by Jon Lackman | 10 May 2012 | Uncategorized
So much to write, so little time. Tempted as I am to relate the story of the 13-year-old who corrected a Metropolitan Museum map, I want to talk today about the new Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, which took an unexpected, fascinating dip into art history last week with its 8th episode, “When Nouns Grew Genitals.” Languages that assign genders to nouns, Lexicon Valley notes, often assign them arbitrarily. But is it possible, they ask, that even in those cases the assignments influence the way we think of those words?
To wit, “Does the grammatical gender of nouns in an artist’s native language enable us to predict how those artists will personify things in their art?” co-host Mike Vuolo asks psychologist Lera Boroditsky:
Boroditsky [and Edward Segel] identified works by Italian, French, German and Spanish artists, all grammatically gendered languages, from around 1200 AD up to today. Artworks that depicted a personification of an abstract entity, things like justice, time, fame, peace, truth. Their sample size was about 800 [drawn from ARTstor] and they found that 78% of the time the gender in the artwork matched the grammatical gender of the word being personified in the artist’s native language. In other words, if in your native language death is feminine you’re far more likely to personify death as a woman.
by Jeremy Miller | 4 May 2012 | Books, Modern, Photography
Book Review: Bouvet, Vincent and Gérard Durozoi. Paris Between the Wars 1919-1939: Art, Life and Culture. Trans. Ruth Sharman. New York: Vendome Press. Print. 2010.
Art is neither created nor viewed in a vacuum. It is this notion perhaps that helped to inspire Vincent Bouvet and Gérard Durozoi in the organization of their recent book Paris Between the Wars 1919-1939: Art, Life and Culture. Bouvet and Durozoi’s effectively chosen subtitle prepares the reader to view the arts of the period in a set of wider contexts. With chapters discussing daily life in Paris, the history and experiences of this city, and the influential position held by the decorative arts, the authors subtly and effectively reframe their view of artistic life in this often-studied time and place. Tellingly, painting and sculpture are addressed together in the fifth chapter of the book, preceded by the chapters described above as well as “The World of Fashion.” With following chapters that discuss photography, film, advertising, literature, and music, readers are left with a strong understating of the cross-pollination endemic of artistic production in 1920s and 1930s Paris.
Nonetheless there are moments when the purpose of this inclusiveness is not entirely clear. Bouvet’s chapter “The City of Light” provides an overview of major infrastructure and civic development projects undertaken in Paris in the years after World War I. Each of these projects is treated briefly, as one might expect given the scope this book. Unfortunately what they meant for the development of the arts in Paris remains unclear. For example, Bouvet’s analysis of public transport in Paris discusses new motorways, the availability of air travel, and the development of Paris’ tram system. How did this mobility affect the production, display, or sale of art? Did it serve as a subject for art, or alter the consciousness of artists, or their sense of modernity? Certainly this new public mobility had effects on the lives of artists. Here, as in other areas, Bouvet and Durozoi have suggested areas of potential influence on the arts that may be further explored in more focused studies.
The second guiding principle of the book is to include an abundance of relevant, high quality images. Far from making the study into a picture-book, the images reproduced throughout the text serve to frame, inform, and illustrate the text quite effectively. For example, two color photographs of the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriel Modernes are displayed on pages 106 and 107. The photograph on page 106 shows the Porte d’Orsay entrance to the Exposition on what appears to be a quiet day. A few blurry figures stand near the entrance, while the sharply angled lighting and scattered leaves suggest early autumn. The entrance gate is overshadowed by a large decorative panel that is about 60 feet tall and decorated in a Cubist style. The image in this panel is composed of six figures arranged vertically, each representing one of the modes of art on display in the Exposition. The impressive scale of this entrance helps to underscore the powerful role that the 1925 Exposition has played in the development of both decorative and fine arts. Printed on page 107 is a color photograph showing two of the department store pavilions from the Exposition. The distinctively Art Deco architecture and signage is familiarized by the green of the grass, blue tones in the sky, and sharp red fence demarcating space in the left background. That color photographs of high descriptive value survive at all from the 1925 Expo is remarkable. In the context of Bouvet’s chapter on the decorative arts, they help to bring the artistic experience described by the author closer to reality.
One of the great joys of studying history is the thrill of imagining living and operating in a different time and place. Though not often discussed by historians, this imaginary process is a great reward of deep archival and scholarly research. In the hands of Bouvet and Durozoi the reader’s imaginary experience is quite strong, supported by the numerous and descriptive images, and the ambiance of the everyday. Rich in quality images, thoughtfully organized, and lucidly written, Bouvet and Durozoi’s addition to the vast literature on Les Années folles is directed primarily at readers who are fairly new to its subject. Nonetheless I suspect that those who have studied the arts of the period will benefit from this text, and find its carefully selected images and broad overview of the experience of artistic Paris in the 1920s and 1930s rewarding.
by Liam Considine | 26 April 2012 | Modern, Photography
The term “snapshot” predates the invention of photography. From 1808, the term has meant “a quick or hurried shot taken without deliberate aim, esp. one at a rising bird or quickly moving animal.” It is strange to think that this hunting term for a spontaneous and haphazard reaction would ever be associated with the Nabis – those “prophets” of Modernism gathered around Maurice Denis’ assertion that a picture is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order. Nevertheless this is the evidence presented by “Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard” currently on view at the Phillips Collection; the exhibition provides yet another opportunity to consider the technological mediation of perception and the fraught relationship between painting and photography.
Rooted in the discovery of thousands of snapshots in Edouard Vuillard’s family archive, the exhibition shows Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Henri Rivière Félix Vallotton as well as Dutch painter George Hendrik Breitner and Belgian Henri Evenepoel to have been swept up in the craze for handheld cameras that seized the United States and Europe after the invention of the Kodak by George Eastman in 1888. By pairing over 200 of these photographs with 70 paintings, prints and drawings, “Snapshot” forces us to see the work of these artists through their respective engagements with photography.
Though visually exhausting, the sheer number of photos in the show conveys the explosion of images brought by the Kodak, and makes palpable the atmosphere of technological novelty. Aimed at cultivating a mass amateur market, Kodak cameras became a phenomenon in the 1890s by making everyday life a subject for photography. Marketed with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest”, the Kodak freed consumers of the need for technical or aesthetic aptitude. Within reach of the middle-class consumer, the box cameras came loaded with a 100-exposure roll, and could be sent to a processing facility where the negatives were developed, the camera reloaded and mailed back to the owner. Indeed these devices seemed designed to prevent deliberate composition: held at the waist, the operator could only approximate the frame and focus through a distant viewfinder. As Clément Chéroux argues in the catalogue, the Nabis were not among the amateurs of the fin de siècle who formed photo-clubs and considered photography a hobby. Rather, these were photo-dilettantes who engaged in visual notetaking of daily life and social gatherings, comparable to today’s Facebook mobile uploads.
This artlessness would seem to place the snapshot at an almost inconceivable distance from the virtuosic manipulation of pigment and surface texture that, giving rise to indeterminate spatial and psychological scenarios, creates an almost synaesthetic effect in the paintings of Bonnard and Vuillard. However by highlighting the snapshot’s contingencies of space, cropping, shadow and depth of field, as well as the intimate subject matter brought into view, we are given the sense that around century’s end photography had permeated these painters’ visual awareness in subtle and elusive ways. For instance Nude in an Interior (c. 1935) is a shimmering image of Marthe at her bath that displays Bonnard’s anguishing ability to emanate light from within his paintings. It bears a resemblance to the photograph of Marthe in a similar pose and setting hanging next to it, and we think that we have arrived at the source. However the snapshot, Marthe in the Bathtub, Vernouillet, was taken in 1910, and predates the painting by twenty-five years. In the case of Bonnard, who lost interest in photography in 1916, the snapshot seems to have been a brief preoccupation with questionable authority over the chromatic and spatial investigations that he sustained into the middle of the last century.
Relationships between painted and photographic images are conjured and troubled throughout the exhibition. Vuillard’s Child Playing: Annette in Front of a Wooden Chair (1900) is emblematic of his signature conflation of the subject’s absorptive experience with a patterned interior. Its relation to the strikingly similar snapshot hanging next to it of a boy sitting in a room draped with correspondingly decorative arabesques seems clear, but the photograph was taken by Evenopoel – the Belgian who was included in the exhibition because of his thematic and stylistic convergence with the Nabis.
The final room presents the highlight of the exhibition: a suite of paintings by Vuillard paired with snapshots from the cache discovered in his family archive. Even here, the relationship between his camerawork and painted interiors is mostly a matter of conjecture. In a series of lively snapshots Misia Natanson – wife of Revue blanche editor Thalée Natanson– mugs for and returns Vuillard’s plainly infatuated gaze. However, in the corresponding painting, In Front of the Tapestry: Misia and Thalée Natanson, Rue St. Florentin (1899), her face is obscured and turned away from view. Thalée’s hand likewise covers his face, and the two figures merge into a muted decorative scheme that belies the emotionally fraught scenario. The famous Interior with Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893) creates a spatial and psychological claustrophobia that is echoed in the surrounding snapshots of Vuillard’s family apartment, yet the painting predates Vuillard’s engagement with photography by two years. Can it be argued that photography affected Vuillard’s painting before he owned a camera?
The Nabis are often associated with a hermetic retreat from the disruptions of modern life into an aesthetics of bourgeois interiority. Recently, T.J. Clark has held up this aestheticism as an alternative to the 20th century’s legacy of avant-garde negation. By conjuring “a sense of what the aesthetic existence keeps at bay”, Clark writes “Bonnard’s art, in its privacy and privation, internalizes the disaster of the twentieth century in a way that all forms of ‘modern’ fellow-travelling – even the noblest and most well-meaning – to my mind fail to do. Retreat and dream, in other words, are a necessary moment of the art of the last hundred years.” However the comparison that “Snapshot” solicits with the circulation of images in present-day forms of social media suggests that, beginning with the Kodak, this aestheticist retreat was becoming less and less possible, and that one could not return to a form of painting that was unaware of photography. The snapshot, as Douglas Nickel writes, changed “the way people regarded their own histories…the way lives were lived became entangled in the way lives were represented. A modern society of the spectacle was taking shape.”
Could these artists have been aware of the historical implications of this vast expansion of image production at the end of the 19th century? The tension in “Snapshot” between handmade and mechanical images gives a sense that the stakes for art were becoming clear. Though they thrilled to the snapshot in life, the ambivalence of the Nabis’ painted response anticipates Walter Benjamin’s judgment of 1931: “the amateur who returns home with great piles of artistic shots is in fact no more appealing a figure than the hunter who comes back with quantities of game that is useless to anyone but the merchant. And the day does indeed seem to be at hand when there will be more illustrated magazines than game merchants. So much for the snapshot.”
by Annie Harris-Kornblith | 10 April 2012 | Islamic
Walter Denny, senior consultant to the Met’s new Islamic galleries, was my first art history professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His intro class had two hundred students. Arriving the first day, I noted students clustered around the podium. Through them I could see a robust man with white hair and a bright purple laptop – the first hint of his animate persona. Although I don’t remember Denny’s first words to the class, I recall his ability to capture attention and respect. He said, “People often tell me I’m intimidating, but once they get to know me, they find that I’m really quite sweet.” I later checked ratemyprofessor.com and found a certain amount of “Works you like a mule” and “BEWARE.” Others complimented his teaching, personality and infectious passion. “Walter is really a throwback to the old-fashioned scholar,” one report notes astutely. Although my impression of Professor Denny has changed over the years, one thing was made very clear on that first day: This man doesn’t mess around, or stop for breath. As the note-taking began, he warned us, “Drop your pencil and you’ll miss one hundred years.” Still, he manages to leaven the lecturing with tales of his most recent misfortunes. “The vending machine ate my quarters!” “I walked into a glass wall!”
When I walk into Denny’s office to interview him for this article, I no longer have concerns about tests or papers. As he finishes off his chocolate milk, I pull up a chair, excited to learn where he came from, how he chose Islamic art, and his impressions of working at the Met. Denny grew up in small-town Iowa where he developed interests in physics, math and music. At fifteen, his father got a Fulbright to teach physics at Robert College in Istanbul, where Denny fell in love with architecture, one building in particular: the Mosque of Rustem Pasha. He found it in a French guidebook, given to him by a friend’s mother. “‘It’s very beautiful,’ she said. ‘You might want to take a look.’” Eight years later, Denny wrote his thesis at Harvard on this very mosque, whose “decoration came at a crucial moment in Ottoman Turkish art in the 16th century.” Forty-three years later, this fall, he’s doing an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington on this same period in which Turkish art changed suddenly.
Although Denny is quick to note, “I wanted to be a teacher since I was two,” he has always divided his time between academia and museum-work. He’s worked for the Harvard Art Museums, the Smith College Museum of Art and, for the last five years, the Met.
Every good art historian has to know something about museums because that’s where the art is. They used to ask the bank robber, Willie Sutton, why he robbed banks and he said ‘because that’s where the money is stupid!’ And it’s true…There’s a group of art historians today that believe that theory is their province and that they shouldn’t have to deal with things and quite frankly that’s an attitude that has come into graduate schools and it’s just as wrong as wrong can be.
Denny travels from Amherst, Massachusetts, to New York every week. His involvement with the Met began nearly five years ago, when a colleague asked Denny if he had a student interested in working on the museum’s Ottoman Turkish art. Denny decided that he himself was interested. He was especially excited to research a particular carpet that had been deemed fake by four art historians and warehoused. He smiles, telling me “It’s one of the greatest carpets they’ve got and in another couple of months it’ll be on display.” (He’ll be giving a lecture on it this week at the museum.) Denny has also worked on the Met’s website, photos, educational materials, tour-guide training and audio guides.
For the new Islamic galleries, he “worked with conservators, designers, helped to write the labels, wall texts and provided photographs.” He’s proud of the galleries’ architecture, which serves to contextualize Islamic art, he feels. The courtyard was made by Moroccan craftsmen and the Damascus room is “a room right out of a palace in the 18th century.” Generally, it seems that “people really love [these areas].” Although some critics believe museums shouldn’t present architectural reconstructions, Denny defends them. “The museum really told [the craftsmen] what we wanted. That is, we had art historians and professionals do all the planning and then the craftsmen executed it according to what we wanted.” Denny said that “the biggest surprise [he] had was how smoothly things went. There were so many people working on this, so many people on the team and they were so diverse. It was a very nice surprise.”
Denny’s appointment at the Met was originally planned to end with the opening of the galleries, but he was asked to stay, to help rotate the collections. Preserving the objects requires replacing silks every three months, wool every six months, and so on. The museum’s Islamic collection consists of 12,000 works, ten percent on view at a time. Accordingly, the tours, audio, and wall text must also change. So it seems that Denny will stay for years to come, studying the art of his fascination.
I asked Denny if the events of September 11, 2001 changed the museum’s plans for the galleries. As he explains,
They went right ahead with their plans and pretty much what we have there today is what they intended to have all along…I think people are more interested than they would have been, but the Met’s mission is pretty clear. The museum is careful not to have a political agenda and I think it works. These questions were all asked by reporters and Philippe de Montebello, who of course was there when I wasn’t, stated very clearly and unequivocally that this has been in our plans all along. This is not a response to political events. The museum is simply doing what the museum does.
Denny says he hopes the galleries will help to accurately inform people about Islam. He says that the department’s “new mantra is ‘from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean,’” meaning that Islamic art is not monolithic and exists in many different cultures – “Arabs, Turks, Persians, Indians, all kinds of ethnic groups, all kinds of languages.” He notes that there is secular Islamic art, not just religious, and that despite popular belief there are many human and animal figures. Most importantly, however, is the understanding we gain of the people, who as Denny explains “are just like us. Some of them are fun loving, some of them aren’t, they like to laugh, they like to have a good meal and a good time and even lift a good glass, which they’re not supposed to do. And the art helps to show this.” The galleries have been well received. In their first four months 360,000 visited, an extraordinary number for such a small section.
Still thinking about his year abroad at age fifteen, he tells me toward the end of the interview, “What really astounded me at the beginning was not how different Istanbul was from Grinnell, Iowa, because it certainly was different, but once I got to know people, how very similar they were.”
by Ana Perry | 9 April 2012 | Uncategorized
Critic Hilton Kramer died this past week at the age of 84. The New York Times writes:
A resolute high Modernist, he was out of sympathy with many of the aesthetic waves that came after the great achievements of the New York School, notably Pop (“a very great disaster”), Conceptual art (“scrapbook art”) and postmodernism (“modernism with a sneer, a giggle, modernism without any animating faith in the nobility and pertinence of its cultural mandate”).
Alejandro Zaera-Polo has been selected as the dean of Princeton University’s School of Architecture. Zaera-Polo has been a visiting lecturer in architecture at Princeton since 2008. On top of his work at Princeton, Zaera-Polo is also the Berlage Chair at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Norman R. Foster Visiting Professorship of Architectural Design at Yale University. Alejandro Zaera-Polo will succeed Stan Allen, the dean since 2002, who will return to full-time teaching and architectural design.
Joel Smith has been appointed the first curator of photography at the Morgan Library & Museum. Smith has been working at Princeton University Art Museum since 2005 and was named Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography there in 2011.
Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada has named Gaëtane Verna as director. Verna was previously director and chief curator at the Musée d’art de Joliette in Lanadaudière, Québec.
Sotheby’s has appointed Ryoichi Hirano as International Senior Specialist for Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art and Deputy Managing Director, Sotheby’s Japan. Hirano is the former head of the art gallery Hirano Kotoken and gallery director of the Yayoi Gallery in Tokyo.
by Jon Lackman | 4 April 2012 | CAA2013, Conferences, Contemporary, Theory
CAA has announced the sessions for the 2013 conference. The three I’m most looking forward to:
Art and “The War on Terror”: Ten Years On
August Jordan Davis, Winchester School of Art, A.J.Davis@soton.ac.uk
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. This session offers a forum for a timely review of this decade of art and war (and their interpenetration). The session consists of a roundtable of artists, art historians, and critics, including Martha Rosler, Jonathan Har- ris, and Nicholas Mirzoeff, followed by papers. Papers might address the art and activism of Artists Against the War; pertinent curato- rial projects of this period (e.g., the Whitney Biennial of 2006: Day for Night); the work of “embedded” artists; popular culture’s role in shaping narratives of the wars (e.g., films including World Trade Center, Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Stop-Loss); or consider what the legacy of this recent past might mean for art today.The “New Connoisseurship”: A Conversation among Scholars, Curators, and Conservators
Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; and Perry Chapman, University of Delaware
A conversation on the past, present, and future of the “new connoisseurship” brings together leading figures from the academy, mu- seum, and laboratory to consider what matters about the material objects we study. The aim is to go beyond stocktaking to recuperating and repositioning the material object as subject for art-historical research. What lessons can we learn from the ever “new” and serially “scientific” connoisseurship, from Morelli’s forensics to Berenson’s reliance on photographic evidence, to today’s “technical art history”? Given the fate of the Rembrandt Research Project, as well as what scholarship has revealed about artistic practice in the workshop, can or should we aspire to establish a corpus of “authentic” or “autograph” works, or is this a chimera, the wrong question to ask? At this moment can we look squarely and constructively at connoisseurship, a word that has come to be spoken with disdain by so many schol- ars, redolent of an outmoded practice? “Close looking,” so fetishized and admired and freighted a concept, neither accounts for what is below the visible surface, nor recognizes the interventions and transformations of appearance of that surface resulting from the vicissi- tudes of time and restoration. What can be gained from research and rethinking the historical record as it becomes increasingly available in conservation archives? How can we ask better questions and benefit from our varied categories of knowledge going forward? What can or should art historians do to take advantage of—and to train a generation of “new connoisseurs” conversant in—new developments in conservation and technical studies?The Changing Complexion of Theory
Ian Verstegen, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, ianverstegen@yahoo.com
This panel is devoted to registering the fundamentally chang- ing nature of contemporary theory. For many years, theory was influenced by post-structuralism, and the theories of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault were largely language-based and devoted to forms of nominalism. 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 has disrupted this status quo. 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. This panel not only seeks to trace the influence of such newer ideas but also raise the very question of theory in the humanities. Papers are sought that go beyond the exegesis of
recent theorists and discuss the relation of theory and the func- tion of relativism and objectivism in the academy.
The Art History Newsletter is devolving more and more into a franchise of the CAA PR office. Among recent postings, 14 of the last 15 regard our inescapable disciplinary über-organization. Nothing against CAA, we’re all members, but that means we’ve all been perusing the 2013 conference CFP since it’s been released and made our own top session picks. Isn’t there anything else going on in art history at the moment?
(This because I miss the “old” Art History Newsletter, which always surprised me with the latest news, juicy tidbits or unexpected perspectives…)
Fair point. Inescapable to some extent this time of year with the conference and awards in swing, but I will certainly try to favor the rest of the art history universe in the weeks and months to come. By the way, I’m always looking for contributors….
Odd that Bourdieu is being described as a recent theorist. More perplexing still is the mention of Jacques Deleuze…Who is this mysterious man?
oh dear…I suppose he meant Gilles.
by Vanessa Rocco | 20 March 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences, Modern, Photography
As I headed out to Los Angeles from New York last month, a remark by Mary Anne Staniszewski kept coming back to me. I spent a stimulating evening last winter at a small alternative art space on Ludlow Street listening to her, Martin Beck, and Ken Saylor talk about the practice of putting together exhibitions as a self-conscious act, and Mary Anne said that “curating” was definitely one of the words of 2011, stretching far beyond the art world. Indeed it has been popping up everywhere. And I became one of the fashion victims, as I considered how to “curate” my way through the sessions of the packed 100th CAA.
Wednesday, February 22
I took a flight from JFK at the crack of dawn, to arrive in time for “The Challenge of Nazi Art.” This was the only panel, other than my own, that I attended from start to finish. The opening remarks by Christian Fuhrmeister made it clear that the organizers wanted to open a dialogue about something that art historians have found it almost impossible to discuss, something I have also struggled with as a scholar of Weimar-era photography and exhibition culture. I was particularly drawn in by Despina Stratigakos’s visual evidence of how domestic design was pitched to young Nazi couples, and that what we think of “modernism” still seeped into much of that design, eliminating an easy bifurcation. Former CAA president Paul Jaskot, a great, natural speaker, spoke about the concept of “banality” and the need for art historical analysis of the era’s cultural products. More provocative questioners may have been intimidated by the largeness of the (double) room, but all in all it was a highly thought-provoking panel.
Thursday, February 23
Packed day. I spoke first thing in the morning, about “Radical Photo Spaces” at a session called “The Other Histories of Photography: The First 100 Years.” I thought our turnout was impressive, considering the time and that we were unfortunately competing with another session on photography (“Photographic Practices in Latin America”) and a video/film themed session that I was pining for (“Mobile Spectatorship”). I enjoyed going last: I think it’s a law of physics that you get the most questions—when I spoke in Chicago two years ago I went second-to-last and got zero questions! But the crowd was clearly interested in one of the main points of the session as a whole, which was how to bring attention to alternative photo practices that have been left out of the canon, and whether that can directly impact how photography is shown in museums now. Consensus seemed to be: yes, but it still doesn’t happen often enough. It’s always invigorating when the historical feels relevant to the audience.
After lunch I finally got to “curate” a time slot for myself, 2:30-5. I started at the standing-room-only Distinguished Scholar Session honoring Rosalind Krauss. Bois did an affectionate opening, and I stayed for Harry Cooper, which I loved, to hear how a practicing curator was influenced by her scholarship, particularly on sculpture. Then I exited to support a former peer of mine from the CUNY Graduate Center, Cary Levine, who was speaking about Pettibon and hardcore punk in a session called “Towards a Rock and Roll History of Contemporary Art” which sounded almost too cool, but Cary did a great job of integrating Pettibon’s subversive Zine imagery with the music of California punkers Black Flag. It brought back memories of my childhood in San Diego in the 1980s when more sophisticated kids were wearing those T-shirts in seventh grade while I still thought “punk” was a playground slur. Although pretty beat, I finished at the HGCEA session (Historians of German and Central European Art) to show fealty, as a member to an organization co-founded by my dissertation advisor, Rose-Carol Washton Long. And speaking of HGCEA, there was a super-cool dinner for members that same evening on the top floor of a downtown theater space, a space so raw that it looked like someone had just torn down some scenery from the walls. Very hip for HGCEA!
Friday, February 24
The morning session was another case of me bopping around. I went to “Live Forever: Performance Art in the Changing Museum Culture” and watched Pablo Helguera, the first speaker, upend the normal mode of speaking from the podium, which was mesmerizing. He engaged with an historical topic (why a preponderance of creative minds all came from a particular small town in Mexico) but turned all the lights off, put a spotlight on himself, and spoke in the middle of the room— a performance-paper hybrid. Kudos to him for thinking outside the box (throughout the conference he also took part in graduate-seminar style gatherings that were open to the public, another very cool way to push for feedback through new models of learning). I made brief stops at “The Modern Gesamtkunstwerk” and the Radical Art Caucus session, before moving on to my shift at the Book Fair table of the Women’s Art Caucus, to try to sell copies of my now-in-paperback The New Woman International, co-edited with Elizabeth Otto. People were not in heavy-duty buying mode, but many flyers and review copies were distributed, which is always a good thing, and these tables become places to discourse with long-lost friends. Once our shift was over at 1pm, I noticed another publication table giving away free food and drink, and ran into grad school classmates who had scattered across the country. That evening my husband, daughter and I met up with my cousin JD Walsh who is now a television actor and director, so we really had the whole breadth of the LA experience, not least of which was staying at the Biltmore, the most glamorous convention hotel ever.
Saturday, February 25
I only attended morning sessions so that we could take my daughter to Disneyland. I was particularly enthused by Kim Sichel’s paper in Jordana Mendelson’s session, “The 1930s,” where she focused on Brassaï’s book Paris de nuit. All forms of alternative (meaning outside canonical museum presentation) photography circulation fascinate me at the moment, including those in books, and Sichel showed Brassaï’s images as they appeared in the original publication, with full bleeds, even spilling over onto the steel spirals—gorgeous. In keeping with my attempt to see as many diverse photo-based papers as possible, I made a last minute dip-in to “Pop and Politics, Part II” to hear Martin Berger talk about Warhol’s Race Riots. This session proved to me that yes, going to CAA can be important to reinvigorate old talking points in lectures to our students. I use Race Riots routinely in my history of photo lectures but I had never closely contemplated the contemporaneous meaning of the word “Riot” before: that although Warhol seems sympathetic to the protesters in his images, the use of the word “Riot” was actually considered quite incendiary and helpful to the anti-protester position. So the images are, at best, ambivalent. Thank you Martin Berger!
All in all, I would say it was a most stimulating CAA, although I have heard some differ. Maybe I got into it because, as a colleague said to me, it was “a great CAA for Germanists.” But mostly I think it fulfilled what we should expect from these gatherings: new ideas, old friends, and a reminder of why we do what we do.
Thank you for posting this! Great to read.
by Ana Perry | 14 March 2012 | Uncategorized
According to the Yale Daily News, Yale art-history department chair Alexander Nemerov will leave after this semester for Stanford. There he joins Chinese art specialist Richard Vinograd, former Art Bulletin editor Nancy Troy, who was recruited to Stanford in 2010 from USC, and others.
Artforum reports that the Tel Aviv Museum of Art appointed longtime Israel Museum chief curator Suzanne Landau as its director and chief curator. “This announcement comes as a surprise to those who thought the dual position would be split between two people, a curator based locally and a director hailing from abroad, according to Haaretz. Landau will be replacing Mordechai Omer, the former director and chief curator, who died eight months ago.”
According to The New York Times, the J. Paul Getty Museum announced that Timothy Potts, former director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, will replace Michael Brand who left the museum in 2010.
Michael Brand was recently named Director of the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, according to ABC Sydney. “His first priority is to ensure the Gallery remains ‘a popular, admired and loved gallery, in a great international city.’ And one thing he’s keen to do is continue the ‘ambitious’ trend the Gallery’s had of generating its own exhibitions instead of taking packaged versions.”
On February 29, the Russian artist and historian Eliy Belyutin died. In 1954 he founded a school of painting called “New Reality” that focused on artists’ feelings and thoughts. He also wrote art-history books including two volumes on 19th century Russian art, which he co-wrote with Nina Molina.
by Megan Koza Young | 4 March 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences
So, this missive is a bit late, I know, but this was by far the busiest CAA I have been to in years. It was also the friendliest. Perhaps everyone was feeling the celebratory spirit of the CAA Centennial. Nowhere did I see the heckling or browbeating of scholars or artists by those who consider themselves superior, which is often thought of as de rigueur for the conference and a rite of passage for first-time attendees. Instead there was an overwhelming sense of ease and relaxation.
The lack of Internet at the hotel was not so great, however. The only WiFi was in the Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge, which almost always had a fresh urn of hot coffee, colleagues from across the fields, and easily accessed Internet. I miss the printed-paper abstracts. I know CAA puts them online now, but that doesn’t help when you’re choosing sessions on the fly, with only paper titles. It was like trying to judge a book by its cover – and I wonder what nuggets of scholarly gold I missed.
In my experience, the best panels by far were the two official ones devoted to “Tourism (and) Culture” and the mini-symposium on this topic held at the University of Southern California. Convened by Laurie Beth Clark, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the panels and symposium discussed the role that culture plays in defining tourism and the role that tourism plays in defining culture. Clark did an amazing job organizing this group of over 20 scholars, which I had the privilege of joining. The presenters were a lively mix of art historians and visual artists, but all presented thoughtful research in an engaging way that also stirred great conversations, which extended into the concourse of the Staples Center. The three panels looked at artworks made for sale to tourists, artworks that represent tourists, and artworks that derive from the experiences tourists have. Papers analyzed various existing tourist venues, creative works derived from tourist experiences, and new paradigms for the production of tourist culture.
Every time slot held at least one session of interest. Adam Lerner’s and Steven Wolf’s Thursday morning session Punk Rock and Contemporary Art on the West Coast took a fresh look at California Punk visuals and performance as art. Historicizing the “the Local” in Contemporary Art likewise presented an old topic in contemporary terms. Everywhere I went the focus seemed to be on the modern and the contemporary, lending in large part to the liveliness pervasive throughout the conference.
The Centennial Reception at LACMA on Wednesday evening was not to be missed, although I could have done without the twenty-minute coach ride listening to the two older female art historians sitting next to me discuss how they pamper their cats with homemade food. This was a fitting prelude to In Wonderland: Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists, LACMA’s current exhibition. This show is the best I’ve seen in years. Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington held their own, without overpowering the lyrically disturbing work of Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo. The installation was quietly beautiful, allowing viewers the luxury of winding through a maze of extraordinary work, without forcing a chronological reading. The only flaw was the copious didactic text. The art spoke for itself.
The scheduled trip to Venice Beach and Santa Monica was lackluster in terms of execution and art. At the Santa Monica Museum we were treated to an excellent exhibition of the ceramic sculptures and vessels of Beatrice Wood, but had less than 45 minutes to view the exhibition and make our way around the entirety of Bergamont Station’s numerous other private galleries, most of which were hosting opening receptions that evening.
I am curious to know why the conference convened right after the majority of the “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions closed. With nine or more sessions devoted to the art, architecture, and material culture of California, several focused specifically on “Pacific Standard Time,” it was disappointing to not be able to see the relevant shows. Such exhibitions (and CAA conferences) are planned years in advance. The “Pacific Standard Time” installations at The Getty Center, the Watts Towers Art Center, Redcat, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, LA MOCA, the Hammer Museum, and the California Museum of Photography, to name a few, were all closed and being de-installed.
That said, this year’s CAA brought new life to the conference. Let’s hope that New York maintains that momentum.
It’s unfortunate that most of the major (and best) Pacific Standard Time shows did not coincide with CAA. Not to disparage CAA and its conference attendees interested in postwar art, but this constituency would have been an extremely minor addition to the attendance numbers for these venues. Also, with 68 participating institutions stretching from Santa Barbara to San Diego, coordinating schedules would have been close to impossible.
I’m currently teaching a class based on PST, and even being locally based, coordinating visits and exhibition schedules vis-a-vis our academic calendar was simply not possible.
Your site is important to the preservation of American Artists and also to Upside-Down Art known as Masg.
Thank you for providing it!
Painting has transformed and transisted across timelines to arrive today where we find Hard-edged, graphic work holding as strongly as neo-expressive strokes such as those by the world’s best selling, living artist Georg Baselitz.
PLease allow me to introduce myslef as I am L. R. Emnerson a hard-edged painter with broad roots in the 21st century art and design community at large.
I am the lead artist of the Upside-Down Art Movement which included notable renowned aritists such as Georg Baselitz and Anish Kapoor whco have both exhibited recently at the Tate Museum in London, England.
To me patterns take on a life of their own, like living entities existing within the mind and I cannot help but to give them their due in the spotlight.
Though we’ve involved museums around the globe in my work I am simply content working alone, researching and developing more patterns.
The L. R. Emerson II collection totaled over 100,000 works by 2010 and by 2011 comprised of my depicting critically acclaimed musician Leon Russell as its’ Mona Lisa – making Leon Russell the “poster child” or first celebrity ever featured in an Upside-Down Artwork. In 2012 the official L. R. Emerson II brand was announced to major design communities.
Like Emerson knives, L. R. Emerson II’s uncle Ernest Emerson knows the meaning of Brand reliance and delivery.
For me there are patterns in everything ad they are constantly communicating to me – calling me to draw them and manipulate or engage them somehow or another.
In 2006 and again in 2007, I established a world record and subsequently broke that same record for “The Most Works created in an Hour”. The record stand to this day at 87 works created in one hour.
Again, it is an obsession with patterns and also shapes and forms that pulses though my “art heart”. As a child my passion was creating, drawing, painting and coloring patterns over and over again.
Upside-Down Art is certainly related to Ambigrams and I have spent the past thirty years striving to develop the ultimate Upside-Down Artwork – working as an upside-down artist.
Three decades later I am pleased to say I have been called the Thomas Edison of artmaking and my discoveries have been compared to Giotto’s attempts at drawing in Perspective using an algebraic method to determine the placement of distant lines.
It is correct that Peter Newell honed Amigrams to an early high point but even the radial of the ancient Maya proves inverted, upside-down thinking has actually existed for eons.
Ambigrams are a fallout of artists work in geometry and linear perspective as all graphic arts may ultimately attribute their roots.
Being at the current forefront of Upside-Down Art I am often credited with inventing it but I quickly explain that while I have set world records and invented dozens of new methods the compositional variant itself has a longer history than I can claim.
In my own time, however I have moved the media position to focus more centrally on Upside-Down Art so that the rest of the works will one day embrace the fact that other forms of compositional balance do indeed exist.
Coming from a time when art education did not offer my generation the compulsions toward “the new” I set out to create my own “new”. I invented Masg – a form of Upside-Down composition which has landed me in the Famous Artist category. Though I was successful in the mid 1980′s I kept “Masg” or Upside-Down Art a secret for 20 years until my own styles and methods has been documented and numbered in excess of 37 forms.
Whereas my works had numbered in excess of 10,000 by 2005 and there were over 10 awards in my resume I was finally confident my decades of research in Upside-Down thinking was relevant and worth sharing.
Today I am called upon to lead the movement and am certainly spearheading the evolution of Upside-Down Art but am most pleased when I see so many artists now mimicking my ideas as so many predicted would happen.
Major British sculptor Anish Kapor has joined the Upside-Down Art Movement and Georg Baselitz has been a central figure in his own ways since the 70′s. Others have also begun to trend their style toward upside-down thinking such as Dana Helms who does not make actual Upside-Down art but at least works upside-down! Another person who has begun to follow my work is Dai Giang who also does not exactly make ambigrams but at minimum is creating upright works , that he calls ‘Upsidedownism’ in which at least the compositions have some parts within that are shown upside-down.
As we finally see artists across the globe continue to accept the evidence that art texts, world-wide are wrong I shall be then be pleased to rest. I’ll rest knowing then Upside-Down Art or as I termed it Masg from Gaelic meaning to mix or infuse has finally left it’s mark on art history.
2012 marks the 29th Anniversary of my published, multi-directional artistic style named Masg, from Gaelic meaning to mix; or infuse. Masg is better known as Upside-Down Art.
Using key segments of my research, I published the Purple Tree: Art in a Boundless Age, 2009 which documents the evolutionary process and changes my artmaking has undergone since 1984.
In reflection, I see whereby I survived the chaotic art transitions many of us experienced in the 1980’s to later realize my own pioneering exploration has since changed the very way other artists and photographers compose their work.
For thirty years, I have strived to revolutionize the art world by compelling artists, historians, critics and conservators to embrace changes the trident compositional “norm” that dominates artmaking today. Enduring decades of artistic experimentation, I have set a mark which today compels others to challenge compositional truisms. Simply put, I have provided a firm rationale to insist that art education texts worldwide need revision!
Recently internationally acclaimed artist Georg Baselitz commented he found my work Upside-Down Art “…inspiring” which is encouraging noting Baselitz’ own art has sold for as much as $4.2 million dollars at auction and is equally unusual.
Since 2005, my work has been exposed to a world audience. In 2011, I produced Upside-Down Art for Leon Russell who was inducted with support from musical collaborator Sir Elton John into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Working in the in the mid 1980’s as an advertising designer connected me with performers and entrepreneurs. Initially, I attended Platt College in 1985 and five years later delighted in seeing my artwork presented on stage to Grammy Winning singer/songwriter Leon Russell who later invited me to work for him.
Keeping active in the arts, I have functioned in many varied design environments including printing and publishing, fashion design, advertising sales and design, photography, fine arts exhibition and art education.
Historically, we hold that three primary balances exist for arranging subjects within the picture plane; Symmetrical Balance, Asymmetrical Balance and Radial balance.
This is fine, but as a student artist living in the early 1980’s the limited choices of compositional balance left me feeling artistically confined. Contrarily, against my teacher’s advice I elected to design my compositions by solving the subjects from multiple directions. Determined to find my own road, I literally turned my artwork upside-down at a time when averting the compositional truism was neither taught nor accepted.
Despite rejection, I began to simply devise my subsequent visual riddles from multiple directions.
I continued into the mid 1980’s making hundreds and later thousands of works – continuing to experiment with compositional variants. This pioneering exploration of the compositional realm subsequently lead me to cultivate 37, new documented artmaking methods which overall are my primary contribution to art in the 20th and 21st Century.
In 2005, after having been kept secret for over two decades, Masg or Upside-Down Art was introduced to more than 500 galleries and in excess of 50 renowned museums worldwide including:
National Gallery
Tate Museum, London
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Musée du Louvre, Paris
The Museum of Modern Art, NYC
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Since 2005, my family and I have seen other artists and photographers navigate toward designing from multi-directional vantages. Things were different however when I started. The art world and the web was completely void of any evidence of any artist working upside-down other than Georg Baselitz who was featured in 1984 in the Los Angeles Times with his neo-expressionist paintings, 1880’s cartoonist Peter Newell and early 20th century cartoonist Gustave Verbeek.
Since graduation, my studio and pedagogical practices challenge me to centralize my artistic effort; thus I am refining my 30 year artistic journey and focusing on definitive research involving art education and composition.
Transversely, whereas real world experiences have enhanced my teaching practices it has been through my VCU study where I’ve realized the best skill I possess is the ability to confidently and effectively imbue my passion for artmaking. It is all about being able to pass along my passion in the end.
My quest has simply been striving to carve out new avenues of expression through experimentation, innovation and invention.
Most respectfully,
L. R. Emerson II
One image, Two Views ™
http://www.upside-down-art.com The World’s Largest Solo Artist Site™
Find L. R. Emerson II on the web at http://www.upside-down-art.com
by Maria Taroutina | 2 March 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences, Modern
The CAA panel “Future Directions in Nineteenth-Century Art History,” chaired by Getty curator Scott Allan, raised very interesting and thought-provoking questions about the relation of the nineteenth-century to the art of the past. Typically, nineteenth-century artistic production – especially in the second half of the century – is discussed in terms of the “future” and the ways in which it foreshadows twentieth-century developments. Thus, Delacroix is seen to have taken the first steps to “pure painting,” Manet is the forefather of Modernism, Gauguin’s Primitivist canvases foreshadow those of Kandinsky, while Cézanne is considered to be a Proto-Cubist. By casting an eye to the past, this session not only showcased some of the exciting new directions pursued by emerging nineteenth-century scholars, but also offered a breath of fresh air to the stock Franco-centric “avant-garde” narrative.
The first paper, presented by Allan Doyle, explored the tensions inherent in Xavier Sigalon’s copy of Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgment” and examined some of the post-Enlightenment controversies over the role of creativity versus academic instruction. Demonstrating that originality and copying were not always mutually exclusive, Doyle shed light on a widespread, too often-ignored nineteenth-century phenomenon that formed an integral part of that century’s artistic practice and vision. This paper was followed by Jeremy Melius’s eloquent analysis of John Ruskin’s “Ariadne Florentina” lectures delivered in 1873-76 during his Slade Professorship at Oxford. Melius convincingly argued that even on the level of language, Ruskin’s analysis of a set of Florentine prints (erroneously attributed to Botticelli at the time) betrayed his deep investment in historicity and his conception of art as a living embodiment of the past that self-consciously allegorizes its own relationship to history. Lastly, Sarah Schaefer’s fascinating discussion of Gustave Doré’s Biblical illustrations touched on the often-neglected topic of the fate of religious imagery in Modernity. Arguing that Doré’s illustrations aspired to create a “transnational” and “pandenominational” Modern Judeo-Christian visual vocabulary through the incorporation of new media and new modes of representation, Schaefer claimed that Doré attempted to forge a new sense of piety and spirituality in the face of Modernity’s constant flux and fragmentation.
Taken together, these three papers persuasively staged Modernity’s “other” side by raising questions of past artistic heritage, restoration, revivalism, historicity, spirituality and the fate of religious imagery – subjects that are typically left out of nineteenth-century art historical narratives. As with last year’s session, the 2012 “Future Directions in Nineteenth-Century Art History” panel demonstrated the continuing and very welcome thematic and geographic expansion of the field beyond the standard Franco-centric accounts of the ascension of the avant-garde.
Maria, the panel session I was on–”Future Directions in the History of British Art”–also sought to address the ideology you express: a thematic and geographic expansion of the field beyond French art. Three of our papers were 19th-century (mine own included), one 18th-century, one 20th-century. Unfortunately, our panel was among those that conflicted with the honoring of Rosalind Krauss, a conflict which I cannot help but see as (yet again) another example of Franco-modernist art history asserting dominance. That isn’t necessarily a judgment on Krauss’s importance, just an observation about an interesting coincidence.
The same thing happened with the second nineteenth-century session “Civilization and Its Others.”
by Michael R. Smith | 1 March 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences, Modern
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the College Art Association’s yearly conference. It also marks, by a rather happy coincidence, the 100th anniversary of the publication of Kandinsky’s influential text, Concerning the Spiritual in Art—a perfect opportunity for not only celebrating Kandinsky’s work, but also reconsidering it. To that end Susan J. Baker, University of Houston, Downtown, and Valerie Hedquist, University of Montana, had the good sense to chair the panel, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Kandinsky’s Radical Work at 100.”
The scope of the panel was wide, but was thematically organized around various interpretations of the ‘spiritual.’ First up was Linda Dalrymple Henderson who pointed out how pervasively the scientific understanding of the early 20th century, along with various occult themes, informed Kandinsky’s writing on art. Even after Einstein’s special theory of relativity had made the whole conceptual apparatus of the ether vacuous, Kandinsky seems to have relied heavily on the notion as means and a medium for expressing spirituality. This also helps explain how Kandinsky could liken the effects of color on the human consciousness to musical vibrations.
Sarah Warren discussed some of the political consequences of the ‘spiritual’ in her presentation, which is an avenue not often pursued in Kandinsky scholarship. In the main, Warren did a fantastic job of connecting Kandinsky’s sense of the new spiritualism in modern art to his interest in medieval icons. For many early modernists, Kandinsky among them, primitive folk art could serve as a transitional bridge to modernism. This was politically problematic, however, insofar as Russia’s Nicholas II attempted to turn such icons to his political advantage by using them as a means of aligning himself more closely with the people. But theosophy, which Kandinsky was influenced by, had been suppressed by the Russian state. In so doing, Nicholas II had also revealed the falseness with which he identified himself with icon imagery. Both theosophy and icon art shared the common tenet that there is a hidden, spiritual meaning to be discovered in reality, and a rejection of the former amounted to a rejection of the latter.
The next panelist was yours truly. The scope of my presentation was part historical, part philosophical. One of the essential tensions that runs through Kandinsky’s text is between materialism and spiritualism, which I describe as the problem of positivism and the problem of life respectively. In broad terms it is a statement about the sort of epistemological claims that science and art are capable of making. Part of Kandinsky’s rejection of materialism can be seen, at least in part, as a rejection of the positivistic epistemology that undergirds some forms of the scientific endeavor—especially when that epistemological standard is used as a means of addressing the question of the value of life (which was a thoroughly spiritual, and thus artistic affair for Kandinsky). It is also pertinent to note the degree that this tension permeated the intellectual atmosphere of the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in the writings of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.
Todd Cronan was the final panelist, but was unfortunately not able to attend. His paper was read by Charles Palermo. Cronan focused on what he terms the ‘affective formalism’ in Kandinsky’s work. This doctrine asserts, roughly speaking, that a work of art is not a vessel in which the artist inserts his or her internal feelings. Rather, Kandinsky believed that the artist and the artwork should serve as a conduit for expressing a ‘sense of the world’ which would become manifested in the painting. Thus the viewer, as a receiver of this sense of the world, was an essential component in this equation. And even though Kandinsky was committed to the interpretation of the beholder as being more-or-less equivalent to the art work’s meaning, he seems to contradict himself by also simultaneously holding the opposite position—namely, that the artist should give no consideration to the response of the viewer.
This session was well attended; approximately 75-100 people were in the audience. Perhaps this is a signal that the question of the spiritual in art (which has been somewhat lacking in postmodernism) is due for a reawakening.
Glad to see such a turn out, wish I was there. I think you are right about spiritual reawakening, in everything, not just art. Also, if Nietzsche ‘killed’ God, it was in order to reveal god.
by Jeremy Miller | 1 March 2012 | CAA2012, Career, Conferences, Teaching
This stimulating panel was presented at CAA and chaired by Laura J. Crary of Presbyterian College and William Ganis of Wells College. Three well-crafted papers addressed aspects of teaching art history at a college with no art history department per se, but in which art history is an important component of education. Lisa DeBoer of Westmont College presented her paper “Curricular and Pedagogical Strategies for Solo Flyers in Studio Departments” which explored potential advantages and problems of more closely aligning art history with studio art instruction. Taking as her point of departure the James Elkins article “Parallel Art History/Studio Program” (Art Journal, Vol. 54, Fall 1995), DeBoer raised the possibility of challenging the severe academic split between the two types of instruction, suggesting there are potential benefits of greater crossover between studio and art history departments.
In “No Art Historian Is an Island” presented by Amy Von Lintel of West Texas A&M University, the hybrid nature of art history as a discipline was elegantly juxtaposed to what the author referred to as the “realities of the many headed hydra”, referring to the diversity of responsibilities one takes on as an art historian in a small department. One particularly prescient strategy presented by Von Lintel was to create a more interdisciplinary experience for her students through collaborative teaching. By inviting carefully selected guest lecturers from other departments at her university to her classes, Von Lintel not only vastly expands the knowledge base of her classroom, she employs a pedagogical strategy which reinforces the value of deep learning and fosterers greater student focus. Furthermore, her collaboration with the other faculty at her college undoubtedly serves as a model for successful collaboration and specialization for her students, stressing the nature of scholarship as a shared enterprise.
The third and final paper was presented by Gregory Gilbert of Knox College and titled “The Solitary Art Historian in a Liberal Arts College: Strategies for Aligning Faculty and Student Research”. After some years of struggling to find time for his scholarly duties beyond the classroom, Gilbert decided to more explicitly integrate his ongoing scholarly work into his courses. Rather than employing the common strategy of teaching his dissertation, Gilbert instead began to use his courses to both share and expand his research area through the vehicle of his coursework with students. He was able to do this by proposing seminar themes, term paper topics, and student research areas more closely related to his area of focus. In doing so Gilbert found that he was able to more effectively guide students at all areas of research and course projects.
Having some background in medical academic publishing, I was reminded of the ubiquitous strategy of collaborative research and publication in the medical fields, where research duties are divided according to rank and/or specialty and credit is shared among several authors. Faculty at teaching hospitals or universities publish collaborative work with their advanced students, providing clear benefits for both parties. Simultaneously hearing Gilbert’s strategies and recalling my experience left me wondering why art historical publication typically continues to be such a solitary enterprise.
The theme that clearly united all of these papers was collaboration. The panel emphasized how art history faculty can improve their efficacy through collaboration with one another and faculty from other departments. Most importantly this panel stressed how working with students can be viewed as collaboration, albeit heavily guided by the instructor. By viewing teaching as essentially collaborative, faculty can foster a greater sense of ownership and responsibility over art history and create more learner-centered environments where students can more effectively integrate art history into their own sense of self.
by Annie Harris-Kornblith | 26 February 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences
“Victoria Szabo talking about training grad students to collaborate to create database. Training grad students! I love it!”
“Many thanks to #CAA2012 for the amazing panel with Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster.”
“Lev Manovich encourages CAA to embrace the intersection of art history and art practice.”
“Academic publishing as a colonization of intellectual property.”
“Very first panel on art history meets digital humanities – congrats! Let’s hope they will continue dating.”
“Publishing most vertical thing in academia, approaching colonial scale, next year we will reach one trillion in student debt.”
“Provocative and inspiring comments from Terezita Romo about categories of “hybrid” & “universal” at PST and Chicano Art panel.”
“F1219 – yes, everyone in the rooms has memorized the library of congress call number for Pre-Columbian art history.”
by Annie Harris-Kornblith | 25 February 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences
“Black clad east coasters shedding cardigans and sunning themselves like lizards on rocks outside the conference.”
“This panel was an invigorating breath of jet-lagged-yet-fresh air and a vision of moving beyond the dead-end rhetoric of the copyright cartel, consumer culture, and commodity art.”
“You probably don’t want to hear about the truly bizarre but interesting talk by Carolyn Tate comparing Mesoamerican sculpture to miscarried fetuses and ancient mosaics to fertility cycles. You probably also don’t want to hear about how I also lost my temper a bit in a question and answer session on Jeff Koons.”
“Will be thinking about Krauss apotheosis session for a while. Agreed, disagreed; rinse, repeat.”
“2 packing fails: no black clothes or fancy scarves. Only proof I’m really an art historian? Rad funky glasses.”
“People are talking tech…The first panel I sat on spoke on internationalizing the practice of art history. Immediately, it felt like the voice of God was speaking, until I realized it was a man on Skype. Not one, but two participants were joining in from online.”
“Visit The Bearded Man at UPNE booth #417 – Tell him the internet sent you – Compliment his shoes.”
“It’s an odd thing, lamenting the death of the print book while standing in a book exhibit, surrounded by gorgeous print books.”
“Walked into the “Your Labels Make Me Feel Stupid” session. It’s packed.”
“Artists book includes magic recipes for having erotic dreams, curing madness, and becoming the King of England.”
by Anthony Grudin | 24 February 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences
The first session of “Pop and Politics” ended up being really interesting and productive. Ten minutes before the scheduled start time, things weren’t looking so promising, as panelists and co-chairs still outnumbered audience members in the massive conference room. By the time the panel started, however, we had a lively audience of at least 40. Allison Unruh introduced the panelists and expressed her well-deserved satisfaction at having assembled such a diverse and interesting group of scholars and topics. My paper proposed a reading of Warhol’s Superman (1961) informed by contemporary injunctions to amateur cultural participation, particularly those directed at working-class audiences. Hiroko Ikegami’s paper investigated Jasper Johns’ ties to the Japanese art world in the 1960s and 1970s, unearthing fascinating material that has thus far remained unremarked in Johns scholarship, including compelling evidence of mutual influence between Johns and major critics like Takiguchi Shuzo and Shinohara Ushi. Seth McCormick provided a fascinating overview and critique of Hal Foster’s argument regarding Warhol and rupture, countering with an approach informed by Rancière and Robert Dine, and concluding that the “fetishistic and eroticized character” of Jasper Johns’s images ought to be recognized instead of their simulacral qualities. Tom Williams explored the history of Claes Oldenburg’s dalliances with political action and politicized artmaking. He walked us through this intriguing material and then argued, convincingly, that in Oldenburg’s case at least, “It wasn’t so much that Pop Art was political as that political critique found an amenable ally in Pop Art.” Finally, co-chair Kalliopi put forward a long-overdue investigation of some of the female and francophone elements of Pop, including stunning works by Niki de Saint Phalle, Chryssa Romanos, and Axell. She pointed out that Pop “meant different things to its friends and enemies in the fractured Parisian artworld,” and drew attention in particular to Romanos’ Reportage series, which she convincingly described as exposing consumerism’s complicity with contemporary violence and exploitation.
Overheard in the hallway later:
Solo attendee to group: Are you guys still going to the [inaudible] session?
One of group: [pause] Informally…
Soloist: Can I join you informally?
by Jeremy Miller | 24 February 2012 | CAA2012, Career, Conferences, Photography, Teaching, Theory
The Los Angeles Convention Center is massive. Despite its girth, the College Art Association 2012 Conference occupies about one third of the center. There is no shortage of simultaneous interesting sessions, forcing attendees to choose carefully.
The sessions I’ve visited thus far have been largely interesting, with some presenters generating more enthusiasm than others. “Deconstructing Costume Histories: Rereading Identities in Fashion Collections and Exhibitions” was highly informative, offering new research from several experts from academia and museums. “Who Do We Teach: Challenges and Strategies in Recognizing Our Students, and Developing and Supporting Curriculum for Multiple Constituencies” offered some interesting perspective on pedagogy, but seemed to not line up well with the expectations produced by the title. Focus was placed not on who students are, but on how certain professors deal with their own expectations of students. Several interesting and relevant questions were produced by audience members regarding how instructors and professors might apply the theories presented to their own practice. The responses seemed highly personal and largely unsatisfying for the audience, suggesting the session successfully identified an area of need, but failed to adequately address that need.
“The Other Histories of Photography: The First One Hundred Years” was comprised of five papers exploring the margins of the field, often with surprising results. In particular Melody D. Davis’ exploration of the positions and operations of stereography in 19th century culture, and 20th century historiography, was both enlightening and instructive. Davis’ enthusiasm and expertise effectively brought her subject to life, illustrating it’s history and relevance. “Technology in the Art History Classroom: A Hands-On Learning Workshop” was an informative workshop offering participant the opportunity to learn briefly about four web-based pedagogical tools, followed by a more in-depth exploration of one particular tool of the participant’s choice. I appreciated the practical applications and solutions offered which helped to concretize and contextualize much of the more theoretical content of the conference.
On that theoretical note, “The Theoretical Turn”, a special session honoring the work of Rosalind Krauss, sought to elucidate Krauss’ influence on other scholars and professionals in art history. Presenters spoke about the effects that Krauss’ work has on them both personally and professionally. Yve-Alain Bois’ introduction neatly summarized the effects of Krauss’ work on his own career, and subsequent speakers elucidated their particular relationships with her work. After hearing these stories, the vast network of Krauss’ influence began to crystallize more clearly, and I appreciated hearing how various scholars have uniquely incorporated her work into their own practice.
On a practical note, the Los Angeles Convention Center could be much more visitor friendly. The lack of food options is surprising, and the existing options are reminiscent of the food one typically finds at a zoo. A few of the temporary walls dividing larger rooms have been found to be insufficient at isolating noise from neighboring sessions. Most of the sessions I visited were not more that half full, implying that smaller rooms would have been more practical and might have fostered greater discussion and debate. Of course, this may be a reflection of my own interests and choices of sessions.
by Annie Harris-Kornblith | 24 February 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences
“The CAA’s 100th Annual Conference couldn’t have come at a better time for the city…”
“Looking forward to warm sunshine…”
“I’ve seen so many people knitting during sessions. Is there a group art project happening that I’m not aware of?”
“I’ve heard rumors of a cage match between art history profs and painting profs tomorrow.”
“If the panel is not good, I’ll be devastated. Hard to suck the fun out of Polke.”
“How many people would watch a web stream of a CAA panel?”
“David Antin confronts mystery of Duchamp’s sugar cubes–and art itself–in acceptance speech…”
“A whole panel with ‘no talking allowed’ – excited for this silent format focused on visuals”
“This is like the art history Oscars...”
“This Rosalind Krauss session at #CAA2012 is PACKED! Morbid curiosity?”
“‘That was sooo graduate student’ – overheard at #CAA2012″
“So listen closely, Grasshopper, as I parse my infinite CAA wisdom into some key points…save the sweet talk for quiet moments…don’t put all your jpegs in one basket…I can now identify the conference dress code as thoroughly ‘biz cas’…Surrounded by aesthetics, it might appear very pure and civilized, but under the surface we’re dealing with the sordid world of ‘networking.’”
by Jon Lackman | 23 February 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences
“At the Where The Bodies Lie session… really really really excited about Patricia Cronin’s talk … I think, for some, it’s a bit early to be talking about putrefying bodies.”
“Psychotropic drugs and yayoi kusama. Great transnational fluxus panel.”
” ‘Aztec rulers were cool and hot’ – Emily Umberger”
“Seriously, Kincaid its only secondary to Rockwell because nostalgia? #caa2012 me thinks not!”
“Love the idea of 4-dimensional calendars integrated into the Olmec landscape.”
“So far a good first day at #CAA2012 with solid papers. But oh do I tire of academic, “This is a comment / mini-lecture, not a question” Q&As”
“At the Job Hunt 101 session. Looks like its going to be pretty packed.”
by Jon Lackman | 22 February 2012 | CAA2012, Conferences
The College Art Association conference kicks off today in L.A. I expect record tweeting this year, considering the number of people who’ve already reported boarding a flight to #CAA2012. On Hyperallergic, Jeffrey Songco shares his “10 must-see sessions.” Meanwhile, if you lost a yellow floral (eyeglasses?) case at CAA last year, you’re in luck: PSU Press kindly brought it back. We’ll be rounding up conference coverage from all over, and publishing some of our own, from various contributors. Happy conferencing!
by Jeremy Miller | 20 February 2012 | CAA2012, Career, Conferences, Current Events, Teaching, Theory
The schedule of sessions for the almost-here College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles is overwhelming. Thankfully the abstracts have arrived to help clarify some of the content. While attendees will undoubtedly seek out sessions that pique their personal and research interests, I would like to suggest five sessions which are likely to appeal to a broad range of art historians by focusing on pedagogical and disciplinary issues.
1. The State of the Discipline
Chairs: Sandra Esslinger, Mount San Antonio College; Deana Hight, Mount San Antonio College
While many of us may feel we already have answers to questions this session is likely to pose, it seems important for anyone who wishes to imagine their future in Art History.
2. What Is Conceptual Thinking?
Chair: Steven Bleicher, Coastal Carolina University
Like conceptual art, conceptual thinking is an area that I find to be challenging for my students. I look forward to being in their shoes for a couple of hours.
3. Who Do We Teach? Challenges and Strategies in Recognizing Our Students, and Developing and Supporting Curriculum for Multiple Constituencies
Chairs: Joan Giroux, Columbia College Chicago; Cindy Maguire, Adelphi University
Speaking of being in their shoes, shouldn’t we strive to better understand our students? We spend so much energy helping them understand who we are and what we do, and I for one am often surprised by them.
4. Flying Solo: The Opportunities and Challenges Presented to the Solitary Art Historian in a Small College
Chairs: Laura J. Crary, Presbyterian College; William Ganis, Wells College
Though on it’s surface this session has a narrow focus, I suspect that many of the questions presented will be relevant to even those art historians in larger departments. I, for instance, fly tandem. Nonetheless I am looking forward to learning about how other historians have embraced the challenges of interdisciplinary pedagogy and small departments.
5. Technology in the Art History Classroom: A Hands-On Learning Workshop
Chair: Sarah Jarmer Scott, Wagner College
I’m always looking for new opportunities to engage my students. Many of the technological and pedagogical advancements I’ve experienced have made a positive impact on my classroom, and many of them have been more distracting than productive
“I asked Denny if the events of September 11, 2001 changed the museum’s plans for the galleries.” The galleries were supposed to be reopened years ago but the money got pulled and they had a hard time getting new backers.