
aesthetic parity with fine art, its tradition of ‘fore-understanding’
must be broadened and deepened so as to encourage the viewer … to
want to understand what these objects have to say…”. The Renwick’s
exhibition 40 under 40: Craft Futures lashes contemporary craft into a
conceptual land grab, exploring new territories such as sustainability,
modern economies, and the role of the craftsperson. How is it that we
now train not only the hand, but the networked and socially conscious
mind that guides it? Current directions in craft foundations pedagogy
will be plumbed using folk art as a divining rod.
A Systems Approach to Color and Drawing
Rosanne Gibel, The Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale
As we examine the curriculum that we believe will provide a sound
foundation for all of our majors in art and design, the basic principles
may or may not change. The delivery form, however, is essential if
they are to carry the concepts forward and utilize them in their creative
process. They must find the concepts themselves relevant. This case
study of a systems-based color course provides a format that allows
a wide variety of students to engage in the process. A proposal for a
drawing class with the same approach represents a challenging work
in progress. C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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The Problem with Digital Foundations
Lauren Kalman, Wayne State University
Kitchen Culture and Postwar Feminist Art
Jody B. Cutler, St. John’s University
Foundations studies are increasingly called upon to lay a techniquebased groundwork for digital technologies. This often results in
the addition of courses like Media Arts, Electronic Arts, or Digital
Foundations to the traditional Drawing, 2D Design, and 3D Design
Bauhaus-based core. Though seemingly inert, the addition of a course
specifically dedicated to digital arts highlights problems in both
approaches to teaching technology at the introductory level, and notions
of fundamental skills in the already existing core classes. It serves to
further compartmentalize knowledge and renders some foundations
courses more or less relevant to each fine art or design discipline.
Several significant works of postwar feminist art created in the United
States cite/site kitchens, not surprisingly. Among prevalent early
examples are the pink-skinned, egg-and-breast-ornamented Nurturant
Kitchen of Womanhouse by Robin Weltsch and Vicki Hodgetts (1972)
and Martha Rosler’s deadpan video monologue, Semiotics of the
Kitchen (1975). In experimental forms, these works engage notions of
kitchen space as battleground between the sexes, the generations, and
conflicting female identifications with food and feeding. Fast-forward
to Carrie Mae Weems’s cinematic Kitchen Table series of blackand-white photographs (1990–91), in which the bare-bones, orderly
setting takes on a therapeutic role for the woman-subject (portrayed
by the artist), and Liza Lou’s beaded installation, Kitchen (1990–95), a
celebratory feast for the eyes. Constructing a conversation among the
four works mentioned (interpolating others), this presentation considers
continuity and divergence in feminist art filtered through the kitchen
theme from first generation to third wave.
Conservator: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the
Study of Islamic Tilework
Chairs: Jonathan Bloom, Boston College; Keelan Overton,
Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art
Although surfaces sheathed in tiles are among the most iconic images
in Islamic architecture, significant questions remain unresolved about
style, context, attribution, and technique. This session integrates
interdisciplinary voices into ongoing art-historical debates while
identifying projects, partnerships, and questions to shape the study of
Islamic tiles in the future. To what extent, for example, can museumbased projects benefit from the insights of living craftsmen and cultural
heritage specialists? How have patterns of taste and collecting shaped
the canon of Islamic tilework? How can we more effectively approach
tiles through the lens of reuse, as living objects that defy singular arthistorical attributions? What role does theoretical mathematics play in
tile patterns?
Creative Kitchens: Art, Food, and the Domestic
Landscape after World War II
Chairs: Silvia Bottinelli, Tufts University; Margherita D’Ayala Valva,
Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
Cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, architecture, and design
history have shown interest in the kitchen as a site of domestic labor
and social interaction since the 1980s. Art-historical scholarship has
given attention to Eat art practices, looking at their roots in Futurism,
but it has only started to explore the implications of food in the home
kitchen through exhibitions and conferences such as Counter-Space:
Design and the Modern Kitchen (Museum of Modern Art, 2010–11),
“A Taste of Home” (Vrije Universiteit Brussels, 2012), Feast: Radical
Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Smart Museum, University of
Chicago, 2012), “Molecular Cuisine: The Politics of Taste” (School of
Visual Arts, New York, 2012), and Atelier and Kitchen = Laboratories
of the Senses (Marta Herford, 2012). This session complicates our
understanding of food and the domestic environment in contemporary
art through the theoretical frames of feminism, reception studies,
and relational aesthetics. Instead of limiting their analysis to the
iconographical interpretation of food in art, speakers compare Eat art
performances and everyday cooking; examine food as a perishable art
material, which eventually elicits the public’s disgust; and discuss art
experiences that question the kitchen as a gendered space, associated
with consumption, homemaking, motherhood, and generosity.
Kitchen Interventions: Elżbieta Jabłońska’s Art Actions
Barbara Kutis, University of Delaware
In her series of performances and photographs, Through the Stomach to
the Heart (1999–present), Elżbieta Jabłońska transforms the domestic
spaces and labors of the home into artistic endeavors. By photographing
artists and curators in their kitchens and by cooking in gallery spaces—
either on a makeshift or disproportionately large kitchen—Jabłońska
confronts the misconception that the roles of female artist (and arts
professional) and the domestic are incompatible. Drawing on the
strategies of artists from the 1960s and 1990s that have similarly used
food in art, this presentation shows how Jabłońska utilizes a maternal
subjectivity to critique and engage with the stereotype of the “Polish
Mother,” a figure that tirelessly and thanklessly cooks for others. By
simultaneously embracing and confronting key social expectations of
women, it contends that Jabłońska presents cooking as a critical artistic
action that reframes the gendered space of the kitchen.
Food Decay and Disgust: Paul McCarthy’s Bossy Burger as
Contemporary Still Life
Anja Foerschner, Getty Research Institute
In Vanitas still lifes, food, as perishable substance, served as a symbol
of the transience and emptiness of earthly existence. Edible materials,
in this case icons of American consumer culture, are also a vital aspect
of Paul McCarthy’s performative installation Bossy Burger (1991),
which shows parallels with traditional still lifes. Used in an excessive
manner in the performance, food is left to rot in the installation.
Important thereby is the emotion of disgust, which is triggered in the
reception of McCarthy’s work by his violation of rules of restraint and
cleanliness, and intensified by the decaying remnants. Setting us apart
from our spontaneous morality, disgust is similar, or even inherent, to
the idea of Vanitas. McCarthy’s work not only functions as a critique of
the absurd abundance of contemporary consumer life but, in line with
the concept of Vanitas, unmasks it as a self-referential and illusive void
with questionable persistence.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Free Lunch? The Presumption of Generosity in Relational Art
Michael Peterson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Food is a staple in the emerging canon of relational art. Relational
projects include dinner parties, soup kitchens, community gardens, and
molecular gastronomy extravaganzas. Food is sometimes presumed to
mean generosity and eating together to create community. Feeding the
audience can be done in the spirit of a gift as understood in the frame
set out by Lewis Hyde. But even for Hyde, gifts are not inherently
generous. Food can be offered in ways that are self-interested, parodic,
or even hostile. In everyday life feeding can be a passive-aggressive
act or part of a torture regime. Food can also seem unserious, as in
Claire Bishop’s dismissal of some relational work as simply providing
“curry for refugees.” This paper surveys feeding and eating in recent
relational art, moving beyond the equation of food with generosity, and
it discusses my own collaboration with Laurie Beth Clark under the
company name SpatulaandBarcode.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
A Two-Way Street: How Academic Museum and Gallery
Programming Can Achieve Curricular Impact
Chair: Leonie Bradbury, Montserrat College of Art Galleries
Academic museums and galleries are charged with the responsibility
of designing programming with their core audience of students in
mind. But how can they go beyond standard gallery programming,
such as temporary exhibitions, gallery talks, and lectures, to achieve
real curricular impact? What theoretical and practical structures can we
use to guide this development? An important part of the solution are
sustained collaborations and input from faculty and students. This panel
is pleased to present innovative examples of academic programming
designed by academic museums and galleries in close collaboration
with faculty and students that have been successfully integrated into the
curriculum and, alternately, how these new curricular initiatives have
become part of the academic gallery’s program offerings.
Using Art Museums to Leverage Campus-Wide Learning:
Two Case Studies from Oberlin College
Steven S. Volk and Taylor Allen, Oberlin College
In collaboration with its Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
has developed a new pedagogy, “Crossing the Street,” designed to use
art to achieve specific, campus-wide learning goals. We illustrate the
approach by showcasing two successful collaborations between the
academic curator and faculty in biology and history. The faculty discuss
how they structure and evaluate museum visits in light of concrete
learning objectives, and suggest how a museum’s curricular impact can
extend far beyond art history or studio art courses, and how this impact
can be measured and sustained in a liberal-arts institution.
Art and Science in Dialogue: Object-Based Workshops
at the Smart Museum
Anne Leonard and Sidney R. Nagel, University of Chicago
In concert with recent arts-science initiatives at the University
of Chicago, the Smart Museum has been forging new, creative
collaborations that draw scientists on the faculty into interdisciplinary
dialogues. Steering away from the traditional exhibition format,
we have successfully launched a series of object-based workshops
held in the museum’s study room with a collection focus. A loosely
formed group of faculty from the humanities and sciences helps plan
workshops around interdisciplinary themes, such as time and scale,
magic, and beauty. Faculty and students alike join the discussions,
fostering intellectual encounters and curricular collaborations that
could emerge in no other context.
Academic Galleries as Learning Laboratories: Bridging Theory
and Practice at Columbia College, Chicago
Neysa Lillian Page-Lieberman and Robert John Blandford, Columbia
College, Chicago
Two practicum courses, Gallery Management and Curatorial Practice,
use galleries at Columbia College, Chicago, to support classroom
learning and enable students to put theory into practice. Open to
undergraduate and graduate students of all disciplines, in collaboration
with departments across campus, this expanding program is the result
of a six-year partnership between the college galleries and an academic
department. The presenters share the results of this experiential
approach to exhibition curriculum.
Color Adjustment: Revisiting Identity Politics of
the 1990s
Chair: Tara Burk, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
During the fractious culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s, fierce
polemics were waged over the status of the arts in American culture.
This period was bookmarked by national controversies about artists
who foreground issues of race, sexuality, and gender in their works.
Recently debates about censorship and identity politics in art and art
history were productively reignited when the National Portrait Gallery
censored a David Wojnarowicz video from the exhibition Hide/Seek:
Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. While artists such as
Wojnarowicz and Robert Mapplethorpe are often key figures in these
conversations, This session opens up the floor to the rich art history
of works made in the era of culture wars, where race and sexuality
form a crucial yet underexamined nexus, and informed by a queerof-color critique. It revisits the 1990s and asks, what was at stake in
the development of identity politics as a discourse within art history
and criticism? How do these works resonate in the present, and what
methodologies are viable today? If we understand the 1980s and 1990s
as a second wave of identity politics in art practice, what is the relation
of these works to earlier precursors in the social liberation movements
of the 1960s and 1970s? What was the role of criticism in the history of
the culture wars?
“Listen Up to the Grand Diva Rap”: Marlon Riggs’s
Inclusive Didactic Address
Carolyn J. Trench, University of Pennsylvania
In 1991 PBS stations nationwide broadcast Marlon Riggs’s Tongues
Untied (1989), a film about black gay male experiences that quickly
became a flashpoint in the culture wars of the early 1990s. Key
opponents proposed that Tongues was “too shocking to show” and
that viewers should “see for themselves” to confirm this fact. Tongues
subverts this effort by interpolating all viewers with its radically
inclusive address. In segments on the “Snap” and on voguing,
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Tongues repurposes documentary techniques to complicate the
didactic relationship between insider and outsider, letting “outsiders”
become part of Tongues’ community. While speaking for and to those
marginalized by mainstream media, as discussed by much of the prior
writing on the film, Tongues refuses to limit its address to this audience,
queering early 1990s identity politics and offering a new paradigm
for understanding the crucial political and artistic conflicts of the
culture wars.
On the Ropes
Jordana Moore Saggese, California College of the Arts
Despite the widespread popularity of sports in contemporary culture,
the successes of the black athlete have always been tempered by
stereotype. Headlines of gambling, gun slinging, and womanizing
keep pace with those about game-winning shots and championship
dreams. Focusing specifically on the contemporary artists Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Glenn Ligon, and Lyle Ashton Harris, this paper examines
the intersecting racial and gendered stereotypes present in the black
male athletic body and its representation. It analyzes the varied ways
these three artists use the motif of boxing to interrogate the relationship
between black men and a dominant white, heterosexual culture and to
invoke the inevitable violence and tragedy of that dynamic. The artistic
revisions of these bodies opened myriad possibilities for the revision
of broader constructions of gender, race, and sexuality in American
culture.
Look at Me: The Black Woman’s Body in the Art of Renee Cox
Tracy M. Zuniga, University of California, Riverside
Artists of color use the body as a material source of engagement
within critical examinations of identity politics, particularly within
conversations around race and sexuality. The work of Renee Cox
addresses racialized and gendered tropes that dominate the aesthetic
imaginary and discourse that shape prevailing ideologies around black
women’s bodies as well as other bodies of color. This presentation
explores how Cox is responding to or “talking back” to the construction
of the black female body as well as black womanhood. It reads Cox’s
work as a queer portrayal of the black female body that addresses
the perverse history of the black body as spectacle, examining how
her work “flips the script” on the way her body is read, using it as a
source of power through images of submission and domination and
confronting the inscribed “American Grammar” (Hortense Spillers).
Identity Predicated on Absence: Diasporic Narratives and
Félix González-Torres’s Queer Candy Spills
Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, Washington University in St. Louis
Since the early 1990s scholars have questioned whether or how the
late Félix González-Torres’s intersecting identities as a gay Latino
man should affect interpretations of his work. An additional, valuable
context for consideration is his experiences as part of the Cuban
diaspora. Beginning with a visual and experiential analysis of one of
González-Torres’s candy spills, this presentation demonstrates how
such works hinge on the removal of candies rather than the presence
of the remaining mass. Such a privileging of absence and dispersal
resonates powerfully with Cuban diasporic narratives, in which writers
constructed an identity based on displacement from their homeland.
In light of this connection, González-Torres translates the language of
diaspora and desire into a queer destabilization of traditional notions of
both sculpture and subjectivity.
Painting Pleasures: Queer Voices in Glenn Ligon’s Earliest
Text Paintings and Beyond
Alex Fialho, independent scholar
Glenn Ligon’s first text-based paintings were produced in 1985,
yet they were not exhibited until his 2011 midcareer retrospective,
Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, at the Whitney. In these underexamined
works, Ligon infused his previously abstract painting practice with
text appropriated from gay pornographic magazines. These seminal
paintings evoke desire through both the textural and the textual,
as Ligon pairs broad swaths of lushly rendered paint with pithy
confessions of lust and erotic encounters. Ligon’s initial withholding
and eventual revelation of the text-based precursors twenty-six years
after they were produced exemplify “gay stashing,” a term used
to discuss consciously deferred exposure of explicitly homoerotic
material. Ligon’s gesture of gay stashing is made paramount in the
context of his 1989 National Endowment for the Arts grant, and against
the backdrop of the culture wars and their ensuing punitive pressure
and censorship constraints.
The Role of Spanish and Hispanic Art in the Collections
and Exhibitions of New York Museums
Chair: Marcus Bruce Burke, Hispanic Society of America
The Hispanic world has been central to major museums in New York
City. Curators from the Brooklyn Museum, the Frick Collection, and
the Metropolitan Museum of Art examine the history of collecting
and displaying art from the Iberian Peninsula and Ibero-America.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century acquisitions receive attention as the
foundation for current developments and future growth. These holdings
have drawn additional works in temporary exhibitions, from the tightly
focused to the encyclopedic, that have promoted scholarship and the
taste for Hispanic art. This programming has also gone to the heart of
efforts to forge relationships with audiences and encourage attendance.
As the curators describe the endeavors of each museum, they analyze
how their collaboration is yielding results at the local, national, and
international levels.
Cultural Negotiations of the Readymade
Chairs: Orianna Cacchione, University of California, San Diego;
Birgit Hopfener, Freie Universität Berlin
With the introduction of the concept of the readymade by Marcel
Duchamp in 1915, previous Western notions of retinal art were
radically questioned, as context was introduced as constituent in
the processes of signification of the art object. In today’s art world
globally engaged and art-historically informed artists work with both
the readymade and functional objects. The concept of the readymade
currently plays a dominant role and has been globalized through
transcultural negotiation. Considering the complexity of contemporary
daily life, which often takes place between and across national borders
and historical entanglements, Western and non-Western artworks
alike can be understood as agents in a transcultural discourse of
contemporary art. These practices provoke a critical rereading of
the historical concept of the readymade to interrogate art’s critical
capacities and culturally different genealogies of art history. By
scrutinizing how cultural negotiations of the readymade articulate
cultural difference, the panel instigates a transcultural discourse and
contributes to recent debates about the methodologies used in both
transcultural and global art history.
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The Readymade as Transcultural “Inter-esse”
Stefan Römer, Leuphana University
With the artistic practice of the readymade there was a fundamental
restructuring of the concept of the original and thus the institution of
art following the 1960s, when the real discussion of readymades began.
But what still seems missing in recent discourses is an analysis of how
the readymade reflects the thresholds between the Eurocentric and a
globalized field of art. With this background this presentation reflects
on the concept of the readymade as a transcultural artistic strategy
testing the cultural contexts as massive institutional thresholds. Has
the term “global” after postcolonial discussions become a readymade
itself? A deconceptual reading of the readymade as a transcultural
artistic strategy leads to an art practice and theory of postcolonial
politics of transcription as de-ontological states of “Inter-esse.”
Ready to Make Things That Resonate Transculturally:
Nam June Paik’s Objets Sonores in 1962–63
Franziska Koch, Heidelberg University
In his text About the Exposition of Music (1962), the thirty-year-old
Korean Fluxus member and electronic music adept Nam June Paik
famously declared to have renounced the performance of music in favor
of “exposing” it in the form of objets sonores. He put these on display
in his first solo exhibition in Wuppertal in 1963. This paper compares
the temporal and corporeal qualities that Paik’s objets sonores allowed
the viewer-cum-listener to experience to earlier forms and functions
of readymades and objets trouvés. It investigates how the synaesthetic
perception that these objects engendered supported the artist’s call for
“indeterminism and variability in visual art.” Finally, it asks to what
extent Paik’s artworks were designed not only to challenge established
disciplinary demarcations of music and the visual arts but also to
question underlying cultural, chiefly Eurocentric, assumptions related
to the status of the object in art.
From the Periphery: New Forms of Readymade
Marcus Moore, Massey University
This paper analyzes the transcultural readymade as response to how
Duchamp’s legacy plays out on the periphery of the mainstream
centers. Specifically, the transcultural readymade colludes with two
traditions: the readymade’s blueprint and customary practices of Māori
tikanga in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Artworks by Michael Pārekowhai
(b. 1968, of Ngā-Ariki, Ngāti Whakarongo, and Pākehā descent)
demonstrate a merging of traditions to register toi whakairo (knowledge
and excellence through carving). Carving instructs genealogy: the
passing on of hand-based skills and oral knowledge intergenerationally.
Carving is undertaken communally, and Pārekowhai’s readymades
double as communal, usable objects: functional musical instruments to
be played collectively. This agency holds implication for the social and
aesthetic functions of the readymade.
Akasegawa’s Uchuu no Kanzume (Kani-kan) (Canned Universe)
Jaimey Hamilton, University of Hawai’i, Manoa
This talk addresses the historical importance of Akasegawa Genpei’s
readymades in postwar cross-cultural contexts. Akasegawa was a
central member of the Neo-Dada Organizers and Hi Red Center in
Japan. Between 1963 and 1964, during the heightened atmosphere of
Anpo demonstrations against the American commercial and military
presence, he worked on a series of tin cans, another of counterfeit
Yen notes, and yet another of wrapped objects. One of the tin cans,
called Uchuu no Kanzume (Kani-kan), or Canned Universe, opened
and emptied, with the label mounted on the inside, beckoned both
cultural insiders and the international avant-garde world to contemplate
the new reality of the capitalist forces. This paper discusses this and
Akasegawa’s other readymades as contingent political-aesthetic
strategies in the context of postwar international Neo-Dada.
The Case of the “Fake” Pot: Negotiating the Transcultural
Readymade in the Work of Ai Weiwei
Ros Holmes, University of Oxford
In 1998, at the conclusion of the group show Double Kitsch, Max
Protetch Gallery returned Ai Weiwei’s Coca-Cola Tang (1997), one
of the artist’s readymades, stating that they could not sell the work
because they did not believe it to be “authentically old.” This paper
examines a number of important theoretical issues that arise from the
correspondence between the gallery and the artist and the chain of
events within which Ai’s work became implicated. It questions how
contemporary appropriations of the readymade move between different
cultural contexts and argues that Ai’s practice engages in a doubleedged process that both acknowledges and disrupts inherent value
systems, ultimately questioning the power structures that underlie the
so-called global art world.
Precolumbian Ceramics: Form, Meaning, and Function
Chairs: Michael D. Carrasco, Florida State University; Maline Werness,
Humbolt State University
Ceramics, ranging from painted and incised utilitarian vessels to lifesize terra-cotta sculpture, are ubiquitous in the archaeological record
and represent a major medium in the art of the Americas. Research on
ceramics has established site-specific and regional chronologies and
important visual and textual corpuses. Nevertheless, key art-historical
questions about the role ceramic objects played in ancient visual
culture remain underdeveloped. Spanning the geographic extent of
ancient Latin America, this session raises significant questions about
categorization and classification, the depiction of gender, ceramic
sculpture, the relationship between media, and the continuity of
regional traditions.
Are Colima Gadrooned Vessels Pumpkins or Barrel Cacti?
Emic Classification, Representation, and Embodiment in
Precolumbian Mexican Ceramics
Khristaan D. Villela, Santa Fe University of Art and Design
Gadrooned vessels in the Comala style of Colima ceramics from West
Mexico are some of the most common and recognizable varieties
of Precolumbian ceramic sculpture. Most catalogues describe these
objects as representations of pumpkins, based on their resemblance
to some varieties of squashes. This paper introduces an alternative
identification of these vessels, arguing that they are instead images
of barrel cacti. But must it be one or the other? A more productive
approach to Precolumbian ceramic sculpture may entail object class
analysis rather than focus on mimetic form or species taxonomy.
Abundant Precolumbian, Contact period, and ethnohistoric evidence
points to an ancient class of containers that included pumpkin squashes
and barrel cacti, as well as images of the same rendered in clay, stone,
and other media. The study of these vessels also opens avenues on
the larger question of the nature of representation and embodiment in
Precolumbian visual culture.
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The Women’s Terra-Cotta Army: Large-Scale Sculpture from
El Zapotal, Veracruz, Mexico
Cherra Wyllie, University of Hartford
El Zapotal Mound 2 yielded hundreds of small-, medium-, and largescale terra-cotta sculptures. A colossal skeletal god rendered in unbaked
clay is the focal point of a banquette and ossuary. Nineteen life-size
terra-cotta women, each fashioned individually, flank the shrine in
procession, interpreted by scholars as female warriors sacrificed in the
battle of parturition, who accompany the Death God in the afterlife.
Newly available data on the Mound 2 depositional sequence, along
with refined osteological analysis and a greater understanding of
termination rituals associated with the architecture of the region,
suggest a reevaluation of the narrative program. Throughout central
and southern Veracruz we see indications of a changing emphasis in
ritual activity, with women becoming key protagonists in elite spheres
of activity. The large-scale terra-cotta sculptures in El Zapotal and
throughout the Mixtequilla are an intricate part of this transition and
may signify new populations or changing religious beliefs.
Exploring the Effigy Funerary Urn Genre: A Highland Maya
Interpretation of Mortuary Space
Kathleen McCampbell, Florida State University
This paper examines the iconography and ritual function of highland
Maya ceramic effigy funerary urns, which date to the Late Classic–
Early Postclassic periods and were likely produced in the northern
region of highland Guatemala. The urns’ iconography includes jaguar
figures, the old god of the hearth, and the Maize God and is rendered
in a distinct style that departs from contemporaneous funerary urn
examples. This iconography marks the urns as heated spaces where
regeneration or sprouting may occur, an important concept in Maya
eschatology, which makes explicit the analogy that exists between
the life cycles of maize and humans. The urns’ iconography and ritual
function conceptually link this genre to incensarios, cache vessels,
and mortuary architecture. Highland effigy funerary urns represent a
new iteration of an established iconographic tradition and effectively
condense architectural tombs and their attendant symbolism into a
single ceramic vessel.
Zoomorphs, Religion, and Nationhood in Precolumbian
Caribbean Ceramics
Lawrence Waldron, independent scholar
While Taino ceramics have received some attention from art historians
in recent years, the two-thousand-year-old family of Precolumbian
Caribbean ceramics to which they belonged has remained largely
unstudied by visual culture specialists. The Caribbean Ceramic Age
began around the fifth century BCE with the arrival of agriculturalists
from northeastern South America. Named after the type-site of Saladero
on the Lower Orinoco, Saladoid pottery represents a combination
of preexisting slip-painted and modeled traditions that combined in
Venezuela and diversified greatly in the Caribbean. In the range of
Saladoid ceramic adornment, more than twenty animal and bird species
are decipherable. Traditional narratives of the related Taino and South
American lowlanders establish the symbolic importance of many
of these species. Some variations in mainland and island Saladoid
zoomorphic pottery suggest emerging cultural differences. Similarities
and differences between the earlier Saladoid and later Taino can also
elucidate cultural developments across the Caribbean Ceramic Age.
Netted within Bounds: Cupisnique Ceramics in Northern Peru
Kimberly L. Jones, University of Texas at Austin
Cupisnique ceramics remain relatively undefined with regard to
their cultural context during the Formative period and thus to their
significance in the rise of social complexity on the Peruvian north
coast. This situation results from a lack of clear provenience for
many known Cupisnique vessels. Recent archaeological fieldwork,
however, is augmenting the data by which to refine our understanding
of Cupisnique culture. This presentation defines and bounds Cupisnique
ceramic vessels in time and space. It also explores how framing a
Cupisnique ceramic corpus permits us to identify and trace selective
visual programs in Cupisnique iconography. While isolated
themes or motifs have been fruitfully addressed, their combination
and interplay in Cupisnique iconography reflect its role in visually
manifesting an ideological system that may be examined through
comparison with other visual media and archaeological contexts.
Life’s Edge: A Thinking-Feeling Lab in the Risks, Powers,
and Possibilities of Forms-of-Life
Chair: Jill H. Casid, University of Wisconsin–Madison
In Means without End Giorgio Agamben argues that life as we live
it has been reduced to naked life, in which the state of exception is
the rule, its perimeter the camp, and its defining limits the sovereign
power to put to death and make live. No less starkly Agamben puts the
emphasis on practice, replacing life with “forms-of-life” to maintain
that life “can never be separated from its form” and that the “ways, acts,
and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all
possibilities of life, always and above all powers.” Taking its cue from
the challenge of forms-of-life, this session puts into critical interface
and also reanimating contact the “live” in performance studies, visual
studies, art practice, and bioethics and biopolitics. This thinking-feeling
lab in the risks, powers, and possibilities of forms-of-life reposes the
questions of the ontology of the live in terms of the quickening and
complicating hows, namely, what manifold kinds of life may do. And
it asks the revivified question of the happy or the good to reengage as a
vital problematic the aesthetic, ethical, and political entwinement of life
and its complex forms. What forms-of-life do we risk enacting in our
engagements with the sentence that promises to make vibrant what it
ostensibly merely describes: “It’s alive”? This session takes advantage
of the conference’s New York location to collaborate with José Muñoz,
and features the performance artist Nao Bustamante, the performancestudies scholar Rebecca Schneider, the artist Steve Kurtz of Critical Art
Ensemble, and Kandice Chuh.
Making Art, Making Time
Chairs: Ignaz Cassar, independent artist; Eve Kalyva, University of
Buenos Aires
This session queries the current attention to art’s contemporaneity
in both theoretical and practical terms. Contemporary art can be
understood as a particular temporal definition of art production
pertaining to the historical moment, and the notion of contemporaneity
has been considered in relation to historicity and memory, ethics, and
the value of the new. In this light, the session addresses the implications
of contemporaneity with regard to art, history, and criticism. However,
recent art practices (notably installation and performance) have
developed novel ways of engaging the spatio-temporal continuum of
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experience, while institutions enlist more readily available forms of
presentation and public engagement (ebulletins, blogs, podcasts). The
session thus explores the temporality of art in works that themselves
engage with the notion of time.
Contemporaneity and the “Unframability” of Time(s)
Christine Ross, McGill University
The notion of contemporaneity discloses a concern for what occurs
at the same time and is of the same time. In contemporary artistic
practices concerned with globalization and environmentalism,
contemporaneity is a perspective that emphasizes the simultaneous yet
anachronistic temporalities of our times. But how is it represented? Is
contemporaneity representable? This paper raises the question of the
limitations of the now common reliance of multiscreen projections
on the aesthetics of montage to convey the experience of the global.
Following Antonio Negri’s examination of the contemporary
constitution of time, it shows how montage’s reliance on the framing of
units becomes problematic in a post-Fordist period where labor time is
increasingly unframable. The paper examines Harun Farocki’s Workers
Leaving the Factory . . . (2006) and Nancy Davenport’s Workers
(leaving the factory) (2007) to posit that it is not montage but digital
seamlessness that conveys the unrepresentability of contemporaneity.
The Tensed Object of Performance
Mechtild Widrich, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
The tension between “that was then” and “this is now” has become
central to performance theory. Ephemeral art, whether performance,
installation, or relational, resides neither in its documents nor in some
inaccessible past but is constructed on the go by audiences as the object
of an imaginary performance. We, temporally distinct spectators, relate
to the disparate bodies, artifacts, and historical discourses through these
imaginary performances, which are not purely subjective, for they
answer to our demands for proof. How can different audiences, some
of whom read documents rather than witness an event, agree on this
one object enough to canonize it? Why do we treat performances as
museum objects? The past, live event is inseparable from the persistent,
problematic document—but the two are not indistinguishable factors in
a postmodern play of presence.
Cotemporality
Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh
Do the times taken, and given, by contemporary artists have much,
a little, or nothing in common with the complex configuration of
different kinds of time that have come to define contemporary life in
all of its diversity across an increasingly fragile planet? A thickened
experience of the present is pierced by prodigious contemporizings of
past times, layered by uneven and inequitable distribution and haunted
by diminished expectations of times to come. Reviving a seventeenthcentury usage, we might name as “cotemporality” this volatile,
layered coexistence of many speeds and spaces. Both studio-based and
moving-image arts are battling to meet the demands of contemporary
difference. Cotemporality appears in certain kinds of cinema (Tree of
Life) and in some installations (The Clock). This paper draws upon Paul
Ricoeur’s juxtaposition of Augustine and Aristotle in his exploration of
the relationships between time and narrative.
Twenty-Second Delay: Time, Memory, and the State of
Here and There
Patricia Kelly, Emily Carr University of Art and Design
In H.M. (2010) Kerry Tribe probes the limits of memory through the
double projection of a single 16mm film loop. Here, the patient H. M.,
whose long-term memory holds for up to twenty seconds, is used to
demonstrate that memory is highly subjective, shifting in relation to
individual experience and need. In Manon de Boer’s Presto: Perfect
Sound (2006) the relationship between sound and image is used to
question how memory functions. After the violinist George Van Dam
plays part of a Bartók sonata six times, De Boer produces a “perfect
performance” from the optimal sound composites, eschewing the visual
continuity of any singular take. These works, coupled with theoretical
debates on the nature of memory, are used to analyze contemporaneity
and its relation to historical displacement. In an age of instantaneous
communication, the political purchase of temporal experience and its
centrality to current art discourse are underscored.
Acts of Time/Endurance: 9 Encounters in Twenty-Seven Hours
in Berlin, Tokyo, Mumbai
Katherine Mezur, independent scholar
This paper analyzes time and urban corporeality in the twenty-sevenhour encounter/performance 9, performed in Berlin in 2011 by the
Mumbai-based action/painter artist Nikhil Chopra and the Berlin- and
Tokyo-based butoh performance artist Kaseki Yuko. The work grew
from the transformation of World War II, postwar, and postcolonial
cities into urban spaces with distinctive boundaries that divide bodies,
habitat, and memories. Gestures in 9 concentrate on bodily acts in
communication, task, and art labor. Quotidian acts reflect and implode
memory and contemporaneity through their durational repetition. The
presentation thus emphasizes the durational mode of gesture in and
through time and space. How does duration mark these urban pasts,
which are repeatedly destroyed, rebuilt, and memorialized? How does
gesture mark these walls and histories of endurance? Which of their
time acts of city/memory reclaim through gesture the time memories of
moving and captured peoples, walled and exploded cities, and the gaps
between them?
Roman Art History: The Shock of the New
Chairs: Kimberly Cassibry, Wellesley College; James Frakes,
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Archaeological discoveries in Rome and in the provinces are radically
transforming our understanding of the era’s imperial culture. This
session assesses recent Roman finds and addresses the methodological
challenges posed by a dynamically evolving body of evidence that is
increasingly weighted toward the provinces. Case studies focused on
sculpture and architecture analyze the discoveries prompting specialists
to reconsider the empire’s most famous monuments, as well as those
curiously still excluded from the canon.
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New to Look Old: The Archaizing Terra Cottas from the
Temple of Apollo on the Palatine
Barbara Kellum, Smith College
The Palace of Diocletian at Split: Using New Comparanda to
Expand Old Views of Late Roman Palaces
Anne Hunnell Chen, Columbia University
The archaizing terra cottas from the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine
(28 BCE) are arguably some of the most important Roman finds in
the last sixty years but also some of the most problematic. Small-scale
objects of humble material, they are cast in a retrospective hybrid
archaizing style and, unlike contemporary literary sources, they tell
a tale of the battle of Actium as a war both civil and foreign. Recent
excavations at the victory monument Octavian/Augustus built at
his campsite at Nikopolis have revealed that archaizing decoration
also played an important role there, so these new-to-look-old
representations factored into the commemoration of the very recent
naval battle both in the east and in the west, in capital and in province
alike. These decorations demonstrate how history was constructed in
visual terms and are key to construing the artful strategy of Augustus’s
restored republic.
The Palace of Diocletian at Split, a touchstone monument of Roman
architecture and permanent textbook fixture, has been the constant
subject of archaeological campaigns and publications since the
eighteenth century. But even this well-trodden territory can reveal new
information when examined with reference to recent archaeological
discoveries and interculturally sensitive theoretical perspectives.
Moving beyond recognition of the militaristic parallels for which the
site is justly famed, this paper makes use of new comparanda, both
inside and outside the Roman Empire, to provide fresh insight into the
form and function of Diocletian’s coastal retreat. Comparison is made
between design elements in the palace at Split, its recently discovered
east Serbian counterpart, Felix Romuliana, and contemporary Sasanian
royal residences. It is suggested that Roman translation of architectural
design elements gleaned from the east functioned as part of a conscious
effort to heighten the legibility of Roman imperial power on an
increasingly international stage.
Imperial Politics Was Local at Sessa Aurunca: The Sculptural
Program of the Antonine Theater
Susan Wood, Oakland University
The theater at Sessa Aurunca appears to have had an unorthodox
sculptural program. It included statues both of the theater’s patron,
Mindia Matidia, and of her imperial relatives, but Matidia’s formed the
focal point of attention. Its format is unparalleled: rather than following
a familiar type like the “Large Herculaneum Woman,” Matidia appears
as a scantily clad running nymph. The statue seems to be an original
creation for this specific location, a rarity in the second century CE.
This discovery also allows us to identify five more surviving portrait
heads of Matidia. Statues and busts of Matidia’s deified relatives
appeared around hers in the scaenae frons. They were more formulaic
than her image, but the heraldic details on two cuirassed statues were
rather rare and apparently allude to specific policies and achievements
of the emperors they represent.
The Reuse of Sculpture in Late Antique Shrines in Rome
and across the Empire
Blair Fowlkes-Childs, Birkbeck College, University of London
A group of sculptures that includes miniature Dionysiac herms,
statuettes, and Mithraic reliefs sparks a reevaluation of the fourthcentury phase at the sanctuary of Jupiter Dolichenus on the Aventine
hill, and the possibility that the cult site was reused. The paper draws
together evidence from other contemporaneous cult sites in Rome,
such as at Iseum and Mithraea, as well as from recent excavations at
several sites across the empire, in particular in Greece and Spain. It
analyzes the significance of assemblages of sculptures of various dates
and production quality in religious contexts, drawing upon extensive
new research on the collecting habits and customs of pagans during late
antiquity, and pinpoints connections between worship practices in the
capital and in the provinces during the religious and political turmoil of
the Late Antique period.
New Evidence Generates New Narratives: Maxentius,
Constantine, and the Basilica Nova
Elisha Ann Dumser, University of Akron
As a seminal architectural accomplishment of the Late Roman
Empire, the Basilica Nova features in every introductory art-history
survey. Yet the narrative recounted there—that Maxentius began
construction in 306 CE only to have his rival Constantine complete
the structure with significant alterations after 312 CE—has been
proven false by recent archaeological work. New evidence establishes
that the so-called Constantinian southern entrance was a vital
component of the basilica’s plan from its Maxentian beginnings,
and that the north apse credited to Constantine may postdate his
reign by several decades. Accepting these facts allows for the first
accurate reconstruction of the Maxentian Basilica Nova and a
clearer understanding of the ideological importance of its singular
form—but the implications extend further to reshape our portrait of
Constantine’s civic architectural patronage in line with the rather
tepid reputation he enjoyed among the citizens of Rome.
Society for Photographic Education
Traversing the Void: Synchronized Community Projects
Chair: Shannon Lee Castleman, Nanyang Technological University
Shannon Castleman, who was the winner of SPE’s 2012 Garry B.
Fritz Imagemaker Award, gives a presentation about her practice
and work, which includes video installations resulting from planned
events that are best described as synchronized community video
projects. Castleman utilized a consistent framework and set of rules
for the production of her works that were produced in public-housing
apartment blocks in Singapore and Cuba. Emerging from these
experiments are simple conversations about and between neighbors.
The projects expose a surprising series of funny, idiosyncratic, and
even moving vignettes. They allow residents and neighbors to view
and be viewed with tacit recognition and permission. They are artworks
about neighbors discovering neighbors, looking at each other from
across a void.
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1890–2010, Part I
This session explores a range of art produced by German-Jewish artists
over the course of the long twentieth century in relationship to the
historically dynamic and fraught equation, GermanandJewishandartist.
Jewish Art Circles: The Studio of Hermann Struck
Celka Straughn, University of Kansas
Highly regarded as a Jew and an artist, Hermann Struck (1876–1944)
maintained his orthodox faith and developed a strong commitment
to Zionism while achieving widespread recognition as a graphic
artist. A friend to numerous artists, writers, and leading figures,
Struck was active in Berlin’s cultural as well as Jewish circles, which
often overlapped, especially in his studio. A center for art, politics,
and religion, his studio facilitated an interchange among artistic,
intellectual, and political/Zionist circles. Upon arrival in Berlin, a
thriving German art center in the early twentieth century, young
Jewish artists often found their way to Struck’s studio. No specifically
Jewish artists groups existed; instead, various Jewish associations and
organizations provided different forms of support, such as scholarships,
commissions, and occasional exhibitions. Access to such support
depended in part on connections and recommendations, for which
Struck and his studio formed an influential network.
German Romanticism and the “Jewish Prince”: Reconciling
Zionism and Orientalism in the Drawings and Performance Art
of Else Lasker-Schüler
Catherine Wilkins, Edison State College
Though best known for her poetry, the Berlin modernist Else LaskerSchüler was also a visual artist whose work dealt with self and
otherness. Lasker-Schüler’s struggle to resolve personal-identity
conflicts—regarding nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, and
profession—is often interpreted through the lens of early-twentiethcentury Zionism because of the artist’s Jewish faith. However, it is
a distinctly German Romantic tradition reflected in the stereotypical
portrayals of race, religion, sexuality, and individualism in the writings,
performance, and visual arts of Lasker-Schüler, not a reflection of
strictly Jewish difference. This paper employs the East German artist
Ursula Mattheuer-Neustädt’s poem and portrait of Lasker-Schüler as
a framework for exploring the nineteenth-century stereotypes at work
in the oeuvre of the latter, as well as the thematic and stylistic links
between a new generation of Germans and their early-twentieth-century
Jewish counterparts.
Pictures That Satisfy: Irma Stern and German-Jewish Identity
in South African Modern Art
LaNitra Berger, George Mason University
This paper considers the life and work of the German-Jewish South
African artist Irma Stern (1894–1966) and her contributions to
modernism in South Africa and beyond. Despite being virtually
unknown outside of South Africa, Stern is crucial to our knowledge
of modernism because she demonstrates how artists outside of Europe
addressed racial, religious, and gender boundaries in different cultural
contexts. Active throughout the twentieth century, Stern witnessed
defining moments in Jewish and South African historical consciousness.
During apartheid Stern received support from the Afrikaner National
Party because her paintings of black and colored South Africans
projected an embrace of multiculturalism that provided political cover
from international criticism of the regime. Her acceptance of this
support was a source of friction within the Jewish community, which
was divided between anti-apartheid resistance and self-preservation.
Stern’s work expresses a visual understanding of the complex nature of
political and cultural identity in modern South Africa.
A Turbulent Relationship: The Prussian Academy of Art
and Jewish Artists, 1900–33
Helga Aurisch, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Unthinkable during the period of the German empire, Max
Liebermann’s presidency of the Prussian Academy of Arts during the
Weimar Republic was an astonishing achievement. However, as the
first Jewish artist elected to this position, Liebermann was attacked by
the conservative establishment as well as by the artistic avant-garde,
including Felix Nussbaum, a young Jewish painter struggling to make
his career in Berlin. Nussabaum’s hard-edged Mad Square (1931),
mocking both the stolid professorial body of the academy and the
controversial figure of its president, serves as the starting point for
a discussion of the conflicted policies of the Berlin academy toward
Jewish artists in the period between the last years of the German empire
and the rise of Nazism in Germany. The problem is considered from
the point of view of cultural politics, individual rivalries, and the everrecurring generational conflict between established groups and the
avant-garde.
Lea Grundig and Miriam Novitch: Art, Remembrance,
and Politics in the Cold War
Oliver Sukrow, University of Heidelberg
The work and life of the German-Jewish artist Lea Grundig (1906–
1977) have been investigated primarily from the perspective of her
partisan cultural-political engagement in the German Democratic
Republic after 1949. This has led to the idea that after her Israeli
exile she curtailed any personal artistic Holocaust remembrance,
especially in the 1960s, when she held important public offices and
when GDR-Israeli relations reached a low point. However, this paper
challenges this picture by showing an example of Grundig’s continued
close contact to Israel: in the 1960s, she corresponded with Miriam
Novitch (1908–1990), founder and first curator of the art collection of
the Ghetto Fighters’ House, who later acquired Grundig’s Holocaust
graphics. Although the GDR never accepted Holocaust responsibility,
Grundig and Novitch’s contact demonstrates how art could serve as
medium of remembrance despite cold war politics.
1890–2010, Part II
The Reluctant “Other”: E. M. Lilien’s Female Imagery
and the Ambivalent Desire for Home
Lynne Swarts, University of Sydney
Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874–1925) is recognized as the major modern
Zionist artist whose iconography formed the foundations of the Israeli
national art school, Bezalel, in Jerusalem. Recent historiography on
Lilien focuses less on his Zionist iconology than on the discourse
surrounding his construction and imaging of a new muscular (male)
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Jew in body, mind, and spirit. Yet Lilien’s female images, which
have been largely ignored by scholars, also deserve our attention.
These images reveal how Lilien, a Galician-born Jew who spent
the majority of his career in Germany, was a reluctant “Other” who
struggled to reconcile Jewish alterity and its discontent, assimilation
and parochialism, with his desire to be part of the German modernist,
cosmopolitan fin de siècle. This paper considers the paradox of Lilien’s
representation of the new Jewish woman in relation to growing
European interest in German Orientalism, German-Jewish identity, and
the often ambivalent desire for home.
The Art and Artists of Das jüdische Prag
Nicholas Sawicki, Lehigh University
In Prague in the winter of 1916–17 a new literary and artistic anthology
brought together the work of some of the city’s leading Jewish artists
and writers. Titled Das jüdische Prag, it was the first publication of
its time to make a case for the contribution of local German-Jewish
artists to modernism and to position their art in an openly Jewish
context. Through its visual and literary content, it presented a complex
and often conflicting picture of what it meant to be a German-Jewish
artist in a city where both Jews and Germans were minority cultures,
and where the majority of the population was Czech. The anthology
provides a starting point in this paper for a broader examination of the
representation of Jewish artistic identity in Prague at a critical moment
in the city’s history, as it began to transform itself into the capital of a
new Czechoslovak state.
The “Significant Other”: Lucia, Laszlo, or Both?
Rose-Carol Washton Long, The Graduate Center, City University
of New York
Lucia Moholy, like many women married to Bauhaus faculty members,
subordinated her career to her husband’s. By the 1970s she began to
insist that she had had a significant impact on Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s
photographic development and should be given credit for some of his
work. While scholars of her work have largely accepted her claim,
Laszlo scholars generally give less credit to Lucia and do not address
the complexity of their creative partnership. This paper discusses
Lucia’s subordination of her 1920s photographic work not only in
connection with ambivalent attitudes toward women at the Bauhaus but
also as conditioned by her patriarchal German-Jewish upbringing in
Prague. Her adolescent unpublished diaries as well as portraits she took
of herself and Laszlo suggest why she could not begin to experiment
with photography until she met Laszlo and why some of their best
photographs resulted from their work together.
Becoming Wolf Vostell
Erin Hanas, Duke University
Wolf Vostell (1932–1998) dressed like a Hasidic Jew from the mid1960s until his death. This was not an act of religious devotion—he
did not practice Judaism—but was a provocative part of his artistic
practice, which confronted destruction and violence in society. This
paper examines how Vostell’s artistic career developed alongside
his performed German/Jewish identity and how understanding this
informs an analysis of the motif of the train in his oeuvre. Specifically,
it focuses on his mobile project Fluxus Zug (1981), which traveled
by railway around North Rhine-Westphalia for four months. Vostell’s
outward identity and use of trains served pedagogical and therapeutic
purposes, for both the artist personally and German society generally.
The German/Jewish artist mobilized art’s redemptive potential and
challenged the fraught relationship among Germans, Jews, and trains,
which haunted Germany in the aftermath of World War II.
Self-Portrait of a Self-Hating Jew
Tanya Ury, Leiden University
What is Jewish culture? Is it culture that concerns itself with Jewish
identity, history, religion? Race? Is it constructed by artists who
consider their Jewish origin as significant? What of the work made
by artists who do not consider their Jewish background as being of
significance? How would one define Judaism? The German curator
Hans Günter Golinski writes: “The paradoxical situation of artists from
a Jewish background, which ranges from normal to being a special
case, furnishes them with a sharpened consciousness that distances
them to society at large and makes them aware of the conditions of
minorities” (The Right of the Image: Jewish Perspectives in Modern
Art, 2003–4). Referencing her own self-portraiture on themes of Jewish
and female identity, the multimedia artist Tanya Ury discusses taboo
zones and censorship in Great Britain and Germany. Comparisons are
also made in their representation of Jewish culture.
Transmaterialities: Materials, Process, History
Chairs: Richard Checketts, University of Leeds; Marta Ajmar,
Victoria and Albert Museum
This panel engages with materials as objects of historical study. It
maps some of the distinct and often implicit kinds of knowledge and
meaning ingrained in artifacts through the use of certain materials.
Specifically through a consideration of materials as both object and
agent of various kinds of transformation, it generates discussion at the
intersections between notions of materiality, making, and the larger
social frameworks within which things exist. How might material
transformation be embodied, negated, or represented in made objects?
In what senses might material transformation as a process within
artifacts be understood to inform their meanings? In what ways might
a material work as a cause, a medium, or a mode of resistance within
larger intellectual and social transformations? How might processes of
making be understood as in dialogue with, or as transgression of, the
“natural” properties of things? How are encounters between different
cultures expressed and shaped in the materialities of things? It is
precisely a potential to transcend, bridge, and challenge the empirical
and chronological categories implied by such questions that constitutes
the real historicity of materials. The panel draws out ways the
conventional approaches in the history of art and design may be altered
by pursuing these lines of thought.
The Generative Possibilities of Base Materiality in Postwar
Conceptions of Art and Architecture
Alex Potts, University of Michigan
The postwar period saw the emergence of tendencies such as new
brutalism and art informel characterized by a privileging of close
engagement with base materiality. Often seen as attempts to return to a
ground zero of spontaneous artistic creation that would escape modern
society’s mediated forms of interaction with the material world, such
tendencies are more fruitfully seen in thoroughgoing dialectical terms.
The vital manifestations of this materialist brutalism were fuelled by
a double impetus—to negate capitalism’s reifying mediations and to
fashion forms, images, and environmental structures that would be
true to the underlying substance of things in the modern world. This
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talk focuses on the powerfully articulated, contradictory conceptions
of artistic form played out both in the artistic practice and in the
theoretical and polemical writing of the painter, sculptor, architectural
and artistic theorist, and revolutionary activist Asger Jorn.
Art Historians of Southern California
The Material Means of Bauhaus Paper Studies
Jeffrey Saletnik, Amherst College
Scholars have discussed tensions in framing and understanding nonWestern art—that it is treated as tokenism or not coeval with other
artistic developments in Europe and the United States. Even in the
discourses of contemporary art, which have become more diverse and
international, fluidity of expertise and knowledge between Western and
non-Western art remain limited. At a moment of hyperglobalization,
when the world is becoming increasingly more connected through
various media and economic markets, there is debate whether one can
distinguish European and American art from non-Western art, or if
terms such as “Western,” “non-Western,” and “Eastern” are applicable
when discussing cultural production outside Europe and the United
States. Alternatively, do these traditional labels, although problematic,
still speak to the discipline as a whole and therefore convey the subject
matter? Is non-Western art history still marginalized, despite all the
theorization that has attempted to give equal value to non-European
art? Furthermore, is it possible to integrate art history and rethink the
discipline in a more globalized manner?
Bauhaus folded-paper studies are perplexing objects of historical
inquiry; many were destined for the waste bin, and those that survived
became a kind of ephemera, filed away, and often flattened, in archives.
By attending to paper studies not in terms of their materiality per se
but as exercises, one finds that these delicate folded objects provided
students with significant insight into design as—to invoke Deleuze on
folding—a “fluid logic of connectivity.” This presentation explores
how one can look at Bauhaus paper studies, and the material of
pedagogy more generally, as agents for the transmission of knowledge.
It addresses pedagogic methods and practices at the Bauhaus as
functional means toward creative understanding in design education;
specifically, it examines how folded-paper studies—made famous
through the teaching of Josef Albers—provided students with an
opportunity to transform matter, thus instantiating design as an active
process.
Sese oblectari in dies: The Meditative Function of the Wierix Prints
Pasted into the Cistercian Prayerbook of Martin Boschman
Walter S. Melion, Emory University
Composed in 1610 by Martin Boschman, a subprior at the Cistercian
monastery of Pelplin in Pomerania, the Paradisus precum selectarum
consists of personalized prayers and spiritual exercises, written by
several scribes, and of 221 engravings, the majority (115) by the Wierix
brothers of Antwerp. Pasted into the paper manuscript, the illustrations
are integral to its program: the images closely correlate to the verbal
imagery of the prayers and scriptural passages they ornament. Though
clearly interpolated, the material circumstances of these images, which
are embedded within enclosing rubrics and prayers, indicate that the
pictures were meant to function in tandem with the textual imagery
they amplify. This paper asks how the pictorial images, having been
transformed into visual glosses through the process of cutting and
pasting, contribute to the meditative and liturgical program of the
Paradisus, which was designed to serve jointly as breviary, missal, and
sequence of spiritual exercises.
Miraculous Matter of Neapolitan Baroque Art
Helen Hills, University of York
This paper examines miracle, matter, materiality, and conversion in
the Baroque Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples to illuminate
the relationships between miracle, transformation, material change,
and the politics of place under Spanish Habsburg rule. This richly
adorned chapel orchestrates the relics of Naples’s many protector
saints—including San Gennaro’s miraculous blood—to protect Naples
from catastrophic affliction. In Rome artists and intellectuals explored
the relationships between sanctity and place through martyrdom and
burial, but in Naples sanctity was detached from place of martyrdom to
articulate a special relationship with the city. This presentation explores
Ribera’s altarpiece and the metallurgical work of the chapel to consider
the work of conversion, liquefaction, matter and miracle, form and
holiness, metal and mountain, to ask, what is the matter of
the Baroque?
State of the Discipline: The Position of Non-Western Art
in Art History
Chairs: Kristen Chiem and Cynthia S.Colburn, Art Historians of
Southern California
Globalization and the Art-History Survey
Cynthia Colburn and Kristen Chiem, Pepperdine University
In recent years, globalization has prompted inquiries into cultural
encounters, intersections, exchange, and hybridity in the history of art.
Yet, when investigating connections between diverse artistic traditions,
the artwork of cultures that have had less engagement with the West
over time and space is often marginalized. Further, though colleges
have seen a dramatic increase in the visibility of non-Western courses
in undergraduate art-history curricula, it has been more challenging to
develop curricula that highlight the multifaceted relationships between
non-Western and Western artistic cultures while still recognizing the
unique character of the art of disparate peoples and places. Based
on data from ongoing assessment of the foundational courses in our
undergraduate art-history program collected through the collaborative
efforts of faculty specializing in non-Western and Western art, this
paper explores how art-history survey courses can play a key role in
meaningfully integrating global art into the curricula.
(Non)Western Art Historiography and Eclectic Taste in
Nineteenth-Century Iran and India
Talinn Grigor, Brandeis University
Described as “one of the most heated controversies of modern
scholarship,” the Orient or Rome debate was inflamed by the
simultaneous publication of two books in 1901. On the one hand, the
Italian archaeologist Giovanni Rivoira, in The Origin of Lombardic
Architecture, argued that the origin of Western, especially Gothic,
architecture is to be found in Roman ingenuity. On the other hand,
in Orient oder Rom, the Viennese art historian Josef Strzygowski
contended that Western artistic sources ought to be traced to the IndoGermanic Geist, pointing instead to the Orient. Strzygowski continued
to trace Western artistic connections “not to the ancient Near East . .
. not to Persia but to Iran, Armenia, and India.” Centered on the 1901
Orient or Rome debate in general and Strzygowski’s art-historical
theories in particular, this paper traces the question of non-Western art
historiography vis-a-vis architectural eclecticisms in late-nineteenthcentury Iranian and Indian architecture.
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When Is It Western and When Isn’t It? The Role of Lebanese Art
in (Western) Art History
Kirsten Scheid, American University of Beirut
Is it possible to integrate art history and rethink the discipline in a more
globalized manner? The experience of professional artists working in
Beirut from the colonial period to the present suggests it is. While the
corpus of Lebanese art historiography demonstrates the limits of the
replication of a Greco-Renaissance canon, recent documentation of
artists’ strategies of affiliation, universalization, and social critique in
borrowed art reveals the gains of using art history’s traditional tool kit
to grapple with its traditional blind spots. The very labels “Western,”
“non-Western,” “marginal,” “metropolitan,” and so on make a fruitful
field of study when approached as aesthetic, material, and sensual
productions in concrete yet circulating objects. The question is not
how this art world is non-Western but when and why it is. The case of
Lebanese art shows how art history’s sensitivity to affect and aesthetics
can be capitalized upon without universalizing its theoretical premises.
Reading Iranian Photography
Elahe Helbig, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn
The history of Iranian photography reflects not only national
developments in society but also in politics and culture. Moreover
Iranian photography has stayed in permanent correspondence with
Western developments and adapted Western expertise and trends.
Nevertheless Iranian photography is related to the above-mentioned
mutuality that has evolved in a nonlinear synthesis that requires Iranian
photography to be seen as more differentiated, as part of the general art
history as well as of the national, with its own specific characteristics.
This paper discusses the complexity of this interweaving synthesis by
carefully looking at various generations of Iranian art photographers.
Although they reflect in their works theoretical discourses as well as
artistic movements of the Western hemisphere, they reproduce them
in accordance with national concepts of identity. By analyzing some
representative examples, this paper discusses a different way of reading
Iranian photography.
Art, Literature, and Music in Symbolism and Decadence
Symbolist Dualities
Chair: Deborah H. Cibelli, Nicholls State University
The Symbolists often created images and forms that had dual meanings.
Symbolist dualities include but are not limited to the sacred and
profane and evoke myriad depictions of women as saints/demons and
creators/destroyers. The idea of duality even informs experiments in
which Symbolists combined different media, as they expressed their
philosophy through the visual arts, literature, music, and theater. This
session examines Symbolist dualities and how the division of unity
was inherent to Symbolist theories regarding the transforming nature
of visual art and related disciplines.
The Ideal and Matter: Gustave Moreau’s Ambiguous Dualities
Peter Cooke, The University of Manchester
Moreau’s art is essentially paradoxical, a place where aesthetic unity
is imposed on contradictions. Moreau saw life in terms of the play of
interdependent polar opposites, founded on the essential duality of the
Ideal and Matter. Attached to French academic idealism, he developed
a reactionary spiritualist ideology in opposition to the materialism
of the prevailing naturalism. Yet his major works do not conform to
academic norms of didactic clarity, offering instead ambiguity and
mysterious polysemy. While clinging to the noble tradition of allegory,
Moreau created a modern form of Symbolism. Through the analysis of
important paintings, this presentation shows how Moreau’s ideological
opposition between the Ideal (or Spirit) and Matter found increasingly
complex expression in ambiguous relationships between masculinity
and femininity, life and death, line and color, art and nature, spirituality
and sensuality, Christianity and paganism.
George Minne and Maurice Maeterlinck
Albert Alhadeff, University of Colorado Boulder
The sculptor George Minne, working in the Symbolist climate of Ghent
and Maeterlinck phantom figures, fashioned a series of male nudes in
the 1890s. Long seen as gothic, their antecedents lie in the writings
of the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic Jan Van Ruysbroeck, whose
exegeses Maeterlinck explored in La Revue générale. This paper
places Minne’s nudes in a heretofore unknown context that bridges
current frames of reference with Belgium’s Flemish past, which ties
the profane to the sacred, a naturalist agenda to the mystical. Minne’s
nudes favor a vie immobile, a phrase integral to Maeterlinck, and
aligns them with Ruysbroeck, where a humble, dispassionate, and
reserved response to God is set against one that favors superlatives and
hyperboles. Minne’s nudes define themselves in a secular guise, with
the vestments of a spiritual seer, the dress of Ruysbroeck—dualities
that invest the quotidian with the metaphysics of the seer from Brabant.
The Vicious Wallpaper: Destabilizing Structures in
Edouard Vuillard and Charlotte Gilman Perkins
Martin Sundberg, Universität Basel
The wallpaper visualizes the complexity found in Symbolist interiors
because it can point in many directions—such as cozy surrounding
or vicious threat. Considered as skin, the wallpaper is a precariously
thin border that easily can sway and take on a different meaning. It is
a recurrent motive in Vuillard’s art, especially in a series with a floralpatterned wallpaper from 1896–99. Some years earlier, Gilman Perkins
published the well-known short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Using
Vuillard and Gilman Perkins as points of departure, this paper not
only discusses the wallpaper’s seminal importance but also presents a
rereading of the wallpaper as a (de)stabilizing force within the pictorial/
textual structure through a juxtaposition of their works. The wallpaper
forms a threshold figure—visualizing Symbolist dualities.
Leonardo da Vinci and Odilon Redon: Ambivalent Beauty
of the Fin-de-Siècle
Rosina Neginsky, University of Illinois at Springfield
One of the last photographs of the French Symbolist painter Odilon
Redon shows him seated next to an easel, which holds in progress a
large pastel, known as Homage to Leonardo da Vinci. This work of
art is inspired by Leonardo’s Madonna with Child and Saint Anne,
painted in 1509–10 and now located in the Musée du Louvre. Both
artists painted women’s portraits and created images of the Madonna.
However, their feminine portraits and their Madonnas are permeated by
the ambivalent beauty, the beauty of good and evil, of the divine and
earthly. This paper inquires to what degree Redon’s duality in feminine
portraits came out of his admiration of and his interest in Leonardo
da Vinci’s work and to what degree it is a product of the turn-of-thecentury spirit.
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The Modern Interior as Space and Image, Part I
Model Cottages: Imagining Working-Class Interiors at the
Great Exhibition of 1851
Edward Hollis, University of Edinburgh
The nineteenth century—the Era of the Interior—witnessed the
displacement of art from aristocratic and religious interiors to the
spaces of increasingly ornamented bourgeois households. The
decorative arts changed accordingly. From 1863 the French State
channeled “mediocre” painters into the decorative arts. England too
launched a reform of the decorative arts, resulting in more artists
producing complete interiors. Current art history—still indebted to a
modernist discourse that sees cultural progress to be synonymous with
the removal of ornament from both utilitarian and fine art objects—has
yet to acknowledge the importance of the decorative arts in the myriad
interiors of the 1800s. This panel studies the modern interior in the
trans-Atlantic world in new ways. By addressing the modern interior
as both space and image, the panel proposes to redefine the modern
interior and its objects as essential components of modern art.
As their name implies, the Model Cottages at the Great Exhibition of
1851 were constructed for display rather than inhabitation, and they
provide an opportunity to consider not just what the modern interior
was but what it was imagined and hoped to be. To some, the cottages
were a hygienic machine; to others, a threat to the liberal social order.
Celebrated as social architecture, the cottages have not been studied
as interiors. This paper explores the rooms inside them through
contemporary representations, fictional and factual, reflecting on the
relationship between the real home and its aspirational model, the
modern interior and its commodified image.
“Partly a Chapel, Partly a Boudoir”: Interiors, Interiority,
and Canova’s Penitent Magdalene
Christina Ferando, Columbia University
In contrast to recent critical focus on the visual features of modern
interiors, this paper analyzes the broader sensory appeal of domestic
spaces and the opportunities they offered for tactile pleasure. Regarding
Dalou’s sculptures of female figures, the paper considers how the
placement of objects reinforced a gendering of bourgeois households.
It contrasts visual parallels between the subject of the works and the
mistress of the home with the tactile enjoyment of such works in
the male cabinet de travail. It then examines Renoir’s engagement
with sculpture in the context of his discussion of art’s decorative
function and its appeal to the art lover. The heightened sensibility of
the jouisseur legitimates a potentially transgressive touch. The tactile
interior disturbed perceptual hierarchies that had persisted in aesthetics
from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century and promoted the
jouisseur as a fully embodied subject.
After the successful exhibition of Antonio Canova’s Penitent
Magdalene in the 1808 Parisian Salon, the work’s owner, Giambattista
Sommariva, reclaimed the sculpture and lodged her in his Parisian
townhouse. Acknowledging the sculpture’s religious subject,
Sommariva created a chapel-like space that isolated the Magdalene
and enhanced her religious and aesthetic aura. Her beauty seemed more
exquisite and her penitence more sincere in this space described by
one contemporary as “partly a chapel, partly a boudoir.” Both boudoir
and chapel were intimate spaces for contemplation and retreat. In the
context of Sommariva’s display, viewers felt extraordinary compassion
for the distressed saint and, in turn, reflected on their own empathetic
suffering. The formal attributes of Canova’s Magdalene and its mode of
display therefore worked together to align the interior with the concept
of interiority, appealing to modern ideas of subjectivity and the self.
Théophile Gautier and “Marilhat”: Romanticism’s
Decorated Interior
Marika Knowles, Yale University
Théophile Gautier began his 1842 necrology of the Orientalist painter
Prosper Marilhat with the description of the interior of an apartment
in the Impasse du Doyenné, which conserved, in dilapidated form,
an eighteenth-century decor of white and gold boiseries. Gautier’s
affinity for the interior in the impasse was reflected in his idea of the
microcosm, a theory used throughout the nineteenth century to defend
avant-garde art; for the microcosm is much like an interior, a mental
chamber decorated with images selected by the artist. This world in
a world produces art that resembles not nature but the artist’s idea
of nature: nature seen through an interior. That Gautier places this
description of a physical interior at the head of an essay about
an Orientalist painter speaks to the way that the artist’s interiority
could transform even what was most exterior—the Orient—into a
domestic mirage.
The Domestic Interior as a Tactile Space: Aimé-Jules Dalou
and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Kathryn Brown, Tilburg University
The Automobile Domesticated: Subjects, Objects, and the
Afterlife of Ornament
Daniel Marcus, University of California, Berkeley
In interwar France the automobile was a site of confusion between
interior and exterior, extending the domestic sphere into city streets
and country roads—like a “véritable salon roulant” as one advertiser
put it. Transformations in automobile design in the 1920s prompted
new ways of thinking about interiority in painting. During this
period the interior of automobiles came to mimic the design and
ornamentation of the bourgeois home, resuscitating the plush
upholstery and drapery that modern architecture had recently purged.
This paper focuses on Henri Matisse’s odalisques of the late 1920s,
reading these works in relation to a series of paintings and drawings he
made from inside his car along the Côte d’Azur—works in which the
domestication of the automobile is registered in terms of the loss
of sight and, ultimately, of subjectivity.
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The Modern Interior as Space and Image, Part II
Frederic Edwin Church, Landscape as Design
Katie Pfohl, Harvard University
The American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church’s interest in
architectural and ornamental design infiltrated all aspects of his art,
ranging from the actual compositions of his landscape paintings to
the elaborately ornamented frames he designed to accompany them to
his collection and display of a global range of objects in the Persianstyle home he helped design. Church displaced emergent problems
within his painting practice onto the exigencies of nineteenth-century
design culture, restructuring his landscape paintings according to an
architectural or ornamental logic that made them more like the modern
interior in their capacity to contain the increasingly culturally and
geographically diffuse nature of American material culture.
Fashioning the (Masculine) Interior: Tissot, Portraiture,
and the Fashion Plate
Justine De Young, Harvard University
While James Tissot is well known for his genre pictures of Parisiennes
in exquisite interiors, he is less often discussed as a portrait painter.
Yet he was a sought-after portraitist in both Paris, where he painted the
elegant Marquise de Miramon and the president of the Jockey Club,
and London, where he painted, among others, the dashing Colonel
Frederick Barnaby. This presentation examines the domestic interiors
of his portraits closely—particularly those of his often overlooked male
sitters—comparing the settings, poses, and standards of comportment
seen in his masculine portraits with their feminine counterparts and
those of his aristocratic sitters with his bourgeois subjects. Exploring
Tissot’s portrait settings in conjunction with contemporary French and
British fashion plates illuminates the conventions and ideals of chic
French and British society and also excavates the unfamiliar world of
masculine fashion plates of the 1860s and 1870s.
Imperial Anxiety and Aggressive Decor: Imaging the Domestic
Interior of the German Kaiserreich
Marianne Eggler, Fashion Institute of Technology
This paper analyzes a series of domestic interior designs published in
imperial Germany in the 1880s, an epoch in design history often vilified
by modernists for its rampant historicism, unabashed eclecticism, and
unbridled decorative excess, and mostly overlooked in favor of the
subsequent modern era. Indeed, central to a canonical understanding
of the modern interior of 1920s Weimar Germany is the “cleaning
house” of extraneous ornament and, in particular, a rejection of the
elaborate (and dust-collecting) draperies popular during the Bismarkera Kaiserreich (1871–90). Images of interior decor are analyzed in
the context of German nationalism, imperialism, militarism, and in
relation to the Mensur (student fencing ritual). Fantastically festooned
fenestrations decorated with swords, spears, shields, and battle axes—
literal representations of saber rattling in the innocent guise of home
furnishings—suggest an imperial culture under siege, undergoing
radical change, and fraught with perceived enemies, both external and
from within.
Faire Tapisserie: Édouard Vuillard’s Decoration for Dr. Vaquez
Cindy Kang, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
This paper presents a case study of Édouard Vuillard’s Interior with
Figures, a decorative suite of four panels painted in 1896 for the
library of Dr. Henri Vaquez in Paris. Scholars have already noted that
Vuillard drew inspiration from the interiors of Dr. Vaquez’s home
and other bourgeois domestic spaces for the subject of his paintings.
The paper investigates instead how Vuillard reimagined elements of
interior decoration, specifically tapestry and wallpaper, as the formal and
conceptual basis for modern painting. It analyzes, for example, parallels
between the production and structure of tapestry and Vuillard’s technique
of distemper. Furthermore, the floral backdrop that runs through all four
panels recalls millefleurs tapestry while simultaneously representing
wallpaper. This play with notions of elite and mass interior ornament lies
at the heart of Vuillard’s conception of modern decoration.
Historians of British Art
The “Uncozy” Interior: Gustave Caillebotte’s Intérieurs Démeublés
Elizabeth Benjamin, Northwestern University
The plush cocoon of Walter Benjamin’s archetypal collector, which
writers like Huysmans and Goncourt filled to the brim with bibelots,
has led to a view of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior as a space
best suited to the accretion of objects. However, Gustave Caillebotte’s
sparsely furnished portraits and genre scenes from the early 1880s
present an alternative image of interior space uncannily emptied of
comfort. With collectibles cropped out of view and the remaining
upholstery squeezed into tight spaces, Caillebotte removes furnishings
from the context of conversational groupings touted by contemporary
decorating manuals and in doing so uncomfortably (and literally)
paints people into corners. As a result, what remains—a tense interplay
between the overstuffed upholstery and the people it threatens to
swallow or crush—belies the standard narrative of the cozy interior.
Parallel Lines Converging: Art, Design, and
Fashion Histories
Chair: Julie Codell, Arizona State University
Art, fashion, and design historians have long been separated into distinct,
discrete disciplines in academia and museums, and their subjects are
often differentiated by gender, class, training, production modes,
reception, consumption, venues, and market niches. Despite wellorganized, concerted efforts since the nineteenth century by artists and
artisans to bridge these distinct areas through arts and crafts
movements, concepts such as the Gesamtkunstwerk, and the influence
on European art of Asian objets d’art, as well as the historical reality
that since the Renaissance many artists designed goods as a regular part
of their activities, these distinctions and borders persist. Studies of
material culture and images of objects and dress in art help bridge
discourses of art, fashion, and design histories, and many scholars are
working to forge a common set of discourses or distinct but overlapping
discourses, as they borrow and inflect each other’s visual vocabularies
and methodologies. This session explores these overlapping discourses in
British art from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and suggests
how art, design, and fashion histories together can explore new
connections among visual histories and social histories, production and
consumption of visual objects, and conventions among all these histories.
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Gothic Architecture, Ornament, and Sexuality in the
Circle of Horace Walpole
Matthew M. Reeve, Queen’s University
Roses and Castles Art: The Floating Population’s
Claim to Citizenship
Susanna D. L. Cole, Columbia University
Comprised principally of men of the new “third sex” of homosexual
men, members of Horace Walpole’s (1717–1797) circle were dominant
patrons of the modern styles in art and design, and particularly the
Gothic. Adapting what has been called Queer Family Romance, this
presentation explores the use of architecture, the decorative arts, and
art collections in the creation of familial relations between third-sex
patrons and their buildings. The exchange of the Gothic as a shared
taste and the exchange of objects among a number of collections
centered around Walpole’s villa at Strawberry Hill gloss his patrilineal
metaphors of Strawberry Hill as parent of the Gothic villas built after
it. These buildings embodied an alternate sexuality that was noted by
critics who developed some of the earliest tropes of homosexuality
in critiques of their ornamentation as flamboyant, effeminate, and
particularly narcissistic.
By 1850 the families who worked on the English canals had become
a floating population of outcasts unknown to the legal, religious, or
educational authorities. The canal people created a sui generis form
of art known as Roses and Castles. Part of the traditional visual
vernacular, the Englishness of castles and roses, is put to a new use
on the canal boats as part of the floating population’s claim to a place
in the nation. Roses and Castles art can be understood as a craft and a
pastime for a profession. In fact it derives its significance from a variety
of disciplines upon which English life prior to the canals had depended,
such as English land law and the multitude of obligations and identities
that were derived from it. The art form itself functioned simultaneously
as public advertising and domestic decorative art.
St. Martin’s Lane: Artists and Artisans in Mid-EighteenthCentury London
Stacey Sloboda, Southern Illinois University
In a series of articles published in 1966, Mark Girouard noted the
existence of “two worlds”—those of fine art and craft practice—in
St. Martin’s Lane in the eighteenth century. The St. Martin’s Lane
Academy, founded in 1735 by William Hogarth, was a formal and
informal center of artistic training and community for two generations
of British painters, sculptors, and architects. At the same time, St.
Martin’s Lane and the surrounds of Soho and Covent Garden were
replete with the shops of cabinetmakers and upholsterers, carvers,
print engravers, and other luxury trades. Providing a specific account
of interactions between the artists of the St. Martin’s Lane Academy
and the artisans of St. Martin’s Lane, this presentation focuses on the
area as a nexus between those two models of creative production,
problematically labeled “art” and “craft,” to further understand
relationships between them conceptually, historically, and in practice.
“A Wild Kind of Imagination”: Fashionable Eclecticism and
Excess in Thomas Johnson’s English Rococo Designs
Brigid von Preussen, Columbia University
English Rococo design has often been discussed in terms of its debt
to the Continental Rococo, whose motifs were transplanted into a
British context and combined with elements drawn from other styles.
Instead of linking individual motifs to specific progenitors, a strategy
that risks mapping contemporary notions of originality onto the
eighteenth century, this paper interprets the hybridity and asymmetry
of many English Rococo designs as formal responses to the fashion
cycle and the diversity of taste. These designs did not simply capitalize
on consumers’ demand for different foreign styles but were valued by
many contemporaries for their inventive imitation. Using the designs
of Thomas Johnson (1714–1778), a contemporary of Chippendale,
as a case study, the paper identifies a cut-and-paste approach to
design with closely entwined commercial, aesthetic, and even
nationalistic implications.
“A Bon-Vivant in a Buttoned-down City”: F. C. B. Cadell’s
Paintings of Edinburgh Interiors in the 1920s
Ysanne Holt, University of Northumbria
With his own living spaces as setting, in the 1920s the Scottish
colorist Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell produced still lives and
paintings of elegant models amid a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese
ceramics, lacquer screens, French eighteenth-century furniture, and
brightly colored textiles, all of which refer us to a construction of
artistic and social identity, to social relations and discourses about art
and decoration, taste, and fashionability pertaining to a middle-class
milieu in Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town. To properly access these
representations of interior spaces, and the figures and objects therein,
requires an analysis drawing upon studies of material culture, design
history, cultural geography, social class and networks as much as the
characteristic procedures of art history. This paper raises questions
about how we might comprehend the performance of Bunty Cadell’s
own personal and professional identity amid the wider context of
interwar modernism and modernity in the Scottish capital.
Art as Fashion in the Name of Social Revolution: Eileen Agar’s
Angel of Anarchy and Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse
Susan King Obarski, University of California, Irvine
Eileen Agar’s androgynous bust resembling a fashion mannequin,
Angel of Anarchy, was illustrated alongside the first English translation
of the manifesto “Towards an INDEPENDENT Revolutionary Art,”
drafted by André Breton and Diego Rivera with Leon Trotsky. Agar
also produced and wore her ceremonial hat fashioned from cork,
seashells, fish bones, and coral to exemplify the nonalienating labor,
creative exuberance, and connection to nature that the Surrealists
promoted for all British workers. Adequately evaluating this quest to
transform British capitalist society of the 1930s with a wide range of
cultural products, from artworks to commercial design and fashion,
necessitates going beyond the usual methods of art history to engage
political theory, studies of material culture, and design history. Such a
cross-disciplinary perspective opens up our understanding of how
Agar crafted avant-garde art as fashion to question gender norms and
to emphasize the revolutionary social role that cultural products
could play.
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ARTspace
The Comic Grotesque, or Grotesque Comics
Patricia Mainardi, New York University
Chairs: Caryn Coleman, independent curator and writer;
Jenny Krasner, independent artist
The taste for the grotesque mode of caricature arrived in France during
the Revolutionary era and remained controversial, always considered
a “foreign” invention even while thriving on Gallic soil. “The genre
of grotesques has been transmitted to us by England, along with
constitutional government and roast beef and potatoes,” wrote a French
periodical in 1833, and, indeed, early French caricature bears a startling
resemblance to work produced in England by artists such as Gillray,
Cruikshank, and Rowlandson. Since the distortions of caricature
present a direct challenge to the ideal, it is not surprising that the great
age of caricature in both countries coincided with the efflorescence of
grand-style history painting. This paper examines this debate over the
place of the grotesque in caricature, seen against the classical values
of France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and
exploring the taxonomy of caricature in both countries.
Film and Video as a Social Art: Contemporary Moving
Images and Social Practice
Social practice in visual art is a direct interventionist call for exchange,
awareness, and social change. But what happens when the immediacy
between artist and audience is mediated? And what occurs when the
conduit for this interaction is the moving image? A play off of Amos
Vogel’s seminal avant-garde film anthology, Film as a Subversive
Art (1974), this session explores the function of film and video in
prescribing meaning as it positions this affective medium as an attempt
to increase a collective understanding of the world. The panel and
program look at film and video works that inscribe a documentary
approach (often comingling fact with fantasy) in the post-9/11
landscape.
CAA Committee on Diversity Practices
Diversity and Retention in the Academy
Chair: Kevin C. Concannon, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University
How far have we come in terms of diversity and retention of faculty
in the twenty-first-century university? This panel explores the very
definition of “diversity” as well as the more practical questions of
effective strategies to build diverse faculties. Panelists bring a variety
of perspectives to the issue; each ten-minute presentation is followed
by a discussion among panelists and audience participants.
Entering the Spielraum: The Global Grotesque
Chair: Frances S. Connelly, University of Missouri–Kansas City
In modern parlance “grotesque” is a term typically used to describe a
kind of degradation or disfigurement, but this is one-sided. It is more
accurate to say that the grotesque makes visible a cultural breach, and
does so through the elision of difference between at least two disparate
realities. Rupturing the perceived integrity of these boundaries, the
contested space created between them is precisely where the grotesque
creates meaning. This Spielraum puts accepted conventions of thought,
representation, and belief into play, and the resulting turbulence is
full of destructive and creative possibilities. Because the grotesque
is deeply rooted in cultural norms, it conjoins cultural anthropology
with art history and aesthetics. More important, it interfuses ethical
with aesthetic questions. Nowhere is the grotesque Spielraum more
robust than in the ongoing fragmentation and intermixing of worldart traditions during the last two centuries. To describe this global
phenomenon in terms of stylistic influence is to seriously underestimate
the depth of the transformations in progress. This session explores
particular images or bodies of work in which the boundaries of
once-distinct art traditions, styles, or genres become grotesque, their
fragments recombining in this ever-shifting global borderland.
Fracture and Productivity: The Grotesque in
Otto Dix’s Weimar Portraits
Elizabeth Berkowitz, The Graduate Center, City University
of New York
Otto Dix’s depictions of World War I carnage certainly merit the label
“grotesque.” Yet the distortions predominant in Dix’s 1920s Neue
Sachlichkeit portraits more poignantly illustrate the term. In these
portraits Dix represented his sitters through a hybrid of photo-realist
linearity and exaggerated and unnatural physical features. Previous
scholarship has explained such figural distortions through subject
matter, analyzing the relationship between the portrait subject and
either Dix’s biography or contemporary social issues. However, this
paper shifts primacy of place to Dix’s formal choices, evaluating a new,
grotesque style defined through the viewer’s response. Dix’s portraits
constituted a productive grotesque, in which social or political critique
occurred primarily through a new style and mode of reception. In its
utilization of the tension between an identifiable figure and its distorted
composition, the grotesque style of Dix’s representations defined a new,
menacing, post-photographic genre of portraiture for a postwar world.
Damnation and Desire: The Spielraum of Roée Rosen’s
Justine Frank
Carol Zemel, York University
This paper uses the concept of Spielraum to explore contemporary
implications of Roée Rosen’s Justine Frank (2008). Frank, a fictive
figure invented by Rosen, is a Belgian Jew born in 1900 who joins
the Surrealist circle in Paris in the mid-1920s. She becomes the lover
of Georges Bataille, produces drawings that displace boundaries of
gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, and writes a pornographic novel,
Sweet Sweat. Eventually she becomes “too much” for the Surrealists
and in the 1930s moves to Palestine, where she is again an artistoutcast among the immigrant artists and intellectuals gathered there.
As embodiment of sexual and ethnic transgression, even among
the disobedient and displaced, Frank is a grotesque figure—both
compelling and revulsive—whose Spielraum makes visible the spaces
and boundaries of cultural breach: Paris as the utopic site of artistic
experiment; Palestine as the utopic site of a national ideal.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Perverting Minimalism: Santiago Sierra
Andrés Montenegro, University of Essex
The Smithson Effect
James Meyer, National Gallery of Art
This paper focuses on Santiago Sierra’s artistic practice and compares
certain works by the artist with canonical or paradigmatic cases of
Minimalist sculpture to highlight what is not Minimal in his practice.
Sierra’s work infects the Minimalist canon with what it originally sought
to occlude, that is, the social body located beyond the phenomenological
encounter between spectator and work. In Sierra’s pieces Minimalism
is not an autonomous form that, through its specificity, transcends its
immediate context. Rather, Sierra’s perversion of Minimalist strategies
exposes what Minimalism tries to hide—the indisputable imbrication
of the Minimalist work within larger social and economic systems. By
materializing Michael Fried’s worse fear, the presence of a body inside a
Minimalist form, Sierra’s works critically deform the Minimalist canon
while simultaneously redirecting it from within toward different ends
and following different desires.
We are uncomfortable with an art history of influence. Words like
“style” and “legacy” evoke older traditions of connoisseurship and
a canonical comprehension of art history as a narrow sequence of
individual masters. In recent decades a lexicon of “returns” and
“effects” has supplanted the older model. An effect is a change that
is a result of an action or other cause. Effect implies a causitive
relationship of two things and the diachronic quality of this operation.
The effect is dynamic; it is not a style or manner that can be copied
but a process of cause and effect. The centrality of Robert Smithson’s
example in recent practice (the Smithson “return”) has been much
noted, yet the nature of his impact has eluded description. This paper
describes Smithson’s endeavor as an open-ended system that artists
inhabit, betray, and extend.
The Glance of Grotesque in the Contemporary Urban
Landscape of Street Art
Maria Antonietta Malleo, Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo
In street art it is possible to identify modalities and iconographies
incorporating the destructive and recreative logic of the grotesque.
This paper analyzes how with the world’s increasing urbanization the
use of distortion, disfigurement, adbusting, and hybridization of forms,
genres, and imaginaries (digital languages, pop culture, and learned
culture) of spatial and architectural semantic levels is transforming,
with perturbing and wrong-footing visual dynamics, the global urban
landscape into a big, unique grotesque. It is a world language with local
inflections produced from an antagonist and marginal youth culture
that challenges the rules of usage of public space and resemanticizes
the recognized and official conventions of communication
and monumentality. This liberating play of deconstruction and
reappropriation of space has found a last application in the Arab
revolutionary urban landscape of Cairo and Tunis.
Effects
Chair: Huey Copeland, Northwestern University
This session explores the complex dynamics of influence, affect, and
visibility that have shaped American artistic discourse since 1968.
Conceptually the panel takes its cue from the title of a 1994 special
issue of October devoted to the critical and artistic reception of Marcel
Duchamp. That volume and the book that arose from it are both called
The Duchamp Effect, yet neither publication explicitly reflects on
that final term or its import for art-historical practice at length. This
session offers a wide-ranging consideration of the operative conditions
and limitations of the art-historical “effect.” The papers reframe
understandings of aesthetic transmission, foregrounding approaches
that put pressure on narratives of progress and dreams of mastery, while
remaining attentive to the recursiveness and determinative weight of
social conditions as well as artists’ responses to them. Panelists pay heed
to how questions of political hegemony and cultural difference might
reframe established genealogies and so disarticulate the common sense
behind current modes of periodization and contextualization.
Lights Out: Tom Lloyd and the Effect of Disappearance
Krista Thompson, Northwestern University
This essay examines the work of Tom Lloyd, an artist who started
using light and industrial light fixtures in his art in the 1960s. Lloyd’s
Electronic Refractions were featured in the first exhibition at the Studio
Museum in Harlem, which opened in 1968. This essay considers the
influence of contemporaries like Bruce Nauman and Dan Flavin on
Lloyd’s illustrious career and his notable contributions to the use
of light in American art. It also interrogates what his work reveals
about how race functions within different parts of the art world and
in histories of art. How do certain social conditions and structures of
visibility in the art world inform, expand, or limit the possibilities of
effect? What are the effects of archival disappearance? What new forms
might art history take to illuminate these processes?
Entanglement
Jeannine Tang, Courtauld Institute of Art
This paper offers an account of entanglement following Trevor
Paglen’s formulation of “entangled photography,” or the use of limittelephotography and satellite observation to investigate the CIA’s black
sites since 2005. Rather than describe his photographic documents
as grounds for interpretation or use as evidence, Paglen emphasizes
the juridical relations embedded in the gesture of opening a shutter or
initiating an act of photography, symptomatic of a relational turn in
photographic theory exemplified by the work of Ariella Azoulay and
others. While Paglen’s entanglement turns away from indexicality
toward the opening of photography onto a political field of relations,
entanglement also describes the cluster of references (to include
Abstraction Expressionism and Photo-Conceptualism) with which
Paglen’s photography associates. This paper imagines entanglement
through Paglen’s photographic project and Deleuze’s conception of the
entanglement of individuals, groups, and masses to read the reciprocal
effects of individual practice, militarized politics, and the postwar
neo-avant-garde.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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No Drones: Louise Lawler and the Transference of War
Mignon Nixon, Courtauld Institute of Art
Ever since the response to 9/11 put the humanities on a war footing,
we have witnessed an escalating militarization of culture and
academe. Militarist thinking is evident in some revisionist histories
of postmodernism, which reduce those debates to culture wars, and
in a revival of fantasies of mastery that feminist, psychoanalytic, and
poststructuralist work once brought to consciousness. Current debates
also neglect the transferential dimension of war, or war’s propensity to
repeat the past as, in Freudian terms, “a new edition of an old desire.”
This paper considers Louise Lawler’s recent exhibition No Drones,
with its allusion to two works by Gerhard Richter, as a pivotal instance
of artistic response to drone discourse: one that brings the past to bear
on the present to stimulate reflection on the problem of intellectual
responsibility for war now.
Side Effect: Affect
Johanna Burton, Bard College
The very texture of what might constitute legible legacies within art
history has been troubled, in the last decade, by the sheer omnipotence
of references within current artistic practices that nonetheless show
little fidelity to genealogy as such. Indeed, if it was once the case that
“appropriation” ruffled feathers by wrestling old images into new
contexts (to say nothing of posing questions about what constituted
authorship as such), today little of the tension born of pilfered sources
remains. Images and ideas are understood to circulate so freely that
the very notion of tracing them back is often met with incredulity:
what exactly is to be learned by investigating an object’s prior life?
Utilizing curatorial case studies in addition to individual artworks, this
paper considers the ways in which art-historical effects now register as
impressions or sensations rather than as causes, perhaps evidencing a
new mode of art-historical affect.
Emerging Scholars
Chair: Constance Cortez, Texas Tech University
Portraits, Potatoes, and Perception: Toward a Sense of
Moche Artistic Vision
Lisa Senchyshyn Trever, Dumbarton Oaks and Harvard University
Ceramic sculpture made by Moche artists in ancient Peru (ca. 300–
900 CE) has long impressed modern viewers with its achievements
in naturalism. Although Moche sculpture exhibits apparent parallels
to classical and later European naturalism, these traditions are
incommensurable in important ways. This presentation juxtaposes
the iconic example of the Moche portrait vessel against the foil
of the fantastical scenes of humans and mythological animals
found on potato-shaped bottles. The comparison is productive in
problematizing definitions of Moche naturalism as the imitation of
nature. Moche artists were just as concerned with perceiving cultural
forms in nature as they were with copying natural likenesses in
sculpture. But, whereas naturally formed images were mostly valued
as oddities, curiosities, or monstrosities in the early modern period,
the Moche may have considered such images as central to their
particular sense of artistic vision.
Remaking the Sacred: The Señor de Santa Teresa and the
Miraculous “Renovation” of Statues in Viceregal Mexico
Derek Burdette, Tulane University
The churches of colonial Mexico were filled with innumerable statues
of Christ created in the wake of the sixteenth-century conquest.
Over time, many of the once brilliant images succumbed to hungry
insects and the deleterious effects of smoke-filled churches. During
the seventeenth century several of these fallen statues underwent
purportedly miraculous renovations that returned them to their former
glory. Focusing on the case of the statue known as the Señor de Santa
Teresa, this paper argues that a formulaic renovation narrative recast
artistic intervention as divine artistry to address ecclesiastical concerns
over religious decorum and bolster popular devotion to the region’s cult
statues. It unpacks the discourse of heavenly beauty and divine artistry
deployed in documents from the period to describe the remade image,
and in so doing, brings into greater focus the significance ascribed to
sacred imagery in the Americas and across the early-modern world.
Transnationalism and Abstraction in Colombian Art of the 1950s:
A New Historiographic Model
Ana M. Franco, Universidad de los Andes
During the last decade the historiography of Latin American modern
art has moved beyond local geopolitical and nationalistic narratives to
reposition the region’s art in a global context. This approach should
be extended to promote an alternative model for the historiography of
Colombian art. In her foundational text Open History of Colombian
Art, the influential critic Marta Traba focused mostly on the study of
Colombian artists as isolated figures rather than as participants in larger
processes—an approach that has pervaded most histories of Colombian
art to date. In contrast, the model proposed here emphasizes the
mobility of Colombian artists and their interactions with international
art centers. The paper focuses on the birth of abstraction in Colombia in
relation to postwar geometric abstraction, in particular, Edgar Negret’s
and Eduardo Ramírez-Villamizar’s experiences in Paris between 1950
and 1955.
The Photographic Record: Images of and as Objects
Chairs: Catherine Craft, Nasher Sculpture Center; Janine Mileaf,
The Arts Club of Chicago
Photography’s use as a means of documenting works of art began
almost as soon as it was invented. Although technologies of
reproduction and their effects on the production and reception of
works of art have been heavily theorized, the photographs themselves
have been less carefully examined. Many of these images, produced
primarily as copy prints or installation photographs, have taken on a
significant independent existence; in some cases the image has even
displaced or otherwise obscured the original object of study. Often, in
fact, it has become difficult to separate an iconic image from the object
depicted. This session focuses on photographs produced by artists
of their own and others’ art objects and installations—photographs
routinely treated transparently as documentation. Such images,
however, often generate a context not integral to the original object and
can even obscure the facts of the object’s actual existence. Does the
photograph as a record of an artwork operate as a surrogate, substitute,
or supplement? An index or a document? When an artist makes a
photograph of an artwork, does the photograph become an artwork as
well?
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Documents, Artworks, and/or “Critical Propaganda”:
Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery Installation Photographs
Katherine Hoffman, St. Anselm College
From 1905 to 1917 the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, or
291, at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York, founded by Alfred Stieglitz
and Edward Steichen, was important not only for the photographs
exhibited but also for the European and American modernists’ works
shown, some for the first time in the United States. Stieglitz’s various
installation shots may be viewed not only as documents but also as
artworks, or sometimes as critical propaganda for Stieglitz’s ideas
and cultural causes. This paper examines some of those installation
shots: the first Steichen exhibition; the 1906 Kühn/Henneberg/Watzek
exhibition; the 1914 Primitive Negro Sculpture exhibition; the 1915
Picasso/Braque, Brancusi, and Nadelman exhibitions; and the 1917
Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition. Because of the gallery’s lasting influence,
it seems important to reexamine Stieglitz’s 291 installation shots to
better comprehend the multiple levels of meaning inherent in the
photographs, which involve elements of documentation, fine art, and
critical/cultural commentary.
The Curious Case of Compass in the Photography of Man Ray
Caitlin Condell, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
In 1920 Man Ray constructed an assemblage from a large horseshoeshaped magnet and a toy gun. He titled the object Compass, hung it
from a string, and photographed it. That same year he photographed
himself in his studio with the object hanging from a peg on the
wall beside him. Some accounts suggest that Man Ray destroyed or
disassembled the object shortly after photographing it. Yet two years
later the object’s silhouette appears in a rayograph, which he then
photographically reproduced and published in a limited edition. The
recurrent inclusion of Compass in these photographs serves as an
intriguing case study of Man Ray’s developing photographic practice
in the early 1920s. An examination of the shifting role of the object in
these photographs offers crucial insight into the metamorphosis of Man
Ray’s relationship with photography as both a means of documentation
and an artistic medium.
Quaker Oz and Dada’s Missing Objects
Michael White, University of York
One of the best known images of Berlin Dada is the defaced mask of
Beethoven that appeared on the cover of the Dada Almanach in 1920.
Stamped “Oz Dada-Works,” its producer was Otto Schmalhausen,
otherwise known as Dada-Oz or Quaker Oz, George Grosz’s brother-inlaw. This paper uses newly discovered visual evidence to consider the
relationship between the image and the sculpture from which it derived,
an object exhibited by the artist at the Berlin Dada Fair a few months
beforehand. While determining the hitherto confused status of the work
as alternatively the sculpture it began as and the photomontage it was
subsequently taken for, the analysis is extended to shed light on the
strategic ways the Berlin Dadaists generally deployed photography to
present three-dimensional works, including the dissemination of the
images of the Dada Fair itself that continue to define its reception.
Sculpture as Multiple: Joseph Beuys’s Arena
Marin R. Sullivan, University of Leeds
With Arena (1972) Joseph Beuys transformed two hundred and fifty
photographs of his previous works into a complex sculptural object.
Though formally unique within Beuys’s practice and the greater context
of vanguard art of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Arena exemplified
a new approach to sculpture that emerged in the postwar period. As
artists explored temporary installation tactics, performance-infused
environments, and ephemeral, process-oriented materials, sculpture was
no longer defined by the creation of a single, autonomous object but by
a heterogeneous collection of transient parts. As a result, photography
became an increasingly integral component of sculptural practice.
This paper examines the terms by which Beuys utilized photographs
as sculptural material, and how he exploited photography’s ability to
not only document the sculptural object but also disperse it. In Arena
Beuys multiplied the possibilities of sculpture by collapsing, without
eradicating, the boundaries between object and image.
Art and the War on Terror: Ten Years On
Chair: August Jordan Davis, Winchester School of Art,
University of Southampton
March 2013 marks the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of
Iraq. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (collectively identified by the
Bush administration’s rubric of the “war on terror”) featured in myriad
ways both explicitly and tacitly within contemporary art production,
exhibitions, and criticism of the 2000s. The art and activism of Artists
Against the War, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Day for Night, and
the work of “embedded” artists are but several such examples. This
session offers a timely review of this decade of art and war and their
interpenetration. Addressing the legacy of this recent past and what it
might mean for art today, in the United States, United Kingdom, and
Iraq itself, the session consists of a roundtable of artists, art historians,
and critics.
The Enemy Within: Political Fear and Censorship
Pierre Saurisse, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London
Since 2003 the US government’s formal rhetoric abstracted their post9/11 focus from specific acts of terrorism to target an emotion: terror.
At the same time, fear visualizations were publically disseminated,
such as the Homeland Security Advisory System (the terror alert level
colored spectrum) and Colin Powell’s brandishing a phial of anthrax at
the UN. This decade, declared officially at war with terror, saw some
artists adopt varying therapeutic approaches to collective anxiety,
such as Cai Guo-Qiang through explosives and Roger Hiorns through
tranquillizers. While others, such as Goshka Macuga, highlighted
how a politics of fear developed through the vivid and fearful images
displayed. Fearful withdrawal from other works (such as John Latham’s
God Is Great and the cancellations of Gregor Schneider’s project Cube)
was another example of the effect examined in this paper and identified
by W. J. T. Mitchell as “cloning terror”: terror (re)produced “in the
process of trying to destroy it.”
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Creative Time in the Age of Bush: The Public Art Institution
as Agent of Political Response
Jennifer K. Favorite, The Graduate Center, City University of
New York
In the direct aftermath of September 11, 2001, the public art agency
Creative Time coordinated projects in New York City, most notably
Tribute in Light (Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, 2002–11). Against
the climate of ensuing hyperpatriotism and later the climate of protest
surrounding the invasion of Iraq, Creative Time’s curatorial model
shifted, incorporating political and social engagement. This paper
details the evolution of Creative Time’s sponsorship of public art
projects between 2001 and 2008, analyzing the Freedom of Expression
National Monument (Laurie Hawkinson, John Malpede, Erika
Rothenberg, 1984 and 2004) and Who Cares (Mel Chin, Coco Fusco,
Jens Haaning, Michael Rakowitz, 2006). Such change culminated with
2008’s Democracy in Action. Staged at the Park Avenue Armory in
Manhattan, many of the works addressed the abuse of civil liberties in
the name of the war on terror—artworks where public interaction was
required to complete the installations.
Controlling the Frame
Dora Apel, Wayne State University
Ten years in, what have we learned about the war on terror through
documentary photography? How does the liberal state mobilize
photography in support of state-sanctioned violence, and what are
the available forms of visual resistance to that framing? How are
documentary practices facilitated by the global accessibility of digital
technology? How is digital technology deployed by the state to recruit
more soldiers? What are alternative deployments of documentary? This
paper examines the ways images construct ideology through analyzing
the work of four photographers: Ashley Gilbertson and Geert van
Kesteren, who were either embedded or independent photographers in
Iraq, and on the US homefront Nina Berman and Timothy GreenfieldSanders. Their photographs either support the assumptions that underlie
the war on terror or resist being instrumentalized for that purpose,
sometimes oscillating between the two positions.
Stained Glass Windows: Radiance and Symbolism
Chair: Liana De Girolami Cheney, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
This session examines the use of stained glass as it refers to a material
or to works produced from it in a practical and symbolic manner in
paintings from medieval to modern art. Discussions focus on how
stained glass became a valid art form and how figurative designs draw
from the Bible, history, or literature of the time.
Between Art and Literature: The Role of Stained Glass
in Symbolism
Anna Mazzanti, Politecnico di Milano
Glass played a special role, and was of interest, among the Symbolists
of the late nineteenth century. From vases to stained glass and lamps,
glass was a significant part of the furniture in dimly lit environments
and imbued them with filtered colors that were sometimes the subject
or background of painted representations. Both could be sources
of interpretation and could have hidden meanings in their pictorial
representation.
Sarah Wyman Whitman’s Stained Glass Windows
Jennifer Ehlert, Harvard University
In Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, the memorial window of American
artist Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842–1904) describes her as an
“interpreter of beauty in art and life”. Whitman, an early student of the
Opalescent Stained Glass technique, and a great champion for the Arts
and Crafts Movement in America, believed in art as a form of service
that elevated society. A founder of Radcliffe College, Whitman’s
contributions to women’s education are invaluable. In 1879, she
founded Boston’s Arts and Craft Society and was an early supporter of
the Museum of Fine Arts. Greatly admired by Isabella Stewart Gardner
and William James, Whitman was well known among Boston Society.
I propose that through her travels, studies, and the influence of her
teachers, specifically W. M. Hunt and John LaFarge, Whitman formed
her own symbolism. Although this symbolism was anchored in the
Classical and Renaissance pasts, it reflects her assimilation of Scripture,
literature, and newer art movements, and demonstrates her devotion to
American culture.
Symbolist Stained Glass Windows in Early-Twentieth-Century
Italian International Exhibitions
Lucia Mannini, independent scholar
In the decades straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
stained glass windows in Italy were destined mainly for churches
and designed in a traditional style. Private settings allowed artistdesigners more freedom of expression. However, the most important
occasion of creating modern stained glass was offered to Italian artists
by international exhibitions organized in Italy (Turin 1902 and Milan
1906 especially). A modern style in stained glass, at that time, meant a
formal synthetic language and a technique that above all exploited the
potential of colored glass. For the designs of these windows, Italian
artists availed themselves of the most up-to-date international examples
(European and American) reflecting and representing, at the same time,
the vibrant local cultural milieu.
ARTspace
The Artist and the Law: Testing Boundaries,
Challenging Limits
A panel composed of artists with varying concerns and practices as well
as a lawyer specializing in art law discuss art that is situated in between
artistic and legal practice, raising serious legal issues, both conceptually
and practically, in present day and historically. Topics include
illegalities, crime, public intervention, protest, injustice, definitions of
law, culturally specific aspects of law, and specific court cases.
Aissa Deebi, American University of Cairo
This presentation discusses law with a more international approach,
bringing forth the concept of art for social transformation as it departs
from a critical moment in current post–Arab Spring Egypt. The
ideological transformation of Arab mainstream politics addresses the
potentials of art in an emerging democracy in Egypt following January
25. These complex, real-politics artists are provoking a potential space
for creative activist practice by testing the boundaries of the possible.
The current discourse is an open voyage for prediction.
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Amy J. Goldrich, Art Law Committee of the New York City
Bar Association
This talk explores art that raises legal issues and artistic practice that is
situated between the two professional realms. It expands the definition
of “law” to reach beyond a purely literal definition of it, addressing
topics such as social laws and conventions, the transgression of which
can lead to severe punishment and exile, if not a loss of physical liberty,
and repercussions suffered by the artist as a result of their work.
Alix Lambert, The Brooklyn International Theater Company
Mel Chin, independent artist
Mel Chin’s art, which is both analytical and poetic, evades easy
classification. He is known for the broad range of approaches in his art,
including works that require multidisciplinary, collaborative teamwork
and works that conjoin cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas.
With a critical focus, he presents several relational works and discusses
the art of activism and the evolutionary nature of being a catalyst.
Maureen Connor, independent artist
This presentation discusses the topic from the vantage point of an artist
who addresses crime and law in her own work and recently co-curated
(with Julian Hoeber) the exhibition No Person May Carry a Fish into
a Bar (Blum and Poe), which examines the intersection of crime and
art. It contributes to a discussion of what constitutes crime and what
constitutes art, including works of art that document crime and law,
works of art that are evidence, works of art that help in the solving of
crimes, and works of art that are themselves criminal acts.
Maureen Connor angles her discussion as the founder of The Institute
for Wishful Thinking. The Institute’s project Artists in Residence for the
US Government (self declared) believes that the community of artists
and designers possesses untapped creative and conceptual resources
that can be applied to solving social problems. Using a reskilled
conceptual toolbox that might contain activism, philosophy, urban
studies, anthropology, and political science as well as their experience
in critical thinking and reframing, artists can work as change agents—
imagining what could happen in the best possible future.
Jenny Marketou, independent artist
Elizabeth M. Grady, smARTpower
This presentation explores the visual and conceptual context of a
number art projects created for urban public spaces in New York
City and worldwide as a filter and lens through which to compile, to
illuminate, and to identify what it means to “be public” or to “become
public.” It furthers deals with the challenges and possibilities along
with ethical, aesthetic, and legal issues faced in this discourse. By
interweaving both short-term projects with longer term strategies
aiming to return privatized urban space to common use, the
presentation gives the audience opportunities to reflect on what is going
on, and to imagine how things might develop otherwise for control of
the urban space and its privatization under the forces of the market,
social media, and the laws of fear.
Although social practice has gained significant ground in recent years,
the challenging goal of achieving real social change can be elusive.
The title of this panel places the artist at the center of the debate,
suggesting that the primary authorial role and determining force is the
artist as actor and subject. However, often a project’s level of success
in changing audience perspectives lies in the degree to which the artist
manages to direct and realize a project from the sidelines, engaging
in dialogue and collaborative decision making while empowering
participants to play a central role. Without diminishing the significance
of the artist’s role, the key to successful community-based projects is
to create a frame within which debate and dialogue can productively
happen as the collaborative team works together to determine the final
form of the artwork and desired mode of social collaboration.
Dread Scott, independent artist
This world is a world of profound exploitation and injustice, complete
with laws to reinforce the status quo and police and courts to enforce
those laws. Injustice was meant to be challenged and unjust laws were
made to be broken. If you’re doing good art, you you may need more
lawyers than gallerists.
ARTspace
The Artist as Activist: Art as a Catalyst for
Social Change, a Critical Assessment
A panel of curators, critics, artists, and arts professionals discuss art and
art practices that engage any number of contemporary issues relating
to social, political, and environmental change and the histories and
resources for artists working within that realm. Topics include activism,
protest, aesthetic vs. social value, and the impact and effectiveness of
such practice.
Martha Schwendener, independent critic
Schwendener is interested in discussing how the issues in question
are engaged within the institutional art system—galleries, museums,
and MFA programs—and outside of this system. She is interested in
how relational aesthetics and social practice relate to this, but more
important how recent social movements, particularly the Occupy
movement and the revival of the global justice movement (a.k.a., antiglobalization movement) after the financial-political crisis of 2008,
have approached socially and politically engaged art. She discusses in
particular the interstices of art and creative activism, and the question
of whether, as activists have suggested, another world is possible for
both art and society.
Sacha Yanow, Art Matters Foundation
Yanow discusses the history of Art Matters’s no-strings-attached
support for individual artists who are socially and politically engaged,
from 1985, when the foundation began during the initial decade of the
AIDS crisis, through to the present. Yanow chooses several specific
examples, and speaks to the process of evolving and staying responsive
to the needs of artists who are catalyzing change—adding thoughts
on some challenges we see with social practice, activism, and the
individual artist’s process.
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ARTspace
The Artist as Ethicist: Who Is Responsible? Chair: Blane de St. Croix, Indiana University, Bloomington
Panelists discuss art and art production that walks an ethical
(or sometimes controversial) line and/or establishes new ideas
for standards of ethical principles. Topics include cultural and
environmental implications, materiality and sustainability, human
rights, political correctness, class and economic structure, legal
frameworks, and art establishment hierarchies in both present day
and throughout art history.
International Collaborative Arts: Conversations on
Practice, Research, and Education
Chairs: Diane Derr and Radha Dalal, Virginia Commonwealth
University in Qatar
This session considers collaborative practices spanning the vast terrains
of research, practice, and education within the global landscape. During
the past decade the fields of art and design have witnessed a significant
increase in the prominence of collaborative practices embedded in
the global landscape. Numerous terminal-degree programs in the
creative arts routinely integrate international research and educational
collaborations. Curators, artists, and designers are constructing hybrids
of these traditional practices through international collaborations. In
1996 Nicolas Bourriaud coined the phrase “relational aesthetics,”
describing the “interhuman sphere: relationships between people,
communities, individuals, groups, social networks, interactivity” as
prevalent in artists working within the international scene. Whether
viewed as symptomatic of developing communication technologies
or reflective of the changing political and economic climate, these
practices have impacted the creative use of media, information, and the
participatory exchange within the author-subject-spectator relationship.
This session addresses the complex and multifaceted collaborative
environment within our global landscape.
Planetary Collegium and the I-Node: The Right to Knowledge
Katerina Karoussos, I-Node, Planetary Collegium
In 387 BC Plato founded the Academy in Athens, which for a thousand
years was the intellectual center of the world. At the entrance to the
Academy, there was a sign that said, “Let no one inapt to geometry
come in.” The presentation deals with the question of how the pursuit
of knowledge might include interaction with the other, the practice
of collaborative inquiry, within the frame of Plato’s geometry. In this
respect, the model of the Planetary Collegium stands in a privileged
place, where the right to philosophy is not simply authorized but
actually developed. With its location in Greece, the birthplace of
democracy, the I-Node gives a new value to the Planetary Collegium.
However, this value has less to do with locality and much more with
the catalytic energy that democracy and philosophy offer toward the
liberated dissemination of knowledge at large.
Leading through Collaboration: A Chairperson/Faculty Perspective
Muneera Spence, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar
Students and faculty are often thrust into a collaborative paradigm
without the essential skills and tools needed to create an environment
that can generate positive collaborations. Through the personal
experience of intense series of collaborations over the last ten years,
a set of principles was developed that formed the basis for the course.
Understanding thinking, learning, and communication styles while
building the skills to maximize understanding human interrelationship
and potential is key to lifelong learning. Keeping the design goals in
focus motivates and completes the circle of success. I share the insights
I have gained while developing a course dedicated to collaboration
and subsequently translating the collaborative interplay to creating a
collaborative faculty of graphic design. Bringing the course to Qatar
encouraged the integration of cultural and contextual factors and has
made the translation of these collaborative methodologies far more
robust.
Postnational Technollaboration within the Postbiotanical Village
Max Kazemzadeh, Gallaudet University
This paper explores the culture and praxes latent within a range
of emergent international creative open-source research groups,
institutions, hackerspaces, labs, studios, educational institutions, and
farming communities that collaborate in the development of locally
centric projects and tools inspiring creativity and sustainability.
Exhibitor Session
How to Get Published and How to Get Read
Chairs: Loren Diclaudio and Natalie Foster, Routledge
This session provides guidance and support when navigating the world
of publication in both books and journals, for experienced published
academics and newly graduated art historians alike. It focuses on the
contemporary publishing landscape and addresses publishing in the
digital age.
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Issues Surrounding the Online Foundations Experience
Chair: Sara Dismukes, Troy University
This panel offers multiple viewpoints concerning the teaching of
foundations courses online. This includes experiences of teaching
foundations online, inheriting students who have taken their
foundations classes online, and strategies for maximizing this teaching
environment.
South Asian Encounters: Anthropologies of Travel
and the Visual
Chairs: Renate Dohmen, University of Louisiana at Lafayette;
Natasha Eaton, University College London
Travel has changed and yet remains a constant in the world we inhabit.
This session questions how the domain of the visual structured and
still structures experiences of travel in relation to South Asia and
what agency images play in the fictionality, potentially fulfilling or
structurally disappointing experiences of travel.
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“Life Injected with Life”: Locating Tolerance in Nasreen
Mohamedi’s Abstraction
Robin Simpson, University of British Columbia
Filipiniana: Visual, Temporal, and Virtual Voyages across the
Pacific (and between the Philippine and South China Seas)
Nadine Wasserman, independent curator and critic
Since 2000 there has been renewed interest in Nasreen Mohamedi’s
(1937–1990) abstract drawings of dense systems of grids, axial
trajectories, and geometric forms. Produced throughout the 1970s and
1980s these drawings were accompanied by a parallel photographic
practice that, in part, documented Mohamedi’s travels throughout
India and the Arab world. Never intended by the artist to be exhibited,
these photographs are largely considered formal footnotes to her
drawing practice. Consequently, Mohamedi’s drawings are approached
as solipsistic exercises, a viewpoint that overlooks possible political
dimensions within her practice. In addressing this, the paper argues
that the sites of these photographs are equally important to the analysis
of Mohamedi’s work. Central to this argument are photographs
of the sixteenth-century Mughal city Fatehpur Sikri. Mohamedi’s
experience and documentation of this site provoked an examination of
the management of difference and aversion within post-independence
India—in short, the spatialization of tolerance.
Inlaid with traditional Philippine mother-of-pearl designs, a simple
shipping pallet is transformed into a metaphor for immigration,
displacement, and global commerce in Yumi Roth’s Cargo Cult.
Using this piece as a starting point, this paper considers the work
of contemporary Philippine and Phil-Am artists such as Roberto
Chabet, Maria Taniguchi, Mark Salvatus, Roberto Robles, John Frank
Sabado, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Alvin Gregorio, and Christina
Quisumbing and discusses how their work touches on topics such
as place, landscape, travel, tourism, colonialism, migration, exile,
displacement, identity, memory, and nostalgia as well as globalization,
global commerce, and technological interconnectivity.
Bombay to Goa: Travel, Escape, and Desire in Bombay Cinema
Ayesha Matthan, Jawaharlal Nehru University
The cinematic encounter with Goa in Bombay cinema falls into
a visual pattern of tourist images. This paper links such films to
tourism signage, from postcards and travel brochures to film posters.
Employing discourses on tourism and the male gaze, this study
foregrounds the nature of transgression as projected in the liminal space
of Goa. Goa, with a different colonial history, becomes a peripheral
site for the touristic/filmic imagination to play out neocolonial images
of the unknown. Thence, the Bombay film industry joins the tourism
network of outlining plots that tourists aspire to relive in their holiday
adventures with Goa. Modern phenomena from transport and mobility
to capitalism and the camera are important markers and consumers
of Goa and its people. The tourism lens, produced visually by both
the tourism and the Bombay film industry, is effective in re-creating
neocolonial travelogues, from Bombay to Goa.
Touristic Agencies: Aditi and the Living Exhibit at the Festival
of India, 1985–86
Rebecca Brown, Johns Hopkins University
In 1985–86 the United States hosted more than eighty art exhibitions
as part of the nationwide Festival of India. Both objects and people
traveled, and the artist-performers, like the works they made and were
exhibited next to, slipped in and out of objecthood, actively framing
their own curatorial narratives, reshaping the contexts they found
themselves in. This paper probes that nexus of the living, performing
object by taking up Richard Davis’s call to acknowledge the lives
of images with Robert DeCaroli’s agentic reading of sculptures and,
counterintuitively, thinking these elements in the context of the people
exhibited in the Festival of India. The artist-performers’ incorporation
of their own touristic experiences challenged the cultural diplomacy
and imagined difference between the US and India staged in the
festival.
Refugee to Celebrity: Changing Subjects (and Narratives) in
Photographs of Travel by Water
Jennifer Way, University of North Texas
How have photographs of refugees from Southeast Asia in the
mid- and late twentieth century been recontextualized in relation
to changing American narratives of exodus, displacement, and
belonging constructed around notions of craft premised on ethnic and
Orientalized difference? During the 1950s American and Vietnamese
governments associated images of Vietnamese people fleeing
communists with self-determination, homelessness, vulnerability, and
threat. Consequently, an American resettlement program published
photographs domesticating them as industrious artisans working for
export, belonging autochthonously to a new nation. Two decades on,
the refugee photographs resonated in images of boat people escaping
from Southeast Asia, questioning whether they could acclimatize as
productive citizens elsewhere. Recently Louis Vuitton’s Core Values
Program published Annie Leibovitz’s photographs portraying Angelina
Jolie with a superbly crafted “Alto” bag, traveling in Cambodia by
boat. How do they reiterate or abnegate discourses of mobility by
water, belonging, humanitarian crises, and trauma in Southeast Asia?
Association of Art Museum Curators
The Curatorial Career: Perspectives on the Profession
Chair: Judith F. Dolkart, The Barnes Foundation
This session explores the curatorial profession from the perspective
of leading art museum curators who represent various vantage points
across the career spectrum. Each expounds on his or her own career and
discusses future trends and shifts affecting the field at large.
Research Informing Design
Chair: Brian Donnelly, Sheridan College
How do designers use research, and how do design educators teach it?
Systematic exploration, logic, and rational thinking have always been
part of design; but specific methods of research previously associated
primarily with engineering, the social sciences, or marketing—
observational research to uncover problems and shape solutions,
demographics to define audiences, iterations and focus groups to refine
products, and so on—are coming to be seen as essential to design. The
question of research cuts sharply into our wider understanding of the
definition and purpose of design.
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Bauhaus Pedagogy: Hannes Meyer’s Holistic Design Research
Dara Kiese, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
In the prevalent view of Bauhaus pedagogy, architectural and design
production was grounded in the elementarist analysis of form. Less
known is that the school’s second director, Hannes Meyer (1928–30),
reconfigured the curriculum and pedagogy and broadened the focus to
include user-centered design research. To remain open and adaptable
to the changing circumstances of Weimar Germany, Meyer believed
a complex understanding of human behavior was required for both
designer and user, predicated on a holistic engagement with material
and spiritual concerns through analytical research and psychology.
Inspired by humanities-based education and interdisciplinary
methodologies—from social sciences, philosophy, and Gestalt theory
to anarchism and ecology—Meyer sought to instill in Bauhaus students
and the wider public a new framework of theoretical inquiry about
design, architecture, and urbanism. By equipping the public with elastic
and adaptable products and buildings, the school set out to engage the
user in the design process itself.
Site of Research: Fermilab and Architecture
Nana Last, University of Virginia
This presentation examines the ways research informed a series of
architectural design studios focused on the Fermi National Laboratory
Particle Accelerator site. The studios were based on research into the
scientific work done at the site, its sociopolitical situating and the
site itself. In using the same site for multiple semesters the studios
demonstrate how a wide range of design approaches can be generated
from the same base material, suggesting the productivity of using
research for design. The Fermilab site is of particular interest because
it shares a number of aspects with design processes in architecture,
most notably a reliance on visualization as a critical component in the
production of knowledge. Visualization, data collection, research, and
spatialization thus emerge as a foundation for shared processes between
the scientific research, architectural research, and generation and
formation of design responses.
Teaching Design Research: A Case Study
Maia Wright, Texas State University-San Marcos
How can we, as design educators, engage students in meaningful
research that provokes innovative visual work in response to a genuine
community need? This case study documents a collaboration between
MFA design students at Texas State University and the Texas School
for the Deaf in Austin, Texas. One of the primary objectives of the
project was for the students to draw on various models of investigative
inquiry to design and implement a research plan that would inform
their design work. The intent of sharing the process behind this project
is to contribute to the conversation about how design research and
community-based collaborations build students’ skills in immersive
information gathering and offer opportunities to produce exploratory
design work in response to complex and multifaceted situations.
The Context Problem: Writing and Research in Art and Design
Sarah Butler, Parsons The New School for Design
Response to the context problem is an essential moment in any creative
practice. Designers and artists engage a range of disciplines, audiences,
and stakeholders; their works inhabit the mixed realms of public and
private, actual and anticipated, material and virtual. And so, how best
to identify the destination of any work, in writing? This presentation
describes workshops at Parsons The New School for Design, conducted
within the writing and research component of the second year of the
MFA program in design and technology. Combining methods in art,
design, and the social sciences, these duration-intensive, collaborative
writing experiments provide opportunities for critical, reflexive
interpretation of the imagined contexts of students’ thesis projects.
Empathy, attunement, and co-creative capacities are strengthened
through active, representative participation in a contingency setting.
Currently in their second iteration, the workshops also provide
significant insight into the concerns and issues defining the highly
volatile, transdisciplinary field of design and technology.
Toward an Open-Source Model for Design Research
Christopher Moore, Concordia University; Joshua Singer, San
Francisco State University
Scholarly research is traditionally predicated on solitary inquiry that
builds upon past knowledge within a narrow disciplinary field. This
practice rewards the individual ethos of a revered “authority,” yet
neglects the valuable contributions of colleagues working within
complementary domains. Given the emergence of new centers for
interdisciplinary studies, how might design researchers begin to
embrace alternative models for collaborative scholarship? This paper
presents a case-study analysis of two intensive research residencies
conducted in Montreal and Berlin, within the framework of
DesignInquiry. An international cohort of researchers and practitioners
from various disciplinary specializations contributed to an open-source
body of empirical knowledge, made available for appropriation and
continued development. With such a fluid, ad hoc research team,
how can issues of copyright, authorship, and intellectual property
be reconciled with the benefits of unencumbered exchange among a
diverse team of specialists?
The Darwin Effect: Evolutionary Theory, Art,
and Aesthetic Thought
Chairs: Michael Dorsch, The Cooper Union for the Advancement
of Science and Art; Jean Marie Evans, The Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution bore a decisive influence on
aesthetic thought that was nothing if not diverse, cropping up in a
variety of unexpected places. From biological models used in dating
the geometric ornament of so-called primitive cultures to works of art
such as Gustave Courbet’s crumbling seaside cliffs and Emmanuel
Frémiet’s statues of entanglements between simians and prehistoric
human beings, Darwinian theory offered art historians and artists
a rich, evocative lens through which to view the discipline and
the world anew. The twentieth century continued to engage with
Darwin’s ideas in a variety of manners, from mannequin dioramas of
prehistoric humans exhibited in natural history museums to Malvina
Hoffman’s ethnographic figures sculpted for the Hall of Man at the
Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. In 2009 the 200th
anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the
publication of The Origin of Species resulted in a number of specialized
studies on nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists’ engagement with
Darwinian theory. This session uses this earlier scholarship to examine
evolutionary theory in its more systematic application to a wider artistic
and aesthetic realm. In presenting Darwinian theory as an intellectual
force originating at the intersection of science, visual culture, and
historiography, the session creates a nuanced, multifaceted depiction of
one of the most dynamic influences on aesthetic thought in the past 154
years.
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Sculpting a Sumerian Race: The Nineteenth-Century
Reception of Sumer
Jean Marie Evans, The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
Seeing and Not Seeing: The Post-Darwinian Eye and Aesthetics
in Great Britain
Barbara Larson, University of West Florida
Visual evidence of ancient Sumer was almost completely unknown
until 1877, when the site of Tello began to yield numerous statues of
Gudea, the ruler of Lagash (ca. 2100 BC). Shortly thereafter, Sumer
was featured in the form of a polychrome plaster reconstruction of
Gudea at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris in an ethnographic
exhibition celebrating the progress of human labor. The materialization
of Gudea revealed a desire to see an ancient Sumerian race, and
thus uniquely positioning sculpture vis-à-vis the nineteenth-century
discourses of race and aesthetics. The specific role of classical sculpture
in the earliest human taxonomies, and its persistence as a racial
paradigm, anticipated the early methodologies underlying the reception
of Sumerian sculpture. The early reception of Sumerian sculpture
should be contextualized within the role of sculpture as a document of
human taxonomy.
The physical eye after Darwin is fallible with much in shadow or
obscured—it grasps color and form more emotively, quickly, and
deeply than narrative or detail. The neurological loop from eye to mind
and instinct or memory with its Darwinian history was the basis for the
influential aesthetic theories of Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and
James Sully, all of whom emphasized pleasure and psychology. Certain
theorists such as Sully and Darwin’s devoted follower Grant Allen
were concerned with the nuances of racial aesthetics: only those with
the highest intellectual development could take pleasure in painting.
This paper discusses the withdrawal from the concrete and mastered
external world (with copious detail) in art after Darwin, the subsequent
reorientation toward effect or interiority in light of new theories of
vision and aesthetics that build on the evolutionary history and material
nature of the eye and mind, and hierarchical notions of viewing.
Inscribing Darwin: Nineteenth-Century Representations
of Evolution
Judith Berman Kohn, Cambridge University
Origins, Loss, and Desire in Gauguin’s Tahitian Eve
Martha Lucy, Drexel University
Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, provided the first
scientific description of the processes by which species originate and
evolve. By the time Origin was published there already existed a
readily available set of both popular and scientific images to illustrate
evolution. In fact a relatively small set of artists created, appropriated,
and recycled these popular and scientific illustrations of evolution.
While the implication of Darwin’s work was that evolution suggested
neither progress nor racial or cultural superiority, illustrative material
often subverted this notion. This paper traces the connections among
these artists and discusses how their work, built on a set of stock
images, operated to reinforce prevailing notions of race, politics, and
culture in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and France.
Evolving from “Savages”: Mannequin Displays of
Prehistoric Humans and Race
Linda Kim, Drexel University
In the early twentieth century mannequin dioramas representing
prehistoric humans were popular exhibits in America’s natural history
museums. Spurred by an increasing scientific consensus on Darwin’s
evolutionary theses and several highly publicized fossil discoveries in
the late nineteenth century, these exhibits also drew from the newly
established authority of paleontology as an academic and museum
discipline. Another surprising resource and ally to these exhibits
came from physical anthropology and its research on race, for the
reconstructions of prehistoric humanity in natural history museums
were as firmly embedded in representations of contemporary “savages”
as they were on the hominid fossil record. A close study of the details
and museums’ descriptions of these mannequin displays reveals the
failures and lapses in both paleontology’s and physical anthropology’s
accounts of human history and diversity.
Gauguin’s Te nave nave fenua is a multilayered origins fantasy. Painted
in Tahiti in 1892, the canvas presents a primitivist take on original sin:
a brown-skinned “Tahitian Eve” stands naked, her hand poised to pick
a flower, her sidelong glance hinting that what she is about to do is
forbidden. But for nineteenth-century European audiences, the painting
was also a fantasy about societal origins, encapsulating, through the
body of the other, a longing for an untainted, premodern existence.
This paper complicates our understanding of such origins fantasies by
considering their inevitable intersections with the scientific discourses
of the time, particularly prehistory and paleontology. These disciplines,
which concerned themselves with restoring origins, were marked by a
pervasive sense of loss that also haunts Gauguin’s nude bodies. Tahitian
Eve is a fossil, delivering the promised original form while at the same
time signaling its absence.
Online Education in Fine Arts: Helpful Way In
or Easy Way Out?
Chair: Jessica Doyle, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts
Can fine arts possibly be taught online? Some say graphic design
or software applications might be compatible, but many artists and
educators question if drawing, painting, sculpture, performance,
and installation, for example, have the same effect online as in
the classroom studio. As more instructors teach online, either in a
supplemental manner or as a sole learning atmosphere, differences
in perspective provide rewarding possibilities and challenges. This
form of learning is a new and innovative approach to education that
is undoubtedly being embraced and can bring a great amount of
potential to the world of academia and higher education in the arts.
A serious look and talk about this evolving way of approaching the
twenty-first-century mode of learning may be actually quite helpful
to artists. Studies have shown that, on average, online learning at the
post-secondary level is not just as good as but more effective than
conventional face-to-face instruction in certain areas. The looming
question here is, how effective is online learning in the arts?
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Synchronously Significant: The Effectiveness of Online
vs. Traditional Studio Instruction
Amy Sands, Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Online learning not only has made major technological advancements
since its earliest inception but is becoming a staple ingredient of many
colleges and universities. The online learning platform for the studioart classroom is a valid option in a contemporary educational structure
as well as a ubiquitous and necessary alternative. In a breakdown
comparison of two similar studio-drawing courses that I teach—
Foundation: Drawing 1 traditional course and Drawing through a Lens
online course—I demystify the differences and similarities between
what takes place in a traditional studio setting and the online classroom.
This study looks into effective tools and cross-disciplinary initiatives
for engaging today’s student in an enriching Web-based environment.
Comparative coursework provides examples of real learning situations.
There Go My Students
Annette Cyr, National University
In a drawing class I discover students going online to view videos and
successfully apply what they learn. To misquote Gandhi, “There go
my students; I must catch up with them.” In response I create an online
drawing course. Here I chart the considerations, questions, challenges,
and results of my process, in the aesthetic, pedagogical, and technical
realms. The path starts with definitions based on the onsite model and
ends with expansion into new methods of instruction and critique.
Those of us with experience in a traditional studio education are in
effect bilingual, expert in both the traditional onsite art-mentoring
environment and adept in (and/or continually learning) the current
technologies. We have a critical role to play in pushing the boundaries
of technology and education, while insuring humanism, quality, and
excellence in the studio arts.
Virtual Reality Creating New Online Venues for Fine-Art Studio
Education
Joy Rosenthal, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
When I received a grant for developing an online digital photography
course, I did not have an idea of the typical online classroom forum.
As students become more engaged in online environments it will
be acceptable for them to interact and learn in an online virtual
environment. The virtual environment happens in real time, the
interaction can be spontaneous and impromptu, and the sense of
classroom community becomes stronger. For an online fine-art studio
course it is vital to have a sense of community, especially when
reviewing students’ work. The online environment has a gallery,
where each student has a prearranged screen to post work. We meet
there to review and discuss work as a group. There are some surprises
and drawbacks to this format. I discuss them and what makes it an
ideal place.
Automating Qualitative Assessment (Computer-Based Critique)
Brian Evans, University of Alabama
Can we successfully teach fine art online? Today’s students do not
typically learn in old-school ways, yet use of new technologies doesn’t
mean we have to exclude the old ways. Quantitative assessment of
learning, where a simple correct response can be measured, is easy in
an online space. What is less straightforward is qualitative assessment.
Can aspects of a studio-art course such as critique and discussion be
both well engaged and effectively assessed in an online space? The
answer is yes, and it can be done with large numbers of students and
minimal teacher intervention using computer-based peer assessment.
There is ready evidence that studio classes benefit from a blended
learning approach where computer-based peer assessment is integrated
into a traditional class. But these learning technologies also allow for
new learning objectives and collaborative engagement in ways that
would otherwise be impossible in a studio class.
Technology Serving Pedagogy: Teaching the Fine Arts Online
Lucinda Bliss, Montpelier Academic Center, Union Institute
and University
It is a common assumption that quality courses in the visual arts cannot
be taught online. Nonetheless, many programs are expanding online
models and finding them popular with students and administrators.
In examining assumptions about virtual education, I’ve come to view
the online classroom as a rich teaching and learning environment in
which diverse students can develop technical skills and place them in
conceptual frameworks. This paper shares examples from effective
online courses, demonstrating how the inclusion of multiple formats for
participation leads to deeper dialogue, committed student participation,
meaningful engagement with course content, collaboration, and
success for students with a range of learning styles. It also discusses
ways my work in developing online courses has informed my work
in assessment. Given faculty commitment to new technologies and
vigilance in tracking student participation and progress, the visual arts
can be taught online with great success.
Military and the Landscape: Revealing and Reflecting
Chair: Ruth A. Dusseault, independent artist
Dramatic depictions of war have appeared in art throughout history. In
recent decades contemporary artists have depicted the military in new
ways. Created with a tone of scientific detachment, these perspectives
are broader than those of armies and nations; they are geographically
informed and expose the absurdities of war while remaining sensitive to
those who fight. The military, as part of its logistical planning, creates
imaginary scenarios, with populations and environments playing
roles. Stagecraft and digital scenography are used for recruitment and
training, as well as for celestial warfare and gaming. These activities
enter the physical landscape as components of an overarching economic
endeavor. The afterimage of war is less controlled, leaving dystopic,
sometimes bizarre representations and tracings on the land. This panel
focuses on this threshold between utopian systems and reality, viewing
the landscape with the same objective gaze as the military, sometimes
using the same devices. The artists investigate the formal constructs of
war, working rationally but also intuitively and poetically. Examples
span vertically from suburbia to outer space, and horizontally through
time from the historic atomic landscape to present-day conflicts.
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Play War: Homemade Recreational Battlefields
Ruth A. Dusseault, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dusseault has documented paintball fields and scenario games across
the country since 2008. Situated on low-valued exurban land, the
sites emerge around utility ways, industrial parks, fallow farms, and
interstitial scruff between shopping malls and airports. They are usually
hand-built by amateurs using raw materials drawn from the detritus of
previous settlements and obsolete industries. Each imaginary battlefield
reflects its immediate geography. Makers reuse agricultural structures,
real-estate billboards, concrete forms, shipping containers, cable
spools, telecommunication equipment, loading pallets, railroad ties, and
crashed vehicles. Like apocalyptic folk sculptures, they collectively
depict a survey of military conflicts at home and abroad, past, present,
and future. Fantasy-induced family-friendly war play, with a little real
pain, serves to indoctrinate future generations into military culture—a
systemic attribute of one of the world’s largest all-volunteer armies.
Nuclear Weapons and Shrines: Public Weapons in America
Paul Shambroom, University of Minnesota
Technologies of Vision: The Radical Cartographies of Harun
Farocki and Trevor Paglen
Kristin M. Brockman, The Ohio State University
Harun Farocki’s and Trevor Paglen’s artistic practices intersect by
way of their shared interest in making visible that which is ostensibly
invisible. Though their work is realized in different media, both
share practices invested in the systemic collection, production, and
classification of images. Both Farocki and Paglen pull aside the veil of
secrecy created through government-sanctioned obfuscation under the
rubric of confidential intelligence, using technology to uncover military
sites and operations invisible to the naked eye. Farocki’s films and
videos and Paglen’s photographs interrogate the invisible landscapes
of war. These artists’ works create maps of battle zones and occupation
throughout the world. Farocki and Paglen evince the power of military
technologies of vision, mapping the status of images and sites of
war. They invite the viewer to become an active participant in, rather
than passive consumer of, increasingly sanitized and commercialized
depictions of military action and violence in mainstream media.
Miniature War in Iraq . . . and Now in Afghanistan
Brian Conley, California College of the Arts
Paul Shambroom explores government power in the daily lives of
ordinary citizens, often concentrating on military subjects. His latest
project Shrines: Public Weapons in America shows how physical
manifestations of militarism function as symbols of security or fear
within the civilian landscape. Built for combat or other military
functions, these objects now serve in a range of different roles in their
new settings: memorial, tourist attraction, retail signage, playground
equipment, historic artifact. An earlier project, Nuclear Weapons,
was done during the window of opportunity between the cold war
and 9/11. He photographed warheads, submarines, bombers, missiles,
and associated facilities throughout the US over a ten-year period. He
made thirty-five visits to more than twenty-four sites plus hundreds of
individual Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silos in sixteen
states in the US. Mostly in rural areas, these sites are visible and
accessible within our communities, farmlands, and public roadways
throughout the central plains.
Miniature War in Iraq took a history buffs’ war game and gave it a
topical twist. Conley collaborated with a community of miniature-war
gamers, who construct elaborate dioramas on which they play out
historical battles using toy soldiers and rolls of the dice. But this time,
instead of replaying the Battle of Waterloo or the D-Day landing at
Omaha Beach, gamers at the Games Expo 2007 in Las Vegas found
themselves playing out a still-unfolding conflict from the present war.
Working with Arabic-speaking researchers, Conley culled up-to-theminute information on events on the ground in Iraq. Relayed to the
games master, these urgent dispatches furnished scenarios for two days
of play. Miniature War in Iraq was presented in 2008 at Yerba Buena
Center in San Francisco and in 2010 as an expanded performance
with new scenarios, entitled Miniature War in Iraq . . . and Now
Afghanistan, at the Boiler/Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn.
Omniscience and Contingency: Landscapes of Military
Intelligence and Terror Simulation
Steve Rowell, independent artist
The Military-Industrial Marketing Machine: Leveraging
the Media Landscape
Owen Mundy, Florida State University
Referencing a 2003 RAND Corporation report that outlines the
importance of the US military’s mastery of outer space, the first
project presented, The Ultimate High Ground, is about the terrestrial
manifestations of a network of foreign enclaves, remote military
bases, and stealth satellites. These represent the intangible—the
electromagnetic atmosphere, charged with encrypted transmissions—
as a critical conduit of America’s geospatial awareness. These
data centers, satellite teleports, and office parks form the surficial
infrastructure of interception and surveillance. The second project,
Playas Townsite, is a photographic record of a twenty-first-century
ghost town, preserved in an undead state. Playas, New Mexico, was
built as a company town in the 1970s, abandoned in the 1990s, and
resurrected in 2005 as a for-profit combat-training facility. Beyond
the fringe of the romantic Southwest, Playas is a dystopic suburban
America, an omen of predicted domestic terror and conflict.
As a former US Navy photographer, I often create artwork about
the effects of military representation on cultures, sites, and bodies.
Examples of my research-based projects include Through a Glass
Darkly (2008), a compilation of landscape scenes from the one hundred
most popular war films, and The Drone War Did Not Take Place (2012)
and Camp La Jolla Military Park (2008), both ongoing on- and offline critiques of the military academic industrial culture of San Diego,
California. Drawing from research for these projects, I discuss trends
to militarize culture in order to increase recruitment, influence popular
opinion, and control our borders. I pay particular attention to the power
of representation and storytelling and their use in cinema, photography,
and networks by private and public entities.
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Putting Design in Boxes: The Problem of Taxonomy
Chair: Craig Eliason, University of St. Thomas
Through case studies and reflection, this panel evaluates the state
of classification in the study of design. It considers structural and
historical aspects of the taxonomic practice within design studies, the
relationship between description and classification, the limitations
of taxonomic approaches, and strategies for effective classification.
Presenters are scholars in the fields of architecture, graphic design, and
typography. Their presentations and the dialogue they generate consider
how intentional examination of the problem of taxonomy can create
insights about design practice, design history, and design research.
Catachresis and Contronymity: The Paradoxical Taxonomy
of Beaux-Arts Architecture as Exemplified in the Work of
Henry Hornbostel
Charles L. Rosenblum, Carnegie Mellon University
“Beaux-arts” as a descriptor in American architecture refers with
apparent clarity to the eponymous Paris school. Yet, in the failure
to distinguish among the institution’s often-competing factions, the
term has experienced catachresis and contronymity. Its meaning has
changed, and it has reached the point of indicating two opposites.
Known for staunch revivalism that reiterated established classical
models, the École des Beaux-Arts also produced trends toward
individual expression, technological experimentation, and contextual
responsiveness. The architect Henry Hornbostel, who studied at the
École from 1894 to 1897, exemplified these latter phenomena. In the
early twentieth century he won more national architectural competitions
than any other American architect by using his personal and progressive
brand of beaux-arts methodology. At once an exemplar of beaux-arts
characteristics and an exception to prevailing definitions, Hornbostel’s
work achieves clarity only in light of the catachresis and contronymity
of the term “beaux-arts.”
The Formalists’ Revenge: Tags, Buildings, and Doing
Architectural History Online
Gabrielle Esperdy, New Jersey Institute of Technology
This paper explores the strange persistence of formalist taxonomies in
architectural history from Banister Fletcher to Charles Jencks, from
the printed page to the World Wide Web. Through a case study of the
SAH Archipedia, a media-rich, fully searchable online encyclopedia
of the built world launched in October 2012, the paper considers the
unexpected relevance, surprising utility, and methodological perils
of formalist taxonomies and canonic hierarchies in current historical
practice. It deals specifically with the problem of “putting design
in boxes” by looking at metadata creation, semantic tagging, and
controlled vocabularies for styles, periods, materials, and types within
the SAH Archipedia. It considers the limitations of evolving algorithms
for generating tags and the necessity of the historian’s interpretive
skills to correct erroneous tags and supplement the authority files with
more inclusive taxonomies. The paper concludes by speculating on
the historiographic implications on doing old-fashioned architectural
history in the information age.
Design Artifacts as Primary Sources: Using Faceted Classification
and Discursive Method
Katherine Hepworth, Swinburne University of Technology
Historians engaging in visual analysis of design artifacts are typically
dependent on one of two approaches, art-historical connoisseurship or
semiotics. Both of these methods frequently rely on taxonomies, either
for connoisseurship classification of stylistic features or for semiotic
content analysis. This paper proposes an alternate visual-analysis
method, discursive method, supported by an alternate classification
system. Faceted classification is a nonlinear classification system
wherein particular artifact attributes are identified (as facets) and
assigned to groups. Faceted classification differs from taxonomic
classification in three main attributes—polyhierarchies, multiple
inheritance, and flexibility—which provide significant advantages to
historians dealing with design artifacts. These advantages are discussed
in detail in this paper, and the interrelationship between faceted
classification and discursive method is explored. Advocating the use
of description as a crucial research tool, discursive method puts the
historian’s observations about design artifacts at the heart of designhistorical research.
Fleeing the Boxes: The Systematic Description of the Fused
Languages of Form in the Context of Typeface Design
Catherine Dixon, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
This paper outlines a response to the problem of describing formal
diversity within the field of type design by means of the limited scope
of a set of category “boxes” determined by existing classificatory tools.
A particular challenge was an increase in those typefaces that fuse
formal languages—visual features previously used to define categories
often now being reconfigured in new combinations and contexts. The
outcome was a new typeface-description tool that shifts away from
the boxes of previous practice toward the individual description of
typefaces on an elemental basis. A drawback of such an elemental
approach is, however, the lack of contextualization of a given typeface
within a field overview. So the new tool combines an elemental
approach with a set of box descriptors, and using a convergence/
divergence model allows for the mapping of patterns of practice, from
both synchronic and diachronic viewpoints.
Arts of Transition: Visual Culture, Democracy,
and Disillusionment in Latin America
Chairs: George F. Flaherty, University of Texas at Austin;
Luis M. Castañeda, Syracuse University
The so-called transition to democracy in Latin America, with
origins in nineteenth-century national independence movements,
is well documented by scholars. According to established narrative
patterns, the region is perpetually on the road to or off track from this
unquestioned universal good, aggressively sold by national elites and
supranational institutions. Their proposition has been to overlook the
paucity and social injustice of the present to envision a prosperous and
equitable future as a result of political and market reforms. Modernist
art and architecture often functioned as the primary platform to conjure
this futuristic panorama. In Mexico’s macroeconomic “miracle” of
the mid-twentieth century, citizens were asked to take a leap of faith
based on a visual culture of modernity rather than modernization
itself. Similar cases abound, from the monumental landscapes of
Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia to Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto,
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and Alejandro Otero’s kinetic art installations in Caracas. The
utopian aspects of these interventions—frequently at odds with social
realities—are well known, but the cultures of resistance that flourished
parallel to them are not quite as apparent. Similarly, the emerging
artistic expression of disillusion, after decades of failed reforms, is only
now receiving attention. With no universally accepted definition or
form of democracy, acts of visualization are required, ranging from the
state-sponsored to the openly insurgent.
CAYC al aire libre: Democratic Conceptualism in 1970s Argentina
Daniel Quiles, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
On September 23, 1972, the Centro de Arte y Comunicación
inaugurated CAYC al aire libre, an outdoor component of the
larger group exhibition Arte de sistemas II. CAYC al aire libre was
censored and demolished one day after its inauguration, in a powerful
government response to one of the only ventures into public space in
the long history of CAYC, founded by the critic and industrialist Jorge
Glusberg in 1969. The paper explores this event and several initiatives
throughout the center’s history that are representative of its quixotic
vision of a democratic conceptualism, one that insisted upon diverse
voices and spectator feedback despite the near impossibility of such
activity in that period in either artistic or activist spheres.
Dystopia Embodied: Homenaje a la necrofilia and
the Corporealized Object
Sean Nesselrode, New York University
Provoking national outrage and forcibly closed by the Venezuelan
government, Carlos Contramaestre’s 1962 exhibition Homenaje a la
necrofilia (Homage to Necrophilia) consisted of abstract paintings
that incorporated animal bones, viscera, and waste material. While
the exhibition is most often treated as an exemplar of the scandalous
political commentary that defined the artist collective El Techo
de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale), this paper considers the
implications of the paintings’ material instability. Contramaestre’s
use of organic material not only serves as a parodic enactment of
the violence that followed the restitution of democracy in 1959; it
also lends his paintings a tentative objecthood that is undone by
their inevitable decomposition. In the context of the larger, utopian
project of modernizing the nation, Contramaestre’s murder of the art
object becomes an assault against the very parameters of Venezuelan
modernism—both political and artistic—as they had come to be defined.
practice that would propel a transformative mode of realism. Perna’s
works provided a cogent response to the program touted by a previous
generation’s abstract art, also intent on enlisting collective perception
yet within the frame of the country’s officially sanctioned process of
modernization.
Brick by Brick: Responses to Notions of Progress and
Development in Colombian Contemporary Art
Gina Tarver, Texas State University, San Marcos
Propelled by the theory of desarrollismo, Colombia undertook a period
of rapid modernization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Architecture
played a crucial symbolic role in development, serving as a visible
promise of the nation’s progress toward a more complete and equitable
modernity. A nationally rooted form of modern architecture emerged
whose foremost representative was Rogelio Salmona. Salmona’s use
of the modest red brick to create clean-lined, unified buildings based
upon natural shapes became synonymous with Colombian modernism.
Several contemporary Colombian artists have focused on the ubiquitous
brick, so closely associated with Salmona, to counter the ideas of
permanence, strength, solidity, stability, and naturalness embedded
in Colombian modern architecture. Alluding instead to ephemerality,
fragility, hollowness, and constructedness, artists such as Efraín Arreita,
Jaime Ávila, and Felipe Arturo reference brick architecture in artworks
employing a diverse range of materials in order to question and counter
easy notions of progress.
The Arts of Transitional Justice: Narrative Employment
and Memory Techniques in Peru
Cynthia Milton, Université de Montréal
From 1980 to 1995/2000 Peru underwent a civil conflict that pitted
various armed groups (including the state) against each other, while
exacerbating internal community tensions. Like most conflicts, the
subsequent national historical accounts are confused, limited, and
partisan. While the work of the Peruvian truth commission (CVR)
is in many ways exemplary, it faced challenges and limitations. In
the present day the work of the CVR is largely disparaged by Peru’s
political elites. In the ongoing national debate over the past, local
memories are often elided or sidestepped. This presentation analyzes
the narrative structure of a series of artworks that emerged as the
result of initiatives by nongovernmental organizations in the
Peruvian highlands.
The Nonmagical Realism of Claudio Perna: Counterimagining
Venezuela under the Sign of Disillusionment
Juan Ledezma, independent scholar
Medieval Art and Response, ca. 1300–ca. 1500
“Geographic facts are aesthetic facts.” Armed with this premise, the
Venezuelan geographer and Conceptual artist Claudio Perna proposed
discrete acts of creative intervention that would both document and
subvert his country’s perceptual geography. The artist’s tactics, as
revealed by the study of two large-scale projects, were informed by
the conviction that the social perception of geopolitical sites is part
of such sites themselves. These projects appropriated amateur and
other marginal forms of photographic documentation that, variously
reworked, instigated a chain of continuous reperception, which lead
to the permanent transformation of the documented culture. The
photographer became a coparticipant within a collective perceptual
In The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response
David Freedberg argued that study of “the ways in which people of
all classes and cultures have responded to images” is as important to
the history of art as the study of images themselves. Recent studies
in optics, somatics, and psychology have greatly expanded our
understanding of how images from the medieval period were thought
capable of affecting a viewer’s emotional, behavioral, and intellectual
response. This session explores ways to socially, historically, and
theoretically contextualize the affective relationship between images
and their viewers in this period.
Chairs: Theresa Flanigan, The College of Saint Rose; Holly Flora,
Tulane University
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Re-formed and Reborn in the Holy Font: Images, Materials,
and Viewer Reception in the Orthodox Baptistery of Ravenna
Carly Jane Steinborn, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Experiencing the Magdalene: Seeing, Smelling, and
Hearing Salvation in Northern Devotional Art
Penny Howell Jolly, Skidmore College
Originally attached to the impressive cathedral of the city, the
Orthodox Baptistery of Ravenna provides a striking example of early
medieval architecture and decoration. Dating to the mid-fifth century
AD, the building’s elaborate interior is adorned with colored-marble
panels, stucco reliefs, and both ornamental and narrative imagery
in mosaic. Using the visual evidence in conjunction with exegetical
sources, this paper reconstructs the experience of a fifth-century
visitor to the space and the crucial role of images and materials in
eliciting viewer response to the ceremony. The imagery, materiality,
and ritual acted in dialogue with one another and together helped
enhance the initiate’s “rebirth” and newfound union with a Christian
God. The analysis explores the complex interaction between the
baptistery’s exceptional variety of media and images and their
combined effect on a newly converted viewer.
Late medieval artists encouraged audiences’ interactive responses to
devotional imagery by employing innovative pictorial strategies that
enhanced viewers’ affective and performative responses. This paper
examines a series of early-sixteenth-century Flemish paintings of
Mary Magdalene produced on spec for Antwerp’s open markets by the
Master of the Female Half-lengths, Quentin Massys, and others; these
works promoted viewers’ imagined sensory responses, particularly by
stimulating scopophilic responses and olfactory and auditory arousals.
But the paintings’ affective powers were dangerous; depending on
viewers’ inclinations, the well-dressed beauties depicted could evoke
desire for the preconversion prostitute rather than contemplation of the
saint, while paintings of the lute-playing, lovesick Magdalene risked
lascivious responses instead of promoting sublime elevation. Even
so, such risks were worth taking, for pious viewers could imitate the
saint’s own spiritual transformation—her conversion—by moving from
imagining the pleasures of the sinner courtesan to coexperiencing her
penance.
The Power of Picture Books: Le Somme le Roi and the Moral
Imperative of Visual Literacy
Alexa Sand, Utah State University
This paper concerns the moral treatise known as the Somme le Roi,
written in Old French for King Philip III of France by his Dominican
confessor in 1279, a book expressly designed to aid in the reader’s
quest to live, and to die, well. The coordination of pictures and words
in several early manuscripts of the Somme inculcates an affective
approach to reading that is at once somatic and intellectual, material
and spiritual. In their didactic role, these manuscripts helped shaped a
generation of aristocrats who would increasingly place visual prowess
at the center of their courtly and devotional identities, thus linking
the ability to engage affectively and intellectually with pictorial
representation to what it meant to be “noble” in both the social and the
spiritual sense.
The Role of Touch in Medieval Devotion. Really?
Martina Bagnoli, The Walters Art Museum
The ability to touch and be touched by God is an important aspect of
Christianity. If in the Old Testament God extends his favors from a
distance, in the New, Christ is accessible to people’s touch. Among
the five senses touch is the one that best expresses Christ’s dual nature
as man and God. In his hands (literally) touch, a prime instrument of
human discernment, becomes a sign of his divine nature. The story
of touch stands in the balance between the desire to gain physical
proximity to the divine, on the one hand, and the impossibility of doing
so, on the other. Medieval art labored in the gray area between touch
and untouch, between engaging the senses and denying them. Its overt
physicality involved sensory perception, yet it aspired to show things
immaterial. Understanding this paradox is crucial to appreciate the role
of tactility in devotional art.
Seeing Magic, Feeling Magic: A Sixteenth-Century Embodied
Response to Engraved Images on Precious Gems
Liliana Leopardi, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
This paper analyzes aspects of the core ideas expressed by Camillo
Leonardi in his Speculum Lapidum by examining a number of images
described therein and suggests a manner in which magic rings may
be considered fetishes used to bridge the Self (unmediated experience
of body and mind) and the Other; in other words, it considers them
as transitional objects that mediated the relationship of the individual
to the external world. This analysis evidences the period’s concerns
and fears that body and mind were not discrete isolate entities; by
controlling one, the other could also be manipulated. The use of magic
images and objects such as engraved rings may be, then, conceptualized
as an early modern attempt to provide a path to psychological integrity
for a Self seen as porous and fragmented.
International Center of Medieval Art
Jerusalem: Medieval Art, History, and Sanctity
through the Eyes of Many Faiths
Chair: Cathleen A. Fleck, Saint Louis University
The city of Jerusalem has long been considered a special and holy
place by diverse religious cultures, though competing claims have
also rendered it a locus of continual conflict and strife. This session
examines the diversity and complexity of how the Abrahamic faiths of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam expressed through visual media their
perception of Jerusalem’s sanctity—as understood through history
or as constructed by history. For example, how did patrons of art and
architecture from the late antique to early modern eras throughout
the world use Jerusalem’s representation as religious and political
instruments of power, persuasion, consolation, spirituality, or myth?
Representations could be in many forms, from pilgrimage maps to
whole complexes in foreign lands duplicating Jerusalem’s holy sites.
By studying the city as a place of intercultural claims and taking account
of the emerging fields of Mediterranean and intercultural studies, this
session addresses a representation of Jerusalem as it relates to the city’s
understanding by more than one of these three religious cultures.
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Dome of the Rock as Image of the Ancient Jewish Temple
Pamela Berger, Boston College
The Temple of Solomon as described in the Book of Kings was
rectangular in plan, as were the subsequent temples of Zerubabbel and
Herod. By 135 CE the Herodian structure was completely destroyed,
yet over the centuries Jews gathered surreptitiously at the site and wept.
By 691 a Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock, Qubbat al-Sakhra,
graced the site. As early as the ninth century pilgrims confused the
polygonal building with the ancient temple. From Carolingian art
through the Renaissance, the Dome of the Rock came to stand for the
temple in Christian art. Islamic painting also used the Dome of the
Rock as the image of Solomon’s Temple. Most surprising of all, Jewish
artists from the late fifteenth century into the early 1900s depicted
the temple as a circular or polygonal structure with the profile of the
Islamic shrine, and they often drew a crescent on top.
From Jerusalem to Civate: The Ciborium as Ark and Tomb
Gillian B. Elliott, Corcoran College of Art and Design
The well-known eleventh-century fresco scene of Christ in the garden
of Heavenly Jerusalem that adorns the vault in the narthex of the
basilica of San Pietro al Monte in Civate (Italy) invited medieval
viewers to contemplate the Second Coming of Christ in the terrestrial
city of Jerusalem. The focal point of the church, the ciborium, with its
four painted stucco reliefs, gives all the more evidence of the purpose
of this church as an alternative pilgrimage site to Jerusalem. The
iconography of the stucco paintings, as well as the structure of the
ciborium itself, invited contemplation of two loca sancta in Jerusalem,
namely the lost Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies of the Jewish
Temple and the Constantinian church of the Holy Sepulchre. The
ciborium in Civate, like the ark and the tomb in Jerusalem, provided
direct access to Heavenly Jerusalem.
Between the Temple Mount and the Holy Sepulchre: Architectural
Translation of Jerusalem to Twelfth-Century Pisa
Neta Bodner, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Pisa built monuments that evoked
Jerusalem and its sacred sites. The memory of the destroyed temple,
the memory of Christ’s Anastasis, and the link of the Muslim Dome of
the Rock to both were transported to Pisa along with the shapes of their
physical memorials. The paper outlines how the three-way tensions
among the loca sancta in Jerusalem were translated to Pisa through
architectural reproductions. By representing Jerusalem in Pisa, the
commune was representing itself as Jerusalem of Solomon’s day, of
Christ’s era, of Constantine’s heritage, and of the triumphal Crusader
conquest and victory over the infidels. Pisa used the architectural
representation of Jerusalem to promote itself not only as a religious but
also as a political, military, and cultural center at its medieval zenith.
Referencing Solomon’s Temple: The Foliate Frieze as
Golden Vine in French Gothic Churches
Mailan Doquang, McGill University
This paper examines the formal, semantic, and ideological connections
between French Gothic churches and buildings in the Holy Land,
focusing on foliate friezes and their Solomonic allusions. The sculpted
foliate bands in Gothic churches were not simply decorative but instead
were laden with meaning, synecdochically representing Solomon’s
Temple by referencing the Golden Vine. The Solomonic and paradisal
associations of the vine in Jewish contexts were equally fitting in
churches, which evinced in their inclusion of foliate friezes (and in
their use of temple dimensions) an ideological claim to the legacy of
both the temple and Solomon. By appropriating the vine motif from the
Jewish temple, moreover, clerical authorities proclaimed the triumph of
the True and New Temple (the church), while simultaneously referring
to the Eucharist, the central ritual of the Christian faith, and ultimately
to Christ, described in the Book of John as the True Vine.
Representing Pilgrimage in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Bianca Kühnel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The paper is concerned with visual representations of central places,
rites, and routes of pilgrimage in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The three monotheistic religions share many patterns of faith, at
times even commemorating the same places. These commonalities
can, paradoxically, stress crucial differences between the respective
approaches of the three religions to their holy places. Visual
representations connected to practices and concepts of pilgrimage
reflect the existence of exchanges between the three religions, which
might not be witnessed in other sources. Thus, for example, the
depiction of Ishmael’s footprints in plans of the Ka’aba area evoke the
presence of Christ’s footprints in representations of the Mount of Olives
or of the Ascension. The paper tries to understand the relationship
between common visual form and symbolical content in several
examples that took shape within the Judaism-ChristianityIslam triangle.
Critiquing Criticality
Chairs: Pamela Lynn Fraser, University of Vermont;
Randall David Szott
This panel addresses the limits of the critical approach to art making,
viewing, and analysis in university art programs. The meaning of
the word “critical” has become so diffuse that it is difficult to make
out its defining features. Its use ranges from pointing to a general
application of analysis to art objects to something as specific as
developing a relationship with the school of thought called critical
theory and everything in between. The demand for criticality, however
one defines it, has become nearly hegemonic in undergraduate and
graduate art programs. Rather than lamenting an “authentic” or precise
use of criticality, we imagine what other aspects of human experience
and meaning making might be fostered in art education. How might
a more diverse approach change art practice and pedagogy? This
panel measures and judges the efficacy of the critical approach and its
implementation. What has it accomplished? And what has it forsaken?
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
52
Fluxus and the Constructive Turn
Roger Rothman, Bucknell University
Tristan Tzara’s “great negative work,” André Breton’s assault on the
“reign of logic,” and Guy Debord’s “critique of separation” have
established the avant-garde as an enterprise founded on critique.
Recently, however, scholars have turned toward the logic and potential
of construction. For example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has proposed
a shift from the critical to what she calls “the reparative,” and Bruno
Latour recommends a shift from deconstruction to design. Their
work—along with that of Isabelle Stengers, Steven Shaviro, Simon
Critchley, and others—suggests a broad-based critique of critique. This
“constructive turn” is especially useful in rethinking Fluxus, which—
unlike Dada, Surrealism, and the Situationist International—was almost
entirely opposed to critique. In addition, by enabling a reconsideration
of Fluxus, the recent constructive turn makes it possible to reevaluate
the premises and promises of the avant-garde at large.
“Criticality Gone”: Jeff Koons’s Critique of Criticality
in the Late 1980s
AnnMarie Perl, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Early on in the history of criticality’s rise to prominence, Jeff Koons
redefined his artistic project, which continues essentially unchanged
into the present, against criticality, disassociating himself from
the fashionable, critically sanctioned movement of Simulationism
in 1987 and developing over the next few years a powerful and
systematic critique of criticality. Despite the fact that Koons’s critique
was not acknowledged by its targets, who influentially dismissed
Koons’s work in their own terms as “complicit,” Koons’s parody
of criticality’s claims and conceits (after “criticality” and following
Smithson, Koons’s “entropy” is another import from physics), his
occupation and even incarnation of criticality’s blind spots and taboos
(like popular culture, advertisement, pornography), not only helps
to explain Koons’s ongoing project, which, contrary to criticality’s
proponents, deserves serious study, but also begins to indicate the
ways art history of the recent past, so dominated by the criticality
model, may be freshly approached.
Thinking through Criticality
Shona MacDonald, University of Massachusetts
The critic Robert Storr and the cultural theorist Susan Stewart both
identified in recent writings antagonism between theory and art
making (or “practice,” though some artists abhor this term). The
gist of this antagonism is that art seen essentially through the lens of
theory becomes derivative and/or allegorical. This thinking seems to
be in direct contrast to the role of theory and criticism in the 1990s.
During this period theory was read, art was produced, and a symbiotic
relationship formed; artists were expected to be well versed in
theoretical and critical texts by the likes of Adorno, Barthes, Foucault,
Derrida, and Baudrillard. This discussion unpacks why this change
has occurred, if artists and theorists even feel it has occurred, and if
so, what do artists now think about theory and do they care about it in
relationship to their work?
Mediocrity Doesn’t Happen Overnight . . . It Takes a
Lot of Hard Work
Michael Lawrence Aurbach, Vanderbilt University
During my three decades of full-time teaching, studio-art instruction
has changed dramatically. In my mind there has been a steady erosion
in the quality of instruction due to problems with our graduate
programs, far too much emphasis on critical theory (abandonment of
the art-historical canon, no matter how flawed), failure of our national
art organizations to advocate greater status for studio art within the
academy, the growth of business or consumer models within university
administrations, curricula that have deemphasized the development of
technical skills, and the rapid shift to fashionable “boutique” and online
studio courses. Most of the wounds to the art academy have been selfinflicted, and the destructive trends will be hard to reverse.
Uncritical Thinking
Charles Dobson, Emily Carr University of Art and Design
Academics in university art departments typically promote rather than
question a narrow range of arcane texts. Many refer to authorities from
other fields but focus on theories long abandoned by academics in those
fields. But these theories still lend an air of substance to anything an
art academic may want to write. And reference to authority is so much
easier than testing theory against real evidence. In traditional religions
arcane texts serve to mystify and protect dogma from challenge. They
serve the same purpose in the academy, while providing a foundation
for careers based on their teaching and interpretation. But if uncritical
theory supports faculty, it often cripples students. Many suffer from
paralysis on graduation, burdened by the need to make defensible
rather than engaging work. Others begin deploying theory as a prop
for unremarkable work. We need to be more critical of the theory
underpinning art discourse.
Consideration as an Alternative to Critique
Karen Schiff, independent artist
Some students equate criticism with negative criticism, and fear that
practicing critique will make them meaner people who enjoy art less.
We indeed train students in antagonism: to look askance at the object of
criticism; to unearth what is implicit; to expose weaknesses or areas of
unconsciousness. Deconstruction can devolve into destructive gestures.
In an alternative paradigm of consideration, instead of uncovering
what’s not there, students would consider what is there in the materials
they are examining. What can be learned? What are underlying ideas,
motivations, or influences? These are familiar, “critical” questions, but
their tone, and the information they seek, is categorically different. The
etymologies of the two words tell the story: “criticism” comes from
krinein, “to separate, judge”; the root of “consideration,” sidereal,
means “to observe the stars.” Consideration emphasizes an inclusive,
bird’s-eye perspective.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
53
Hell Yeah
Andreas Fischer, Illinois State University
In 1990 David Foster Wallace wrote that irony “serves an almost
exclusively negative function,” that it is “singularly unuseful when it
comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”
A decade and a half later, the theorist Johanna Drucker argued against
postmodernist negativity in similar terms. Wallace and Drucker provide
significant diagnoses of continuing cultural problems of criticality and
offer suggestions toward a more productive postcritical condition. Both
writers contend that once critique has been made, it prevents culture
from moving forward. As Wallace points out, “Victorious rebels seem
best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled
against themselves.” Both Wallace and Drucker underscore the
possibility of affirmational relationships that involve some degree of
increased experiential proximity to subject matter. Perhaps the critiques
of postmodernism, having been made and elaborated, are yielding to a
more affirmational mode that is now necessary.
Writing with Images
Elisabeth Friedman, Illinois State University
The culture of criticality infuses practices of making and practices of
writing alike. Asking students to write about their work (or the work of
others) often results in tired clichés, bland generalizations, or stultifying
descriptions. Words and images generated under the sign of social
critique frequently proceed from answers rather than questions. This
leaves little room for contradiction, ambiguity, or affirmation. Drawing
on the work of scholars such as John Berger, Susan Buck-Morss, Sunil
Manghani, and others, this paper engages creative reconsiderations of
the relationship between text and image, writing and looking, theory
and practice. What might it mean to write with images rather than about
images? What must our research and writing practices take into account
to engage with images on their own terms? What new kinds of thinking
do images invite?
New Approaches to the Study of Historical
Arts in Africa
Chair: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, The City College,
In April 2011 Holland Cotter of the New York Times reflected on the
state of scholarship on African arts and wrote: “The bottom line is
plain: unless some of those few scholars [of African and other nonWestern arts] stay on the case, we risk losing both the art and the
history in ‘art history.’” This session responds to Cotter’s call and
investigates fresh approaches to the study of historical arts of Africa.
It draws on research conducted by a range of scholars of African arts,
including curators and conservators. As a result, this session offers
focused examinations of changing archival, fieldwork, and museumbased methods to expand understanding of materials, methods,
aesthetic strategies, and cultural contexts of a single object or corpus
of objects.
Unraveling the Foundation of African Arts in New York
during the Modernist Era
Yaëlle Biro, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Heated reactions to the Museum of Modern Art’s famous 1984
exhibition Primitivism had the unfortunate consequence of suspending
scholarship on reception of African arts in conjunction with the
emergence of modernism in Europe and North America. By unraveling
that history through archival research, this paper returns to this moment
and recovers pivotal factors that shaped the foundation of African art
history. Expanding upon the Metropolitan Museum exhibition African
Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde (November 27, 2012–April 14,
2013) and drawing on long-neglected dealers’ archives (including
accounting books, photographs, and press clippings), this presentation
highlights specificities of New York’s appreciation of African arts in
the 1910s and 1920s. Strong commercial ties with Europe did not stop
the African art market in America from having its own identity. African
arts’ symbiotic relationship with modernism and a growing AfricanAmerican engagement inspired by Harlem Renaissance luminaries
characterized these arts’ reception in America.
When a Statue of a Colonial Agent Turns Out to Be a
Pende Power Object: Joining Science, Field, and Archive
Richard B. Woodward, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
A statue by a Pende sculptor from the (former) Belgian Congo that
depicts the colonial agent Maximilien Balot—sole European casualty
of the 1931 Pende rebellion—is anything but a benign or charmingly
cynical “colon” figure. Technical examination reveals twelve small,
carefully aligned horizontal channels piercing the figure, four each
passing through the head, chest, and knees, and all intersecting a larger
vertical shaft drilled head to foot. Why the statue was pierced and
what role it played in its local context would remain obscure without
light shed by documents recording the agent’s death and knowledge
of Pende attitudes and practices acquired from field research. Joining
these factors substantiates interpretation of the sculpture as a power
object, even though the figure is not laden with charged materials
and the process of amalgamating lab, field, and document provides a
model for delineating African art history in rare instances where such
opportunity exists.
A Muslim Masquerade in Southwestern Burkina Faso?
Lisa Homann, Wayne State University
In the recent explosion of scholarship on Islam and Muslim societies
in Africa, little attention has been paid to artistic practices deeply
related to and structured by Islam but not Islamic, per se. This paper
examines funerary white masks, also called lo gue, in the city of BoboDioulasso, Burkina Faso. Owned and managed exclusively by Muslim
Zara peoples, this urban masquerade features visual and administrative
elements that serve to distinguish it from local non-Muslim ones. Zaras
have designed lo gue as the visual opposite of neighboring non-Muslim
masks, fashioned the practice primarily as entertainment, and timed
the dances to accommodate their responsibilities as Muslims. Although
lo gue is not empirically Islamic, it identifies Zara practitioners as
Muslims and privileges their duties as such. In this way, white-mask
practice challenges us to rethink the discourses surrounding Islam and
its relationship to historic and contemporary Muslim artistic practices.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Textiles as the Material of African Art History
Sarah C. Brett-Smith, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
What Is Art Thinking in the Context of Design Thinking?
Amy Whitaker, Sotheby’s Institute of Art
This paper proposes that textile analysis enables the historian to obtain
hitherto inaccessible points of view in predominately oral societies,
providing a new method for art history. In Mali, West Africa, Bamana
women paint yellow, leaf-dyed wrappers with fermented mud to create
geometric patterns. After French conquest and colonization, women
invented mud cloth patterns to comment on change and modernization.
Such inventions are exemplified in one design, “Garde Cerce,” a
pattern named for the French colonial servitor of the 1920s and 1930s,
the garde de cercle. This design provides a glimpse of how Africans
viewed the colonial establishment and those who carried out its orders.
An analysis of this pattern provides the historian with the viewpoint
of those who cannot write and in fact did not have a right to speak in
public assemblies, namely women.
From the Bauhaus to the Illinois Institute of Technology to more recent
programs such as California College of the Arts’ design strategy MBA
and the School of Visual Arts’ MFA in products of design, the history
of industrial arts has married design practice and business thinking.
However, little is said about the difference between an artistic process
and a design process. Artistic process is something altogether messier:
the designer moves from point A to B, or C, D, or F; the artist invents
point B. Design refines answers; art asks questions. Drawing on the
history of design education and the author’s experience teaching
business to artists, this paper explores case studies of the medical
device inventor Thomas Fogarty and Christopher Miner, a video artist
turning a 1.2 million square foot Sears building into an arts complex.
Ultimately Joseph Beuys was right: everyone is an artist, but everyone
is a businessperson too.
Design and Business: Strange Bedfellows or Two Sides
of the Same Coin?
Chair: Chris Garvin, The University of the Arts
Recently “design thinking” has become a buzzword in prominent
business schools as well as in the professions they serve. Artists’ and
designers’ unique abilities to both uncover and solve problems are
now seen as a desirable alternative to standard business thinking,
quantitative analysis, and risk management. Designers and creative
professionals are increasingly asked to take a larger role in the business
dynamics of their clients and partners. The new fields of service and
interaction design try to address this by taking a wide view of design
problems, considering the end users and the context of their creations
as much as the designs themselves. While business education is ripe
to adopt art and design school techniques in the quest to make a better
MBA, art school seems less enthusiastic about the idea of co-opting
what business schools are doing as a way to improve design education.
This panel poses questions about this overlap to try to uncover a
relationship here for our future or if this is a passing fad.
Learning to Do What I Say: Incorporating Entrepreneurial
and Design Thinking in Building Curriculum
Neil Kleinman, The University of the Arts
In this time of cross-disciplinary thinking, human-centered design,
and entrepreneurship we are apt to borrow the language of all the
disciplines that surround us as a way of showing that we are current,
hip, informed, and understand how transformative this time is. This
presentation describes a curriculum-development approach that uses the
principles of entrepreneurial thinking and human-centered design. If we
want our students to learn how to prototype new designs, risk failure,
test assumptions, listen to the users, and so on, we need to do more
than simply have them attempt these as part of classroom exercises. We
must “design” and execute new curriculum using the same principles.
Yes, there will be risk and failures, but isn’t that what we’re asking our
students to embrace?
The Path to Combining Design and Business at a University
Andrea Marks, Oregon State University
Traditional notions of where programs or disciplines should be housed
are now on the table for discussion. Graphic design is typically
housed in a larger school of design and architecture or coupled with
a fine-arts program within a college of liberal arts, yet these older
models are quickly shifting. As restructuring continues on university
campuses and design continues to trend toward a more collaborative,
cross-disciplinary field, it is necessary to reconsider where design
disciplines fit on a college campus. In the summer of 2012 the graphic
design program at Oregon State University merged with other design
disciplines to form a School of Design and Human Environment,
housed in the College of Business. The choice to move the new School
of Design and Human Environment to the College of Business poses
new and exciting opportunities and challenges for the design and
business communities.
New Approaches to Theory and Research in Art- and
Design-Led Educational Programs
Borja and Peinado, École Parsons à Paris
Recent interest in design expressed by business concerns worldwide
has lead art and design schools to question the validity of current
disciplinary boundaries. “Design thinking” has become a buzzword,
but art and design schools have been slow to rise to the opportunity this
represents for the development of new, hybrid programs. Traditionally
art and design schools have only marginally included business courses
in their curriculum. As surprising as this might seem, art and design
education shies away from hybridity while claiming to embrace
it at the same time. Hybrid approaches, as desirable as they might
seem in the abstract, suddenly become difficult to realize in practice.
The disciplinary boundaries that separate educational programs
from one another, and which we inherited from nineteenth-century
ideas about education, are a very powerful deterrent to any kind of
decompartmentalization of knowledge.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
55
Performativity, the Performative, and Performance
in Contemporary Art
Italian Art Society
Chair: Robert Gero, State University of New York at Old Westbury
Chair: Diana Gisolfi, Pratt Institute-Pratt in Venice
Performativity and its root, the performative, have become a topic or
mode that one encounters almost daily in the world of contemporary
art and its discourses. They are invoked regularly in radically multiple
ways with seemingly multiple meanings. Clearly not reducible to
an attribute or quality of performance, performativity has become a
methodological approach. This session is an inquiry into the complexity
of the concepts of performativity, the performative, and performance
in order to draw out the distinctions between these concepts and to
work toward some definitions, or at least a better understanding, of
the morphs and manifestations of these concepts through the prism
of contemporary art. It also presents how performance has come to
pervade every aspect of our creative and cultural fabric, beginning
with the new prominence of performance art, then addressing how
performance is applied to the sum total of art practices that are often
seen and judged as performed.
The concept and practice of disegno have ancient sources and
continuing importance. Written sources reach back to Aristotle and
Pliny, include Acquinas and Dante, and are connected with the very
idea of creativity, both divine and human. Such sources were readily
available in Renaissance Italy, especially after the arrival of the printing
press in the 1460s. They spawned renewed considerations of the “prima
idea,” the intellectual and practical importance of drawing, and debates
about the definition of drawing, its varied stages, media, surfaces, and
applications. The literature and documents encompass terms such as
schizzi, disegni, modelli, bozzetti, and abozzi. This session is devoted to
meditations on disegno in diverse Italian contexts.
Performance Nominalism and Its Discontents
Bruce Barber, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
This paper explores how the term “performance,” beyond its ubiquity
in art-world discourse and general cultural uses, has continued to
feed an expanded global commoditization process peculiar to late
capitalism. With reference to Claire Bishop’s observations about
the leveraging of the term “delegated performance,” and recent
texts affirming relational, operative, and dialogical art practice as
manifestations of the avant-garde, the paper presents three transnational
examples of performance art practice that remain strategically invisible
to the mainstream, arguing the necessity of a failed underground for
the continued viability of radical art practice. The paper concludes
with some theoretical observations about failure and the avant-garde,
echoing Greg Sholette’s view that political (art) agents of dark matter
possess “at best a potential for progressive resistance, as well as for
reactionary anger.”
Toward a Theory of the “Enacted Turn”
Jessica Wyman, Ontario College of Art and Design University
In the early twenty-first century the language of performativity finds
a wide application, from artistic enterprise to reality television to
political manifestation that draws forward through history a series of
connected social and artistic engagements (such as the early artistic/
political forays of the Suffragists, among others). Now, the matter of
the performative seems to be at its apogee as it incorporates facets of
presence of both producers and receivers of content using a seemingly
endless array of media. This paper suggests some of the intellectual
underpinnings that have driven this “enacted turn” (following on the
literary and, later, the visual “turns”) and uses examples of a range of
current manifestations of its application in contemporary art and society
that highlight both its utility as a framework and some of its limitations.
Disegno
Pliny and the Birth of Disegno
Sarah Blake McHam, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Pliny the Elder’s Natural History provided Italian Renaissance readers
with a wealth of information about ancient art, for in his books about
the earth’s metals, minerals, and stones, Pliny offered long excurses
about Greek sculpture and painting. Prior to the fourteenth century
readers had skipped over these parts of the encyclopedia. Among the
many legacies Pliny bequeathed to the Renaissance was an emphasis
on drawing, or what we know as disegno, and its fundamental role in
the creation of the arts. Pliny’s ideas were imparted above all in the
anecdotes about individual artists with which he enlivened his histories.
These stories galvanized Petrarch’s interest. Once Petrarch redirected
attention to Pliny, later theorists followed suit. This paper traces the
thread through the fifteenth century when writers like Ghiberti and
Alberti picked up from the Natural History the account of the formative
role of disegno in the creation of painting and sculpture.
Nicholas of Cusa and the Theological Foundations of Disegno
Il Kim, Pratt Institute
In the introduction to the second edition of his Lives of the Artists,
Vasari clearly defines the word disegno as twofold: conceptualization
and its execution. This way of understanding disegno, whether executed
on paper with charcoal or directly on canvas with oil paint, has
precedents in the fifteenth century; in his De pictura Alberti focused
on the former—the means of conceptualizing painting. Regarding the
latter he simply noted, however, that only through daily practice can
the artist perfect the execution of these concepts. Meanwhile, Nicholas
of Cusa integrated both the former and the latter, saying that without
a firm configuration in his mind of the art of painting, which includes
the what (subject matter) and the how (technique), the painter cannot
execute any actual image in matter. Cusa’s theological understanding of
painting could have been a bridge toward Vasari’s definition of disegno.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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The Practice of Design in Baroque Naples
Paola d’Agostino, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This paper examines some Neapolitan Baroque drawings from the
Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. There are only a few drawings
that can be attributed to sculptors and/or architects working in Naples
at the time, and only a handful of clay sketches. By comparing works
from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum with known drawings by Giovanni
Antonio Dosio, Cosimo Fanzago, and some of the artists working
in the circle of Lorenzo and Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, this paper
explores the different uses of drawings and clay sketches in the
production of sculpture and decorative arts. It also looks into the
changes that occurred in sculpture’s workshop practice, in patronage,
and in collecting. Finally, it addresses the use of the words modello and
disegno in the writings and documents of the period.
Building for the “Common Good”: Public Works,
Civic Architecture, and Their Representation in
Bourbon Latin America
Chairs: Luis J. Gordo-Peláez, University of Texas at Austin;
In 1700 a new king, Philip V, and a new regal dynasty, the French
Bourbons, came to the Spanish throne. The rule of this dynasty over
the Hispanic world had a substantial impact in the Americas, with
the introduction of ambitious governmental, military, and fiscal
reforms. Over the next one hundred years the cities of the New World
experienced a considerable transformation in their urban landscapes.
Viceroys, Corregidores, Intendentes, and Municipal Cabildos promoted
drastic improvements of public works, buildings, and repairs of city
halls, jails, bridges, waterworks, fountains, paved roads, granaries,
slaughterhouses, butcher’s and fish shops, and parks. This panel
examines civic architecture, public infrastructures, and representations
of these, built for the “common good,” during the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries in Latin America. It also explores the relationship
between such public improvements and the construction of late colonial
identities, individual and/or collective. As such, papers address not
only architectural and urban history but also the history of the image,
sculptural objects, and other forms of material culture.
The Real Casa de Moneda of Mexico City: Vitruvian
Architecture in the Bourbon Regime
Oscar Flores Flores, Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
In 1535 the Royal Mint was established in the Viceregal Palace in
Mexico City where it remained until the Bourbons ascended to the
Spanish throne. By the sixteenth century private individuals controlled
minting and distribution. The mint was incorporated into the Crown in
1730, and beginning in 1731 authorities rebuilt the old building. This
process met with difficulties due to the arrival of Peninsular artists
and the reaction of Novohispanic architects; the conflict between these
groups characterizes the artistic development in the viceregal capital
and the problems of architectural practice in Mexico City in the first
half of the eighteenth century. Due to the building’s basis in Vitruvian
ideas, authorities approved a proposal for the facade, which satisfied
the Vitruvian postulates of strength, comfort, and beauty. The building
thus evinced “enlightened” ideals in architecture, displaying its civil
and utilitarian character and revealing its sponsorship by the Crown.
Commemorating Community in the Viceroy Portraits
of Late Colonial Lima
Emily A. Engel, Indiana University
In a landmark eighteenth-century portrait, Viceroy José Antonio
Manso de Velasco is depicted standing in a colossal interior with an
opening behind him that pans onto the port of Callao, which was rebuilt
under his supervision following the 1746 earthquake that devastated
coastal Peru. In addition to including predictable iconographic
ornamentation, many viceroy portraits created after the Manso painting
visually reference public works projects. This paper considers how
Lima viceroy portraits memorialize civic collaborations between
viceroys and the city council while reconceptualizing the ability of
a portrait to participate in transitional moments in the history of the
region. The Lima city council utilized a viceroy portrait collection
to visually reiterate the interdependence of municipal government,
viceregal authority, and civic architecture. Improvement of viceregal
infrastructure, such as the port’s reconstruction, was a shared
responsibility in Lima, where protecting the common good had a range
of implications from aesthetic to imperial.
Civic Architecture, Public Patronage, and the Modern Self
in Late Colonial Havana, Cuba
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the city of
Havana, Cuba, inaugurated several works of civic architecture built
for the “common good.” Evincing relatively rigorous translations of
Greco-Roman classicism, these projects resulted from the patronage
of Spanish administrators, Peninsular (Spanish-born) merchants, and
Creole (Cuban-born) elites. Acting individually and through civil
associations, Creoles cofinanced a variety of works with Peninsulars,
including a house of charity and public cemetery. These projects
celebrated “enlightened” reform and civic achievement, and indicate
a group of Creoles and Peninsulars acting together to bring public
improvements to Havana for mutual benefit of both parties. These
examples complicate our view of the formation of late colonial identity
as only a process of cultural opposition, that is, Creole opposed to
Peninsular. Rather, shared investments in the common good and
socioeconomic objectives suggest alternative pathways for identity
formation and its expression in advance of the independence period in
Cuba.
Art and Product Placement, 1850–1918
Chairs: Gloria Groom, The Art Institute of Chicago; Martha Tedeschi,
The Art Institute of Chicago
This session considers the intersection between art and consumer
culture from the second half of the nineteenth century until World
War I. Taking a broad and international view, it investigates product
placement in the arts, focusing on the implications of artistic practices
or choices for building or delimiting audiences and markets. Papers
consider the consumption (market) implications of various strategies
of representation (including subject matter, style, and cross-cultural
references), venue and media choices, and technological developments
in printing, photography, and image distribution.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Impressionism and the Industrialization of Time
André Dombrowski, University of Pennsylvania
Impressionism sought to make represented time and the time of
representation coterminous. With its seemingly quick and unpolished
touch, it gave the modern cultures of speed their first appropriately
modernist forms. But scholars have rarely if ever paused to interrogate
the concrete technologies of timekeeping that underwrote this seismic
stylistic shift, manifest especially in the new possibilities of measuring
the duration of nerve impulses in the mid-1860s, the growing
electrification of time, and particularly the international inauguration of
the first universal time in 1884, months before the advent of Pointillism
and its serried orders of paint. Impressionism’s play with the laws and
markets of time became possible only at a moment when commodity
form itself was profoundly structured by the ever greater temporal
precision of the second Industrial Revolution. Indeed, Impressionism
should be seen as one of the period’s crucial aesthetic innovations born
of the product time.
Tobacco Served in an Artistic Package: Smoking,
till Life, and Consumer Culture in Gilded Age America
Ross Barrett, University of Chicago
In the 1870s and 1880s William Harnett produced dozens of still lifes
devoted to tobacco smoking, a pastime aggressively marketed to latecentury American men. These understudied paintings played a crucial
role in the artist’s efforts to build an audience. In his smoking pictures
Harnett developed a painterly brand that appealed to the leisure-time
tastes of working- and middle-class men, a consistent and identifiable
visual lexicon that creatively engaged the products and promotional
discourses of the mass consumer market. While incorporating the
specific commodities that increasingly defined tobacco consumption,
Harnett’s paintings invoked a new type of leisurely smoking
experience marketed by tobacco companies, a mode of passive
recreation that clashed with traditional notions of virtuous masculine
amusement. Harnett’s creative engagement with tobacco culture in
turn allowed the artist to consolidate a modern still-life aesthetic that
refigured the genre as a nonmoralizing and non-narrative art form
devoted to idle pleasures.
Art vs. Merchandise: The Case of the
Société d’Aquarellistes français
Jane Roos, Hunter College, City University of New York
Seceding from the Salon in 1879, the Société d’Aquarellistes français
(Society of French Watercolor Painters) devised a near-perfect strategy
to legitimize its private exhibitions and to deregulate the prices for
its art. By 1882 watercolors by the sociétaires flew off the walls and
commanded as much as 25,000 francs each, just at the time when
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando, a largescale oil painting shown at the seventh Impressionist exhibition, sold
for a miniscule 2,000 francs. This paper explores the ways the SAF
shrewdly responded to a changing art market and, by creating an aura
of exclusivity, turned passive art viewers into impatient art consumers.
It considers the gradually apparent flaw in the SAF’s success and
concludes by tracing the impact of its innovative merchandising on the
dealer Georges Petit and ultimately on the reception of Impressionist
paintings.
Tattooing as High-Status Commodity Art in the
Late Nineteenth Century
Matt Lodder, University of Reading
This paper investigates the status, presentation, marketing, and
acquisition of tattoos by wealthy clients in Britain and America at the
end of the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. It examines
how tattoo art served as both a product in and of itself—signifying
taste, fashionableness, and means—and a way of proudly and vividly
illustrating and marketing wider artistic trends by placing them on
the body: late-nineteenth-century tattoo designs reflect the visual
and artistic culture of the period, with emphasis on Orientalism and
the decorative arts, and records exist of clients having their favorite
etchings put permanently on skin. Moreover, the paper argues that
tattooing transforms the body itself into an artistic product that, as it
moves around in the world, serves to build the reputation and legend of
the tattoo artist and to drive future business.
Vallotton and the Art of Attraction
Bridget A. Alsdorf, Princeton University
This paper explores how Félix Vallotton’s work frames his own art
as a product of consumption and an instrument of attraction, with
particular attention to his multimedia practice. Ranging from paintings
to woodcuts and lithographs to illustrated books to art criticism
and novels, Vallotton’s oeuvre is a particularly rich example of the
explosion of artistic media in fin-de-siècle France, and offers insight
into how this media proliferation prompted artists to cater to and
contemplate varied audiences, from crowds viewing their posters
in the street to elite circles of collectors encountering their work in
rarefied venues. In their desire to attract an audience, artists needed
a visual hook, an image that could attract the attention of passersby
from the street. Vallotton’s interest in badauderie (“gawking” or
“rubbernecking”) is particularly relevant here and is the crux of his
interest in the relationship between art and commerce.
The Art History of American Periodical Illustration
Chairs: Jaleen Grove, State University of New York at Stony Brook;
Doug B. Dowd, Washington University in St. Louis
This panel addresses the opportunities and challenges associated with
art-historical engagement with American periodical illustration. Despite
the prominence of illustration in the nineteenth century and its popular
aesthetic influence well into the twentieth, illustration has not been
made as central to American art-historical narratives as its ubiquity
might warrant. Why? Do commercial practices always render aesthetic
considerations secondary from the start? How might the contingencies
of the production of illustrated periodicals create opportunities for
integrating aesthetics with social practices, technologies, commerce,
and cultures? We are in the middle of a long-awaited turn to
developing the theory, criticism, and historiography of illustration, with
exhibitions, journals, and conferences emerging in Europe and North
America. Can art history be the primary discipline through which to
study and understand the interdisciplinary nature of illustration?
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Reading Late-Nineteenth-Century Periodical Illustrations:
Scribner’s Monthly as Model
Page Knox, Marymount Manhattan College
Arguably the most prominent monthly magazine of the 1870s,
Scribner’s Monthly was highly regarded for its illustrations. Initiating
improvements in reproduction technology and promoting illustration
as a “fine art,” Scribner’s transformed the acceptance, appreciation,
and consumption of images by the American public. In a discussion of
selected images from the periodical by artists ranging from Moran to
Millet, this paper presents Scribner’s as an effective model for reading
illustrations as both historical and aesthetic documents. A close formal
analysis of the magazine’s illustrations is equally important as their
consideration as representations of mass media, popular culture, and
the varieties of visual experience that arose during the late nineteenth
century. Scribner’s elevation of the status of illustration makes the
periodical an ideal site from which to debate questions regarding the
medium during this unique period of its reception as well as its larger
role in American art-historical narratives.
Illustration, Cartooning, and Problems of Nomenclature:
Visual Matter in Collier’s Weekly, 1935–40
Douglas B. Dowd, Washington University in St. Louis
Illustrations are best understood as cultural artifacts with aesthetic
properties, not as art objects in the normative sense of that term.
Anxiety about status and dated, misguided comparisons to painting
have stunted the field. Illustration is most usefully compared to
cartooning, its graphic sibling and companion tradition in popular,
purposive images. Collier’s Weekly provides a case study in the
utility of the terms “illustration” and “cartoon.” These words are
used conventionally to refer to categories of images, but they are
also applied idiomatically to indicate approaches to drawing and
communication. In this period Collier’s featured artists such as George
de Zayas, Harry Beckhoff, and Robert O. Reid whose work spanned
categories and integrated aspects of illustrative and cartoon drawing.
Analysis is used to clarify the meaning of terms, identify deficiencies in
vocabulary, and embrace the essential contingency of published images.
Beyond the Auteur: The Illustration as a Word/Image Object
Jarrod Waetjen, Northern Virginia Community College
Anxiety surrounding the marginalization of the periodical illustration
stems in part from insisting that illustrations should be treated as finite
aesthetic objects. Indeed, separating the image from the text that it is
designed to illuminate, in an attempt to elevate the author or artist,
results in the creation of two truncated objects. Building from the work
of visual culture scholars such as W. J. T. Mitchell, this presentation
considers periodical illustrations as text/image objects, which in
turn opens lines of inquiry that have been afforded other text/image
objects such as film, graphic novels, children’s books, and illuminated
manuscripts. To serve as praxis, the presentation ends with a brief
analysis of Al Parker’s illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post.
Affective Illustration
Jennifer A. Greenhill, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This paper gets around the taste concepts that have ghettoized
periodical illustration by focusing on the physical experience of
engaging with the medium. Although some scholars have worked to
legitimate illustration by treating it as fine art, this approach leaves
to one side its intimate engagement with the viewer’s body as she
flips through the pages of a journal, perhaps placing it on her lap or
close to her face to scrutinize the details of an advertisement or an
image embedded in a story. What might we learn by attending to the
experience of periodical illustration? What sorts of engagement do
these images, and the magazines that house them, invite and expect?
And how might illustrators explore the experiential dimensions of
their art? This paper focuses on the work of early-twentieth-century
illustrators who were highly attuned to the affective potential of their
medium.
Making Inroads, Paving the Way: Postwar Architecture,
Design, and the Formation of Jewish-American Identity
Chairs: Kai K. Gutschow, Carnegie Mellon University;
Lynnette Widder, Columbia University
What role did Jewish Americans play in the establishment of modern
architecture and design in the postwar period? What role did modern
architecture and design play in (re)establishing Jewish identity in
postwar America? This session explores alternatives to the dominant
story of modern architecture and design in America, which often leaves
out questions of identity politics. The abstraction, functionalism, and
mechanized production of modern architecture and design, as well
as the values of American nationalism and American hegemony in a
globalizing postwar world, seemed to allow little space for the overt
promotion of identity. Assimilation was the order of the day, and at
times conformity seemed to be implicated in even the newest good
design. The post-Holocaust world demanded new answers to questions
of identity, assimilation, political engagement, and self-assertion
from American Jews. At the same time the new, upwardly mobile
middle class, of which so many Jews were a part, often used modern
architecture and design to express their intent to become patrons,
producers, and tastemakers. The confluence of these two trajectories
can be traced throughout Jewish contributions to popular and high
cultural production of the period. The single-family house, alongside
the developer suburb, and the commercial and cultural centers of
communities provide a particularly fertile ground to explore identity
formation. Families, developers, and institutions often sought out
particular architects and builders to realize their own milieu. The
media’s role in creating the myth of modernism and the American
Dream is also implicated in this storyline.
Newish and Jewish from Europe: Refugees, Survivors,
and the Spread of Modernism in Postwar America
Samuel D. Gruber, Syracuse University
The architecture of the American Jewish community was transformed
following World War II by émigré and refugee architects engaged to
design synagogues and Jewish community centers. Eric Mendelsohn’s
synagogues for St. Louis, Cleveland, and elsewhere are well
known, but the work of Fritz Nathan, Mendelsohn’s German-Jewish
contemporary, is virtually forgotten. Nathan arrived in the United States
in 1940 and designed synagogues, teamed with émigré artists in the
New York and New Haven metro areas. Both architects helped create
the architectural language for Jewish institutional buildings that was
adopted by Americans. We can now add the work of refugee architects
David Moed of Antwerp (arrived 1939) and Norbert Troller from
Brno, who after surviving Terezin and Auschwitz came to America and
designed scores of JCCs from the late 1940s through the early 1960s
for small Jewish communities across America. Other Jewish refugees
and survivors also championed a modern aesthetic for synagogues.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Non-Jewish Architecture for Jews: The Jersey Homesteads
after Auschwitz
Daniel S. Palmer, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Mad “Men” and the Visual Culture of the Long Sixties
The post-1945 transformations of the community and buildings in the
Jersey Homesteads (present day Roosevelt, NJ) demonstrate how Jews
assimilated into the culture of suburban America. The government
established this agro-industrial cooperative in 1933 to relocate an
entirely Jewish population of immigrant garment workers from New
York City’s slums to a rural garden city of modernist concrete housing
with a clothing factory so they could be self-sufficient. Once the
government divested itself of sponsorship and the community became
fragmented, leftist cooperation gave way to a suburban enclave of
commuters, with Jewish religious life in a newly built synagogue
as one of the few remaining cohesive elements. This paper analyzes
the town’s adaptations after World War II, when demographics
diversified and many homeowners altered their houses to look more
conventional. These changes show an important dimension of the
complex relationship between American Jews and the architecture of
the “American Dream.”
Bert Cooper hangs a Rothko in his office. Joanie parades in a tight
sheath while Betty’s 1950s dress flares over a crinoline petticoat.
Grace Kelly and Brigitte Bardot hairdos glamorize the characters. The
opening credits feature a black-suited Cary Grant surrogate falling
among the era’s omnipresent glass-box facades. Don Draper moves
from a suburban home to a bachelor pad to a stunning Park Avenue
apartment. Midcentury modern furniture embellishes both home and
office. The sets and content of the award-winning television series
Mad Men show us that the discussion of objects in the long sixties
is a far cry from being exhausted. Using the series as a springboard,
this session interrogates the visual culture of the postwar era and
investigates the architecture, design, and rising corporate culture of
advertising. Gender, class, and changing social practices are explored
as well as the dynamics of Mad Men’s popularity and its success as a
current marketing tool.
A Symbolic Landscape for Suburbia: Baltimore Chizuk Amuno’s
“Hebrew Culture Garden”
Jeremy Kargon, Morgan State University
The Mad Men, a Bank, and a Gallery: A Mid-Century
Award-Winning Advertising Campaign
Suzanne F. W. Lemakis, Center for Culture: Department of
Fine Art, Citibank
The embrace of modern architecture by American Jewish institutions
was historically coincident with many Jewish communities’ migration
from city centers to suburban environments. This geographic shift,
which accelerated after World War II, reflected changes in widely held
attitudes toward landscape as well as toward architecture. A useful case
study is a design for Baltimore’s Chizuk Amuno congregation, which in
1954 began planning a suburban campus with the New York architect
Daniel Schwartzman. Among the congregation’s most important initial
requests was a “Hebrew Culture Garden,” inspired by Cleveland’s
ensemble of public ethnic-cultural gardens dating to the 1920s.
Chizuk Amuno’s original interpretation of this earlier example and its
development throughout the synagogue-planning process illustrate the
Baltimore Jewish community’s changing engagement with patterns
of settlement, public space, cultural consumption, and the balance
between religious and secular Jewish identities.
The Faith of Albert Kahn
Claire Zimmerman, University of Michigan
Albert Kahn (d. 1942) is a foil to the heroic figures of modern
architecture. His factory complexes exemplified conditions of modern
building in the twentieth century, but also helped establish precisely
what modern architecture was not—raw function and service. As
Kahn’s own history ended, architects materially influenced by images
of his work fled Europe for the United States. Not all Jewish, the
émigrés were nonetheless associated with forced emigration. The
most successful, perhaps not surprisingly, were not Jewish, seemingly
able to separate work from ethnicity. The International Style, directly
associated with Jewishness by the Nazis, was deployed in the United
States to suppress ethnic affiliations and maintain architecture as elite
aesthetic practice. Here, then, are two not-modernisms: industrial
building and Jewish identity in architecture. In Kahn these two
coincide, suggesting a new story to which mainstream postwar
modernism now becomes the foil—an architecture that embedded
ethnicity and professionalism at once.
Chair: Mona Hadler, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center,
Between l945 and 1959 the National City Bank of New York
commissioned more than one hundred paintings from a roster of
American artists for an award-winning advertising campaign that sent
the message that the bank had the expertise to fund a wide range of
industries in the US and abroad. BBDO, rumored to be the model for
the fictional Sterling Cooper firm of Mad Men, was the agency that
shaped the message and united the world of banking and art. By end
of the decade the advertisements developed into the simple modern
images that are associated with 1960s art and advertisements. This new
image, shaped by the Mad Men, would prevail in the coming decades.
This paper explores the changes that occurred over the decade in this
campaign and links the imagery to shifts in the art world and the world
of advertising.
The Ubiquitous Glass Box: Mad Men and the Rise and Critique
of Viral Corporate Architecture at Midcentury
Scott Murray, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The physical setting of Mad Men may be characterized by the term
“glass-box architecture,” encompassing the influential midcentury
modernist skyscraper typology that emerged in New York City. The
rapid rise of corporate modernism presented a double-edged sword: it
introduced innovative and progressive priorities for architecture; but
its reception as an easily imitated style also led to the monotonous,
even menacing ubiquity that for many defined this architecture. This
latter point engendered a critique of the architecture both within the
discipline itself and within popular culture and a debate that closely
correlates to the themes of intergenerational strife and shifting cultural
ethos surrounding the counterculture and Civil Rights movement
that form the dramatic basis of Mad Men. This paper investigates the
rise of the glass box and suggests a broader context within which to
understand Mad Men, its depiction of a particular culture of the 1960s,
and its contemporary resonance.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Executive Modern: Abstract Art and the Planning of
Corporate Space
Alex J. Taylor, University of Oxford
Using the appearance of a Rothko canvas in a Mad Men executive suite
as a departure point, this paper considers how abstract art was used
by office planners in the 1960s. Specifically, it examines the role of
art in the total design schemes of Knoll Planning Associates and other
designers, exploring how artworks became integral to the aesthetic
and behavioral controls of an efficient office. Art’s role in visualizing
hierarchical variation helped give form to organizational structure and
status in otherwise indistinguishable modular office layouts. Further,
the paper considers how art helped compensate for the depersonalized
and anonymous qualities of the modern office, staging superficial
moments of individuality without sacrificing the spatial and ocular
efficiency demanded by midcentury corporate enterprise.
Mad Men, Bad Men, and Empty Modernism
Kristina Wilson, Clark University
This paper examines the symbolic value of modernism in the office
sets of the TV series Mad Men. In the earlier seasons the modernism
of the office space was understated yet witnessed shocking acts: rape,
duplicitous identities, and theft occurred amid generic ensembles of
dark Scandinavian furniture. In the more recent seasons everyone’s
bad behavior is old news, but the new office set is filled with ever more
aggressive attention getters: couches from Knoll, Saarinen tables, and
Castiglione’s Arco Lamp. The place of modernism has shifted in the
show, as it shifted in American culture in the 1950s and early 1960s,
from a position of functional ubiquity to that of the self-referential
commodity. Mad Men’s new office set is empty symbolism and reveals
our contemporary willingness, in the age of Facebook, to see marketing
not as a tool but as an ontological state in itself.
Becoming a Bachelor: Don Draper, the Apartment, and the Closet
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, University of Notre Dame
The first episode of Mad Men establishes an opposition between the
apartment and the single-family home. The apartment is bohemian,
sexy, and secret. The suburban home, by contrast, is the space of
marriage. Both spaces, however, serve as closets. The apartment
secretes Don’s illicit activities, while the home secretes the truth
about his unhappy marriage and his stolen identity. When Don exits
the suburban home and moves into his own bachelor apartment, he
reverses not only the usual trajectory of masculine maturation but
also the association of the bachelor pad with the closet (as secreting a
sexual identity). At the same time, his life becomes more available to
surveillance and intrusion. This paper examines the cultural meaning
and design of Don’s apartment as key to his changing identity by
placing the apartment in the context of the midcentury apartment plot in
film, Playboy design, and theories of the closet.
Art/History and the Small Liberal Arts College
Chair: Christine Y. Hahn, Kalamazoo College
Many small liberal arts colleges across the United States tend to join
together their studio and art history faculty into joint departments.
While the two disciplines clearly depend upon each other, it does
not always follow that the relationship is an intuitive or natural one.
Oftentimes the two can remain in separate pedagogical silos while
sharing departmental service duties alone. Add to that the small size
of the department overall (most commonly ranging from departments
of two to six members combined) and the challenges seem to mount.
What, then, are some possibilities for drawing upon this relationship in
productive and innovative ways?
The Historian in the Studio
Rachel Epp Buller, Bethel College
I am the Historian in the Studio. As both a printmaker and an art
historian by training, I bridge the divide. In my role as a faculty
member at a small, liberal arts college, I get to “do it all”; should my
students not have the same opportunity? I regularly incorporate art
history–based projects into studio courses and studio projects into art
history courses. This integration builds critical thinking and particularly
encourages discussion of appropriation among a generation for whom
image borrowing is second nature.
Using Collaboration to Model Professional Studio and
Research Practices within the Senior Seminar
Sarah Archino, Millsaps College
Millsaps College requires a capstone seminar for majors in studio
and art history. While both courses focus on fundamental and often
problematic issues such as artistic influence and primary source
research, they have been taught separately. This paper presents
results and reflections after piloting an integrated course with a studio
professor. In addition to individual senior projects, students collaborate
on a semester-long exhibition project. A series of interviews provides
critical practice in formulating questions and responses, allowing
students to generate research goals and develop a body of primary
research as the basis for artist statements and interpretive wall text.
Studio students learn to effectively discuss their theses and understand
their role in scholarly discourse; art history students refine interview
techniques and learn to write without reliance on secondary source
materials. This paper reflects honestly upon this class, sharing both its
successes and plans for future refinement.
Teaching Non-Western Art in a Hybrid Studio–Art History Format
Anne-Marie Bouché, Florida Gulf Coast University
Survey of non-Western art is a hybrid studio–art history generaleducation course developed at Florida Gulf Coast University by a
ceramicist, Tricia Fay, and an art historian, Anne-Marie Bouché. Its
goals are to (1) provide an exciting, rigorous entry-level academic
experience; (2) introduce students to the world, highlighting the role of
the arts in mediating the transition from a colonial past to a postcolonial
global culture; (3) develop skills needed for college work; and (4)
entice some students to explore other art program offerings. The course
covers Africa, the Americas, and Australia. In addition to taking quizzes
and a final, students write analysis papers and complete studio projects.
Assignments are process-oriented and stress creative and criticalthinking skills. The hybrid studio–art history format is a remarkably
effective tool for developing student core competencies, confidence,
and intellectual engagement.
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Art in the Walls: History, Practice, and Engagement with
Architectural Tile in Turkey
Felicity Ratte, Marlboro College
This class is part of an ongoing collaboration between the studio
and history faculty that engages students in the practical application
of techniques within the context of focused historical study. The
presentation describes a team-taught class and explores the theoretical
underpinnings of combining historical research with hands-on practice.
The course focuses on the history, design, and use of ceramic tile
in architecture during the early Ottoman Empire. Classroom time
combines discussions of relevant art-historical readings with studio
time exploring tile design and execution. The focus of the study
is on the interrelationships between architectural design, cultural
conventions, and aesthetic prescriptions that have influenced tile design
and decoration. The class now under way offers an opportunity to
discuss in real time the challenges of the course format, of collaborating
across disciplines, and of engaging students in the simultaneous study
and production of artistic work.
Material and Narrative Histories: Rethinking the
Approach to Inventories and Catalogues
Chairs: Anne Helmreich, Getty Foundation; Francesco Freddolini,
Luther College, University of Regina
This session identifies novel, scholarly approaches to inventories
and catalogues by exploring the multifaceted nature of these texts
as narratives and as material objects. We understand narrative to
include language, rhetoric, argument, and discourse and to exist
in both temporal and spatial dimensions as well as socio-historical
contexts. Materiality points to production and dissemination of these
texts. Although catalogues and inventories are building blocks for
much scholarship in art history, these texts are often treated as purely
empirical sources. The need to rethink the role of these texts in art
history is particularly pertinent at this juncture, when new modalities
of inquiry made possible by digital humanities have fuelled a quest
for “data.” Investigating inventories and catalogues in tandem unveils
similarities, differences, and tensions associated with the evolution,
production, and circulation of these texts. Moreover, by analyzing the
texts together, we can better understand their current and potential roles
in the methodologies and writings of art history, particularly in the
digital age.
Why Cauldrons Come First: Exogenous and Endogenous
Taxonomies in the Earliest Chinese Antiquarian Catalogues
Jeffrey Moser, McGill University
The catalogues of antiquities compiled in China at the turn of the
twelfth century are among the earliest systematic studies of ancient
things ever written. Two of these catalogues—Illustrated Investigations
of Antiquity (Kaogutu, 1092) and Manifold Antiquities Illustrated
(Bogutu, 1123)—survive in their entirety, enabling analysis of the
paradigms that they established for categorizing, interpreting, and
visualizing antiquities. The two works feature different systems of
organization. Illustrated Investigations uses epigraphic and formal
analysis to associate antiquities with canonical texts. Manifold
Antiquities relates the objects to self-evident hierarchies of natural
phenomena. These approaches constitute different ways of mediating
exogenous taxonomies of imposed categories and endogenous
taxonomies derived from the objects themselves. By explaining how
interaction between these taxonomic approaches generated meaning
in the two catalogues, the paper proposes an analytical model for
interpreting the formation of catalogues and inventories from other
historical settings.
The Inventory as Negative Description
Allison Stielau, Yale University
Art historians depend on inventories as positive descriptions of
existence, evidence of objects that were seen, touched, and measured
at a particular point in time. But what is being indexed by an inventory
that instead records the absence of objects? This talk considers a few
early modern catalogues made in the aftermath of loss, when items
became physically estranged from their owners by way of theft,
shipwreck, mere carelessness, or deliberate destruction. Inventories
of stolen gloves, drowned coinage, dropped earrings, and smelted
metalwork beg penetrating questions about what it means for an object
to be, or no longer be, “extant.” In documenting dispossession, these
negative descriptions also allude to the affective relationships that build
up between people and things. Like the Latin Ubi sunt form, they can
be read as a kind of elegy or lamentation.
Between Notary and Maestro di Casa: Florentine Inventories
during the Principato
Cinzia Maria Sicca, Università di Pisa
This paper explores inventories produced in Florence following the
accession of Duke Cosimo, arguing that a change in style, structure,
and language stems from the new functions they fulfilled. Before 1537
inventories were produced either by the head of a household (including
merchants based outside Florence) or by a notary. The appointment of
Duke Cosimo I and his marriage to Eleonora di Toledo brought into
Florence new practices borrowed from courts and princely households
in Italy and abroad. The tasks of the Maestro di Casa, the roles of
Guardaroba Maggiore, Sottoguardaroba, and so on, were introduced
about 1540, and the first structured inventories date to 1544, four
years after the move from Palazzo Medici to Palazzo Vecchio. These
new inventories differed substantially from previous ones because
they separated different types of goods, paying great care to the
identification of the rooms in which they were placed.
The Salon Livret and the Origins of the Modern Picture Title
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Yale University
When did European artists begin to title their paintings, and how did
the practice develop from earlier forms of inventory and catalogue
making, in which the verbal identification of pictures was largely
the work of middlemen? This paper offers a partial answer to these
questions by tracing the gradual emergence of the artist-authored title
in the livrets prepared for the eighteenth-century Salons of the French
Academy. It also offers a brief comparison to the catalogues of the
Royal Academy in Britain during the same period. While the birth of
the modern picture title can be dated with some accuracy to the 1790s,
the ambiguities of authorship evident in such documents continue to
haunt the verbal identification of images.
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Between List and Legacy: Enumerating the Hugh Lane Collection
Morna Elizabeth O’Neill, Wake Forest University
The challenge of elucidating Hugh Lane’s significance for the history
of art is one of compiling inventories to reassemble his collection. The
Anglo-Irish art dealer and philanthropist, who died on the Lusitania
in 1915, sold old masters, collected modern art, and formulated the
collection of three public museums. He left the majority of his dealer
holdings to the National Gallery of Ireland, and executors settled his
estate through private sales and four different auctions in 1917. In
this context, this paper explores the ways these lists, and thus Lane’s
career, negotiate the categories of private collection and public gift. The
collection inventory allows us to assess Lane’s legacy in the history of
art and to restore the idiosyncratic subjectivity of Lane’s aesthetic as a
collector.
Sexing Sculpture: New Approaches to
Theorizing the Object
Chairs: Jillian Hernandez, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey;
Susan Richmond, Georgia State University
A number of contemporary art historians have posited provocative
analyses of the sexual and gendered dimensions of modern and
contemporary sculptural production.
Their scholarship acknowledges a pressing need to formulate new
interpretive frameworks for contemporary sculpture. Building on
their work, this panel interrogates contemporary sculptural practices
through the lens of interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies. In
a contemporary moment in which queer suicide, gay marriage, and
the gendered ramifications of economic downturns, riots, and war are
pressing realities, what is the cultural relevance of sculptural practices
today and how can theories of gender and sexuality (and corresponding
examinations of race and class) continue to expand the possibilities
of interpretation? How do current sculptural practices uphold or,
conversely, equivocate the certainties of gendered and
sexual embodiment?
Material Specificity and the Index of the Feminine
Rachel M. Lachowicz, Claremont Graduate University
My practice has often been understood to act, in part, through its
materiality. In a work like Sarah, which placed four slabs of red
lipstick against each other in reference to the hard cold steel of Serra’s
One Ton Prop, the lipstick signifies and acts in gendered ways, while
indirectly questioning steel as sex and gender neutral. The positions of
masculine or feminine are not fixed, and I build away from initial arthistorical references, offering the potential for ever-changing canons
and trajectories of art. Scholarship in transgender studies explores
the use/absence of makeup as a transmogrifier. The materials are not
essentially feminine, but we experience them through a culture that
desires bodies to be gendered and sexualized. Although these bodies are
absent in much of my work, their sexual presence is referenced through
the cosmetics I employ.
Object Lessons: Thinking Gender Variance through
Minimalist Sculpture
R. E. H. Gordon, Parsons The New School for Design
This lecture proposes a strategy for reading a variety of Minimalist
sculptural practices against the grain, finding in them renewed
possibilities for theorizing queer embodiments. It employs a
methodology in which our lived experiences of sculptural works
might be seen as capable of teaching us new conceptual frameworks
through which new or different genders might recognize themselves
and emerge, and examines the work of John Cage, Fred Sandback,
Robert Morris, and Richard Artschwager to this end. Discussed through
these case studies are the theoretical and spatial underpinnings that
make possible (or deny) the existence of non-normative genders, thus
positioning gender as a question of phenomenology.
Broadway Flesh: Dan Flavin’s Early Dedications
David J. Getsy, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Dan Flavin often dedicated his otherwise interchangeable, typical
units (fluorescent lights) to specific people, and this paper examines
a series of early dedications that evoke the visibility or invisibility
of sexual identity. Flavin’s early works struggle with how difference
can look like sameness, and this paper focuses on the sequence from
icon IV (the memorial work to his twin brother) to icon V (known
as Coran’s Broadway Flesh). Flavin had issue with his twin’s
homosexuality, so the decision to follow his memorial icon with a
flashing, flesh-toned work dedicated to a gay neighbor cannot be
seen as neutral. The question of sexual legibility continues to be
germane to Flavin’s subsequent all-fluorescent works, and the paper
discusses the switching dedications of the earliest examples. Flavin’s
named, generic, interchangeable units are shadowed by sexualities
and genders, and his works inadvertently support a queer account of
abstraction and its potentialities.
The Stand: Possessing Powers
Lily Cox-Richard, University of Michigan
Hiram Powers (1805–1873) was nineteenth-century America’s most
celebrated sculptor, often called the Father of American Sculpture. In
his Neoclassical marbles, idealized female figures symbolize allegorical
themes such as The Last of the Tribes, California, and most famously,
The Greek Slave. Structural supports depicting tree stumps, fasces,
and massive quartz crystals buttress the figures to their bases. This
presentation investigates and reframes the content of Powers’s work.
My carved plaster copies of his sculptures focus on the supports,
specifically the messy contact points between figure and ground.
Idealized female bodies and their phallic support structures conflate,
and the resulting sculptures attempt to manifest the fluidity of gender
in formal terms. By coopting Powers’s sculptures and making them my
own, I explore myths and allegories used to promote American national
and artistic identity, while complicating the gender and sexual identity
of both sculpture and sculptor.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Rethinking Vaginal Iconography in Hannah Wilke’s Sculpture
Rachel Middleman, Utah State University
This paper examines the early ceramic sculpture of Hannah Wilke
and the discourse surrounding it in order to rethink the historical
narrative of “vaginal iconography” in feminist art. The discrepancy
between the cultural environment in which Wilke’s work was first
exhibited in the 1960s, demonstrated by her participation in the 1966
erotic art exhibition Hetero-Is, and the declaratively feminist language
with which critics wrote about her vulva-shaped sculptures in the
1970s suggests the necessity of a more nuanced understanding of
vaginal imagery. As Wilke expanded on her folded ceramic shapes in
a multiplicity of mediums in the 1970s, her relationships with men
in her private and professional life also surfaced in these abstract
sculptures. The vaginal iconography in Wilke’s work, rather than being
essentialist, demonstrates her critical and intertextual negotiation of
feminist heterosexuality, a position that is concerned with both sexism
and eroticism.
Emerging Scholars
Chair: Keith Holz, Western Illinois University
Over the past several years the Historians of German and Central
European Art and Architecture have sponsored sessions offering an
opportunity for young scholars to share their work in progress with a
professional audience. It aims to enrich the discourse within the field
of German and Central European art history by encouraging a new
generation of researchers. This year’s session presents new research
informed by critical thinking on Romantic landscape paintings by
Caspar David Friedrich, on printmaking and printed currency during
the years of Germany’s hyperinflation, and on the historiography of
twentieth-century architecture in Poland.
The Eye and the Hand: Caspar David Friedrich and the
Organic Instruments of Artistic Creation
Nina Amstutz, University of Toronto
In the 1820s Caspar David Friedrich painted several anthropomorphic
landscapes. Two such paintings take the eye and the hand as their
subjects. These organs are not painted in the likeness of the human
body; they are metamorphosed into landscape. Eyes and hands are the
conventional instruments of the imagination and are often emphasized
in self-portraiture. Their potency as symbols of creation is linked
with their religious usage as emblems of God’s creative intervention.
Friedrich reduces the traditional Christian iconography of the eye and
hand to pure landscape, suggesting a discovery of God’s benevolent
eye and divine handiwork in the wonders of nature. But these paintings
also read as personal reflections on the status of eyes and hands in the
creative process. Looking to analogies between the body and nature
in Romantic nature philosophy, this paper contends that Friedrich
conceptualizes the artist’s activity as an earthly equivalent to divine
creation.
Impressions of Inflation: Prints, Paper, and Prices in Germany,
1918–23
Erin Sullivan, University of Southern California
During the years of rampant inflation in Germany, the atmosphere of
economic anxiety encouraged a boom in print production. The inflation
as subject is visible in prints by artists including Max Beckmann and
George Grosz and in popular press illustrations. But its traces are also
present in the materials and the marketing of graphic works, as prints
were increasingly promoted for their potential exchange value. This
paper explores these traces, and considers them next to characteristics
of the ever-expanding supply of paper money, or Inflationsgeld. Prints
and paper money shared attributes that became problematic in the
context of inflation: both were mechanically reproduced, and their
perceived value was tied to their relative rarity. Both also employed
different strategies to affirm faith in the abstract, rather than actual,
value of printed paper. The graphic arts, therefore, offer a unique visual
and material archive of the inflation years.
Historical Overhangs: Problematizing Cold War–Era Temporal
Frameworks in Polish Architectural History
Anna Jozefacka, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Historians of Eastern and Central European twentieth-century art and
architecture who investigate the influence of politics and ideology
on such disciplines routinely adapt their work to the well-established
prewar/postwar division of historical time. Validated by the mayhem
of World War II, underscored by the establishment of communist
regimes, and codified by Cold War–era politics, such a politically
based compartmentalization of historical time weighs heavily on
the art and architectural history of this region. The paper uses the
development of twentieth-century Warsaw to investigate the validity
of that division and debate its consequences for art-historical inquiries.
Contrary to many studies of Warsaw’s post–World War II rebuilding,
this investigation positions the city’s recovery efforts within a broader
temporal framework that takes into account the prior thirty years of
architectural and urban design effort to transform Warsaw into a capital
city for the emerging modern nation-state.
The Particulars of Postidentity
Chairs: Jessica L. Horton, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual
Arts; Cherise Smith, University of Texas at Austin
This panel brings together critical, comparative, and historical
perspectives on the rise of postidentity discourses in contemporary art
of the past two decades. The circulation of terms like “postfeminist,”
“postblack,” “postindian,” and a variety of other “posts” signals a
hypothetical new era in which individualism and equality have replaced
the collective identifications and struggles against discrimination that
marked the Civil Rights era and its aftermath. Today’s professional
artist is expected to move and create freely in a global art market,
uninhibited by the specificity of his or her race and gender. Yet each
of these terms has its own historical and ideological legacy, specific
to those collective histories and practices whose “end” it heralds.
This session delineates where and to what ends such terms intersect
and converge in the larger fields of postidentity discourse and
contemporary art.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
64
Postblack: Afro-Kitsch and the Queering of Blackness
Derek Conrad Murray, University of California, Santa Cruz
The term “postblack” emerges from black-queer and black-feminist
critiques of normative racial blackness as they were visually
constructed during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Viewed
through the queer-feminist critique, blackness (as a set of visual
rhetorics) was characterized as a hetero-normative, masculine-defined
brand of political resistance that was hostile to women and sexual
difference. During the 1980s and 1990s identity debates, interventions
emerged in the art world that diversified the monolithic notion of
how blackness signifies culturally. Does postblack constitute the
queering of black visual culture, or is it merely a catchy marketing
term? Is it simply the art-market elite’s version of the neoconservative,
postmulticultural, postracial society rhetoric? Or does postblack reflect
the strides African Americans have made in overcoming structural
intolerances of the art world? This paper considers the conceptual,
political, and aesthetic complexities of postblack as it manifests itself in
the visual production of selected African American artists.
A Latino New Wave: Minimalism, Race, and Postidentity
Politics in the Art of Juan Capistran
Rose G. Salseda, University of Texas at Austin
This paper visually analyzes All Mod Cons (2005–7), a series of
artworks by the Los Angeles–based multimedia artist Juan Capistran,
and explores the artist’s use of Minimalism and his critical engagement
with race in the context of postidentity politics. Though All Mod Cons
is distinguished for its Minimalist aesthetic, Capistran counters the
visual language through his artistic validation of racial politics. He
then repackages Minimalism as a radical style of art that engages the
political realities of contemporary Los Angeles. Yet Capistran’s refusal
of labels such as “Latino” and “Chicano” for his artwork complicates
his artistic practice for All Mod Cons. Grounding the discussion within
the histories of Minimalism and the politics of race, the paper reveals
the possible ways younger generations of Latino artists, like Capistran,
participate in a postidentity politics that, in a seemingly contradictory
manner, honors race-based activism but eschews racial identity.
Post-Jewish/Post-Holocaust: Contemporary Jewish American Art
and the Visual Language of Memory
Stacy R. Schwartz, San Jose State University
The construction of American Jewish identity has historically balanced
efforts to reconcile acceptance into majority culture with maintaining
traditional Jewish heritage. The late-twentieth-century figure of the
“post-Jew” and a cosmopolitan perspective recognizing the hybrid
character of Jewish American identity emerged alongside pluralist
multiculturalism as an alternate identity framework. Expression of
Jewish identity in a diasporic community has often been anchored in
communal rituals and sociopolitical events, especially the Holocaust,
uniting an increasingly diverse community. This paper examines
approaches to the Holocaust by American post-Jewish artists,
particularly the iconographical language of the subject as a living
identity constantly redefined by individual experience and cultural
surroundings. Renewing discussions of Holocaust representation and
the functions of such art, stylistic and thematic shifts in post-Jewish
works constitute efforts to navigate inherent tension between historical
and experiential identity, as well as the broader cultural transference of
collective memory within contemporary society.
A Particular Commonality: Jimmie Durham’s Building a Nation
and the Globalization of Dissent
Mark James Watson, Clayton State University
As many scholars have noted, the globalization of contemporary art
has seen the recuperation of postmodern identity and diversity as a
blue-chip art brand. This presentation explores how one contemporary
artist responds to this recuperation using Jimmie Durham’s Building
a Nation, an installation and performance work first appearing in
London in 2006. Formally, the work invests in the Brecthian tradition
of avant-garde critique, revealing the particularity of its own Cherokee
identity through an ephemeral format. Yet the content of the work
advances justice and solidarity across state or ethnic borders, drawing
upon a particular Cherokee tradition of anticolonial diplomacy to
create alliances between viewers defined by commonality rather than
difference. In so doing, the work suggests the creative potential of what
Taiaiake Alfred calls “power as diplomacy” to reinvest the avant-garde
tradition with critical potential.
Spiral: Outside of Black and White
Andrianna Campbell, The Graduate Center, City University
of New York
The term “postblack” emerged in the contemporary era to define art
that transcended race as a constitutive element of its relevance and
power. Although the term emerged in the 1990s, the desire to produce
postblack art has its foundation in the 1960s and coalesced with the
formation of the group Spiral. This group of artists—Romare Bearden,
Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff—promoted art and
exhibition practices that were not wholly defined by the race of their
makers. This paper examines Spiral’s paradoxical refutation of the
Social Realist tendencies prevalent during the Harlem Renaissance and
its embrace of a political and abstract formalism. The latter resulted
in the 1965 exhibition Black and White, in which a binary exploration
of race issues continued even as artists tried to escape such a limited
framework.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The Place of the Viewer, 1950s–1960s
Chair: Kerr Houston, Maryland Institute College of Art
An interest in the position of the viewer—physical, narrative—colors
an entire band of artistic practice and art-historical discourse before
the 1950s; think of Michelangelo’s intentional distortions, for instance,
or Riegl’s approach to Dutch group portraits. Nevertheless, it does
seem fair to say that interest in the place of the viewer developed in
dramatic new ways in the 1950s and 1960s. The popularization of
phenomenology, the acute attention of Leo Steinberg to viewing angles,
and Barthes’s declaration regarding the birth of the reader each played
a part, as did a variety of other factors that yielded a richer and more
expansive conception of the role of the viewer in art’s ongoing history.
This session features three talks that focus on distinct ways the place of
the viewer mattered shortly after the midpoint of last century.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Who Cares If You Look?
Todd Cronan, Emory University
In 1958 the composer Milton Babbitt wondered in an article, “Who
Cares If You Listen?” He urged a “total, resolute, and voluntary
withdrawal from the public world” and the “complete elimination of
the public and social aspects of composition.” But his argument could
not have come at a worse time. At nearly the same moment Marcel
Duchamp declared, “I attach even more importance to the spectator
than to the artist.” Babbitt’s indifference and Duchamp’s commitment
to the spectator marked a turning point in twentieth-century artistic
debate. Duchamp’s assertion of the beholder’s share in the production
of meaning was part of a larger artistic dialogue. This paper provides
a new genealogy of participatory aesthetics at midcentury. Rather than
returning to earlier avant-garde models, it shows how participatory art
and theory were consciously worked out—and contested—by artists
and art historians in the 1950s.
Reconsidering the Nineteenth Century
through Asian Art
Chairs: Ellen Chang Huang, University of San Francisco;
Sunglim Kim, Dartmouth College
This session brings studies on Asian art into broader discussions about
nineteenth-century transformations across the humanities. In addition
to political upheavals brought about through the European revolutions
and industrial age, the nineteenth century provided the contexts for
modernism, historicism, and the birth of academic fields—including art
history—as we know them today. For Asia the nineteenth century was
not only a period of intensifying intercultural contact with European
and American peoples; it was also a time when interaction occurred
within and among disparate Asian societies themselves. Although Asian
art in the nineteenth century is typically discussed in scholarship as
being on the cusp of modernity, early modern, or premodern, this panel
seeks its modern features (unique or universal).
“. . . models for a kind of visual experience”: Claes Oldenburg’s
Sculptural Strategies in the 1960s
Katherine Smith, Agnes Scott College
Reclaiming Past Glory: Antiquarian Trends in Late-NineteenthCentury Chinese Court Art
Ying-chen Peng, University of California, Los Angeles
In the catalogue for the exhibition Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties,
Benjamin Buchloh asserts that Oldenburg was among the first artists
“to fuse a critique of the presumed autonomy of the painterly and
sculptural work with a consideration of institutional and architectural
frameworks.” For Oldenburg attention to the position of the viewer
was central to this critique, directing the evolution of his own practice
and his responses to contemporary environments: artistic, architectural,
and urban. Oldenburg’s approach, established in the early 1960s,
is a formative example of shifting representational strategies and
new perspectives on the American landscape, and was shaped by
an understanding of vision as contingent and corporeal. This paper
relates Oldenburg’s sculptures to contemporary public art, architecture,
and urban design and examines ways that his early projects and
later monument proposals anticipated, paralleled, and in some cases
informed divergent discourses during the 1960s.
This paper examines Empress Dowager Cixi’s (1835–1908) special
commissions aimed at reclaiming the Qing regime’s past glory.
Following the patronage pattern established by Emperor Qianlong (r.
1735–96), Cixi commissioned a series of war paintings, porcelains
mimicking eighteenth-century classics, and a Western-style building
erected during the Qianlong reign. These purposeful reproductions
reflected Cixi’s sophisticated taste and political agenda. To her the
classic was no longer pure Han Chinese art but eighteenth-century
court art, a mixture of Han Chinese and Western influence. She also
symbolically reclaimed the empire’s past glory and positioned her
regency in the legitimate imperial lineage through reproducing these
new classic works. Furthermore, these works overturn the common
assumption about the nineteenth century as an age of decline for
Chinese art and call for a refreshed understanding of Late Qing court
art production.
The Southern Civil Rights Movement and Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men
Keri Watson, Auburn University at Montgomery
Mirroring Korean Art in the Nineteenth Century:
Foreign Accounts of Korean “Art”
Virginia Moon, University of Southern California
Most scholars have interpreted Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (James
Agee and Walker Evans’s epic look at farm tenancy in Depressionera Hale County, Alabama) as a document of the rural South during
the Great Depression, concluding that Agee is a master of realism
and celebrating Evans’s stark photographic style. In contrast to these
readings, which situate the book in the time of its production, this
paper examines its reception in the 1960s and concentrates specifically
on its effect on the southern Civil Rights movement. It has been
suggested that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men acted as a kind of bible
for workers in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and
Congress of Racial Equality, but through interviews conducted with
nearly one hundred veterans of the movement, this paper presents the
meaning of the text as contested, pluralistic, and ever changing.
In the years between 1876 and 1910 foreigners traveled to Korea and
wrote about their journeys, often providing perceptions of Korean art
at this critical moment of modernization. These writings, however,
have not been addressed in Korean art-historical scholarship. Using the
nineteenth-century works of William Eliot Griffis (The Corean Origin
of Japanese Art [1882] and Corea, The Hermit Nation [1882]), W. R.
Carles (Life in Corea [1888]), and Pierre Louis Jouy (The Collection
of Korean Mortuary Pottery in the United States National Museum
[1890]), this paper examines what forms of Korean art were privileged
by these writers and what Western-derived systems of artistic judgment
they mirrored as they introduced Korean art to Western audiences. In
holding a mirror up to Korea at this time, these reflections are critical
to understanding the larger historical movement that undergirded the
modernization of Korean art.
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Representing the Cerebral Mind: Translation and Visuality
in Modern Japan
Stephanie Su, University of Chicago
This paper examines the emergence of new modes of painting that
pursued a cerebral quality in modern Japan at the end of the nineteenth
century. Following the importation of history painting from France to
Japan, three concepts appeared around the 1890s: history painting, ideal
painting, and composition painting. Instead of thinking in dichotomous
terms such as “Western” or “Japanese,” the discourses of these new
modes of painting focused on how to demonstrate the cerebral quality
in art: what was it and how to represent it? Was the cerebral or the
aesthetic quality more important? This paper clarifies the above terms,
including their connotations, the theoretical grounds to support them,
the contexts in which they were related to each other, and the early
examples implementing them.
Ambivalent Exchange: The Gift of Photographic Albums
between Korea and Japan in 1876
Hye-ri Oh, State University of New York at Binghamton
This paper examines the historical and cultural significance of
photography in the realm of diplomacy between Korea and Japan
during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As an object of study,
it draws attention to the gifts of two photographic albums given by
Japan to Korea in 1876 as a diplomatic courtesy. By engaging the
concept of gift exchange, which presupposes a certain relationship
between the donor and the recipient, this paper poses the following
question: What kinds of disparate desires and needs were triggered in
giving and receiving photographs as gifts in diplomatic terms? The
photographic albums worked as a system of communication between
Korea and Japan, affirming the convergence of heterogeneous political
and cultural discourses. This study provides a framework through
which to reconsider the conception of photography in East Asia and
intercultural relationship between Korea and Japan during the late
nineteenth century.
Global Textiles and the Dress Culture of Nineteenth-Century
Jiangnan Women
Rachel Silberstein, University of Oxford
Like other genres of late Qing material culture, dress has long been
characterized by decay and viewed with disdain. For twentieth-century
scholars degeneration in design and technique comprised a zeitgeistian
reflection of the waning imperial rule. But such conclusions were based
on the study of imperial and official clothing, genres most damaged by
Taiping-inflicted destruction and widespread corruption. The imperial
bias implicit in this scholarship effectively marginalized the study
of other genres of dress, in particular the dress of nineteenth-century
women. Yet it is this genre that most belies the narrative of decline,
displaying instead vitality and originality—innovative styles and novel
materials. Accordingly, this paper sets out to examine and refute the
narrative of decline in nineteenth-century dress. Focusing upon the
consumption of foreign textiles, the paper explores how fashionable
dress provided a medium for women to respond to the tumultuous
changes of the nineteenth century.
Indigeneity on the Global Stage
Chair: Elizabeth Hutchinson, Barnard College, Columbia University
Stop(the)Gap: International Indigenous Art in Motion, Adelaide
International Film Festival, 2011
Brenda Croft, University of New South Wales
Some of the most provocative and illuminating moving-image work
today is being created by Indigenous new-media artists, yet there
has been minimal international focus on this work. Despite physical
distances, Indigenous communities around the globe are linked through
their shared colonial histories, each bearing scars of dispossession,
injustice, inequality, and misrepresentation. Stop(the)Gap was a major
international Indigenous moving-image project, developed for the
2011 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival in partnership with the Samstag
Museum of Art. The Indigenous Australian curator Brenda L. Croft
worked with Indigenous curatorial colleagues from Canada, Aotearoa/
New Zealand, and the United States to bring together recent works
by renowned Indigenous artists from the four countries, to challenge
global preconceptions of contemporary international Indigenous
expression, and to explore the fertile space between cinema and the
visual arts. How successfully (or not) this was achieved is the topic of
this presentation.
It’s about Time: Indigenous Art in the 2010 and 2012
Sydney Biennales
Susan Kennedy Zeller, Brooklyn Museum
According to the Biennale director David Elliott, “The European
Enlightenment is over.” As the critic John McDonald wrote, “One
truly noteworthy aspect of this exhibition is that it is probably the least
Eurocentric Biennale we have ever had.” They and other critics and
exhibition directors implied that the 2010 and 2012 Sydney Biennales,
the largest, most important contemporary art venue for the Pacific, were
instrumental in positioning Indigenous artists’ works as equal with nonIndigenous works on a world stage. This paper’s premise is that only
those artists whose works fully integrate an Indigenous sense of time as
a fluid component, circular or moving back and forth between present,
past, and future, have made the meaningful leap into the forefront
of world art. Specific Native American, First Nation, and Aboriginal
artists’ examples are reviewed from both Biennales.
“Can You Include Edward Curtis Photographs?” Taking Two
Hundred Pieces of Contemporary Native American Art to Russia
Suzanne Newman Fricke, University of New Mexico
While organizing the exhibition Octopus Dreams: 200 Works on
Paper by Contemporary Native American Artists for the Ekaterinburg
Museum of Fine Arts in Yekaterinburg, Russia, the museum’s
director requested the inclusion of images by Edward Curtis, the latenineteenth–early-twentieth-century photographer who specialized in
portraits of Native Americans. As the principal curator, I emphasized
the problems with including Curtis’s work; he was not Native
American, not contemporary, and his work is overly romanticized and
consciously anachronistic even for its time. Despite these arguments,
the director persisted. In the end, Curtis’s work was not included in the
show due to a lack of funding. Despite the sentimental view of Native
life, once the show was hung on the walls (without Curtis) visitors
demonstrated a genuine enthusiasm for even the most challenging
pieces. Both the sentimentality and the enthusiasm suggest the
complexity in the foreign views of Native art and culture.
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Anticipating Sakahàn: The First International Quinquennial of
New Indigenous Art
Jolene Rickard, Cornell University
What are the historical circumstances that have instigated the need
for a global view of Indigenous experience? On the cusp of the fifth
anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous People, the first international quinquennial
of Indigenous art will take place in the capital of Canada. Sakahàn,
meaning “to light a fire” in the language of the Algonquin, is the
National Gallery of Canada’s first survey of recent Indigenous art
and opens in the spring of 2013. Under the curatorial direction of the
Mohawk curator and artist Greg Hill with the assistance of the Tlingit
curator Candice Hopkins and others, more than one hundred Indigenous
artists from around the world will be assembled. This paper engages the
emergence of Indigenous art and what it signifies in the overall ongoing
revitalization of Indigenous communities globally.
Reception Studies, Part I
Pierre Bourdieu’s writing on the field of cultural production has been
effective in rethinking practices and assumptions in art history about
the artist, artwork, and interpretation, shifting the inquiry into new
directions. It proposes that the fields of art, art history, criticism,
curatorial work, and institutions such as museums are themselves
objects of study. One of Bourdieu’s most important contributions is the
expansion of reception studies through a theoretical framework for the
role of mediators such as critics, curators, dealers, collectors, museums,
and galleries as helping to define and produce the meanings and value
of works of art. Increasingly studies of modern art have analyzed
case studies in the reception of artworks and artists. To name a few
examples, Michel Melot’s study of Daumier, T. J. Clark’s of Manet’s
Olympia, Anne Higonnet’s of gender paradigms in art criticism, Anne
Wagner’s of Rodin, and Bell Hooks’s on race and the interpretation of
Basquiat.
The Reception of Fiber as a Medium of Art:
The Case Study of Sheila Hicks
Elissa Auther, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
This paper examines the reception of fiber as art through a case study
of the slow elevation of the work of the fiber artist Sheila Hicks
from “craft” to “art.” The analysis begins with Hicks’s debut in the
late 1960s in craft-based contexts and ends with her April 2012 solo
exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, a leading contemporary art gallery in
New York’s Chelsea district. The extended trajectory of the reception
of Hicks’s work poses a number of questions about the social and
institutional dynamics that determine how art is defined and valued and
broadly illuminates the role of critics, curators, dealers, and scholars in
the consecration of art.
Reading Modern Women Artists in Interwar France
Paula Birnbaum, University of San Francisco
This paper uses reception theory to explore how an institution that
promoted works of art by women artists in 1930s Paris encouraged
the open-ended questioning of modern female subjectivity. Through
a process that involved the convergence of diverse views and
backgrounds of participating artists and critics, the Société des
Femmes Artistes Modernes (FAM) sought to construct and transmit
its own history of women artists by both engaging with and resisting
the critical category of l’art feminin, a social construct that flourished
decades earlier. While the group conformed to gender expectations in
its institutional ideals, case studies highlighting the critical reception
of individual artists show how differences of opinion over what a
woman artist meant in the public sphere existed among FAM’s diverse
members and audience.
In the Eye of the Beholder: Foujita and His Critics in Japan,
France, and the United States
Ikuyo Nakagawa, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Throughout his international career, the Japanese-born painter
Tsuguharu (Léonard) Foujita (1886–1968) forged multiple personae,
ambivalently responding to various stereotypes. Foujita’s many faces
materialized from the complex dynamics between his performative selffashioning and his audience’s expectations, and his varying receptions
in different countries mirrored the artistic and sociopolitical agendas
specific to each context. Foujita’s major success in Paris in the 1920s
was built upon the post–World War I French nostalgia for the past and
the avant-garde’s embracing international bohemianism, both embodied
in his traditionalist and primitivist Japanese otherness. His compatriots,
however, fixated on the “Western-style painting” institutionalized in
modern Japan and condemned his artistic strategy as shallow exoticism.
Post–World War II outcries against Foujita’s wartime propagandistic
career arose in both Japan and the United States, responding in part to
the new cold war paradigm but reflecting in contrast the Japanese sense
of insecurity under the Occupation and the American trauma of the
Japanese American internment.
John Singer Sargent’s Exile
Susan Sidlauskas, Rutgers, The State Unversity of New Jersey
Sargent may have been one of the consecrated artists of the Gilded
Age—to borrow Bourdieu’s formulation—but his position was far
more equivocal than this label suggests. The legacy of disdain that
Sargent’s later works elicited from figures such as Roger Fry, Walter
Sickert, and Lewis Mumford, to name just a few, continues to shape a
truncated vision of the painter’s inventiveness and ambition. Painting
at his own fin de siècle, Sargent in fact invented radical structures—
based on dynamically interacting layers of skin—to convey a new
kind of knowledge about the interdependence of bodily and social
transformation. Reexamining a reception history riven with numerous
inconsistencies and unexpected juxtapositions allows us to locate
Sargent in a shifting but revelatory position in relation to both the
(academic) history that he was identified with and the (avant-garde)
modernism from which he remains exiled.
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Visualizing Reception: The Shape of the Art Market around 1800
Christian Huemer, Getty Research Institute
In his desire to bring order into the multitude of artistic expressions
around 1900, the German art historian Richard Muther recommended
reversing the binoculars for a moment. By zooming out we are
actually able to gain a better sense of overall interconnections and
patterns within a large number of facts. Today, big data sets in
conjunction with new visualization software allow for a “distant
reading” of cultural consumption that may complement the longstanding case-study approach. For this paper a subset of 230,000
auction sales records from the Getty Provenance Index® databases
has been used to develop network diagrams of agents connecting 130
sale locations in Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands
(1800–20). Such visualizations, addressing the flow of objects,
money, and people over time and space, have the potential to draw
our attention to evidence difficult or impossible to see otherwise,
prompting us to pose new questions.
Reception Studies, Part II
gallerists had to put in perspective a picture that confronted sexuality,
culture, and artistic tradition—a challenge both embraced and artfully
sidestepped.
Bianca Eshel-Gershuni: Innovator and Outsider
Ayelet Carmi, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Born in Bulgaria in 1932 and an active artist in Israel from the mid1960s onward, Bianca Eshel-Gershuni began her career creating
wearable jewelry and continued with painting and large-scale sculpture,
emphasizing narrative and biographic elements. Although these were
innovations at the time, they opposed the most valued concerns in
the local art scene. Eshel-Gershuni had several important museum
exhibitions, yet the artistic discourse defined her as an outsider, and her
art as “feminine.” Whereas in the United States a developing feminist
discourse allowed some women who addressed gender issues to enter
the mainstream, this was not the case in Israel, were the art field not
only lacked such a discourse but blatantly dismissed gender issues.
The paper analyzes why Eshel-Gershuni has not been credited with
being an innovator in the Israeli art field despite her pioneering role in
introducing gender issues.
“All the World a Kaleidoscope”: A Media Archaeology
of Abstract Imagery
Erkki Huhtamo, University of California, Los Angeles
Was the outbreak of abstract art such a rupture as the historiography
of modernism has made us believe? The nineteenth century
experienced multiple forms of imagery that were not only abstract
but also in motion. The introduction of the kaleidoscope led to a
“kaleidoscomania,” an intense burst of material and discursive activity.
Optical devices like phenakistiscope discs and mechanical magic
lantern slides such as chromatropes or “artificial fireworks” spread the
infatuation with abstraction even further, inspiring textual production.
As widespread as such abstract forms became, they hardly flourished
within the canonized traditions of academic art. What, if anything, did
they have to do with the evolving discourse on modernism? Answers
can be sought by excavating and analyzing nineteenth-century forms of
abstract imagery as well as the discursive formations that surrounded
and informed them. An emerging approach called “media archaeology”
provides intellectual tools for accomplishing this task.
Can You See Me Now? The Reception of the First
Modern Woman Artist
Diane J. Radycki, Moravian College
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) was a daring innovator of
gender imagery—the first woman artist to challenge centuries of
traditional representations of the female body in art. This paper
analyzes two early exhibitions of her Self-Portrait Nude with Amber
Necklace (1906). Not until after World War I, after Dada with its
critical view of society and following the rise of the New Woman and
the New Woman artist, was Modersohn-Becker’s work reevaluated.
Before her death, it had been exhibited only in shows of Worpswede
naturalism; after World War I, however, important new galleries began
showing it with German modernism, “women artists,” French Fauvism,
and so on. In 1919 and 1921, respectively, J. B. Neumann (Dada) and
Alfred Flechtheim (Neue Sachlichkeit) exhibited Modersohn-Becker’s
nude self-portrait alongside works by Feininger and Matisse. The
Suzy Lake, National Treasure: Consecration in the
Canadian Context
Michelle Meagher, University of Alberta
Though well known in the Canadian context, the work of the Americanborn photographer Suzy Lake has been rarely present in the larger US
and international markets. Recent recognition by curators in major
American galleries has spurred what the Canadian critic Chris Ironside
has described as a “Suzy Lake renaissance.” This paper analyzes
reviews, promotional materials, and catalogue essays that have
framed Lake’s work in the last decade in order to expose persistent
national anxieties and insecurities within the Canadian field of art.
How is Lake’s status as a “national treasure” enabled by her recent
international (and particularly American) recognition and consecration?
How is Lake claimed as a specifically Canadian artist working on
specifically Canadian conceptual and political matters? What broader
cultural work is performed when Lake is presented and celebrated as a
national treasure?
Free German Art: The Reinterpretation of German Expressionism
at the Museum of Modern Art during World War II
Jennifer McComas, Indiana University Art Museum
In the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition the Nazis branded German
Expressionism with their official seal of disapproval. In response a
number of exhibitions featuring Expressionism were held outside
Germany, including Free German Art at the Museum of Modern Art.
In this 1942 exhibition the museum contrasted German dictatorship
with American democracy by casting Expressionism as a victim of
political antimodernism and associating its formal qualities with artistic
and political freedom. Yet while the exhibition popularized a view
of German Expressionists as antifascist heroes, it also minimized the
anti-Semitic basis for the Nazi censorship of Expressionism. Indeed,
the purge of “degenerate” art from the German museums was simply
presented as the result of Hitler’s philistine aesthetic taste. This paper
examines how wartime exhibitions such as Free German Art not only
established a new interpretation of German Expressionism but also had
a long-term impact on the American reception of German art.
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69
Nordic Modernism at Home and Abroad, 1880–1920
Creating a Finnish National Identity at the 1900 Paris
Universal Exposition
Margaret Herman, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
The year 2013 marks the centennial of the American-Scandinavian
Foundation’s Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art, which
opened in New York in December 1912 and acquainted American
audiences with modern art from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
The anniversary of this other important 1913 show offers an occasion
to reconsider the scope and impact of modern Nordic art at home
and abroad. Papers in this session examine the relationship between
the academy and the avant-garde, the establishment of alternative
exhibitions and societies, the collection and patronage of modern
Nordic art, and its influence in North America. The panel also provides
the opportunity to consider the alternative model Nordic art offered to
the predominantly French contributions on display at the Armory Show.
The architectural firm Saarinen, Gesellius, and Lindgren and the
artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela designed Finland’s pavilion for the 1900
Universal Exposition in Paris at a time of enormous political upheaval
at home. In the late 1890s Russia imposed stricter policies aimed at
limiting the Grand Duchy of Finland’s political, economic, and cultural
autonomy, and long-simmering separatist movements began to boil
over. In the face of “Russification,” Eliel Saarinen’s pavilion, which
combined local craft tradition and national romanticism with references
to international modern styles, and Gallen-Kallela’s frescos celebrating
Finnish history and mythology were bold proposals for an independent
national identity. This paper reconnects the pavilion with its political
symbolism, the exterior form with its interior artistic program, and
the architect with the artist to argue that the 1900 exposition was as
significant a site for nationalist ambitions as the better known Paris
fairs of 1889, 1931, and 1937.
Chairs: Kirsten Jensen, Hudson River Museum; Leslie Anne Anderson,
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Krøyer’s Beach: Nordic Modernism and the Reemergence
of Denmark, 1880–1910
Thor J. Mednick, University of Toledo
Peder Severin Krøyer (1851–1909) was the leading member of the
fin-de-siècle art colony in Skagen, Denmark. His paintings are credited
with introducing elements of the latest French styles into Danish
painting. This unidirectional analysis, however, misses a key aspect
of Krøyer’s artistic enterprise. His careful deployment of typically
Scandinavian effects such as the midnight sun and deep blue sky also
succeeded in propagating a romantic and essentialized view of the
distant north in his southern audiences. Krøyer’s principal success was
in fashioning a sort of hybrid modernism—one that took part in the
wave of naturalist painting popular at the Paris Salon while at the same
time retained a distinctively Nordic identity. The artistic emergence
of Skagen in Krøyer’s work, meanwhile, coincided with Denmark’s
economic recovery from serious military losses sustained in the 1860s.
Krøyer’s Skagen thus also became a sort of cultural flagship of the new,
modern Denmark.
Nordic “Genius”: German Patronage of Edvard Munch’s Art
Hilde Marie Jamessen Rognerud, Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design, Oslo
Past research on the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) has
focused primarily on the relationship between his biography and the
various tendencies and developments found in his work, thus fostering
the romantic myth of an isolated, irrational artist genius, working and
reworking his tormented memories and raw emotions onto endless
canvases of self-confession. Based on such tragic presumptions, how
can we understand Munch’s success in Imperial Germany from around
1902, his French-inspired, soul-searching art a provoking experience
to the regime? This paper shifts focus from decadence to vitality,
analyzing how the term “genius” was strategically and rhetorically
applied to Munch by German mediators and patrons of his art, its
transhistorical Renaissance genealogy communicating quality. The
study brings to light the complex ways Munch, being Nordic, was
implicated in the articulation of modern German cultural identity,
leading him to rare international success in his own time.
The Norwegian Contributions to the 1912–13 Scandinavian
Art Exhibition and Their Impact on North American Painting
Clarence Burton Sheffield, Rochester Institute of Technology
Recent scholarship has overlooked the key role played by Norwegian
artists, critics, and patrons in the 1912–13 exhibition. The Norwegian
artists selected were more unconventional, radical, and bold than their
counterparts and suggested a more complex, eclectic, and nuanced
range of styles, allegiances, and ideologies. Contemporaries, including
the famed American artist N. C. Wyeth, noted the avant-garde quality
of their work. In a letter written to his father, Wyeth recounted the
details of a visit to his friend, the art critic Christian Brinton. Wyeth
said, “He has just returned from Norway with most wonderful material
and also many examples of their illustrated books which profoundly
astonish me! We are years behind them in cleverness of illustration
and decidedly so in process of reproduction.” Wyeth’s acquaintance
with Scandinavian art was due largely to Brinton. Wyeth’s praise for
Norwegian art suggests that Norway was uniquely positioned, and that
its North American future was secure.
The Latin American Presence at International
Exhibitions, 1855–Present
Chairs: Maya Jiménez, Kingsborough Community College, City
University of New York; Michele Greet, George Mason University
From as early as the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the first
international exhibition to include fine art, Latin American artists
contributed works for display. Until 1924 artists from Latin America
participated in international exhibitions primarily as individuals or
under nationalist labels. This changed with the first survey of Latin
American art held at the Musée Galliéra in Paris. Here, for the first
time, organizers conceived of Latin American heritage as the unifying
factor behind the show, giving rise to a classificatory schema that
would persist for the rest of the twentieth century. With the foundation
of the São Paulo Biennale in 1951, Latin Americans began to set
their own parameters for the international exhibition. This session
addresses the many diverse ways Latin American artists, architects, and
exhibition organizers participated in international exhibitions, world’s
fairs, salons, biennials, and other group exhibitions that highlighted
multinational participation.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
70
Paintbrush Politics: Cultural Presence of Mexico and Brazil
at the US Centennial, 1876
Katherine Manthorne, The Graduate Center, City University
of New York
The Centennial Exposition opened on May 10, 1876, in Philadelphia
with minimal representation from Latin America. Mexico and Brazil
were the exceptions, each exerting a robust presence that attracted
global audiences to their pavilions. At that moment Mexico was
politically unstable, with the overthrow of President Lerdo de Tejada by
Porfírio Díaz imminent, while Brazil was an imperial state (until 1889).
Yet these vastly distinct governments seized this opportunity to present
their nations to the world. Mexico, via its art exhibition, presented itself
as a cosmopolitan nation with a strong pictorial tradition. By contrast,
Brazil created a self-portrait based on natural resources, conveyed in
commercial displays, complemented by photographs and landscape
paintings, and reinforced by Emperor Dom Pedro II, present throughout
the exposition. Wielding paintbrush politics, Mexico and Brazil crafted
their national images for international consumption on this specifically
American stage.
Cuban Art and Culture in and around the 1939 New York
World’s Fair
Susanna Temkin, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Amid much fanfare, the Cuban national pavilion at the 1939 New York
World’s Fair opened on May 20, 1939. Decorated with allegorical
murals and sculpture, the pavilion featured exhibitions on sugar and
tobacco as well as a bar serving mojitos. Across the fairgrounds in the
Amusement Zone, “authentic” faux-colonial architecture provided
the backdrop for dancers who performed daily at the independently
financed Cuban Village. Geographically isolated from the official
fairgrounds, a display of more than forty Cuban artworks was
contemporaneously held at Manhattan’s Riverside Museum as part
of the US government–sponsored Latin American Exhibition of Fine
and Applied Arts, the first broad survey of Latin American art held
in the United States. Exploring the contexts of the national pavilion,
Cuban Village, and Riverside Museum, this paper considers how these
distinct sites of display at the 1939 New York World’s Fair affected the
presentation and critical reception of Cuban art.
Positioning the Americas: The Guggenheim and Carnegie
Internationals of the 1960s
Delia Solomons, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Although the subjects of less study than biennials and world’s fairs, the
Guggenheim and Carnegie Internationals served as influential platforms
for curators and critics to propagate their visions of the global art
world. In the 1960s much was at stake in the branding of international
art and Latin America’s position within it. The outbreak of the Cuban
Revolution brought Latin American art to the fore of US cultural
politics. At the same time, as Abstract Expressionism’s dominance
waned, many hoped to safeguard New York’s newly won status as a
center of the art world. Amid these tensions, the Internationals served
as battlegrounds to position global art and the Americas. This paper
examines curatorial attitudes ranging from progressive to xenophobic
through the selections, methodologies, and rhetoric employed, and
considers several of the included artworks themselves as complex
pieces often resistant to staunch categorization or political agendas.
Locating Latinidad at the Biennale di Venezia
María del Mar González-González, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
The selection of the Puerto Rico–based Conceptual art team of Jennifer
Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla to represent the United States at
the 2011 Biennale di Venezia intended to convey a pluralized US
identity (Allora was born and raised in Pennsylvania, while Cuba-born
Calzadilla was raised in Puerto Rico). The curatorial statement for
Gloria claims that the exhibition examines national identity, democracy,
and freedom. This presentation explores how the selection of Allora
and Calzadilla complicates the issue of nationality by highlighting
the colonial relation between the United States and Latin America
through Puerto Rico, a territory that resists cultural identification with
the continental US. The work and transnational status of the artists do
not allow for a neat insertion into the biennial circuit, which is highly
compartmentalized according to nationality. Their participation thus
reveals how historically produced power relations shape biennials and
exposes the limitations of nation-state–based curatorial models.
Decolonizing documenta: Latin American Artists in Germany
Julia Roth, Freie Universität Berlin
Okwui Enwezor’s documenta 11 marks a turning point regarding the
representational practices that had heretofore dominated prestigious
international exhibitions of contemporary art. For the first time in the
history of documenta—which Armin Bode established to reconcile
what the Nazis deemed entartet (degenerate) art—artists from Asian,
African, and Latin American spaces were included in large numbers.
Moreover, and more important, the artists chosen and the way their
works were represented challenged hegemonic Western presumptions
of non-Western art as mostly exotic, authentic, or primitive by
confronting the audiences with a variety of experiences. This
paper examines the way Latin American artists were represented at
documenta 11 and asks how they have been incorporated in exhibitions
in Germany ever since, including documenta 13 and the 2010
exhibition The Potosí Principle. How can we sing the song of the Lord
in an alien land?
Crossing Continents: Expatriate Histories of Art
in the Twentieth Century
Chair: Geraldine A. Johnson, University of Oxford
The history of art history has often been a history of expatriate
experiences and the formulations of those who have lived abroad.
Already in the later sixteenth century, Karel van Mander not only read
Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists but also travelled from his native
Flanders to Florence and Rome before completing his own volume of
artists’ biographies. In the early twentieth century, a slew of scholars
fled the scourge of national socialism in Continental Europe, and their
writings were affected by their new, expatriate status in the United
States and Britain as well as by memories of their homelands. This
session focuses on this phase in the expatriate histories of art history,
when émigrés from Germany, Hungary, Austria, and other Central
European countries found new intellectual homes in Britain, the United
States, and even farther afield. The papers explore how collective
and individual expatriate experiences have shaped art history as a
discipline, in terms of what objects, artists, and cultures have been
studied and how these subjects have been approached theoretically,
methodologically, and even linguistically.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Inside/Outside: Germany/London
David Cast, Bryn Mawr College
The record of German art historians who found refuge in England
before 1939 is one of opportunities and difficulties. The Warburg
Library, transferred to London in 1933, offered some scholars (Bing,
Saxl, Wind, Wittkower) an intellectual and professional home. But the
situation of other scholars was often difficult, not only because within
their ranks political and intellectual fissures existed (Antal, Hauser)
but also because professional art history in England was defined more
by connoisseurs and critics than by the forms of academic enquiry
associated with the German tradition. This presentation sketches out the
general pattern of the lives of these scholars, both the successful and
the less so, and the ways their encounters with British culture affected
not only the study of art history in England (Wilde, Kurz) but also the
kinds of scholarship with which they themselves (Wittkower, Pevsner)
began to engage.
Otto Brendel and Erwin Panofsky: On the Problems of
Describing and Interpreting Art in the New World
Katharina G. Lorenz, University of Nottingham
The transplantation of academic careers brought about by the rise
of national socialism in Germany during the 1930s had significant
repercussions for the thinking and intellectual positioning of individual
scholars, quite apart from the impact on their personal lives. This paper
explores the work of a specific group of emigrant art historians—
German classical archaeologists working in the United States from
the 1930s—and studies how the scope, trajectory, and tone of their
academic work changed from their German to their American careers.
The analysis concentrates on the career of Otto Brendel (1901–1973)
and his writings on the form and meaning of Roman art. It uses a
comparative study of Erwin Panofsky’s model of iconology in its
German and American manifestations as a framework against which
to plot the shifts in Brendel’s work, and focuses especially on the
linguistic challenges posed by the ekphrastic nature of classical
archaeological scholarship.
Drawn from Memory: Reconstructing The Hall of the
Great Council of Florence in Exile
Bruce L. Edelstein, New York University Florence
From Budapest to Vienna and from Vienna to England, Johannes
Wilde was twice an expatriate. In 1941 he began work on his famous
study entitled The Hall of the Great Council of Florence. Due to
the war, he was unable to travel to Italy to examine either the space
or the relevant documents and was forced to rely on his memory of
the place, secondary sources, and archival transcriptions made by
others more than thirty years earlier. Almost seventy years after its
publication, Wilde’s study remains an essential model for art-historical
reconstruction and still conditions current debates regarding the room
and its decorations. This paper examines the effect of Wilde’s distance
from the object of his study and offers broader reflections on the
meaning of the expatriate experience to his work in general.
Facing Forward, Looking Backward: John Rewald’s
Trans-Atlantic Scholarship
Jorgelina Orfila, Texas Tech University
Although seldom mentioned in studies on the emigration of scholars
fleeing national socialism, the art historian John Rewald (1912–1994)
was a German exile who came to the United States at the beginning of
World War II. Rewald was then already an expatriate: in 1932 he had
moved to France, where he had begun his scholarly career studying
Impressionism and Postimpressionism with a specialization in Paul
Cézanne’s art. Although he later abjured his German roots, Rewald
was a product of the educational system of the Weimar Republic.
Nevertheless, he shunned the theoretical orientation associated with
many of the German scholars that capture most of today’s critical
attention. Instead, Rewald’s documentary scholarship upheld the
scientific methods of inquiry that in the interwar years were extoled
as specific to German scholarship. Thus, by analyzing how Rewald’s
expatriate status shaped his scholarship, this paper illuminates the
historicist underpinnings of modernist scholarship on modern art.
Concerning the Profane in Indian Art: Expatriate
Art Historians and the Writing of Indian Art History
Devika Singh, University of Cambridge
The foreign, and mainly German and Austrian, origins of some of
India’s leading art historians from the 1930s to the 1960s remain an
understudied dimension of the history of Indian art that disrupts the
knowledge hierarchies of the colony-metropolis relationship. By 1947
German-speaking émigrés held essential positions in the Indian art
world. Participating in the circulation of foreign art and ideas in India
and influencing the appropriation of modernism, they also significantly
impacted the development of Indian art history. However, far from
systematically propagating an esoteric, Hindu-centered perspective on
Indian art as did many nationalist art historians of the first generation,
expatriate art historians instead championed an inclusive take on Indian
art. Integrating its Muslim as well as Hindu heritage, they participated
in the elaboration in the arts of the Nehruvian vision of national
integration and of the composite culture.
The Visual Culture of Global Trade: Early American
Interactions with Asia and the Pacific
Chair: Patricia Johnston, College of the Holy Cross
Americans developed a taste for Asian commodities and arts in the
Colonial period, when these expensive luxuries were trans-shipped
through London for legal trade. Immediately after the revolution,
American ships embarked for China and other parts of Asia and the
Pacific, where direct trade made raw materials, products, and visual
arts less expensive and more available to Americans. Imports from this
trade—lacquerware, ceramics, painting, sculpture, furniture, silver,
wallpaper, textiles, and other media—had a dramatic impact on the
visual arts of early America. Studying the influx of Asian and other
Pacific visual and material culture brings fresh interpretations to the
study of American art before the Civil War. The papers in this session
investigate a wide variety of issues, including new materials, forms,
imagery, and aesthetics. They also examine how direct contact with
Asia and the Pacific reveals how Americans collected and imitated
Asian arts and illuminates the global circulation of objects and images
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This session contributes
to the study of American art in the Federal period by emphasizing its
internationalism, which has been overshadowed by the more frequent
study of visual expressions of early American nationalism.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F E B RUARY 13– 16
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Beyond Hemp: The Manila-Salem Trade
Florina H. Capistrano-Baker, Ayala Museum, Philippines
Maritime trade between the Spanish colony of Manila and Salem,
Massachusetts, then one of the richest cities in the early American
republic, flourished from 1796 to 1858. Not as well known as the
Spanish-controlled Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade in luxury goods
that preceded and overlapped with the Manila-Salem trade, the latter
focused primarily on agricultural products—sugar, molasses, rice, and
Manila hemp (abaca). By the 1820s two major American companies
were firmly entrenched in Manila: Peele, Hubbell and Company;
and Russell and Sturgis. Using published and unpublished sources
including letters from American merchants to illuminate this prosperous
period, the paper discusses three types of export art produced for an
elite American market: souvenir watercolors of intertwined human
figures that spell the owner’s name (letras y figuras); watercolors of
local attire and occupations (tipos del pais); and finely embroidered
whitework garments of pineapple fiber (piña) such as those depicted in
the watercolors.
Captains to Cabin Boys: Porcelain Ownership in Federal America
Jessica Lanier, Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History,
Material Culture and Salem State University
Following the revolution, Americans eagerly anticipated direct
trade with China as one of the main benefits of peace. In the public
imagination, as well as in the commercial aspirations and economic
theories of the period, China was associated with exotic and valuable
luxuries such as tea, porcelain, silk, and lacquer. However, the
romantic notions of China were quickly tempered by the realities
encountered in Canton. Nonetheless, American traders perpetuated
idealized visions of the Celestial Kingdom, particularly among
female consumers at home, via an elaborate gift culture. Using Salem,
Massachusetts, a major player in the early China trade, as a case
study, the paper demonstrates that ownership of Chinese porcelain
was more closely linked to maritime culture than to status and that
everyone from captains to cabin boys eagerly acquired goods that
attested to their successful participation in this potentially lucrative, if
also risky and unpleasant, trade.
Cultivating the Chinese Manner into Early American
Garden Design
Judy Bullington, Belmont University
Ornamented garden landscapes, introduced into the colonies along
with Georgian-style domestic architecture, grew in popularity during
the Federal period. Private gardens were shaped by the interests of
wealthy citizens, and their designs were meant to reflect civic virtues.
A frequently referenced, but seldom analyzed, aspect of these early
gardens was the taste for merging ornamentation in the Chinese manner
with classical Greco-Roman forms. Orientalized summerhouses,
temples, bridges, and fences embellished gardens surrounding the
estates of prominent figures of the period and functioned, from
the standpoint of iconography, as a projection of an individual’s
social status and global worldview. Examining the depictions and
descriptions of these fashionable designs reveals a largely romanticized
understanding of Chinese models transmitted primarily through two
sources: the influence of English landscape practices that embraced
chinoiserie, and decorative motifs on trade goods purchased for
domestic consumption.
Embedded Exchange: Tattoos as Markers of
American/Pacific Islander Interaction in the Late Eighteenth
and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Anna Felicity Friedman, University of Chicago
Tattoos as simultaneous objects of material culture and images of visual
culture present a unique opportunity for investigating global trade and
cultural exchange in that they are not merely collected, purchased, or
gifted but are embedded in the skin, permanently. A significant subset
of American travelers to the Pacific Islands got images inscribed on
their skin that represented traditional, indigenous motifs and reflected
a nuance of cultural encounters in this region. Such tattoos ranged on
a continuum from “exotic” souvenirs acquired as passing novelties to
marks of radical identity transformation that represented foreigners’
adoptions into Pacific Islander societies. Reception of such tattoos in
American society can be understood through personal correspondence,
published texts either by the tattooed travelers or by those who
observed them, reviews of texts written by some of these travelers,
newspaper and journal accounts of these individuals and their tattooing,
and a few rare images.
International Association of Word and Image Studies
From the Wall, to the Press, to the Streets
Chairs: Eve Kalyva, University of Buenos Aires; Ignaz Cassar,
independent artist
Gallery enclosure can be understood as a literal and figurative qualifier
of art: a space that is distinct from yet exists within the wider social
sphere. Artistic practices utilize language to facilitate material and
discursive transgressions beyond the traditional art object and its
institutional isolation. Appearing on gallery walls, disseminated
in the press, and occupying public sites (billboards, pavements,
the streets), such practices challenge the traditional hierarchies of
the art world, shift institutional policies, and open participatory
communication channels. Acknowledging the manifold social practices
of contemporary art and the diversity of scholarship that this committee
embraces, this session discusses the presence of image and text in the
public sphere from a historical and critical perspective and considers
art’s sociality. It addresses the social interaction with works that
manipulate the visual and the textual beyond the traditional frame of
art, which can be understood in material, institutional, and theoretical
terms. Equally, it examines subversive displays of word and image, the
rhetoric of public art, challenges of divides such as private/public and
elitist/communal, understanding spatial transgression as institutional
critique and working “around” the frame, and open-access art in new
sites—from art magazines and postcards to billboards, the internet, and
social-networking sites.
Pasted and Posted: Ray Johnson’s Networked Art, 1955–65
Miriam Elizabeth Kienle, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This paper examines the collages that the artist Ray Johnson (1927–
1995) produced and posted ca. 1960. While Johnson is often considered
to be the progenitor of the “mail art” movement, scholarship on the
artist has little considered the relationship of his work to the actual
postal system in which it circulated. This paper analyzes how his
practice engaged postal policies and statutes during the cold war. While
the US Postal Service promoted postal mechanization and stronger
obscenity statutes to manage the heterogeneous exchanges, chaotic
materiality, and centrifugal character of the modern post, Johnson’s
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mail-art practice conversely emphasized the promiscuity of associations
found in the average postman’s bag. In response to these (often
homophobic) regulations, Johnson produced collages whose queer
iconography, semiological compositions, and subversive circulation
demarcate homoerotic desire as a political concept.
scope than is typically acknowledged, playing a central role in the
construction of temples for multiple sectarian groups. Other nonroyal
patrons included courtiers, mendicants, and artists. This session
generates discussion about how an expanded understanding of patrons’
identities might change our approach to the study of temples.
Across North and South: Conceptual Art Practices in a
Variety of Contexts
Eve Kalyva, University of Buenos Aires
Divine Kingship Revisited: Indian Temple Art and Patronage
in the Sixth to Eighth Centuries
Julie Romain, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and University
of California, Los Angeles
This paper discusses conceptual art practices in a variety of
institutional, geographical, and historiographical contexts. It suggests
understanding its use of language as a critical strategy for negotiating
the space of art as a public, and therefore, social space. To do so, it
presents the case of Argentina—the graphic interventions of Vigo,
Romero, and Pazos; and international exchanges, notably CAYC’s
touring shows in the US and Europe, and collaborations with Kosuth,
Lippard, and Harrison. Here, the prioritization of self-referentiality, or
the unimportance of execution, becomes a non-tentative generalization,
while the division (Western) conceptual art/ conceptualism (Latin
American) risks animating a hegemonic dissolution of alternative,
political, and aesthetic, references to artistic production. As such, this
paper redefines the legacy of conceptual art practices in the reflective
mode of engaging with context, which they propose and initially
perform on their own body in order to initiate a critical strategy for
reading the world.
“I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White”: The Resonant
Afterlife of Those Notorious Museum Tags
Jody B. Cutler, St. John’s University
While the Whitney Museum’s recurring biennial exhibition of recent art
in America has been a critical thrashing ground since its inception, the
most contemporaneously hated to date was surely the 1993 installation,
emblematized, according to the vitriol, by the special edition of
admission tags produced for the show as a site-specific, interactive
piece by Daniel Joseph Martinez (b. 1957). Imprinted with words from
the phrase “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White” in various
combinations, Museum Tags in retrospect has resonated increasingly
as a succès de scandale for the very provocations that once alienated
Martinez from the art world. Starting with a review of the commentary,
the paper explores the role of the language component qua language
within a dialectics of private and public at the conceptual crux of the
piece and the artist’s implicit negotiation of Frankfurt School aesthetics
with Barthesian notions of the fluid author/reader/subject.
Thinking beyond Royalty: Reassessing Temple
Patronage in Premodern South Asia
Chairs: Katherine E. Kasdorf, Columbia University; Risha Lee,
National University of Singapore
The paradigm of royal patronage has shaped the historiography of
South Asian temples in many important ways. Viewed as monumental
displays of royal power and sites of economic consolidation, as
collaborations between king, god, and brahmins, and as visual
expressions of dharma, devotion, and divine favor, temples in
premodern South Asia have been understood widely in terms of their
connection to royal figures and dynasties. Yet research increasingly has
found that nonroyal figures sponsored the construction and operation
of temples. Merchant patronage seems to have been far greater in
This paper considers nonroyal patronage at temple sites in the Deccan
and South India from the sixth to the eighth centuries. It focuses on the
temples and inscriptions attributed to the Chalukyas of Badami, who
ruled from ca. 550 to 750 CE. Previous scholarship presumes royal
patronage at many Chalukya sites, even though there is no inscriptional
evidence to support this. Such an approach to the material has been
perpetuated by a reliance on theories of divine kingship and political
legitimation that have been used to interpret the meaning of many
temples of this period. Visual and inscriptional evidence suggests a
more diverse picture of the social context in which the temples were
built and the patrons who supported them. These included not only
royal patrons such as the king and queen but the feudatories, military
officials, merchants, courtesans, and artisans who served the court.
Mapping Artistic Space: Style and the Kaveri River
Padma Kaimal, Colgate University
In the architectural forms of dozens of stone temples built across the
vast watershed of the Kaveri River in southern India during the ninth
and tenth centuries, there is a common architectural style. This is
surprising because the Kaveri is, in many other ways, diverse. Climate,
government, and language now distinguish Karnataka’s upper Kaveri
highlands from Tamilnadu’s lower Kaveri delta, and they did so in the
ninth century as well. Some of these temples were dedicated to the
worship of Siva, some to goddesses, some to Jaina tirthankaras. We
can read in this evidence that what we call “architectural style” was
primarily shaped by artisans, not patrons. Those artisans worked and
moved across political boundaries and language shifts, cleaving only to
the unity of this great river system’s watershed.
Between “Temple” and “Shrine”: Merchants and Mendicants
along the Madhumati
Tamara I. Sears, Yale University
The many small temples dotting the banks of central India’s rivers
are among the most important for the history of Indian architecture.
Often forgotten in the focus on larger centers, they functioned less as
proclamations of royal power than as places of worship created within
the context of human settlements. Taking the case of the adjoining
villages of Terahi and Mahua, located along the flowing waters of the
Madhumati River, this paper rethinks the relationship between temples,
rivers, and burgeoning communities. Known primarily for a handful of
seventh- to ninth-century temples, Terahi and Mahua remained vibrant
architectural centers well into the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Modestly conceived, the new temples, built primarily by Saivas and
Jains, functioned much like shrines. They constituted an architecture
of everyday life, built in accordance with the aspirations of merchants,
mendicants, and agrarian communities rather than monumentalized
desire for the legitimation of kings.
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Elite Collaborations for a Hoysala Style: Merchants, Kings, and
Temple Patronage in Dorasamudra (Twelfth–Thirteenth Centuries)
Katherine E. Kasdorf, Columbia University
A Kalamkari World: Seventeenth-Century Painted Cottons
and a Theory of Asian Networks
Sylvia Houghteling, Yale University
The profusely sculptural twelfth- to thirteenth-century temple style
named for southern Karnataka’s Hoysala dynasty distinguished the
kingdom’s built landscape from any other. Though monarchs stood to
benefit from the prestige brought by the visually stunning temples, the
patronage of these monuments was diverse. At the heart of the capital
city, Dorasamudra (present-day Halebid), merchants sponsored the
temples that came to define the Hoysala style’s most sculptural variety.
Considering these temples’ location and striking appearance, it may
be productive to view the development of this especially elaborate
subset of the style as a mark of prestige not only for the king but, more
inclusively, for the city. This paper explores the possibilities of this
viewpoint, elaborating upon the collaborative roles of multiple elites in
the monumentalization of the Hoysala capital and the formation of the
Hoysala style.
This paper explores the seventeenth-century trade in kalamkari, or
South Asian painted cottons, as a paradigm of an interconnected early
modern Asian art world. Used as currency, wall hangings, prayer mats,
and clothing fabric, these colorfast kalamkari established what Hans
Van Maanen calls a “landscape of connections” from the Coromandel
Coast to the ports of the Arabian and Andaman Seas. Drawing upon
Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, this paper considers kalamkari as
agents of their own passages into new environments. When the fabrics
were traded, they entered visual realms distinctive from their place of
production. Yet kalamkari were never purely foreign or local. Entering
a home, a dowry collection, or a religious site, these textiles were
quickly assimilated into intimate and sacred events and spaces. Thus,
every kalamkari dually reinscribed the visual network, both adapting to
its context and binding the new site into the painted cotton world.
The Art World of the Thirteen Factories
Winnie Wong, Harvard University
Meta-Mentors: Double Duty
Chairs: Niku Kashef, California State University, Northridge;
Timothy Nolan, independent artist
Artists have influenced both the physical art world and the virtual in
various ways, including artist-run galleries, pop-up exhibitions, projects
in virtual space, print and online publications. Artist initiatives have
helped change the conversation and the space in which art is shown and
experienced. This session looks at artists who take on other art-related
professions such as gallerist, curator, and writer and have explored a
variety of methods and platforms to assure that the perspective of the
artist maintains a vital role in the contemporary discourse.
Art Worlds in Asia
Chair: Sonal Khullar, University of Washington
From the philosopher Arthur Danto to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,
scholars have theorized the art world as a set of conventions or a field
of practices and discourses through which art comes to be cognized,
classified, critiqued, and consumed by individuals and institutions.
In contrast to the popular characterization of the globalized, twentyfirst-century art world as being structured by the free flow of agents
and artifacts, these theories of the art world tend to emphasize the
bounded, ordered, regulated, and coded nature of art making. Yet the art
world is not hermetic and can be constituted by multiple subcultures.
Indeed, scholars like Howard Becker have encouraged us to regard
the art world as porous and plural, that is, as art worlds, or distinct but
interconnected networks of social and economic activity that sustain
artistic production. Recent art-historical research has drawn attention
to the existence of rich and complex art worlds in Asia, centered in the
court and the bazaar, the temple and the monastery, the workshop and
the studio, the art market and the museum. These worlds generated
cross-cultural exchange of images and objects from ancient through
modern periods, and created publics for art that defied conventional
categorizations as sacred or secular, elite or popular, and urban or
rural. The notion of art worlds enables us to think beyond dichotomies
such as local and global or regional and national to develop new
accounts of aesthetics and politics at micro- and macro-levels, from the
visual economy of the Indian Ocean and the Silk Road to that of the
Guangzhou Biennale and the Ravi Varma Press.
From 1700 to 1845 the city of Guangzhou, China, served as the
exclusive port of trade between China and the world. Overseen by the
guild of Thirteen Merchants, European and American traders lived and
conducted their business in an area of the port known as the Thirteen
Factories. Though the trade centered overwhelmingly around the major
commodities of tea, silk, and ceramics, the wealth and contact brought
together in Guangzhou also spurred a substantial trade in paintings,
including oil on canvas works. Made by anonymous Chinese painters,
bought and ordered by seafaring Western merchants, and consumed by
elite and popular Westerners alike, the picture business of Guangzhou
makes up one of the richest corpora of transnational artistic production
in the modern world. This paper brings together the substantial new
research in Chinese- and Western-language archival sources, and
presents a new picture of the art world of the Thirteen Factories.
Omissions and Revisions: The Vexed Role of Mass-Produced
Media in Tibetan Buddhist Art Worlds
Melissa R. Kerin, Washington and Lee University
By examining several Tibetan Buddhist temples and shrines in the
western Himalaya, this paper identifies and analyzes the physical
environs in which mass-produced objects are displayed and used.
Religious photographs and lithographic reproductions work in
collaboration with a variety of different media, such as paintings
and sculpture, all of which function within multiple networks of
meaning and value that constitute the art world of Tibetan Buddhism.
Such an analysis of the art world of Tibetan Buddhist culture is of
paramount importance, for if art history continues to eschew the
study of mass-produced devotional art objects, art historians are
dangerously participating—knowingly or not—in the cult of value
determined by the art market and the Western art world that privileges
manual production, originality, and antiquity. The paper is, therefore,
a corrective to pervasive misrepresentations of Tibetan Buddhist
devotional art and aesthetics.
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Mekong as Metaphor: Charting the Rise of Regionalism in
Southeast Asian Art
Pamela N. Corey, Cornell University
In the 2000s, with the growth of Asian biennials and triennials, the
Mekong began to feature as a prominent regional platform for cultural
exchange projects and contemporary art initiatives in Southeast Asia.
The concept of this particular riverine network serving as a means
to link together a transnational community of artists and curators
has served as a way to claim a presence for certain Southeast Asian
artists by utilizing the mechanisms of the global contemporary art
circuit against the background of the Greater Mekong Subregion as an
economic and geographical entity. This paper contextualizes the growth
of the Mekong as a metaphor for a particular artistic community,
including artists from countries only recently charted on the global art
map, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma, and examines the ways
both official and curatorial orchestrations appear to have strengthened
or created ambivalence in a sense of regional cultural identity.
“A Simultaneous Validity of Coexisting Cultures”: J. Swaminathan,
the Bharat Bhavan, and Contemporaneity
Katherine F. Hacker, University of British Columbia
The innovative nature of the Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, India, is linked
with the vision of its founding director J. Swaminathan, yet it is rarely
discussed or analyzed. The Bharat Bhavan presents a remarkable
experiment in rethinking the exhibitionary order, fundamentally
overturning notions for displaying “tribal” (adivasi) cultures. As
Swaminathan writes: “We will try to define contemporaneity as a
simultaneous validity of coexisting cultures . . . We are therefore
treating adivasi art as contemporary art, whatever be the motivations
behind it.” Swaminathan’s promotion positioned tribal art not as
endangered or in need of preservation, recalling nationalist debates, but
rather as a vital creative impulse. Swaminathan’s intervention also had
significant consequences for newly recognized artists, notably Jangarh
Singh Shyam, who exhibited in Paris at Magiciens de la terre. While
Swaminathan’s polemical move arguing for indigeneity and individual
agency offered up a radically different paradigm and subject position in
the 1980s, how might we assess the import of his project today?
Interventions into Postcolonialism and Beyond:
A Call for New Sites, Objects, and Times
Chairs: Kivanc Kilinc, Izmir University of Economics;
Saygin Salgirli, Sabanci University
Traditional architectural and art-historical scholarship has contributed
extensively to the transfiguration of the West from a geographical
designation into a universal with various connotations of particularism.
In response, recent postcolonial studies have complicated the idea
of the West as a singular, central, and homogenous cultural milieu
by showing how the so-called periphery played a central role in the
making of major European cities through (post)colonial and (post)
imperial relations. Both European and postcolonial cities have been
explored as sites of endless encounters of art objects, architectural
styles, and building traditions, which circulate the world through the
agency of multiple global and local actors. Edward Said once coined
the term “voyage in” of the Third-World intellectual into the West as
an insurgent activity, leading to the displacement of the Eurocentric
logos. In a similar vein, over the past two decades postcolonial theory
has “voyaged in” into the least expected fields, displacing many
established categories and convictions. Such widespread application of
a theory should raise a series of questions, including, How far can we
mobilize our conceptual tools and rethink categories that are constantly
reinstated and uncritically applied to art and architectural history in
various contexts?
Rethinking Egypt as a Paradigm of Periphery: The Temple
of Dendur as the Center of Hybrid Culture at the Edge of a
Global Roman Empire
Erin Peters, University of Iowa
After Egypt’s annexation as a Roman province in 30 BCE, GrecoRoman authors made it the paradigm of periphery in contrast to the
Roman center of the empire. This literary tradition influenced modern
art-historical scholarship, which isolates Roman Egypt from the rest
of the Roman Empire. Rather than continue this separatist tradition,
this paper engages with incorporative modes of thought inspired by
postcolonial models of hybridity and globalization. It analyzes the
architectural and decorative elements at the Augustan Temple of
Dendur (ca. 15 BCE), which emphasize publically accessible areas.
This emphasis reflects a shift from the traditionally secretive nature
of Egyptian temples to more Roman ideas of public participation
and pilgrimage, resulting in new hybrid cultural traditions at Dendur.
Hybrid traditions are noted in discussions of art in other Roman
provinces, and this case study demonstrates that art in Roman Egypt
should be considered within a global Roman Empire.
Reanimating the Muted Site of Modernity
Shima Baradaran Mohajeri, Texas A&M University
Following the Iranian White Revolution of 1963 and its subsequent
development plans for a rapid industrialization, Tehran and Shiraz
became the sites for modernist architects to explore the canonical
tradition of modernity into a different cultural place. The architectural
projects developed within this vestigial site of coloniality are
often interpreted as part of the wholesale modernization ambitions
of the Shah and thus have been roundly criticized by scholars
as a “deadweight” or “archaic” form of modernity. Yet, careful
historiographic analysis suggests that these projects reinvigorate a
number of unmodern themes already present in Iranian architecture
while promising a disjunctive synthesis with the tenets of Western
modernity. Examined from the standpoint of the simultaneous
narrative of histories, these projects bring uneven cultural terrains into
synchronized events of modernity only to emphasize the promise of
genuine cultural dialogue.
Submerged Stories from Eastern Turkey: Dams, Archaeology,
and the Unnamed “Colonial”
Laurent Dissard, University of California, Berkeley
This presentation examines the building of dams along the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers in Eastern Turkey, and their accompanying
archaeological salvage projects, from the perspective of the “subaltern.”
Through a careful study of the published reports and photographs of
the rescue excavations, the paper scrutinizes the ways certain types
of evidence were selected and rendered visible, while others were
marginalized if not completely erased. Supposedly excluded from
the scientific process of archaeology, such traces are recovered and
these submerged facts found on the sidelines of archaeological science
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resurface. By investigating issues related to dams and development, as
well as the appropriation of archaeology in a context that resembles the
“colonial,” the paper uncovers the absence of Turkey’s marginalized
others, mentioned in the scientific reports of archaeology but whose
histories remain to be written.
Imagining Creative Teaching Strategies in Art History
Chairs: Lise Kjaer and Marit Dewhurst, The City College of New York,
Exciting discoveries and challenging new scholarship in the field of art
history are commonly taught in a pitch-dark classroom, in a classical
lecture style. This session addresses, rethinks, and critiques alternative
pedagogical strategies in teaching art history on both graduate and
undergraduate levels.
Acting Out: Reenactment in the Art-History Classroom
Jessica Santone, independent scholar
What happens when we bring the methods of the artists we study
into the classroom? The recent pedagogical turn in contemporary art,
particularly evident in performance practices, provides new impetus
to examine these creative strategies for inspiration in teaching art
history. This paper proposes that the strategies of contemporary artists
engaged with pedagogical performance practices have much to offer to
the teaching of art history across time periods and in various media. In
particular, such recent artistic strategies pay close attention to the role
of the participatory audience, whether through physical collaboration,
political actions, intersubjective engagement, or curated environments.
Through a series of short comparisons between recent performance
projects and concrete examples of embodied learning activities that
reenact art in the classroom, the paper argues that approaching students
in art-history classes as members of participant audiences enriches
individual learning experiences and transforms the classroom into a
collaborative space of creativity.
Modeling What the Professionals Do: Holding a Miniconference
in an Art-History Survey Course
Marie Gasper-Hulvat, East Stroudsburg University
As art historians, so much of what we accomplish in our professional
research can feel miles away from our classroom experiences. This
presentation outlines a highly successful project introducing firstsemester students to the basics of what art historians do. Using
pre-prepared ninety-second commercials, students created their
own version of an art-history conference based on independent
investigations of scholarly research. With this project, students
produced an analytical critique paper, along with a video
“advertisement” of their work, concerning a full-length journal article
of professional art-historical scholarship. Demonstrating their work
reading, analyzing, and critiquing texts that built upon overall course
content, students presented these advertisements in brief conference
sessions followed by Q&A. This project required thinking processes
and communication skills that could support career aspirations in any
field, yet in a format that gave students a taste of how art history as a
professional discipline operates.
Archive Paradigm Learning in Art History
Robert Petersen, Eastern Illinois University
Archive Paradigm Learning (APL) is based on the simple premise that
learning art history should be more like doing art history. In an APL
class students work collaboratively as if they were research teams
sorting through unidentified archive materials. This process forces them
to constantly check and rethink assumptions and work to find words
to describe what they see. The class has lectures, discussions, and
readings, but ultimately the students are tested on their ability to apply
the course content to the archive materials. Through the APL process
students engage in active learning and often even make new discoveries
as they see connections between works that would have remained
outside the set of possibilities deliberately designed in the course by
the instructor.
Guided Discovery for Research: Exploring, Evaluating,
and Selecting
Miriam Wattles and Chizu Morihara, University of California,
Santa Barbara
The research process for the very traditional assignment of the arthistory paper needs to be reinvented. Today’s undergraduates are lost
within a confusing environment of print and web-based information.
Through guided-discovery exercises—involving finding and evaluating
information, hands-on exploration, and critical thinking—students
not only become more interested in a course and produce prideworthy
work; they also gain a sense of keen curiosity and key skills needed
for life-long learning. Since the fall of 2010, our collaboration has
introduced task-specific research skills to classes ranging from a small
seminar of six students to a large survey of one hundred students.
Despite wide-ranging levels of proficiency, students see an increase in
their ability to critically examine resources, to think analytically, and to
write successful papers.
AP Art History and AP Studio Art
Working with the Sketchbook Page
Chairs: Yu Bong Ko, Tappan Zee High School and Dominican College;
Dale Clifford, Savannah College of Art and Design
How can students develop skills for looking at, thinking about, and
communicating ideas about works of art? This session considers the
use of concept-mapping technique for creating student-generated
sketchbook pages throughout the year. Concept mapping is a
graphical tool for organizing and visually representing knowledge
by diagramming relationships among ideas, concepts, images, and
words. It encourages students to work simultaneously with visual
and linguistic representations. In working with the sketchbook pages,
students annotate printed images of works of art, use lines to point to
parts of the image, draw additional pictures to explain relationships,
and write critical phrases to link concepts, construct meaning, and
communicate complex ideas. As a result, students develop a holistic
understanding of connections among concrete and symbolic concepts
and among visual and contextual evidence to support their analysis of
the work.
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Olfactory Art
Chairs: Adrian Kohn, Massachusetts College of Art and Design;
Smell is the most visceral of the sensory faculties, but olfactory
artworks are hard to find in most accounts of the history of art. In order
to redress that omission, this panel examines art of the nineteenth,
twentieth, and twenty-first centuries based in olfactory experience.
This exploration encompasses at least three approaches. First, we
study the aesthetic goals and technical practices of individual olfactory
artists. Second, we seek to understand the broader implications of these
artworks in terms of how we come to know the world through our
sense of smell. And third, we investigate what the label “olfactory art”
means as an art-critical and art-historical designation, specifically how
scent is analogous to other art mediums and also how it is aesthetically,
experientially, and psychologically different.
Perfume Is the Next Photography
As music is the art form that speaks to the sense of hearing and
painting to sight, perfume is the art form that speaks to the sense of
smell. The full acceptance by the academy, gallerists, and the public
of photography as art medium is relatively recent. Scent will be the
next major artistic medium to be recognized as such. Its artists have
always worked within the stylistic modes of mainstream art history.
Aimé Guerlain’s Jicky (1889) and Jacques Cavallier’s L’Eau d’Issey
(1992) are clearly of the Romanticist and Minimalist schools. The
barrier to recognition—comprehension—of works of scent as works
of art by perfumers, who are the full equals of sculptors, composers,
and architects, has been simply a language to make olfactory art
understandable aesthetically and intellectually. Apply the art-historical
language we already have, and scent is revealed as—instantly,
obviously—art.
What Sound Does a Scent Make?
Clara Ursitti, Glasgow School of Art
My art practice focuses on the nonvisual, and I have been working
with fragrance since the early 1990s. I present some of my scent-based
installation and performance work and discuss this in relation to some
thoughts on recent advances in the scientific study of the senses through
a crossmodal sensory model. Much of this talk is based on research
conducted while I was the Arts Council of England Helen Chadwick
Fellow at the University of Oxford, where my thinking was both
challenged and affirmed by the Crossmodal Research Laboratory. The
importance of “being there” and the experiential is emphasized.
The Use of Smell in Art, an “Olfactology” Art Research
Peter De Cupere, MAD-Faculty, Hasselt
Smell offers many possibilities for use in the arts. It can add meaning to
a piece or make a statement and explore a concept on its own. Through
several examples, this presentation provides an overview of how smells
can be used and the problems one may encounter when working with
them. Some of these difficulties arise not only from environmental
conditions such as temperature, humidity, and materials, but also
from social aspects, cultural habits, and psychological connotations,
all of which form the complicated context of an olfactory artwork.
After conducting creative research in a lab and in an art studio into
the activation and continuity of smells, it is clear from the reactions
of visitors that smell still has many unknown characteristics that can
advance the art world.
Olfactory Landscapes
Christian Stayner, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
The disciplines of landscape architecture, urbanism, and design have
long privileged purely visual and allographic tools for describing and
theorizing inhabitable space. Through rereadings of various canonical
projects in landscape history, this paper foregrounds smell as a rich
design and historical methodology. Working within this framework,
the paper also recounts a series of olfactory landscapes I codesigned
with Jennifer Bonner for a large urban public park in Canada and an
installation at the Istanbul Modern Museum of Art.
Inhaling the History of Art: On the Role of Olfaction
during the Avant-Garde
Caro Verbeek, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and Royal Academy
of Arts, The Hague
Several artists have incorporated an olfactory dimension in their work
from the beginning of the twentieth century, a practice that has gone
nearly unnoticed by most art historians. The “lower” senses were the
main focus of several manifestos, theories, and works of art by artists
such as the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Dadaist and
Surrealist Marcel Duchamp. This paper describes the context that paved
the way for this sensory interest in smell. Three historical examples
of olfactory experimentation illustrate different ways scent was
applied: Giacomo Balla’s manifesto Arte degli Odori of ca. 1916; the
International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938 at the Galerie des BeauxArts in Paris; and Marcel Duchamp’s Belle Haleine of 1921. These
works of art demonstrate that certain smells can become nonlingual
symbols that enter our emotional brain and simultaneously address our
(cognitive) collective memory and consequently represent concepts
and/or (national) identity.
The Olfactory Imaginary in Modern and Contemporary Art
Jim Drobnick, Ontario College of Art and Design University
Even as sensory aesthetics becomes a burgeoning genre of artistic
practice, little has been written about its art-historical precedents,
especially with regard to the sense of smell. Focusing on the era of
modernism and the avant-garde, this paper provides an overview of
how odors, perfumes, aromas, and fragrances have been featured in a
period often discussed in purely visual terms. While the appearance
of olfactory artworks was intermittent in the early twentieth century,
a prominent concern with smell can be discerned in the numerous
mentions of odors in artists’ writings, demonstrating that an olfactory
imaginaire had been in preparation long before its actual blossoming
in current artistic practice. This paper traces the presence of smell in
several of the heroic trajectories of modern art, such as the evolution of
abstraction, the dialectics of art and popular culture, and the infusing of
art with sociopolitical relevance.
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ARTspace
The Imaginary City in the Twenty-First Century
Chairs: Ayse Hazar Koksal, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University;
Ayse Nur Erek, Yeditepe University
This panel reflects on the ongoing debates about art and the urban
imagery, concerning the city with its past and its present. In regard
to the discussions on global cities as nodes of an immense network
of commercial, political, and cultural transactions, this panel focuses
specifically on the globalizing cities—where the urban imagery
of a city contributes to its transnational, historical, and cultural
conditioning in terms of mapping the global hierarchy. Thus we frame
the session on what the urban imagery performs for the cities, revealing
“other modernities” that become visible through the processes of
globalization.
High-Speed Urbanization: Exploring the Rise of Urban
Culture in Contemporary São Paulo
Alexander Lamazares, Bronx Community College,
This paper offers a cultural analysis of contemporary urban spaces
in São Paulo as a contact zone between high culture and low culture,
addressing both its production and reception. It looks at the city’s
rapidly changing visual culture, with its mixture of high and low,
elitist and populist, artistic and applied. There are two factors causing
perpetual change: economic gain and social segregation. This paper
examines the revival of São Paulo, which is under way closer to
the city center, the “bad” side of Avenida Paulista, the active artery
that separates downtown from upscale neighborhoods in the city’s
southwest zone. It considers street culture along Augusta Street. Well
into this decade it was a red-light district, full of streetwalkers and
sex clubs. It has also become a gay neighborhood, a teenage-hangout
district, even an old-ladies-walking-their-dogs district. This paper
analyzes this urban space as a center for Brazilian modernity.
Flânerie’s Art and Measure of the Globalizing City
Kathryn Kramer, State University of New York College at Cortland
Flânerie’s original proving ground was nineteenth-century modernizing
Paris. Yet twenty-first-century artists, often in collaboration with
social scientists, have embraced the old walking practice for a
new, globalizing, urbanizing century. Today’s flânerie establishes
a multisensory connectivity among individuals and objects in the
streets of world cities well beyond the West, producing in the process
imaginative analyses of their spaces as well as vibrant documentations
of their transformations. This paper offers a brief history of this revival,
and focuses on how current global flânerie constructs especially
dynamic urban imaginaries in aspirational world cities that have
not attained conclusive world-city status according to conventional
measures. It takes Shanghai, an ambitious yet still aspirational world
city, as a case study. Special attention is paid to flânerie’s resonance
in the context of Shanghainese urban regeneration, creative industry
clusters, the Shanghai Biennales, and Expo 2010 Shanghai.
The Negotiation of Interstitial Space in the Glocal City
at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Gabriel Gee, Franklin College
The acceleration of time-space compression in the late twentieth
century has furthered an increasing tension in the contemporary urban
fabric caused by an opposition between transnational global fluxes
and the defense of site-specific identities. To counter homogenization
trends, two very different stances have articulated a resistance intent
on promoting an ongoing heterogenization of the world. First, cultural
heritage has been heralded as an economic incentive to be protected
and even constructed. Second, local urban identities and textures could
be explored as disruptive models of sociocultural development. This
paper is concerned with the role played by artistic practices in the
alternative construction and imagination of the city at the dawn of the
twenty-first century. It identifies interstitial space as a privileged locus
of aesthetic intervention. It discusses its capacity to divert the flattening
impact of homogenizing tendencies and unveils new material and
spiritual objects in the urban fabric.
The City as Contact Zone
Bettina Lockemann, Braunschweig University of Art
The photographic project Contact Zone, photographed in Japanese
cities in 2006, shows an image of Japan that focuses not on aspects of
otherness but on things familiar. However, the series does not aim at a
mapping of structures and locations; rather, it shows a view of Japanese
cities that is rather uncommon in pictures by Western photographers.
The implemented documentary style gives the viewers an opportunity
to engage with what is visible and the atmosphere that is created rather
than supplying information on architectural or historical structures.
Thus, the visible is always intertwined with invisible structures—for
example, societal, historical, or cultural—that lie underneath what
is depicted. This paper discusses how aspects of the visible and the
invisible inform my photographic images and how this approach of
artistic documentary photography is reflecting upon the perception of
the global city.
Ancient Greek and Roman Art
Chair: Christine Kondoleon, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Cults in Common? Greek-Italic Religious Connections in
South Italian Vase Painting
Keely Elizabeth Heuer, independent scholar
Red-figure vases produced in Southern Italy were made initially to
fulfill the needs of Greek settlers in the region, but most South Italian
vases of the fourth century BC are from areas controlled by native
peoples. A significant number of South Italian vases from non-Greek
areas in Apulia and Campania are decorated with figures in Italic dress,
usually groups of women and armed young men. These vases were
deliberately marketed to an Italic consumer, and thus the repeated
presence of Greek ritual objects, often Dionysiac, in the hands of the
non-Greeks represented on them is striking and provides evidence for
shared religious elements between Greeks and the Italic population,
the extent of which has been highly contested. This paper analyzes this
iconography in light of the popularity of Dionysos and other mystery
cults among the Greek inhabitants of Southern Italy as well as finds in
Italic sanctuaries.
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The Recycling and Restoration of Funerary Monuments in
Late Classical Athens
Rachel Kousser, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
In recent years studies of Classical Athenian grave monuments
have focused on questions of gender, patronage, and civic selfrepresentation. They have, however, neglected critical issues
concerning the ritual function and materiality of these large-scale
painted marble sculptures. This investigation of the recycling and
restoration of funerary images in the late fourth century BC reveals
the vulnerability of these seemingly permanent memorials as well as
the mutability of their landscape settings. With a focus on damage and
reuse during the Greeks’ struggle with the kingdom of Macedon, this
research highlights how these private monuments could be appropriated
for the public good. In so doing, the paper demonstrates the ultimate
power of state authority over these symbols of elite privilege. This has
important implications for our understanding of the monuments’ social
role.
What Demeter Wore to the Eleusinian Mysteries: Cult and the
Art of Dress on Makron’s Skyphos in the British Museum
Anthony Mangieri, Salve Regina University
The Athenian vase painter Makron depicts the goddess Demeter
wearing an elaborately decorated himation over her chiton on a redfigure skyphos in London (British Museum E140). Eagles, dolphins,
panthers, chariots, and a winged figure embellish her garment on this
Late Archaic vase. This paper explores how Makron uses sartorial
decoration for narrative, poetic, intertextual, and ritual purposes and
effects. The carefully selected motifs on Demeter’s garment add new
layers of meaning to the scene and expand our understanding of the
Eleusinian cult. The images on Demeter’s mantle serve as semiotic
signs that visually express the concepts of descent, search, and ascent
that are central to the Mysteries, and bring to mind passages in the
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, thus prompting further storytelling.
Makron’s vase allows us to study how the representation of embellished
textiles in vase painting illuminates ancient Greek cultic beliefs and
acts as well as artistic intention.
The Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum: Memory
Distortion in Imperial Rome and Modern Scholarship
Maggie Popkin, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
This paper analyzes our primary accounts of the events in 202, which
disagree about whether a triumph transpired. The Arch of Septimius
is the source of these contradictions. Its visual appearance (sculptural
decoration, inscription, architectural form, even location) seeks to
make clear that it celebrates Septimius’s Parthian triumph—whether
one occurred or not. Drawing on research on memory distortion, this
paper argues that the arch sought to create false memories of a Severan
triumph—and that the confusion in ancient and modern sources
suggests that it succeeded.
Rhetoric and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Gandharan Sculpture
Kristen Seaman, Kennesaw State University
The sculpture of ancient Gandhara (in what is now Afghanistan and
Pakistan) is remarkable for its display of cross-cultural exchange
between the Greco-Roman world and the East. Such exchange began
when Alexander the Great conquered Baktria and Gandhara in the
late fourth century BCE, and it continued during the Hellenistic and
Roman periods, through the resulting Indo-Greek kingdoms and trade
routes with the Mediterranean. Previous scholarship about Gandharan
sculpture has addressed its Greek and Roman styles and stone carving.
Yet there is one neglected aspect of cross-cultural exchange in
Gandharan art: rhetoric. This paper explores the use of Greco-Roman
rhetorical techniques in Gandharan sculpture, focusing on the technique
of diegema, or narrative. A possible mechanism of transmission for
the techniques was the widely circulated rhetorical handbooks called
“Progymnasmata” (preliminary rhetorical exercises) that provided the
basis for Greco-Roman education in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
Wood, Glass, Wax, Stone: Beyond Panel Painting
in the Northern Renaissance and Baroque
Chair: Ellen Konowitz, State University of New York at New Paltz
The past fifteen years have seen important studies of Northern
sculpture, stained glass, metalwork, and other media that signal a shift
away from the traditional focus on panel painting as a measure of
achievement in Northern Renaissance and Baroque art. The field has
changed due to contributions including major exhibitions of tapestry
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and stained glass (Metropolitan
Museum of Art and J. Paul Getty Museum) and new scholarship on
manuscript illumination and on sculpture in stone, wood, and gold.
Moreover, scholars now recognize that panel paintings were not
typically intended to be viewed in isolation but in the context of other
media such as glass, carvings, and weavings, for instance, in a church
interior, a government building, a domestic chamber, or a pleasure
garden. This panel explores a range of dimensions—including political,
social, devotional, and secular—of Netherlandish and German works
of art in various media and examines larger issues presented by
intermedial projects.
The Aesthetics of Spectacle: The Bruges Mantlepiece to Charles V
Ethan Matt Kavaler, University of Toronto
One of the most magnificent manifestations of governmental art of
the early sixteenth century is the carved mantelpiece (1528–31) in
the Bruges Vrije. Dominated by five life-size oak statues of Charles
V and his grandparents, the work stands witness to Charles’s natural
inheritance of both the Burgundian/Hapsburg lands and those
of Spain. Situated against coats of arms, medallions, and other
elaborate ornament in the latest antique manner, the statues render
the mantelpiece almost a crystallization of a procession—recalling
the presence both in person and in representation of dynastic figures
in joyous entries amid the fanfare of trumpets and triumphal banners,
arches, and stages. As such, the mantelpiece refers both to ritual actions
and to standing images—and mediates the presence of Charles V
himself. The antique in the Netherlands was only then taking shape,
and the Bruges mantelpiece helped establish this manner as a mode of
political authority.
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Material as Medium and Meaning: Margaret of Austria’s
Church at Brou as Gesamtkunstwerk
Laura D. Gelfand, Utah State University
Time Travel: Automata and Waxworks in the Labyrinth
Gardens of Early Modern Amsterdam
Angela Vanhaelen, McGill University
This paper offers a synthetic analysis of the iconographic imagery and
stylistic symbolism encoded in the glass, stone, and other materials in
Margaret of Austria’s royal monastery of Brou in Bourg-en-Bresse,
completed in 1532. This results in a richer understanding of the
building and its commissioner, and how materials, imagery, and style
work together to communicate meaning. Margaret’s political and
spiritual motives are revealed in the building’s iconographic program,
in the materials used, and in the stylistic vocabulary. A variety of
styles from deliberately Archaic to distinctly Flemish and Spanish
are used in specific sites throughout the building. Here ornament is
not simply decoration; it functions as a stylistic signifier pointing to
and highlighting Margaret’s Burgundian and Habsburg bloodlines.
Examining the entirety of the church and its contents enhances our
understanding of Margaret of Austria’s original goals and how the
completed building successfully achieved them.
Civic descriptions of Amsterdam devoted pages to distinctive sites
called doolhoven or labyrinths: pleasure gardens constructed in the
courtyards of private inns. In the mid-seventeenth century, numerous
visitors to Amsterdam described these urban maze gardens in their
travel accounts, especially the novel attractions encountered there.
These included multicursal hedge mazes, waxworks, fountains
embellished with unusual hydraulic effects, and automata—mechanical
figures made of wood or metal that moved “as if they were alive,” the
guidebooks proclaim. This paper asks why these inventive works in
metal, wax, wood, and water have not been taken up in art-historical
examinations, and challenges existing scholarship, which disparages
the doolhoven as sites of popular entertainment for uneducated people
and children. By analyzing how itinerant visitors moved through
the maze garden, the paper assesses it as an innovative spatial and
temporal apparatus that aimed to incorporate new technologies and
understandings of the human body into society.
In Their Place: The Spaces of the Peasants in the
Très Riches Heures
Lynn F. Jacobs, University of Arkansas
In the Très Riches Heures peasants are depicted within defined
boundaries, which differ from the unbounded spaces in scenes of
aristocratic life. The images demonstrate how landscape space can
become implicated with social class ideology. The spatial structures
here articulate the values of a society that saw itself as composed of
three estates—and of an elite that wanted peasants to stay at the bottom
of this social order. However, this manuscript’s imagery of peasants
within enclosed spaces belies the socioeconomic realities of the
fifteenth century, when the French countryside experienced profound
social change marked by increasing social tensions and improvement
in the peasant’s economic and political rights. Hence, this manuscript
visually affirms the boundaries of class just when these boundaries
were beginning to crumble.
Nature vs. History: The Imagery of the Ruin in Sixteenthand Early-Seventeenth-Century German Intarsia
Andrew Morrall, Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts,
Design History, Material Culture
This talk examines the imagery of ruins in German sixteenth- and
early-seventeenth-century works of art, concentrating on the fashion
for depopulated landscapes of ruination that covered the rich intarsia
surfaces of South German Kunstschränke, those artfully designed
chests made to contain antique coins, cameos, and other artifacts of the
Kunstkammer and the collector’s study. In contrast to normative Italian
and Netherlandish traditions of displaying ruins, grounded in depictions
of ancient Rome, this imagery is more generic and semantically looser,
suggestive of a larger theme beyond the pathos of the passing of
empires: that of the triumph of a primal, rampant nature over human
history, of a struggle between nature and civilization as an underlying
force in human destiny.
Model Images
Chair: Juliet Koss, Scripps College
“The model, one could say, predicts,” wrote Georges Canguilhem in
1961, invoking the capacity of any model—whether architectural,
scientific, or conceptual—to function as a proposal for the shape and
scope of a creation to be carried out in the future. Like images, models
may also represent completed constructions, yet even so they encourage
reconfiguration and interaction. This indeterminate temporality derives
partly from a slippery sense of scale: models suggest control over
structures and events that may take place (or may have taken place) at
another size, elsewhere. What, then, happens when a model appears
within an image? Visual representations of models—including drawing,
painting, photography, film, and newer media—have long engaged
with, and often profoundly altered, this already uncertain temporality
and scale, and images themselves can operate as models for future
creations or as conceptual models. This session explores the relation of
images and models to ask how the understanding of these two forms of
representation might inflect interpretations of their interaction.
Rivals, Catalysts, Accomplices
Reinhard Wendler, University of the Arts, Zurich
Like the combination of word and image, that of model and image
produces a third medium with its own specific rules and possibilities;
both components generate meaning via “interpretative gaps for viewers
to fill in” (Jordanova 2004) and function as “calls to action […] with
a claim on us to share in [their] mode of action” (Wartofsky 1968).
The interplay of models and images could also be considered a visual
force field with the potential to activate viewers using encouragement,
seduction, or deception. Remarkably, given the conceptual affinity of
these two forms of representation, the use of images can also challenge
the perspectives generated by traditional model theory. Models—like
images themselves—are far more than mere representations of some
preexisting entity or structure, yet their bewildering vigor may be more
easily hidden behind time-honored philosophical phrases than behind
the surface of an image.
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Drawing Michelangelo’s Models
Carolyn Y. Yerkes, Columbia University
Michelangelo’s architectural projects are a major focus of the collection
of late-sixteenth-century drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art known as the Scholz Scrapbook: a series of plans, sections, and
details documenting nearly every major work the architect designed in
Florence and Rome. This comprehensive approach suggests that the
draftsmen aimed to produce a complete architectural survey dedicated
exclusively to Michelangelo’s work. Because so many of his buildings
remained unfinished when the Scholz drawings were made, they
relied on other forms of documentation for Michelangelo’s unbuilt
designs, including drawings, prints, and, most important, models. This
paper discusses the drawings of Michelangelo’s models in the Scholz
Scrapbook and proposes that these include studies of a lost model for
St. Peter’s; it explores how the idea of comprehensiveness came to be
considered a goal of architectural representation and how, as a result,
architectural models came to be viewed as historical evidence.
dating sites. Yet since its inception, photography has also functioned as
a medium of manipulation, capable of staging fantasies, embellishing
half-truths, and asserting outright lies. These distortions suggest a
counterhistory of photography, whose key terms are not “absolute
truth” and “perfect identity” but “doubt” and “uncertainty.” In this
alternative history of the medium, deceptions sometimes labored under
the guise of factuality and, at others, flaunted their artifice. Early uses
of photography were as attuned to its myth-making capabilities as to
its claims to authenticity. With the radical mutability afforded by our
current digital age, the role of photographic illusion has become even
more compelling. The attendant doubts about reality and falsehood
have been nearly transformed into an aesthetic fascination with digital
artifice. Given this long but relatively underexplored history of fudging
in emulsion, this double session investigates the historical dimensions
of photographic doubt and interrogates pictures of illusion, fantasy,
and deceit, as well as moments of indecision, confusion, and suspicion.
Talks cover a range of historical, material, and theoretical perspectives
and provide analyses across media.
Didactic Dismemberment in Seventeenth-Century England
Kimberley Skelton, independent scholar
Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects
Lisa Saltzman, Bryn Mawr College
Early modern architectural models were contradictory objects,
simultaneously evoking well-ordered buildings and negating that
order; while theorists argued that models were definitive miniatures,
these miniatures invited disorder when disassembled by revealing
potentially irrelevant, distracting details. During the seventeenth
century, distraction came to be thought of as a fundamental risk to
human processes of understanding, as philosophers argued that sensory
perceptions could lead the viewer’s rational mind astray. This malleable
viewer was thus vulnerable to control through manipulation of the
physical environment. The late-seventeenth-century English architect
Roger North, among others, developed two-dimensional drawn replicas
of models intending to immobilize the viewer, avert distraction, and
instruct about design. Examining North’s drawings and writings
alongside contemporaneous philosophical discussions of human
perception, this paper reveals how the paradoxes of the early modern
model became, in two-dimensional drawing, a means of creating a new
sensory viewer.
This paper explores the idea of photography, as it has taken shape in the
historical and cultural imagination, as a means of establishing a new
framework for thinking about contemporary photographic practice.
Specifically concerned with the question of how the photographic
image has functioned to secure identity across modernity and the
implications of that history for the present, the paper proposes an
unlikely genealogy for photography, one that begins with the infamous
early modern case of imposture involving Martin Guerre (fortuitously
born Daguerre), best known through the cinematic adaptation of the
historical work of Natalie Zemon Davis. Part fact, part fiction, much
like photography itself, the paper weaves together a tale of imposters
and automata, images and identity, historians and detectives to press the
conception of photography in new directions.
Model Use
Maria Gough, Harvard University
This paper examines how the Soviet avant-garde artist Gustav Klutsis
(Gustavs Klucis) repurposed his unbuilt design proposals for a
radiophonic Moscow into the realm of print media in the mid-1920s,
focusing in particular on the role of metamorphosis in his graphic and
montage processes.
Photography in Doubt, Part I
Chairs: Sabine Tania Kriebel, University College Cork;
Andres Mario Zervigon, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Photography, in Edgar Allan Poe’s estimation, unfailingly provides
an “absolute truth” and a “perfect identity of aspect with the thing
represented.” Guided by such nineteenth-century perceptions,
photography has long operated socially and legally as a medium of
documentation and verifiability—on passports and driver’s licenses,
in print journalism and online reportage, in courtrooms and internet
The Doubtful User: W. H. F. Talbot’s Early Attempts of the
Advancement of Photography
Mirjam Brusius, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science;
Chitra Ramalingam, University of Cambridge
Doubt in photography has always existed from the perspective of the
user as much as in the picture itself. One of those who experienced
this distrust in the new technique was in fact one of the medium’s
inventors, W. H. F. Talbot—a gentleman amateur who enthusiastically
tried to advance the medium within his wide circle of Victorian savants.
Talbot thought of photography as the perfect medium for fields such
as botany, the antique, or the natural sciences, fields in which he was
himself astute. But the doubtful attitudes of the scholars at increasingly
professionalized institutions, who were his potential targets, challenge
assumptions about widespread trust in photographic truth. This paper
pays close attention to two incidents in about 1850 at two crucial sites
in London where Talbot was active and where the discrepancy between
photographic ideal and usage become apparent: the Royal Institution
and the British Museum.
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The Authority of the “Never-Seen”: Abstraction as Obfuscation in
Surrealist Photograms
Susan Laxton, University of California, Riverside
Border Crossings: Rethinking Identity Questions in
Art and Architecture
Avant-garde photograms, which appeared almost simultaneously
in the early 1920s, negotiate two opposing terms, “abstraction” and
“photography.” Of these, Man Ray’s Rayographs are distinctive for
their sustained exploitation of the theoretical implications of the
form: its reversals of perceptual conventions; its paradoxical fusion of
ephemerality and materiality; its spectral implications; and above all,
its unprecedented view of the “never seen,” an aspect of the medium
that seemed to attest to latent, obfuscated forms beyond perception,
analogous to unconscious operations. The doubt that this new model
threw on the terms of photography radically expanded the medium at
the level of theory and practice, but it also yanked the metaphysical rug
out from under nonobjective art, refracting the terms of modernism and
the critical position of avant-garde movements that sought to reform it.
In recent years the opening of most European borders has blurred some
traditional distinctions between people of one culture and those of
another. There and elsewhere, past and present, are economic émigrés,
war refugees, those who moved to avoid being in a minority within
redrawn borders, political refugees, enslaved people, children of guest
workers, expatriates, resettled victims of calamity, and multiracial
people. Given the long-existing impurity of identity, and also CAA’s
attention to artistic identity-creation at recent annual meetings, we ask
how and why identity is created by images and buildings at various
times and places. This session addresses art or architecture that reflects
or questions aspects of national and group definition.
Picturing Doubt: A Cold War Theory of Photography
John J. Curley, Wake Forest University
This paper explores cold-war visuality: the ways that cold-war factions
desperately attempted to manage photographic meaning for their own
ideological ends. The conflict required stable images, yet the globalized
image culture of the 1950s only exacerbated photography’s ambiguity.
Put simply, the cold war repressed photography’s inherent doubt. Such
contradictions emerge in a consideration of the relationship between
photography and Abstract painting at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. In the mid-1950s MoMA supported the international tour
of two very different types of exhibitions: American Abstract paintings
and the photographic The Family of Man. While scholars have explored
the implications of these individual exhibitions, their consideration
together—across mediums and discursive spaces—dramatizes how
painterly doubt was the dialectical other to photographic certainty.
As the 1960s progressed, however, the cold-war image could no
longer sustain these contradictions, a condition registered by MoMA’s
changing attitudes toward photography.
Frater meus, patria mea: Passionate Attachment and
Photographic Doubt
Eve Meltzer, New York University
“Arnold liked pictures.” When Elaine, the wife of the convicted
pedophile Arnold Friedman, makes this admission in Capturing the
Friedmans, her words hit us between the eyes. While pictures are easy
to “like,” “liking” here refers to child pornography and abuse, to which
Arnold and his son confessed in 1989. It also points to the relations
that shaped both father and son at the core of their being, for such
pictures—although never visible within the film—visualize something
of these most formative and, in effect, indubitable attachments.
Departing from the work of scholars who theorize subjectivity as
formed by invisible psychic bonds, this paper considers the relationship
between affect and photographs of groups, from the familial to the
national. By picturing the structure of vital attachments, photographs
(from those Arnold liked privately to those shot at Abu Ghraib, destined
to be public) make space for questioning and doubt.
Chair: Carol Herselle Krinsky, New York University
Between Shores: Henry O. Tanner, Trans-Atlanticism,
and the Margins of Space
Jeffrey G. Richmond-Moll, University of Delaware
Henry Ossawa Tanner lived a life between two shores of the Atlantic—
America and France—and his navigation of these national boundaries
deeply affected his art. Tanner pursued his prolific body of biblical
paintings solely during this time “in between,” never painting a
religious scene on American soil. While some have asserted that he
“never turned his back on race,” it seems that he left America for
Europe in 1891 to transcend race. A trans-Atlantic vision of space,
when placed alongside the precedent of betweenness in theology
(Christians as pilgrims wandering in the present age), allowed Tanner
to transcend racial rhetoric. Tanner’s sojourning religious pictures
thus became universal statements about human experience, national
and spiritual belonging, and particularly the shifting experience of
nationality at home and abroad.
Edward S. Morse’s Writings on Nineteenth-Century
Japanese Culture as Ethnographic Allegory
Jonathan M. Reynolds, Barnard College-Columbia University
In 1877 the American Edward Morse was invited to teach marine
zoology in Japan. Over the next six years, Morse conducted research
in his primary field, travelled extensively, assembled a major ceramics
collection, and studied Japanese architecture and material culture.
Two publications became canonical resources for English-speaking
audiences interested in Japan. Morse sought to record traditional
practices that he believed were under siege because of Japan’s rapid
westernization. His writings are characteristic of a genre of amateur
ethnography of non-Western cultures produced by European and
American writers in the late nineteenth century. Morse’s work can
be viewed not just as a nostalgic elegy to a traditional culture on the
threshold of extinction but also allegorically as a critique of impact of
the modernization process in America.
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The Transformation of Hungarian Koloszvar into
Romanian Cluj-Napolca
Samuel D. Albert, independent scholar
After World War I large swaths of what had been Hungarian lands were
suddenly small parts of new countries. This transfer was of institutions
as well as of people. Into the remaining artifacts of Hungarian
Koloszvar, a new Romanian identity was inserted. How can an
already-constructed city fabric be reimagined? Various strategies were
employed: a new building style unrelated to traditional Transylvanian
forms was introduced; the urban fabric was modified; the new
Romanian Orthodox Church was built on a square formerly dominated
by Habsburg-era buildings; a new University House rendered the old
administration building insignificant. This paper presents strategies
used by newly empowered Romanian architects and their attempts
to envisage a Transylvanian building style, neither Hungarian nor
Romanian.
Medicina y Marginales: Middle-Eastern Diaspora and
Immigrant Interventions in Modern Argentina
Caroline M. Wolf, Rice University
Argentina’s immigration policies in the mid-nineteenth century were
part of the government’s vision to “whiten” the country and supply
agricultural labor. However, a portion of mass migration to the southern
cone came from Ottoman provinces. Middle Eastern immigrants
disrupted the nation’s plans to colonize the pampas and established
non-European collectivities within Buenos Aires. As a result, the
community faced discriminatory regulations. Argentine governments
manipulated medical discourses in an attempt to control non-European
immigrant bodies and spaces, and particularly turco migration. This
paper considers the Hotel des Immigrantes as well as the Isla Martin
Garcia’s quarantine station and lazaretto as part of the government’s
effort to control immigrant bodies. Ultimately, Middle Eastern migrants
successfully countered discriminatory discourses and established their
own social and medical identity within the city.
The Crossroads of Palmyra: Historic Preservation,
Vernacular Architecture, and Civilizing Missions
Heghnar Watenpaugh, University of California, Davis
Palmyra, Tadmur in Arabic, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was
transformed during the French Mandate in Syria from 1922 to 1946.
The French planned to evacuate sedentary and seminomadic (Bedouin)
inhabitants from the Roman-era ruins, create a modern city for them
nearby, and excavate the ancient remains, a project later completed by
the independent Syrian state. This engendered a struggle between the
colonial power and the indigenous residents, and involved the elite
(local, Arab) intellectuals and politicians based in Syria’s large cities,
who felt both fear and contempt for Bedouins while casting them in
heroic roles within Arab-nationalist narratives.
Myth and Modernism: New Perspectives on the
1913 Armory Show
Chairs: Marilyn Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt, New-York Historical
Society; Stephanie A. D’Alessandro, The Art Institute of Chicago
The year 2013 marks the centenary of the International Exhibition
of Modern Art ( “the Armory Show”), which took place in New York
and traveled to Chicago and Boston. Organized by a small group
of American artists, the exhibition introduced the American public
to European avant-garde art, while offering American artists an
opportunity to exhibit their work outside of the few available galleries,
the National Academy of Design, or similar venues. In 2013 the NewYork Historical Society celebrates this anniversary with an exhibition
and catalogue titled The Armory Show at 100. Milton Brown laid the
foundation for Armory Show studies in his 1963 book, The Story of the
Armory Show. In the past fifty years there has been surprisingly little
substantial scholarship on the exhibition, with a few notable exceptions.
As a result, a body of myth and received wisdom has developed around
the show, and the subject is long overdue for a thorough reexamination.
Who Bought What at the Armory Show: Forgotten and
Not-So-Famous Collectors
Vivian Endicott Barnett, independent scholar
The list of collectors who bought American and European art at the
Armory Show includes famous names: John Quinn, Arthur Jerome
Eddy, Katherine S. Dreier, Stephen C. Clark, Lillie P. Bliss, Albert
C. Barnes, and even Henry Clay Frick. But who were the other
people? Not only lawyers and businessmen but also artists acquired
paintings and sculpture. Thus, the question arises whether their taste
in collecting reflected or differed from their own work. To date little
attention has been paid to the many women recorded as purchasers:
Elizabeth Cheever, Clara Davidge, Lydia Hays, Helen Loewenstein,
Ethelyn McKinney, Harriet Monroe, Eliza Radeke, Gertrude Watson,
Mary Livingston Willard, and Caroline Wilson. Who were they and
what did they collect? Rather than focus on boldface names, the paper
investigates unknown or unfamiliar collectors. Emphasis is placed on
those who collected what was considered to be modern art.
How Futurism Got Left Out at the Armory: A Case Study
in the Politics of Exhibition and Its Repercussions
Zoe Marie Jones, Humboldt State University
In 1912 the painter Gino Severini, a founding member of the Italian
Futurist movement, received an invitation to participate in the Armory
Show. However, despite an initial announcement by Walt Kuhn in
December 1912 that the Futurists would be part of the exhibition,
the Futurist chief, F. T. Marinetti, ultimately forbade his artists to
participate. As a result, Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. 2 became associated with a generic brand of “futurist”
painting that left the Italian movement without a presence in America.
The Armory Show was instrumental in shaping society’s view of
twentieth-century art both for what was included in its program
and also for what was left out. In the case of the Futurists, this had
monumental repercussions for the success of the movement in
contemporary circles and also in later scholarship on the avant-garde.
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American Beauty: The New York Times, the Armory Show,
and Artistic Authority
Alexis L. Boylan, University of Connecticut
Possible Taxonomies of Hyperbridity and an Introduction to
Contradiction Aesthetics, Now that “Friend” Is a Verb
Robert Lawrence, University of South Florida
On October 5, 1913, the editors of the New York Times began a contest
in search of “The Girl of To-Day,” with artists and illustrators as
judges. Beauty contests were not uncommon, but the the Times’ editors
claimed this was no mere beauty contest; in seeking a woman who
best embodied the qualities that constituted American-ness, the editors
called upon artists to judge because, they argued, artists came with
special authority to know beauty and the nation. Yet, in their choice of
artists, the editors broke with the voices that had dominated the artistic
conversation surrounding the Armory Show months earlier. The Girl
of To-Day was an attempt to undermine much of the critical narrative
constructed around the Armory Show. The editors and participating
artists sought, through this contest, to reorient and reclaim authority in
constructing ideas of modernity, beauty, and art.
To outline possible critical approaches to the emerging aesthetics
arising from the combination of established physical media with
internet components, and to set a context for the presenters and the
discussion that follow, this paper introduces key issues and historical
precedents informing this new hybrid form. Discussed are early hybrid
projects including works by Kac, Muntadas, Goldberg/Santarromana,
Hansen/Rubin, and Elahi, as well as examples from my own fourteenyear hybrid practice. This survey represents the range of modalities
at play, and suggests some key critical intersections with other
contemporary practice including video, installation, performance,
mobile media, tactical media, intervention, and other relational
practices. In a broader cultural sense, it poses questions about how
hybrid art might offer a uniquely articulate examination of the now
normalized contradictions inherent in real/virtual blurring in all aspects
of contemporary life.
Beyond the “Shingle Factory”: The Armory Show in the
American Mass Media after 1913
Melissa Renn, Fogg Museum, Harvard University Art Museums
While much has been written on how the mass media covered
the Armory Show in its opening year, to date there has been no
comprehensive study of how the exhibition was presented in the
popular press in the following decades. Drawing on new archival
research, this paper explores how the Armory Show was portrayed
in the American mass media after 1913. Looking closely at the many
articles on the Armory Show published in periodicals such as Life,
Time, and Vogue from the 1930s through the 1970s, this paper compares
the varied ways the exhibition was presented and re-presented in the
popular press, largely as a controversial event; the mass media played
a significant role in both mythologizing and canonizing the Armory
Show, and the press shaped both the critical and the popular reception
of this landmark exhibition of modern art.
ARTspace
Pieces and Bits: Hybrid Art that Combines Physical
Forms with Internet Components
Chair: Robert Lawrence, University of South Florida
This panel gathers theorists and practitioners to consider critically
emergent art practices that negotiate frictions and slippages between
the virtual and physical. It looks at historical precedents and the current
scene, and makes projections of future developments. There has been
limited critical writing about this hybrid work, leaving open many
theoretical approaches to the emerging field. This panel focuses on the
distinctive possibilities of this kind of contemporary work across the
increasingly blurred borders of the physical and virtual. Work coming
from this panel can provide an initial critical framing for ongoing
discourse on such an expanding, innovative, interdisciplinary practice.
Digital Anonymity as Physical Autonomy
Brad Troemel, independent artist
Unlike previous times when the internet was seen as a location for
self-referential digital art to reside, contemporary artists are looking
increasingly to the internet and its affects as a middle ground or subject
matter. It is not only on but through this ubiquitous medium where
new social standards, property relations, material access, and cultural
products are formed. Digital and fleshly life exist in a continuum with
each other: everyone is an internet artist to a degree; some just choose
to critically engage aspects of post-internet life in specificity. One such
aspect is the emergence of decentralized systems of exchange and the
corresponding confusion created over how to valuate information or
goods once there is no longer an authoritative standard in place. My art
is created in response to this moment of uncertainty, using participatory
projects to engage viewers’ criticality about the extended amount of
liberty the internet promises us.
The Aesthetic Internet as Source, Matrix, Tool
Abigail Susik, Willamette University
This presentation examines three examples of internet-based art that
reveal the variation in current aesthetic approaches to this platform: the
use of the internet as a source for subject matter and found material;
as a display, sharing, or archival matrix for a virtual public; and as a
digital tool for an interactive audience. Starting with the Mexican artist
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s influential work Vectorial Elevation (1999),
which allowed internet users to create light sculptures over Zócalo
Square in Mexico City, the internet’s capability as a participatory
aesthetic tool is highlighted. The use of the internet as an open-source
matrix is also discussed in relation to the collective work of the Graffiti
Research Lab during the last decade and their related web page. Finally,
the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué’s 2012 performance and installation,
The Pixelated Revolution, draws on the informational realm of the
internet for its source material about the Syrian Revolution.
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Bridging Bits and Bricks: Integrating Digital Artworks into
Gallery Contexts
Robert Hult, Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery
Internet art has struggled to find a foothold in commercial galleries,
as the translation of online work into a bricks-and-mortar gallery
often results in a material dissonance. However, commercial gallery
support can offer digital works context and legitimacy within greater
contemporary art discourse. Conceived to bridge this gap, klausgallery.
net creates a “virtual wall” for a real-world commercial space
exhibiting internet art in its native habitat with connections to gallery
discourse. Envisioned with the artist and curator Duncan Malashock,
the project (accessible through klausgallery.com) presents a series of
online solo and group exhibitions, accompanied by events at Klaus
Von Nichtssagend gallery. Artworks are available for purchase via a
public ownership model, with the collector agreeing to host a piece on
a designated website. The gallery has looked to sales models from Sol
Lewitt’s wall drawings to limited edition videos to relational aesthetics,
applying them to endlessly reproducible digital artworks.
Virtual Performance: Implication and Potentialization Online
Nathaniel Stern, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
How can intensity and networked relations online make the virtual
“felt,” with real-world implications? Here networked art activates and
performs thinking-feelings along with us. MTAA’s 1 year performance
video asks us to watch the artists in a mocked-up studio for one year.
Hans Gindlesberger’s Westering stitches together only the interpolated
moments of Google Street View for a cross-country American trek.
Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott’s No Matter makes patterns, prints,
and sculptures of imaginary objects produced in Second Life. And
my own project Wikipedia Art, with Scott Kildall, uses the world’s
favorite encyclopedia as a platform for art that anyone can edit—with
severe consequences; another of my projects, Given Time, activates two
Second Life avatars, forever staring at each other across both virtual
and actual space—facing streaming projections we walk between.
Each of these artworks presents absent yet implicit bodies made of
connections, potential, and relation.
Questioning Feminisms in Latin America’s Art Histories
Chairs: Aleca Le Blanc, Getty Research Institute; Harper Montgomery,
New feminist scholarship compels us to consider why Linda Nochlin’s
groundbreaking question, Why have there been no great women
artists?, should be posed differently to histories of Latin American
art. Female artists, patrons, and scholars have held prominent roles
in Latin American cultural circles in every temporal period, from
ancient to present-day. Such twentieth-century figures as Tina Modotti,
Lina Bo Bardi, Gego, Marta Traba, and Tania Bruguera were not
marginalized but instead were powerful players in shaping discourses
in their respective countries and beyond. Despite the importance of
these women, a discussion of gender has only occasionally entered into
historical narratives. However, an important body of contemporary
literature about representations of gender and sexuality in the ancient
Americas has emerged in the past decade. Likewise, feminist models
are increasingly applied to studies of Colonial Latin American art. This
panel considers how feminism and femininity have shaped discourses
about Latin American art’s conception and interpretation in ancient,
colonial, modern, and contemporary periods. It asks, What does
feminism look like in Latin America’s art histories?
Sacred Transformations, Indigenous Influences:
Mary Magdalene and Other Case Studies in Colonial Art
Charlene Villaseñor Black, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper investigates the transformation of female saints’ images as
their cults moved from Old World to New, and in particular the figure
of St. Mary Magdalen. Beginning with the visibility of la Magdalena
in early modern Europe as an archetype of the “fallen woman” and
model penitent, the paper documents censorship of her image in the
Spanish empire. While the Inquisition successfully squelched erotic
content in Spain, in Mexico the Magdalene appears frequently with
breasts uncovered, her body languorously exposed. Why were such
eroticized images tolerated in Mexico? Did indigenous attitudes toward
human sexuality and prostitution inflect her cult? The paper traces the
spread of this devotion in the Iberian world, the use of her image in
conversion, and indigenous agency in the creation of Colonial art.
Why is it so important to consider gender as we study sacred art in
the Americas?
Jesus as Mother: The Politics of Gendering the Sacred Heart
in New Spain
Lauren Grace Kilroy, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
This paper adds to ongoing discussions of the mutability of Christ’s
gender, by scholars such as Leo Steinberg and Carolyn Walker Bynum,
by considering how we can read images of Christ’s body parts in a
gendered fashion. By focusing on eighteenth-century representations of
the Sacred Heart from the viceroyalty of New Spain in relation to the
notion of Jesus as Mother, the paper considers how the “feminization”
of Christ’s body parts relates to the sociocultural milieu. In a culture
that celebrated the Virgin Mary as the ultimate mother, what role did
Jesus as Mother have to play? And did Mesoamerican concepts of
gender influence the perception of Christ’s heart as feminine? The
paper queries not only how these images might communicate a nuanced
gendered identity but also how such feminine associations both
supported the devotion as well as eventually undermined it.
Women’s Trajectory in the Mexican Academy of San Carlos:
Their Incorporation into the Art World
Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
The presence of women in the Mexican Academy of San Carlos (now
National School of Plastic Arts) was beset by obstacles. Despite the
insensibility to female participation in the activities organized by
the institution, women managed to be a part of the exhibitions for
artists who did not belong to academy. The academic environment
was adamantly resistant to opening the doors to this sector of the
population, and when it finally did it, the artistic education was
different from that offered to males. The disadvantaged situation of
women in the academic environment was commented upon by the
popular media of that time. The revision of documentary and artistic
collections of the academy makes it possible to know the trajectory
of women in the first institution devoted to the studies of fine arts
in America, as students and artists, and allows us to visualize their
incorporation into the art world.
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Incorporated Vision: A Feminist Critique of
Development Discourse
Ana Maria Reyes, independent scholar
messages have been employed, maintained, transformed, critiqued,
and/or overturned by artists and architects. Feminist art practices, in their explorations of the body, intimacy,
domesticity, and the constitution of gendered identities, were
uniquely positioned to expose hegemonic development ideology that
nourished the most repressive regimes during the cold war in Latin
America. Desarrollista ideology mandated the import of “experts”
to observe, study, and propose corrective measures for all aspects of
underdeveloped nations, economies, and subjects’ private lives. Vision
was implicated both in the sense of envisioning nations and subjects as
underdeveloped and in visualizing/engineering a more modern, updated
future. This paper discusses three works by the Latin American artists
Marta Minujín (La Destrucción, 1963), Lygia Clark (Mandala, 1969),
and Beatriz González (Muerte del Justo y Muerte del Pecador, 1973)
and argues their feminist art practices rendered visible the discursive
constitution of subjectivity and by doing so challenged the scientific
development discourse that permeated every aspect of public and
private life.
TRUE, the Polar Section of the World’s Edge—The Atlantic Basin
Project—An Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity
Thomas Joshua Cooper, The Glasgow School of Art
Now We See You, Now We Don’t: Feminisms in Argentine Art,
1980s–1990s
Marta García Barrio-Garsd, independent scholar
Argentina witnessed a critical mass of women—artists, curators,
cultural agents—trying to operate outside patriarchal discourses
between the end of dictatorship and the country’s economic default
(1983–99). Their multiplicity of voices ranged from public political
interventions to all-women’s exhibitions. Some appropriated American
feminist strategies deploying national and ethnic traditions. Monolithic
divisions (political vs. essentialist), the state’s bias to a “women’s
art” void of social demands, theoretical shortcomings, and a tendency
to perceive feminist art as foreign ideology resulted in weakness
and fragmentation. In the 1990s women’s art became part of the
mainstream via the pluralistic agenda of international postmodernism.
Some barriers were lifted, but structural problems remained, such as
prevailing androcentrism in some public exhibitions and collections.
Rather than a rare episode, the multifaceted feminisms of the 1980s
and 1990s produced a pivotal, historical precedent that needs critical
examination, without exclusions.
and Architecture, Part I
Maps are understood as images that identify the boundaries of a terrain,
networks of transit, and borders between nations, and that distinguish
land from sea, private from public spaces, and red from blue. This
descriptive aim was once shared by painting, but by the eighteenth
century, maps acquired a scientific and objective status at the cost
of its artistic one. In the modern era, these cartographic descriptions
employed a graphic and diagrammatic style that came to connote
a veracity based on empirical observation and methodologies. And
currently, with new digital instruments and technologies, maps provide
ever more accurate images of the world through an array of modes
from street to satellite views. Yet, greater precision in cartographic
instruments does nothing to take away from the critical perspective that
maps are value-laden images. They are representations bound to social,
political, cultural, and economic practices of their historical moment
as much as to a given territory or place. The session raises important
questions concerning what the politics of mapping are and how maps’
This is an artist’s talk about an artist’s project—part of a larger
ongoing sea-picture archive and critical review of all the major
terrestrial extremities and cardinal points encircling the entire
Atlantic Ocean. This project took twenty-three years to pursue.
Ideas emerge of the imaginary, the invisible, and the intangible in
True. Investigations ranged from practical issues with physical and
historical geography and ancient and contemporary cartography to
psychological concerns of emotional circumstance in solitude and
intense cold—while working from the North to the South Poles.
Making only a single picture in each singular site, a visual register is
created of tangible, physical places where necessary considerations
of extremity and isolation mark their effects on human existence. It
is in the visual discovery of each site, and its long-term accumulation
into pictures, that the construction of a platform has been made for
reviewing the human condition—in extremis.
Cartography as Simulacrum: The Construction of Place in
Flemish City Views of the Mid-Sixteenth Century
Ryan E. Gregg, Webster University
Scholarship has tended to attribute to city views the techniques of
cartography and its consequent discourse of mathematical accuracy.
Antwerp-originating city views, however, such as those by Anton van
den Wyngaerde and Jan van der Straet (better known as Giovanni
Stradano), derive from more artistically observed techniques. That
artistic vision allows for a departure from their natural sources, despite
the written assertions of the views’ fidelity. Their so-called inaccuracies
appear instead to assert the images’ status as simulacrum rather than
similitude. The apparent cartographic truth of Antwerp city views
draws attention to their deviations, to say that the image is not, in fact,
what it represents. The verisimilitude dissimulates, leaving only the
artist’s manipulations of the species. The Antwerp city views would
seem, then, to be a warning—the experience of the world produced by
cartographic images is one far removed from the real.
Mapping Philosophy in Early Modern Europe
Susanna Berger, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
The broadside Typus necessitatis logicae ad alias scientias capessendas
(Scheme of Logical Necessity for the Purpose of Grasping the Other
Branches of Knowledge), designed in 1622 by the Carmelite professor
Jean Chéron (1596–1673), depicts the human quest to reach wisdom.
Nearly a hundred small figures stumble along treacherous pathways,
scale craggy cliffs, cross wild hunting grounds, and sail through a
roiling sea in pursuit of wisdom, represented by a domed temple rising
above the waters near top of the print. The broadside, which functioned
as a thesis print for use in public examinations, was engraved by
Léonard Gaultier (1560/1–1635), who had collaborated with another
professor on similar maps of knowledge a few years earlier. For
Chéron’s students at his Carmelite convent in Paris, the broadside
served as a map of intellectual discovery, its intricate juxtaposition of
text and image providing the opportunity to master logic and thus to
find wisdom.
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Anna Bella Geiger’s Mapas Elementares: Space and Place
in Brazil during the 1970s
Elena Shtromberg, University of Utah
Among the major events that transformed the spatial orientation of the
Brazilian citizen during the 1960s and 1970s were the emergence of
the new capital city Brasília, the first landing of Apollo on the moon,
and the forced resettlement of the Amazonian rainforest carried out by
the military government. It is not surprising that a number of artists
in Brazil throughout the 1970s responded to the shifting topography
by turning to mapping practices in their work. The videos Mapas
Elementares numbers 1 and 3 from 1976–77 by Anna Bella Geiger, an
artist known for her oeuvre of maps across a range of media, introduced
an alternative cartography with different vantage points for considering
the question of identity and citizenship. Rather than represent the
physical world, Mapas Elementares present an expanded topology
where political, cultural, linguistic, and psychological coordinates are
brought to the fore.
Pictorial Maps and Maplike Paintings in Mid-Imperial China
Julia Orell, University of Zurich
The characterization of maps as pictorial and of paintings as maplike
frequently appears in scholarship on Chinese cartography and
topographical landscape painting from the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. However, these observations are usually based on superficial
similarities and on modern assumptions about what a map is. This
paper examines these presumed interstices between cartographic and
painting practices by taking into account the great variety of visual,
textual, and contextual characteristics in extant maps to analyze the
specificity of the cases when so-called maplike features enter the realm
of painting and vice versa. In addition, the discussion of textual sources
pertaining to maps, mapmaking, and the relationship between maps
and landscape painting reveals that they could share a framework of
production and reception under the auspices of historical geography
rather than cartography.
In the Map: Maya Lin’s Blue Lake Pass
Miriam Ashkin Stanton, Williams College Museum of Art
Mapping Heterotopian Spaces: Affective Cartography
as Artistic Practice
Simonetta Moro, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts
Maya Lin’s Blue Lake Pass is a physical construction of a mental
construct—a volumetric topographic map, incised and pulled apart
at its gridded seams. To date, analyses of this work have inaccurately
conflated map and terrain, claiming that Blue Lake Pass captures the
sensation of traversing the inside of the earth. Instead, the installation
renders cartographic practice visible. More than viewers, we become
participants—enacting the map’s method of producing meaning. We
experience an amalgam of angles and scales, a shifting of proportions
and perspectives. Investigating this reification of a cartographic
process, this paper considers the significance of physical and perceptual
relationships to place—positing that it is sometimes by way of a
conceptual schema that we connect most to our surroundings. By
embodying a topographic map, we comprehend cartography not as a
removed, sterile system but as a phenomenologically felt experience.
In my current and ongoing artistic practice, I focus on two case
studies—Venice and New York—explored within the rubric of
historical and topological transformation, and consider the impact of
the aquatic environment in the perception and experience of both cities,
including the consequences of rising sea levels. This paper highlights
the differences between architects and urban planners, on the one
hand, and artists, on the other hand, in responding to a specific place
considered problematic or in need of solutions. When artists engage
in mapping practices their approach is less oriented toward the future
and the utopian and more focused on the present and the heterotopian
(as spaces of “Otherness,” according to Michel Foucault’s definition,
spaces that are complex, layered, and imperfect). The practice of
“affective cartography” opens up the possibility to create a visual
response that is poetic and critical, nonprescriptive and unprejudiced.
Mapping Spaces: Cartographic Practices in
Art and Architecture, Part II
Barry Le Va: The Map and the Void
Michael Maizels, University of Virginia
Icons of Space: Grids, Maps, and Pictures ca. 1300
Karl Whittington, The Ohio State University
In the years around 1300 in Italy, the practices of cartographers,
urban planners, and painters began to intersect with greater frequency.
All were creators of spaces—built, virtual, and pictorial—and their
technologies formed a shared base of knowledge and practice. This
paper investigates one of these tools—the grid—in order to reveal
the ways that later-medieval painters engaged with contemporary
cartographic practices. It explores both the indexical and iconic
function of grids in maps and paintings, revealing the flexibility
of the grid as both an emergent mathematical tool and an abstract
visual symbol. It questions the conventional wisdom that the use of
cartographic forms and strategies in artistic contexts should be read as
evidence of empiricism, showing that while painters did harness the
forms and strategies of maps, they also used them as points of contrast
and departure.
In the late 1960s the artist Barry Le Va rose to fame with ephemeral
sculptures composed out of shattered glass, shredded felt, and scattered
concrete dust. These early works evolved into a series of explorations
in which wooden dowels were used to realize complex systems
of measurement or construct Byzantine perspective systems that
penetrated the walls and floors of their galleries. This paper examines
the cartographic aspect of Le Va’s practice in light of the ongoing
explorations of measurement and mapping by peers such as Bruce
Nauman, Robert Smithson, and Mel Bochner. These artists all worked
to bring the process of mapping into disjunctive proximity with the
territory that it typically describes at a remove. The friction between
map and territory denaturalized scientific knowledge acquisition and
echoed a larger unraveling of the humanistic faith in man’s ability to
know and map the world.
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Nancy Graves: Mapping from Space
Christina Hunter, Columbia University and Nancy Graves Foundation
Beginning in 1971 Nancy Graves (1939–1995) created an extensive
series of paintings, collages, prints, and drawings of the Moon, Mars,
and Earth that were based on the most advanced imaging technologies
of the period transmitted by orbiting NASA and weather satellites.
Ranging from the Lunar Orbiter lithographs to the twenty-four-footwide Mars painting, this series accentuates the complexity of Graves’s
conceptual investigation of systems of visual representation, a theme
she had explored in her earlier Camel sculptures. Though based directly
on scientific recordings, Graves’s representations of the technical data
using a complex vocabulary of signs, dots, gestures, and markings
unexpectedly undermine their documentary objectivity to generate
artistic experiences of perceptibility and acknowledge that maps,
like art, are contingent sign systems. That this series depicts terrains
that cannot be verified by lived experience further emphasizes this
conceptual gap and distinguishes her practice from that of her artist
peers.
Crossing Oceans: Visual Culture and the History of
Exchange in Colonial Latin America
Chairs: Dana Leibsohn, Smith College; Meha Priyadarshini,
Columbia University
This session takes its cue from both geography and historiography.
The geography of interest is that of Colonial Latin America and, in
particular, its location between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In the
period from ca. 1500 to 1850, the visual cultures of Mexico, Peru,
the Caribbean, and Brazil were shaped in profound ways by two
major oceanic throughways. From across the Atlantic came European
immigrants and African slaves, Christianity, books, paintings, and
prints. From the Pacific came ships laden with Asian peoples and
goods, including silk and porcelain, spices and slaves. Indigenous and
immigrant communities in Colonial Latin America received, resisted,
and remixed these introductions—at times keenly aware of their
foreignness, in other instances indifferent to the geographic origins
of imported traditions or materials. Scholarship on the region has
long recognized cultural complexity. From the earliest days, however,
the study of Colonial Latin American art has privileged the Atlantic
world. Yet there now exists an increasingly healthy scholarship on
Indigenous traditions, and even more recently studies of the Pacific
have grown in number and sophistication. Consequently, the time is
ripe to consider oceanic exchange broadly and to study its effects on
the visual culture of Colonial Latin America. This session explores
how scholars of the Atlantic world and those of the Pacific might speak
across traditional divides.
Trans-Atlantic Booty: Thevet and Hakluyt Abduct the
Codex Mendoza
Todd Olson, University of California, Berkeley
The Codex Mendoza was commissioned by the Viceroy of New Spain
in the sixteenth century. Intercepted by pirates on its transatlantic
voyage, the codex was obtained by the French royal cosmographer
André Thevet, who later sold it to the English geographer and colonial
apologist Richard Hakluyt. As the collaboration between Indigenous
scribes and Spanish conquistadors, the codex appropriated preconquest
historiography, ethnography, and a glyphic notational system for
recording and exacting tribute. The circulation of these viceregal
pictures in France and England transformed their value. Although gift
exchange has been amply theorized, the role of tribute in relation to
the development of a capitalist economy requires analysis. This paper
addresses the reception of the Codex Mendoza by Thevet and Hakluyt
and its effects on their respective theoretical alternatives to a model of
coercive imperial exchange.
Urban Images and Mental Maps: Representations of
Havana and Veracruz in the Seventeenth Century
Joseph Clark, Johns Hopkins University
This paper examines the Spanish American port cities of Havana and
Veracruz in the seventeenth century through the lens of urban planning,
vernacular architecture, and orthographic images. Although historians
often use visual media in their assessments of historical cityscapes,
their literal interpretations too frequently neglect art-historical readings
of these sources as distinct forms of pictorial genre. Conversely, arthistorical approaches favor the form and content of those images and
rarely consider the circumstances of their creation and the purposes
for which they were used. By studying both genre and historical
context, this paper historicizes urban images. In Havana and Veracruz
material conditions modified Iberian designs, while non-European
actors contributed to built environments that were not often reflected in
European depictions. Based on these examples, early modern European
artistic conventions were more influential in shaping representations of
Latin American cities than in shaping the cities themselves.
The Annual Permission Ship and Furniture Production
in Eighteenth-Century New Spain
Teresa Calero Martínez de Irujo, Universidad Anahuac Norte
The year 1713 marked the end of the Spanish War of Succession
and the signing of the peace treaty in Utrecht; England also won the
asiento and the contract for the annual permission ship, with the right
to carry five hundred tons of free merchandise to the major ports of
Spanish America. From that moment on, furniture production in New
Spain changed dramatically. Before this time, the decorative arts in
New Spain were inspired largely by aesthetics that prevailed in the
Spanish empire. The arrival of the annual permission ship altered
the way decorative arts were conceived, specifically furniture. The
British vessels brought with them objects of a different aesthetic that
stimulated a physical transformation of the manufacturing of furniture.
This paper shows how British items were accepted and reinterpreted in
New Spain and helped create a new style.
The Folding Screen in Colonial Mexico: The Reinterpretation
of a Japanese Art Form
Sofia Sanabrais, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Manila Galleon trade transformed Mexico City into a major
commercial center, and the market for Asian goods (textiles, porcelain,
and lacquer among them) affected a change in taste throughout
the Americas and introduced Asia into the colonial imagination.
Commodities were not the only things to traverse the Pacific; the
Nahua historian Chimalpáhin wrote an eyewitness account of the
visits made by Japanese delegations to New Spain in 1610 and 1614.
They presented folding screens as diplomatic gifts to the New Spanish
viceroy, bestowing a certain sovereignty of taste to the art form. This
paper discusses the Colonial Mexican folding screen, or biombo, and
the phenomenon of cultural transfer to explore how the Japanese object
was adapted, recontextualized, and reinterpreted by artists and patrons,
and how the materiality of Asian art forms conveyed meaning in
colonial society.
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The Translations of Nebrija: Ancient Rome, Early Modern
Vernaculars from the Philippines to Tuscany, and the
Interpretation of Mesoamerican History
Byron Hamann, The Ohio State University
More than a dozen Spanish-to-Indigenous-language dictionaries were
created in sixteenth-century New Spain. The Native American concepts
and categories they record are an important resource for contemporary
academics studying Colonial and pre-Hispanic Indigenous histories—
especially those based on visual and material evidence. Many of the
sixteenth-century authors of these dictionaries acknowledged the
influence of Antonio de Nebrija’s Spanish-to-Latin Dictionarium in
their creation. However, the full implications of this Latinate influence
for the production of Indigenous dictionaries, and their interpretation
today, have not been addressed. Analyzing publication-history
genealogy charts and case studies from pre-Hispanic and Colonial
imagery, this paper argues that to understand Indigenous dictionaries
from the New World, we must contextualize them within vast spatial
and temporal vistas: a transatlantic, transpacific corpus of Spanish
translating dictionaries; and a chronological perspective traversing
the pre-Hispanic past, the antique Mediterranean, and the early
modern world.
Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change
Chair: Cecelia Levin, Harvard University
The seminal 1967 volume Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change
by the cultural anthropologist and art historian Claire Holt provided
American scholars with their first look at the cultural expressions
of this expansive equatorial archipelago. It was not Holt’s intent to
present a mere chronological presentation of the material. Rather, she
told the evolutionary story of Indonesian visual culture as perceived
by its creators, lending her distinctly intuitive, creative ken to an
interpretation that reflected great authenticity. As a result of her
acknowledgment of the fluidity of Indonesian cultural forms—how the
visual arts, wayang kulit (shadow play), dance, and music were kindred
due to their essential role as storytellers—she never sat comfortably
in one discipline, while her novel interconnections crosscut between
Indigenous artistic traditions and foreign adaptations and between
antiquity and her own era. Holt’s publication also establishes her as
the first scholar to explore modernism in Asia and undertake a critical
analysis of a post-Colonial Asian visual culture. Does Holt’s reading
of Indonesian art still successfully serve art historians today? Through
an exploration of topics drawn from the Hindu-Buddhist, Islamic,
and modernist traditions, this panel presents a response that modifies,
augments, and enriches Holt’s pioneering visions.
Balinese Hinduism and Its Art
Bokyung Kim, Whitman College
The present often turns out to contain historical material as valuable as
information contemporaneous with the period of interest. In particular,
several monumental books published in the field of Indonesian art
have proved that premodern/modern Balinese rituals and texts can
be used to trace early Indonesian culture. The formation of Balinese
Hindu (especially Śivaite) iconography and its usage in modern Bali
is examined in this paper, which points out how much these later
Balinese materials reveal about several unsolved questions in ancient
Java. Historical continuity and traceable variations in these Balinese
religious and artistic traditions are critically assessed, because they
are prerequisite for recharacterizing the materials from the past and
reconstructing the missing components in ancient Javanese culture.
Continuity of Pre-Islamic Heritages in Javanese Muslim Minds:
Parallelism, Adaptation, and Creation
Hee Sook Lee-Niinioja, Oxford Brookes University
In Java Islamic civilization has been linked to the message of the
Prophet since its advent in the fifteenth century. Islam changed local
cultural landscape, creating a unique regional heritage. This interaction
has enriched both the material culture of the Muslim world and
preexisting ones. Until the nineteenth century mosques were erected
with multitiered roofs. As pre-Islamic traditions underline the form
and setting of sacred places, mystical Sufis borrowed them, according
to their belief that mosques are sacred, and invented amalgamation of
Indigenous and Islamic ideas and forms in architecture. Consequently,
Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (unity in diversity) underscores Javanese identity
and culture, where animism, Hindu-Buddhism, and Islam coexist,
and moves toward a syncretic religion. This paper discusses Javanese
ornaments (the triangular tumpal, kalamakara, lion-fish with elephant
trunks, lotus bud, and scroll) as national identity in religious-secular
buildings during three Islamic periods, finding commonness to enhance
communication between faiths in the current, conflicted society.
Framing Shadows: Nationalism, Mysticism, and Wayang Kulit
in Claire Holt’s Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change
Elizabeth Emrich, Cornell University and Herbert F. Johnson
Museum of Art
Claire Holt’s visual and textual framing of wayang kulit puppets in her
1967 publication Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change, combined
with the textual tradition that Holt draws upon, specifically the 1933
article “On Wayang Kulit,” by K. G. P. A. A. Mangkunagara VII of
Surakarta, is indicative of her awareness of both the national politics
of Java and Indonesia and the politics of representation. Taking into
account Mangkunagara VII’s position as a Javanese nationalist during
the early twentieth century, Holt negotiates the concept of a modern
Indonesian nationalism three decades later in a nuanced application
of his work. Through her framing of images of Javanese shadow
theater puppets, considerations of which characters to illustrate, and
her descriptive text within the chapter, Holt reveals not only her
internalization of Mangkunagara VII’s argument about the mysticism of
shadow puppet theater but also her conceptualization of an Indonesian
nationalism that incorporates Javanese cultural practice.
The Japan Factor: Great Asianism and the Birth of
Indonesian Modern Art (1942–45)
Farah Wardani, Indonesian Visual Art Archive
The Japanese Occupation of Indonesia (1942–45) is lacking in
Claire Holt’s canonic volume—touched on briefly in three pages.
This study further elaborates on this era, with some new thoughts
on the Indonesian version of Social Realism as a fusion of Western
European Romanticism, Soviet Realism, and the spirit of Japanese
“Dai-Asia.” It explores how concepts of modernism, as adapted from
its Western context, were integrated with the notion of a “Greater
Asian” identity, particularly through the arts of the Japan Occupation
period, and demonstrates how they influenced the constructions of both
modern Indonesia identity and modern Indonesian art. Moreover, it
introduces a new comparative analysis between Japanese wartime art
and Indonesian Social Realism that reveals that Japanese influences
were greater than previously acknowledged in the story of Indonesian
modern art history as theorized by scholars such as Holt and Jim
Supangkat.
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Walking through Time: iPhone App and the Comob Net App
Chris Speed, University of Edinburgh
Chair: Joseph S. Lewis, University of California, Irvine
The development of a series of iPhone apps that disrupt social practices
explories the impact that networked handheld devices have had upon
perceptions of history, people, and place. Shelflife was developed for
the international charity Oxfam and allows visitors to UK thrift shops
to leave stories on donated objects. Walking through Time challenges
assumptions that Google time is always the most up-to-date, by
replacing street maps of Scottish cities of the present with maps of the
past. Comob is a Net app that explores the potential for collaborative
mapping with GPS technology by allowing users to draw lines between
each other in real time.
Re/Search: Art, Science, and Information Technology
(ASIT): What Would Leonardo da Vinci Have Thought?
A consummate scientist, researcher, risk taker, artist, and entrepreneur,
Leonardo da Vinci would fit into today’s art/science/information
technology creative community. This session focuses on the word
“entrepreneur,” which was deeply embedded within his conceptual
oeuvre. Recently the National Science Foundation (NSF) and
the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) held a joint meeting
in Washington, DC, “Re/Search: Art, Science, and Information
Technology (ASIT)” and invited ASIT practitioners to begin a
conversation about best practices, successful collaborations, chasms
and barriers across disciplines, interdisciplinarity, institutional
structures, and trends in research and practice. The meeting’s subtext
was how the NSF and the NEA can assist ASIT artists to become more
competitive within their processes when their practices and research
do not fit neatly into specific agency-funding criteria. This session
would like to push this a little further and explore funding concepts and
models outside of those agency’s territories.
Entrepreneurship and Experimentation: Nineteenth-Century
Art Worldwide as a Case Study of Funding an Online, Open
Access Journal
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Seton Hall University; Emily Pugh,
Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is one of the earliest digital-only,
peer-reviewed, and open-access art-history journals. Recently the
journal received a grant from the Mellon Foundation for a three-year
initiative to maximize the possibilities of its chosen e-medium. During
these three years, six articles are planned for publication that take
full advantage of new web technologies in either the research or the
publication phase, or both. This presentation has three parts. First is a
talk about the early history of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and
the innovative entrepreneurship that was needed to bring about the
journal. Second, the Mellon grant is addressed, outlining what it allows
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide to do and how it will open up the
journal to new digital humanities scholarship. Third, future projects and
the continuing challenge of funding are discussed.
New Resourcing Models for Hybrid Arts and Sciences
Research Praxis
Shawn Brixey, University of Washington
Contemporary artists increasingly use novel systems of support for
their work. Crowd-funding for example is uniquely suited for a global
marketplace. However, their system of marketing, tax-status, and
reward favors ideas and products that can be communicated visually.
While effective for small projects and limited production creative
commodities, the use of these models to reliably resource large,
complex, multidisciplinary arts and sciences research is not yet viable.
Hybrid arts and sciences research with large zones of creative and
technical impact needs and produces very different resource ecologies.
Resourcing these kinds of initiatives requires alternatives. Scalable,
networked resourcing models rely on shared investment and return;
they provide support for hybrid research and reinforce core intellectual
economies of entrepreneurship, collaboration, and discovery. This
presentation discusses a selection of hybrid arts and sciences projects
and the entrepreneurial resource models these activities successfully
employed.
Artists as Connectors: In Education, Research, and Technology
Richard Jochum, Teachers College, Columbia University
It is not only curiosity and imagination that contemporary artists are
able to share with Leonardo but also the courage to initiate and further
develop connections between seemingly disparate fields of practices
and knowledge. This paper looks at three examples of entrepreneurship
in the arts: the Berlin based arts-research collective Storydealer, which
had been working at the intersection of performative storytelling and
business consultancy; the Australian science-art group SymbioticA,
which has managed to receive funding allocated to scientific research;
and DJ Moby, who has a generous approach to copyright and social
media without losing sight of commercial success. All these projects
reflect in various ways a shared approach to art, media, and technology.
How to Make a Living as an Artist: With or
Without a Dealer
Chairs: Sharon Louden, independent artist; Sharon Butler,
Eastern Connecticut State University
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, in the early days of the New York art
world, galleries supported artists with stipends, studio space, regular
exhibitions, and more. But what does gallery representation mean
today? This panel of New York dealers and artists discusses the
parameters of the contemporary artist-gallery relationship, including
how to cultivate alliances with galleries and what artists should (and
shouldn’t) expect from gallery representation. Panelists also discuss
strategies that artists should consider in addition to traditional gallery
representation for generating income and expanding exhibition
opportunities.
Utrecht Caravaggism in the Midwest: Hendrick ter
Brugghen’s St. Sebastian Tended by Irene
Chair: Henry Luttikhuizen, Calvin College
Hendrick ter Brugghen, Dirck van Baburen, and the
Representation of St. Sebastian in Utrecht Painting
Wayne Franits, Syracuse University
This lecture explores the significance of portrayals of St. Sebastian by
artists from Utrecht, the principal center of Catholicism in the early
modern Netherlands. Focusing primarily on Hendrick ter Brugghen’s
monumental St. Sebastian Tended by Irene, it examines the shift in
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interest during the early seventeenth century in St. Sebastian’s narrative
toward the godly Irene’s ministrations to restore him to health after
he was nearly martyred. Ter Brugghen’s painting and those associated
with his colleague and possible collaborator, Dirck van Baburen,
testify to the desire among Counter-Reformation theologians to stress
the social and practical application of the faith. Moreover, the iconic
qualities of these canvases, which present a static though emphatically
three-dimensional saint, betoken an original function associated with
the plague, as representations of St. Sebastian were thought to possess
thaumaturgic properties because he had recovered from wounds
inflicted by plague-tipped arrows.
Toward Beauty: St. Sebastian in Ter Brugghen’s
Religious Paintings
Natasha Seaman, Rhode Island College
In 1625 Ter Brugghen produced St. Sebastian Tended by Irene and his
deeply archaizing Crucifixion (New York). In both works the artist
evokes sixteenth-century Northern painting. In the Crucifixion, the
figure of Christ appears as a re-creation of, if not direct quotation from,
sixteenth-century paintings, inserted between the strongly seventeenthcentury Mary and John; the wounds of Christ drip with blood in a
manner typical of earlier crucifixions but rarely seen in seventeenthcentury painting. In the Sebastian, however, the archaic elements are
reduced to details such as the gruesome treatment of Sebastian’s bound
left wrist. A close examination of Sebastian with the Crucifixion reveals
the significance of Sebastian as the beginning of a new phase in Ter
Brugghen’s religious paintings in which effects of beauty and light
prevail over the ugliness and concern with pre-Reformation painting
that was so often present in his previous works.
Spiritual Comfort and Charitable Healing in Ter Brugghen’s St.
Sebastian Tended by Irene
Valerie Hedquist, University of Montana
As the plague hit Utrecht in 1624–25, Hendrick ter Brugghen painted
St. Sebastian Tended by St. Irene, an image with both traditional and
contemporary associations with the epidemic. In his composition Ter
Brugghen presented an interlocking diagonal of figures, carefully
arranged to accentuate the hands, arms, heads, legs, and arrows of
the wounded male saint and his two female rescuers. This forceful
triad before a sliver of barren land demonstrates a stylistic and
thematic synthesis of archaism and Caravaggism. In a similar manner,
Ter Brugghen highlighted both the time-honored miracle-working
intercessor, St. Sebastian, and the more recently acknowledged role
of the corporeal caregiver, St. Irene. His painting presents the stark
nude Christ-like body of St. Sebastian as a source of spiritual succor
against the plague, as well as the gentle St. Irene, who tenderly
touches the wounded as a model of benevolent physical healing
during the outbreak.
Harems Imagined and Real
Chair: Heather Madar, Humboldt State University
The eroticized odalisque situated within the lavishly appointed setting
of the harem is a familiar cliché of Orientalist art. The harem of the
Ottoman sultans in particular was much mythologized by Western
European travelers, writers, and artists from the sixteenth century
on, creating a lurid popular conception of the harem that was rife
with misconceptions. This constructed notion of the harem became a
key trope of Orientalist thought and encapsulated Western European
perceptions of the decadent, despotic, yet desirable East. This panel
critiques harem imagery and the larger harem discourse in which it
participated, and reconsiders the often heavy sociopolitical freight
of harem imagery and the symbolic significance borne by depictions
of women’s bodies and spaces gendered as female. It also facilitates
analysis of images of harems as well as “the harem” in a comparative
light, and explores a range of meanings associated with harem imagery
in multiple contexts. Particular focus is placed on lesser-known works,
including imagery from outside the nineteenth-century, depictions of
less commonly represented harems, and images by women artists.
Refracted Reflections: Self and Other in European and
South Asian Representations of the Harem
Saleema Waraich, Skidmore College
European depictions of the Ottoman harem have long fueled the exotic
imagination and also prompted condemnation of Muslim cultures.
This paper examines representations of women associated with the
harem—from South Asian and European perspectives—which shifted
as European fantasies surrounding the harem came to circulate in South
Asia. One striking encounter involves the refashioning of a European
print, attributed to Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (A Sultana, 1777),
by an anonymous Lucknowi artist, who placed the original figure of a
reclining Ottoman woman into an interior evocative of the Lucknow
court. The South Asian adaptation of European Orientalist fantasy
prompts a variety of provocative questions: does she symbolize South
Asian curiosity about European representational techniques and subject
matter? Is the figure trapped by the Orientalist discourse that surrounds
European paintings of odalisques? Does she represent shifts in South
Asian views of the Ottoman harem?
Seeing through the “Veil Trick”: Visuality and Eroticism
in Monti’s Sculpture Circassian Slave in 1851
Joan DelPlato, Bard College at Simon’s Rock
Despite the recent burst of critical scholarship on the harem
representation, little of it directly addresses harem-related sculpture.
In Circassian Slave, exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition, Raffaele
Monti articulated in white marble the texture of not only the harem
slave’s firm young flesh but also, remarkably, her diaphanous veil,
through which viewers are invited to peer, distinguishing her facial
features. The Illustrated London News decried Monti’s “veil trick” as
formulaic, lamenting its popularity with viewers. This paper, drawing
upon historical and theoretical sources, articulates the intricate
visual dynamics of the sculpture, which survives in a model in the
Wallace Collection. In European statuary the veiled female sculpture
functions as a multivalent signifier; this work is indebted to Classical
and Neoclassical conventions. It is also pointedly ethnographic and
smartly contemporary with global reach into Circassia as well as Italy
and England.
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The Harem Comes Home: Imperial Decor and the
Politics of Chintz
Samantha Burton, McGill University
This paper explores the metaphorical, visual, and material interplay
between harem and home through an examination of the fin-de-siècle
Western vogue for Eastern-inspired interiors. That white, Western
women should so eagerly draw on an Orientalist model of design in
their homes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seems
somewhat paradoxical, given that it was precisely the Western fantasy
of the Eastern domestic sphere that was held up as the predominant
sign of the “Other” woman’s oppression, particularly in the context
of the emerging suffrage movement. Bringing the work of a number
of female artists together with contemporary interior decorating
materials, this paper argues that even as the incorporation of Eastern,
harem-inspired objects into the Western home enabled white women to
subvert contemporary ideas about gender and sexuality, this trend also
functioned as an expression of its followers’ whiteness and affiliation
with imperial power.
Shifting the Imagined Erotic Object to a Heterogenous
Modernist Subject: Maghrebi Female Interiors as Painted
by French Women Orientalists, 1890–1930
Mary Healy, University of Limerick
Attempting to reevaluate the French Orientalist canon, this research
uncovers and examines eighty-six largely ignored French women
Orientalists, all of whom practiced in France and many in the Maghreb
region of North Africa between 1860 and 1968. Many of these women
were hugely successful artists in their day; yet today we know little to
nothing of their contribution to the Orientalist movement. Presenting
a few of these women artists and their Orientalist paintings from 1890
to 1930, this paper explores the crossing view of the female “Other”
with the cultural “Other” in the interior space. Further complicating
discussions surrounding the use of the female body in Orientalism, this
discourse can be defined as being at the intersection of modernism,
gender, and cultural difference.
The Constructed Harem: Matisse’s Odalisques and
Contemporary French Women in Orientalist Dress
Nikoo Paydar, independent scholar
In the 1920s in Nice, Matisse created more than one hundred
odalisques in paintings, drawings, and lithographs, yet these images
and their relationship to society women in Orientalist dress in the
1910s, or “Society Orientalism,” have been overlooked in the literature.
Reflecting an important historical moment in women’s engagement
with the harem, Society Orientalism of the period was marked by
women wearing harem trousers, which were associated with female
liberation and self-assertion. Focusing on Matisse’s odalisque images as
a set, this paper argues that Matisse’s female figures in Orientalist dress
lack the self-assertion enacted by society women in Orientalist dress
in Paris in the 1910s and, taken together as a set, inescapably declare
contemporary female engagement with the harem through dress to
be a cliché.
Arts Council of the African Studies Association
Bodies of Knowledge: Interviews, Interlocutors,
and Art-Historical Narratives
Chairs: Carol Magee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill;
Joanna Grabski, Denison University
This panel examines the use of interviews in the production of arthistorical narratives. We consider interviews, interlocutors, and arthistorical narratives as representing distinctive bodies of knowledge
that engage and entangle in the processes of scholarly production.
By opening up questions about the relationship among interlocutors,
interviews, and art-historical narratives, our inquiry builds on insights
from scholarship in art history, anthropology, and history including
the work of Burton and Pasquariello, Clifford, Marcus, Gupta and
Ferguson, and others who have written about interviews and the
disciplinary practices of knowledge production. The panel is an inquiry
into the processes, methods, and instruments of knowledge production
that figure across a range of art-historical fields, disciplinary specialties,
and diverse theoretical platforms.
Beyond Words: Some Reflections on Visual Experience
and the Promises and Failures of Interviews
Till Förster, Unversity of Basel
Compared with observation and participation, interviews seem to offer
a more direct access to how artists think about the visual. However,
interviews define roles and statuses of researcher and respondent.
Through interviews, researchers urge respondents to translate the visual
into words. The experience of the visual, which is often embedded in
everyday routines and practices, then rises to the surface of individual
and social consciousness. However, by making visual experience
conscious, it changes its character—hence the refusal of many artists
“to interpret” their works. Put in words, the sensory qualities of the
visual are partially replaced or complemented by the vividness of the
rhetoric of the speaker. This raises epistemological questions: Can the
researcher expect the interviewee to render his own visual experience
intelligible to others? Will this account of visual experience overlap
with that of the researcher? And can artificial situations capture visual
articulations in real social life?
Whose Voice Is the Loudest? Negotiating Rival Histories
of New Orleans Black Indian Masking
Cynthia Becker, Boston University
Since the 1880s African Americans in New Orleans have created
elaborate beaded and feathered outfits that they wear on Mardi Gras
and other occasions. They organize themselves into Indian “tribes,”
such as the Yellow Pocahontas and the Creole Wild West. A few have
been featured in museums but most remain anonymous, performing
in New Orleans’ African American neighborhoods. Interviews with
individual Black Indians, who discuss their artistic process and the
meaning of their beaded designs, are used to consider how each one
approaches issues of originality, artistic innovation, tradition, African
and Native American origins, empowerment, and rebellion against
slavery. This paper considers how an interviewer must negotiate
various self-representations and multiple interpretations in order to recreate the history of an artistic practice. It concentrates on how the New
Orleans Mardi Gras Indians respond to various scholarly narratives
regarding their origins and reflects on how the interviewer negotiates
these competing voices.
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Picturing War: Interviews, Images, and the Writing of History
Drew A. Thompson, Williams College
From 1983 to 1992 images from the Mozambican News Agency
(AIM) were the world’s purview on Mozambique’s war with South
Africa. These images found their way into international art biennials.
This paper traces the circulation of these images from the press into
art galleries. During studio interviews, photographers used a technical
language that offers insights into the ways they used artistic practices to
compensate for the logistical challenges faced when photographing and
how they modified their images before exhibiting in art galleries. Last,
the paperconsiders the stakes for AIM photographers in sharing their
experiences at this particular moment in time. This paper highlights
the analytical possibilities for rethinking the relationship between
photography and historical knowledge production and the types of
historical revisionism engaged in by both scholars and photographers
around oral interviews and studio apprenticeships.
Beyond Interviews, beyond Art Criticism: Sharing Time,
Learning More
Fiona Siegnethaler, University of Basel
Because interviews as a particular form of knowledge are susceptible to
repetition and generalization of an artist’s work and life, the narratives
that are constructed about artists often reproduce similar stories, rarely
pushing beyond what has already been published. Often this is due to
methodological approaches that prioritize the analysis of the work on
the one hand and punctual interviews within a very short framework on
the other. Advocating the use of extended, long-term research methods
that complement the mere interview, this paper discusses how the South
African artist David Koloane and his oeuvre have been represented
in articles and catalogues over the last thirty years almost exclusively
through the lens of apartheid oppression and the liberation struggle. It
traces the dominant discourses that situate his work within this context
and then considers how prolonged engagement and many conversations
help to consider his current production within a contemporary
postapartheid framework.
Conversations with Oshitola
David Doris, University of Michigan
The Yoruba ritual specialist Kolawole Oshitola is an extraordinary
figure whose words and acts have been central to the work of African
scholars across disciplines. Over fourteen years we have developed
a strong relationship built on trust and familial reciprocity—he
calls me son, I call him father. Though I have worked with many
other specialists during that time, working with Oshitola has been a
singularly fruitful, even tantalizing, experience. But it does raise some
compelling questions. Thinking about what Oshitola has shared (and
not shared) with me, I want to consider our expectations regarding
scholarly distance and human intimacy enacted in conversational
exchange; the verifiability of authoritative utterance regarding “cultural
knowledge”; and the limits of interpretation when even a trusted,
knowledgeable teacher and father, like Oshitola, is himself constrained
by oath to silence.
Multiples in Context: The Early Years
Chairs: Meredith Malone, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum,
Washington University in St. Louis; Bradley Bailey,
Saint Louis University
This session explores the emergence of the art of the multiple—threedimensional objects issued in edition—from the late 1950s through
the 1960s, a period marked by an explosion of interest among artists
on both sides of the Atlantic. Artists associated with Fluxus, Nouveau
Réalisme, Pop, GRAV, and Zero, among others, embraced the multiple
as means of challenging the elitist status of the art object and eschewing
individual touch in favor of multiplicity and the dissemination of
ideas. Unlike painting and sculpture, or even fine-art printmaking, the
multiple engaged directly with conditions of industrial production,
commercial marketing, mass communication, and an increasingly global
economy. Given recent scholarly interest in the role of the multiple in
postwar artistic production—such as Eye on Europe: Prints, Books and
Multiples—1960 to Now held at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006
and Multiple Strategies: Beuys, Maciunas, Fluxus at Harvard’s BuschReisinger in 2007 with its corresponding symposium—it seems time for
a reevaluation of its larger history, networks, and impact.
Paradox of the Original and Its Reinterpretation:
Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s Editioned Replicas
Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, The Israel Museum
Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray embraced replication as a device to
spur rethinking, unhinge original meanings, and blur conventional
categories. In the 1950s and 1960s they forged close relationships with
the Milanese scholar-poet-dealer Arturo Schwarz, who produced replicas
of fourteen of Duchamp’s readymades in 1964–65 and ten of Man Ray’s
objects in 1963–64 and 1971, in close collaboration with the artists.
Displayed in public and private collections, these editioned replicas
gradually were mainstreamed, becoming stand-ins for the lost originals.
Based on an analysis of extensive unpublished correspondence between
Duchamp, Man Ray, and Schwarz, this paper offers a new account
of the commissioning and fabrication of the replicas, and elucidates
the relationship between the replicas and original objects. Its findings
contribute to a greater understanding of what originality, authenticity,
and authorship meant for these artists and demonstrate how the reception
of the replicas has evolved within the art establishment.
Art à prix modéré: Spectacle and Social Democracy
in the GRAV’s Multiples
Lily Woodruff, Michigan State University
During the 1960s the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel produced
multiples whose material, form, and production scales were to echo and
enhance the subsidized Habitations à Loyer Modéré (HLM) housing
developments that themselves were multiplying around major French
cities in the post–World War II era. While their artworks aimed to bring
a seductive Gestalt therapy to the masses, many critics saw their kinetic
objects as mere entertainment. This paper considers their mobiles,
prints, sculptures, and questionnaires in terms of the period’s rhetoric
of cybernetics and social demystification they used to describe their
process. The GRAV endeavored to distinguish their art from science by
treating the viewer as an active participant and not as an informational
factor; yet the smoothness of their technocratic gloss risked producing
a hypnosis that resembled the effects of another spectacular object that
was multiplying in the HLM: the television.
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Samples without Value: Piero Manzoni’s Art of Distribution
Gregory Tentler, Rhode Island School of Design
In 1959 the Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) introduced his
pneumatic sculpture kits Corpi d’aria (Bodies of Air). As a multiple,
the kit was designed for mass production, international transport,
and execution by the purchaser. Corpi d’aria rewrote the role of
spectators by making them either sole or collaborative authors. The
idealistic suggestion of a democratic art of participation was, however,
undermined by the identical end products that voided participants’
aesthetic choices. This paper demonstrates how Manzoni’s multiple
inaugurated a critique of artistic labor and value that was carried
through all of the artist’s subsequent Conceptual works. It also
explores how Manzoni developed these qualities in dialogue with
contemporaries in Gruppo T and the critical milieu surrounding the
Galleria Schwarz in Milan.
The Expandable, Renewable Artwork
Liz Kotz, University of California, Riverside
What does it mean to think of multiples as a form of publication—one
that would also be dynamic and transformable? This talk examines
Fluxus founder George Maciunas’s proposed designs for An Anthology
of Chance Operations (1961/1963) in order to trace his efforts to
formulate a “perpetually renewable and expandable” publication
that could be endlessly replicated, altered, and added to. Maciunas’s
rejected designs—for a loose-leaf, unbound volume, including a plastic
hinged cover, corrugated board with aluminum bolts and washers, and
putting all the pages in a specially made box—show the development
of the idiosyncratic design strategies he would soon use for Fluxus I
(1964) and other early Fluxus editions. In so doing, they illuminate his
elaboration of collectively produced and continually reauthored works
of art that would not so much be viewed or read as unpacked, handled,
and used as materials for something akin to private performances.
Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association
Collaborative Understanding through Technical
Investigations: Art Scholars, Conservators, and
Scientists Researching in Tandem
Chairs: Steven Manford, independent scholar; Joyce Hill Stoner,
University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum
Recent catalogues raisonné and other art-history publications have
benefited significantly from research carried out by teams of art
historians, curators, conservators, and scientists. When scholars with
these disparate viewpoints work together, new insights can emerge
about the process of creation: how an artist developed ideas. New
discoveries are often made due to combinations of documentary,
biographical, stylistic, and visual evidence revealed by art-historical
inquiry, the results of in-depth examinations of the works typically
practiced by conservators, and analysis of materials by conservation
scientists (which may challenge traditional approaches to instrumental
analysis). All three fields benefit, and new depths of an artist’s mind and
decision making can be plumbed. As technical art history emerged as a
discipline in the last decades of the twentieth century, collaboration and
teamwork—which have long been the norm in the sciences—brought
about a methodological change in art-historical scholarship. Research
and publications on specific artists or schools have been broadened
by optical and scientific methods including X-radiography, infrared
reflectography, and analysis of paint stratigraphy; new noninvasive
imaging techniques can reveal hidden features in works of art. This
session features new findings from interdisciplinary research carried
out in the areas of painting and sculpture.
Revealing Hidden Layers in Late Rembrandt Paintings
Annelies van Loon and Petria Noble, Mauritshuis, The Royal
Picture Gallery
In the Science4Arts ReVisRembrandt project, art historians,
conservators, and scientists are working closely together to apply
new analytical imaging techniques to better understand Rembrandt’s
late enigmatic painting technique, which is characterized by loose
brushwork, pronounced surface roughness, and a predilection for
translucent paint mixtures containing smalt and organic lake pigments.
In the case of Rembrandt’s Homer (1663), analytical imaging (XRF) in
combination with cross-sectional analyses gave insight into the paint
degradation processes related to the use of smalt and lake pigments
that disfigure the painting, and provided new information relating to its
original appearance. Similarly, in Saul and David (ca.1655), the curtain,
partly hidden below the thick, yellowed varnish and overpaint, could be
visualized for the first time with unprecedented detail. For Rembrandt’s
Self-Portrait (1669), various stages in the buildup of the painting,
including the brown undermodelling, were revealed.
Edgar Degas Sculpture: An Innovative Systematic Catalogue
Suzanne Lindsay, University of Pennsylvania; and Shelley Sturman,
Daphne Barbour, Barbara Berrie, Michael Palmer, and Suzanne Lomax,
National Gallery of Art
The systematic catalogue of Edgar Degas’s (1834–1917) sculpture
at the National Gallery of Art took new form when we—an art
historian, two conservators, and three scientists—confronted a unique
corpus that became fully available for study in 1999: the majority
of the lifetime sculpture of this experimental artist and bronzes cast
from them. Essays by each contingent and entries with detailed
technical and art-historical sections entered into dialogue with one
another, building a bedrock of new facts, arguments, and questions
for subsequent research. Through our multidisciplinary approach,
we revised Degas’s place in larger historical, artistic, and technical
contexts; we also probed the acknowledged foundation of his work,
his commitment to craft, in a medium that is famously complicated
technically. Degas was deeply preoccupied with the medium
throughout his career, and his sculpture is highly sophisticated
formally and technically, if often risky and always fragile.
The Techniques of Henry O. Tanner
Amber Kerr-Allison, Smithsonian American Art Museum;
Anne Marley, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
When conservators and curators work together, an exciting sort of
intellectual alchemy can result. Such was the case with the scholarship
of these two presenters who collaborated on the 2012 exhibition and
catalogue Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit. Combining the
results of archival art-historical research and state-of-the-art scientific
analysis, the presentation shares discoveries made about the technically
complex and evolving oeuvre of the American expatriate artist Tanner
(1859–1937). Specifically, it discusses what makes a Tanner a Tanner,
based on analysis conducted at the Smithsonian Lunder Center for
Conservation and the Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute.
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Scientific Analysis in Attribution Questions:
High Expectations, Necessary Collaborations, and
a Question of an Early Vincent van Gogh
Jennifer Mass, Winterthur Museum; Kristin de Ghetaldi,
University of Delaware
Conservation scientists are often asked to address attribution
questions related to works of art. In the case of easel paintings,
scientists and conservators must consider the presence or absence
of specific pigments, fillers, and grounds, as well as relevant paintdeterioration phenomena. In the case of Vincent van Gogh scientists
and conservators have begun to collect information regarding his
canvases in order to answer questions relating to attribution and dating,
though his early works have not been subjected to a comprehensive
study. Recently a painting attributed to van Gogh (dated 1879) was
brought to Winterthur’s Scientific Research and Analysis Laboratory.
The pigments, fillers, degradation products, and binding media were
characterized using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray
fluorescence, and scanning electron microscopy. The analytical findings
are discussed as well as the importance of connoisseurship relating
to this particular painting. The role of science in the attribution of
artworks is also explored.
Deterritorializing Design: Rethinking the
Relationship between Theory and Practice
Chair: Betti Marenko, Central Saint Martins, University of the
Arts London
What might emerge from an encounter between Gilles Deleuze and
design? It is time for an investigation of how Deleuze’s philosophy
and design impact each other and how theory and practice creatively
affect each other. This need is driven not only by Deleuze’s intellectual
proximity to issues that are relevant to design practice but also by the
changing nature of design, which as a process reflects a Deleuzian way
of thinking and doing philosophy. Beginning with an investigation of
how the field of design is currently mutating, the panel suggests an
open-ended definition of design reflecting design’s own entanglement
with the practice of “making worlds” and “creating futures.”
Alignments, tensions, and conflicts between Deleuze and design
are explored, with Deleuze taken to disrupt design and with design
equally taken to disrupt Deleuze. Design is conceptualized as a force,
a disruption, and a process, and as such is examined with and through
Deleuze’s thought. As the material expression of possible worlds,
design resonates with Deleuze’s notion of virtuality, assemblages,
affect, and matter. As a profoundly disruptive force, constituted in the
multiform entanglement of practices, discourses, industry agendas,
lifestyles, and behaviors, design is can offer a critique of how the
emergence of complex relationships between human and nonhuman
agencies elicits affects, tells stories, and ultimately makes us think by
doing. Deleuze’s thought is remarkably appropriate to both explore and
explode the theory and practice of design.
Deleuzian Design: How to Catalyze an Encounter between
Philosophy and Design
Betti Marenko, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
Design needs to be alert to ideas circulating outside its more familiar
domain. It needs to be conversant with what philosophers, critical
thinkers, and designers of concepts are developing. An intra (rather
then inter) disciplinary appetite must be fostered. The way thing
theory, radical materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented
ontology affirm the distribution of the agency of material things and the
symmetry between human and nonhuman actors ought to reverberate
with how design constructs (and reflects on) its own agenda. A
Deleuzian brand of vitalist nonorganic materialism should affect
the way design as a complex nexus of theories, practices, cultures,
discourses, and industries, each with its own material entanglements,
theorizes its own presence in the world. Design is exquisitely located to
embody, in a creative, experimental, and innovative way, the questions
and tensions circulating in current theories and the way these are
reformatting the paradigm of the world we inhabit.
Redesigning the Objectile: Deleuze and the Science of
Imaginary Solutions
Derek Hales, University of Huddersfield
This paper introduces pataphysical notions of space, time, and the
clinamen to counter-actualize the Deleuzian objectile for postdigital
design. After reviewing the objectile in Deleuze’s le Pli, the concepts
used stem from two main sources: first, Deleuze’s writing on the
clinamen, drawing out relations with media theory and putting
Deleuze’s thought into relation with other philosophical approaches;
second, Deleuze’s brief references to Alfred Jarry, used to bring to the
objectile a Jarryesque logic via pataphysical usage of the clinamen.
To the Edge of Chaos: A Deleuzian Approach to an
Emergent Innovation
Jamie Brassett, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
The work of Deleuze and Guattari resonates with current concerns
regarding connected forms of creative production, network selforganization, and the emergence of creativity across disciplinary
boundaries. In the world of design and innovation, these concerns
are expressed especially (but not exclusively) within the discourses
of “design thinking,” where practices and processes from design
impact other areas (notably business). Under these densely connected
conditions, where multiplicitous activities, actors, and actions mutually
affect one another, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concepts of smooth and
striated space and the principles that drive them are of great interest
insofar as they all engage in a mapping of creative critique. This
paper charts how an engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s “partial
critique” can drive new ways of expressing innovative acts. Deleuze
and Guattari take us to the edge of chaos, a place where creativity
emerges, designing changes, and innovation happens.
Technical Art History and the University Curriculum
Chairs: Michele Marincola, Institute of Fine Arts, New York
University; Charlotte Nichols, Seton Hall University
The session considers the issues associated with integrating technical
art history in the university course curriculum. During the past two
decades there has been increased collaboration among curators,
conservators, and conservation scientists in an effort to promote the
study of artistic process in an interdisciplinary context. Such efforts
have been funded by major grants and are reflected in the increasing
number of publications and museum exhibitions related to technique, as
well as in graduate programs in art history, particularly those affiliated
with conservation programs. However, for many the challenges
of incorporating such an approach in the classroom are daunting:
the instructor’s lack of scientific training, limited direct access to
conservators or their labs, and a need for access to appropriate highresolution images. This session presents case studies that address these
challenges and related issues.
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The Creation of Historically Accurate Reconstructions
of Old Master Paintings in University Education
Brian Baade, University of Delaware
Seeing/Knowing: Image Theory and Learning
Strategies across the University Curriculum
This presentation discusses conservation projects to create historically
accurate reconstructions of paintings that are intended to serve as
educational and interpretive tools in an academic context. Highlighted
are the ways European paintings from the thirteenth to eighteenth
century may be studied by replicating the artists’ materials and
techniques instead of imitating surface effects only. The layering and
materials used by the original artists are revealed in cross-sectional
cutaways on the reconstructions. Painters under review include
Duccio, Giotto, Hans Memling, Carlo Crivelli, Roger van der Weyden,
Tintoretto, El Greco, Rembrandt, and Tiepolo.
Fifteen years ago the Mellon Foundation launched the College and
University Art Museum initiative to connect rich resources of academic
museums to college curricula. Resulting innovative staff positions
enabled museums to reset their educational mission at a time when
art history departments were also expanding to include new-media
and visual-culture discourses. Today academic museums and galleries
inhabit increasingly more central positions in existing and new
disciplinary and interdisciplinary conversations. Indeed, the phrase
“visual literacy” has begun to take hold, as new research and methods
centered on image theory and visual cognition emerge as learning
strategies across higher education. Where do the academic museum’s
next major philosophical and structural innovations lie, and thus its
future contributions?
Teaching Technical Art History at the Graduate Level:
The Summer Institute in Technical Art History at the
Institute of Fine Arts
Michele Marincola, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
In the United States art historians often regard the study of processes
for making art as the specialized domain of the artist, conservator, or
scientist, and few outside of the museum world regularly integrate
technical studies into their research and teaching. This is changing
at several universities. Technical art history offers an approach
to contextualizing materiality, artistic innovation or restraint, and
alterations over time, and places technical information within reach
to open new avenues of inquiry within art history. But how to teach
it? The Institute of Fine Arts recently received support from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for summer funding to teach technical
art history to North American doctoral students in art history, with
the goals of augmenting their research and increasing interest in
the field. This lecture discusses the 2012 summer course held at the
IFA, “Replication and Its Processes,” including its content, formats,
successes, and challenges.
The Summer Teachers Institute in Technical Art History
(STITAH): A Case Study in Teaching the Technical
Sarah Barack, Yale University Art Gallery
The benefits of incorporating technical art history into the standard
undergraduate curriculum are multifold and include both the
promotion of a deeper understanding of materials and manufacture
and the potential to attract an increasingly diverse student body. Yet
formal opportunities to study technical art history at a professional
development level are not readily accessible. The Summer Teachers
Institute in Technical Art History (STITAH), funded by the Samuel
H. Kress Foundation, was developed to address this need and to help
support the growth of such course offerings at institutions throughout
North America. The seminar, offered at the Conservation Center,
Institute of Fine Arts, in 2011 and at the Yale University Art Gallery
in 2012, provided an intensive, week-long introduction to technical
art history for undergraduate faculty. This paper provides a critical
review of the STITAH and its pedagogical approach toward objectfocused teaching.
Chair: Natalie R. Marsh, Graham Gund Gallery, Kenyon College
Seeing, Knowing, Showing: Experiments in “Visualizing
the Liberal Arts”
Laurel Bradley, Carleton College
The campus museum, once a repository for collections, is being
reinvented as a laboratory for visual learning. Artifacts—tangible
objects not reducible to screen shots —gain power as the world
goes increasingly digital. Academic museum professionals, firmly
recommitted to serving the curriculum, see the shift to visual
pedagogies as an opportunity for leadership within their parent
institutions. At Carleton College, the Visualizing the Liberal Arts
initiative has fostered extensive experiments with visual teaching
and learning methods. While the Perlman Teaching Museum indeed
occupies a central position in the initiative, the most powerful result
of Carleton’s experiment was expanding exhibition culture beyond the
museum. This paper stimulates conversation about the role of museum
professionals on campus; venues and timetables to encourage faculty
to add curatorial exercises to pedagogical tool kits; and the need to
go beyond existing silos defining disciplines, funding streams, and
teaching roles.
Seeing, Knowing, and Showing: Curricular Exhibitions
in the Library
Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, Carleton College
With an ambitious program of curricular and student-driven
exhibitions, and productive collaboration with the campus museum,
the exhibitions program in Gould Library at Carleton College plays a
central role in fostering curatorial thinking and object-based learning
beyond the museum. This paper demonstrates the role of the library
exhibitions program in supporting multidisciplinary visual pedagogy
at Carleton through selected case studies. The paper characterizes the
library’s program as a grassroots approach to realizing the broad goals
of Carleton’s Visualizing the Liberal Arts initiative through short-term,
modestly scaled exhibitions produced in conjunction with specific
courses. Shared examples demonstrate both the challenges and the
possibilities of developing exhibitions outside the museum, and suggest
how a decentralized approach to exhibitions can “feed” a curatorial
culture across campus.
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From Visual Pedagogies to Learning Theories: Using Academic
Museums to Catalyze Campus-Wide Learning
Steven S. Volk and Liliana Milkova, Oberlin College
The Work of Art Criticism in the Age of Blogs and Ezines
As teaching museums, college art museums have traditionally catered
to art-history and studio-art students. For the past four years Oberlin
College has been piloting a new pedagogy designed to encourage
literally every department and program on campus to make use of
the encyclopedic collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum.
Faculty from departments such as mathematics and chemistry bring
their students into a space of cultural and pedagogic engagement in
the museum. In this presentation, the authors, a history professor and
the museum’s academic curator, discuss the program’s theoretical
foundations, employing both visual-literacy and learning-theory
approaches, and its methodology, specifically its development at
Oberlin and how other museums can transfer it to their own campuses.
In his preface to the third edition of Criticizing Art: Understanding
the Contemporary, Terry Barrett declares, “Good criticism is careful
and engaging argumentation that furthers dialogue about art and
life.” Encyclopaedia Britannica explains, “Art criticism is often
tied to theory; it is interpretive, involving the effort to understand a
particular work of art from a theoretical perspective and to establish its
significance in the history of art.” Critical writing that is intellectually
stimulating and theoretically grounded in sources considered to
possess quality and significance has been recognized as “good.” Today,
however, “criticism” is found on ezines and Facebook, and “critics”
range from respected professionals to casual bloggers. Art criticism
has become globally accessible. Has this widespread accessibility
resulted in qualitative changes? Arthur Danto explained that in our
contemporary, post-historical period, art can appropriate the popular
forms of mass culture, as long as it maintains conceptual validity
and rigor. “The artist, the gallery, the practices of art history, and the
discipline of philosophical aesthetics must all . . . give way and become
different, and perhaps vastly different, from what they have so far
been.” Must the practice of art criticism also give way?
Yo Veo: Visual Interventions
Robert Colby, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Yo Veo: Visual Interventions” is a research project inspired by
object-based teaching at the Ackland Art Museum, University of
North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Robert Colby, the Ackland’s former
coordinator of academic programs, and Mimi Chapman, associate
professor at the UNC School of Social Work, collaborated to adapt
object-based teaching to create a new form of cultural-competency
training using images. The current project provides a model showing
success using both qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods.
Yo Veo supports middle-school teachers working with new immigrant
students in communities that have not previously attracted immigrant
populations. In a facilitated conversation using photographs, teachers
process sensitive professional, pedagogical, and political issues and
rethink important conclusions about their students. The project has
revealed hypotheses about image theory, psychology, perception, social
engagement, and the role academic museums can play in facilitating
meaningful community dialogue.
Platform: The University Museum as Propagator and
Disseminator of Cross-Disciplinary Research
Kathryn Bonansinga, University of Cincinnati
The present and future success of the academic museum is in crossdisciplinary research and programming. This presentation discusses
three examples of exhibitions that exemplify transdisciplinary
leadership by the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visuals
Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. All of them capitalized
on the center’s location as a unit of a Hispanic-majority university
in the Chihuahuan Desert on the US–Mexico border. Hydromancy
by SIMPARCH (2007) addressed the preciousness of water. The
Disappeared (2009) focused on art created by survivors of military
dictatorships in Latin America. Light Lines (2011) involved an array
of mirrors that reflected and directed sunlight into the gallery. The
presentation discusses how the exhibitions succeeded (collaboration
with scientists and engineers and curricular development) and where
they fell short (educational outreach and curatorial connectivity).
Chairs: Diana Spitzer McClintock, Kennesaw State University;
Susan Todd-Raque, independent curator
Make to Know: Toward Art-Critical Transmedia Literacies
Charlotte Frost, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
This paper makes a case for a hands-on approach to gaining necessary
art-critical transmedia literacies. It begins by describing the emerging
characteristics of several types of postinternet art contextualization. For
example, through art-focused, email-based discussion lists, blogging,
and microblogging, art criticism has become more democratic, faster,
and highly participative. However, certain types of archive corroborate
certain types of knowledge, and the criteria by which we judge art
belong more to the book than to the blog. In my own practice—
including the various incarnations of the Arts Future Book project—a
transmedia approach has helped me access the value of new-media
art and art criticism. Aligned with the digital humanities, art criticism
must embrace the makerly turn and thoroughly explore how meaning is
created and transferred through new media.
140 Characters or Less
Renee McGarry, Sotheby’s Institute of Art
There is a lot of talk about art in the world of microblogging, but it is
hard to call it engagement. It comes from college students, museum
visitors, and gallery goers, but hardly any of it comes from art
historians or critics. This paper asks why and how scholars and critics
can, do, and should participate in the microblogosphere by exploring
case studies of interactions about art on Twitter and Facebook. How do
scholars and critics engage with the public in these spaces? How can
we interact with a broad audience in a way that is multidimensional,
nuanced, and respectful without oversimplifying our arguments?
When space is limited, is it worth having these conversations? Does
it undermine our scholarly and critical authority to do so? And
perhaps most important, how do we, as scholars, critics, and the
public, conceive of authority in a horizontally organized universe of
microblogging?
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The Field of Content Production: Art Writing in the
Twenty-First Century
Jeanne Willette, Otis College of Art and Design
Is it possible today in 2013 for an Apollinaire or a Greenberg to make
the career of an artist, to coin a movement, to name a trend? The
answer, in short, is “no.” The old paradigm of print has passed, and a
new paradigm has changed the very ground of art writing. The demise
of print and the rise of the internet created a decentered nonterritoriality
of the web, where the role of the art writer must be reconsidered. The
mode of technological production in cyberspace has generated a new
kind of reader who demands a new kind of access and who practices
a new kind of reading. This paper explores the ramifications of the
dispersal of art across a global landscape and predicts the results of the
dissemination of art writing across the web, a place where there are no
gates and no gatekeepers, where “everyone is a critic.”
The Home, the Museum, and the Gallery: Illuminating
the Nexus between Identity, Materiality, and Visual
Culture in the Pacific
Chairs: Fiona P. McDonald, University College London;
Each paper in this session presents a specific case study from the
Pacific that traces out issues relating to the politics of representation
that emerge through visual or material culture. Aotearoa New Zealand
is the main site of investigation in hopes of concentrating on the
richness of a geographically specific dialogue that links the home, the
museum, and the gallery through a focus on materiality and identity.
Leaving Home: Representing Material Histories
This presentation looks critically at how objects found in postwar
homes in Aotearoa New Zealand have become accessioned into
national collections and perform more broadly as markers of national
memory and national identity, which in turn become tangible heritage
exhibited in national institutions, both galleries and museums.
The exploration follows the social life of these things and their
representations as history across genres and sites, personal and public.
Biculturalism and Its Discontents: Making Maori Art
in the Museum
Conal McCarthy, Victoria University of Wellington
This paper discusses how national and regional museums and galleries
are embedded in conversations that tackle “biculturalism and its
discontents.” The discussion unpacks the complexity of institutions, as
well as exhibitions and collecting policies, in relation to contemporary
Maori and Pacific art.
The Mutable Woolen Blanket: In the Home, the Studio,
the Museum, and the Gallery
Fiona P. McDonald, University College London
This presentation explores through visual and material culture an
emergent phenomenon in contemporary art where artists recycle or
repurpose everyday objects, in particular woolen blankets, into their
work. The talk presents the work of three artists who use woolen
blankets as an object of memory, identity, and contestation of a colonial
past. It illuminates how these works are displayed in public art galleries
and how material culture found in homes, collections, and exhibitions
is integral to the way identity in Aotearoa New Zealand is navigated by
contemporary artists by looking at art through an anthropological lens.
Engagements between Indigenous and
Contemporary Art
Chair: Ian McLean, University of Wollongong
In the 1960s and 1970s new ideas about art and life associated with
the Earth, performance, and Conceptual art profoundly changed the
relationship between Western and Indigenous art practices. While
the impact of Indigenous art on Western modernism during the first
half of the twentieth century was also significant, it focused mainly
on the formal attributes of Indigenous visual objects and, in some
cases, discourses of national identity. However, in the last decades
of the twentieth century, Western artists became more interested in
the performative aspects of Indigenous art as well as the meaning of
the art, and made greater efforts to actually engage with Indigenous
communities and artists. This contrast between the two periods is
also evident in the impact of Western art practices on Indigenous
ones. This session investigates instances of engagement between
Indigenous art and contemporary art practice and theory that focus on
the reasons for and consequences of this engagement and its relevance
to contemporary art.
“Gallery, Alcove, or Riverbank”: Threads of Postminimalism,
Land Art, and (Native) America
Larry M. Taylor, Graduate Theological Union
Indigenous cultures were ignored by Minimalism, engaged by
Postminimalism and earth art, and reimagined by Native American
artists. Postminimalist and land art departed from Minimalist
precedents by greater dialogue with nature, materials, and Indigenous
symbols. Recently Indian artists have seized on this juncture, further
correcting historical oversights as well as rerouting the agency of
Native identity. While few were directly involved with Postminimal
art in the early days, later artists such as Faye HeavyShield, who grew
up at the Blood Reserve (Alberta), initiated a dialogue with it that also
sufficiently preserves and speaks to Blood tradition and transformation.
Critical attention to the ways Natives have engaged contemporary art
must account for the dramatically different contexts of Indigenous and
mainstream communities.
Postmodern Allegorists: Twenty-First-Century
Native American/American Painting
Lisa Roberts Seppi, State University of New York at Oswego
Many Indigenous artists—such as Norman Akers, Andrea
Carlson, Jeffrey Gibson, Mario Martinez, Steven Yazzie, and Kay
WalkingStick—embrace the aesthetic potential of allegory as they
address relationships between past and present, exterior material
world and interior self, visual and literary, historical and personal.
Their art incorporates multiple references to places, events, people,
and things on the surface and beneath the surface, becoming personal
maps of the unseen. This approach is indicative of postmodern
allegory (as defined by Craig Owens) in part because it is a
fundamental aspect of their lived realities as Native American artists.
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Native Americans experienced the condition of fragmented identity
long before postmodern critics and theorists identified and discussed
such a state. Moreover, the metatextual condition of postmodern
visual culture has long been part of Native American art and life.
This paper examines Native American contemporary painting as a
distinctly postmodern school.
a relatively unexamined aspect of how Indigenous art enters into
dialogue with contemporary art. This paper examines the roles of key
arts advisors in informing the entry of Indigenous art practices into the
contemporary domain. In conceiving these exchanges we can consider
new ways of conceptualizing authorship, and thus meaning, in relation
to key practices.
Interrogating Media in Contemporary African Art:
A Preference for the Indigenous?
Victoria L. Rovine, University of Florida
Queer Caucus for Art: The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender
Caucus for Art, Artists, and Historians
Since the late twentieth century, studio artists from non-Western
regions—locations often associated with Indigenous cultures—have
found an increasingly enthusiastic reception in Western bastions of fine
art. This paper focuses on two key artistic media that are prominently
represented in exhibitions of and scholarship on contemporary African
art: textiles and recyclia. Both media have a history of associations with
Western conceptions of Africa as “traditional,” rooted in and delimited
by Indigenous cultural practices. This paper explores how this history
has shaped the reception of these media in the field of contemporary
African art by artists such as Yinka Shonibare, Abdoulaye Konaté,
Romuald Hazoumé, and Willie Bester. Following an overview of these
media’s prominence in contemporary African art, the paper focuses
on the work of a highly visible and much-heralded artist, El Anatsui,
whose work combines the recycling of refuse with the aesthetic of
textiles.
Historicizing Indigenous Contemporary Art: The Rise of the
Indigenous Curator
Mario A. Caro, New York University
The increased inclusion of Indigenous art into the contemporary art
world has much to do with the entry of Native curators and scholars
into professions that traditionally have been the domain of nonNatives. Indigenous curators have been particularly effective when
working at an international level, for only at this level can issues such
as the sovereign status of Native nations—which come up against the
policies of the nation-state—be addressed. Ironically this generally
requires the participation of nation-state bodies such as the National
Museum of the American Indian. The success of Indigenous curators
at the international level has been particularly evident in the national
pavilions at the Venice Biennale, with Australia and Canada pioneering
the exhibition of Indigenous art in the 1990s. This presentation
historicizes Indigenous curatorial practices and examines a selection
of projects that generated scholarship on curating from an explicitly
Native perspective.
Articulating Coauthorship in Contemporary Indigenous Art
Quentin Sprague, University of Wollongong
The arrival of remote Australian Indigenous art on the contemporary
art scene is not a chance meeting between separate cultural domains.
Indigenous art reaches the Western art market through a series of
exchanges that traverse a complex intercultural network. A variety of
interested parties often play direct advisory roles to Indigenous artists,
facilitating their greater access to the forms and tropes of contemporary
art and enabling a compounding of cultural definitions. The nature of
influence played by art advisors, curators, dealers, and others forms
Not I: The Desire of the Nonsubject Queer
Chairs: Dan Taulapapa McMullin, independent artist; Clifford Eberly,
independent artist
This panel deals with the idea of a nonsubject queer, that is, an artist
who is queer but whose artistic subject is not easily identified with
queer desire or politics. The purpose is to address queer artists whose
practices are focused on abstraction, conceptualism, materialism,
ephemerality, the nonmonumental, social practice, and other subjects
that are informed by queer desire, but are not presented as such,
in an effort to complicate the discussion of desire and politics in
contemporary art and academia. Another purpose is to address the
sublimation of desire in contemporary art. The subject of queer art is
relatively new to art history, but the queering of art is probably as old
as art itself. The identification of a queer art practice is more often the
project of art historians than of artists who can be identified as queer.
The panel raises discussion with nonqueer and queer contemporary
artists, curators, collectors, and academics on the contemporary and the
queer in art today.
Artists, Architects, Libraries, and Books, 1400–1800
Chairs: Sarah McPhee, Emory University; Heather Hyde Minor,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Bernini owned three copies of Vitruvius, a manuscript edition
of Galileo’s Mecchaniche, and seven volumes of the poetry of
Giambattista Marino. Inigo Jones possessed treatises from Vitruvius to
Philibert Delorme, along with Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch. Jacques
Lemercier collected three thousand books, including the Koran.
Velázquez had two editions of Pliny’s Natural History, along with
books on navigation, the Americas, and the movement of the planets.
How are historians to understand the content of these libraries? What
kinds of libraries did architects and artists assemble and how did they
use them? How did their reading affect their art? Traditional approaches
to these questions have followed a bibliographic method, equating
the contents of books with the mind and education of the owner, and
trying to understand how individual volumes were used as sources in
the creation of buildings or works of art. But related developments
in history, sociology, and literary criticism suggest that this approach
may oversimplify the historical reality of books and how people
read them. In recent decades the basic constituents of study—author,
book, reader—have been revised, with the author redefined as a social
function, the book as a polyvocal text, and the reader as an active
interpreter. This session gauges the current state of research.
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Leon Battista Alberti as Author and Architect in De re aedificatoria
Heather Horton, Purchase College, State University of New York
An Italian Art Library under the Polar Star
Martin Olin, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) is frequently portrayed as the
architect described in his treatise De re aedificatoria (ca. 1450s). As
a result, Alberti’s complicated buildings, each emerging from rich
contexts in Rimini, Mantua, and Florence, are read as built illustrations
of the unillustrated treatise, and, in turn, isolated statements from De
re are commonly used to reconstruct the buildings, each of which
remained incomplete in Alberti’s lifetime. This paper teases apart the
text-building conflation with a close analysis of De re and reveals the
fusion as a deliberate authorial strategy, originating in the treatise itself.
Alberti divides his carefully plotted, metacritical voice between two
poles: an erudite authority, who overtly references ancient texts, and
a purveyor of practical construction advice, who observes and relates
contemporary building practices. In blending these two modes of
authority Alberti produces and assumes a cross-disciplinary expertise
that furthers his literary ambitions and launches his architectural career.
While studying in Italy in his twenties, the Swedish architect
Nicodemus Tessin the Younger (1654–1728) became steeped in the
Roman tradition and formed a firm belief in its eternal values. During
his career as an architect, he found that access to books, prints, and
drawings of Roman architecture was indispensable. The images
were not simply sources for design ideas but a compensation for
the crippling absence from the Eternal City. Tessin became an avid
collector. “I have everything in the manner of interesting books and
prints from Italy,” he wrote proudly in 1707, and in 1712 he published
a catalogue of his books. Although unique in a Swedish context,
Tessin’s collection, architectural oeuvre, and theoretical positions were
part of an international reception and critical reinterpretation of the
Roman High Baroque that would become a foundation of European
architecture in the eighteenth century.
All in a Day’s Work: The Publications of Juan Gómez de Mora,
Royal Architect to the Spanish Habsburgs
Jesús Escobar, Northwestern University
This paper examines the library of Juan Gómez de Mora (1586–1648),
head of the royal works in Madrid and one of the most prolific builders
in seventeenth-century Spain. The paper briefly outlines the collection
but focuses on what can be deduced from its contents about the duties
of the royal architect. Gómez de Mora authored three published
accounts on ceremonial events at court, and a fourth survives in
manuscript. These publications were intended to inform an audience
that was both local and global, in that they would have been read in
the far parts of the Spanish empire. Closer to home, Gómez de Mora’s
books occupied the same shelves as works by other architects as well
as poets and cosmographers, suggesting that he viewed his library as
a place for his work to coexist with the growing body of knowledge in
arts and sciences studied and produced at court.
George Clarke’s Library-Laboratory of Architecture
Eleonora Pistis, Oxford University
George Clarke (1661–1736) was an amateur architect, described by
historians as the unofficial advisor for all architectural activities at
Oxford University between 1702 and 1736. His library contained an
astonishing collection of books, prints, and drawings, one that was
avant-garde for its period. Located within Oxford University, it was a
place frequented by eminent scholars, artists, and architects, including,
among others, Nicholas Hawksmoor. This paper demonstrates that
Clarke’s library was intended to serve not as a mere archive of material
but rather as an institution for the advancement of learning—a sort
of “library-laboratory of architecture.” It discusses how once the
various materials on the library’s shelves were placed side by side on
a tabletop, they intersected with architectural practice and generated
a mutually stimulating dialogue that contributed to a renewal of the
identity of English architecture.
Architecture and Erudition: Carlo Fontana (1638–1714)
John Pinto, Princeton University
Throughout his career Carlo Fontana built and published extensively.
The scope and breadth of Fontana’s books range from presentations of
his own designs to the magisterial volume examining the entire history
of the Vatican Basilica (1694), which cites 127 published sources. The
theme of history emerges powerfully in Fontana’s treatment of St.
Peters, extending to other books, notably the volume on Montecitorio
(1694) and the posthumous work on the Colosseum (1725). Fontana’s
texts and images draw on an impressive array of sources; academic
scholarship and creative design exist in dynamic balance. Viewing
Fontana’s publications as a group illuminates the shifting definition
of what it meant to be an architect in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. Fontana’s books go far beyond the mere
documentation of executed designs or formulation of abstract theories.
In them we see an increasing sophistication of texts and images.
Abstraction and Totality
Chairs: Ara Hagop Merjian, New York University;
Anthony George White, University of Melbourne
In his 1962 book, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Renato Poggioli
argued that a totalitarian order renders avant-garde art “unthinkable.”
In some underexamined cases of twentieth-century modernism,
however, it was precisely the unthinkable nature of abstraction—
preverbal form, literally unspeakable—that afforded an ideological
pliability. How do we account for the solicitation of abstract artists
under Mussolini’s Fascist regime? Or the subsequent use of abstraction
in Italy as a benchmark of Marxist, anti-Fascist bona fides in the wake
of the regime’s fall? What of the emergence of Clement Greenberg’s
critical dogma as an aestheticizing totality in its own right? How did
abstraction shift in Russian modernism from hastening the rejection
of bourgeois culture to its incarnation as the demonic Other under
Stalin? The varying significance of forms that have been defended as
carriers of absolute meaning begs further questions about the professed
innocence of abstraction. This panel addresses the paradoxes of abstract
art’s relationship to ideology in the early and middle twentieth century.
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The Radicality of Abstract Expressionism
Valerie Hellstein, The Phillips Collection and George
Washington University
It is commonplace to understand the Abstract Expressionists’ “inward
turn” as a forfeiting of social responsibility. In this view, the “Abstract
Expressionist ego” is made coterminous with an idea of freedom
and individuality heralded as the antidote to Soviet totalitarianism
and the standard bearer of capitalism. Through a consideration of
key discussions at The Club coupled with an analysis of Abstract
Expressionist painting as bodily engagement instead of representations
of interiority, this paper argues that, contrary to the prevailing narrative,
the Abstract Expressionists offered a radical, anarchist alternative to
this cold-war liberal ego.
Abstraction and Communism in China: The Works of Qiu Deshu
Hayoon Jung, University of California, San Diego
This paper examines the relationship between abstraction and Chinese
Communism through the case study of Qiu Deshu (b. 1948). Qiu began
as the party’s favorite worker-artist, producing propaganda works in
the Socialist Realist style. After the Cultural Revolution, however,
he radically changed his style to abstraction as a means by which to
pursue an independent technique and style. However, according to
the changing political climate, his works were alternately allowed or
prohibited, often accompanied by physical punishment and mental
torture. Tracing Qiu Deshu’s abstraction, particularly vis-à-vis his
lived experience, offers a lens through which to approach the rapports
between Chinese abstraction and Communism.
Lines of Dissolution: Arab Nationalism and Abstraction
in Syria, 1936–52
Anneka Lenssen, The American University in Cairo
In Syria in 1941 a group of students scrawled the first slogans of a
new political movement on a Damascus wall: “We are here under
a single Arab homeland.” This paper examines the artistic practice
of Adham Ismail (1922–1963), one of those activists. It details
Ismail’s experiments with the Arabesque line as informed by French
philosophical writing, and addresses how Ismail sought to catalyze
national self-realization through a corporeally motivated process
of abstraction—color rhythms and unending lines that manifested
in durational time rather than gestalt. Finally, it historicizes “Arab
abstraction” and its claims to an ahistorical validity as pure form. The
peculiar racial-philosophical basis of Ismail’s paintings must be linked
to the crises of political representation he experienced in his hometown
of Antioch in a disputed border region between Turkey and Syria.
The Ideology of the Square: Cultural Critiques of Geometric
Abstraction in Soviet Russia
Maia Toteva, University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College
Discussing the legacy of Malevich’s icon—the black square—this
paper reassesses the modus operandi of geometric abstraction in
Russia after 1915. In the wake of the October Revolution, the black
square signaled, among other notions, the transformation of art’s
semiotic and symbolic procedures. It was Malevich’s associate, El
Lissitzky, who sought to reconcile the Suprematist lexicon with art’s
new ideological purpose by ascribing political aspirations to the once
self-referential avant-garde icon. The reductionist effect preconditioned
the dual attitude of the “second Russian avant-garde” to the arsenal
of modernism. The group Dvizheniye (Movement) built kinetic
constructions to expound flight as the essence of human existence,
while Conceptual art employed geometric abstraction to denote the
emptiness of modernist utopias and the relativity of representational
and cognitive systems.
Abstraction as Ornament: Visualizing Volksgemeinschaft
Michael Tymkiw, University of Chicago
This paper explores the relationship between abstraction and ornament
in early National Socialist attempts to visualize the process of forming
a Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community.” As a case study, it
uses a monumental stained-glass window designed by Cesar Klein
for the 1934 Berlin exhibition Deutsches Volk—Deutsche Arbeit. The
discussion centers on how changing conceptions of the window’s
design—which progressively jettisoned all figurative and iconic
elements—became entwined with shifting notions about how to
represent an individual’s relationship to the people’s community and
with contemporary public debates about whether nonfigurative art
could be considered “good” Nazi art.
Interpreting Animals and Animality
Chair: Susan Michelle Merriam, Bard College
Since the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975,
the humanities have witnessed the emergence and rapid growth of
animal studies. Philosophers, historians, and literature specialists
have all developed a body of scholarship attentive to animals and the
concept of animality. Art historians have given some attention to the
role of the animal in visual culture, but considering the diversity of
materials and images in which animals or the concept of the animal
is represented, there is an extraordinary range of questions still to
be addressed. Perhaps the most pressing question has to do with
the extent to which our encounters with represented animals have
shaped our approach to the natural world. This panel examines the
role played by the animal in the interpretation of visual material. One
important strand looks at how understanding of the human subject
has been shaped by the animal; a second strand gives greater attention
to the animal in the image, shifting interpretation by developing
alternative contexts; a third uses theoretical material enabled by the
inclusion of the concept of the animal.
Human and Animal Conversions: Caricature and the
Delineation of Human Faciality, ca. 1600
Bronwen Wilson, University of East Anglia
Foxes, goats, birds, monkeys, cats, and dogs were at the heart of early
modern debates about the borders between human and animal, and yet
the depiction of animals by the Carracci and its relation to caricature,
while noted in the literature, have been set aside. Caricature has instead
been harnessed to penetrating psychological insights and to poetic
and divine fury expressed in the line. The function of drawing is also
important in this paper but rather for how the line—the trace—and its
mimetic inheritance could be converted into something understood
through reason. Attending to the boundaries between animal and human
brings forward the ways the art-historical narrative of artistic invention
has suppressed the creaturely in the human. The origins of caricature,
considered in the context of human and animal likeness, also provide a
glimpse into what is lost with the turn toward the modern sciences.
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Charles Le Brun’s Animal Passions, the Ménagerie, and the
Galerie des Glaces at Versailles
Sheila McTighe, Courtauld Institute of Art
Le Brun’s 1668 lecture on physiognomy to the Académie was
accompanied by drawings of human and animal heads, resembling the
illustrations to Della Porta’s 1586 treatise De Humana Physiognomia.
In the curious hybrid heads of 1668, however, the eyes of men and
animals are interchanged. With this unsettling crossover between
human and beast, Le Brun not only characterized the passions of
animals but also showed fundamental differences between human and
animal vision. Le Brun’s dissections of animals, his observations in
the Ménagerie at Versailles, and his acquaintance with the writings of
the physician Cureau de la Chambre suggest that the artist found the
physiology of perception formed a frontier between human and animal.
This context for Le Brun’s physiognomy opens up possibilities for
interpreting the most political of his paintings at Versailles’s Galerie des
Glaces, the representations of Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands at
war with the French king.
Hunting Birds: François Boucher’s Diana’s Return from
the Hunt (1745)
Catherine Girard, Harvard University
Up-close depictions of dying and dead animals proliferated in French
painting of the first half of the eighteenth century, adapting Dutch
and Flemish models to modern pictorial concerns and to an obsession
with animal death fueled by Louis XV’s consuming passion for
venery. Scholarship on Rococo art has not yet examined how this
actual relation with carcasses was explored in images. This paper
examines how one of the main figures of Rococo art, François Boucher,
incorporated hunting subjects in his 1745 Diana’s Return from the
Hunt. By mobilizing falconry iconography and texts, this paper argues
that the detail in the center of this otherwise elegant composition—a
nymph squashing the eye of a freshly killed bird between her thumb
and her forefinger—is a nexus of violence. The subtle cruelty of her
grasp puts the tranquility of the scene under pressure, articulating
Boucher’s luscious fare to sanguinary practices.
“That Sort of Love Is Unseemly”: Bestiality and the Passion for
Horses in Hans Baldung Grien’s Bewitched Groom (ca. 1544)
Pia F. Cuneo, Univeristy of Arizona
The so-called Bewitched Groom by Hans Baldung Grien remains
one of the most puzzling images in the history of early modern art.
Scholars have proposed a number of ingenious explanations of the
print, but absent from their hermeneutic strategies is attention to the
cultural and physical contexts of early modern animals qua animals,
as opposed to their roles as dutiful, one-dimensional signifiers of the
classical man/animal, rational/sensual dyad. This presentation draws
on sources produced in sixteenth-century Germany that deal with
the breeding, care, and training of horses to argue that the print’s
audience was likely constituted of the same and similar groups of elite
men who commissioned, wrote, owned, and read these hippological
sources. Primed by their familiarity with these sources, such readers/
viewers would have understood the print as addressing the passionate
relationship between humans and horses expressed in practices ranging
from the respectable to the reprehensible.
Rewilding the Museum of Rudolf II
Sarah R. Cohen, University at Albany, State University of New York
The two volumes of naturalistic animal paintings known as the
Museum, originally housed in Emperor Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer,
present vivid portraits of about 170 animals, mostly wild, alone, and
with little sign of human intervention. Previous studies of the Museum
have taken the perspective of the emperor, whose natural history
collections represented a microcosmic world over which he could
imagine himself to preside. From a more biocentric standpoint, the
paper assesses the pictured animals as the protagonists of this artwork
and applies the contemporary scientific theory of rewilding, in which
“keystone species” are reintroduced into areas of diverse animal
habitation to create a self-sustaining, wild ecosystem. Rudolf II’s
artists, in like fashion, reconstituted key Kunstkammer specimens to
create fully living, fiercely independent creatures. Although rewilding,
like art making, is the work of humans, the final product—wild
creatures existing simultaneously on their own—presents the illusion of
being purely natural.
Beyond Good or Bad: Practice-Derived Epistemologies
of Studio Critique
Chairs: Adelheid Mers, School of the Art Institute of Chicago;
Judith Leemann, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
From their respective locations within college art education, art
historians and artists who teach have distinctly different views of the
ubiquitous practice of studio critique and the pivotal role it is expected
to play. Art historians tend to anecdotally extol critique’s failures—
the bad or even catastrophic critique. While art history/theory and
studio practice remain the pillars of the traditional art school (with art
education as the oft-dismissed practical cousin), what has emerged in
newly complex institutions with their ever shape-shifting departments
is a third set of conversations. This discourse firmly shows up the
theory/practice divide as false dichotomy. Becoming widely established
under the rather inelegant moniker “art as research,” what can be found
here are any number of intersections between the fine arts, applied arts,
humanities, social and natural sciences. This panel’s cochairs share an
interest in explicitly examining critique as immanent to production and
seek epistemologies of making and of assessing.
Getting Closer: Critique as an Integral Source in Learning
through Making
Sara Black, Antioch College
As traditional assumptions around the production and acquisition
of creative knowledge are challenged through the growing ubiquity
of artistic collaboration and experiential learning, might we expand
our understanding of how visual artists can learn, produce, and
share knowledge? How might this inform our educational practices
as educators? The pedagogical research with which I am engaged
emphasizes that art making is at its foundation primarily and essentially
social; that art is a product of culture and collective experience, whether
the work is massaged through conversation prior to or during its
development, literally fabricated in conjunction with others, or evolving
as a finished work through changes in audience or historical context.
This practice invites visual-art students to engage in a more extended
and collaborative critique process enabling creative cogeneration over
a series of revisions. This presentation shares recent examples of these
pedagogical strategies and outcomes.
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Demystifying Critique: Exploring Language and Interaction
with Non-Native Speakers of English
Allison Yasukawa, Maryland Institute College of Art
For students new to the art-school context, critiques can be a confusing,
intimidating territory to negotiate. While precritique instruction
may address key vocabulary, theoretical framings, and principles of
aesthetics, this preparation often fails to account for the specialized
needs of non-native speakers of English (NNS) by ignoring the primary
role that language and interaction play in critiques. This presentation
discusses a critical reexamination of the way critique is taught with
practical examples from a class of first-year NNS at an art college. The
class was designed to foreground the discursive codes of the critique
genre in order to help students identify, isolate, and analyze relevant
linguistic and paralinguistic structures through discourse analysis and
conversation analysis. Making these structures legible through studentgenerated critical examination demystified critiques and allowed
students to become confident, active participants in the critique process.
Working Space: Online Models for Studio-Art Critiques
David MacWilliam, Emily Carr University of Art and Design
This paper presents case studies of models and methodologies for
online critiques within practice-based studio-art courses at Emily Carr
University and focuses on the challenges and emergent potentials in
representing and teaching these material-based studio practices online.
Since 1999 Emily Carr University has developed and implemented a
range of online and blended learning models to explore the potentials
of new technologies in art education. Web-based course-delivery
platforms such as Moodle, student websites, wikis, and weblogs have
become important elements in teaching online. These new learning
tools present particular challenges and new potentials to teaching
traditions within a studio-based education. They redefine the student
experience along with the assessment of student learning and outcomes.
Can written reflections within online critiques enhance and amplify
aspects of the studio-critique tradition? Are there new and unique
potential opportunities for learning within the limitations inherent in
online teaching in studio-art education?
Sometimes the Work Has to Risk Not Being Art: Studio Critique,
Truth Telling, and Generosity
Randy Lee Cutler, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design
A practice that ideally suspends judgment, the studio critique is
a pedagogical opportunity to intervene in the material-semiotic
implications of the medium and/or the larger contexts in which the
work operates. Exploring the social and improvisational aspects of
dialogical exchange within the studio-critique context, this paper takes
up Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech 2001 and his examination of
truth telling and power. How does truth telling, what Foucault called
parrhesia, operate particularly within the frame of education and
cultural production? What is at stake in making art today? Does the
artist take risks? The implications initiated in the classroom consider
how truth telling and generosity say something about the role of
artistic expression within a larger social and political context. With a
suspension of judgment, what does it mean to take on the potential of
critique, and how does it affect forms of reflection and transformation
of the work?
Expanding the Critique: Contemporary Art as Practice
Joey Orr, Emory University
In their book Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison undertake
a historiography of objectivity as a way of examining one of several
epistemic virtues. In their view, “one becomes objective by performing
objective acts.” They also state that their study sharpens when “actions
are substituted for concepts and practices for meanings.” Might we think
of contemporary art as a cluster of embodied practices, or technologies
of the self, that produce particular kinds of images, authors, viewers, and
readers? This language begins to sound similar to the growing literature
surrounding practice-led research and artistic research. Should the
critique then expose and make explicit the epistemological dimensions
of practice? Might we also consider theories on participation? In this
way, the critique might also become less concerned with material form
per se and more invested in the various situations involved in the work’s
production.
Crit-Space as a Research Place
Graeme Sullivan, Pennsylvania State University
As a canonical practice, the studio critique is valued for opening up a
critical space of dialogue. Yet, what begins in dialogue can easily lapse
into monologue. With contemporary practices pushing artistic thinking
beyond conventions of creative intent, expressive capacity, and material
processes, the individual agency sought from the studio crit takes on new
potential. Researchers driven by curiosity as much as systematic inquiry
are similarly realizing the necessity of going beyond the teleology
of expected outcomes and embracing a multiplicity of realities. The
thoughts and actions encountered and embodied during the studio crit
create new spaces for critical inquiry. The crit-space becomes a site of
possibility where art practice is a personal and public action that disrupts
artistic constructions, genres, and discipline expectancies. The studio
critique is thus a space for reflexive experience that conceptualizes the
artist as researcher and results in responsive dialogue, transformative
knowing, and contextual relevance.
Uneasy Guardians: Ensuring the Future of
Intractable Art Forms
Chairs: Megan Metcalf, University of California, Los Angeles;
Holly Rachel Harrison, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The panel brings together the latest in theory and practice surrounding
the challenging conservation, legal, and curatorial demands of contemporary art, particularly forms in the so-called expanded fields of sculpture
and photography. Drawing on the insights of curators, artists, legal and
conservation experts, and art historians, the panel examines the sometimes-divergent priorities of the various stakeholders charged with
preserving, presenting, and historicizing intractable art forms. The
investigation asks whether the practical limits of showing and caring for
contemporary art rub up against theoretical limits in such a way that
requires both to shift. This inquiry takes as its starting point the transformation of art that began in the late 1950s to increasingly emphasize performative practices and durational demands, elements outside of the
purely material qualities of an artwork. Ensuring the future of contemporary art depends on the cooperation of systems that are only just beginning to be in dialogue. To date, panels and workshops convened on the
topic have focused largely on sculpture and other strictly physical objects
using a series of compelling case studies. This conversation moves forward by focusing on the issues surrounding practices even more challenging to the conventional museum setting such as multimedia installations, participatory works, events and performances, and film and video.
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Coproduction at the Museum of Modern Art
Glenn Wharton, New York University and the Museum of Modern Art;
Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural
Change and University of San Diego
This paper explores how the emergence of media art, installation,
and performance defies the institutional logic of contemporary art
museums, which is erected upon the attempt to preserve artworks as
unique and stable objects. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from the
Museum of Modern Art, the paper shows how the transformation of
media art, installation, and performance into legible and stable museum
objects requires a process of coproduction, in which creative and
productive agency is not monopolized by the artist but is distributed
among different actors. It shows how the process of coproduction
moves museums away from their traditional role as neutral containers
of preexisting art objects and transforms them into active agents in
the production and definition of artworks. This opens up a new area of
conflict, as museums come to compete with artists, critics, and artists’
estates who also potentially claim ownership over defining the artwork.
Of Mutability: The Ethics of Curating and Re-presenting
Ephemeral Artworks
Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art
The dramatic shift in art since the 1920s from the object to ephemeral
works incorporating performance, temporary installations, unstable
materials, and site-specific locations has recently become an important
focus of curating, collecting, and preservation. What are the ethical
implications of re-presenting artworks in ways that inevitably reframe
their ephemerality within an institutional context devoted to historical
and archival perpetuity? This paper examines the complex issues raised
by this paradox, and the new ways contemporary artists are building
change into their work from the outset. A number of examples are
discussed, including works by Marina Abramovic, James Lee Byars,
Cory Arcangel, and Sharon Hayes.
Changing Understandings of Change
Corey D’Augustine, independent scholar
Following the widespread break with traditional studio materials and
techniques in the twentieth century, it is no longer guaranteed possible
to understand the relationship between material appearance and
artistic intention through visual analysis alone. Further, as a variety of
contemporary materials and techniques result in rapid changes to the
work’s appearance that are seldom seen in traditional art, the physical
condition of an artist’s body of work may have a dramatic impact on
its art-historical reception. As such work becomes historicized, the
developing roles of technical art history and collaborations between
artists and conservators have never been more important.
Appraisers Association of America
Today’s Qualified Appraiser: An Essential Ally for
Artists, Museums, and University Galleries
Chair: Anne Frances Moore, AFM-MFM Fine Art
Artists, museums, and university galleries frequently face situations in
which they need to know the precise monetary value of works of art:
when negotiating insurance policies, when shipping art for exhibitions
and treatment, when making a claim, during the deaccessioning
process, when there are condition issues, and during the donation
process. A qualified appraiser is an essential ally for directors, curators,
and registrars and also for artists, especially when determining the
monetary value of an artist’s work for sale, insurance, estate, or IRS
purposes. Today, as never before, it is important to be precise when
declaring a monetary value for works of art. As outside consultants,
fine- and decorative-art appraisers are skilled art historians with
training in the requirements to comply with Uniform Standards of
Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) procedures mandated by
Congress for IRS donations and other legal and ethical circumstances.
Learn more about how you can protect yourself and your institution
with a qualified appraiser as an ally.
Negotiating the Ineffable
Martha Buskirk, Montserrat College of Art
Association for Critical Race Art History
Artist, title, date—the customary caption format speaks volumes
about art-historical conventions. Traditional connoisseurship looks
to the object itself for evidence that might support attribution as well
as dating, with such internal markers ideally supported by external
documentation. For many recent art forms, however, this process is
reversed, with a reading of the art’s presumed significance becoming
the basis for decisions about how to maintain or reconstitute its
physical presence. The ongoing standard of individual authorship
masks a collaborative process of production, with the artist operating
at the intersection of multiple forces, including institutional and market
demands. This process also extends well beyond the ostensible moment
of origin, as the identity of the work of art continues to be renegotiated
over time. Thus production and reception are deeply intertwined,
as interpretation impels physical interventions that reflect a later
audience’s understanding of a work’s historical importance.
Chairs: José Esteban Muñoz, New York University; Erica Agyeman,
independent curator
Subaltern Rising: Racialization and Visual Culture
in the Wake of Independence
The years 2012 and 2013 mark fifty years of independence for
dozens of former colonies across the globe. This panel is dedicated
to the consideration of art and other forms of expressive culture at
the moment of historical transition, especially as it was evident in
the reconfigured racialization of citizens, economies, geographies,
and political systems. Commissioned public monuments and state
architecture, redrawn cities and renamed streets and public spaces,
and the establishment of cultural institutions—including national
museums and libraries—were acts of autonomy in newly independent
nations. How were the burst of creativity among artists producing
work for the state, reorganized marketplaces and other commercial
venues, performance, and national pageants inevitably informed by
the preceding colonial order? Which postcolonial strategies reflect
symbolic and stylistic borrowings from the language of European
modernism in general? How do these mid-twentieth-century breaks
from colonial and imperial rule influence subsequent visual and cultural
programs?
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Strategic Ricanness: The Colonial Man of Tomorrow
Sandra Ruiz, University of Illinois
To What End? Eschatology in Art Historiography
This paper turns to Papo Colo’s performance piece Superman 51 (first
performed in 1977 and reexhibited in 2008 for El Museo del Barrio’s
Arte No Es Vida) to read how a colonial body endures in and for
Ricanness. It also turns to this work to expose the policies imbedded
in El Museo del Barrio’s presentation of Ricanness. In his piece,
Colo runs the West Side Highway with fifty-one planks and strings
attached to his back, as his Superman cape, for ten minutes and then
falls from exhaustion. It appears paradoxical to speak of Superman in
tandem with the Rican Colonial subject—one an iconic hero, the other
supposedly powerless; but this paper is interested in their similarities as
expressed by the artist and the museum. It addresses how this subject
learns to choreograph himself against imposed movements of being and
time and how he endures within institutional sites.
The papers in this session address the embedding of eschatological
purposes into the writing of art history. Such purposes have helped
shape the study of art history since its inception as an academic
discipline. A seminal instance is Franz Kugler’s Handbuch der
Kunstgeschichte (1842), the first attempt at a geographically
comprehensive history of art. Following Hegel’s example, Kugler,
a professor at the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin, saw artworks as
embodying the varied extent of spiritual progress in different cultures.
According to his analysis, Western European art demonstrated the
greatest progress along a universal road toward spiritual fulfillment
that all cultures were following. The survey textbooks of world art
now commonplace on North American college campuses transform
Kugler’s narrative while retaining its underlying trajectory. Today’s
surveys present an egalitarian and pluralistic landscape in which each
culture’s distinct and equally valid artistic heritage contributes to a
broader vision of multicultural harmony (if not homogenization).
Eschatological purposes remain evident not only in such surveys but
in the broader scholarship that informs them. Individual “periods”
of art and art history itself continue to be viewed through the lens
of culminating transitions and conclusions. The active struggle of
scholars, architects, and artists with how, and how not, to make use of
this lens thus reflects concerns about the construction and goals of art
historiography that remain relevant today.
Nigeria’s Independence House: Anxiety and Promise
Erica Agyeman, independent curator
Artists and historians honored the fiftieth anniversary of Nigerian
independence with assessments of progress in Nigerian art since
1960 and reflection of the current “state of the arts.” For some artists,
the golden jubilee also invoked thoughtful (re)consideration of the
hopes and anxieties fostered by independence. Otobong Nkanga’s
Souvenir of a Monument (2011) examines the lost history of Nigeria’s
Independence House. A gift of the British government in 1961, the
twenty-five-story building was the tallest in West Africa and intended
to be a symbol of good will, modernity, and hope at independence.
Nkanga’s interactive project consisting of a blog, postcards, and a
performance interrogates this relic of the past in relation to its uses in
the present. This paper looks to Nkanga’s work to consider how this
monument has been translated through time and the continuous and
selective process through which its historical narrative is constructed.
Recharting Art Import/Export Routes in India:
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Annie Paul
On December 12, 2012, India’s first Biennale, the Kochi-Muziris
Biennale, will be launched. Located in Kochi, and invoking Muziris,
an ancient trading port town in Kerala in the deep South of India, this
Biennale is happening far from the celebrated centers of art in India—
Delhi and Bombay. This could be viewed as a brazen effort by a small
group of artists from Kerala to wrest aesthetic power from the center, to
reorient Indian art worlds, or to broaden the scope of aesthetic activity
and assert independence from a controlling curatoriat located in the
country’s political and business centers. This paper will document
the political economy of the artists concerned, the rational for such a
global initiative at this time, the cultural politics involved, and what this
means for Indian art in general.
Chair: Jeanne-Marie Musto, Fordham University
Projecting the Future in German Art Historiography of
the Nineteenth Century: Franz Kugler, Karl Schnaase, and
Gottfried Semper
Henrik Karge, Technische Universität Dresden
The conception of art history as a new discipline was decisively formed
in the mid-nineteenth century by Franz Kugler and Karl Schnaase. Both
German scholars observed connections between the art productions
of former epochs and those of their own time. From this viewpoint,
the art of the nineteenth century had to be considered as the result of
a long tradition of modernity, based on the Renaissance and pointing
through the present time into the future. Kugler presented his opinion
prominently in his Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (1842), whereas
Schnaase wrote on several occasions about the future progress of
art. Schnaase took an evolutionistic approach to the development of
architecture similar to that taken by the architect Gottfried Semper:
both advised against all attempts at planning a programmatic new style.
For Semper the potential of new developments lay in the continuation
of design patterns inherited from the earliest human cultures.
Delacroix, Chenavard, and the End of Art History
David O’Brien, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign
The art-historical visions of Eugène Delacroix and Paul Chenavard
had much in common. Both men saw the achievements of the Classical
period and the Renaissance as high points in the history of art and
both decried their contemporaries’ faith in progress, believing that
modernity’s materialism, commercialism, and technophilia adversely
affected artistic production. Yet while Chenavard argued that presentday artists could only offer inferior variations on the achievements
of past masters, Delacroix felt that great geniuses could still rival
them. Relying especially on the exchanges between the two artists
recorded in Delacroix’s Journal, this paper compares and contrasts the
eschatological aspects of the two artists’ understanding of history in
order to illuminate their attitudes toward tradition and modernity.
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The Rest Is Silence: The Sense of Roger Fry’s Endings
Benjamin Harvey, Mississippi State University
This paper explores, to use Frank Kermode’s eschatological phrase,
“the sense of an ending” found in several important examples of
Roger Fry’s art criticism. At the very end of “Retrospect” (1920),
Cézanne: A Study of His Development (1927), and Art History as an
Academic Study (1933), Fry chooses to reflect upon and undercut his
own critical and evaluative role. More specifically, at such moments
he relates critical judgment to critical discursiveness and its absence.
Rather than attempt to issue an authoritative judgment, he “spar[es]
you a peroration” or (invoking Aesop) he devotes himself to “his Silent
Serenity, King Log.” Fry’s strategic silences draw attention to that
peculiar cognitive space beyond the text itself, a space that includes the
reader’s own potential encounter with the art under discussion.
Origin and Immanence: Benjamin’s Art Historiography
in the Trauerspiel Book
Jenny Doussan, Goldsmiths, University of London
Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama is frequently
interpreted as a critique of Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty.
According to this reading, Benjamin argues that efforts at sovereignty
confront a permanent state of lawlessness that they can never fully
master. However illuminating, this political reading overlooks
Benjamin’s analysis of the Trauerspiel as the origin of German tragic
drama. In examining the Trauerspiel, Benjamin employs his arthistorical theory of “origin.” For Benjamin an origin constitutes “an
eddy in the stream of becoming,” whose current “swallows the material
involved in the process of genesis.” A dialectic between transcendence
and immanence—one determinedly opposed to the notion of historical
progress—can be detected in this theory of origin. Rather than
privileging Benjamin’s theory or his critique of Schmitt, this paper
explores how Benjamin uses both as support for concluding that we
have arrived at the “total disappearance of eschatology.”
World Art Histories and the Cold War
Robert Born, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and
Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Universität Leipzig
During the two decades following World War II several panoramic
surveys of art history were written on either side of the Iron Curtain.
This type of text was deeply rooted in the tradition of German
historiography. Such surveys gave expression to the Hegelian
concept of history, which had established an idealized notion of the
essentially progressive development of artistic forms. The texts under
consideration here were written by art historians trained in the German
and Austrian traditions who were forced into exile by the Nazi regime:
Horst W. Janson, Ernst H. Gombrich, and Arnold Hauser. The paper
investigates the models of artistic development and the respective
underlying teleology advanced by each of these authors against the
background of their experiences of working in exile. Their approaches
are contrasted with the developmental model conceived by the Soviet
art historian Mikhail V. Alpatov.
The Experience of the Studio: Master–Pupil
Relationships in Europe and China, 1400–1700
Chairs: Christina Neilson, Oberlin College; Michele Matteini,
Reed College
Of all the institutions of art, the studio was perhaps the most essential.
And it is a given that much artistic production that took place in the
studio depended on exchanges between masters and pupils. Yet the
nuances of how these associations operated deserve further scrutiny.
This panel moves beyond issues of attribution, originality, and labor
division to explore instead how social, psychological, personal, and
political relationships between masters and assistants affected artistic
output. How did rivalry, ambition, love, and friendship impact art? How
can we use visual evidence to interpret the interactions between masters
and assistants? Of what did training and learning consist in workshops
and studios? What evidence do we have of masters posing challenges
and promoting competition among their assistants? Was imitation of
the master always desirable? How were arrangements between artists
shaped by changes in the makeup of the workplace, from a place of
labor (the workshop) to a site of intellectual exchange (the studio)?
What was the relationship between the studio and the world beyond?
How did writers in China and the West reflect upon the cultural and
social significance of master–pupil relationships?
Augsburg Painters and Their Pupils from the Fifteenth
to the Early Seventeenth Centuries
Danica Brenner, University of Trier
Current research on painters’ workshops, especially in Germany,
tends to focus on differentiating the masters’ hand from that of their
pupils. This paper shifts the focus to workshop practice and training
modalities, analyzing the relationship of Augsburg painters and their
pupils from the fourteenth century up to the beginning of the early
seventeenth century. In doing so, general requirements and the course
of apprenticeship and journeyman’s years of service are discussed as
well as their life within the master’s household. For discussing whether
or not the “style” of a certain master as well as living and working
with him influenced the assistant’s art, significant examples from other
northern alpine cities are included. Within this context the paper also
examines how pupils were bound to work in their master’s maniera
while being part of his workshop.
The Master, the Pupil, and the Thief: The Life of Frans Floris
and the Issue of Artistic Transmission in Karel van Mander’s
Theory of Art
Valentin Nussbaum, National Taiwan Normal University
In his life of Frans Floris, Karel van Mander relates the anecdote of
Lambert Lombard, who, after visiting incognito the workshop of his
former pupil, made a joke to the journeymen by maintaining that
Floris “stole the art from him through imitation, just as was said by
Apollodorus in an ode: that the art was stolen and that Zeuxis ran off
with it.” As a mise en abyme of the ambiguous relationships between
master and pupil, van Mander’s anecdote reverses the concept of
gift and addresses, through the secret visit of the workshop and the
revelation of Floris’s astute qualities as thief (or imitator), the changes
between the old corporatist practice based on workshop secrets and the
recent humanist conception devoted to the academy and its mannerist
principles. The life of Frans Floris proposes a model that transcends a
narrow conception of originality, authorship, and authenticity.
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The Combined Brush: Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming as
Dual Masters in Ming China
Lihong Liu, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Artistic genealogy can be investigated as a social-historical
construction as much as a practice-based lineage. The relation between
Shen Zhou (1427–1509) and Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) is both.
Regarded as two successive masters at the Yangtze River valley city
Suzhou (the Wu Region) in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Shen and
Wen became two paragons of the “Wu School” painters. Numerous
accounts outline their lineage in terms of styles and social relations.
However, the technical side of their master–student relation, which was
embodied in the procedures of their combined brushes (hebi), remains
unexplored. This paper reveals the combinatory procedures of Shen’s
composition (buzhi) and Wen’s depiction (dianran), which followed an
unforeseen, extended process in time in completing the artworks, and
explores how these dual practices forged the principles of painting at
that time.
of art and medicine. This has allowed practitioners from both sides to
explore fundamental issues, motivations, and methods of inquiry as
they engage in medical research, employ medical-imaging technologies
in creative ways, and interpret modern medicine. Artists bring an
open-ended investigative spirit to the table. Their astute powers of
observation and ability to effectively communicate abstract ideas have
generated new interpretations of medicine that transcend the typical
historical examples of disseminating ideas through illustration. Artists
are also sometimes at the vanguard of criticism of medical research
and the culture of the medical community. What is the relationship
between art and medical practice and research? This panel explores the
impact of medicine on artistic practice, of creative process on medical
research, and the very notion of the artist’s body as subject matter.
Future Directions in Nineteenth-Century Art History
Chair: Morna O’Neill, Wake Forest University
In Dialogue: Anthony van Dyck in Peter Paul Rubens’s Workshop
Eva Struhal, Université Laval
Frederick Henry Evans and the Gothic Inheritance
Andrea Wolk Rager, Case Western Reserve University
Peter Paul Rubens’s workshop was the most avant-garde training
institution for young artists in Antwerp in the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Although it has been the subject of several recent
art-historical studies, there are still many unanswered questions: How
did Rubens train his students? Was his studio more of a workshop or an
artistic academy? This talk focuses on Anthony van Dyck’s affiliation
with this workshop during the early years of his career and sheds new
light on the relationship between Rubens and the young artist. Focusing
on their collaborative projects such as the decoration for the Jesuit
Church in Antwerp, it looks at the way these artists’ familiarity with the
Italian Renaissance and its canon may have shaped the perception of
each other’s art and persona.
In 1896 Frederick Henry Evans was invited to photograph Kelmscott
Manor, the rural Oxfordshire home that was the spiritual birthplace of
the Arts and Crafts movement and the embodiment of William Morris’s
theories on the interconnectedness of art, nature, and society. Evans’s
elegiac views of Kelmscott not only serve as evocative meditations
on Morris’s legacy but also illuminate the strong affinities between
Pictorialist photography and the ideals of Morris’s anti-industrial
utopianism. This paper proposes a new approach to the work of Evans,
positing that the artist’s fin-de-siècle architectural photographs served
as reflections on the complex and troubled inheritance of the Gothic
Revival. Throughout his photographic oeuvre, Evans seemingly
struggles to unveil the revelations and redemption promised by the
Victorian religion of art and beauty as the salvation of society but
uncovers instead only apparitions and fading dreams.
Secrets under the Pillow: The Practice and Legacy of the
Album to See the Large within the Small
Ching-Ling Wang, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and Museum
für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
This paper discusses issues related to the Album to See the Large
within the Small. As a secret painting manual, how did it influence the
orthodox-school painters around Wang Shimin, including his relatives,
friends, and pupils? As a paradigm of learning to paint, what position
does the Album take in their painting careers? What role has the album
played among this orthodox painters’ group as distinct from the other
painters? What does this album mean in the lineage of the painting
of the orthodox school? To answer these questions, this paper first
reconstructs the situation when each of the orthodox-school painters
was making their own Album to See the Large within the Small or
something similar. These painters used it as a secret painting manual,
and its circulation in their society was central to their group identity.
Art and Medicine: Reciprocal Influence
Chairs: Patricia Olynyk, Washington University in St. Louis;
Adrienne G. Klein, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
American Genre Painting, the Transnational Print Trade, and the
Global Nineteenth Century: The Case of Richard C. Woodville
Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire, Columbia University
This paper examines the work of the American genre painter Richard C.
Woodville (1825–1855) in relation to the emergence of a transnational
art-publishing industry based in Paris and London and operating
throughout the northern hemisphere from Russia to the United States.
Woodville’s short career as an expatriate painter in Düsseldorf, Paris,
and London and the artist’s elusive personality have driven largely
contextual analyses that explore the artist’s pictorial narratives in
relation to significant issues of antebellum America. Yet the painter’s
work also indicates a lifelong engagement with the art-publishing
industry and its remarkable geographical expansion at midcentury.
This paper demonstrates that the cultural dimensions of nineteenthcentury practices of image reproduction made it possible for Woodville
to envision and situate the representation of American life outside the
confines of a fixed regional or national experience and to articulate an
essentially shifting artistic identity.
The history of artists engaging the ideas, methodologies, and
technologies of medicine is richly varied. A newly expanded context
for collaboration and art making has emerged that bridges the cultures
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Painting Spectacles: The Military Paintings of the
Salle de Crimée in Versailles
Julia Bischoff, Courtauld Insitute of Art
Between 1856 and 1859 fourteen of France’s best-known military
artists worked on the Salle de Crimée at Versailles, as public opinion
fluctuated between resentment at the young empire’s failure to keep its
initial peace promises and acceptance of the semi-successful outcome
of the war that had restored France’s glory. This paper reconstructs
the program devised for the Salle de Crimée, as outlined in 1859 by
Eudore Soulié, the curator of paintings at Versailles. In its discussion
of the Salle de Crimée, it brings together the official dicta and notions
of postwar politics pursued by the commissioners, the sensationalism
and desire for spectacle of the Parisian mass culture, public opinion
on the Crimean War, and the new visuals of unprecedented methods of
war reportage to shed light on the formal innovations of Second Empire
battle painting.
Women’s Caucus for Art’s Blockbuster Exhibitions:
Renewal, Activism, and Innovation
Chair: Priscilla Otani, Women’s Caucus for Art
Over the last two years, the Women’s Caucus for Art has produced
three feminist blockbuster shows without the benefit of major grants,
corporate sponsorships, or museum space: Man as Object: Reversing
the Gaze; Petroleum Paradox; and Honoring Women’s Rights. All
three shows challenge current prevailing notions regarding blockbuster
exhibitions. How have these shows exceeded expectations for DIY
exhibitions? How can blockbuster shows balance showcasing both
emergent and well-known artists? What happens when feminist
shows address themes that are not exclusively feminist issues? How
can feminist blockbuster shows be simultaneously historical and
contemporary, scholarly and popular? Starting with one person’s
“great idea,” each of the shows took shape through the work of a
volunteer exhibition team fueled by ambition and willingness to take
risks and seize opportunities to grow the the exhibition from modest
size to blockbuster. Panelists discuss their roles in these shows, their
motivations for mounting them, the challenges of aligning individual
ambitions with those of teammates and collaborators, and ultimately
the factors that led to the success of each endeavor.
dynamics. Above all, these panels provoke a broad spectrum of rich and
rigorous engagement with notions of Othering across geographical and
temporal boundaries in the Central European context.
Central Europe’s Others, Now and a Thousand Years Ago:
Europe’s Center around AD 1000
William J. Diebold, Reed College
The exhibition Europe’s Center around AD 1000, on view from 2000
to 2002 in major museums in Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic,
and Slovakia, used visual and verbal expressions of Otherness to define
a Central European identity. The exhibition emphasized the similarities
between the present and the Middle Ages and argued that Central
Europe was unified around the year 1000 in ways that were remarkably
similar to the kind of unification that was perceived to be taking place
at the time of the exhibition, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Because the exhibition did not take the expected position that the
medieval past was other, it needed something else against which to
define its view of Central Europe. It found this crucial Other in the nonChristian peoples of high medieval Europe: the Jews and the various
groups that had not been converted to Christianity.
Site/Sight of Alterity: Albrecht Dürer’s The Men’s Bathhouse
of ca. 1496
Bradley J. Cavallo, Temple University
Despite its network of intersecting erotic gazes, no sustained
attempts have been made to interpret Dürer’s The Men’s Bathhouse
in the context of early-modern gender normativity, its Other, or
their regulation. Dürer’s print addresses these issues ambiguously
by presenting a homosocial setting imagined as the site/sight of a
homosexual desire that must conceal itself under the cover of inaction.
His idealized naked males can look but can’t act on their desires
because of their awareness of the unobtrusive act of surveillance
performed by a clothed figure behind them. Overpowering them into
stasis, his gaze analogizes that of a society desirous to prohibit sexual
acts and hence maintain prescribed sexualities. As depicted by Dürer,
passive coercion in the form of acknowledged observation governs
bodies best by encouraging them to regulate themselves, aware as they
are of the gaze but not when, where, or how they might be inspected
and judged.
Central Europe’s Others in Art and Visual Culture, Part I
Chairs: Elizabeth Otto, University at Buffalo, State University of New
York; Brett Van Hoesen, University of Nevada, Reno
Savages on Display: The European Peasant and the Native North
American at Central European Fairs in the Nineteenth Century
Rebecca Houze, Northern Illinois University
From Charlemagne to Schengen the physical borders of Central
European nations have been the subjects of constant dispute. Equally
as fraught are the complex debates that have raged around notions
of national and individual identity, which have been formed through
concepts of race, ethnicity, nation, temporality, religion, gender, and
sexuality. These constructs have been powerfully solidified in visual
representations. The papers for this double session exemplify new
approaches to concepts of the Other and related ideas of insiders and
outsiders from the Middle Ages to the present. Contributors address
discursive arenas and visual cultures that reflect the influence of trade,
crusades, colonialism, postcoloniality, and tourism as they helped to
form images and ideas of Others. Collectively the papers rethink tropes
of particular Central European identities and explore visual culture
in relation to subtle and overt challenges to established institutions,
structures of inclusion and exclusion, and conventional power
World fairs and regional exhibitions were important venues in
nineteenth-century Central Europe for expressing national identity.
Ostensibly organized as celebrations of industry and empire, these
events showcased the contrast between primitive and civilized in
temporary pavilions and in exhibits of applied arts. By the 1890s
ethnographers on both sides of the Atlantic, fueled by cultural anxiety
about vanishing traditions in the face of industrialization as much
as by the spirit of scientific inquiry, constructed elaborate villages
demonstrating lifestyle and ceremonial practice, from Moravian village
weddings to Kwakiutl potlatches. The Central European fascination
with the Native North American was a response to industrialism and
to the rise of nationalist movements in the late nineteenth century, and
this paper explores a trans-Atlantic dialogue in which the image of
the European peasant likewise became a surrogate for American ideas
about tradition, immigration, and civilization.
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Otto Dix’s Jankel Adler and the Materiality of the
Eastern Jew in Weimar Culture
James A. van Dyke, University of Missouri–Columbia
Czech, Slovak, and Rusyn: Nation Building in
First Republic Czechoslovakia
Karla Huebner, Wright State University
This paper consider Otto Dix’s portrait of Jankel Adler (1926). Adler
was a Polish Jew whose depictions of Jewish life and types as well
as wry reflections on the status of the classical tradition enjoyed
considerable success in the avant-garde circles of Düsseldorf and
Cologne between the end of World War I and his emigration in 1933.
Dix, however, was one of the most provocative and prominent artists
of his day, a painter who constantly defined himself in relationship to
others. In examining the portrait of Adler, this paper reflects upon what
this particular picture contributes to our understanding of the role of the
Other in the constitution of Dix’s subjectivity and public image, while
drawing attention to the ambiguous, perhaps ironic presence of (antiSemitic) stereotypes in, rather than simply against, Weimar culture.
With the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918, this “multinational
nation-state”—inhabited by Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Jews, Rusyns,
and many other less numerous ethnicities—needed to create an identity
both internally and abroad. However, a major reason for bringing
Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia into the new state was in fact the
existing tension between Czechs and Germans, which prompted Czech
nation builders to seek a Slavic majority. Who, then, was considered
Czechoslovak? How would the new citizens be portrayed in visual
culture? This paper examines how Czech and Slovak periodicals
represented Czech, Slovak, and Rusyn women during the First
Republic, and how Czech periodicals gradually but increasingly began
to show Slovak and Rusyn women as Other, contrasting with an urban
Czech ideal of a fashionable, active, efficient young woman. While
remaining respectful, these representations show a growing recognition
of difference and the Czechs’ move away from a sense of idealized panSlavic unity.
The Roma Pavilion: Contemporary Art and
Transnational Activism
Brianne Cohen, Université catholique de Louvain
This paper analyzes the Roma Pavilion at the Fifty-fourth Venice
Biennale (2011). The exhibition Calling the Witness staged a stream of
live testimony by artists, filmmakers, social workers, political activists,
art historians, and more to interrogate the stateless position of Romani
peoples today. Perhaps more than any minority in Central Europe, the
Roma have been particularly demonized in the last decade as cultural
outsiders. The pavilion assumed a contestatory symbolic role within the
biennale’s nationalistic structure. Located at the UNESCO headquarters
in Venice, Calling the Witness was also illustrative of a move away
from nation-state–based cultural sponsorship toward other transnational
humanitarian, legal, and social-activist models. How may such NGOlike models enliven visual-symbolic resistance to cultural Othering
in Central Europe? What are some of the limitations of this shift in
contemporary art? Such analyses are critical at a time of increasingly
fluid borders and sociopolitical uncertainty in Europe.
Central Europe’s Others in Art and Visual Culture, Part II
New York; Brett Van Hoesen, University of Nevada, Reno
A Black Jewish Astrologer in a German Renaissance Manuscript
Paul H. D. Kaplan, Purchase College, State University of New York
Among the thousands of images of black Africans in pre-1800
European art, the depiction of a person of color in the act of writing is
extremely rare. This paper explores a 1520 miniature by the Nuremberg
artist Hans Hauser, an author portrait of the Jewish astrologer Sahl
ibn Bishr (fl. ca. 820), which precedes one of his treatises. Hauser,
probably at the behest of his patron, Elector Joachim I of Brandenburg,
depicts Sahl—pen in hand and spectacles perched on his nose—with
emphatically dark skin and African features. This unique image
must reflect the influence of Joachim’s brother, Cardinal Albrecht
of Brandenburg. Albrecht’s devotion to and promotion of two black
African saints (Maurice and Fidis) resulted in many Christian images
of Africans, but Hauser’s painting, of a Jew who wrote in Arabic for
Muslim patrons, represents an unusual extension of this interest in
Africans into the secular realm.
The Outsider’s Vision: Bohumil Kubišta as Social Critic
Eleanor Moseman, Colorado State University
The Czech artist Bohumil Kubišta (1884–1918) represents a selfimposed outsider fixed on exposing the tensions of class and ethnicity
in Habsburg Prague, where Czech- and German-speakers compete for
cultural, industrial, religious, and political power. Kubišta’s paintings
and writings reveal his engagement with the impact of modernity on
social structure and the utopian view of art’s role in social progress, a
stance not fully attainable without adopting the position of outsider.
Steeped in Marxist philosophy, Kubišta targets capitalist mechanisms
of access and labor, set against the religious underpinnings of bourgeois
society, which reinforce the imperial power of social elites. While
economic need dictated his enlistment in the Habsburg navy, the
seemingly contradictory status of a modern artist as imperial sailor
actually provided Kubišta with the necessary distance to recognize
and critique class and ethnic stratification in Prague as symptomatic
of broader power structures reinforced by capitalist and imperialist
domination.
To Hell and Back: Helhesten and Cultural Resistance in
World War II Denmark
Kerry Greaves, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
In Denmark ideas of nationalism were perhaps never more highly
charged than during the German occupation of World War II. To the
leading modern artists of the period, at stake were not only notions
of national identity and political belief but also the very survival of
culture itself. In response, the social-activist collective and eponymous
journal Helhesten spearheaded cultural resistance in Nazi-occupied
Denmark through a radical art that promoted ideas of community,
experimentation, and Danish folk in opposition to the Nazi conception
of Volk. This paper explores how Helhesten mobilized the chaos
and fear brought about by the occupation to establish a new kind
of countercultural movement that set the stage for postwar groups
such as CoBrA. It also serves as a reassessment of the emergence of
later twentieth-century avant-gardes as well as the way art history
understands the exchange between national and international, and local
and foreign.
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From Fiction to Fact: The Need to Document in Post-Yugoslav Art
Nadia Perucic, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Following the Yugoslav wars of 1991–95 and the breakup of the
country into several states, the new political and cultural leadership
established regimes that caused a general closing of society, different
from the restrictions that characterized Socialist Yugoslavia. Memories
of the Socialist past were suppressed, unsavory aspects of the present
were ignored, and outsiders and other undesirables were marginalized.
This paper focuses on post-Yugoslav artists who, throughout the 1990s
and 2000s, aimed to reverse this trend by recovering forgotten histories
or highlighting contemporary issues that were censored by their new
governments and the mainstream media. These artists often used
extensive preliminary research as part of their method, leading to works
with a documentary or journalistic format. By adopting elements of
reportage, artists aimed to position their artworks in opposition to the
dominant public discourse in an effort to shape a more comprehensive
and inclusive social reality.
Conservator: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study
of Islamic Tilework
Chairs: Keelan Overton; Jonathan Bloom, Boston College
Although architectural surfaces sheathed with luminous tilework are
among the most iconic images in Islamic art, significant art-historical
questions pertaining to stylistic development and original context
remain unresolved, and curators and conservators are continually
confounded by elusive attributions and techniques. This session builds
upon questions and concerns raised during a March 2011 symposium
devoted to Islamic tiles, “Color Cladding: Islamic Tiles from the Doris
Duke Collection,” which included seven invited specialists from the
fields of academia, the museum, and conservation. Building upon this
successful workshop-style symposium, this session integrates new and
interdisciplinary voices into the conversation while further identifying
viable projects, partnerships, and questions that will shape the study of
Islamic tiles in the coming years.
Remonumentalizing Islamic Tilework: A New Biography of
Window Grilles from Islamic Iran
Yuka Kadoi, University of Edinburgh
While the bulk of tiles from modern-day Iran found their way to
Euro-American collectors and museums as fragments during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ubiquity of such tiles in
public museums and private collections across the globe provokes
several museological questions. In particular, the provenance of a
group of post-medieval/early modern monumental tilework that came
to the West in their entirety, including tile spandrels, most of which
are attributed to Safavid or Qajar Iran, as well as tile window grilles of
probable Timurid or Safavid provenance, needs to be redefined. This
paper addresses art-historiographical questions surrounding a type of
tile window grille now in American and European collections. Instead
of inquiring into the grilles’ authenticity, the paper considers the role of
dealers, brokers, collectors, curators, and restorers in the formation of
the collecting canons of Islamic tilework in the early twentieth century,
especially in the 1930s.
From Damascus to Cambridge: William Morris and the
Iznik Tile Panels at the Fitzwilliam Museum
Rebecca Bridgman, The Fitzwilliam Museum
The Islamic art collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum includes four
Ottoman, Iznik-style tile panels made in Damascus during the sixteenth
or seventeenth centuries. Those panels can be connected, in different
ways, to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Morris
was a founding member of that movement and, along with other
practitioners, was interested in and influenced by Islamic art. At the
Fitzwilliam, however, those connections extend beyond mere stylistic
influence. Sydney Cockerell, the museum’s director between 1908 and
1937, who acquired the tile panels alongside countless other works
of art, was in his formative years mentored, employed, and, arguably,
strongly influenced by William Morris. Subsequently, Cockerell acted
as friend and advisor to William’s daughter, May Morris. This paper
explores the connections embodied by those tile panels, considers the
past contexts of their use and collection, and assesses their importance
today in the presentation of Islamic art to diverse audiences.
Shining Bright: Luster Mihrabs from Medieval Iran
Sheila Blair, Boston College
Ensembles of dozens of luster tiles used to decorate mihrabs (prayer
niches) in shrines and tombs in Iran during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries are the most expensive and lavish type of tilework executed
in medieval times. Only six examples survive, most of them now
inaccessible for study. The major exception is the one installed in the
wall in Doris Duke’s home at Shangri La, made by the tileworker Ali
ibn Muhammad at Kashan in central Iran in Sha’ban 663/May 1265.
Looking closely at it and its mates, we can see why this one is so
important, how it was made, and how it might be reconstructed and
thus begin to understand how these splendid works of art looked in
their own time and why they have continued to appeal both in Iran
and abroad.
“In the Absence of Originals”: Replicating the Tilework of
Safavid Isfahan for the Victoria and Albert Museum
Moya Carey, Victoria and Albert Museum
In 1877 Robert Murdoch Smith, acting on behalf of the South
Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London,
arranged for “having coloured drawings made by Persian artists of
mosaics, tiles and general decorations in the interiors of the ancient
mosques and other sacred buildings in [Isfahan], which Europeans
are not allowed to enter.” The result is a series of thirty-seven painted
reproductions of tiled walls, domes, and vaults, offering one-to-one
color records of six Safavid building complexes, as they then stood.
This paper examines the unusual story of this remarkably Victorian
project, which epitomizes the flexibility of the museum’s mission
in Iran, acquiring examples of historic design in whatever form
negotiable. These late-nineteenth-century drawings may also document
the condition of the buildings prior to the cosmetic adjustments made in
the early twentieth century, when Iran’s Safavid architectural heritage
became a trophy for emerging nationalism.
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From Incas to Indios: Race in Colonial Andean Visual Culture
Ananda Cohen Suarez, Cornell University
Chair: Pamela A. Patton, Southern Methodist University
Racial taxonomies permeated nearly every facet of life in Colonial
Latin America. In the Andes former subjects of the Inca empire became
transformed into “indios,” a racial status and economic category
invented by the Spanish Colonial administration to exert control over
a vast Indigenous population. Visual culture served as an extension of
the crown’s campaign to construct a harmonious multiracial society
delimited by clear physiognomic, sanguinary, and cultural boundaries.
This paper investigates the contested process of making race visible
in the Colonial Andes. In particular, it locates counternarratives to
prevailing Colonial racial ideologies embedded within visual culture’s
peripheries, such as the perimeters of textiles or the margins of painted
compositions. It was in these inconspicuous spaces that “raced” Andean
subjects were afforded a level of freedom and multidimensionality that
wielded the power to contradict normative understandings of racial
hierarchies.
Representations of “Race” in Iberia and the
Ibero-American World
The conception and representation of race found especially protean
expression in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, where the struggle
to articulate what differentiated one people from another and to
understand the significance of such differences took myriad forms from
the late Middle Ages onward: in the efforts of Old World legislators to
establish boundaries among groups like “New Christians,” “Moriscos,”
and “Gitanos”; in the quasi-scientific portrayals of castas inspired
by New World contact with Indians, Africans, and Asians; in the
assertive self-delineation of the modern Chicano movement; even in
contemporary Spanish and Portuguese anxieties over African/Muslim
immigration. Visual and material culture often played a key role in such
efforts, whether as a means of concretizing widely accepted “racial”
markers such as skin color, hair type, or clothing; as a vehicle for
shaping either literal or imaginary boundaries among already-identified
groups; or as a framework designed to end, regulate, or provoke
interactions among them. This session asks how ideas about race, in
its various constructions, found visual expression in Iberia and Latin
America from the late Middle Ages to the present.
The Black Madonna of Montserrat: An Exception to Concepts
of Dark Skin in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia?
Elisa A. Foster, Brown University
Medieval and early modern sculptures of the Black Madonna are
often interpreted through the lens of “race,” yet this concept did not
fully develop until the eighteenth century. While dark skin sometimes
signaled sinfulness or ethnic Otherness, it also could be a sign of
antique age and sacred provenance. The famous Black Madonna of
Montserrat (La Moreneta), located on a mountaintop shrine near
Barcelona, further complicates these medieval concepts of blackness in
an Iberian context. Unlike those of other Black Madonnas in Western
Europe, the Virgin of Montserrat’s origin legend is distinct for its
attention to an immediate Muslim threat. This paper questions whether
the continued presence of an ethnic and religious Other altered the
understanding of the Black Madonna’s dark skin in medieval Iberia. To
this end, it asks if Spain is again the exception in medieval art, or if the
exception is the category of the Black Madonna itself.
The Color of Salvation: The Materiality of Blackness in
Sandoval’s De instauranda Aethiopum salute
Grace T. Harpster, University of California, Berkeley
In 1627 the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval completed the only published
mission history exclusively about Christianizing Africans in early
Spanish America. His work, inspired by experience in the slave port
of Cartagena, advocates the proper baptism of blacks, and it does
so through a theoretical discussion on the nature of blackness itself.
Sandoval abstracts black skin into a material pigment, likening it to
the color of various foods, inks, and fabrics, in order to focus on the
African soul, which—unlike the inalterable black body—could be
whitened with Christianity. While Sandoval concerns himself with
a “harvest of [white] souls,” the black body was more valuable in a
seventeenth-century slave economy, twisting Sandoval’s materiality of
blackness in a sinister direction. Through an exploration of this treatise
the paper demonstrates how color played a vital role in the Spanish
missions; in many ways, the question of African salvation was visual.
From Casta to Costumbrista: Racialized Social Spaces in
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting
Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Saint Joseph’s University
In Colonial Mexico the miscegenation of the Indigenous, African,
and European populations produced diverse offspring that challenged
racial and ethnic purity and disrupted social stability. During this
period the visual arts played a critical role in depicting how race was
understood scientifically and culturally. This paper examines the
racialized social spaces represented in casta and costumbrista painting
and argues for the continuity from casta paintings to costumbrista
images. The end of legalized casta nomenclature in the late eighteenth
century did not signify the end of castas as racial and social signifiers.
Eighteenth-century casta painting portrayed racially mixed families
in a hierarchical manner on a series of separate canvases, while
nineteenth-century costumbrista painting depicted gatherings of a
racially and socially mixed populace on a singular canvas. Despite their
formal differences, both genres constructed racialized social spaces
loosely based on everyday life that weaved and fused the real with the
imaginary.
The Form of Race: Architecture and Casta in Modern Spain
Matilde María Mateo-Sevilla, Syracuse University
Ever since the Enlightenment, European discourse about Spanish
architecture and race was meant to deprecate the country. It was argued
that all the styles had been imported, proof that the Spaniards lacked
architectural genius. This paper explores the first and most influential
attempt to subvert this widespread belief, Fernando Chueca Goitia’s
“Invariantes Castizos de la Arquitectura Española” (Madrid, 1947).
Chueca’s essay raises many interesting questions about the role played
by architecture in the definition of a new Spanish identity after the loss
of the empire and a bloody civil war. It is also a fascinating attempt
to relate the most abstract aspects of architecture—form, geometry,
space—to a notion of race, or casta, based on spiritual values. The
result is an original, even bizarre definition of the Spanish essence
through pure architectural morphology.
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Hybrid Practices
Chairs: Vesna Pavlovic, Vanderbilt University; Niku Kashef,
California State University, Northridge
As the lines between analogue and digital practice blur with the ease
of use and availability, artists merge traditional and digital techniques
as tools in making work and participating in a larger and more flexible
arena of artistic production. In transforming the platforms that they
operate on today, artists are not easily categorized. This panel brings
together artists and activists, traditional and online publishers, and other
cultural producers to discuss the shift in positions in artistic practice.
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
Gender and Artistic Practice in Early Modern Europe:
Media, Genres, and Formats
Chairs: Andrea Pearson, American University; Melissa Hyde,
University of Florida
With the aim of illuminating more fully the social and cultural
work of artistic practice, this panel identifies gendered strategies in
art making―in the era’s artistic media, genres, and formats―and
considers how art or art making was conceived of in gendered terms.
In what ways were the practices of art making gendered in the early
modern period? By whom and for whom were they gendered? When
and why were specific media, genres, or formats identified more
strongly with women or with men? How did these perceptions of
artistic production and products intersect with norms of femininity and
masculinity? How did artistic practices, media, and formats shape the
boundaries of gender? Did they uphold or transgress social norms? Was
the sex/gender system reinforced, challenged, or undermined through
patronage and spectatorship? When did gendered aspects of art making
and reception become matters of concern or contention? How did
individuals, groups, and institutions manage or otherwise engage these
points of conflict? This session offers fresh insights about these and
related issues.
The Trouble with Pasiphae: Gender and Mythological Painting
at the Gonzaga Court
Maria F. Maurer, University of Alabama at Birmingham
This paper examines the gendered depiction and spectatorship of
images of Pasiphae and the Bull associated with the Gonzaga court in
Mantua. The Cretan queen who satisfied her lust for a bull and gave
birth to the Minotaur was depicted by Giulio Romano at the Palazzo
del Te and in a contemporary majolica dish produced by the workshop
of Nicola da Urbino. While Giulio’s suggestive fresco was meant to
entertain and titillate a male audience, Nicola’s more docile depiction
assumes that women would view the iconography as a caution against
sexual impropriety. However, male and female spectators had access
to both images and were therefore familiar with both the sexual
and moral, or masculine and feminine, aspects of Pasiphae’s visual
presentation. Although artists and patrons sought to differentiate their
treatment of the Pasiphae myth in order to appeal to male and female
sensibilities, actual viewing troubled such gendered distinctions.
Juan Sánchez Cotán’s San Diego Still-Life Painting as
Vehicle for Gender Transformation
Martina Pfleger Hesser, San Diego Mesa College
Juan Sánchez Cotán’s still-life paintings produced prior to his entry
into monastic life are somewhat of a mystery. Focusing on his Quince,
Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber still life from 1602, an artist’s path
emerges of personal growth, self-censorship, and most important,
gender transformation. The vehicle is the hyper-realistic, ecstatic
mysticism of the Spanish Counter-Reformation. All elements in this
painting can be read in a sensual and sexual context culminating in the
uppermost object, the quince, which can be interpreted as a symbol for
marriage. These artifacts help the artist to revise his own gender and
transform himself into a femalelike entity with an altered sexuality.
Entering a religious community, he would have had to negate his own
male sexuality and transform himself into a more passive, “female”
role to prepare for his marriage to the divine. This still-life painting is a
document of Sánchez Cotán’s difficult transformation.
Masculine Voices and Feminine Bodies: Gendering Margaret
of York’s Le Dyalogue de la duchesse (Add. Ms. 7970)
Erica O’Brien, University of Bristol
Women, Men, and the Needle’s Art in Early Modern England
Jennifer L. Hallam, New York University
Much scholarly attention has been devoted to the frontispiece of Le
Dyalogue de la duchesse de Bourgogne à Jésus Christ, a manuscript
commissioned by Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, about 1468.
Critical analysis of the manuscript has focused on how its creator,
Nicolas Finet, employed the iconography of the noli me tangere
in the frontispiece and a dialogic structure in the text as tools for
instructing Margaret in her duties as duchess. This paper reexamines
the illumination’s iconography, exploring the image’s use of a curtain
sack to communicate its primary significance as an Annunciation.
It addresses the gendered voices within the textual dialogue,
demonstrating how Finet shapes Margaret into “religious capital,”
thus endowing her with a singular spiritual authority. By highlighting
the uniquely female aspects of her political and devotional roles, Le
Dyalogue encourages Margaret to fulfill her dynastic expectations and
to become a vehicle for reform.
In his popular seventeenth-century pattern book, John Taylor
championed needlework as an activity that not only kept women silent
but also vanquished idleness and fostered virtue. As recent scholarship
has demonstrated, early-modern English women found many other
reasons for picking up needle and thread, from shaping historical
counternarratives in which they identified with agentive biblical
protagonists to forming homosocial alliances and furthering political
ambitions. These studies have, thus, challenged the binary opposition
between subjected sewing woman and agentive governing man.
Focusing on examples where traditional “high” and “low” art forms
converge and touching on issues such as creativity, imitation, invention,
and execution, the current paper complicates other long-standing,
gendered polarities—art/craft, public/domestic, professional/amateur,
labor/leisure—to refine our understanding of what “art” meant in earlymodern England, how it was valued, and who was allowed to make it.
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Crafting Identities and Creating Place: Empress Marie-Louise’s
Watercolor Album at the Museo Glauco-Lombardi, Parma
Lindsay Dunn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This paper examines watercolor paintings (1812–20) now in the
Museo Glauco-Lombardi, Parma, that were created by Empress MarieLouise, the second wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. For Marie-Louise her
artistic production was more than a pleasurable leisure pursuit; it was
an integral part of her identity as an aristocratic woman and allowed
her to fashion a perception of herself that was feminine, fashionable,
and indicative of her dynastic heritage as an Austrian Habsburg.
Marie-Louise’s artistic production is placed within a genealogy of
aristocratic female artists who all created art imagery during their
tenures as consorts and rulers, including Hortense de Beauharnais and
Marie Christine of Austria. Marie-Louise’s watercolor album traces
her journey from French empress to duchess of Parma, Piacenza,
and Guastalla, while simultaneously emphasizing her femininity and
dynastic ties to the Austrian Habsburgs.
Plato’s Dilemma: Unweaving the Threads Binding
Art and Religion
Chair: Donald Preziosi, University of California, Los Angeles
Epistemological technologies such as art history, aesthetics, and
museology have been insufficiently attentive to the enduring
contradictions and conundrums long grounding these modern practices.
Chief among these are the dilemma regarding the indeterminacy of
signification, the impossibility of controlling how artifacts may be
read or construed, and the consequent dangers of art to fundamentalist
politics and religion, exemplified in recent struggles over idolatry,
blasphemy, and the aesthetic dimensions of nativism, ethnic cleansing,
and genocide. Plato’s proposed banishment of mimetic art from his
ideal polity voiced a need to discipline citizens in proper social uses
of artistry, giving authority to control how works were to be construed
not in makers or users but in those whose authority was claimed
to be vested in proper readings of an imaginary divine design—an
artistic fabrication. Why have theocratic cures to the indeterminacy of
artistic signification invariably entailed better art? Is social or cosmic
decorum a religious or aesthetic phenomenon, or doesn’t decorum
itself problematize such distinction? Why hasn’t recent art-historical
interest in indexicality adequately engaged the inextricability of
artistry and religiosity? This session explores diverse aspects of these
interconnections and conundrums.
Attentiveness, Decreation, Immanence: Benjamin, Weil, Deleuze
Jae Emerling, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
This presentation focuses on theoretical concepts that traverse the
relation between art and religion: attentiveness, decreation, and
immanence. The first two concepts were developed by Walter Benjamin
and Simone Weil, respectively; they are at once theological, aesthetic,
and historiographic. Focusing on attentiveness and decreation gives
us an oblique, uncanny image of art history and religion that opens
onto Gilles Deleuze’s concept of immanence, which counters the
transcendence implicit in religion and art. As Deleuze says, we must
turn our attention “to this world, our world here and now,” rather
than to some world or time to come; for him art is a vital, materialist
“atheistic mysticism.” Rethinking the relation between art history and
religion requires us to encounter images anew by experimenting with
temporal and interpretative modes that reveal how and why an image
complicates history with a creative involution, becoming: immanence,
a vitalism within aesthetics.
An Icon for Nonconformists
Andrei Pop, University of Basel
Henry Fuseli’s Oath on the Rütli is often seen as a civic humanist
canvas commending patriotism. But the disunity and flamboyance of
his oath takers, which irritated Fuseli’s commissioner, Johann Caspar
Lavater, is political in a deeper sense. The Oath might be called
Protestant politically and theologically: it makes do with the outer signs
of historical transformation, whereas Catholic absolutism regarded
ritual as the embodiment of natural law. The Protestantism of the
Oath is grounded in an act of oath taking that creates the federation it
represents. A contrast may be drawn with Anselm of Canterbury (1033–
1109), the archbishop who defended church autonomy and proposed
a proof of God’s existence out of His concept. His ontology is the
reverse of Fuseli’s: in judging “that than which there is nothing greater
(God) does not exist,” I contradict myself. These opposed claims are
examined with an eye to logical and aesthetic detail.
A Queer Cross: Art, Religion, and the Thorns of Desire
Horace Ballard, Brown University
In the past few years there has been growing interest in the religiously
themed works of Marsden Hartley and William Congdon. There
remains, however, a disinclination on the part of some curators and
scholars to investigate the sociopolitical complexities of the ancient
world implicit in the Passion event and its analogous proximity to
questions of queer desire, spirituality, and politics that exists at the
heart of Congdon’s and Hartley’s work. In considering Plato’s dilemma
around the function of images and orthopraxy within the polis, this
paper argues that Hartley’s and Congdon’s works are veiled by desire
and thus unravel the perceived mimesis of art and Christian theology.
In moving away from iconicity in the modern era, this paper asks
whether the presumed religious legibility of Christ’s Passion can be
read as a redoubled sign, a simulacrum of the spiritual turmoil that dare
not speak its name.
From Ritual Objects to the Avant-Garde: Jews and the
Search for Religious Meaning in Art
Jeffrey Abt, Wayne State University
The revaluation of Jewish ritual objects that began with their relocation
from home and synagogue religious observances to museums’
historical, ethnographic, and aesthetic displays did not end there. At the
Jewish Museum in New York, modernity’s secularizing ethos relegated
many ritual objects to neglect as Jews turned to avant-garde art for
meaning. Beginning in the 1960s the museum presented a decadelong series of solo shows for artists such as Robert Rauschenberg
and group shows exploring the latest innovations—all consisting of
works devoid of Jewish content, most created by non-Jewish artists.
But the museum’s founding purpose, as part of the Jewish Theological
Seminary, was to focus on works by Jews or with Jewish content. When
its backers began pursuing the avant-garde exhibitions, debates arose
over the comparative value of ritual objects vs. modern art. That contest
of meaning posed significant questions that remain urgent in today’s
pluralistic and secular societies.
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Against the Day: Chiasmatic Disconcordances and
Semblances among the Ungoverned
Scott Contreras-Koterbay, East Tennessee State University
When Artists Become Martyrs: Understanding the
Place of Art in the “Revolution”
Dina Ramadan, Bard College
Plato’s problem was circumstantial, when the ontic categories dividing
art and religion were activated channels of belief embodying assertive
instances of recollection. Examples of contemporary art are exactly the
opposite—impermeable unactivated semblances, disconcordant and
repetitive matrices. Wherein lies art history, if not between recollection
and repetition, between a Lacanian imaginary discursiveness as a
concatenation of sins and a Symbolic ordering of inherited traits
searching for lost aesthetic origins? This paper presents art history as
an avoidance of the void, veering from the neurotic and eliding the
psychotic in a fruitless attempt to build faith in itself. The result: art
history emerges as pointless unless it functions as a religion.
This paper focuses primarily on the Egyptian Pavilion at the 2011
Venice Biennale to honor the memory of the thirty-two-year-old
multimedia artist and musician Ahmed Basiony, who was killed
during the violence in Tahrir Square on January 28, 2011. The
exhibition, 30 Days of Running in the Space, included both a
multimedia project shown a year earlier and unedited video footage
from the demonstrations in the days leading up to the artist’s death.
The combination of these two elements at the biennale allowed for
the simultaneous presentation of Basiony as an artist, an activist,
and a martyr. The emphasis on Basiony’s martyrdom throughout the
exhibition threatens to restrict our reading of his work to the tragic
events leading to his death. This also raises larger questions about our
restrictive expectations and dated understanding of artistic production
within the context of contemporary uprisings.
Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World,
Iran, and Turkey
A Revolution in Art? The Arab Uprisings and
Artistic Production
Chairs: Dina A. Ramadan, Bard College; Jennifer Pruitt, Smith College
Since the early weeks of the Arab Spring, critics and commentators
have been eager to assert that in something of an awakening, artists
from the region are finally being allowed the freedom to express
themselves, after decades of repression. Exhibitions and symposia
soon followed, concerned with the unique role played by artists in the
groundswell of grassroots activism, as well as how artists are tackling
political upheaval in their work. This panel engages in a more nuanced
examination of the relationship between art and politics—one that
recognizes the limitations of prescribing a role for artistic expression
based on anachronistic understandings of contemporary revolutions.
Given the evolving nature of the revolutions in the Middle East, what
is the role of artistic production in the revolutionary movements? How
do we move beyond the temptation to assign artists the responsibility
of representing the revolution? Drawing on studies from contemporary
Egypt, Libya, and 1950s Iraq, this panel proposes possible paradigms
through which to understand the complicated relationship between art
and revolution from a range of disciplines.
Can There Be an Art of a Revolution? The Counter-Example
of the Politics of Painting in 1950s Baghdad
Saleem Al-Bahloly, University of California, Berkeley
This paper provides a historical counterpoint to contemporary debates
about artwork and revolution that have followed in the wake of the
Arab Spring by examining the politics of the artwork at an earlier
moment—in the years preceding the July Revolution in Iraq in 1958.
At that time painting developed as a place to give form to, and thus
bring into intelligibility, the misery of workers and peasants who
starved under falling wages and mounting inflation and whose political
expression was interdicted by a monarchy that forbad protests, labor
organization, political parties, and the press. Taking the example of
paintings by Mahmud Sabri, this paper argues that it is in circumstances
where conventional venues of political action have been foreclosed that
the artwork acquires political efficacy.
“King of Kings of Africa”: Racializing Gaddafi in the Visual
Output of the 2011 Libyan Revolution
Christiane Gruber, University of Michigan
During the 2011 popular uprisings of the Arab Spring, battles were
staged through oppositional image worlds in which the incumbent
icons of state were mocked via visual forms of humor falling all along
the comedic spectrum. In Libya pictorial forms of ridicule had as their
main target Muammar al-Gaddafi. After failing to win support from
Arab governments, Gaddafi fashioned himself as a traditional subSaharan chief and the “King of Kings of Africa.” His bombastic title,
Afro-like hairdo, and eye-catching robes made him an easy target for
visual satire, which turned visibly more racist when he began using
mercenaries drawn from sub-Saharan Africa to violently suppress
street demonstrations. Throughout the uprisings the opposition sought
to degrade Gaddafi through the use of a variety of blackFace visual
stereotypes, revealing that within the particular case of Libya, satirical
contentions during the Arab Spring were not just transgressive and
factional but instrumentally racist as well.
Painted Discontent: The Role of Street Art in the
Egyptian Revolution
Jennifer Pruitt, Smith College
Street art and political graffiti were almost nonexistent in Cairo prior
to the uprisings of 2011. Since this time, an explosion of street art has
occurred, much of which contains an overtly political message. The
widespread, conscious documentation and digital sharing of Cairene
street art have transformed this most ephemeral and localized form of
art into an eternal and global expression. Revolutionary images have
spread beyond Egypt as artists abroad participate in parallel projects in
solidarity with the Cairene movement. Moreover, the artists themselves
often make clear references to street artists elsewhere in the Arab world
and beyond. This paper investigates the nature of street art, at once
local and universal, in revolutionary Egypt.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
115
New Scholars Session: International Artists Working in
Eighteenth-Century Great Britain
Chair: Amelia Rauser, Franklin and Marshall College
This session features new scholars whose work investigates artists of
diverse nationalities working in eighteenth-century London.
Quacks, Peddlers, and Pastelists: Jean-Etienne Liotard
(1702–1789) and Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1715–1783)
in London
Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, Courtauld Institute of Art
Although Liotard and Perronneau were both established artists and
successful exhibitors, their receptions in midcentury London could
scarcely have been more different. For Liotard London was a place
of wild success: royal commissions, extraordinary prices, and a large
number of works, of which a wealth of material survives. Perronneau’s
experience is more elusive: a sole portrait, the scant details of one
exhibition, and a body of printed material that points less to the higher
echelons of court than to London’s commercial and at times sordid
reality (he is recorded more often as a witness in a murder trial than as
an artist). This paper endeavors to make sense of both the perceived
promise and experienced realities of international travel for artists
in this period. Paying particular attention to the pastel medium, it
juxtaposes these two Londons, asking what they can tell us about the
wider paradigm of early-modern itinerancy.
The Bel Composto: The Role of Inset Paintings in
Robert Adam’s Interiors
Katherine McHale, Hunter College, City University of New York
Robert Adam, the preeminent British architect and designer of his age,
stressed the important role played by paintings in his environments,
declaring that a room that made no provision for them would be
“wretched.” He held in high esteem the artists who devised the
thematic programs for the inset panels that formed a vital part of
his interiors. These paintings comment on the rooms’ purposes and
relate the interests and histories of their owners. But alterations
made to Adam’s designs by their owners’ descendants have impeded
accurate evaluations of the significant work produced by Adam’s
painter partners. This paper examines their significant contributions
to the visual culture of their time, and finds that these artists provided
essential components of the all-encompassing bel composto designed
by Adam to reflect the status and taste of his clients.
Family, Students, and Legacy: Benjamin West’s Workshop
and the Shaping of an American School of Art
Abram Fox, University of Maryland
For more than sixty years, spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, Benjamin West’s London workshop amounted to a national
school of art for aspiring painters born or reared in America. This
paper considers the multigenerational relationships among his students
and explores the multiple modes of familial identity—biological,
household, national—in operation within West’s attempts to solidify
a unique position in European art history as the progenitor of two
national schools of art. His influential workshop responded to the
structure of the eighteenth-century institution of family, and family was
more than just a metaphor in the artist’s studio: West’s artistic progeny
included fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, cousins, and brothers.
By expanding his artistic family to encompass his students and the
nascent American painting tradition, this work contextualizes West’s
teaching efforts within the broader scope of his efforts to achieve
lasting fame and assure a legacy.
For and Against Homoeroticism: Artists, Authors,
and the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name
Chairs: Christopher Reed, Pennsylvania State University;
Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, University of Louisville
This session explores historical links between the treatment of
homoerotic desire in literature and in the visual arts of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Papers examine particular novels, poems, or
plays portraying same-sex desire in a positive, negative, or ambivalent
way, and locate their significant correspondence in paintings,
sculptures, and photographs of the given period.
Cold-War Martyrdom: St. Sebastian and the Sexual Politics
of a Queer Icon at Midcentury
Richard Kaye, Hunter College and The Graduate Center,
This talk examines the fate of the figure of St. Sebastian in midtwentieth-century painting, photography, and literature, focusing on
the ways this Christian martyr became a densely coded emblem of
decadent posturing and covert homoerotics in works by several writers
and painters: Marsden Hartley’s painting Sustained Comedy (1939);
Paul Cadmus’s painting Fantasia on a Theme by Dr. S. (1946); George
Tooker’s painting Subway (1950); Tennessee Williams’s play Suddenly,
Last Summer (1958); and a series of 1966 photographs of the Japanese
novelist Yukio Mishima by Kishin Shinoyama based on a Sebastian
by Guido Reni. These diverse works exemplify the complex ways
artists drew on the homoerotically charged Renaissance iconography
of Sebastian to denote homoerotic secrecy, tormented confession,
erotic denial, and psychic disorder in a repressive cold-war social and
political climate.
Dandy, Decadent, Dissident: D’Annunzio, Ontani,
and St. Sebastian
Anna Mecugni, Vassar College
Building on Richard Kaye’s studies on the figure of St. Sebastian as
an emblem of homoeroticism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
works of literature and visual art, this presentation offers a comparative
analysis of two little-known examples. The first is a mystery play
that the Italian decadent author Gabriele D’Annunzio composed in
1911. The protagonist and muse of the play was Ida Rubinstein, the
androgynous, lithe star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The second
is a photographic tableau vivant from ca. 1970 in which the Italian
performance artist Luigi Ontani impersonated Sebastian from a
painting by Guido Reni. A dandy in the age of advanced capitalism,
Ontani perceived Sebastian as a powerful icon of ambiguity, in contrast
to the repressive gender and power structures of bourgeois society. The
notions of fluid gender boundaries and performative identity that these
works suggest are central to dandyism. They raise the crucial question
of dandyism’s political implications.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
116
Masculinity in Repose: Homoerotic Referencing in the
Work of Christopher Wood and David Hockney
Andrew Stephenson, University of East London
The Habitual Decryptors of Desire: Duane Michals,
Hervé Guibert, and Michel Foucault
Nicholas de Villiers, University of North Florida
Among the narrative frameworks of the homoerotic that circulated
within twentieth-century visual culture, the intense eroticism of the
youthful male body lying supine or in repose was common in modern
fashion photography, advertisements, and the cinema. This paper
examines how such homoerotic codings and cultural referencing
featured in the works of the British artists Christopher Wood and
David Hockney. Wood’s Nude Boy in a Bedroom (1930) inflected
homoerotic desire through his encounter with Breton sailors, while
drawing upon Jean Cocteau’s novel The White Book (1930) and his 25
drawings of a sleeper (1929) showing his male lover asleep. Although
differently inflected, Hockney’s Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from
C. P. Cavafy (1966) and The Room, Tarzana (1967) communicated
the homoerotic charge of an imagined promiscuous Southern
Californian lifestyle portrayed in John Rechy’s City of Night (1965) and
approached through the poetry of C. P. Cavafy that recast Los Angeles
as Alexandria.
Duane Michals is known for black-and-white photographs that combine
handwritten text and homoerotic imagery. The question of how to read
“gay meaning” in his work is a complicated one that this paper explores
through the work of two French writers: Hervé Guibert and Michel
Foucault. Guibert, also a photographer, collaborated with Michals
on the book Changements and discusses Michals in his own book of
writing about photography, Ghost Image. Tom Roach suggests that
Guibert’s photography is difficult to classify as gay and challenges our
common interpretation of queer desire and friendship in photographs.
In La pensée, l’émotion Guibert’s friend Foucault also challenges this
knowingness about gay desire/identity in Michals’s Homage to Cavafy.
Foucault puts forth, instead, a reading of pleasure in photography that
short-circuits our desire to interpret desire. This paper combines these
texts on photography with readings of pleasure and ambivalence in
Michals’s and Guibert’s photographs.
Outing Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, or Ernst Kris’s
Creative Homophobia
Michael Yonan, University of Missouri-Columbia
An influential treatment of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s famous
Character Heads is an essay by the art historian and psychoanalyst
Ernst Kris, published in 1952, that interprets these sculptures as an
outgrowth of paranoid schizophrenia. One important aspect of Kris’s
interpretation has received little scholarly attention, namely, the
reason he posits for Messerschmidt’s supposed mental instability: the
sculptor’s purported homosexuality. Kris argues that same-sex desire
is detectable in Messerschmidt’s art, and he develops an extensive
Freudian reading of the sculptures that locates their eccentricity in
suppressed homosexual desire. The link between generative creativity
and heterosexuality, commonplace in Western thinking about art, is
recast to position homosexual shame as the starting point for aesthetic
errancy. Messerschmidt’s desire for men launched a deviant creative
process that resulted in compelling yet ultimately monstrous art. This
paper locates Kris’s text within specifically postwar American tensions
about homosexuality and its cultural effects.
Photography, Homosexuality, and Desire to Express:
Novelist Yukio Mishima and Photographer Tamotsu Yatō
Yasufumi Nakamori, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
This paper examines the brief relationship between the renowned
novelist Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) and the photographer Tamotsu
Yatō (1925–1973) in late 1960s Japan, while tracing their respectful
and joint desires to express their own homosexuality in coded,
collaborative artistic projects. The paper pays attention to Mishima’s
desire for dramatic suicide by seppuku, as expressed in his novel
Patriotism, which was made into a film with the same title in 1966. It
reveals that Mishima’s most intimate images—of his own death or of
him engaged in extremely private, sexually provocative acts—were
recorded by his personal photographer, Yatō, who has remained almost
unknown up to the present day and who, during his short tenure as a
photographer of less than ten years, produced only three publications.
Mishima wrote a preface to the first two, and an image of him was
included in the third.
Reframing Postblack
Chair: Kathleen Reinhardt, Freie Universität Berlin
The term “postblack” emerged in a casual conversation between the
artist Glenn Ligon and the curator Thelma Golden in regard to the
latter’s Freestyle exhibition, held at the Studio Museum in Harlem in
2001. Since finding its way rather inauspiciously into the art-world
consciousness, the term has produced a vibrant discourse both within
and outside the arts. “Postblack” resonates because it articulates the
frustrations of young African American artists (the post–Civil Rights
generation) around notions of racial identity and belongingness they
perceived to be stifling, reductive, and exclusionary. The elusiveness of
postblack makes it difficult to fully define, and certainly not all African
American artists grouped under this banner can be easily encapsulated
by it. It is more of an ethos than a dictum; nevertheless, it continues
to define a generation of artists that seeks to escape the limitations
imposed by race. This session considers whether postblack represents
a departure from social engagement and the often-troubling realities
of African American life, or if it constitutes a radical re-envisioning of
the political and polemical importance of its imaging. How do African
American artists and curators negotiate the complexities of representing
blackness in a cultural and economic climate that demands its persistent
visualization?
Ming Wong, Jean-Ulrick Désert, and the Parallax View
of European Otherness
Tavia Nyong’o, New York University
This presentation considers how the work of two Berlin-based artists,
Ming Wong and Jean-Ulrick Désert, reframe postblack aesthetics by
comparing Désert’s Negerhosen2000/Postkarten von meinen Lieben
and Wong’s Life and Death in Venice as postcolonial refigurations of the
stranger in Europe. Employing the classic touristic backdrop of Venice,
and drawing upon deep reservoirs of nostalgia, eroticism, and reverie,
Wong and Désert reposition the “non-European” at an indeterminate
angle between the gazer and the gazed-upon. The viewer of their
work must pivot between one frame of vision that confirms the visual
mastery of the West over the racialized body and another that perturbs
that vision with the stain of its desire. Such a parallax vision assumes
heightened political significance at a moment of rising European
xenophobia and economic precarity, where the figures of the stranger,
the citizen, and the tourist increasingly interinanimate each other.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
117
Book Reviews and Beyond: caa.reviews at Fifteen
Chair: Sheryl E. Reiss, University of Southern California
Faithful Impressions: Fuseli, Lavater, and the
Physiognomic Pursuit of Knowledge
Stephanie O’Rourke, Columbia University
This roundtable panel, organized in conjunction with the fifteenth
anniversary of caa.reviews in 2013, brings together the past editors-inchief of the journal (including its founders) as well as former members
of the editorial board and the current editor-in-chief. Panelists consider
the origins and original intentions for the “born-digital” journal; its
accomplishments over the past decade and a half; its current and future
directions; and, more broadly, the scope and object of the reviewing
enterprise—not only of books and exhibitions but also in a more
comprehensive sense. Topics include open access to the journal and
expansion of its readership base both globally and to underserved
constituencies; changing digital technologies such as audio and video
capabilities and how they can best be used by caa.reviews; interactivity,
reader response, and social media; the journal’s place vis-à-vis its sister
print journals; and the value of the journal to its readers and to CAA.
The journal’s future as CAA’s flagship digital publication is a particular
focus of the panel.
In the 1770s and 1780s Johann Heinrich Fuseli drafted illustrations for
multiple editions of Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy.
Far from the legible silhouettes we would expect for such a text,
Fuseli’s images include dramatic narratives of death and madness,
featuring grotesque facial contortions, extravagantly splayed nudes, and
shadowy obscurity. This paper considers the extent to which Lavater’s
philosophical claims and Fuseli’s artistic illustrations reacted to,
critiqued, and transformed one another. Lavater argued that systematic
study of man’s facial structure would reveal his inner characteristics.
Crucially, physiognomy provided an avenue to truth because the
interior nature of things was “impressed” upon the perceptible
world. Lavater and Fuseli’s professional collaboration produced a
deeply contentious exchange concerning the illustrations and their
reproduction. This paper argues that the disputes between the two men
can be read as a metacritical debate about physiognomy, the production
of knowledge, and impressions both literal and figurative.
Happy Fathers and Other New Ideas in French Art:
Genre, Masculinity, and Philosophy in the Final Decades of
the Old Regime
Ryan Whyte, Ontario College of Art and Design University
CAA Publications Committee
Art in the Age of Philosophy?
Chair: Hector Reyes, University of California, Los Angeles
The relationship between philosophy and art has been a rich field of
research for scholars of eighteenth-century painting. Such inquiry
has identified philosophical motivations for the pursuit of pleasure,
especially aesthetic pleasure, and led to a new understanding of the
intellectual foundations and commitments of supposedly frivolous
painters, such as Fragonard, Greuze, Boucher, and Chardin. This
panel broadens the inquiry in eighteenth-century philosophy and art
by considering a wide range of philosophical and artistic practices.
Are there neglected philosophies that might relate to artistic theory or
production? How might philosophical approaches help us to rethink
the status of other media or artistic production more generally in the
eighteenth century? Does an emphasis on philosophical questions
occlude or lead us away from important formal questions?
The Allegorical Tomb of Locke, Boyle, and Sydenham:
A Celebration of Empiricism
Anne Betty Weinshenker, Montclair State University
The impresario Owen McSwiny devised a series of large paintings,
commissioning teams of Italian artists who executed them in the
1720s. Each was an allegory commemorating an English notable
deceased during one of the previous few decades. Only one of the
canvases was dedicated to three individuals: John Locke, Robert
Boyle, and Thomas Sydenham, noted figures in science, medicine,
and philosophy. Friends and sometime collaborators, they shared
a firm commitment to Baconian method, claiming that knowledge
is based on observation, experiment, and sensory experience, not
tradition or theory. The painting dedicated to them integrates symbols
of science, allusions to empirical principles, and related allegorical
figures. McSwiny later published a collection of engravings
reproducing nine of the paintings, including this one. They were
paired with half-titles; the page accompanying the Locke-BoyleSydenham plate devotes yet further attention to the presence of
implements used in scientific experimentation, reaffirming the
epistemological stance they represented.
This paper explores how French painters and printmakers in the 1770s
and 1780s constructed an icon of masculinity—the happy father—
by exploiting the ability of genre pictures to propose hypothetical
situations as a means of doing philosophy. Paintings by Jean-Baptiste
Greuze and Etienne Aubry engaged in a critique of the economic
theories of the Physiocrats by taking up the Physiocratic concepts
of population and rural agricultural productivity in ways that mask
economic signs in favor of emotional ones. Such artworks employed
the visual language of sensibilité to elaborate the notion of paternal
happiness in the hearth as a counterpart to period artworks that
illustrate the Rousseauian father who instructs rather than feels. Greuze
visualized the happy father by synthesizing sensualist epistemologies
with visual traditions rooted in Cartesian deductive method and theories
of expression.
Aesthetic Discourse in Science: The Rococo and the Natural World
Lauren Cannady, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
This paper examines the ways the language of philosophical aesthetics
were applied to scientific discourse, particularly conchology, in
eighteenth-century France. Naturalist texts by the authors EdmeFrançois Gersaint and Antoine Dezallier d’Argenville suggest a
contemporary response to shells and methods of their display that
privileged aesthetic properties of objects of nature. Utilizing the lexicon
of visual seduction borrowed from Roger de Piles’s theorization of
painting, these authors drew explicit analogies between drawers of
shells and formal garden design. A grouping of shells, like a parterre,
could be organized into a pattern that revealed itself in a single
coup d’œil, as if possessing the qualities of a picture. Through the
consideration of aesthetic philosophy and the visual arts—for instance,
the decorative painting of Jacques de Lajoüe—we can better understand
observation and sensory experience as methods essential to the
discipline of natural history in the eighteenth century.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
118
Radical Thought: Connecting Guardi, Newton, Vico, and Damasio
Johanna Fassl, Franklin College Switzerland
Whereas the intellectual foundations of French painters have been
researched in a systematic manner, Venetian artists have received
relatively little attention in this endeavor. In a transdisciplinary
balancing act between eighteenth-century art, science, philosophy, and
modern neuroscience, this paper seeks to explain how the application
of Giambattista Vico’s paradigm verum et factum convertuntur to
Isaac Newton’s experimentum crucis sets up a psychophysical and
neurological framework for the interpretation of a series of paintings
by Gianantonio Guardi. The predominant whiteness in Guardi’s
stories of Tobit then emerges as both the constructive force of light
and seeing and the symbol of inner vision. In a final step, the paper
explores today’s world of brain research, trying to confirm the validity
of Vico’s epistemology through Antonio Damasio’s claim that human
consciousness is an ever-changing process and that the story of the self
is a perpetual construction and reconstruction.
Radical Art Caucus
Reconsidering Mural Painting, Part II: Working Walls,
Mural Painting, and Labor in the 1930s
Chairs: Sylvia Rhor, Carlow University; Heidi A. Cook,
University of Pittsburgh
In March of 2011 Maine’s governor Paul LePage ordered the removal
of Judy Taylor’s mural from the walls of the building housing the
Maine Department of Labor stating that the 2008 mural’s pro-union
imagery was at odds with his administration’s pro-business goals. This
event ignited controversy between the government, public, and artist,
and served as a reminder of the powerful role mural painting can play
in labor politics. The Maine case invites us to return to one of mural
paintings’ most influential moments in the 1930s to reexamine the
strategic position of mural painting via-à-vis matters of state, labor, and
justice. As part two of a session devoted to new research on murals, the
three papers examine the visual techniques and themes used by interwar
murals to intervene in labor politics. They bring into comparison public
and semiprivate murals, union mural commissions and corporate
commissions, as well as examine how workers, manufacturing, and
industry were depicted in these often didactic works.
David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Como se pinta un mural:
Workers Labor against Fascism
Andrea Lepage, Washington and Lee University
In David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 1951 treatise Como se pinta un mural (How
to Paint a Mural), he codified ideas that were central to his politics
and mural production for three decades. Siqueiros upheld the role of
plastic art in resuscitating the “fundamental function” of painting: art
must reflect the social condition of the masses. Through the lens of
Siqueiros’s manual, this paper examines the 1939 Mexican Electricians’
Syndicate (SME) mural produced by the International Team of Plastic
Arts, a collective organized by Siqueiros. In the mural and the manual
Siqueiros called upon workers to mobilize against the threat of fascism.
The mural appealed to the worker’s experience by aligning the program
with his moving perspective as he ascended the SME headquarters
staircase, a strategy discussed at length in Siqueiros’s practical guide.
In so doing, Siqueiros equated the artist with the worker and imbued
both with agency to exert social change.
Art, History, Labor, and Politics in Ernest Fiene’s History
of the Needlecraft Industry
Ellen Wiley Todd, George Mason University
In 1940 Ernest Fiene completed The History of the Needlecraft
Industry, two sixty-five-foot murals for the auditorium of New
York’s Central High School of Needle Trades. Commissioned by the
International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), they feature
giant allegories of Enlightenment conquering Greed on one wall,
and Harmony and Achievement on another. These contrasted with
union workers and labor, manufacturing, and government officials
who promoted labor’s cause. Distinctive vignettes portray historical
events or significant accomplishments from 1900 through the New
Deal. While praising its scale and comprehensiveness, commentators
ignored Fiene’s use of allegorical and Christian symbolism alongside
references to documentary photography. These juxtapositions create a
tension in the mural’s dual signification as a historical document and a
monumental work of New Deal art. While satisfying the ILGWU, this
tension in the murals also addresses the specifics and inconsistencies of
garment-industry politics within a New Deal context.
The Apotheosis of Power: Corporate Mural Commissions
in Los Angeles during the 1930s
Monica Jovanovich-Kelley, University of California, San Diego
The publicly accessible areas of office buildings, such as entryways
and lobbies, are commonly overlooked meeting spaces in the
expanding discourse of public space and culture in early-twentiethcentury American studies. By tracing the development of corporate
mural commissions in Los Angeles during the 1930s, this paper
resituates the murals found in these public/private spaces within an
emerging understanding of modernity that takes into account the
period’s progressive pedagogical directives as well as an acknowledged
distrust of laissez-faire capitalism that marked the preceding decade.
Through an analysis of the privately funded and publicly accessible
murals found in the Title Guarantee Building (1931), Edison Building
(1931), and Times Building (1935), larger concepts emerge beyond
that of simple corporate branding. The themes of labor, civic identity
and responsibility, public pedagogy, and modernism’s notion of
progress found within these murals reflect the complicated, and often
paradoxical, relationship between the general public, civic spaces, and
private corporations.
Art Historians Interested in Pedagogy and Technology
Rock the Pedagogical Boat: Open Mic and Tweet
#caa2013rock
Chairs: Janice Robertson, Pratt Institute; Gale Justin, Pratt Institute
With or without technology, are you doing something to rock
the pedagogical boat of art history? What is it? Let’s talk. We’re
crowdsourcing this session: cordless microphones will be passed from
person to person. Everyone is invited to speak, so please be prepared to
keep it brief. Tweet #caa2013rock to contribute to the real time stream,
which will be projected on screen for all to view. Tweet what you’re
thinking, tweet what you hear, tweet that you’re here! New to Twitter?
Come to the tweet corner of the room and we’ll show you how. We
hope that these statements spark in-person conversations within the
framework of the conference, and we invite everyone to join us at the
AHPT Business Meeting, where conversations can continue in the form
of roundtables.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
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Chair: Hilary Robinson, Middlesex University
Gestures of Inclusion and Colonial Hauntings in
Global Feminisms (2007)
Kimberly Lamm, Duke University
Recent years have witnessed a significant development globally in
relationships between feminist art practices, curatorial practices, and
the museum: the feminist blockbuster exhibition, including Tokyo
2005; Bilbao 2007; Los Angeles 2007; New York 2007; Paris 2009;
Arnhem 2009; Vienna and Warsaw 2009; Rome 2010; and Reykjavik
2010. Individually seamless, as a group they demonstrate highly diverse
sets of politics, positions, and histories. Each exhibition was produced
from a particular set of curatorial desires, intellectual positions, and
local practicalities. This panel has emerged from an awareness of this
diversity, and also from a sense that this period is pivotal for feminist
curating. Attention to the moment is crucial to understand what the
global impulse is, to ensure that museum practices do not turn a diverse
political movement into an art-historical moment, and to welcome
the next iterations of feminism in the art world. Panelists address this
moment deeply through papers focusing on individual exhibitions.
This paper analyzes the 2007 Brooklyn Museum exhibition Global
Feminisms, building upon the premise that the “big exhibitions” of
feminist art are an opportunity to think through contemporary feminist
art’s dialectical relationship to globalization. Focusing specifically
on the exhibition’s curatorial gestures of transnational inclusion, the
paper begins by asking: Did Global Feminisms allow new feminist
imaginaries to come into view, or did it reinforce a global spectacle
culture in which images of women perform the crucial specular labor
of mollifying globalization’s impact? Reading Global Feminisms in
relation to recent feminist work on haunting and US feminism’s global
turn, the paper argues that because the exhibition does not take up
globalization as a force that draws from the inequities of colonialism
and imperialism, the exhibition’s gestures of inclusion are haunted by
these older but still crucial mappings of the world.
Feminism Meets the Big Exhibition: 2005 Onward
From “Art” and “Feminism” to Konstfeminism: Sweden, 2006
Whitney Chadwick, San Francisco State University
Konstfeminism, a large retrospective of Swedish art by women, and one
man, opened in 1906 and travelled throughout the country for a year. If
the exhibition shared its focus on gender, sexuality, the body, materials,
and politics with other feminist “blockbuster” exhibitions of the decade,
it also articulated a series of issues specific to Swedish/Nordic histories
and cultures. The exhibition’s title, variously translated as “feminist
art” or “art feminine,” repositioned those terms within current debates
on feminism’s history and legacy within international perspectives.
This paper focuses on a set of issues that include the relationship of
Swedish artistic practices and feminist thought of the 1960s and 1970s
to the politics and policies of the national socialist government and the
European Union and the role of a specifically Nordic history in shaping
social relations, artistic practices, and feminist strategies.
Feminist Art History and the Feminist Revolution: Revision,
Recovery, and Inclusivity in WACK! (2007)
Elizabeth Adan, California Polytechnic State University,
San Luis Obispo
Conceived as a dismantling of existing accounts of feminist art history,
the landmark 2007 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
employed feminist methods of recovery and revision, in conjunction with
thematic categories that foreground affinities between disparate artworks,
mediums, practices, and locations, to formulate a more inclusive
approach to early second-wave feminism and the visual arts. However,
in spite of its inclusivity, WACK! also involved a number of exclusions
that, though perhaps unintentional and arguably unavoidable, give rise
to tensions within and across the exhibition. To consider these tensions,
this paper turns to two additional models of feminist engagement, Chela
Sandoval’s differential consciousness and Ella Shohat’s multicultural
feminism. In particular, Sandoval’s and Shohat’s models enable a
further intervention, in WACK! itself, that revises the feminism upon
which WACK! is founded and recovers a fuller sense of the exhibition’s
combined feminist and art-historical force.
“A history about which there is nothing feminine at all”:
elles@centrepompidou as a Nonfeminine Exhibition of Art
by Women (2009–11)
Amelia Jones, McGill University
This paper examines the epic elles@centrepompidou exhibition,
mounted from 2009 to 2011 across the main galleries of the national
museum of contemporary art, the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, and
curated by Camille Morineau. Billed in the museum’s press materials
and on its website as the “first time in the world” a museum displayed
“the feminine side of its own collections,” elles@centrepompidou
surfaced serious tensions and contradictions at play in exhibitions of
women’s art and in the brief global interest in feminist art in recent
years. Most important, the exhibition exposed the difficulties of
accommodating political aspects of feminism among such institutions.
Attention to elles@centrepompidou (its curatorial motivations, the
ideas presented in the catalogue, and the marketing of the show) affords
a means to explore the limits of the recent embrace of feminist art
among the most established institutions of the global art world.
The Exhibition That Did Not Happen: Feminism and
British Art Politics
Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds
I am not given to local nationalism. But when I was interviewed at
Konstfeminism (Sweden, 2005–6) and asked about the possibility of
such an exhibition in Britain, I said I could not imagine it. Since then,
major shows in then United States, Spain, Iceland, Italy, Poland, and
elsewhere have occurred. Britain has a strong tradition of feminist
thinking in art’s histories and practices. Why could an engagement
with feminism as a force in contemporary art, curation, and theory
not happen there? Working from a concept of the virtual feminist
museum (responding to museums’ lack of engagement with feminist
questioning), this paper addresses the paradox of the exhibition
that could not happen—an exhibition still to come. Historical and
polemical, it aims to understand conditions for and narratives of
feminism entering cultural knowledge not as a movement to be
historicized but as provocation, still imagining real change in the
sphere of art.
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Visual Resources Association
Archaeology Archives: Excavating the Record
Chairs: Jenni Rodda, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University;
Trudy Buxton Jacoby, Princeton University
This session brings to light important archives associated with
archaeological excavations traditionally sponsored by academic
institutions. These archives, largely hidden to all but a handful of
scholars and usually known primarily by word of mouth, are now
being made visible through the use of new technologies and creative
collaborations among and within the sponsoring institutions. Speakers
present case studies detailing those collaborations among library,
technical services, and digital-media staffs that bring these important
records to a wider scholarly audience.
Digital Projects at Abydos
Ileana Selejan, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Abydos is one of the oldest and most important currently active
archaeological sites in Egypt. The earliest kings of ancient Egypt were
buried here, and the remains of their sumptuous funerary monuments
have been the focus of the Institute of Fine Arts’ excavations since
the late 1960s. With the transition to digital photography, the project’s
archives have grown exponentially. Efforts have been made recently
to open a range of visual material from the collection to a larger
community of scholars, students, and museum professionals, with
the belief that concerns in archaeology can best be addressed across
institutional and disciplinary lines. This paper considers directions
in the field, particularly the influence of digital technologies and
the platforms they offer for the distribution of a range of visual
documentation. A central question is whether the digital is indeed
stimulating fundamental changes within disciplines that were
previously isolated within their practice.
From Dusk till Shelf: The Aphrodisias Archive at the Institute
of Fine Arts, NYU
Alexander Sokolicek, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
The documentation archive of Aphrodisias in Turkey is the key product
of the excavations started by NYU in 1961. It comprises about sixty
thousand slides, about twenty thousand digital pictures, more than
five hundred notebooks, hundreds of drawings, inventories of finds as
well as annual reports of the excavations, and publications. Numerous
databases and other digital data have been created. By their nature,
excavations are destructive; hence the Aphrodisias archive represents
the unique and primary record of this investigation. It needs to be
preserved and accessible in perpetuity because of its essential role.
Archaeological methods, aims, and technologies change, but they
always have to be based on the primary documentation data of the
archive. The challenges of the archive are many, such as storage
facilities, accessibility, and internal classification systems that make
the archaeology of archaeology as efficient as possible.
Hidden Collections Become Digital Treasures
Trudy Jacoby, Princeton University
Materials from expedition documentation sets are examined as
examples of varying treatment. One photograph collection is the James
and Lucy Lo archive of the Mogao caves in Dunhuang, China. The
photographic campaign documenting the paintings and sculptures took
place in 1943. This collection is available in ARTstor and will also be
available in a new publication. Princeton University has long been a
center for the study of excavations at Antioch. The archive includes
photographs, inventories, field notebooks, diaries, trench reports,
drawings, and other ancillary records. These materials are being
digitized and made available online. Last year thumbnails of the images
were added to the online resources. Different collections sometimes
require different approaches due to use, demand, or limitations on time
and resources.
The Digital Dig: ArchaeoCore and the Discovery of
Hidden Collections
Lucie Stylianopoulos, University of Virginia
The interest in archaeology and investment in cultural heritage that
emerged in Europe and America in the last half of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries have resulted in a legacy of copious data and
multimedia archival material. These “legacy collections” are found
in a number of academic institutions and archives throughout Europe
and the United States. Despite a plethora of collections, we are still
without conceptual models and data standards that facilitate the sharing
of archaeological data. This paper presents a new schema called
ArchaeoCore being developed at the University of Virginia and vetted
among partner institutions including Princeton, NYU, and Dumbarton
Oaks. ArchaeoCore addresses the need for a data standard for
archaeology that can link legacy data and current fieldwork in a digital
world as well as preserve the rich data held in hidden collections.
Receptions of Antiquity, Receptions of Gender?
Ancient Mythology, Sculpture, and Identity in Art
f the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries
Chairs: Marice Rose, Fairfield University; Alison Poe,
Fairfield University
While post-Classical artists’ responses to the ever-broadening Classical
canon have received much scholarly attention, and while the range of
theoretical approaches to these works has expanded, there have been
few systematic studies of gender construction within art that seeks
to adapt, appropriate, reuse, and/or reinterpret antiquity. This session
explores gender stereotypes, identities, and ambiguities in Classically
informed art in the late medieval and early modern eras.
The Liminal Feminine: Multidimensional Reception in the
Illuminations of The Ovide Moralisé
Ashley Simone, Columbia University; K. Sarah-Jane Murray,
Baylor University
This paper explores the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the art
corpus of the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid) in
verse, with special attention to the depiction of the feminine and its
shifting embodiment in the manuscript tradition. After providing a brief
overview of the illuminations corpus with appropriate digital slides,
this presentation focuses especially on the translations of Ovid’s Europa
and Io episodes and their accompanying illuminations. It defines the
“liminal feminine” dimension of this seminal work balanced at the
threshold of literature, philosophy, and theology. Responding to the
research published by Carla Lord and Renate Kosinski-Blumenfield, it
shows how Christian and pagan identities converge in both image and
text to exalt a new understanding of the feminine that widely shapes
and informs the reception of Ovid for centuries to come.
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Gendering Violation, Response, and Revenge in the Myth
of Philomela
Hetty Joyce, The College of New Jersey
Male and Female, Antiquity, Nudity, and Sexuality in
Sixteenth-Century Personifications of Florence
Claudia Lazzaro, Cornell University
Only a fraction of the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses became popular
subjects in the visual arts. That the tale of Philomela, Procne, and
Tereus (Book 6, 424–623) was not one of these is hardly surprising,
because of the many Greek myths recounting betrayal, rape, torture,
and murderous revenge, this may be the worst. In recent years feminist
critics have written extensively about Philomela, for her story lies at the
junction of three of their greatest concerns: physical violence against
women; the cultural silencing of women; and the undervaluing of
women artists, particularly those working in the “uniquely feminine”
“craft” of textile, as Philomela does to report to her sister her rape,
mutilation, and imprisonment at the hands of Procne’s husband Tereus.
This paper discusses the dramatic gender reversals in the story as well
as changing interpretations of the myth by medieval and early modern
poets and artists.
In the personification of cities as female from antiquity through the
Renaissance, human anatomy is essential to its meaning. However,
visual and verbal representations of cities also exploit analogies with
male as well as female anatomy and gender roles. In sixteenth-century
Florence new kinds of images visualized these gender complexities
with personifications of both sexes. These evoked ancient sculpture
types, recalling Florence’s ancient Roman origins but modified and
transformed through overt reference to Michelangelo’s Florentine
works, equally fundamental to expressing the city’s identity.
Michelangelo’s reinterpretation of antique models and exploration of
the expressive body in male and female nudes inspired such artists as
Tribolo, Vasari, and Giambologna to invent novel personifications that
elicit yet further readings. A comparison between the production of
nude Venus figures in antiquity and that in Florence reveals similarities
as well as radical differences in the representation and cultural
meanings of the nude female form.
Gender Issues in the Arena Chapel: Giotto’s Virtue
Fortitude Reexamined
Mary D. Edwards, Pratt Institute
Giotto’s personification of the virtue Fortitude in the Arena Chapel
in Padua bears a four-edged mace, holds a shield emblazoned with
a rampant lion, and wears the lion-skin cape linked with the GrecoRoman mythic hero Hercules. But Giotto’s figure is not male; it is
female. Until now scholars have fallen into two camps in interpreting
the significance of the attire of Giotto’s virtue: some believe that the
trecento artist meant it to allude solely to Hercules himself; others
suggest that perhaps he intended it to evoke—formally or even
iconographically—Juno Sospita, shown by artists of antiquity wearing
a goat hide in the same way that Hercules wore his cape. Giotto had
neither notion in mind; rather he was inspired by a different figure from
Greco-Roman culture, one with which he became familiar via ancient
artworks or texts or both.
Queer Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso, and St.
Catherine’s Head
Timothy B. Smith, Birmingham-Southern College
In The Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo (chapel of St. Catherine of
Siena, San Domenico, Siena, 1526), Sodoma employed the Belvedere
Torso as a model for the frescoed image of an executed criminal. This
paper explores the recasting of the Torso as a freshly decapitated body
capable of effecting a gender inversion required by its devotional
setting while reflecting the artist’s own personal reception of gender
in ancient art. Close inspection of Sodoma’s decapitated body reveals
the way he has neutralized the overtly masculine aspects of the
Torso; as elsewhere in his oeuvre, the artist reinterprets his classical
model through a lens of gender ambiguity. The paper also attempts to
understand how early modern viewers considered the chapel’s emphasis
on bodily fragments, both real (Catherine’s actual relic head over the
altar) and fictive (severed head and decapitated body in fresco), with an
ancient, fragmentary torso as the starting point.
“Assembly Instructions Included”: Balancing Structure
and Freedom in Studio-Art Courses
Chairs: Casey Ruble, Fordham University; Lynn Sullivan,
Studio-art faculty must grapple with how to promote innovation and
exploration without allowing instructional parameters to become
so broad that students get lost in a sea of options. This roundtable
discussion tackles the fundamental question of whether development
of creativity itself is antithetical to institutionalized education. Each of
the panelists approaches this issue with overlapping abstract, analytical,
and practical perspectives. They question how social, historical, and
economic contexts shape our definition and judgment of art. They
challenge notions of creativity, value, materiality, and individuality.
They look at the role of the art department within the educational
system and in relationship to the art market and today’s pluralistic art
practices. They examine what we are preparing our students for and
how that determines the goals we set in the classroom. All consider
how pedagogy and critique may conflict with, or promote, independent
thought in an era when art seems to be changing faster in form,
concept, and place in culture than academic structures are.
Face the Scientists
Chairs: Francesca Gould Samsel, independent artist; Daniel Keefe,
University of Minnesota
As science and technology become ever more integrated into our daily
lives, artists are mining their content conceptually and physically to
create new work. Some of the most powerful work resulting from
this trend is being made by artists working in the labs or in close
collaboration with scientists. Experience tells us that the biggest
hurdle to initiating collaborations is enlisting scientists willing to set
aside their reservations and open their doors. We bring in scientists
to sit at the table, discuss their work, and provide candid feedback
about specific collaborative projects put forward by the artists. Our
goal is give artists the tools to create the connections that ultimately
make collaboration flow. By putting artists together with scientists we
are seeking a common language and understanding that will enable
productive collaboration.
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Public Art Dialogue
Time, Transience, Duration
Chair: Norie Sato, independent artist
The role of time in public art can be viewed through several lenses:
the duration of the artwork, the mode or material of the artwork,
the concept behind the artwork. Nonpermanent public artworks, for
example, can foster conversation about how ephemeral work exists
in the world, what it is or could be, why it isn’t permanent in the first
place, and just what constitutes permanence. Temporary works can
expand notions about public art—how it is perceived, how artists use
its transitory nature, and how this type of public art might differ from
an outdoor exhibition of artwork made for galleries or museums or
other contexts unrelated to its current exhibition site. Panelists address
temporary works and respond to questions and comments posted to
Public Art Dialogue’s Facebook page and Twitter (http://twitter.com/
publicartdialog). Join the dialogue in person and online.
Gender Politics in the Workplace, Part I
Chair: Claudia Sbrissa, St. John’s University
Statistics compiled by the College Art Association demonstrate
a growing number of women and transgendered professionals in
leadership roles at cultural institutions. The visibility of people in
these demographics entering the art system as artists, critics, writers,
administrators, and educators continues to increase. Research shows,
however, that traditional prejudices regarding gendered power relations
in the workplace are still dominant. This panel fosters a positive
dialogue that will highlight strategies to overcome institutionalized
prejudice and inequality in the workplace. It is presented in conjunction
with the Students and Emerging Professionals Committee’s panel,
“Gender Politics in the Workplace: Part II: the Next Generation.”
CAA Museum Committee
The Position of Academic Programs in Campus Art
Museums: What, Why, Who, and Where To?
Chairs: N. Elizabeth Schlatter, University of Richmond Museums;
Celka Straughn, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas
Over the past decade, an increasing number of college and university
art museums have created positions and departments primarily focused
on academic programs to deepen faculty and student engagement across
disciplines. Many, but not all, of these new positions and possibilities
for academic initiatives have been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. This session provides the opportunity to examine this
growth. What defines these new positions? Who do these jobs serve and
why are they important? How is success determined and what are some
of the major challenges? This session is an interactive panel discussion.
Open Session in Indian Art
Landscapes of Fear and Desire
Chairs: Tamara I. Sears, Yale University; Molly Emma Aitken, The
City College of New York, City University of New York
they have been depicted as urban and rural places and often invested
with feelings of wonder, longing, power, and danger. The appeal of
landscapes was rooted in their potential to collapse mythic and historic
time and to cultivate new encounters between the human and the
divine. Ranging temporally from the Neolithic to the early modern
eras, the papers in this panel trace the many ways landscapes were
refashioned and/or imagined as sites of historical longing, wondrous
speculation, and fearful delight. They look at how landscapes
functioned as dramatic stages, as metonyms for the continual struggle
for cosmic order, and as sites that carried long-lasting imprints of
human emotional responses. The papers investigate prehistoric
investments in landscape, the transformation of place into Hindu tīrtha
or sacred landscape, the dramatization of landscape in India’s classic
epic Ramayana, and the landscaping of memory in Mughal and Rajput
histories of the early Colonial era.
Montane Metonyms: Ibex in/as Landscape
Robert Linrothe, Northwestern University
What little can be known of the attitudes of Neolithic hunter-foragers
in the Indian Himalayas toward their habitat, whether of fear or
desire, is embedded in the landscapes themselves. Animals, humans,
and nonfigurative signs were pecked directly onto the rocks in or as
landscape. No setting was added, neither ground line nor plane. The
dramatic presence of the Himalayan landscape is nearly impossible for
contemporary visitors to ignore, yet there are no known “landscapes”
in Neolithic rock art of the Himalayas. If the landscapes as sites did not
become landscapes as subjects, petroglyphs were certainly responses
to landscapes and became imbricated into them. This paper examines
the range of locations in the western Himalayas in which petroglyphs
are found, considers the role landscape itself played in the meanings
(present and past) of the petroglyphs, and attends to the afterlives
of these significations among contemporary inhabitants of the same
mountain regions.
Where Death Is Conquered
Nachiket Chanchani, University of Michigan and
Smithsonian Institution
The largest conglomeration of temples, funerary monuments, and
steles in the Indian Himalayas is set in the secluded Jageshwar valley.
This paper begins with a discussion on how the valley’s geography has
been manipulated to create an inimitable landscape of north-flowing
rivulets, confluences, islands, terrace fields, rocky outcrops, and cedar
stands. Thereafter the peculiar forms, functions, and layouts of temples
and funerary monuments—built there since the seventh century CE—
are probed. Ultimately the paper reveals how through the crafting of
geography and by the construction of edifices, successive generations
of patrons and masons turned Jageshwar into a unique tīrtha. This
tīrtha has drawn ascetics but has repulsed armies, has fostered the
performance of normative Brahmanical rites but also promoted
antipodean Tantric practices, and has made concrete the endearing
images of Amaravana, the forest where immortals gloriously reside as
well as Dārun. avana, Shiva’s ghoulish glen.
Throughout the history of Southern Asia, landscapes have formed the
sites and subjects of artistic creation. As places, landscapes have been
built into monumental complexes, sculpted into sacred geographies,
and mapped by pilgrimage, commerce, and conquest. As subjects,
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Moving Mountain(s): An Epic Encounter between Divine
and Demonic Realms
Parul Pandya Dhar, University of Delhi
An ancient Indian narrative describes the arrogant attempt by the
demon-king Rāvan. a to uproot Kailāsa, the Himalayan abode of the
god Shiva. Deep-seated as a Southern Asian cultural motif, this largerthan-life episode has been imaginatively rendered in art and extended
to varied sociocultural and political contexts. The climactic moments of
the narrative are expressed through tableaulike juxtapositions of scenic
and iconic elements, each reinforcing the other in evoking its potent
emotive appeal—of power, desire, fear, and ultimately of repentance
and forgiveness. Landscape here acts as a site that bears witness to and
participates in the unfolding drama between god and demon-king. The
configuration of compositional elements constituting the landscape
is imaginatively negotiated to convey tensions and links between
divine, royal, and demonic realms. Through a contextual analysis of
select representations from Indian and Southeast Asian art, the paper
investigates landscapes of power, desire, and fear in imaging an epic
encounter.
Fortified Memories: Picturing Chitor in Eighteenth-Century
Poems and Paintings
Dipti Khera, Yale University
The histories of Northern India’s secular architecture often begin with
Chitor, capital of the regional court of Mewar. Gendered memories
recount the Rajput queen Padmini’s self-immolation and the battles
launched by Muslim kings from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century,
fashioning Chitorgarh as an iconic Hindu fort embodying vexed
histories. Yet these accounts exalt the temporality of Chitor’s fortified
landscape, marginalizing its spatiality and visuality, which are integral
to its layered memory as a site of defeat and conquest, fear and desire.
This paper explores how the topography and architecture of Chitor
shaped the historical memory of its landscape. Regional literary
poems and painted genealogical scrolls imagine the presentness of
this idealized forted space in complex ways in the eighteenth century.
Circulating in a time period when European travelers saw Chitor
as evocative ruins, these memories enable us to unravel ideas of
monumentality and spatial thinking from diverse perspectives.
Photography and Race
Chair: Tanya Sheehan, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Much has been written about the relationship between photography
and race, especially within the fields of art history, anthropology,
cultural studies, and literary studies. Scholars have shown, for example,
how photographs first became tools of oppression in the nineteenth
century, serving as scientific evidence of differences among the races,
shaping power relations between white masters and black subjects,
and generally promoting the aesthetic and social value of whiteness.
Scholars have also studied how photography has been used by
marginalized racial groups as an instrument of empowerment. Their
writing has not only shed new light on nonwhite photographers and
their important contributions to the development of photographic
practices since 1839; it has also taught us to interpret and deploy
photographs in relation to the struggles for social equality that take
place through political movements, works of art and literature,
and everyday experiences. This session poses new questions that
challenge the terms “photography” and “race.” Speakers explore
historical case studies; interpretive surveys of historiography, criticism,
and institutional practices; and other creative proposals to rethink
photography and race.
Black Ops: Photography, Race, and Modernist Subjectivity
Camara Dia Holloway, University of Delaware
How does the formal language of photography signify racially? When
modernist photography emerged during the 1920s, the medium needed
to be reconfigured to articulate a concept of racial difference no longer
defined by biology. Lighting assumed an expressive role resolving the
paradox of an American culture in the process of abandoning scientific
racism yet committed to upholding the color line. With race dislodged
from the body and blackness newly valorized as a badge of modernism,
shadows were tasked with conveying racial meaning. The lighting
practices codified in celebrity portraiture illustrate how the new style
rendered modernist identity while sustaining photography’s capacity to
contribute to racial formation. Shadows evoked the crucial glamour and
buttressed the new racial paradigm. The aura that expressive lighting
generated was compelling yet elusive, able to transmit racial ideology
covertly, passing as objective truth integrated into the essence of the
medium instead of as a constructed fiction.
CAA Education Committee
What We Teach: Perspectives on the Logic, Scope,
and Value of Art Appreciation
Chairs: Brian Seymour, Community College of Philadelphia;
Julia A. Sienkewicz, Duquesne University
Many departments maintain an entry-level survey course variously
called “Art Appreciation,” “Understanding Art,” or the like. These
“foundations” courses have long existed within university curricula,
yet inconsistencies prevail in expectations, coverage, and pedagogical
goals. These differences in course values are due partially to
instructors: some courses are taught by art historians, others by
studio faculty, and perhaps the majority by a diverse constituency of
contingent faculty with a wide array of backgrounds. In addition, the
diversity of student preparation, needs, and interests often drives what
faculty feel they can (or need to) address across the scope of their
semesters. If foundations courses are going to continue to occupy key
slots on university core curricula, and if they are to somehow contribute
to the educational goals of curricula within art/history programs,
it seems the time has come to reconsider what their value is, what
their key learning goals should be, and what role they should play in
a student’s overall college experience. This session initiates such a
dialogue among its speakers and audience.
Flash Photography and African American Visibility, 1938–56
Kate Flint, University of Southern California
This paper considers African American subjects and practitioners in
relation to flash photography from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s.
Examining images made by Gordon Parks (for the FSA and Life) and
Robert H. McNeill (especially for the magazine Flash!) significantly
complicates the arguments of those (including Ralph Ellison) who have
drawn an over-neat analogy between the stark tonal contrasts achieved
through flash photography—those clear distinctions between dark and
light that have been read in metaphorical as well as literal ways—and
the multiple forms of subordination produced through racial inequality.
Rather, these photographers employing flash for their particular
documentary and aesthetic ends made race visible on their own terms.
What is distinctive in technique and subject matter about African
Americans who employed this technology? How does it complicate
our understanding of flash photography’s associations, and of African
American photographers’ relationship with the concept of light?
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The “Panographed” Soldiers’ Stand: Recording/Recoding
Race in the Great War
Vera Grant, Harvard University
How might we understand the relationship between photography
and race during the Great War? Advances in panoramic photography
offered the Army opportunities to easily capture vast troop formations
and gatherings, and to create military photographic spectacles. The
Signal Corps, who directed the army’s photographic program, used
the camera to “see everything” and authenticate their panoramic vistas
for both archival records and citizen consumption. The American
army extended their practice of segregation through a visual lens,
attempting to designate relations within military culture and venerating
the white soldier’s body. Yet these images reflect back varying
negotiations between the raced soldiers’ bodies and their own practices
of interpersonal relations. This paper explores imagined affinities,
contestations, and vexed exclusions through individual and group
stance and gaze. How did the complex process of the panoramic
exposure converge with the resisting and conforming strategies of
soldiers captured on film?
Picturing Imperial Citizens: Race and Sovereignty in the Colonial
Office Visual Instruction Committee’s Photographs, 1902–45
Gabrielle Moser, York University
From 1902 to 1945 Britain’s Colonial Office Visual Instruction
Committee (COVIC) circulated a photographic catalogue of imperial
belonging that aimed to teach schoolchildren what it meant to look
and feel like imperial citizens. Rather than approaching photographs
as visual taxonomies of race, COVIC treated photographs as affective
objects that encouraged a specific identification while reinforcing
the power dynamics created by the “natural” hierarchies of race
and class. Analyzing the images of India produced for the project,
this paper examines how viewers used their encounter with the
COVIC photographs to contest the British Empire’s discourses of
racial inequality, reading the images as moments when the promise
of imperial citizenship was withheld. Such a reading asks: Can we
work against totalizing assumptions about photography as a tool of
colonial oppression and understand the medium as a series of relational
encounters where the promise of imperial sovereignty was tested?
The Photograph as Contact Zone: Negotiating Racial Identities
in Inuit Photography
Carol Payne, Carleton University
What happens when colonialist-statist photographs are returned to the
indigenous groups they depict? Can racialized images be read against
the grain of their initial presentation from an indigenized perspective?
And what is the position of nonindigenous researchers in such
negotiations? Taking those questions as points of departure, this paper
argues for a collaborative approach to photography’s colonial history.
The case study is a collaborative visual repatriation project involving
students from the Inuit postsecondary school Nunavut Sivuniksavut
(NS), Library and Archives Canada (Canada’s national archives),
and non-Inuit researchers. In part of the project, NS students conduct
oral-history interviews with elders from their home communities in
the territory of Nunavut about photographs made by the Canadian
government from the 1940s through the 1960s. The project aims to
foster intergenerational bonds as well as using archival photographs to
encourage and disseminate discussions about Inuit culture and heritage
from Inuit perspectives.
Dystopia: Space, Architecture, and the Filmic Imaginary
Chair: Sadia Shirazi, independent curator and architect
This panel explores the potential of dystopia within critical
representations of space and architecture in the filmic imaginary.
Using dystopic films as a reference point, the panel reconsiders the
relationship between dystopia and utopia from a global perspective,
asking whether dystopia is not constituted by and also constitutive
of utopia. In dominant cinematic representations, dystopia has been
portrayed simplistically as the negative mirror image of utopia. In
these films dystopia is synonymous with a sensationalized doomsday
scenario, playing upon societal fears of the “Other” and subscribing to
oversimplified notions of good and evil, which dilutes the possibility
and potentiality of criticality from within the dystopic genre. In
contrast, the short films of Sara Eliassen, Maha Maamoun, and Ivor
Shearer belong to an emergent strain of the dystopic genre. These
films raise questions about the relationship of space and architecture
to sociopolitical issues, cultural and historical memory, and the future
of societal forms. The panel is also interested in questioning dystopia’s
relationship to temporality and the realms of the real and imaginary
across the distinct subject positions of the artists/filmmakers. After
a screening of three short films—Sara Eliassen’s Still Birds (2009),
Maha Maamoun’s 2026 (2010), and Ivor Shearer’s Last Things
(2009)—a moderated discussion follows between Nora Alter, chair of
the department of film and media arts at Temple University; Shearer,
a filmmaker and artist; Eliassan, a filmmaker and artist; and public
participants.
Craft after Deskilling?
Chair: T’ai Smith, University of British Columbia
After years of Conceptualist deskilling, thought on “craft” has been
on the upswing, as contemporary artists and critics consider the
physical labor holding up our art-world universe. Some scholars are
investigating the intersection of DIY and avant-garde practices (Julia
Bryan-Wilson), while others are working to theorize nuances within
the terminology (Glenn Adamson). This panel seeks to understand the
opposing terms of “craft” and “deskilling” in the (mostly) disparate
fields of contemporary art and decorative art. If craft is traditionally
related to manual skill, what results when Conceptual art embraces
craft, or when craft becomes increasingly conceptual? The papers here
consider the complex refashioning of the craft/art dialectic in the wake
of the readymade, Postminimalism, performance, participatory art, and
new media.
Handcrafted Readymades: Manual Work at the Turn
of the Twentieth Century
Ileana Parvu, Geneva University of Art and Design
One often considers that the deskilling of art practice originates in
the readymade. Duchamp himself did not make the miniatures of
the Boîte en valise or the 1960s copies of the lost readymades. By
distinguishing the preparatory work from its construction carried out
in a specialized studio, he opened up the question of making. This
paper addresses this problem from a different perspective, by taking
its starting point not from readymades but from their reproduction.
Contemporary artists such as Peter Fischli and David Weiss and Zoë
Sheehan Saldaña do not let manual work be done by others but rather
reproduce mass-produced consumer goods with their own hands and
therefore make, so to speak, handcrafted readymades. The paper
discusses the place of manual work after what Lucy Lippard has
called the “dematerialization of the art object.”
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Studio Craft Extends an Invitation
Bibiana Obler, George Washington University
In the 1970s through the 1990s a stark opposition arose between the
craft and art worlds. Studio craft championed technical expertise.
Meanwhile, Conceptual art was seen by many in the art world to have
liberated (fine) art from any obligation to skilled workmanship. But
there were artists from both camps who sought to bridge the divide.
Taking Lynda Benglis’s work in glass and ceramics as a case study,
this paper examines how the studio craft movement encouraged artists
to enter a sphere of experimentation that coupled dilettantism with
workshop know-how. Far from exploding the art/craft binary, Benglis
in her ceramic and glass sculpture has made the most of the resources
generated by the conflicted history of studio craft and contemporary art.
From Maria Martinez to Kent Monkman:
Performing Sloppy Craft in Native America
Elizabeth Kalbfleisch, McGill University
“Sloppy craft,” coined by Glenn Adamson, presents a theoretical
apparatus through which to undiscipline craft; the possibilities for
this action beyond the dominant culture have yet to be adequately
explored. This paper addresses postdisciplinary and performative
aspects of sloppy craft through a discussion of craft objects within
the space of contemporary Canadian Aboriginal and Native American
performance art. For example, handcrafted performance props by Kent
Monkman (Swampy Cree) have become art objects in their own right:
Louis Vuitton Quiver and Dream Catcher Bra (both 2007) cogently
illustrate sloppy craft’s potential, communicating the tension between
semidisposable handicraft, luxurious object of veneration, and vehicle
for cultural critique. Craft-in-performance is further contextualized in
relation to its inversion, performance-in-craft, and addressed through
a discussion of the history of Aboriginal and Native American craft
demonstrators who, at expositions, fairs, and in documentary film,
created performance culture around their work and put “craft into
motion.”
Crafting the Social: Craft and Collaboration in Recent Art
Lisa Vinebaum, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
This paper explores collaboration in the handicrafts as a type of
skill. Drawing on discourse in craft, contemporary art, sociology,
communication studies, and social-network theory, this paper considers
strategies privileged by contemporary artists—with an emphasis on
those working with fiber processes—that harness the handicrafts in
the service of collaboration. By bringing diverse publics together to
participate in the act of crafting, these strategies reinvigorate traditional
skills and recuperate social aspects of making. Here, craft serves not
only to create participatory artworks but also to enact the social, to
foster social bonds, and to create community. The sociologist Richard
Sennett identifies cooperation as a skill that has been eroded in society
at large and that must be revalued and strengthened. This paper posits
the deployment of participatory and collaborative strategies as a type of
reskilling in craft and in social relations more broadly.
The Work Is the Thing: The State of the ILSSA Union
Emily Larned, University of Bridgeport
Founded in 2008 by two letterpress printers, Impractical Labor in
Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA) is an interdisciplinary, socially
engaged art project. Modeled after a research institute and labor union,
ILSSA takes form as an artist-run membership organization consisting
of makers who use obsolete technology in conceptual or experimental
ways. In 2012 ILSSA founders distributed a printed survey to its 175
members, asking each to self-assess his or her art-working experience.
The resulting compilation of responses, the State of the ILSSA Union,
details the material and immaterial working conditions of ILSSA
members and articulates why and how contemporary craft practice
resonates with them today.
The Impact of Contingent Faculty: Changing Trends
in Teaching and Tenure
Chairs: Jennifer Laurel Stoneking-Stewart, University of Tennessee;
Amanda Hellman, Emory University
The results of the recent survey on contingent faculty conducted
by the Coalition on Academic Workforce (CAW) and the American
Association of University Professors (AAUP) are the focus of
this panel. The panel focuses on the impact of the survey since its
publication in 2011 and discusses changes that have been initiated in
the treatment and status of contingent faculty in the arts, if any. It is
drawn from the ranks of faculty, arts administrators, and representatives
from CAW and CAA. Issues such as the future of tenure, professional
development, research and funding, career mentoring, and the impact
on CAA membership are addressed.
Adjunct Advocacy: An Activist’s Account
Jeanne K. Brody, Villanova University and Saint Joseph’s University
This presentation, by an art historian who has taught part-time for
many years and who has been a leader in adjunct advocacy, responds
to the surveys by higher-education organizations in relation to the
growing international adjunct equity movement. Summarizing recent
developments, including the emergence of several prominent national
organizations for adjuncts, this paper documents how contingent
faculty at several universities have formed active adjunct organizations
and how adjuncts at both public and private institutions are finding
ways to organize and even unionize a diverse and changing group of
contingent faculty. Of particular interest is how universities can respond
and improve working and equity conditions for adjuncts without
further strain on the affordability of college for American families, and
whether there should be a new class of full-time faculty at colleges and
universities who are hired primarily to teach.
The Art History Society of the Americas (AHSA)
Victoria H. F. Scott, European Postwar Contemporary Art Forum
Art history in America is underdeveloped, and the root of the problem
is structural. The College Art Association’s membership is 13,000,
only 4,200 of which are art historians, and 700 of those are graduate
students. By establishing an independent body, just for art historians,
members of the Art History Society of the Americas (AHSA)
could concentrate on improving key issues such as the abolition of
adjuncting, quadrupling the lines, raising salaries, collecting statistics,
setting policies to improve and monitor working conditions, and truly
advocating on behalf of art historians at every stage of their careers.
With a more solid and focused organization, art history in this country
could grow by leaps and bounds, bringing it more in line with other
comparable disciplines. With better working conditions would come
better scholarship, perhaps even a greater generalized understanding of
the centrality of art and culture for quality of life in America.
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The Deprofessionalization of the Profession
Michael F. Bérubé, Pennsylvania State University
This talk addresses the working conditions of non-tenure-track (NTT)
faculty in American higher education. It provides an overview of
what the Modern Language Association has done to date, alone and
in tandem with the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, and talks
about what disciplinary associations can and cannot do with regard to
workplace issues. It also stresses the importance of creating information
networks that will effectively nationalize what has been to date a
decidedly local labor market.
Contingent, Adjunct, Part-Time, Temporary: Making It Work
Joe A. Thomas, Kennesaw State University
The CAW/AAUP survey report on contingent faculty simply provides
specific data to support what we already knew: contingent faculty
members are an increasing part of the academic labor force, and they
are poorly compensated. Such discussions of academic employment
inherently assume the preeminence of full-time, tenure-track positions
as the paradigm for appropriate staffing. In the real world of hiring
in an academic department, however, there is a genuine need for a
wide variety of positions. This paper explores practical ways to cope
with staffing in the contexts of how various contingent faculty are
needed in today’s academy—considering experiences in schools public
and private, union and nonunion. Carefully defining the range of
possibilities is a first step. Given the limitations of the status quo, how
can we best address the conflicting needs of institutions, students, and
faculty?
Cause and Effect: Trends in Higher Education
John W. Curtis, American Association of University Professors
With the release of initial results from the Coalition on the Academic
Workforce 2010 survey on contingent academic work, much more
information is available on the working conditions, compensation, and
careers of our colleagues employed in contingent positions at colleges
and universities. This presentation documents overall trends in academic
employment, reviews some of the consequences for higher education of a
growing reliance on contingent appointments, and highlights changes in
policy, process, and academic culture that can halt—and potentially even
reverse—the expansion of the “academic precariat.”
ARTspace
On the Practice of Artist Arbiter
Chairs: Shannon Rae Stratton, threewalls and School of the Art
Institute; Duncan Mackenzie, Columbia College Chicago
Contemporary art in Canada has developed strong tendencies toward
the material, craft, and the appearance of the body with a healthy
smattering of humor, the grotesque, and the absurd. While issues of
identity often spring up in Canadian practice, the work has a much
broader intent, with artists deploying fracture and dismemberment—in
narrative, the figure, and structure—as formal devices to address current
politics of gender, sexuality, class, race, and taste. This session explores
the currency of contemporary Canadian aesthetics and its alignment
with the material, its place in a history of Canadian figuration, and
what bearing this work has on current issues of the body politic. With
a survey of Canadian art at MASS MoCA in 2012 and Canadian artists
receiving wider attention internationally, this panel is a long overdue
investigation into contemporary Canadian visual art with the hope of
bringing wider scholarship to the artists living and working there.
CAA Committee on Intellectual Property
Developing a Fair Use Code for the Visual Arts
Chair: Christine Leszczynski Sundt, Visual Resources: An International
Journal of Documentation
CAA is undertaking a grant-funded initiative to create a fair use
code in the visual arts that will address both scholarly publishing as
well as the creation and exhibition of artworks that incorporate other
copyrighted materials. To develop the code, CAA has formed a task
force, cochaired by Jeffrey Cunard, CAA counsel, and Gretchen
Wagner, ARTstor general counsel and member of CAA’s Committee
on Intellectual Property. This session provides a detailed account of
the scope of the proposed fair use code and the process envisioned by
CAA for the creation of the code, along with ways CAA members can
provide feedback and input into the code as it is being developed. In
addition, the session describes some of the other codes developed by
Jaszi and Aufderheide, and the important developments resulting from
the articulation of those codes.
Society of Contemporary Art Historians
The Social, the Relational, and the Participatory:
A Reevaluation
Chairs: John Tain, Getty Research Institute; Kirsten Swenson,
University of Massachusetts Lowell
The panel gauges the current status of relational art and socially
oriented and participatory practices in the contemporary art world. It
thinks broadly as well as critically about such modes: what they mean
today, how we might distinguish among them, their potential and
implications for the future of contemporary art, as well as the demands
participatory art places on institutions and the challenges critics and
scholars face assessing it.
Visual Representations of Success and Crisis: Negative
and Positive Branding of Cities and Urban Spaces
Chair: Lina Tegtmeyer, Freie Universität Berlin
“New urban tourism” is one service industry that impacts visual
representations of urban space and urban life. Cities have not only
become sites of lifestyle production; they have become lifestyle products.
Cities appear in films. Cities move from being a setting in a television
series to becoming part of the plot of the narrative. Cities—similar to
female bodies without many clothes—are used to promote products,
real estate sites, and academic conferences. “Positive branding” is one
key term in urban development; “negative branding” is another one
that frames processes of decline and shrinking of unsuccessful cities.
In between the processes of decline and growth, of endorsing certain
cities and parts in cities (gentrification, neighborhood empowerment)
and of abandoning others (shrinking, ghettoization, zoning), visual
representations of urban sites appear in all visual genres from
documentary and photography to music videos, postcards, and city
websites, from Hollywood film to HBO series and Facebook snapshots.
This panel envisions debates about the function of cultural value
inscribed into social readings of visual representations—unless we need
to debate social values that we as viewers inscribe into cultural readings.
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Racializing Cities, Naturalizing Space: The Panoptics of
“Slum” Life in the Twenty-First Century
Uli Linke, Rochester Institute of Technology
In pursuit of a critical visual culture of globality, this essay examines
how racial hegemonies are sustained and perpetuated by the ways urban
spaces inhabited by peoples on the margins of the world economy are
imagined, represented, and brought to public visibility. Central to the
inquiry is how iconic representations of slum life are produced for a
white consumer public. Propelled by fantasies of racial essence, primal
bodies, and exotic naturalism, the iconicities of shantytowns and the
black ghetto are circulated as a popular commodity form throughout
Europe’s metropolitan centers. In this process, the paper identifies
“africanism” (spaces of contested black civility, premodern savagery,
urban jungle) and “tropicalism” (naturalized landscapes of color and
houses, childlike creativity, and happy workers) as representational
codes that are imprinted on how slums as sites of urban dispossession
are visually mapped and consumed.
Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo
Miriam Paeslack, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Buffalo, New York, is a city fraught with firmly shaped assumptions
about its character, culture, and identity. Such assumptions are
generated and promoted in large part through images, or through
“cultural texts,” which in Buffalo are strikingly narrowly focused on
either the formerly prosperous and grand metropolis of yesteryear
or the blighted, corruption-ridden city of today. This presentation
introduces the other narratives of the city, the ineffable ones, in the
work of photographers J-M Reed and Julian Montague, the architect
Dennis Maher, and the media artist Carl Lee. In their work they
generate a city that, rather than reminiscing about the past, bemoaning
the present, or trying to brand a future city of great potential, is in
constant flux. This talk addresses not only the persistent ineffabilities
of artistic representation but also how such ineffabilities are being
challenged by a series of recent urban-branding efforts for the city.
Lyrical City: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta
Kristen Oehlrich, Brown University
Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s experimental film Manhatta (1921)
is well known for its dynamic formal elements. Its literary components,
however, are often overlooked. In Manhatta excerpts from Walt
Whitman’s poems function as intertitles, forming lyric counterpoints
to the modernist visual imagery of the film. This essay explores the
relationship between Sheeler and Strand’s use of avant-garde filmic
techniques, such as dramatic camera angles and fast cutting, and their
simultaneous reliance on the romantic verse of a nineteenth-century
American poet. This conjunction of a forward-looking visual aesthetic
with a nostalgic literary appropriation in the most modern of media—
film—produced a critical commentary on the disconnect between what
American art was in the 1920s and what it should look like. This paper
considers how Manhatta portrays New York City by turns positively
and negatively, and explores the reasons for this oscillation.
Northern California Art Historians
The Cult of Beauty: Aestheticism in LateNineteenth-Century Britain
Chair: Jan Newstrom Thompson, San Jose State University
The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900 exhibition
at the California Legion of Honor, San Francisco, raised many
questions and suggested answers about the concept of “progress” in
later nineteenth-century European art. Traditionally seen, the avantgarde is born in Paris and proceeds from one -ism to another up through
World War II. Aestheticism, the Cult of Beauty, however, suggests
that equally progressive developments were abroad in Britain through
the agency of artists working in painting, architecture, decorative arts,
dress, sculpture, and community planning. Indeed, an early form of the
Gesamtkunstwerk emerged in the 1870s, continuing to enjoy popular
support among the “artistic” middle class until the end of the 1890s.
Whistler was by far the most progressive of the painters and decorators
working in Britain during this time, skirting the edges of abstraction
and exploring new formal approaches to traditional landscape painting
and interiors influenced by the recent interest in Japanese art. This
panel looks at the contributions of the artists active during the Aesthetic
movement and their relationships to evolving modernism and explores
the invigorating impulse of late-nineteenth-century British art and its
influence on the development of Continental Art Nouveau.
The Cult of Beauty Exhibition
Lynn Federle Orr and Melissa E. Buron, Fine Arts Museums
of San Francisco
The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900 was the
first major exhibition to explore the British Aesthetic movement.
The exhibition’s title combined the words “Victorian” and “AvantGarde,” which may seem like an oxymoron, but the project aimed to
deconstruct the notion that the nineteenth century’s only progressive
artistic innovations occurred in the Impressionists’ Paris. San
Francisco was the originating, final, and only North American venue
for this exhibition, where nearly two hundred objects were presented
in approximately ten thousand square feet of temporary exhibition
space. This paper highlights San Francisco’s unique installation
and how the design strategies incorporated and defined Aesthetic
design principles. Such features included yards of hand silkscreened
reproduction wallpapers and three walls that were given over to elevenfoot-tall photomurals of Whistler’s Peacock Room (Freer Gallery,
Washington, D.C.). Ultimately this paper demonstrates the creative
process with which San Francisco’s team conceived of and realized this
groundbreaking exhibition.
The Cult of Beauty: Aestheticism in
Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain
Melody Barnett Deusner, Indiana University
The 2012 Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Legion of Honor presented
Aesthetic paintings and decorative objects as alternately withdrawing
from and attempting to reform life in the industrializing late-nineteenthcentury world. This paper charts an alternative history of these objects
in which Aesthetic modernism and modernity are shown to have
been coterminous and mutually reinforcing. Aestheticism’s modernist
pictorial strategies—its flatness, all-overness, and self-conscious
thematization of the activity of compositional arrangement—were
inseparable from the modernity of the Victorian age, namely the latenineteenth-century flourishing of networked technological, economic,
and social systems. Paintings by James McNeill Whistler, Albert
Moore, and Edward Burne-Jones articulated a distinctly modular,
system-oriented conception of beauty. The interiors in which they were
installed functioned as crucibles for the forging of cooperative business
and political relationships, showcases for electric lighting and other
networked technologies, and conspicuous proof of their owners’ and
inhabitants’ organizational and managerial skills.
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Edward Burne-Jones’s Love among the Ruins
Liana De Girolami Cheney, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Edward Burne-Jones’s affinity for the Italian Renaissance assimilation
of classical thought, particularly as embodied in Francesco Colonna’s
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), is evident in his painting Love
among the Ruins (1870). Burne-Jones held Colonna’s book in
high esteem. The paragone between Colonna’s and Burne-Jones’s
imagery reveals the expression of shared aesthetic ideals about beauty
in Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite art. Colonna’s pageantry and
architectural compositions reveal a Renaissance notion of Neoplatonic
aesthetic. Burne-Jones’s imagery too sought to “create beauty”
according to Neoplatonic aesthetics by creating an image of idealized
beauty that would arouse love. In Love among the Ruins, Burne-Jones
visualizes “beauty consists of a certain charm” as something spiritual
that transcends sensual experience and that makes us long for the origin
of what we perceive, and he affirms, “only this is true, that beauty is
very beautiful and softens, and comforts, and inspires, and rouses, and
lifts up, and never fails.”
International Association of Art Critics
Art Criticism and Social Media
Chair: Phyllis Tuchman, independent critic
Advantages of Requiring Solo Senior Exhibitions for
Undergraduates
Robert Tynes, University of North Carolina at Asheville
University of North Carolina, Asheville, has both a BFA and a BA
program in studio art. Currently BFA and BA students are required
to present a cohesive body of work as the culmination of their study
in studio art. BFA students are expected to present solo exhibitions
in their concentration by filling one of two main galleries on campus,
which offer wall space of approximately one hundred linear feet and
floor space between seven hundred and fifteen hundred square feet. BA
students are also required to have a solo exhibition, which, for twodimensional students, takes up one of the two thirty-two-foot walls
of the Second Floor Gallery or equivalent space. Students working in
three-dimensional media are expected to fill a space of approximately
two hundred to four hundred square feet in area. The advantages
(and disadvantages) of these challenging exhibition requirements (in
addition to research papers and oral presentations) for both BFA and
BA candidates are discussed.
BFA Exhibition Requirements and Program Assessment:
A Case Study from San Francisco Art Institute
Jennifer Rissler, San Francisco Art Institute
In the age of social media and 24/7 news cycles, art criticism faces
a number of challenges. For starters, with traditional media—art
magazines and newspaper coverage of the art world—as well as online
sites, including blogs, now sharing readers with Facebook, Twitter,
and the like, short, punchy observations seem to have become more
popular than long-form essays and articles. Also, as camera-wielding
gallery goers seek out the latest, hottest examples of Event art, they
are more interested in ascertaining wait times and line lengths than
slogging through dense essays with erudite footnotes. At the same time,
party pictures and market analyses have become increasingly popular.
Traditionally art criticism has evolved at a snail’s pace. That no longer
seems to be the case. Today journalism-school-educated reporters cover
a broad range of topics that once were the sole domain of critics trained
as art historians and also practicing artists and poets.
The San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) offers its BFA students a
rigorous training in the visual arts, intensified by an interdisciplinary
studio experience with an emphasis on experimentation and critique.
This case study shares best practices in program assessment, including
SFAI’s BFA shared learning-outcomes rubric, and the rationale for
linking assessment to a senior exhibition requirement. This process
allows students to assess their work in relation to learning outcomes
and to view their artistic development over time, by reinforcing the
professional practices artists develop for a life of sustained artistic
practice grounded in the critique process and measured against the
development of ideas and technique.
CAA Professional Practices Committee
Mount Holyoke College’s studio-art program has been shaped by the
success of the Five College Advanced Drawing Seminar, an innovative,
experimental course that brings together multiple faculty and advanced
students from the Five College Consortium—Amherst College,
Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and
UMass Amherst. Inspired by this model, Mount Holyoke’s advanced
studio courses are all team taught and critique based. Independent
study is discouraged. One repeating course serves minors, thesis, and
nonthesis students. One major track leads to a senior thesis project with
a museum show and written thesis, and the alternative track leads to a
group exhibition in the student art gallery. The success of this curricular
program stems from the interactions it fosters between students of
different levels, its flexibility, and the efficiency with which it uses
faculty resources.
Senior Exhibition Requirements for
BFA and BA Programs
Chair: Robert Tynes, University of North Carolina at Asheville
The goals of this special session are to explore different approaches, ask
questions, and stimulate discussion about the idea of requiring senior
exhibitions for BFA and BA students. How should the BFA exhibition
experience differ from a BA or BS—or from an MFA, for that matter?
How can capstone courses be structured to most effectively contribute
to seniors achieving success in the production and presentation of
a quality exhibition? How can an institution, with limited gallery
space, make the best use of its resources to encourage higher quality
exhibitions by its seniors? Does student participation in the exhibition
process help prepare them better for many aspects of professional
practices that they need to know as artists? The six panelists explore
these and other related questions in their presentations, followed by
discussion from the audience.
Team Teaching in a Small Studio-Art Program
Nancy Campbell, Mount Holyoke College
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Artwalk: An Assessment of Maryland Institute College of Art’s
BFA Senior Exhibition
Paul Jeanes, Maryland Institute College of Art
BFA and BA studio-art senior exhibition requirements vary among
institutions across the nation based on curricular requirements and
on the physical gallery space available at every institution. Senior
exhibitions can be a valuable learning experience for undergraduates
as they encourage the professional practice of promoting, curating,
installing, and exhibiting works in a gallery context. The presentation
outlines MICA’s graduate exhibition requirements and its annual BFA
Art Walk commencement exhibition. In discussing MICA’s exhibition
program, photographic documentation of the exhibition is presented
as well as experiential feedback from students in the graduating class
of 2012. Comparisons are made to institutions, such as University of
North Carolina, Asheville, whose number of BFA graduates is lower
per year than MICA’s and whose individual student exhibitions tend to
be physically larger. The assessment fosters dialogue around varying
institutional senior exhibition requirements and how those requirements
are consequential to graduating seniors.
Senior Exhibition Requirements under Review: Does Everyone
Have to Show in the Museum?
Anne Galperin, State University of New York at New Paltz
Our approaches to senior studio and capstone requirements for BFA
and BA/BS students of studio art and design are changing: we are
breaking away from a one-size-fits-all approach for our programs and
working to meaningfully—in terms of career paths—differentiate our
BFA and BA/BS programs from each other. To this end, the Spring
2012 BFA graphic design work was presented outside museum walls.
We are also exploring the redesign of our BS in visual arts with fewer
studios and a required nonart/design minor. The BS capstone could be
an independent, synthetic work mentored by faculty in both areas, with
presentation alternatives to be determined.
BFA Exhibition: Rite of Passage and Real-World Experience
Julie Ganser, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Our program has recently wrestled with questions surrounding the
Bachelor of Fine Arts exhibition. We have asked whether it should
be completely voluntary, or a strict requirement for graduation. Who
should coordinate it—faculty, staff, or maybe the students themselves?
Is a BFA exhibition’s primary purpose to provide an academic capstone
event defined by a thesis defense, similar to a mini-MFA review? Or
perhaps it is simply a rite of passage, with friends and faculty offering
only congrats—not critiques. Maybe the true value lies in the realworld experience it can provide. We balance these goals with other
issues such as limited availability of university gallery space and the
ever-growing demands on student, faculty, and staff’s time.
The Art of the Gift: Theorizing Objects in Early Modern
Cross-Cultural Exchange
Chairs: Nancy Um, Binghamton University; Leah R. Clark, Saint
Michael’s College
This panel focuses on the visual culture of gifts during the dynamic
early modern era, when objects of exchange played an important
role in burgeoning cross-cultural encounters, long-distance
economic interactions, and diplomatic engagements. With papers
that treat exchanges across the Atlantic, within Europe, around the
Mediterranean, and between Europe and Asia, its aim is to examine
the unique contributions that art history may offer to the critical legacy
of the gift with its anthropological and sociological roots. The papers
thus present new perspectives on gift giving, such as a concern for
the visuality of objects in motion, an interest in collecting and display
practices, and an awareness of how objects and images circulate
through different registers of meaning and reception as they travel
through time and space. The presentations explore the broad geographic
scope of the gift encounter, locate gifts in dynamic cross-cultural
matrices of circulation, and move effectively beyond fixed boundaries
of medium. Rather than treating gifts as sumptuous objects worthy of
connoisseurial fascination, the panel complicates static assumptions
about the relationship among art, gifts, commodities, and tribute, as
well as the individuals who conveyed and received them.
Artists as Ambassadors in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Sean Roberts, University of Southern California
The Renaissance artist-ambassador has loomed as a towering figure,
exemplifying the unprecedented upward mobility of painters, sculptors,
and architects in a world increasingly connected by the dual forces
of trade and diplomacy. Focusing on the sculptor Matteo de’ Pasti’s
attempted voyage from Rimini to Constantinople in 1461, this paper
reexamines the category of the artist-ambassador and the multiple
functions of the gifts they often bore. Sigismondo Malatesta dispatched
Matteo as an envoy to Sultan Mehmed II, entrusting the sculptor with
gifts including portrait medals, world maps, and books. The wouldbe ambassador was detained in Crete by Venetians, and his precious
cargo was confiscated. This paper looks anew at the evidence for
this diplomatic exchange, drawing especially on Sigismondo’s letter
to Mehmed II. It examines the role played by Matteo’s medals in
appealing to Ottoman conceptions of Classical culture and evaluates
Ottoman reception of maps as gifts.
Solicitous Gifts: Kunstkammer Memory, Iberian Diplomacy,
and the Translation of Antwerp Art Overseas
Jessica Stevenson-Stewart, University of California, Berkeley and
Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, München
Situated at the hub of a worldly collection, the Magi painting in Frans
Francken’s Kunstkammer thematizes the communicative value of art
between gift and commodity status. An array of visual associations
posed by this fictional collection appeal specifically to cosmopolitan
Christians. As exemplary gift givers, the Magi’s devotional gestures
rationalize the function of objects within cross-cultural exchanges.
Francken underscores the Magi’s cosmographical significance as
stargazers and personifications of three continents by aligning these
foreign kings with a portrait of the cartographer Abraham Ortelius.
Using Francken’s Kunstkammer to complicate our understanding of
cultural memory in the Spanish Netherlands, this paper considers the
function of Antwerp art within Iberian overseas encounters during the
so-called Age of Discovery. From the Antwerp emporium to the Iberian
imperium, the exemplarity of the Magi informed artistic production and
diplomatic performativity. Adoration imagery visually theorized the
salience of gifts as objects that solicited recognition and manufactured
reconciliation.
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The Moor’s Last Gift: Portraits and Patronage in Les marques
d’honneur de la maison de Tassis (Antwerp, 1645)
Cristelle Baskins, Tufts University
Southern Graphics Council International
In the 1540s the Hafsid regent of Tunis sojourned in Naples, Florence,
Mantua, and Brussels. For each of his hosts, Mulay Hassan brought
gifts: textiles, weapons, and Barbary horses. Jules Chifflet, writing in
1645, claimed that Hassan commissioned a Venetian artist in Brussels
to make portraits of himself and his host, Jean-Baptiste de Tassis, each
clothed in Tunisian dress. The pendant portraits served as models for
the plates that appeared in Chifflet’s text (designed by Nicholas van
der Horst and engraved by Paulus Pontius). Chifflet presents Mulay
Hassan as the patron/donor of the pendant portraits who, despite being
a Muslim foreigner, perfectly imitates the gift exchange practiced in
European courts. Tassis, then, can appear as the passive but worthy
recipient of royal benevolence rather than as a court functionary
actively seeking credit for the “extraordinary welcome and splendid
treatment” he offered to the “crude and barbaric” embassy from Tunis.
Have pervasive digital technologies recast the language of print,
historically a reproductive or imitative practice, as a signifier of
handmade authenticity? From the bottom-up explosion of the silkscreen
music-poster scene to Starbucks’s top-down embrace of the print
haptic, rebranding itself with distressed, faux-printed logos, the
aesthetic cues of print have become a new kind of commodity. The
human hand, once considered detached from the indirect process of
printing, is now strongly associated with processes once considered
mechanical, like screenprinting and letterpress. Is the heroic image of
craftsmen working in a printshop alluring to an audience entrenched
in a world of touch screens? Images of lead type, inky squeegees,
and stacks of prints on drying racks flood YouTube, Tumblr, and
other social media. Is it a sign of the times that the very same digital
media from which we seek relief is used to celebrate analogue printed
matter? How has the mundane, daily digital experience reaffirmed our
cultural awareness of physical printed matter and raised the status of
the print from commonplace to notable (even in situations where the
“printedness” is merely simulated)? This panel focuses on the language
of print as a signifier of authenticity and the complex relationship of
real printed matter to its life in the virtual world.
Gifting and “Regifting” the Old Indies: The Mobility of the Gift
in Early Modern Europe
Carrie Anderson, Boston University
In 1679, thirty-five years after relinquishing his post as governorgeneral of Dutch Brazil, Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen presented
Louis XIV with a series of paintings by Albert Eckhout, the Dutch
artist who had accompanied Maurits to Brazil. Teeming with abundant
flora and fauna and populated by Brazilian and African inhabitants,
these works visualize an exotic landscape available for cultivation.
Once in the possession of Louis XIV’s Gobelins manufactory, the
paintings became the models for a tapestry series known as the Old
Indies, copies of which found their way into collections in France,
Italy, Malta, and Russia. Reproduced on commission and redistributed
as gifts, the series exemplifies the dynamic afterlife of exotic images.
This paper addresses how the Old Indies series initiated and responded
to subtle narrative shifts when copies entered the collections of
Grandmaster Perellos y Rocafull in Valletta and Tsar Peter the Great in
St. Petersburg.
Reproducing Authenticity
Chair: Jason Urban, Printeresting.org
Truth and Reproducibility
Beauvais Lyons, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Scientific method is predicated on reproducibility and repeatability.
An experiment conducted in one lab is confirmed as valid only if it can
be reproduced in another. Additionally prints have played a significant
role in the advancement of scientific and technical learning through
their capacity to create repeatable images. By contrast Western art has
historically privileged concepts of originality and authenticity that
exist apart from systems of reproduction and replication. Authenticity
in art has been based most often on its singularity of expression or
provenance. This paper draws from a variety of sources to argue for the
veracity and significance of reproducibility. Chinoiseries for the Qing
Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Studio, Museum, Print: Problems of Virtual Authenticity
Julia V. Hendrickson, Courtauld Institute of Art
In 1765 two Chinese converts to Christianity left France to return to
China. They brought with them a set of Beauvais tapestries, known
as the Tenture chinoise, to be presented to Emperor Qianlong. These
tapestries have long been understood as a quintessential example of
chinoiserie, a phenomenon commonly interpreted as a trivializing
European response to Asian cultures. Yet the French saw fit to
give them to the emperor of China, who had them installed in a
purpose-built European-style pavilion at Yuanming Yuan. Focusing
on the Tenture chinoise, this paper examines the functions of gifts
in eighteenth-century Franco-Chinese exchange, an exchange that
was largely mediated by things. It complicates understandings of the
European-Asian encounter that rely on the concept of chinoiserie, an
interpretative frame whose conventional formulation as frivolous and
superficial occludes the more dynamic relations with objects from afar,
exemplified by the Tenture chinoise.
The visual signifiers of printmaking in the digital realm capitalize on
borrowed history, treating print as a form of authority. Yet why do we
need the authentic in relation to images and ideas perceived digitally?
Addressing popular printmaking blogs and comparing museum print
collection websites, this paper evaluates the relationship of real printed
matter to its life in the virtual world. Examining the online display of
the printmaker’s studio shows why it could be seen as a breeding
ground for a kind of authenticity. Museums possess an original, they
proffer a digital copy yet ostensibly are delivering an authentic digital
version of a work of art. Analyzing the museum as a power structure
brings digital-image legitimacy into question, particularly when
comparing multiple prints from the same edition, displayed entirely
differently among a range of museum collection websites.
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“. . . originality doesn’t exist anyway, only authenticity”
Lauren van Haaften-Schick, independent curator
Encountering the Empathetic Audience in Contemporary Art
Tricia Van Eck, 6018NORTH
Digital technologies have replaced the mechanical or handmade print
as the dominant vehicle for mass communication. This evolution
has caused a rift between printmaking and its utilitarian roots,
rendering the medium vulnerable to the often contradictory aesthetic
and formal codes of art and cultural nostalgia. Mechanical printing
methods have even been adopted as art-historical gestures ripe for
appropriation artists to take. Where an upheaval of authorship and
insistence on amateur technique defined certain appropriation practices,
contemporary printmaking, as an opposite genre of copying, has
assumed a defensive air of sincerity, for which technical, social,
or subcultural dedication is key and is strengthened by inherent
contradictions. If we accept Rosalind Krauss’s posit that “authenticity
need not be a function of the history of technology,” our conception of
authenticity must then depend on context and expand to consider the
appropriationist author Helene Hegemann’s assertion that “originality
doesn’t exist anyway, only authenticity.”
This paper explores the reception and impact of the performative body
in contemporary art and its effect upon the audience. What happens
when aesthetic encounters involve the primacy of the participant’s body
and/or the presence of the artist? What happens when the viewer is
no longer gazing but embodying an artwork? By examining the work
of various artists such as Marina Abramovic, Tania Brughera, Katrina
Chamberlin, Jeremy Deller, Xavier Le Roy, Rivane Neuenschwander,
and Tino Sehgal, the paper questions whether experiential artworks
and interactive exhibitions can break down divisions between subject
and object. Furthermore, it asks if these artistic practices encourage an
empathetic identification or encounter. If so, what are the potentialities
for experiential or performative situations as means to encourage
community, political connections, acceptance of difference, and agency
through art?
Craving the Mark
Lisa Bulawsky, Washington University in St. Louis
Potluck: Bring/Do/Be What You Can
Amy M. Mooney, Columbia College Chicago
The currency of the handmade and the printed mark in the digital
age seems best suited to be investigated by those for whom digital
technologies are second nature. Current undergraduate students are by
definition part of the generation that has “grown up in the digital age.”
With this in mind, a senior seminar in printmaking titled “Think Tank:
Craving the Mark” was designed around the panel topic and offered
to students at Washington University in St. Louis in the fall of 2012.
Through readings and discussions, the development of an online forum,
creative research, and studio production, the seminar participants turned
the panel questions over in various ways and generated a collective
response. This paper is a summation and presentation of the findings
from the seminar, culled from collaborative exploration and discussion
by students, faculty, and the virtual community.
Recently the UK performance group motiroti developed Potluck:
Chicago. Drawing on the metaphor of the collective meal, where
everyone brings a dish, motiroti gathered diverse participants interested
in interconnectivity and social concerns to share a series of meals,
skill workshops, and discussions to strategize reimagining Chicago’s
social life. Through these, the participants engaged in the initial stages
of creative placemaking: imagining, evaluating, and the dynamics of
empathy. How can we gauge the impact of projects such as Potluck:
Chicago? How can we assess empathy as an artistic strategy? Looking
to the theories of Levinas and Derrida, this paper considers the impact
and relevancy of motiroti’s work as it depends upon the strategy
of simultaneous acceptance of self and other. As MFA programs
increasingly promote art and civic engagement, the pedagogical
implications of motiroti’s practice speak to art’s ability to initiate and
sustain social change.
Studio Art Open Session
Chair: Tricia Van Eck, 6018NORTH
Chairs: Robin Veder, Pennsylvania State University; Elizabeth Lee,
Dickinson College
The Empathetic Body: Performance and the Blurring of
Private Self in Contemporary Art
As the audience has increasingly become a focus of inquiry for artists,
and performative and interactive artworks have assumed a more central
place in galleries and museums, this session explores the reception and
impact of these experiential encounters. While subject and identity
construction in museums is nothing new, the panel investigates the
aesthetic encounter when it involves the primacy of the participant’s
body and/or the presence of the artist. What happens when we embody
rather than look at an artwork? This session discusses the effects
of blurring private and public subjectivity within public space. If
experiential artworks and interactive exhibitions elicit more embodied
tools of interpretation and response, then what is this effect? Do these
encourage an empathetic identification or encounter? If so, what are
the potentialities for experiential situations to encourage community,
political connections, acceptance of difference, and agency through art?
The Body of the Artist and the Artist as Body in American
Artistic Practice
This session pursues a historically grounded approach to the artist’s
somatic experience, one that values artistic process as well as issues of
representation. Artists born or working in the United States from the
Colonial to the contemporary period approached their practice—media,
materials, environment, habits, and to a lesser degree imagery—with
understandings particular to their own bodily management. Specifically,
the panel focuses on artists whose bodies were physically compromised
by disease; the therapeutic habits they acquired and medical treatments
they received contribute to explanations of their working processes and
why their art took the form it did. Equally relevant are period notions
about the body’s agency in the manufacture of art or the performance
of “artist.” The focus is on how artists have integrated health-related
practices into their work, and how, as historians, we can recognize and
situate corporeal experience.
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Benjamin West’s Legs: Urban Exercise and Manly Health in A
Drayman Drinking
Lauren Lessing, Colby College Museum of Art
Benjamin West suffered periodically from debilitating joint pain
and inflammation. He described his condition as gout—a diagnosis
that explained a wide range of complaints in the eighteenth century.
Because it was rampant among urban gentlemen during this period
of war and empire building, gout took on great political significance.
Lauded as a patrician illness, it also signified the dangerous threats to
masculine authority posed by personal and social decadence. West,
who had risen from humble American origins to become the official
court painter of George III, prided himself on his ability to triumph
over adversity through discipline and industry. This paper examines
how the regimen West undertook to cope with his illness influenced
his depictions of male bodies in his 1796 genre scene A Drayman
Drinking, in which he presents London as both a gymnasium for the
creation of manly health and a theater for its display.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Cancerous Body and the
Phillips Brooks Monument
Elizabeth Lee, Dickinson College
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 1900;
he died seven years later. During these years America’s most famous
sculptor experimented with a variety of therapies and health regimens.
He learned to play more and work less. However, one of the sculptures
he labored upon until his death was the Phillips Brooks Monument
(1896–1907) in Copley Square, Boston. As a preacher Brooks was
famous for his presence in the sickroom and he enjoyed a cultlike
status among the dying. For Saint-Gaudens the sculpture of Brooks
assumed an almost talismanic presence. He maintained close physical
contact with the figure—working and reworking the preacher’s gesture,
clothing, and stance—and it was one of the last works he touched
before his death. Ironically, as Saint-Gaudens attempted to bring
Brooks to life, his own fragile body was slowly consumed by disease.
Visualizing the Irradiated Body of László Moholy-Nagy
Keely Orgeman, Boston University
Throughout his early career László Moholy-Nagy explored the cameraless process of X-ray photographs (radiographs) in his signature
photograms. However, his understanding of X-rays as a visual
technology shifted when the artist was diagnosed with leukemia and
began receiving medical treatments. The radiation therapy he selected
did not involve radiography: it delivered doses of imperceptible,
deeply penetrating X-ray beams into the blood. The invisibility of this
procedure enabled Moholy-Nagy to visualize on his own terms the
corporeal manifestations of nuclear energy, at which point he abruptly
ceased producing photograms and instead painted the abstract works
Nuclear I, CH, and Nuclear II. In these paintings, completed during
his treatments in Chicago in the 1940s, he imagined bodily responses
to a force at once destructive and lifesaving. This choice of new media
was one of several he made to focus his therapy and art strictly on the
internalization of X-rays.
Fluxus Medicine: George Maciunas’s Prescribed Performances
Colby Chamberlain, Columbia University
George Maciunas’s founding of the New York neo-avant-garde
movement Fluxus coincided almost exactly with his developing a case
of chronic asthma. Thus, when he became an artist, he also became a
patient, two identities that continually intertwined over the course of his
career. Focusing on One Year (1973–74) and several earlier medically
themed performances from the 1960s, this paper argues that Maciunas’s
compositions combined the open form of Fluxus “event scores” with
the fixed prescriptions of health regimes. Even though steroids and
inhalers allowed Maciunas to persist outside the hospital’s confines,
his performances owed their structure to the internalized discipline and
self-monitoring of a permanent convalescent managing his condition.
His example asks how the postwar conception of the performing
body was impacted by concurrent technological and administrative
transformations within medicine—not just in the context of Fluxus
scores but also Happenings and Body art.
Rethinking Pacific Art: The Currency of the Object
Chairs: Caroline Vercoe, The University of Auckland; Nina Tonga,
The University of Auckland
Recent Pacific scholarship has offered new ways of thinking about
and understanding the region’s arts and cultural practice. Along
with analyses of contemporary Pacific art, revisionist writings of
Pacific histories have also offered challenging and innovative ways
of approaching the complexity of visual culture and the role that it
played and continues to play in the present. Much of the discourse
relating to historical forms has tended to coalesce around the
writings and representations of European explorers or missionary
and anthropological writing. While the limitations of these sources
have been acknowledged, it still seems that these texts and images
remain a primary point of departure in the analysis of Pacific art forms.
From the 1960s and 1970s calls have increasingly been made for the
development of scholarship and art practice that reflected and embodied
Pacific epistemologies. The form or vehicle of this expression,
however, tended to focus on poetic and literary forms. This session
focuses attention back on the object of Pacific creative expression
and cultural practice. Unlike the novel, which derives from a Western
tradition, Pacific art forms are firmly located within their contexts as a
point of origin. This session considers the importance of the object of
cultural practice, its performative dynamics, and its role and function
within communities and the wider social order.
Contemporary Hawiian Feather Art: Plucking from
Tradition to Renegotiate Place and Space
Teresa Wilkins, Indiana University
In the history of art, the featherwork of Hawaii has been examined and
studied as a dead art form, an artistic practice of an ancient people and
land. This paper examines how modern practitioners of an ancient art
are working to resuscitate, preserve, and perpetuate Hawaiian culture
and identity in the face of increasing globalization and technological
development. Looking at how feather works function to create concepts
of space, place, memory, and identity, this paper exposes the many
layers of influence within an individual’s or interpretive community’s
construction of identity and commoditization of culture.
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Performing Lien Pohnpei: Poetry and Urohs (Appliqué Skirts)
Emelihter Kihleng, Victoria University of Wellington
Performing Culture: The Art Practice of Ani O’Neill
Caroline Vercoe, The University of Auckland
This paper examines the ways lien Pohnpei (Pohnpeian women)
perform our identities through the making, wearing, gifting, and
exchanging of urohs en Pohnpei (Pohnpeian appliqué skirts). The
ethnographic poetry I have written in relation to these skirts in three
diasporic locations—Pohnpei Island, Federated States of Micronesia
(FSM), the US Pacific Territory of Guam, and Kansas City—also
serves as a performative response to urohs and their production and
circulation among Pohnpeian women. I have spent the last six months
carrying out doctoral research where I followed the social life of urohs
and Pohnpeian women’s articulations of them at home and in diasporic
communities. Urohs are textiles that embody who we are. They are a
tangible thing that connects us to our past, but also continually shift
in style and fashion to shape what it means to be a contemporary lien
Pohnpei at home and away.
This paper focuses on the art of Ani O’Neill. Born in Auckland,
New Zealand, O’Neill practices contemporary art that reflects her
Rarotongan heritage and her urban Pacific experience. Emerging in the
1990s, at a time when many New Zealand–born Pacific artists were
developing a profile both nationally and internationally, O’Neill’s
practice draws on a range of Conceptual and object-based Indigenous
knowledge systems. With a particular focus on The Kikau Broom/
Island Broom Project (2006) and The Buddy System (2001), this paper
explores the interface of her gallery and nongallery interventions.
Echoes of Gunantuna: Garamut
Juie To’Liman-Turalir, OLSH Teacher Training College, Kabeleo,
Papua New Guinea
The garamut (wooden slit-gong) plays a significant role within
Gunantuna (Indigenous) people of the East New Britain Province,
Papua New Guinea, which includes as social placement in the
community, as musical instrument, and as means of communication. In
social placement, there are three values associated with performance
that substantiates the life of any Gunantuna or Tolai. First, Tabu
(shell money), the Gunantuna currency, places social standing among
the Tolai. Second, pi (land) is communally owned, connecting the
genealogical link, land shared by the Indigenous, their spirits, and
their ancestors. Third, Tubuan as a masquerade ritual holds many
interpretations, most significantly regarded as a palavat na warkurai
(authority) or domination. This paper discusses the personification of
garamut as an object, musical instrument, means of communication,
and social placement of status among the Gunantuna.
The Digitizing of Maori Cultural Heritage: Blurring the
Boundaries of an Object, Its Documentation, and Its Distribution
M. Brinker Ferguson, University of California, Santa Cruz
Recently several New Zealand–based national institutions have
initiated a database project to locate all Maori Taonga, or objects of
cultural heritage, in museum collections abroad. This has begun to
raise important issues related to heritage discourse in the twenty-first
century. This paper addresses a number of these issues through two
major themes. The first looks at the ways archival information has
been repositioned outside the relatively comfortable museumscape and
into a global mediascape, which has resulted in a political reshaping
of Maori indigenous authority and the control of representation.
The second theme involves the relationship between Maori material
and digital heritage when viewed through the notions of “aura” and
“authenticity.” Ultimately, the objective is to discuss whether digital
heritage initiatives might represent a third way in museum practice,
one that breaks down Western binary hierarchies of real/copy, private/
public, individual/collective, and ownership/loss.
The Changing Complexion of Theory
Chair: Ian Verstegen, independent scholar
This panel is devoted to registering the fundamentally changing nature
of theory. For many years the content of “theory” was influenced by
poststructuralism, and the theories of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault
were largely language-based and devoted to forms of nominalism,
destabilizing subjects in a complex web of signification. More recently,
with the sociological determinist approach of Pierre Bourdieu, the
materialism of Slavoj Zizek, the realism of Jacques Deleuze (at least
as imputed by Manuel de Landa) and Alain Badiou, the status quo
has been disrupted. Today we are more likely to take for granted the
relevance of biology and the natural sciences, while the return of Marx
has been more serious than countenanced by Derrida or Foucault. Most
important, some theorists accept the theory-independent existence of
the objects of discussion that was strongly resisted in poststructural
postmodern theory. This panel traces the influence of such newer ideas
and also raises the very question of theory in the humanities. If theories
are position holders for the skeptical enterprise of historical inquiry,
what happens when we invoke a realist, a materialist, or a Marxist
view?
Gazing at Humanized Terror: Boteromorphs at Abu Ghraib
Neli Dobreva, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
This paper approaches the paintings of Fernando Botero and Abu
Ghraib, staged at Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in
Santiago, Chili. It analyzes, via a “parallax view” of creation (Zizek),
the movement between paintings and photographs, images from the
American prison at Abu Ghraib during the war in Iraq taken March 20,
2003, as a direct consequence of the September 11, 2001, and the works
of Botero. The main theoretical problem Botero addresses is the idea
promoted by American neoconservatives: “things have fundamentally
changed.” Accepting it as axis between dominant and nondominant
discourses, the paper discusses two perspectives: the aesthetic notion
of the sublime as a problem of philosophy of history, or “sublime
historical experience” (Ankersmit); and a more pragmatic concept of
“kitschification” (Sturken), applied to mass consumption of Trauma and
Memory phenomenon.
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The Uses of Theory
Deborah Haynes, University of Colorado
Theory is never neutral. It is an instrument of power often wielded by
those who have power. This paper criticizes the particular pretenses
and forms of much theorizing, especially when theory and practice do
not interact and mutually transform each other. As Mikhail Bakhtin
cogently argued, a theory that remains rooted in formal or material
concerns is only theoretism—resulting in what we might term “theory
fatigue.” Developed in the abstract, as if the unique individual in
particular situations did not exist, theories alone cannot provide criteria
for shaping scholarly and artistic practice. To be effective, theories
must be especially attentive to individual and cultural difference, to
the specificity of both the theorist and that which is theorized. There
is certainly a place for theory that uses convoluted technical language;
yet only if it is accessible can such theory become the groundwork for
creative work and cultural change.
Re-Viewing Neoliberalism: European Theory, Transnational
Feminism, and the Visual
Robin James, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Taking the panel title literally, this paper discusses how the changing
national/phenotypical complexion of theorists has changed the
“complexion” of European theory. Like second-generation immigrant
children, scholars such as Jasbir Puar and Alia Al-Saji rework OldWorld traditions to function in transnational contexts. The paper
contrasts Guyatri Spivak’s orthodox Marxist distinction between two
types of representation (Vertreten/Darstellen) with Puar and Al-Saji’s
three-dimensional (vertical) and four-dimensional (temporal) theories
of visuality, and argues that four-dimensional models are necessary
for theorizing both political representation (Vertreten) and artistic
presentation (Darstellen) in neoliberal/biopolitical regimes. While this
scholarship is increasingly influential in gender and cultural studies,
philosophy and “theory” seem unable or unwilling to recognize these
second-generation thinkers. We need to acknowledge non-European
locations as sites of theoretical production, not just as sites of importation
and application, because this hybridization both makes for better theory
and is key to the survival of the theoretical enterprise itself.
New Media Caucus
Art in the Age of High Security
Chairs: Jenny Vogel, University of North Texas; David Stout,
University of North Texas
Artists have characteristically explored the potential of emergent
technologies, often subverting intended functions and stimulating
new design developments in the process. Nothing less can be said for
current advances, which are, more often than not, a direct or indirect
result of security and defense research initiatives. In an environment
where security concerns are accumulating a kind of pervasive ambient
narrative, artists play an important role to reveal, redefine, and
repurpose the mechanisms, relationships, and unintended consequences
engendered by these technologies. Whether examining the implications
of anonymous webcam imagery, amplifying the anxiety surrounding
biometric scanners, or turning the first-person shooter game back
on itself, artists have critically engaged with the form, content, and
cultural context surrounding systems of control. This Open Form
session integrates a series of individual performative and media-rich
presentations followed by a moderated roundtable panel discussion.
The presentations take an interdisciplinary approach to combine
aspects of theory, practice, and innovative pedagogy relative to the
high-security apparatus that have become increasingly embedded in our
daily lives.
Images for an Unknown Public
Jenny Vogel, University of North Texas
Webcams have an interesting history that raises many of the same
questions associated with the increasing importance of the internet and
social-networking tools in our everyday lives. But aside from Skype
and other video-conferencing software, webcams also have their own
peculiar presence in the online sphere. Continuously broadcasting
images to an unknown public, questions about users and usability arise.
Webcams have always attracted those searching to connect virtually
to desires that are unobtainable to them in the real world. But this
darker side of our mediated planet also paints a beautiful picture of a
contemporary loneliness, full of poetry and myth. This presentation
examines the phenomenon of webcams through the lens of critical
and philosophical texts. It points out connections of webcam usage to
Romantic ideals of travel and eremitism, Walter Benjamin’s flaneur,
and our changing ideas of privacy and surveillance.
Noise, Art, and Weaponized Abstraction
David Stout, University of North Texas
A mother’s embrace, a warm meal, and a soft blanket provide security.
“High security” like “high technology” suggests something all together
different, more often implying a state of insecurity and anxiety. Military
imperatives drive technological development. This double-edged sword
illustrates its own paradoxical utopian/dystopian promise—the DARPA
initiative that finds a socially useful or “benign” utilitarian purpose.
Artists have historically appropriated, bent, and otherwise reconceived
these technologies in the form of new tools and new mediums. The
hybrid media group, NoiseFold, makes software, installations, and
performances that merge music, sound, and visual art in various guises.
Drawing from real-time simulation, artificial life, and autonomous
systems design, NoiseFold wed these techniques with a sophisticated
visual vocabulary exploring weaponized abstraction, visual noise
decoding, and the playful critique of ubiquitous surveillance. Part
performative essay, part technical demo, the presentation provides a
portrait of artists at work in the age of high security.
Building a More Perfect Drone
Nadav Assor, Connecticut College
This performance-talk explores a preliminary outline of what could
be termed, after Virilio, as “the dronosphere.” The drone is considered
as an emerging focal point for a mass of contemporary references,
fears, practices, politics, relationships, possibilities, and cultural
phenomena. Deploying examples from multiple techno/cultural
contexts as well as from the artist’s own work,the presentation targets
subjects such as alternate vision, the dispersed body, control and the
lack of it, automation, group seeing, choreographies of sensing, and
other qualities of the drone as an elastic sum of potentials, a platform,
medium, and catalyst for cultural production in multiple forms.
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How Does a Patriot Act?
Clark Shaffer Stoeckley, Bloomfield College
The Patriot Act was quickly drafted and passed with little debate in the
wake of 9/11. Shortly after George W. Bush signed it, National Security
Agency mathematician William Binney retired and blew the whistle,
claiming that he was asked to spy on all citizens and not just those the
government deemed suspicious. This ignited a massive awakening
in security culture leading to the rise of privacy advocacy and the
Anonymous meme. These new laws also resulted in the unnecessary
harassment, detainment, and surveillance of the new-media artists
Steve Kurtz, Wafaa Bilal, Duke Riley, and Hasan Elahi. Documentary
artists and journalists like Vlad Teichberg, Laura Poitras, WikiLeaks,
and the Yes Men have faced even more scrutiny because they employ
subversive tactics and technology to creatively draw attention to the
wrongdoings of corporations and governments. How has this impacted
their lives and their art?
Japan Art History Forum
The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art
Chair: Toshio Watanabe, University of the Arts London
Beginning with the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and ending with the
Asia-Pacific War (1937–45), Japanese imperialism caused tremendous
human suffering and to this day casts a dark shadow over SinoJapanese diplomacy. Yet during the interwar period, in particular from
the 1910s to the 1930s, vital artistic interchanges between China and
Japan took place—bearing significant fruit in artistic production as well
as in art-historical discourse. Once regarded a periphery in the Sinocentric cultural order, Japan during this period was the most frequented
destination for Chinese intellectuals, finding sources of modernity
as well as rediscovering East Asian aesthetic values. Contacts with
Japan helped China in critical ways to establish art institutions, to
reconfigure the history of Chinese art, and to gain new insights into
prints and oil painting. A large influx of Chinese objects, in turn,
triggered a fresh wave of art production in Japan, which challenges a
belief widely shared by scholars that “old China” could not possibly
influence “modern Japan.” Featuring some of the contributors to the
forthcoming The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art, edited by
Joshua Fogel (University of California Press), this panel facilitates a
dialogue between historians of Chinese and Japanese art, considering
the artistic and art-historical evolution in modern times across the
national boundaries.
The Guangzhou–Tokyo Print Exchanges of 1935 and 1936
Julia Andrews, The Ohio State University
In Asia, as in Europe, World War II marked a critical watershed in the
history of modern art. The enormous toll of human life, destruction of
cities, and loss of art collections instantly cast many souls and their
creations out of the vivid present and into the hazy past. In East Asia,
moreover, the framing of the conflict in postwar political discourse has
largely silenced those who might endeavor to retrieve this historical
era. One significant casualty of the bitter Sino-Japanese war was
acknowledgment of the profound debt owed by the Chinese art world
to Japanese models of modernity. This paper traces a series of such
contacts between China and Japan in the years leading up to the war,
as documented on the pages of the journals Xiandai banhua (Modern
Prints) and Shiro to Kuro (White and Black).
The Role of China in Modern Japanese Art: From the Wu Liang
Shrine to Hirafuku Hyakusui
Tamaki Maeda, independent scholar
If China’s learning from Japan is a new area of study, Japan’s learning
from China is still a large lacuna in the history of art in modern times.
Among the countless number of objects imported from China to Japan
after the 1911 Revolution were works representing the antiquities
that predated the Tang-dynasty period. A rubbing of walls of the
Wu Liang Shrine (ca. 147–51 CE), for example, inspired Hirafuku
Hyakusui (1877–1933) to produce the monumental scale painting Yu
Rang (1917). Depicting a famous assassin from Shiji (Records of the
Grand Historian, ca. 100 BCE), Hyakusui’s work won the first prize
in Bunten, Japan’s most prestigious competitive exhibition of the time.
Yu Rang exemplifies the tangible impact on the Japanese art world
of jinshixue (“study of metal and stone”)—an antiquarianism that
permeated the learned elite of late Qing–early Republican China.
The Japanese Impact on the Construction of Art History
as a Modern Discipline in Republican China
Kuiyi Shen, University of California, San Diego
Recent efforts in Chinese art history to question, reformulate,
or reconstruct the canon of Chinese painting are based upon an
understanding in the discipline that we share a commonly accepted
structure of ideas and works of art. What has not been recognized is that
the birth and development of the discipline of Chinese art history itself
is intimately tied to the contentious issues in play as a modern Chinese
art world was formed. The newly defined art-historical structure of
the early twentieth century owed an overwhelming and now forgotten
debt to Japanese scholarship that altered previous understandings of
China’s artistic past in significant ways. The Japanese art-historical
model provided such a practical and intellectually satisfying solution
to the challenges confronted by the May Fourth generation that it has
survived in China to the present day.
Public Art Dialogue
Reconsidering Mural Painting: New Methodologies
Chair: Sally Webster, Lehman College and The Graduate Center,
City University New York
This panel extends the discourse on modern mural painting beyond
well-known Depression-era projects by affirming that over the course
of the past century, wall art, in addition to much else, underwent an
enormous redefinition. This panel acknowledges this transformation
while simultaneously claiming a new status for the medium. The
papers, in their broad range of sites, subjects, and methodologies,
validate the need for a reevaluation of this too long neglected medium.
Indeed, this reassessment corroborates an ongoing necessity to
recognize mural paintings’ critical role within the discourse of the
expanded field of public art.
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In the Making: Mural Painting and the Look of Reform in
Theodore Roosevelt’s America
Annelise K. Madsen, The Art Institute of Chicago
Looking Beyond The Wall: Reconstructing City Walls’
Gateway to SoHo
Andrew Wasserman, State University of New York at Stony Brook
The American mural movement’s shift ca. 1900 from allegorical to
historical compositions represents a more complicated story than
merely the effort to break away from the influence of European artistic
training and tradition. Not only did muralists wish to reform their
field of art; they aimed to fashion a new role for themselves as vital
civic players in Progressive Era campaigns for reform. Examining the
decorative program at the Massachusetts State House, and in particular
a mural by Edward Simmons, this paper considers how the new focus
on historical realism enabled artists to participate on a grand scale in
President Roosevelt’s Americanization movement. Muralists created a
painted curriculum for contemporary viewers in Boston. Further, this
paper demonstrates the importance of looking across an expansive
visual and cultural field in our mural scholarship.
Despite its unofficial title as the “Gateway to SoHo,” Forrest Myers’s
Untitled (The Wall) (1973) is but the sole remaining post of a once
four-post visual gateway. This paper considers how the set of four
early City Walls, Inc., murals—Jason Crum’s Peace (1969), Mel
Pekarsky’s Untitled (1971) and Untitled (1972), and Myers’s Untitled
(The Wall)—participated in the aesthetic and psychological reframing
of SoHo during the early 1970s. Writ large on the side of commercial
buildings, the murals served as billboards themselves, announcing the
northern boundary of the downtown Manhattan neighborhood while
also advertising a regional urban renewal beginning to take hold.
Collectively stretching across several city blocks, these four murals add
an important and often overlooked visual form to discussions of the
place of SoHo in postwar American art narratives.
Picturing Jewish History in 1920s Hollywood: The Murals
in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple
MacKenzie Stevens, University of Southern California
The Renewed Spirit of Hyde Park: A Case Study in
Mural Restoration
Emily Scibilia, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
In 1929 a series of painted canvases entitled the History of the Jews
was affixed to the sanctuary walls of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple
in Los Angeles. Designed and realized by Hugo Ballin—a now littleknown muralist, set decorator, and filmmaker—the murals are replete
with dramatic events and portraits of figures endemic to Jewish history.
To appeal to a community made up of the Hollywood film industry’s
elite, Ballin turned to the visual language of the movies, a medium
in which this particular audience was deeply connected and one in
which he was well versed. These murals are best understood through
the language of film and deviate from the traditions of mural painting
established during the American Renaissance. For a congregation that
included many first-generation Jews, the murals revivified a distant past
and made it modern through the burgeoning language of film.
This thesis investigates the circumstances surrounding the untraditional
restoration of the Spirit of Hyde Park mural in 2010 on the 57th Street
underpass in Hyde Park, Chicago. The unstable, deteriorated state of
Spirit led to the Chicago Public Arts Group’s (CPAG) decision to renew
(or reinterpret) the mural over traditional methods of restoration, as
an overlay of abstract designs was positioned in direct dialogue with
the original mural. By contextualizing the wall historically within
the chronological framework of the past four decades, the aim is to
explore Spirit’s changing surface. Through personal interviews with
residents of Hyde Park and CPAG members as its source, the wall is an
archive of collective consciousness of the changing community—not
an archive of what used to be. The restoration is not about the visual
outcome of the work. It is about the meaning imbued in the layers as
they accumulate over time.
“No Vain Glory”: Cartography and Murals in the
American War Cemeteries in France
Kate C. Lemay, Brigham Young University
Design and color in the murals located in the overseas American
cemeteries from World War II are rooted in the beaux-arts tradition,
a stylistic choice that provoked disgust and dismissal by New York–
based midcentury art critics. As a result, little art-historical analysis
has been written about the art and architecture of the cemeteries. Two
sets of murals, however, warrant careful consideration: the battlemap mosaic designed and executed by Eugene Savage in the Épinal
American Cemetery in Lorraine, and the sets of battle maps in colored
aggregate concrete executed by John Joseph Earley in the Brittany
American Cemetery in Normandy. Savage and Earley employed
innovative mid-twentieth-century techniques updating the traditional
and distinctive wall-art format, and the incorporation of cartography
helped to distinguish and define American power in acceptable terms,
an especially important achievement with a resistant European audience
during the volatile years of the early cold war.
A Renaissance Remnant: The Political Iconography
of Justice
Chairs: Ruth Weisberg, University of Southern California;
Judith Resnik, Yale University
Why is the depiction of a classically garbed woman with a scale,
a sword, and sometimes a blindfold still readily recognizable as
the personification of “Justice,” such that it can serve as a shingle
outside a building to mark it as a court of law, but a woman gazing
in a mirror (and sometimes shown with a second face on the back of
her head looking backward) is no longer understood to be the Virtue
“Prudence”? Why did the sixteenth-century artist Giulio Romano
offer an ostrich, along with a balance, as an attribute of Justice? How
did the blindfold, once a negative attribute affixed, for example,
to the allegorical figure of the “Synagogue,” representing the Old
Testament as blind to the “light of Christianity,” come to be valorized
as a positive accoutrement in Justice iconography? And how, given
democratic commitments that everyone has access to courts, can
one develop an iconography of Justice that captures the diverse
participants now eligible to be in court? This panel explores the visual
history and the political deployment of the figure of Justice as well as
its contemporary resonance.
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Seeing Like a Lawyer: Legal Emblems and the Art of Justice
Peter Goodrich, Yeshiva University
Blindness and insight. The early modern legal tradition inherited and
expanded its own ars iuris, a law of images that developed the tradition
of impresa, devices, heraldic insignia, and titles of honor into a unique
tradition of legal emblems. This paper addresses the multiple uses and
significances of blindfolds, gags, bands, and scarfes in early modern
legal emblems. Addressing the blindfold and its absence in diverse
depictions of Iustitia, the paper argues for the status of the blindfold as
an aenigma iuris, a forgotten reference significant of both blindness
and insight.
Giustizia Fascista: The Representation of Justice in Marcello
Piacentini’s Palace of Justice, Milan, 1932–40
Lucy Maulsby, Northeastern University
This paper clarifies how the architect most closely associated with
Mussolini and the artists he employed gave form to the legal codes
that structured the Fascist state through the Milan Palace of Justice,
the most important of a number of law courts built during the Fascist
era. Marcello Piacentini concentrated the building’s symbolic focus in
an entrance sequence that concluded in Arturo Martini’s monumental
sculpted panel Giustizia Fascista. In the panel Martini presented
Fascist Justice as a dispassionate figure with a balance in front of her
chest and a sword across her lap and as the culmination of the two
great traditions in Italian history: ancient Rome and Christianity. The
building and its decorative program continue to serve as the backdrop
for legal proceedings and raise questions about the extent to which
Fascist-era symbols continue to embody the notion of justice in Italian
society and culture.
The Multiple Perspectives of Justice at Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico
Alick M. McClean, Syracuse University in Florence
Justice appears twice on the west wall of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s
Allegory of Good Government in the Sala dei Nove, in Siena’s Palazzo
Pubblico. She undermines the central perspectival composition of the
wall, focused otherwise on the image of the sovereign. Her apparent
redundancy parallels the many vanishing points across the flanking
walls. Such design inconsistencies in the Sala, the Palazzo, and its
urban setting enhanced the legal and political function of the Palazzo.
Within the late medieval commune of Siena a single concept for
Justice was not only absent but undesirable. Sienese legislators and
judges deliberately sought multiple perspectives for passing laws or
making judgments. The degree to which artistic compositional analysis
might be applied not just to paintings and spaces but also to the design
of legislatures and judicial processes, whether in the past or today,
constitutes the underlying question in this paper.
Disaster and Creativity
Chairs: Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University; Yoshiaki Shimizu,
Princeton University
Disaster has been a generative force in world culture. Both natural
events, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunami, as
well as man-made events, such as war and nuclear catastrophes,
have stimulated a rich tradition of visual responses to calamitous
events. As we recently saw in March 2011 with Japan’s Great Eastern
earthquake, natural and man-made disasters are often inextricably
linked. Disaster itself is a paradox, destructive and constructive, both
horrific and sublime in nature. While it wreaks physical devastation
and psychological trauma, it also creates space for reflection and
renewal. Without a doubt, the social upheaval in the wake of disaster
can provide fertile ground for enormous surges of creativity. And the
physical marks of catastrophe brutally etched into the land, the city,
and the human body can be simultaneously repulsive and alluring. This
panel explores the relationship between disaster and artistic creativity.
Artists have responded to disaster throughout history and across the
globe. They describe and interpret; they mediate cultural understanding
of traumatic events.
Late-Eighteenth-Century Eruptions of Vesuvius:
From Natural Disaster to Sublime Science
Thomas Beachdel, The City College of New York, City
University of New York
This paper links the sublime as promulgated by Edmund Burke’s
1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and
the Beautiful and late-eighteenth-century eruptions of Vesuvius to
the professionalization of natural history. The aesthetic language of
the sublime recontextualized the violent phenomenon of volcanic
eruption and incited an increased thirst for inquiry into natural history.
This can be seen in the 1770s in the work of the French geologist
Nicolas Desmarest, whose examination of volcanic rock formations
gave birth to geology, and in Sir William Hamilton’s documentation
of the eruptions of Vesuvius, which gave rise to volcanology. Rather
than being considered in terms of disaster, volcanic eruption ignited
a creative passion for intense empirical observation, a hallmark of
the transformation of natural history into more rigorous disciplines
based increasingly on scientific method, revealing a new way of
conceptualizing the natural world.
Imaging Technological Disasters in Nineteenth-Century
American Photography and Art
Julie Wosk, State University of New York, Maritime College
During the nineteenth century American artists and photographers
captured the shattering impact of man-made technological disasters.
Images of steam-boiler explosions, train derailments, and collisions
were an unsettling reminder of the uncertainty that lay beneath
the celebration of speed and the nation’s rhetoric of technological
optimism and pride. Disaster images helped feed the public’s hunger
for the sensational and had a moral dimension as well, highlighting
the need for improvements in safety and design. These images also
highlighted the tensions between artifice and authenticity, as newspaper
editors were often ambivalent about using after-the-fact photographs,
preferring instead artists’ imaginative reconstructions of events
to depict the anguish of victims and create a sense of immediacy.
Embracing the paradoxes of the age, these wood engravings and
lithographs turned the deadly risks of modernity into enthralling
entertainment and display.
1945 and 2011: The Postwar Japanese Photobook as a
Record of Trauma
Russet Eve Lederman, School of Visual Arts
This paper explores the Japanese photobook as a catalyst in heralding
two distinctive photographic responses in the aftermath of the 1945
atomic bombings and the 2011 Tohoku/Fukushima disaster. From the
near-apocalyptic devastation of the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki
atomic bombings emerged a new generation of Japanese photographers,
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who in the process of healing, created a distinct visual language. With
the photobook as their primary creative outlet, photographers created
complex narratives and mini-universes that reshaped Western notions
of photography and book design. A similar conceptual restructuring is
now occurring among Japanese photobooks published since the 2011
Tohoku/Fukushima disaster. Unlike the more obvious documentation
of atrocities found in postbombing images, post-Tohoku/Fukushima
photobooks focus on the hidden dangers of the seemingly unchanged.
Through a deceptively simple aesthetic vocabulary that presents bucolic
landscapes, many contemporary Japanese photographers question
prevailing governmental reassurances and address the invisible dangers
associated with a large-scale radiation leak.
Fashion and Creativity in Response to Disaster
Valerie Rangel, Dominican University and The Illinois Institute of Art
In the aftermath of a disaster, much attention is given to the
reconstruction efforts of architects, urban planners, and nonprofit
humanitarian agencies. However, very little is known about the role
of fashion designers and their contribution to disaster response and
recovery efforts. To what extent do disasters prompt designers to
address the clothing needs of disaster victims? Does it compel them
to reassess the practical function of clothing during times of crisis? If
so, what is the extent of their involvement and impact? In addressing
the role of fashion in disaster, this paper has three goals: to understand
the nature and outcome of creativity in fashion; to examine the
effectiveness of creative responses to disaster; and to discuss ways
fashion designers can adopt a more meaningful and socially responsible
approach to design.
Between Awe and Anger: Young Japanese Artists Respond
to Tohoku and Fukushima
Julia Friedman, Arizona State University
Artistic responses to the twin disasters that struck Northeastern Japan in
March 2011 span the spectrum from aestheticizing the awesome forces
of nature to condemnation of human ineptitude and industrial-political
collusion. Chihiro Kabata’s series of large-scale paintings depict
glistening black water ripples washing back dimly after a climactic
surge in which so many lives were instantly obliterated by the wall of
murky water. A different response to the man-made and still ongoing
disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is by the Tokyo-based
collective Chim↑Pom, whose clandestine insertion of the smoking
Fukushima reactor into Taro Okamoto’s 1969 antinuclear mural at
Tokyo’s Shibuya station landed them in legal trouble. In contrast to
Kabata’s existentialist awe at the omnipotence of nature, Chim↑Pom’s
reaction is a social critique. Their focus is the mismanagement of
atomic power. Yet, ultimately both Kabata and Chim↑Pom contribute to
forming the collective memory of the disasters.
Tapestry and Reproduction
Chairs: K. L. H. Wells, University of Southern California;
Barbara Caen, Universität Zürich
When Rosalind Krauss included tapestry in a list of “compound arts”
in her important essay “Originality and the Avant-Garde,” she linked
it to a range of decorative and fine arts that are produced in workshops
by many hands. Yet tapestries are similar to Rodin’s cast sculpture—
the focal point of Krauss’s essay—not only because they are made by
many often anonymous craftspeople but also because they are multiples
that reproduce an artist’s model or cartoon. In French these tapestry
multiples are called exemplaires to indicate that they are translations
of a cartoon or re-editions of a previously woven work. We might
thus think of tapestry as analogous to and anticipating the practice of
printing multiple photographs from a single negative, sometimes years
after the picture was taken. This session examines how the production
of tapestry multiples has developed from the sixteenth century, when
Raphael’s famous Acts of the Apostles tapestries were widely copied
throughout Europe, to today, when digital imaging facilitates the
creation of almost photorealist tapestries by contemporary artists
such as Pae White and Chuck Close. The session asks how tapestry’s
status as a collaboratively crafted reproduction of a named artist’s
original work has influenced its production and reception. By focusing
on a medium with such a long pedigree and surprisingly prominent
visibility in the contemporary art world, the session demonstrates not
only that the issue of reproduction was relevant long before the onset
of photography in the nineteenth century but also that the workshop
traditions of the early modern period continue to shape artistic
production today.
Border Zones: Reproduction and Change in Raphael’s
Designs for Tapestries
Lorraine Karafel, Parsons The New School for Design
Raphael’s (1483–1520) innovative tapestry designs, executed in
1515–20 for Pope Leo X (r. 1513–21) and woven in Brussels under
the supervision of the master producer Pieter van Aelst (ca. 1450–ca.
1533), established a new paradigm for luxurious historiated textiles.
Coveted by subsequent patrons, reweavings were made for powerful
kings, ambitious clerics, and wealthy merchants. However, while
the main fields reproduced the original Raphaelesque cartoons, the
borders created to complement the scenes visually and to augment
their message iconographically were often altered. This paper focuses
on borders in Raphael’s tapestry designs, which have never been fully
examined by scholars, identifying these framing devices as locations
for significant change. The reweavings of the original designs, then,
raise questions about the works as reproductions. Tapestry may be
seen as a medium of unique multiples in which reproduction also
becomes renewal.
Raphael/Not Raphael: The Curious Case of Loreto’s Acts of
the Apostles Tapestries and the Similar Sets in Zaragoza and
Bryn Athyn
Jonathan Kline, Temple University
This paper takes as its subject a set of tapestries preserved in the Museo
Antico Tesoro of Loreto, Italy. The tapestries are celebrated locally
for their connection to Raphael—nine of the ten tapestries are based
on his Acts of the Apostles cartoons—but have been denigrated or
overlooked by scholars at large, in part because the tapestries deviate
from Raphael’s designs. This paper distinguishes between copy and
redaction in the production of both tapestries and cartoons, identifies
additional tapestries woven from the same cartoons as those in
Loreto—including sets in Spain and the United States—and ultimately
suggests that the Loreto set may originally have been valued more for
the material, style, and subject matter of the tapestries themselves than
for any possible perception that they were the “autograph” work of the
painter who designed the first Acts of the Apostles cartoons.
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“Painting, with Silk and Gold”: Boucher’s Intermediality
Susan Wager, Columbia University
In 1666 André Félibien bound the fate of paintings to tapestry. Tapestry,
he wrote, was “the surest way to preserve, and even reproduce,
paintings by the most talented artists.” For the next century and a half,
the production and criticism of paintings and tapestry would become
entangled in a network of formal, rhetorical, and conceptual slippage.
Nowhere was this cross-fertilization more productive than in the work
of and after François Boucher. And yet some recent scholarship has
attempted to coopt Boucher’s paintings into a modernist narrative
of medium specificity. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that
Boucher’s oil pendants Rising (1753) and Setting of the Sun (1752)
were made to be reproduced as tapestries. In what ways can we
reconsider these works as being at once paintings and tapestries? And
what would be the consequences of this reconceptualization for our
understanding of Boucher’s oeuvre?
Chair: Kathleen Wentrack, Queensborough Community College,
Critical Reception of the Marie Cuttoli Tapestries, 1930s–60s
Virginia Gardner Troy, Berry College
The ambivalent position of modern pictorial tapestry as both a luxury
art and third-party reproduction makes the study of Marie Cuttoli’s
legacy particularly fascinating. In the 1930s Cuttoli worked with
modern artists—Picasso, Matisse, and others—and skilled Aubusson
weavers to produce mural-size tapestries, known collectively as the
Cuttoli Tapestries. The technique required the artists to prepare fullscale cartoons, which were then meticulously transcribed in wool
and silk, complete with signatures and simulated frames. Sent on a
worldwide tour in 1936 that continued throughout the postwar years,
especially in North America, the tapestries generated considerable
attention (Picasso’s Inspiration was illustrated in fourteen publications
in 1936 alone) and varied critical reception. Critics perceived the
tapestries as mere fiber replicas of more valuable and unique art
originals, bringing to the forefront ideas about artistic authenticity and
reproduction; defenders valued the materiality and flexibility of these
soft alternatives to easel painting.
Reproduction/Interpretation/Transformation: Postwar Tapestry
Making at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh
Francesca Baseby, University of Edinburgh
Dovecot Studios (formerly the Edinburgh Tapestry Company) is a
prominent case study during the modern period of tapestries being
produced from pictorial sources. Since 1945 the studio has woven
tapestries from designs by contemporary British and international
artists. These are interpreted, rather than copied, by the weavers. This
paper focuses on the changes that came about at Dovecot in the 1960s,
for which the increase in architectural commissions was a catalyst.
By the 1960s big businesses and public bodies, encouraged by the
economic climate, were able to undertake ambitious building schemes.
Using archival research and a technical examination of selected
tapestries, the paper examines the nature of architectural commissions.
It explores how the working relationships with artists developed, and
how the finished tapestries maintained key elements of the artistdesigner’s style. Artists discussed include Harold Cohen, Joyce Conwy
Evans, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Hans Tisdall.
Take Two: Early Feminist Performance Art in
Contemporary Practice
Performance art has occupied the forefront of avant-garde art practice
since the 1960s when, as a relatively new medium not dominated by
male practitioners, it attracted numerous feminist artists. Performance
art became such a popular outlet for women artists in the 1970s in part
because its formal execution complemented the feminist movement’s
consciousness-raising activities, as it often critiqued the conditions
of women’s lives and presented alternatives. Female artists turned
to their own bodies as subject in an active expression of agency
and to provide a flexible and direct format with which to reach the
spectator. Moreover, feminist performance art provided one of the
most significant sites for mounting a challenge to modernism via
models of collaboration and crossing traditional boundaries between
art disciplines. So, what has changed, or remains the same, since the
1970s in feminist performance practice? This panel presents select
examples of the continued impact of early feminist performance art on
contemporary art practice.
Changes in Feminist Artistic Practice: Mónica Mayer, the
Feminist Studio Workshop, and Mexican Art, 1978–93
Alberto McKelligan, The Graduate Center, City University of
New York
This paper examines the work of Mónica Mayer, a feminist
performance artist from Mexico active since the late 1970s. Scholars
routinely note that she studied at the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW)
in 1978–80 but fail to consider the influence of fellow FSW students
on her later work in Mexico. This project examines Mayer and FSWrelated groups such as Mother Art and the Feminist Art Workers, using
a transnational feminist perspective to find “common differences” in
the works of these artists. Rather than describing Mayer’s work as a
direct imitation of the techniques she learned from the FSW, this paper
emphasizes how she adapted her works to a specific, local context.
Using archival material made available by the exhibition Doin’ It in
Public, it is argued that Mayer’s work should be interpreted as part
of an ongoing dialogue between artists from Mexico and the United
States.
Being Ana: Tania Bruguera’s Tribute to Ana Mendieta
Drew Elizabeth Bucilla, The Graduate Center, City University of
New York
This paper repositions the work of Tania Bruguera in light of her
interest in the art of Ana Mendieta. These two artists of sequential
generations are bound by their shared gender and Cuban heritage,
as well as common artistic concerns, exploring their personal and
cultural identity through the medium of performance. One year after
Mendieta’s death in 1985, Bruguera began a long-term performance
entitled Tribute to Ana Mendieta, which culminated in a dual exhibition
staged as part of her graduation thesis in 1992. For the show Bruguera
re-created some of Mendieta’s performances, rebuilt several sculptures,
and reproduced documentation of her work. What does it mean for
Bruguera to perform as if she were Ana herself? How does Bruguera’s
recontextualization of the original work shift its meaning? Can we still
call Bruguera’s politics feminist, and if so, what has shifted between
these two generations of artists?
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A Chip off the Old Block: Carolee Schneemann and
Kate Gilmore Get Messy
Harry Weil, Stony Brook University, State University of New York
This presentation analyzes the relationship of dirtying the spaces of art
encounters to the historical function of feminist performance practices,
and how these two modes of communication reinforce each other.
The focus is on the similar ways that Carolee Schneemann in Meat
Joy (1964) and Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–76) and Kate
Gilmore in Through the Claw (2011) parody high modernist aesthetic
by literally making a mess of it, and in effect highlight traditional
power structures and gender relations in the arts and society at large.
Gilmore, however, is working with the historical rhetoric of feminist
performance practices, while Schneemann was pioneering it. In their
mutual interest in wreaking havoc, this cross-generational approach
suggests contemporary feminist art’s affinity for the past and renewed
interest in the erotic, the sacred, and the taboo of the female body—a
potential place for enriching conversation on women in the twenty-first
century.
New Maternalisms: Pedagogy and Performance in
Contemporary “Mama Art”
Natalie S. Loveless, University of Alberta
Forty years after the intervention of feminist art, what is the experience
of the daughters of that era who have since become mothers? How
is that experience expressed in their artwork, and how does this art
relate to the work being done in the 1970s? This paper examines
contemporary performance-based, maternal art practices such as Jill
Miller’s The Milk Truck (2010), Lenka Clayton’s Maternity Leave
(2010), and Jess Dobkin’s The Lactation Station (2006 and 2012) in
relation to the maternal art practices of early feminist artists such as
Mary Kelly (Post Partum Document, 1973–79) and Mierle Laderman
Ukeles (Maintenance Art, 1969 and on). Works such as these encourage
us to ask questions about the power and challenge of the maternal to the
professional body of the artist-academic in ways that benefit from the
ecological commitments of a feminist, new materialist perspective.
Performing Dissent: The Rhetoric of Opposition in
Reenactment Performance
Natalie Musteata, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
In this moment of renewed social conflict, most evident with the
wave of Arab Spring revolutions and the heterogeneous growth of the
Occupy movements, it is necessary to reconsider the intersection of
performance art and the politics of address. This paper focuses on the
recent work of several artists (e.g., Mary Kelly and Sharon Hayes) who
examine historical moments of political unrest through reenactment.
However, each artist engages not only with issues of reenactment but
more specifically with the reuse of historical protest speech. What is at
stake in respeaking politicized language? How does a speech change
when it is removed from its original time, place, and speaker? And
what does it mean to consider reenactment in the present?
American Council of Learned Societies
Twenty Years of Scholarship: The Luce/ACLS Dissertation
Fellowships in American Art
Chair: Steven C. Wheatley, American Council of Learned Societies
How has scholarship on American art changed in the past twenty years?
What has been the experience of the generations of scholars coming
of age in that same period? Since 1992 the Luce Foundation and the
American Council of Learned Societies have awarded 227 dissertation
fellowships in American art. These fellowships fund graduate students
in any stage of PhD dissertation for research or writing for scholarship
on a topic in the history of the visual arts of the United States.
Celebrating twenty years of supporting young scholars, this session
brings together four past fellows with diverse interests within American
art and from different stages of the academic career to discuss how their
research has evolved.
Alan C. Braddock, College of William and Mary
Alan C. Braddock recently became the Ralph H. Wark Associate
Professor of Art History and American Studies at the College of
William and Mary after previously holding positions at Temple
University and Syracuse University. He is the author of Thomas
Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (University of California Press,
2009) and coeditor with Christoph Irmscher of A Keener Perception:
Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (University of Alabama
Press, 2009). His articles and essays have appeared in the journals
American Art, Winterthur Portfolio, and Nineteenth-Century Art
Worldwide as well as exhibition catalogues published by the Blanton
Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Last
year he was a senior fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum,
working on a new book titled Gun Vision: The Ballistic Imagination in
American Art.
Claire de Dobay Rifelj, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Claire de Dobay Rifelj’s dissertation, “Mediums and Messages:
Los Angeles Assemblage and the Influence of Film and Media,
1970–1990,” explores the paradigm shift that altered the content
and structure of collages and assemblages made in Los Angeles in
the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas artists from the so-called California
Assemblage movement in the 1950s and 1960s looked to Beat poetics
for inspiration, artists such as Llyn Foulkes, Alexis Smith, and Ilene
Segalove drew from the realms of fiction, film, and television, infusing
their work with temporal associations, references to the genres and
artificiality of Hollywood, and, most important, narrative explorations.
By incorporating a study of narratology, her project investigates
how works by these artists both construct and subvert artistic and
cultural messages. It also situates Los Angeles as the birthplace of
the “Pictures” generation and its pop and media influences, which
dominated the New York art scene in the 1980s.
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Hayes P. Mauro, Queensborough Community College,
Hayes P. Mauro received his PhD in art history from the CUNY
Graduate Center in 2007. The Luce/ACLS dissertation fellowship
supported travel and research and as well as the timely completion
of his dissertation, since expanded and published as The Art of
Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School (University of New
Mexico Press, 2011). Mauro credits a good portion of this success to
ACLS. Since completing the book, he has worked on book reviews
and curated the student art exhibition at Queensborough Community
College. His recent research interests relate to the concepts of
millennialism and masculinity in American visual culture as well as the
impact of mediated globalization on representation more broadly.
Judith Rodenbeck, Sarah Lawrence College
Judith Rodenbeck is an art historian and critic specializing in art of
the 1950s and 1960s. She is the author of Radical Prototypes: Allan
Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (MIT Press, 2011) and has
written for magazines such as October, Grey Room, Art Journal (of
which she is past editor), Artforum, and Modern Painters as well as
for exhibitions such as the America’s Society retrospective of Antonio
Manuel, I Want to Act! Not Represent! (2011), and the 2013 survey of
Gutai art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She is a professor
of modern and contemporary art at Sarah Lawrence College, in
Bronxville, New York. Her current research examines the “behavioral
turn” in art since the advent of cybernetics.
Art Libraries Society of North America
Artist’s Publications: Beyond Artist’s Books and Zines
Chair: Tony White, Maryland Institute College of Art
With the increased use of print-on-demand publishing technologies,
many artists are blending the typologies of artist’s books, zines, minicomics, and photo books, often creating print publications that are
indistinguishable from one another. Panelists in this session discuss
the impact of print-on-demand technologies on the typology of artist’s
books and on the genres of artist’s books, zines, mini-comics, and
photo books. Has print-on-demand created a new typology (artist’s
publishing) that is inclusive of multiple publication types? Has printon-demand production and distribution transformed the creation of
artist’s publishing and sales beyond more traditional brick-and-mortar
dealer and distributor networks? What is the financial impact of
print-on-demand for artists and/or dealers/distributors? Should new
terminology such as “artist’s publishing” or “book art” subsume the
typologies of artist’s books, zines, mini-comics, and photo books?
Cultivating Nature as Art: Dialogues on the
Rustic Garden in the Long Eighteenth-Century and
the Contemporary Practice of Organic Art in the
Landscape Post-1960
Chairs: Susan Wilson, independent scholar; Yuen Lai Winnie Chan,
University of Oxford
modern form of expression, incentivized by the fact that it was once
respected as one of the most important and influential art forms in
the context of “garden art.” Historical studies of garden art and the
tenets that underpinned them are generally explored within the niche
discipline of garden or landscape history under an academic umbrella
of art history, arts and the humanities, or archaeology. Garden history
also surfaces as a thematic strand in the study of the decorative
arts, literary studies, landscape architecture, and garden design.
However, it is rarely taught in schools of fine art, which arguably
limits this historical context from the critical study of art practiced
in the landscape that continues to evolve. This session encourages
an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and paradigms on the rustic
tradition in garden art and the contemporary practice of organic art in
the landscape.
Rustic Taste in Holland’s Early-Nineteenth-Century
Landscape Garden
Vanessa Bezemer Sellers, New York Botanical Garden
In 1802 a unique garden treatise was published in Amsterdam that
would influence the direction of landscape-garden design—especially
rustic taste—for decades to come. Written by the garden-architecthorticulturist Gijsbert van Laar (1767–1820), the Magazijn van Tuinsieraaden (Storehouse of Garden Ornaments) was a seminal do-ityourself book that for the first time provided middle-class citizens with
an array of garden plans and ornaments to improve their own estates.
Although it enjoyed immediate popularity and in spite of its important
contributions, the book remained little known outside Holland until
its recent online publication in English. The design aesthetics most
frequently represented in the book center on “rustic” or “rural.”
Van Laar clearly preferred the rustic over other ornamental styles,
forwarding it as “quintessentially Dutch,” befitting age-old artistic
traditions (seventeenth-century paintings with weathered cottages)
and sociopolitical realities (Holland as bourgeois Republic). Some
surviving layouts are being celebrated in this Year of the Country
House in Holland.
“Humble and Simple”: Rustic Summerhouses in NineteenthCentury American Landscape Gardens
Kerry Dean Carso, State University of New York at New Paltz
Nineteenth-century rustic summerhouses (also known as gazebos)
were diminutive and ephemeral in nature. Practical farmers’ journals
recommended rustic summerhouses as landscape ornaments, as they
could be constructed of inexpensive materials gathered from nature.
The little structures were meant to last at most twenty years. Indeed,
Andrew Jackson Downing’s journal The Horticulturist described
rustic summerhouses as appropriate for “humble and simple cottage
grounds.” Despite their small scale and insubstantial materials, these
structures functioned as signifiers of gentility, as they projected the
appearance of leisure and taste. Additionally, summerhouses were
part of a larger discourse on the benefits of sylvan retreat and were
therefore a response to increasing anxieties about urbanization and
industrialization in the nineteenth-century United States.
A growing interest in art as a contemporary language in the landscape
that communicates with the public is beginning to gain ground in
community commissions of organic, impermanent art. Moreover,
landscape architecture is expected to participate in the search for a
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Michael Singer and Xu Bing: On the Nature of the
Contemporary Garden
David Henry Ehrenpreis, James Madison University
Recent works by the American artist and designer Michael Singer
and the Chinese artist Xu Bing offer insights concerning the
transformations of the rustic tradition in contemporary artistic practice,
and demonstrate how these two creators have made use of each other’s
cultural traditions. To create his 1992 Pavilion and Garden, Singer built
a pavilion but also sculpted the landscape, creating a large pond and
berms to enhance views and redirecting the river flowing through the
property. While carefully rooted in the New England countryside, his
work draws heavily on Japanese models such as Shugakuin. Xu Bing’s
2008 Stone Path takes the form of seventy-six stones inscribed with
words from a Song-dynasty poem and has already been installed in
three different countries. It is available to all, but place is unimportant.
If Singer has fashioned an American scholar’s garden, Xu Bing’s
project, like its creator, is rootless and nomadic.
From Colonial Roots to the Rhizome: Location, Dislocation, and
Translocation in Contemporary Artists’ Organic Art Practices in
the Anthropocene Age
Edwina Fitzpatrick, Wimbledon College of Art
This paper explores the contemporary practice of organic art in the
landscape, from the perspective that landscapes and gardens—and
indeed our planet—are cultural containers and archives of human
interventions. It raises questions about what “nature” and “nurture”
may be, and how artists “cultivate” ideas around this discourse, through
using a plant’s and tree’s rooting systems both aesthetically and as
metaphors. The focus is on location and site specificity—about how
moving plants from one place to another has an effect. This trans- or
dislocation emphasizes the botanic qualities of a species’s roots—
whether they are deeply rooted tree radicles or the prolific rhizomes
that Deleuze and Guattari discussed. Starting with the colonial legacy
of plant dislocation, the paper goes on to explore some of the ways that
contemporary artists have developed artworks that translocated plants’
rooting systems to cultivate an alternative form of landscape-archive.
Civilizing the Midwest
Chairs: Paula Wisotzki, Loyola University Chicago;
Joseph Antenucci Becherer, Aquinas College and Frederik Meijer
Gardens and Sculpture Park
Since the late nineteenth century civic-minded philanthropists
interested in the visual arts have developed collections and institutions
that would enlighten the populations of midwestern cities. Although
lesser known than their coastal contemporaries, such collections and
institutions offer remarkable opportunities in both the history of art and
the history of philanthropy. From the Butler Institute in Youngstown,
Ohio, which identifies itself as the first museum of American art, to
risk-taking collectors such as Arthur Jerome Eddy, the Midwest has
been a place of fixing and transforming American culture. For William
Rockhill Nelson, one of the founders of the Nelson-Atkins Museum
of Art, 1880s Kansas City was a rough frontier town in need of being
made over into a refined city complete with a gallery devoted to visual
culture. Where Nelson’s expectations were shaped by more traditional
notions of art and its ability to improve the local populace, other
regional figures and organizations such as the Arts Club of Chicago
have been committed to more experimental trends from the earliest
stages of their history. In many cases individuals and institutions have
come and gone, but their impact on the regional experience of art
remains worthy of study. Conversely, the recent past has witnessed
extraordinary growth in midwestern museums and public collections,
the transformational influence of which is only beginning to bear fruit.
The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art: A Nationally
Significant Collection at a Community College in Kansas
David Cateforis, University of Kansas
This paper examines the remarkable history and nature of the
collections, exhibitions, and art display spaces of the Johnson County
Community College in wealthy Overland Park, Kansas, including its
Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (opened in 2007). Hundreds
of artworks are displayed throughout the JCCC campus grounds and
buildings as well as in the Nerman Museum, an elegant, $15 million,
41,000-square-foot facility designed by Kyu Sung Woo. Under the
leadership of the director Bruce Hartman (at JCCC since 1990), and
with generous support from Marti and Tony Oppenheimer and other
patrons, the Nerman has built a high-quality collection of important
works by internationally recognized artists that also features the
work of Kansas City artists and impressive holdings of contemporary
clay and American Indian art. The Nerman also presents temporary
exhibitions of regional, national, and international artists; artists’
lectures; and educational programs, greatly enriching the cultural life of
Kansas City.
“Pictures of the Best Kind”: Charles Hackley and the
Making of Michigan’s Muskegon Museum of Art
E. Jane Connell, Muskegon Museum of Art
The Muskegon Museum of Art, located on the shores of Lake
Michigan, may be small in scale, but it carries the might of an
exceptional history. The museum is the legacy of the lumber baron
Charles Hackley, Muskegon’s principal benefactor. At his death in
1905, Hackley left in his will a bequest of $150,000 to collect “pictures
of the best kind” for the city’s citizens. This paper addresses Hackley’s
enduring influence on Muskegon and the Board of Education’s
formidable task of fulfilling his dream: building the Hackley Art
Gallery, as the museum was then called, which, at its opening in 1912,
was the only art museum in the country built expressly for this purpose
in a city of fewer than thirty thousand residents; and developing a
collection comprising such seminal works as Henry Ossawa Tanner’s
The Holy Family, John Steuart Curry’s Tornado over Kansas, and
Edward Hopper’s New York Restaurant.
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Businessmen-Patrons and the St. Louis Museum Movement
Julie Dunn-Morton, University of Missouri–St. Louis
From its beginnings art patronage in St. Louis was closely tied to the
development of the city’s merchant class. Although initially stressing
art’s civilizing influence as an educational tool necessary for civic
growth, by the mid-nineteenth century the city’s businessmen-patrons
had recognized its promotional power as a tool for civic advancement.
This change in focus occurred at a key moment in the city’s economic
development and resulted in the formation of the first art museum
in America support by city taxes. This paper begins with a brief
introduction to the most significant St. Louis businessmen-patrons and
the various institutions that they supported as potential art venues. An
examination of the success and failure of these institutions reveals the
growing momentum of the museum movement through the last half
of the century and its impact on both the 1904 World’s Fair and the
formation of the City Art Museum.
John White Alexander, Andrew Carnegie, and Refinement in
Pittsburgh at the Turn of the Century
Don Meyer, Yale University
Founded in 1895 by Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune in the
steel industry, the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh was built to serve
as a home for “all the refinements of civilization,” to borrow language
from Carnegie’s 1889 essay “Wealth,” wherein the industrialist
associates such refinements with “all that is highest and best in
literature and the arts.” But refinement’s meaning extended beyond
forms of high cultural production to include, too, the sweltering process
through which steel gets produced. Steel, literally, is refined. This paper
explores the intersection between industrial and aesthetic forms of
refinement in Pittsburgh at the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses
on the artist John White Alexander’s large-scale mural cycle The
Crowning of Labor (1905–15), which adorns the Carnegie Institute’s
east entrance stair hall and which strives to reconcile its own literal
depictions of industrial labor with Aestheticism’s penchant for pure
formal relationships.
Joseph Randall Shapiro’s Framing of Chicago Collections and
Latin American Art during the Third Pan American Games and
1959 Festival of the Americas
Mary Caroline Simpson, Eastern Illinois University
Revolution in Cuba and cold-war politics informed both the
organization and reception of The United States Collects Pan-American
Art, which the collector Joseph Randall Shapiro curated in 1959 for the
Art Institute of Chicago to fulfill his responsibilities as Mayor Richard
J. Daley’s appointed cultural-events coordinator for the Third Pan
American Games. The need to acknowledge the participating nations
led Shapiro to reject the advice of José Gómez-Sicre, the Pan American
Union’s visual arts director, who championed Latin American avantgardism shaped by European-American aesthetics and disparaged
Mexican muralists with communist ties. Shapiro’s catholicity also
more truly represented the galleries, museums, and private collectors,
including eleven Chicagoans favoring avant-gardism, lending
artworks to an exhibition encapsulating US perceptions of Latin
American art. Despite a short-term impact in Chicago, enthusiasm for
this art fizzled there until the early 1980s, when demographic shifts
and multiculturalism revived interest in creating new networks and
audiences.
Building a Legacy for Women Artists
Chair: Barbara A. Wolanin, United States Capitol Historical Society
This panel explores ways that artists, art historians, and leaders of
art organizations work to ensure that the art and accomplishments of
women artists are preserved and made known to current and future
generations. The definition of “legacy” is “a bequest; property or
money given by last will and testament.” Things handed down from a
predecessor or ancestor include intellectual, cultural, and humanitarian
legacies. Despite four decades of efforts since the beginning of the
feminist art movement, great disparities remain in how art by women
is valued and recognized. Only one out of twenty works in museums
is by a woman, and major solo exhibitions for women are still rare.
A woman’s lifetime of work is often dispersed at auction or may end
up destroyed because no one wants to buy it, show it, or pay to store
or conserve it. Examples are drawn from students of the Philadelphia
modernist Arthur B. Carles, women artists in the US Capitol, and the
Women’s Caucus for Art. The panelists, each of whom is creating
legacy through her own leadership, share their varied experiences with
means to build and pass down the legacy of women artists.
Changing the Future: The Women’s Caucus for Art and
The Feminist Art Project
Anne Swartz, Savannah College of Art and Design
The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) Lifetime Achievement Awards,
begun in 1979, and The Feminist Art Project (TFAP), started in 2005,
came into existence in their respective eras due to similar interests in
dialogue, documentation, and recognition of feminist art practices.
Until recently the WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards have been the
only accolade devoted to women in the visual arts. The award is an
opportunity to reflect on the accomplishments of a select group and
create a record through the awards events and catalogue. With the
award, important contributions receive much-deserved attention. In
2005 TFAP developed out of the desire to capitalize on the unique
synchronicity of multiple major museum exhibitions of feminist art.
TFAP focuses on expanding the community, increasing opportunities,
and broadening the discourse. It has expanded to include a broad range
of activities. This paper outlines the separate histories of the WCA
awards and TFAP, the systems they have created to remember the past
and change the future, and the solutions they offer in diversifying art
and academia.
Etched in Memory: Rutgers Institute for Women and Art, Feminist
Art Activism and Legacy Building at a Public Institution
Ferris Olin, Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers, The State University
of New Jersey
Women artists and visual arts professionals have always been active
participants in the cultural landscape, yet they often remain invisible
and undocumented. Rutgers Institute for Women and Art (IWA),
established in 2006 by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, transforms
values, policies, and institutions and insures that the intellectual and
aesthetic contributions of diverse communities of women in the visual
arts are included in the cultural mainstream and acknowledged in the
historical record. To counter the erasure of women artists, the IWA
invents, implements, and conducts live and virtual education, research,
documentation, public programs, and exhibitions focused on women
artists and feminist art. This paper describes the forty-plus-year history
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of feminist art activism at Rutgers; the strategies employed to transform
a public academic institution as well as the art world; and projects
developed to assure a legacy for and about women artists that serves
future generations of students and scholars.
Making History: Art, Gender, and the Women’s Museum
Susan Fisher Sterling, National Museum of Women in the Arts
Having art accepted into a museum collection, displayed in a museum
solo or group exhibition, documented in a catalogue, or included in a
museum archive or research center are among the best ways to ensure
that a woman artist’s legacy will be recognized and survive. The
National Museum of Women in the Arts, which opened in 1987, is the
only major museum dedicated to women artists’ accomplishments, past
and present. As NMWA completes its twenty-fifth anniversary year,
this presentation provides an overview of the founding and growth of
the museum. It considers the range and expansion of its collection,
exhibitions, and programs. It also considers the women’s museum’s
promise as an ongoing advocate for equity for women through the
example of excellence in the arts.
Women Artists’ Legacies: Forming Foundations and
Documenting Works
Joan Marter, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and
Woman’s Art Journal
The Woman’s Art Journal has been published for thirty-four years and
its purpose is to document (and celebrate) the works of women artists.
Legacies for women involve continuous recognition of their artistic
achievements and the appropriate disposition of artworks remaining
in their studios. Forming nonprofit foundations that distribute works
to museums and other art institutions supports the perpetuation of the
artist’s memory and ensures that future generations will know the lives
of women artists and recognize their accomplishments. How are these
goals achieved? As the editor of the Woman’s Art Journal and president
of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts for almost twenty
years, my experiences provide some strategies.
The Sylvia Sleigh Legacy Campaign
Janice Nesser-Chu, Women’s Caucus for Art and St. Louis Community
College–Florissant Valley
The Sylvia Sleigh Legacy Campaign and Initiative facilitates donations
and raises funds to ensure that women’s art will be catalogued,
collected, and preserved in museums and institutions. While president
of WCA (2010–12), I worked with the executors of the Sleigh estate
to develop and begin to facilitate the legacy campaign, built on the
foundation of the donation of Sleigh’s Turkish Bath. The Legacy
Initiative’s goals are to educate women on the importance of their
legacy and cataloguing their work and archiving their papers; to
facilitate the placement of women’s art in museum permanent
collections; to publish articles, essays, and catalogues on women
artists; to cultivate and grow WCA’s programs focusing on legacy;
to partner with and support organizations with goals and missions
similar to WCA’s; and to procure funding to meet these goals through
development of programs on fiscal receivership, sponsorship, and
planned giving.
Association of Art Historians
The Future Role of Art History in Curating
Historic Collections
Chair: Alison Yarrington, University of Hull
This session invites colleagues to join in a discussion about the role of
art historians in curating historic collections. This topic of debate was
chosen in light of a growing number of concerns about diminishing
opportunities for early-career researchers and curators, particularly
in regional museums and galleries; the loss of specialist posts in
major collections and the impact of this on future scholarship; the
impact of the perceived tendency toward exhibiting and acquiring
contemporary art and design at the expense of historical artifacts; and
how our professional associations can foster productive collaborative
relationships between university academics and museum curators,
effectively bringing together expertise in working with ideas and
theories and working with objects to the benefit of all.
Gender Politics in the Workplace, Part II:
The Next Generation
Chairs: Megan Koza Young, University of Kansas; Anitra Haendel,
California Institute of the Arts
Up through the twentieth century the battle against gender
discrimination flowed primarily in one direction—women entered the
work force in positions traditionally held by men and struggled against
discrimination by their male peers and supervisors. Today the tables
are shifting somewhat, as definitions of gender become more and more
superfluous and transgendered professionals more openly enter the job
market. But does this mean that gender discrimination no longer exists?
There is new evidence for same-gender discrimination between older
and younger female (and male) professionals that is quite alarming. As
the second part to the panel presented by the Committee on Women
in the Arts, this session opens a dialogue between generations. When
healthy competition between colleagues turns into sour and fierce
competition, it is time to address the root causes of this problem.
Photography in Doubt, Part II
Chairs: Andres Mario Zervigon, Rutgers, The State University of
New Jersey; Sabine Tania Kriebel, University College Cork
August Strindberg’s Self-Portraits of the Soul: The Photographer
as Medium, the Medium of Photography
Jennifer Raab, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
From 1886 to 1908 the Swedish playwright August Strindberg
produced a series of self-portraits using different kinds of cameras—
one with a remote control, another made from a cigar box pierced
with a hole and without a lens, and finally a “Wunderkamera” that
produced life-size images. Strindberg was attempting a “photography
of the soul.” At once fascinated by the occult and by science, a devout
Catholic at some moments and a fervent atheist at others, he believed
that photography could capture the soul as a material presence as well
as metaphorically evoke the true self. Strindberg’s images point to a
much larger cultural phenomenon: a struggle over the very terms of
objectivity and subjectivity, naturalism and spiritualism. At the end of
the nineteenth century a desire for objective truth both conflicted with
and provoked a need to understand, and materialize, the invisible.
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Suspect Plasticities and Fraudulent Exposures: Artifice and
Authenticity in Fin-de-siècle Ectoplasm Photography
Lucy Traverse, University of Wisconsin–Madison
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a new form of
psychical research emerged in Europe and North America, one that
focused on the psychosomatic production, or “materialization,”
of the deceased by living mediums. The obvious referentiality
and blatant constructedness of the photographs used to document
these so-called ectoplasmic phenomena stand in marked tension
with photographic claims to scientific objectivity. Yet psychical
researchers, exploiting a history of science that emphasized narratives
of disbelief, used the doubt-inducing eccentricity of these images to
their advantage. Paradoxically the novelty and seeming unbelievability
of materialization photographs sometimes worked to lend credibility
to their status as evidence of a new scientific truth. Contemporaneous
understandings of the specific material, chemical, and optical properties
of photography played a crucial part in this debate, as a transatlantic
community of researchers collectively strove to mitigate the doubts that
promised to overwhelm their nascent field of inquiry.
Sketch Reporting after Press Photography
Jason E. Hill, Terra Foundation for American Art and Institut
National d’Histoire de l’Art
The American newspaper and magazine publisher Ralph Ingersoll
harbored real doubts about photography. Between 1940 and 1942,
more than a generation into the dominance of periodical photographic
reportage, the progressive New York daily newspaper PM, under
Ingersoll’s direction, elected to reinstate the obsolescent practice of
the artist’s sketch report as a necessary supplement to the photograph
for the reporting of the day’s news. Beginning with a PM-sponsored
exhibition of contemporary, topical sketch reporting curated by
Ingersoll and Holger Cahill at MoMA in the spring of 1940, and
continuing through the daily publication in its pages of illustrated
news reports by such artists as William Gropper and William Sharp,
PM reintroduced the sketch report to journalism in explicit critical
relation to its then privileged medium—the press photograph—with
the intention of articulating through difference the unique rhetorical
properties of each and, by extension, granting visibility to the rhetorical
structure of pictorial journalism itself.
Simulated Photomontage in the Posters of the Khrushchev Thaw
(1956–64)
Masha Kowell, University of Pennsylvania
Most scholarship on Soviet photomontage focuses on its birth during
Russia’s experimental 1920s and its death in the early 1930s, under the
pressure of a mimesis-driven Socialist Realism. This paper, however,
explores the rehabilitation of this photographic technique as a complex
intermedia strategy in political posters after 1956—the year associated
with the beginning of Nikita Khrushchev’s liberalization. Relying on
contemporary critical response, the photographic theories of Roland
Barthes and Theodor Adorno, and theories of allegory, the paper
examines the phenomenon of hand-drawn, simulated photomontage in
early post-Stalinist posters. This change in official attitude emerged as a
compromise between the State and younger artists, between seemingly
objective “truth” and its “manufacture.” These artists depicted elements
of photomontage in order to reassert the posters’ right to “play” with
scale, disrupt temporal uniformity, and introduce narrative complexity,
while retaining the Stalinist preference for the hand-painted work.
Precarious Marks: Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs
Vered Maimon, Tel-Aviv University
Thomas Ruff’s series of photographs Jpegs can be seen as marking
either the logical end point of the photographic Conceptual document
or the complete evacuation of its critical claims. While in the 1970s
Conceptual documents aspired to the condition of impersonal, deskilled
technical data, Ruff’s Jpegs indicate that today photographic images are
pure information. At the same time, as digital images they vacate more
than reinforce postmodern strategies of appropriation by eliminating
the epistemological and aesthetic division between copy and original
and challenging the indexical truth status of photography. What were
once key critical strategies today mark the historical and technological
conditions of contemporary photographic images as deterritorialized,
groundless, and inherently mutable documents. Thus in both their form
and content Jpegs demonstrate the way the democratizing aspirations
of critical artistic practices were recuperated into communicative
capitalism (the consumer as producer) resulting in new forms of control
and violence.
Revolutions in China’s Printed Image: Print in
Modern China
Chairs: Shaoqian Zhang, Oklahoma State University; Sonja Kelley,
Maryland Institute College of Art
This session explores the development of print culture in modern
China. Historically printmaking developed in connection with
Buddhism, the followers of which could acquire merit by reproducing
sacred texts in large quantities. Printing techniques were eventually
utilized for several purposes, including book illustration and folk
religious imagery such as New Year pictures (nianhua). However,
toward the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and into the
Republican period (1912–49), print was utilized as new media for
political communication and commercial promotion. At the same
time, the introduction of lithography, along with foreign artistic and
cultural influences, further diversified Chinese print production.
Eventually the printed image took on the function of spreading political
ideologies during the war with Japan and the Communist Revolution,
and after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 it
served as a primary vehicle for progovernment propaganda. Since the
1980s Chinese print transformed once again as it entered the global
art market. This session not only evaluates the complex artistic and
cultural dimensions of Chinese prints but also examines the crucial
moments of the modern period during which this medium was given
new applications in political and commercial realms.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
146
Beyond the Mustard Seed Garden: Researching Multiplicity in
Early Modern Chinese Painting Manuals
J. P. Park, University of Colorado Boulder
Red Nostalgia and Amateur Artists: Peasant Prints in Qijiang,
China, in the Late Twentieth Century
Sonja Kelley, Maryland Institute College of Art
After its debut in 1679, the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting
(Jieziyuan huazhuan) was printed in multiple editions and circulated
more widely than any other art guidebook. It is thus recognized as the
most important work of the genre not only in early modern China but
also in Japan and Korea. Appreciation of the book’s significance has
extended into modern history: hundreds of scholarly writings treat it
as the focus of their research. In short, this manual has singlehandedly
eclipsed all other how-to-paint publications across the entirety of East
Asian art history. The book was not only recognized as a masterpiece
of its own day; it also served as a sort of artistic canon for later artists.
While illuminating some of the lesser-known characteristics of Chinese
painting manuals, this paper examines how the myth of the Mustard
Seed Garden took shape and has played out over the centuries.
In the village of Qijiang there is a small studio where local residents—
primarily farmers—use government-provided materials to make
woodblock prints in their free time, and the local government has built
a museum to showcase and sell their works. The studio was founded in
1984 with the help of academy-trained professional artists in response
to the popularity of rural art movements in other parts of China that
had their ideological roots in the Maoist celebration of peasant life.
Today the prints produced in Qijiang are marketed to (mainly domestic)
tourists and have also been exhibited nationally. This paper examines
the role of educated urbanites in the creation of these “peasant” prints,
and it explores the influence of the Maoist romanticization of the rural
on both the creation of the Qijiang studio and the development of a
market for its prints in contemporary China.
Combat and Collaboration: The Clash of Propaganda Prints
between the Chinese Guomindang and the Japanese Empire
in the 1930s–40s
Shaoqian Zhang, Oklahoma State University
Making a Case for Woodblock Prints: Chen Qi, Printmaking,
and a Print Market for Contemporary China
Claire Cuccio, independent scholar
Historically a China-oriented mentality dominated Sino-Japanese
cultural exchanges. Later, however, during their lightning campaign
from Manchukuo to Wuhan, the Japanese advertised themselves as
the legitimate protectors of Asian culture, and essential Chinese cities
under their occupation became a battleground for what Japan called
the New Order in East Asia (Tōa Shin Chitsujo). Some Japanese and
Chinese were able to agree upon a working relationship under a new
structure of political authority, and a number of propaganda posters
were produced to reflect these negotiations. After 1938 the Chinese
Guomindang began paying attention to propaganda art as well. By
examining the subsequent war of propaganda prints between the
Guomindang and the Japanese militarists during the 1930s–40s, this
paper demonstrates how the Chinese were able to utilize a variety of
signs, symbols, and art techniques to create their own propaganda-print
art in the effort to break from Tōa Shin Chitsujo.
In the current era of self-conscious cultural policy and evolving
national identity, the woodblock print has resurfaced in China as
an appealing representative mode. Chinese traditions in woodblock
printmaking combined with the form’s unique versatility make
woodblock prints an embodiment of nativist elements yet particularly
suited to address contemporary questions. This presentation considers
the voluminous print works of Chen Qi (b. 1963), who strives to
participate in both of these discourses. Chen Qi appropriates the
distinctly Chinese style of water-based woodblock printmaking (muban
shuiyin) in his explorations of time, process, visuality, materiality, and
material culture. This paper offers a report from Beijing, focusing on
how Chen Qi’s prints seek to satisfy an expanding domestic market of
contemporary art by and for Chinese.
Shrink to Fit, Fit to Survive: The Printed Image and the
National Engagement of Regional Ink Painting
Yang Wang, The Ohio State University
This paper examines how the translation of an artistic medium that
inherently yields unique images into a mass-produced form allowed
ink painting to retain its relevancy into the latter half of the twentieth
century. By examining the original paintings and reproductions of a
group of Xi’an-based artists active in the early People’s Republic of
China, this paper elucidates how added reproducibility contributed to
the recognition of a regional painting group who would come to be
known as the Chang’an School. Through stylistic manipulations that
transformed the ink medium without sacrificing its lyrical ambiguity,
the school availed the medium to mass publication, ultimately
prescribing a workable model for other artists of the time.
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
147
Index
A
Abbaspour, Mitra Monir 11
Abt, Jeffrey 114
Achilles, Rolf 18
Adams, Jeffrey 22
Adan, Elizabeth 120
Agyeman, Erica 105, 106
Ainsworth, Maryan Wynn 11
Aitken, Molly Emma 123
Ajmar, Marta 31
Al-Bahloly, Saleem 115
Albert, Samuel D. 84
Aldrich, Megan 12
Alhadeff, Albert 33
Allen, Taylor 24
Alsdorf, Bridget A. 58
Amstutz, Nina 64
Anderson, Brooke Davis 16
Anderson, Carrie 131
Anderson, Christina M. 12
Anderson, Leslie Anne 70
Anderson, Susan 13
Andrews, Julia 136
Apel, Dora 41
Apple, Jacki 14
Archino, Sarah 61
Armstrong, Helen 14
Assor, Nadav 135
Aurbach, Michael Lawrence 53
Aurisch, Helga 30
Auther, Elissa 68
B
Baade, Brian 97
Bagnoli, Martina 51
Bailey, Bradley 94
Bailey, Colin B. 14
Bailey, Xenobia 15, 16
Ballard, Horace 114
Barack, Sarah 97
Barber, Bruce 56
Barber, Charles 16
Barbour, Daphne 95
Barnett, Vivian Endicott 84
Barrett, Ross 58
Barrio-Garsd, Marta García 87
Barry, Kristin 17
Barteet, Charles Cody 17
Baseby, Francesca 140
Basic, Rozmeri 18
Baskins, Cristelle 131
Batchen, Geoffrey 18
Beachdel, Thomas 138
Becherer, Joseph Antenucci 143
Beck, Dylan 19
Becker, Carol 19
Becker, Cynthia 93
Bemis, Elizabeth 20
Benjamin, Elizabeth 35
Bent, George R. 20
Berger, LaNitra 30
Berger, Pamela 52
Berger, Susanna 87
Berkowitz, Elizabeth 37
Berrie, Barbara 95
Bérubé, Michael F. 127
Betancourt, Roland 16
Betzer, Sarah 21
Birnbaum, Paula 68
Biro, Yaëlle 54
Bischoff, Julia 109
Bishop, Brian 21
Black, Charlene Villaseñor 86
Black, Sara 103
Blair, Sheila 111
Blandford, Robert John 24
Bleicher, Steven 22
Bliss, Lucinda 47
Bloom, Jonathan 23, 111
Bodner, Neta 52
Bonansinga, Kathryn 98
Bonebakker, Odilia 13
Borja and Peinado 55
Born, Annick 12
Born, Robert 107
Bottinelli, Silvia 23
Bouché, Anne-Marie 61
Boylan, Alexis L. 85
Brachmann, Christoph 14
Bradbury, Leonie 24
Braddock, Alan C. 141
Bradley, Laurel 97
Brassett, Jamie 96
Brenner, Danica 107
Brett-Smith, Sarah C. 55
Bridgman, Rebecca 111
Brixey, Shawn 91
Brockman, Kristin M. 48
Brody, Jeanne K. 126
Brown, Kathryn 34
Brown, Rebecca 44
Brusius, Mirjam 82
Bucilla, Drew Elizabeth 140
Bulawsky, Lisa 132
Buller, Rachel Epp 61
Bullington, Judy 73
Burdette, Derek 39
Burk, Tara 24
Burke, Marcus Bruce 25
Buron, Melissa E. 128
Burr, Chandler 78
Burton, Johanna 39
Burton, Samantha 93
Buskirk, Martha 105
Butler, Sarah 45
Butler, Sharon 91
C
Cacchione, Orianna 25
Caen, Barbara 139
Campbell, Andrianna 65
Campbell, Erin 13
Campbell, Nancy 129
Cannady, Lauren 118
Capistrano-Baker, Florina H. 73
Carey, Moya 111
Carmi, Ayelet 69
Caro, Mario A. 100
Carrasco, Michael D. 26
Carso, Kerry Dean 142
Casid, Jill H. 27
Cassar, Ignaz 27, 73
Cassibry, Kimberly 28
Castañeda, Luis M. 49
Cast, David 72
Castleman, Shannon Lee 29
Cateforis, David 143
Cavallo, Bradley J. 109
Chadwick, Whitney 120
Chamberlain, Colby 133
Chametzky, Peter 30
Chanchani, Nachiket 123
Chang, Christina 22
Chan, Yuen Lai Winnie 142
Chavannes-Mazel, Claudine A.
12
Checketts, Richard 31
Chehab, Krystel 21
Chen, Anne Hunnell 29
Chiem, Kristen 32
Chin, Mel 42
Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate 91
Cibelli, Deborah H. 33
Clark, Joseph 89
Clark, Leah R. 130
Clayson, Hollis 34, 35
Clifford, Dale 77
Codell, Julie 35
Cohen, Brianne 110
Cohen, Sarah R. 103
Colaizzi, Vittorio 22
Colburn, Cynthia S. 32
Colby, Robert 98
Cole, Susanna D. L. 36
Coleman, Caryn 37
Concannon, Kevin C. 37
Condell, Caitlin 40
Conley, Brian 48
Connell, E. Jane 143
Connelly, Frances S. 37
Connor, Maureen 42
Considine, Liam 13
Contreras-Koterbay, Scott 115
Cook, Heidi A. 119
Cooke, Peter 33
Cooper, Thomas Joshua 87
Copeland, Huey 38
Corey, Pamela N. 76
Cortez, Constance 39
Cox-Richard, Lily 63
Craft, Catherine 39
Croft, Brenda 67
Cronan, Todd 66
Crum, Roger 20
Cuccio, Claire 147
Cuneo, Pia F. 103
Curley, John J. 83
Curtis, John W. 127
Cutler, Anthony 16
Cutler, Jody B. 23, 74
Cutler, Randy Lee 104
Cyr, Annette 47
D
Daffner, Lee Ann 11
d’Agostino, Paola 57
Dalal, Radha 43
D’Alessandro, Stephanie A. 84
D’Augustine, Corey 105
Davis, August Jordan 40
De Cupere, Peter 78
de Dobay Rifelj, Claire 141
de Ghetaldi, Kristin 96
De Girolami Cheney, Liana
41, 128
de Irujo, Teresa Calero Martínez
89
de St. Croix, Blane 41, 42
de Villiers, Nicholas 117
De Young, Justine 35
Deebi, Aissa 41
del Mar González-González,
María 71
Delamaire, Marie-Stéphanie 108
DelPlato, Joan 92
Derr, Diane 43
Deusner, Melody Barnett 128
Dewhurst, Marit 77
Dhar, Parul Pandya 124
Diclaudio, Loren 43
Diebold, William J. 109
Dismukes, Sara 43
Dissard, Laurent 76
Dixon, Catherine 49
Dobreva, Neli 134
Dobson, Charles 53
Dohmen, Renate 43
Dolkart, Judith F. 44
Dombrowski, André 58
Donnelly, Brian 44
Doquang, Mailan 52
Doris, David 94
Dorsch, Michael 45
Doussan, Jenny 107
Dowd, Doug B. 58, 59
Doyle, Jessica 46
Drobnick, Jim 78
Dumser, Elisha Ann 29
Dunn, Lindsay 114
Dunn-Morton, Julie 144
Dusseault, Ruth A. 47, 48
E
Eaton, Natasha 43
Eberly, Clifford 100
Edelstein, Bruce L. 72
Edwards, Mary D. 122
Eggler, Marianne 35
Ehlert, Jennifer 41
Ehrenpreis, David Henry 143
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
148
Eliason, Craig 49
Elliott, Gillian B. 52
Emerling, Jae 114
Emrich, Elizabeth 90
Engel, Emily A. 57
Erek, Ayse Nur 79
Escobar, Jesús 101
Esperdy, Gabrielle 49
Evans, Brian 47
Evans, Jean Marie 45
F
Fassl, Johanna 119
Favorite, Jennifer K. 41
Ferando, Christina 34
Ferguson, M. Brinker 134
Fialho, Alex 25
Fiedorek, Kara 11
Fischer, Andreas 54
Fitzpatrick, Edwina 143
Flaherty, George F. 49
Flanigan, Theresa 50
Fleck, Cathleen A. 51
Flint, Kate 124
Flora, Holly 50
Flores, Oscar Flores 57
Flores, Tatiana 19
Foerschner, Anja 23
Förster, Till 93
Foster, Elisa A. 112
Foster, Natalie 43
Fowlkes-Childs, Blair 29
Fox, Abram 116
Frakes, James 28
Franco, Ana M. 39
Franits, Wayne 91
Franses, Rico 17
Fraser, Pamela Lynn 52
Freddolini, Francesco 62
Freund, Amy 15
Fricke, Suzanne Newman 67
Friedman, Anna Felicity 73
Friedman, Elisabeth 54
Friedman, Julia 139
Frost, Charlotte 98
Futter, Catherine L. 12
G
Gagliardi, Susan Elizabeth 54
Galperin, Anne 130
Ganser, Julie 130
Gardner, Virginia 140
Garvin, Chris 55
Gasper-Hulvat, Marie 77
Gee, Gabriel 79
Gelfand, Laura D. 81
Gero, Robert 56
Getsy, David J. 63
Gibel, Rosanne 22
Girard, Catherine 103
Gisolfi, Diana 56
Goldrich, Amy J. 42
Goldsmiths 107
Goodrich, Peter 138
Gordon, R. E. H. 63
Gordo-Peláez, Luis J. 57
Gough, Maria 82
Grabski, Joanna 93
Grady, Elizabeth M. 42
Grant, Vera 125
Greaves, Kerry 110
Greenhill, Jennifer A. 59
Greet, Michele 70
Gregg, Ryan E. 87
Grewe, Cordula 21
Grigor, Talinn 32
Groom, Gloria 57
Grove, Jaleen 58
Gruber, Christiane 115
Gruber, Samuel D. 59
Gupta, Atreyee 19
Gutschow, Kai K. 59
H
Hacker, Katherine F. 76
Hadler, Mona 60
Haendel, Anitra 145
Hahn, Christine Y. 61
Hales, Derek 96
Hallam, Jennifer L. 113
Hamann, Byron 90
Hamilton, Jaimey 26
Hanas, Erin 31
Harpster, Grace T. 112
Harrison, Holly Rachel 104
Harvey, Benjamin 107
Haynes, Deborah 135
Healy, Mary 93
Hedquist, Valerie 92
Helbig, Elahe 33
Hellman, Amanda 126
Hellstein, Valerie 102
Helmreich, Anne 62
Hendrickson, Julia V. 131
Hepworth, Katherine 49
Herman, Margaret 70
Hernandez, Jillian 63
Hesser, Martina Pfleger 113
Heuer, Keely Elizabeth 79
Hill, Jason E. 146
Hills, Helen 32
Hoffman, Katherine 40
Hollis, Edward 34
Holloway, Camara Dia 124
Holmes, Ros 26
Holt, Ysanne 36
Holz, Keith 64
Homann, Lisa 54
Hopfener, Birgit 25
Horton, Heather 101
Horton, Jessica L. 64
Houghteling, Sylvia 75
Houston, Kerr 65
Houze, Rebecca 109
Huang, Chang 66
Huebner, Karla 110
Huemer, Christian 69
Huhtamo, Erkki 69
Hult, Robert 86
Hunter, Christina 89
Hutchinson, Elizabeth 67
Hyde, Melissa 113
I
Iles, Chrissie 105
Iskin, Ruth E. 68, 69
J
Jacobs, Lynn F. 81
Jacoby, Trudy Buxton 121
James, Robin 135
Jeanes, Paul 130
Jensen, Kirsten 70
Jiménez, Maya 70
Jochum, Richard 91
Johnson, Geraldine A. 71
Johnson, Herbert F. 90
Johnston, Patricia 72
Jolly, Howell 51
Jones, Amelia 120
Jones, Kimberly L. 27
Jones, Zoe Marie 84
Jovanovich-Kelley, Monica 119
Joyce, Hetty 122
Jozefacka, Anna 64
Jung, Hayoon 102
Justin, Gale 119
K
Kadoi, Yuka 111
Kaimal, Padma 74
Kalbfleisch, Elizabeth 126
Kalman, Lauren 23
Kalyva, Eve 27, 73, 74
Kamien-Kazhdan, Adina 94
Kang, Cindy 35
Kaplan, Paul H. D. 110
Karafel, Lorraine 139
Karge, Henrik 106
Kargon, Jeremy 60
Karoussos, Katerina 43
Kasdorf, Katherine E. 74, 75
Kashef, Niku 75, 113
Kavaler, Ethan Matt 80
Kaye, Richard 116
Kazemzadeh, Max 43
Keefe, Daniel 122
Kelley, Sonja 146, 147
Kellum, Barbara 29
Kelly, Patricia 28
Kerin, Melissa R. 75
Kern, Ulrike 13
Kerr-Allison, Amber 95
Khera, Dipti 124
Khullar, Sonal 75
Kienke, Chris 22
Kienle, Miriam Elizabeth 73
Kiese, Dara 45
Kihleng, Emelihter 134
Kilinc, Kivanc 76
Kilroy, Lauren Grace 86
Kim, Bokyung 90
Kim, Il 56
Kim, Jongwoo Jeremy 116
Kim, Linda 46
Kim, Sunglim 66
Kjaer, Lise 77
Klein, Adrienne G. 108
Kleinman, Neil 55
Kline, Jonathan 139
Knowles, Marika 34
Knox, Page 59
Ko, Yu Bong 77
Koch, Franziska 26
Kohn, Adrian 78
Kohn, Judith Berman 46
Koksal, Ayse Hazar 79
Kondoleon, Christine 79
Konowitz, Ellen 80
Kooi, Lee Vander 14
Koss, Juliet 81
Kotz, Liz 95
Kousser, Rachel 80
Kowalski, Jeff Karl 17
Kowell, Masha 146
Kramer, Kathryn 79
Krasner, Jenny 37
Kriebel, Sabine Tania 82, 145
Krinsky, Carol Herselle 83
Krohn, Deborah 13
Kühnel, Bianca 52
Kushner, Marilyn 84
Kutis, Barbara 23
L
Labrum, Bronwyn 99
Lachowicz, Rachel M. 63
Lamazares, Alexander 79
Lambert, Alix 42
Lamm, Kimberly 120
Lang, Colin 21
Lanier, Jessica 73
Larned, Emily 126
Larson, Barbara 46
Lasc, Anca I. 34, 35
Last, Nana 45
Lawrence, Robert 85
Laxton, Susan 83
Lazzaro, Claudia 122
Le Blanc, Aleca 86
Lederman, Russet Eve 138
Ledezma, Juan 50
Lee, Elizabeth 132, 133
Lee, Min Kyung 87, 88
Lee, Risha 74
Leemann, Judith 103
Lee-Niinioja, Hee Sook 90
Leibsohn, Dana 89
Lemakis, Suzanne F. W. 60
Lemay, Kate C. 137
Lenssen, Anneka 102
Leonard, Anne 24
Leopardi, Liliana 51
Lepage, Andrea 119
Lessing, Lauren 133
Levin, Cecelia 90
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
149
Lewis, Joseph S. 91
Lindsay, Suzanne 95
Linke, Uli 128
Linrothe, Robert 123
Liu, Lihong 108
Lockemann, Bettina 79
Lodder, Matt 58
Lomax, Suzanne 95
Long, Rose-Carol Washton 31
Lorenz, Katharina G. 72
Louden, Sharon 91
Loveless, Natalie S. 141
Lucey, Conor 13
Lucy, Martha 46
Luke, Christina 18
Luttikhuizen, Henry 91
Lyall, Victoria 17
Lyons, Beauvais 131
M
MacDonald, Shona 53
Mackenzie, Duncan 127
MacWilliam, David 104
Madar, Heather 92
Madsen, Annelise K. 137
Maeda, Tamaki 136
Magee, Carol 93
Maimon, Vered 146
Mainardi, Patricia 37
Maizels, Michael 88
Malleo, Maria Antonietta 38
Malone, Meredith 94
Manford, Steven 95
Mangieri, Anthony 80
Mannini, Lucia 41
Manthorne, Katherine 71
Marcus, Daniel 34
Marenko, Betti 96
Marincola, Michele 96, 97
Marketou, Jenny 42
Marks, Andrea 55
Marley, Anne 95
Marsh, Natalie R. 97
Martens, Maximiliaan 12
Marter, Joan 145
Mass, Jennifer 96
Mateo-Sevilla, Matilde María 112
Matteini, Michele 107
Matthan, Ayesha 44
Maulsby, Lucy 138
Maurer, Maria F. 113
Mauro, Hayes P. 142
Mazzanti, Anna 41
McCabe, Constance 11
McCampbell, Kathleen 27
McCarthy, Conal 99
McClean, Alick M. 138
McClintock, Diana Spitzer 98
McComas, Jennifer 69
McDonald, Fiona P. 99
McGarry, Renee 98
McHale, Katherine 116
McHam, Sarah Blake 56
McKelligan, Alberto 140
McKeown, Joanne 14
McLean, Ian 99
McMullin, Dan Taulapapa 100
McPhee, Sarah 100
McTighe, Sheila 103
Meagher, Michelle 69
Mecugni, Anna 116
Mednick, Thor J. 70
Melion, Walter S. 32
Meltzer, Eve 83
Merback, Mitchell 16
Merjian, Ara Hagop 101
Merriam, Susan Michelle 102
Mers, Adelheid 103
Metcalf, Megan 104
Metzger, Catherine 12
Meyer, Don 144
Meyer, James 38
Mezur, Katherine 28
Middleman, Rachel 64
Mileaf, Janine 39
Milkova, Liliana 98
Miller, Julia 20
Milton, Cynthia 50
Minor, Heather Hyde 100
Mohajeri, Shima Baradaran 76
Montenegro, Andrés 38
Montgomery, Harper 86
Moon, Virginia 66
Mooney, Amy M. 132
Moore, Anne Frances 105
Moore, Christopher 45
Moore, Marcus 26
Morihara, Chizu 77
Moriuchi, Mey-Yen 112
Moro, Simonetta 88
Morrall, Andrew 81
Moseman, Eleanor 110
Moser, Gabrielle 125
Moser, Jeffrey 62
Mundy, Owen 48
Muñoz, José Esteban 105
Murphy, Erin L. 11
Murray, Derek Conrad 65
Murray, K. Sarah-Jane 121
Murray, Scott 60
Musteata, Natalie 141
Musto, Jeanne-Marie 106
N
Nagel, Sidney R. 24
Nakagawa, Ikuyo 68
Nakamori, Yasufumi 117
Neginsky, Rosina 33
Neilson, Christina 107
Nesselrode, Sean 50
Nichols, Charlotte 96
Niell, Paul B. 57
Nielsen, Kristine 18
Nixon, Mignon 39
Noble, Petria 95
Nolan, Timothy 75
Nussbaum, Valentin 107
Nyong’o, Tavia 117
O
Obarski, Susan King 36
Obler, Bibiana 126
O’Brien, David 106
O’Brien, Erica 113
Oehlrich, Kristen 128
Oh, Hye-ri 67
Olin, Ferris 144
Olin, Martin 101
Olson, Todd 89
Olynyk, Patricia 108
O’Neill, Morna Elizabeth 63, 108
Orcutt, Kimberly 84
Orell, Julia 88
Orfila, Jorgelina 72
Orgeman, Keely 133
O’Rourke, Stephanie 118
Orr, Joey 104
Orr, Lynn Federle 128
Ostrow, Saul 22
Otani, Priscilla 109
Otto, Elizabeth 109, 110
Overton, Keelan 23, 111
P
Paeslack, Miriam 128
Page-Lieberman, Neysa Lillian
24
Palmer, Daniel S. 60
Palmer, Michael 95
Panzanelli, Roberta 21
Park, J. P. 147
Parvu, Ileana 125
Patton, Pamela A. 112
Paul, Annie 106
Pavlovic, Vesna 113
Paydar, Nikoo 93
Payne, Carol 125
Pearson, Andrea 113
Peng, Ying-chen 66
Percival, Melissa 15
Perl, AnnMarie 53
Perucic, Nadia 111
Petersen, Robert 77
Peters, Erin 76
Peterson, Michael 24
Petican, Laura 20
Pezalla-Granlund, Margaret 97
Pfohl, Katie 35
Pinson, Stephen 11
Pinto, John 101
Pistis, Eleonora 101
Poe, Alison 121
Pollock, Griselda 120
Pop, Andrei 114
Popkin, Maggie 80
Potts, Alex 31
Preziosi, Donald 114
Priyadarshini, Meha 89
Pruitt, Jennifer 115
Pugh, Emily 91
Pullins, David 15
Q
Quiles, Daniel 50
R
Raab, Jennifer 145
Radycki, Diane J. 69
Rager, Andrea Wolk 108
Ramadan, Dina A. 115
Ramalingam, Chitra 82
Rangel, Valerie 139
Ratte, Felicity 62
Rauser, Amelia 116
Reed, Christopher 116
Reeve, Matthew M. 36
Reinhardt, Kathleen 117
Reiss, Sheryl E. 118
Renn, Melissa 85
Resnik, Judith 137
Reyes, Ana Maria 87
Reyes, Hector 118
Reynolds, Jonathan M. 83
Rhor, Sylvia 119
Richmond, Susan 63
Richmond-Moll, Jeffrey G. 83
Rickard, Jolene 68
Rissler, Jennifer 129
Roberts, Sean 130
Robertson, Janice 119
Robinson, Hilary 120
Rodda, Jenni 121
Rodenbeck, Judith 142
Rognerud, Hilde Marie
Jamessen 70
Rojas, Elizabeth Fuentes 86
Romain, Julie 74
Römer, Stefan 26
Roos, Jane 58
Rose, Marice 121
Rosenblum, Charles L. 49
Rosenthal, Joy 47
Ross, Christine 28
Roth, Julia 71
Rothman, Roger 53
Rovine, Victoria L. 100
Rowell, Steve 48
Rubio, Fernando Domínguez 105
Ruble, Casey 122
Ruiz, Sandra 106
S
Saggese, Jordana Moore 25
Saletnik, Jeffrey 32
Salgirli, Saygin 76
Salseda, Rose G. 65
Saltzman, Lisa 82
Samsel, Francesca Gould 122
Sanabrais, Sofia 89
Sand, Alexa 51
Sands, Amy 47
Santone, Jessica 77
Sanyal, Sunanda 19
Sato, Norie 123
Saurisse, Pierre 40
Sawicki, Nicholas 31
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
150
Sbrissa, Claudia 123
Scheid, Kirsten 33
Scheper, George 17
Schiff, Karen 53
Schlatter, N. Elizabeth 123
Schwartz, Stacy R. 65
Schwendener, Martha 42
Scibilia, Emily 137
Scott, Dread 42
Scott, Victoria H. F. 126
Seaman, Kristen 80
Seaman, Natasha 92
Sears, Tamara I. 74, 123
Seggerman, Alexandra Dika 19
Selejan, Ileana 121
Sellers, Vanessa Bezemer 142
Seppi, Lisa Roberts 99
Seymour, Brian 124
Shambroom, Paul 48
Sheehan, Tanya 124
Sheffield, Clarence Burton 70
Shen, Kuiyi 136
Shimizu, Yoshiaki 138
Shirazi, Sadia 125
Shtromberg, Elena 88
Sicca, Cinzia Maria 62
Sidlauskas, Susan 68
Siegnethaler, Fiona 94
Sienkewicz, Julia A. 124
Silberstein, Rachel 67
Simone, Ashley 121
Simpson, Mary Caroline 144
Simpson, Robin 44
Singer, Joshua 45
Singh, Devika 72
Skelton, Kimberley 82
Sloboda, Stacey 36
Smentek, Kristel 131
Smith, Cherise 64
Smith, Katherine 66
Smith, T’ai 125
Smith, Terry 28
Smith, Timothy B. 122
Sokolicek, Alexander 121
Solari, Amara 17
Solomons, Delia 71
Sommer, Laura 20
Speed, Chris 91
Spence, Muneera 43
Sprague, Quentin 100
Stanton, Miriam Ashkin 88
Stayner, Christian 78
Steinborn, Jane 51
Stein, Perrin 15
Stephenson, Andrew 117
Sterling, Susan Fisher 145
Stern, Nathaniel 86
Stevens, MacKenzie 137
Stevenson-Stewart, Jessica 130
Stielau, Allison 62
Stoeckley, Clark Shaffer 136
Stollhans, Cynthia 20
Stoneking-Stewart, Jennifer
Laurel 126
Stoner, Joyce Hill 95
Stout, David 135
Stratton, Shannon Rae 127
Straughn, Celka 30, 123
Struhal, Eva 108
Sturman, Shelley 95
Stylianopoulos, Lucie 121
Su, Stephanie 67
Suarez, Ananda Cohen 112
Sudhalter, Adrian 11
Sukrow, Oliver 30
Sullivan, Erin 64
Sullivan, Graeme 104
Sullivan, Lynn 122
Sullivan, Marin R. 40
Sund, Judy 14
Sundberg, Martin 33
Sundt, Christine Leszczynski 127
Susik, Abigail 85
Swarts, Lynne 30
Swartz, Anne 144
Swenson, Kirsten 127
Szott, Randall David 52
Trever, Lisa Senchyshyn 39
Troemel, Brad 85
Tuchman, Phyllis 129
Tymkiw, Michael 102
Tynes, Robert 129
T
Tain, John 127
Tang, Jeannine 38
Tarver, Gina 50
Tate, Greg 16
Taylor, Alex J. 61
Taylor, Larry M. 99
Tedeschi, Martha 57
Tegtmeyer, Lina 127
Temkin, Susanna 71
Tentler, Gregory 95
Thomas, Joe A. 127
Thompson, Drew A. 94
Thompson, Jan Newstrom 128
Thompson, Krista 38
Todd, Ellen Wiley 119
Todd-Raque, Susan 98
To’Liman-Turalir, Juie 134
Tonga, Nina 133
Toteva, Maia 102
Traverse, Lucy 146
Trench, Carolyn J. 24
W
Waetjen, Jarrod 59
Wager, Susan 140
Waldron, Lawrence 27
Wang, Ching-Ling 108
Wang, Yang 147
Waraich, Saleema 92
Wardani, Farah 90
Wasserman, Andrew 137
Wasserman, Nadine 44
Watanabe, Toshio 136
Watenpaugh, Heghnar 84
Watson, Keri 66
Watson, Mark James 65
Wattles, Miriam 77
Way, Jennifer 44
Webster, Sally 136
Weichbrodt, Elissa Yukiko 25
Weigert, Laura 21
Weil, Harry 141
Weinshenker, Anne Betty 118
Weisberg, Ruth 137
U
Um, Nancy 130
Urban, Jason 131
Ursitti, Clara 78
Ury, Tanya 31
V
Valva, Margherita D’Ayala 23
van Dyke, James A. 110
Van Eck, Tricia 132
van Haaften-Schick, Lauren 132
Van Hoesen, Brett 109, 110
van Loon, Annelies 95
van Oosterwijk, Anne 12
van Tuinen, Ilona 12
Vanhaelen, Angela 81
Veder, Robin 132
Verbeek, Caro 78
Vercoe, Caroline 133, 134
Verstegen, Ian 134
Villela, Khristaan D. 26
Vincent, Rickey 15
Vinebaum, Lisa 126
Vogel, Jenny 135
Volk, Steven S. 24, 98
von Preussen, Brigid 36
Weisenfeld, Gennifer 138
Wells, K. L. H. 139
Wendler, Reinhard 81
Wentrack, Kathleen 140
Werness, Maline 26
Wharton, Glenn 105
Wheatley, Steven C. 141
Whitaker, Amy 55
White, Anthony George 101
White, Michael 40
White, Tony 142
Whitlum-Cooper, Francesca 116
Whittington, Karl 88
Whyte, Ryan 118
Widder, Lynnette 59
Widrich, Mechtild 28
Wilkins, Catherine 30
Wilkins, Teresa 133
Willette, Jeanne 99
Wilson, Bronwen 102
Wilson, Kristina 61
Wilson, Susan 142
Winn, Lance 21
Wisotzki, Paula 143
Wojcik, Pamela Robertson 61
Wolanin, Barbara A. 144
Wolf, Caroline M. 84
Wolfthal, Diane 12
Wong, Winnie 75
Wood, Susan 29
Woodruff, Lily 94
Woodward, Richard B. 54
Wosk, Julie 138
Wright, Maia 45
Wyllie, Cherra 27
Wyman, Jessica 56
Y
Yanow, Sacha 42
Yarrington, Alison 145
Yasukawa, Allison 104
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard 62
Yerkes, Carolyn Y. 82
Yonan, Michael 117
Young, Megan Koza 145
Z
Zeller, Susan Kennedy 67
Zemel, Carol 37
Zervigon, Andres Mario 82, 145
Zhang, Shaoqian 146, 147
Zimmerman, Claire 60
Zuniga, Tracy M. 25
C A A 2 0 1 3 F EB RUARY 13– 16
151

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