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Reflections on Colorism

Stephanie Brown,
Email Address(s):
svbrown@umich.edu

Colorism can be formally defined as prejudice or discrimination against those with darker skin which encourages the privileging of lighter skin, commonly within the same ethnic or racial group. Colorism has been an emotional and psychological phenomena that has globally impacted communities historically and in present day. This session is moderated by and features Dr. Sarah L. Webb, professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois Springfield. Webb is also the creator of Colorism Healing, an international initiative to raise critical awareness, promote healing and find solutions to colorism through creative and critical work. In Winter of 2019, Dr. Sarah L. Webb curated Reflections on Colorism: Art as the Alternative Mirror as her first visual arts exhibition which further investigates her theory on healing and resistance. In this complete session, select female artists from the exhibition, Reflections on Colorism: Art as the Alternative Mirror, will join Dr. Webb and give 15 minute visual presentations on their methodology and contextual research that support their artworks in relationship to colorism. Together the women will then have a moderated dialogue on how they resist the international phenomena of colorism and how they foster dialogue and provide healing from colorism within their art practice.


Slow Photography, Beyond the Snapshot: Staged, Serialized, and Archival Practices in Postwar Japan

Ayelet Zohar, Tel Aviv University and Frank Feltens, Smithsonian Institution
Email Address(s):
azohar@post.tau.ac.il
feltensf@si.edu

While the discourses and practices of the Decisive Moment ruled the photographic scene of Japan in the postwar era (especially in the 1960s and 1970s), there has always been a parallel track of Slow Photography forming an opposition to the swift nature of the snapshot. Yet, parallel to this dominant discourse of the snap, there was a path that consisted of performative processes that preceded the photo-act, or, reorganizing images taken by the camera into new orders and modes of display and representation – such as series, archives, typologies, assemblages, installations and multifocalities, with new approaches to photography's materiality and spatiality.

The dominance of VIVO and Provoke started to crumple in the late 1980s with the rise of photographers such as Morimura Yasumasa and Sugimoto Hiroshi, whose oeuvre challenged the practices and dominance of direct photography of the generation preceding them. Ultimately, this change of paradigm was significantly coinciding with the entry en masse of women photographers into the scene, gradually coming to dominant the Japanese photography arena in recent decades. Photographers like Ishiuchi Miyako, Sawada Tomoko and Yanagi Miwa (among many others) marked the shift from the snapshot into the multiple practices of Slow Photography, and the growing significance of women practitioners in Japan's photography sphere. This transformation is what we seek to discuss in this panel – a shift in paradigm, the emphasis on seriality, archival practices, staged and performative practices, installation and three-dimensional/ material presence of photography, and the entry of women photographers to dominant the scene.



Revisiting the Living Legacy of Hull-House Settlement’s Foundation in the Visual Arts

Annie V.F. Storr, Brandeis University
Email Address(s):
astorr@brandeis.edu

When Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Chicago’s famous Hull-House in 1889, artistic experience was fundamental to its conception of individual and societal advancement. Resident workers believed access to art was necessary to participation in a democracy. Butler Art Gallery, first among 16 structures eventually comprising the settlement, was Chicago’s first public art gallery. The first craft demonstration venue of its kind, The Labor Museum , opened before 1900. Weaving, kilns, book-bindery, studio classes for all ages, museum tours, courses in art history all followed. Here, some of America’s first craft-workers’ unions were organized. During the 20th Century, Hull-House shifted substantially toward emergent social sciences and social policy. Meanwhile, artistic labor and art education remained central to Hull-House’s neighborhood programs. The settlement’s resources and workers dispersed mid-century, leaving their mark on Urban Gateways and similar agencies. Its influence on Chicago, on 1200 American settlements, and on community arts lasts into the 21st Century. When Hull-House was demolished in 1967, the original house was preserved as the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. There, art experiences thrive, including workshops by a speaker as this proposal was written. Through 130 years, combining studio experience, exposure to culturally diverse arts, and a social theory of creative collaboration has driven continuous, but changing, art activism. This has survived Hull-House’s total transformation from radical social experiment, to one of Chicago’s signature institutions, to an outward-focused campus museum. Based in history, this session is present-minded. Thirty-minute general discussion: “How can we use these precedents and practices today?”


Apophatic Aesthetics in Contemporary Art

Thomas Love,
Email Address(s):
thomaswlove@gmail.com

Apophasis combines apo-, “other than,” with phanai, “to speak.” As opposed to affirmative description, this “other speech” attempts to describe something negatively through what it is not. The sixth-century monk Dionysius the Areopagite used the word apophasis to describe “the unsaying of the names of God,” his diligent attempt to demonstrate the inadequacy of any human conception of divinity. In delineating the limits of thought, apophasis is intimately connected to critique. Many modern and postmodern philosophical discourses grounded in the critical tradition therefore share an apophatic dimension, from Hegelian dialectics to phenomenological reduction and deconstruction. This session argues that apophasis also has a particular visual dimension with profound relevance for art history.

The panelists address how various contemporary art practices employ apophasis as an aesthetic strategy to repudiate the affirmative logic of liberal human rights, queer affect theory, and humanist race thinking, respectively. Working across media—including film, sculpture, sound art, and performance—the panelists address negativity as a visual and aesthetic concept challenging the politics of representation. Apophasis also intervenes in art historical discussions of form by short circuiting the binary of representation and abstraction. Even if abstraction “draws away” (etymologically), it does not negate. Apophasis prompts us to reconsider the positivism of formal analysis and to identify the formal logic of negation itself. Above all, apophasis announces the continued capacity of art to shatter preconceptions and conventions, imagining a new world in the abyss.



Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision

Ann Marie Leimer, Midwestern State University
Email Address(s):
ann.leimer@msutexas.edu

The work of contemporary fiber artist Consuelo Jimenez Underwood ranges from quilted and embroidered wall hangings (Virgen de los Caminos, 1994), to rebozos (shawls) that celebrate heroes (Woody, My Dad, and Me, 2019) or address border issues (Rebozos de la Frontera, 2001), to flags that question the construction of nationality (Home of the Brave, 2013), to site-specific map-based installations (Undocumented Border Flowers, 2010). Currently out for review, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision is a co-edited collection of writings about Jimenez Underwood whose career spans over three decades. The anthology brings together voices from diverse fields to address the artist’s contributions to contemporary art, to political, social, and environmental perspectives on the U.S.-Mexico border, to women of color feminisms, and to the innovative strategies that re-write, re-vision, and re-imagine the mediums of weaving, fabric-making, and our current understanding of art. This panel presents three selections from the anthology that consciously engage with issues in art history, the interdisciplinary field of Latinx art histories, as well as Latinx visual cultural studies, and invites the audience to help direct the development of this research during the question and answer period. This portion of the anthology traces the history of fiber art and the artist’s place within these histories, provides a discussion of Jimenez Underwood’s most well-known installation project Borderlines using Chicana feminist theory, Critical Race theory, and art historical methodology, and surveys a five-year period of the artist’s exhibitions locating these works within the frame of Chela Sandoval’s theory of oppositional consciousness.


Intersectional Engagements: practicing art and design with human and nonhuman communities

Jane Prophet, Penny W Stamps School of Art & Design
Email Address(s):
jane@janeprophet.com

This panel brings together artists and designers whose research depends on socially engaged practices across disciplines with human and nonhuman collaborators and communities. We use case studies from our own practices to discuss the agency and responsibility of art and design, and of artists and designers. Our discussion of the power relations and ethics of collaboration ranges from within-species to interspecies social engagement. Based on a long term research project at the site of a small scale family farm in southeast Michigan, Ruth K. Burke calls for a new approach to interspecies social engagement that better accounts for artists engaging with animals and other nonhuman life, grounded in reciprocal inquiry and co-laboring. Maria Michails' artworks emerge from the cultivation of friendship and trust through immersion in cross-border communities, engaging in dialogues and critical reflections that is subsequently expressed through the co-creation of art. Her paper articulates uneasy questions that arise from these unsettling entanglements of humans from different backgrounds. Colleen Clark and Jennifer Low discuss their use of design research methods to leverage design activism in the classroom, empowering students, who hold the least power within the school ecosystem to identify, and advocate for, opportunities for change. Jane Prophet describes the collaborative work of a large creative team comprising patient experts, specifically women and youth of color living with chronic pain, artists and clinicians. Their artworks, designed objects and interventions inform and challenge gendered and racialized decisions, strategies, and policy-making around the treatment of chronic pain.


Visceral Play: (Re)Figuring and Abstracting Gendered/Racial Imaginaries in Contemporary Art Practice

Jillian Hernandez, University of Florida
Email Address(s):
jillian.hernandez@gmail.com

This panel joins scholars, artists, and curators, some with practices based in Chicago, to explore the potential of femme, non-binary, and queer of color imaginaries in transforming the landscapes of contemporary art. The practices under discussion do not seek institutional inclusivity via respectability politics, but rather, engage acts of truth telling through whimsicality. These approaches can be understood as what artist Mickalene Thomas describes as “visceral play”(Tinson 2014), a mode of practice that recreates forms out of what is available, embraces contradiction, and is attuned to the specificities of racialized/gendered subjectivity while resisting identity politics.

Papers highlight how artists such as Zanele Muholi, Sadie Barnette, Mickalene Thomas, and Yvette Mayorga utilize social media and vernacular objects often associated with domesticity, leisure, celebration, and feminine craft and grooming practices (such as rhinestones, glitter, makeup, and frosting), to visualize and reframe gendered and racialized imaginaries in the contemporary visual field. The panel will consider how this approach was demonstrated in the 2017 exhibition project The Petty Biennial in Chicago, organized by La Keisha Leek, Sadie Woods, and the Art + Public Life’s Inaugural Curatorial Collective. The Biennial featured work and programming by local queer and woman of color artists, and aimed to unsettle the formation of conventional biennials by centering the local. The exhibition included works that affirm women and queer people of color on their own terms, like Darryll Terrell’s Untitled (Dion #2) (2016), and Ricardo Gamboa’s ludic watercolor paintings titled Fag Fucking is Prettier Than Yo Mama (2017).



Perspectives on Constructive Critiques

Denise A. Baxter, University of North Texas
Email Address(s):
baxter@unt.edu

The critique is the defining feature of visual arts and design education. Taking as its impetus the recent publication of CRITS: A Student Manual by Terry Barrett, this session offers perspectives on the broader possibilities of this pedagogical and potentially community-building model. An introduction from a college administrative perspective will be followed by three lenses on critiques. The discussant will then open the conversation to the session as a whole with the goals of reviewing and revising our understandings and practices of critique and recognizing the model’s generative possibilities.


Radical Art Histories and Futures: A Roundtable with the Editors of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art

Daniel Marcus, The Ohio State University and Daniel Spaulding,
Email Address(s):
marcusdanny@gmail.com
daniel.m.spaulding@gmail.com

This roundtable panel brings together editors and editorial board members of the newly-founded online peer-reviewed journal Selva: A Journal of the History of Art, which aims, per its mission statement, “to move beyond the discipline’s present impasses by going to the roots of art historical method.” This task begs a host of urgent questions: What is radical in the history, or historiography, of art? How might the study of radical art histories contribute to shaping the discipline’s future? What is the ‘best practice’ of radical historiography? Would it be a comprehensive approach, as surveyed—to quote from Molly Nesbit’s recent account of Henri Focillon’s methodology—from a vantage that would “contain in its very structure unequal combinations of motion so that [...] one might be able to discern all the wealth in the topologies of the perspectives”? Or should the radical art historiographer aim for density over breadth, zeroing in on moments of actuality—citing Nesbit on George Kubler—like “diamond[s] with an infinitesimal perforation through which the ingots and billets of possibility are drawn into past events”? What shifts in theory and practice are warranted by the skewed topologies and perforations of an art-historical past shaped (perhaps irretrievably) by various dominating classes and epistemologies? Where do we stand today in relation to the counter-art-histories and -historiographies of the recent past?


Silence, Exile, and Cunning: The Art of Survival, The Survival of Art.

Frank Van Skiver Boyer, State University of New York at New Paltz and Maia Toteva, Texas Tech University
Email Address(s):
boyerf666@gmail.com
maia.toteva@ttu.edu

According to popular attribution, Che Guevara once said that the first duty of the revolutionary is to evade capture. Artists who attempt to create critical or noncompliant artwork in societies that repress their freedom or attempt to co-opt them make many tactical decisions to “evade capture.” Those decisions and concomitant actions engender social spaces in which artists can continue to work in spite of the attempts to oppress them. Among the general tactics used by nonconformist actors are silence, conditional or absolute, when publication would threaten their freedom; exile or flight from the repressive social context; and various forms of cunning and imaginative "arrangements" that create conditions for free artistic expression, if only on an ad hoc basis.

This session discusses the subversive strategies used by noncompliant artists in four totalitarian societies. The papers address the historical significance of various art practices created under political oppression and examine distinctive acts of resistance through art that arise from such contexts. The array of tactics and the specific social factors they address, when carefully analyzed and described, serve to highlight the nature, historical importance, and subversive social efficacy of noncompliant gestures and creations. This discussion of art and survival contributes to broader conversations about the range of possibilities for both creative activity and political engagement in the arts.



Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D (Geo)Spatial Networks

Victoria E. Szabo, Duke University
Email Address(s):
ves4@duke.edu

In 2018-19 the Getty Foundation supported an Institute on Advanced Topics in Digital Art History focused on 3D(Geo)Spatial Networks. Teams selected for the Institute reflect an international and interdisciplinary set of collaborators focused on scaling up an existing Digital Art History project, with special attention to projects focused on the intersection of mapping and modeling, and those thematized around Visualizing Cities. The Institute members met in Venice in Summer 2018 and 2019, as well as through regular videoconferences and at other events. Over the last two years of work together we have shared project milestones, best practices, new discoveries, and critical insights into our collective work. We have both furthered our own projects, and collaborated on new ones.

Over the course of the workshop and our follow-up activities, we have also explored some of the key “hard questions” that arise for digital art history, both as a sub-discipline with art history, and as part of an emergent set of interdisciplinary digital humanities practices. We have been especially interested in critical approaches to the digital representation of material objects, systems, and phenomena, and in how engagement with those representations leads to new knowledge in the field of art history. We were also interested in the insights partners from outside of the Art History realm, including engineers, computer scientists, and media arts practitioners, could bring to bear upon our activities. The panel presentations reflect both upon development of individual projects and larger lessons learned from our individual and collective engagements.



Ecologies of Care: Feminist Activism

Basia Sliwinska, University of the Arts London
Email Address(s):
sliwinska.basia@gmail.com

Rosa Luxemburg, a writer and an activist, believed in collective action. Her sensibilities, informed by ethical feminism and care economy, and her call for social transformation and democratic renewal are significant for contemporary activist interventions. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that there is ‘an alternative visual vocabulary emerging’. Similarly, Grace Lee Boggs discusses ‘visionary organizing’, which defines imagining change and creating changes of vision. Lieven De Cauter proposes to consider ‘subversivity’, ‘a disruptive attitude that tries to create openings, possibilities in the ‘closedness’ of a system’. Urgent local and global events and crises motivate collective actions which engage images and bodies in novel and unexpected ways beyond representation. Global activist and interventionist manifestations on- and off-line, and actions of collaborative activist groups raise questions around the use of strategies of embodiment enabling collective action, further expanding the ethos of consciousness-raising employed by 1970s activism. They demonstrate new modes of seeing and a novel approach toward visual activism, its methods and strategies of organization and dissemination.

This session, through art historical and practice-led considerations, seeks to explore the phenomenon of transnational visual activism through a feminist lens. What new forms of participation and belonging within space emerge that account for the interplay of feminized narratives and defeminization of spatial metaphors while considering ecologies of care? What are the new modalities of visual activism? How can we combat the oversaturation of the image to find new visual paradigms within the field of visual activism? What strategies of embodiment are employed for collective action?



Negotiating Women’s Emancipation in East Asia through Art

Amanda S. Wangwright, University of South Carolina and Doris Sung, The University of Alabama
Email Address(s):
aswright@mailbox.sc.edu
dhsung@ua.edu

As suffrage movements unfolded around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women in Asia also fought to enter the public sphere. In these contestations, art emerged as a critical tool at the disposal of policy makers and women alike, to restrict or promote women’s liberation accordingly. This panel explores these images, and the producers of them, to examine the conceptualization and realization of women’s emancipation in East Asia. Alison Miller’s paper argues that Meiji woodblock prints of women silk mill workers promoted state-controlled modern industry while preserving the patriarchal social order by means of aestheticized factory images. Sunglim Kim investigates an entire generation of largely forgotten women painters from Colonial-period Korea and illuminates how their education and careers intertwined with changing socio-political contexts. Focusing on women oil painters in late 1920s China, Amanda Wangwright’s paper analyzes public perception and insider discourse surrounding these artists’ efforts to advance women’s rights and the nation at large. Doris Sung examines a women’s art society in Shanghai and identifies the ways in which its members intended their activities to contribute to society and the nation, while simultaneously improving the social standing of women artists. Aida Yuen Wong, expert on East Asian art and gender, will open discussion. With reoccurring themes of commerce, nationalism, modernity, and the popular press unfolding across a regional context, this session seeks to reassess the ways in which visual art and its makers wielded the power to promote, control, or oppress women’s rights.


Reassessing “Lateness:” Issues of Periodization and Style in Late Medieval Architecture

Alice Isabella Sullivan, Getty/ACLS and Kyle G. Sweeney, Winthrop University
Email Address(s):
alice.isabella.sullivan@gmail.com
sweeneyk@winthrop.edu

This panel engages with notions of lateness and what constitutes lateness in the architecture of the medieval period (c. 1400-c. 1600), and aims to situate Late Gothic architecture within the larger narratives of art history. In some cases, medieval architectural forms and styles persist well into the seventeenth century, posing problems to existing periodizations in the field. How might we begin to explain these examples? Although modern scholarship has adhered to progress models of stylistic change that presuppose a nascent, fully-realized, and late style in architecture, the issues surrounding constructs of “lateness” in architecture remain to be fully considered from methodological and theoretical standpoints. How has the concept of lateness been applied to the study of medieval architecture and its ornamentation? How might these considerations begin to revise historiographic bias in the field? The session features four papers that address historiographic, methodological, and theoretical concerns related to the study of Late Gothic architecture between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries in Western Europe, East-Central Europe, and the Eastern Mediterranean. The individual papers in this session focus on case studies and larger historiographic concerns, dealing with issues of the relationships between monumental architecture and other forms of artistic expression, the role of ornament as bearer of cultural meanings, the coexistence of Gothic and antique features and the attribution of meaning, as well as the development and functions of eclectic styles with roots in both Gothic structures and classical forms.


Toward a New Tectonics- Shifting Paradigms of Creative and Curatorial Practice in Ceramic Art

Joshua Green, National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA)
Email Address(s):
josh@nceca.net

Over the past several years, emerging recognition of ceramics within contemporary art has been a source of celebration, derision, and puzzlement. Ceramics has faced an equally compelling new balance of power shifting from men to women in academic programs and in curation. Women and people of color are opening new pathways for academic and curatorial platforms ... those emerging with divergent cultural viewpoints. Change is occurring in what had come before ... a history of men who had achieved status and dominated representation in education and museum settings. Ceramics has migrated from the domain of decorative arts and assimilated into modern or contemporary art spaces, eclipsing the arcs of artists that Voulkos and others initiated in the 1960s. Many of the works discussed in the context of ceramics history were produced by un-named makers. While great pottery cultures flourished in indigenous cultures in indigenous cultures in both Africa and the West, more often than not, women and others as transmitters of cultural agency have been under-explored. While the focus of academic lectures in ceramic art history has predominantly been on male makers, the vibrancy of current practice is propelled by emerging voices of artists of color, non-binary, and immigrant or transcultural contexts. Theory and rubrics that seek to frame distinction in ceramic art and the domain of craft are evolving to embrace performative, and socially engaged works. Curators and artists are shaping these shifting paradigms to affect the ways that we exhibit, teach, and think critically about ceramic art.


Different Shades of Othering: Orientalism/Occidentalism in the World of Art

Frederick M Asher, University of Minnesota
Email Address(s):
asher@umn.edu

Different Shades of Othering: Orientalism/Occidentalism in the World of Art

The scope and meanings of the terms oriental and occidental may have changed over time but one thing has remained constant—the inference to the superior self and the inferior other. These binaries in Reinhart Koselleck’s words, operate on “asymmetrical concepts that are equally antithetical” such as “Hellene-Barbarian” corresponding to “civilised-uncivilised”. Using the oriental/occidental framework, this panel aims to investigate the realm of visual arts and relevant texts of different geographic locations and a variety of cultural constellations. Each paper will discuss paintings or artefacts and texts to bring to our attention fascinating facts about these unsuspected sites used as arenas to claim cultural and political hegemony. On the one hand each paper will engage in a serious study of the narrator’s voice and locale of this discourse and on the other, the implications of these for the subservient featured in this unpropitious landscape. Tracing this theme’s connections with power and visuality, the four papers will offer close studies of textual and visual references and presentations of women in Safavid and Qajar Iran (17th–19th centuries), Romania (19th century), colonial India with a focus on 19th century Punjab, and the visual material carrying references of the Russo-Turkish wars by an 18th century artist of Ukrainian origin.



The Status and Stakes of Contemporary Art History Publishing Today

Natilee Harren, University of Houston
Email Address(s):
noharren@central.uh.edu

This panel, convened by the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, gathers prominent figures from diverse corners of contemporary art publishing for an informal discussion about the state of the field, particularly as it bridges academia and the larger art world. Among the questions to be considered are: What are the current pressures shaping the direction of academic publishing on contemporary art history topics? How are art historians and artists both inside and outside the academy to navigate today’s diverse platforms of arts publishing? To what extent are criticism and the exhibition catalogue essay now accepted as forms of scholarly output? What are the forces that pressure writers to focus on particular artists at given moments? To what extent is Fair Use being utilized in regard to image reproductions and permissions? Is the desire for critical historical writing on contemporary art dead, and if not, where is it most vividly alive? How might contemporary arts writers better leverage their expertise to reclaim the critical powers of their voice?


Another Revolution: Artistic Contributions to Building New Worlds, 1910-1930 (Part 1)

Florian Grosser, California College of the Arts
Email Address(s):
fgrosser@cca.edu

While the role of art as an agent of revolutionary disruption has attracted sustained attention among scholars, this session instead examines the ways in which artistic movements and individual artists have contributed to the establishment of new political, aesthetic, and social orders in the wake of mass upheaval. Based on the premises that art can itself be revolutionary and that revolution entails not only deconstructive moments but also an ongoing process of rebuilding, we explore how art has shaped post-revolutionary polities around the world between 1910 and 1930.

Individual papers address contemporaneous constellations between the aesthetic and the political from the perspective of specific sites of revolutionary transformation: China, Germany, Mexico, and Russia. Taken as a whole, the panel analyzes parallels as well as divergences in artistic strategies and practices that attempt to displace pre-revolutionary worldviews, institutions, and forms of (co-)existence. Conceived as a contribution to the study of global modernisms, it brings into dialogue pertinent approaches in art history, philosophy of art, and political philosophy. With attention to the constructive, emancipatory potential many artists believed to be inherent to revolutionary movements, we examine the kinds of worldbuilding that occurred in different regions around the globe. Ultimately, from the vantage point of 2020, this panel challenges the once widespread perception of the “failure” of the revolutions of the early twentieth century.



Contemporary Painting and Materiality

Kristy J. Deetz, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
Email Address(s):
deetzk@uwgb.edu

Many contemporary painters have made materials the principal actor in their works, taking center stage with regard to meaning, form and content. What does this new materiality propose? Studying the materials in a painting uncovers process, metaphorical associations of physical substances, and evolving meaning or power to signify, as well as the materials’ aesthetic qualities. Materiality draws upon such diverse fields as material culture, anthropology, technology, and the history of science. A study of painting materials opens new dialogues and layers of interpretation that cross socio-economic and cultural boundaries, uncovering questions about our global economy. Materiality encourages reciprocal influence of studio disciplines opening new investigations of what is painted on and painted with along with possibilities of the immaterial, ephemeral, durational, or conceptual in painting. Might this current focus on materials in contemporary painting be fueled by technological breakthroughs in the world of material sciences? Is it a response to our virtual, digital world and ‘screen’ culture? Or an increasing awareness of global climate change and the environment? This session includes an overview of the topic with individual panelists presenting their unique approaches and perspectives to materials within the current milieu.


Feedback and Feedforth: New Approaches to Nam June Paik

Gregory Zinman, Georgia Institute of Technology
Email Address(s):
gzinman3@gatech.edu

Korean-born American artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was a pioneer in the fields of experimental music, video art, and new media. Paik is credited with establishing video as an artistic medium; his work transformed the landscape of twentieth-century art, and anticipated a number of developments in the twenty-first. Paik’s work is being reassessed by a new generation of scholars who are rethinking early media art in relation to embodiment, digital culture, politics, and aesthetics. Spurred by the publication of We Are in Open Circuits: Writings By Nam June Paik (The MIT Press, 2019), this panel presents a number of new approaches to Paik and his art.

Marina Isgro (Harvard Art Museums) will present an archival study of Paik’s time at WGBH Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a means of interrogating Paik’s larger project of “participation,” especially with respect to the Vietnam War. Global and personal conflict intersect in Johanna Gosse’s (University of Idaho) exploration of the fraught relationship between Paik and mail-art innovator Ray Johnson, and how a Cold War cultural politics of race and nation inflected their respective approaches to network aesthetics. Gregory Zinman (Georgia Tech) will examine Paik’s method of “me-mix,” by analyzing the ways the artist recycled material from his 1980s satellite works into his single-channel works and large-scale video walls of the 1990s. Hanna Hölling (University College London), who has published extensively on Paik and issues of new media preservation, will serve as the panel discussant.



Public, community, and audience: labor and care in socially engaged art practices

Nancy Jane Nowacek, Stevens Institute of Technology and Allison Rowe,
Email Address(s):
nancynow@gmail.com
avrowe2@illinois.edu

In socially engaged practices, the artwork is often art work—from running public consultation sessions, to coordinating resource sharing, sending emails, and mediating miscommunications. These labor activities often create space for artists and institutions to work together to structure new types of ethical and caring relationships with, and in-support of, their public(s). However, traditional object-oriented, display modalities of museums which encourage the dissemination of the products or end-results of a project can displace the labor of socially engaged artworks, thus concealing the relational work of the work.

This session will unpack some emergent and tested methods and models for structuring collaborative processes between artists and organizations in ways that support meaningful public engagement. It will also present perspectives on the multifaceted emotional labor required by artists and institutions when they collaborate on socially engaged art and the corresponding logistical labor and resource requirements that unfold from those needs. For example, when a socially engaged art work seeks to engage a specific audience how do artists and institutions begin to build these relationships so that they might work together on a project? Who is tasked with listening? What form does this listening take? How are systemic barriers within museums contended with? How, or can, institutional resources be leveraged to support community building? And, how does all of this affective labor, and the other emotional components of the work become incorporated into the exhibition format, or otherwise disseminated as a meaningful part of the project?



The Challenge of Mobile Images/Objects in Mesoamerica

Sanja Savkic, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and Rex A. Koontz, University of Houston
Email Address(s):
savkic@bilderfahrzeuge.org
rkoontz@uh.edu

The central theme of this session addresses the circulation of ancient Mesoamerican images/objects and the way that circulation served to constitute knowledge and spread visual systems. We ask: How did Mesoamerican objects instantiate and transmit knowledge? What features allowed transmission? What agency was seen to adhere in the object that allowed such transmission? How does one speak about the historical development of visual systems in this context? We encourage the analysis of Mesoamerican image/object agency in the religious, political, social and economic spheres, in order to better describe and define the formation and transmission of knowledge via visual systems. One of our working hypotheses—that should be tested here—is that the visual cultures of Mesoamerica shared a common conceptual ‘vocabulary’—a dynamic but foundational Mesoamerican visual language—around which separate interpretive communities developed with different perspectives and social, political, artistic and other attitudes, forming a sort of Mesoamerican lingua franca with individual instantiations in visual terms.

Conceiving of ancient Mesoamerican images/objects as active vehicles that participated in networks across time, space, cultures and media should encourage us to consider our intellectual predecessors who have already explored the nature of images/objects as vehicles. A key figure in this area is the work of Aby Warburg, whose approaches may represent a productive way to problematize and bring nuance to the notion of networks and exchange in world art histories, including the Mesoamerican. We welcome exploration of historiographies of the mobile images/objects in Mesoamerica and, in general, in the Amerindian world.



The Cold War in the North-South Axis: Asian Art Beyond the U.S.-Soviet Dichotomy

Midori Yamamura, The City University of New York, Kingsborough Community College and Yu-Chieh Li, University of New South Wales, Sydney
Email Address(s):
myamamura3524@gmail.com
elise.liyuchieh@gmail.com

In the bid to win the psychological war within and beyond the U.S. and the Soviet blocs, culture became an important ammunition during the Cold War. In Art History, since Serge Guilbaut’s seminal work, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1985), studies of the cultural Cold War have thus proliferated. The initial research focused mostly on Europe. However, because the Cold War spread over the globe like an ideological pandemic, later it has become a significant topic in Asia. There, the Cold War is not the one that we know of—namely, the U.S. policy of aggressive containment without a state of war—but an era marked by bloody civil wars and independence movements, including the United States’ active military engagements in Korea and Vietnam and its support of oppressive regimes against emerging democratic or indigenous movements and left-nationalism. These conditions inevitably influenced visual arts from the region. Without expanding the attention to the Global South, we could end up with a myopic view of the Cold War. Through widening the geopolitical arena and examining a range of mediums, this panel will bring out the entanglements and conflicting consequences of the Cold War in Asia. Featuring papers by a curator and art historians, the panel will shed light on new researches in China, Okinawa, Australia, and Southeast Asia to convey a more holistic yet complex picture of the Cold War.


Another Revolution: Artistic Contributions to Building New Worlds, 1910-1930 (Part 2)

Monica C Bravo, California College of the Arts
Email Address(s):
monicacbravo@gmail.com

This session is a companion to "Another Revolution: Artistic Contributions to Building New Worlds, 1910-1930". While the role of art as an agent of revolutionary disruption has attracted sustained attention among scholars, this session instead examines the ways in which artistic movements and individual artists have contributed to the establishment of new political, aesthetic, and social orders in the wake of mass upheaval. Based on the premises that art can itself be revolutionary and that revolution entails not only deconstructive moments but also an ongoing process of rebuilding, we explore how art has shaped post-revolutionary polities around the world between 1910 and 1930.

Individual papers address contemporaneous constellations between the aesthetic and the political from the perspective of specific sites of revolutionary transformation: China, Germany, Mexico, and Russia. Taken as a whole, the two panels analyze parallels as well as divergences in artistic strategies and practices that attempt to displace pre-revolutionary worldviews, institutions, and forms of (co-)existence. Conceived as a contribution to the study of global modernisms, it brings into dialogue pertinent approaches in art history, philosophy of art, and political philosophy. With attention to the constructive, emancipatory potential many artists believed to be inherent to revolutionary movements, we examine the kinds of world building that occurred in different regions around the globe. Ultimately, from the vantage point of 2020, this panel challenges the once widespread perception of the “failure” of the revolutions of the early twentieth century.



Frampton Comes Alive: Hollis Frampton and the History of Art

Bruce L Jenkins, SAIC, Chicago
Email Address(s):
bjenkins@saic.edu

Artist-filmmaker Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was born just over 80 years ago. This time-span means a generational fall into cultural memory must now take place for his work, in particular given his own admission that with photography "the imaginary culture is depicted as passing through time". As his work passes into art history, what remains of Frampton’s affront to the discipline—symbolised by his calendrical film cycle Magellan—as it is found in his ideas such as "metahistory". What endures in his project of "making film over as it should have been"?

This session brings new approaches to Frampton's work by anticipating the convergence of film and art histories. It is thematised by Frampton's unfinished film cycle, Magellan, and seeks to further research into the significance of his work for art history and media by placing it within the broader context of poetry, theories of experimentalism in music and the expanded arts, and conceptual avant-gardes in the 20th century.

Speakers include researchers from North America, Europe, and Australia, placing Frampton's work in a global context for film modernism, as opposed to Frampton's work as most often seen in its peripheral relation to the New York iteration of Structural Film in the 1960s.



Havana: New Research and Critical Reflections on an Urban Palimpsest after Five Centuries

Paul Niell, Florida State University
Email Address(s):
paulniell@gmail.com

After five hundred years of historical development, Havana, Cuba remains one of the most complex and understudied American cities in the hemisphere. Founded in November of 1519, the city has been a multi-layered and continually renegotiated space for centuries. Havana co-evolved over the years with the Caribbean region, the Atlantic World, and the Spanish Empire, and later the empire of the United States. Known to the Spanish as “llave del nuevo mundo” (key to the New World), Havana’s centrality to the Spanish colonial enterprise in the Americas from its founding to 1898 enriched a city at the lynchpin of the Spanish treasure fleets. The city became a nineteenth-century slave society and a major center for sugar exportation, before serving as the political capital and performative stage for the Cuban republican and revolutionary governments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Havana's architecture is legendary, and its buildings have shaped the spaces of urban life and identity. The city’s diverse, multi-layered, renegotiated, and repurposed architecture and spaces combined with its extensive documentation in Spanish and Cuban archives, travel accounts, memoirs, and newspapers invite researchers in visual and material culture studies to investigate one of the richest urban environments in the Americas. In spite of the ongoing challenges to research on various fronts, scholars in recent years have been forging ahead and opening up new understandings of Havana's material history. This session highlights new research as it fosters critical reflections on the evolution of the urban palimpsest of Havana after five centuries.



Life/Site Specific: The Creation, Collection, and Care of Art Environments

Annalise Christine Flynn, Vernacular Art Services LLC and Lisa A Stone, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Email Address(s):
annalise.flynn@gmail.com
lstone@saic.edu

Builders of art environments—personal spaces like homes, gardens, and studios fully transformed into site specific and life encompassing works of art—create across the spectrum of practice, process, and material. These discrete and distinct examples of gesamtkunstwerk are present in landscapes as disparate as Philadelphia’s South Street, the Sonoran Desert, and a small bayou town south of New Orleans. The artists employ media and techniques that continually advance the canonical limits of art making, utilizing tile, concrete, shells, bottles, glitter, junk, steel, wood, clay, ephemera—anything that can be painted, epoxied, affixed, sculpted, or constructed.

While often created by people considered to be at social and artistic margins, art environments are, as described in the first SPACES Archives newsletter (1982), “art as an expression of personal joy.” Life and site specific, art environments encapsulate and affirm the value of myriad historic and cultural perspectives. This session will address the incredible range of these unfettered creative expressions through the lenses of the archive, the collection, the institution, and practice and preservation as well as artist-designed home/studio environments and collections. As museums and cultural institutions increasingly incorporate immersive, experiential artworks into their exhibitions and collections, a thorough understanding of the ongoing legacy of artist-built environments as transformational distillations of the creative life is imperative as we pry open the boundaries traditionally surrounding artmaking.

This panel is structured to encourage audience engagement with questions critical to this field. Panelists will share case studies and corresponding questions addressing such themes as access, preservation, and more.



Marking Time

Elyse D. Speaks, University of Notre Dame
Email Address(s):
espeaks@nd.edu

As Rita Felski writes, in one sense, the everyday and its temporality is democratic because “[w]e are all ultimately rooted in the mundane,” yet, “[a]t the same time, some groups, such as women and the working class, are more closely identified with the everyday than others.” This panel considers aesthetic practices that utilize quotidian time as a structuring device of an artistic process. Often, such strategies are adopted by women and minority artists, yet such alignments are not commonly considered. Looking at work that privileges the temporal structures of the everyday and its routine activities, we aim to ask how we might understand the politics and values embodied therein. What happens when artworks adopt strategies that express mundane temporalities or subvert quantifiable clock time? How might an attention to everyday rhythms open a perspective onto the world in its complexities? What can be yielded by featuring readings that demonstrate how a work embodies temporal structures that distance it from more conventional aesthetic temporal structures, such as the transcendent or historical? What values are substituted by featuring the minor repetitions of the daily or the deceleration of time that accompanies waiting, boredom, or rote activities? And what connections to gender, race, and class might be illuminated by framing aesthetic practices in this way?


Advances In Eco-Sensing and the Soundscape

Eric B Leonardson, SAIC
Email Address(s):
eleona@saic.edu

This panel discusses several ongoing projects that originated with "Eco-Sensing and the Soundscape," a course taught in the fall of 2015 by Eric Leonardson and Lindsey French, at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This studio course connected concepts and applied practices of acoustic ecology with the DIY hacking aesthetic of art and technology to open up possibilities for transdisciplinary collaborations offering new understandings of our environments and our boundaries, locations, and roles within them. Subsequently, numerous collaborations and opportunities have flowed in new contexts and localities. These intersecting interests have grown and gained support beyond academia to reach new levels of public engagement in the ecologies of sound, listening, and environment, while demonstrating the importance of students and teachers who engage each other as partners in play and learning together, mentoring and activating local communities in the core value of listening. Recognition of this is shifting though it remains if this will be a lasting change with the dynamic and complex circumstances operative now. The panelists joining Leonardson and French are sound and media artists Leah Barclay, Alex Braidwood, and composer Christophe Preissing. Landscape architect and SAIC Professor Linda Keane will serve as discussant. Their individual and combined efforts engage and activate students and public communities in design of urban soundscapes using virtual reality, social codes of immigrant communities, river listening, aural architecture, urban soundwalking, plant communication, art-science collaborations, and human-computer interaction.


All the World’s Affair: The Philippines, South Africa, and Romania at the Venice Biennale

Pearlie Rose S. Baluyut, State University of New York (SUNY) at Oneonta
Email Address(s):
PearlieRose.Baluyut@oneonta.edu

Established in 1895, the Venice Biennale is one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world, playing a pivotal role in shaping the canon of Art History, as well as instrumental in state/nation-formation and legitimation. The increased visibility of underrepresented countries or regions are engendering new and critical discourses. This session includes three case studies from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe that explore the intersections of the geography of contemporary art, the ideology, technology, and bureaucracy of global exhibitions, and the curatorial aspirations and national crises from the political to the moral. The case study on the Philippines investigates its official participation through the production and exhibition of Filipino contemporary art in 1964 and 2015, noting how the Venice Biennale served as an international form of cultural development and diplomacy, as well as sustained government corruption. The case study on the South African Pavilion in 2019 explores the curatorial strategy of presenting the themes of social, political, and economic resilience in South Africa, particularly how artists articulate the uneasy discourse on citizenship, rights, and social justice in the post-apartheid era. Finally, the case study on the Romanian Pavilion addresses the 2005 and 2019 participations, and how these may be considered as alter-historiographic exercises meant to investigate the function of exhibitions as a counter-hegemonic art historical practice. Symptomatic of late/neo capitalism, transnational aesthetics, and/or localized global spectacles, the session builds a complex understanding of the production, performance, commodification, consumption, and corruption of/in contemporary art aptly crystallized at the Venice Biennale.


Altered Terrains: Landscapes of Colonial America

Theresa Avila, CSU Channel Islands and Emmanuel Ortega, University of New Mexico
Email Address(s):
sahibah@hotmail.com
babelortega@yahoo.com

The term “landscape” comes from the German word “landschaft;” land meaning natural territory and schaft refering to human-modified space. By the sixteenth century, landscape visually articulated global territories. In other words, for more than five centuries, images have aided in the delineation of lands as possession, as resource, and as manifest destiny. Landscapes established topographic methods to visualize newly conquered territories, such as the Americas. With the advent of art academies in the Americas in the eighteenth-century, European tactics and aesthetics were put forward to shape and define empires in the Americas. Within these institutions and systems, landscape was engaged in the creation of a taxonomy of Latin America, its communities and cultures. Later, landscape was utilized as a genre to define newly born nations.

With the intent of innovating decolonial analytical frameworks that re-define Colonial America this panel examines the tradition of landscapes between 1521 and 1921. The role of landscapes to/in Colonial America is of primary focus. The picturesque, the pastoral, and the sublime are artistic tools used to describe the poetics of nature. How these, and other, conventions affirm, subjugate, and transform through landscapes are also of interest. Additional points of investigation include, but are not limited to, examinations of how landscapes redefine to fit local tastes and hegemonic necessities and consideration of the importance landscape images have on the political status of the various communities they represent and/or erase?



Cross-cultural dress; problematizing the cultural appropriation vs fashion inspiration debate

Reina Lewis, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London , Lezley George, London College of Fashion, UAL and Nancy Micklewright, Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institute, Washington
Email Address(s):
reina.lewis@fashion.arts.ac.uk
lezleygeorge@live.com
micklewrightn@si.edu

The insensitive or exploitative use of style features associated with minoritized cultures or groups has rightly met with criticism and pushback in recent years, whether Afro-American hair styles on white catwalk models or native American headdresses as festival wear. Contestation over out-group use of religious symbols and sources is challenged in the name of religious communities, whether couture gowns decorated with Quranic verses or Hindu deities on T-shirts. Yet research into world fashion cultures shows also the longstanding interpenetration of dress cultures across multiple transnationalisms.

To illuminate contexts in which people design and wear garments and styles that are not their ‘own’, we sidestep a binarized value judgement between cultural appropriation vs cultural authenticity and problematize the ‘inspiration’ defence. Alert to diversity of opinion within cultural, ethnic, religious, and national groupings, we evaluate the differential impact of cross-cultural fashion experiences. We track the transnational movement of garment types in cultural and religious embodiment, such as the imposition of abayas on women visiting Saudi Arabia for work (Muslim or non-Muslim) and the cultural adaptation of abaya-led wardrobes by Emirati women for travel. We explore the intra-national adoption of regional and tribal textile arts by Indonesian designers melding national dress narratives for local and international markets, and the implications of class in the nostalgic styling of rural aesthetics among urban Indian fashionistas. We investigate the forms of cultural competency required to recognise, value, and adjudicate claims to fashion distinction and guardianship.



Historic Libraries and the Historiography of Art (II)

Jeanne-Marie Musto, Independent Scholar
Email Address(s):
musto.jeannemarie@gmail.com

Historic libraries are coming into their own as resources for interpreting intellectual history. Analyzing those libraries that have informed art historians, art critics and their public has opened new paths for exploring art historiography. Whether book and manuscript collections survive intact, perhaps in their original locations, or are known only through bibliographies or inventories, they yield information that broadens established narratives of the discipline. What is more, such collections are ideally suited to documenting art history’s evolving relationship with social, intellectual and geo-political currents.

This session builds on a theme introduced at CAA 2019 by addressing new questions, incorporating new methodologies, and introducing previously untapped collections. New questions include, for example, the distribution and impact of “official” vs. “unofficial” resources in the Communist-era library of the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Art. Another investigates interpretations of Michelangelo through the “textual lens” of Leopoldo Cicognara’s early nineteenth-century library. New methodologies include data visualizations of the readership of an art library given to the University of Paris in 1918; the visualizations incorporate quantitative and prosopographical data. Previously untapped libraries include that of Charles Eastlake, which served him in his several roles, including as Director of the National Gallery, London. Comparative analysis of Eastlake’s library with those of precursors and contemporaries underlines how readily analysis of any one library aids and encourages the analysis of others. Taken as a whole, this session highlights how libraries not only inform but also shape the relatively young and still restive discipline of art history.



Prints and Community Practice

Beauvais Lyons, University of Tennessee and Steve A. Prince, College of William and Mary
Email Address(s):
blyons@utk.edu
onefishstudio@yahoo.com

For more than 500 years prints have functioned as a public form of art, using the multiple to propagate ideas to reach broad audiences and shape public opinion. This session will involve three presentations that address (1) the role of a Chicago-based print collaborative in supporting the work of printmakers and their collective efforts to engage with their community. (2) printmaking as a form of community-building by an artist who is a Director of Engagement for a university museum, and (3) socially-engaged printmaking as part of university-level teaching. This session will ask how we frame our understanding of the social and political role of prints, especially the hand-printed multiple. What is the role of printmaking for museums and other cultural institutions as they seek to engage the community? How does the print serve as a tool for educational, cultural, social, and political engagement with a public that traditionally does not go to museum or other cultural institutions? Does printmaking, which often involves collaboration and working in shared facilities have an intrinsic social orientation? How does printmaking, which is often situated in educational and community-based shops engage with their local communities, as well as use the portability of the multiple to connect local to global communities? The session will be structured so there is ample time for discussion, as well as to share prints from community-engaged projects.


The Return of the Lesbian? Examining Lesbian Visibility in Art History’s Present, Past, and Future.

Alexis Bard Johnson, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries and Ksenia M. Soboleva, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
Email Address(s):
lexibard@stanford.edu
ksenia.soboleva@nyu.edu

The last few years have witnessed a re-emergence of the lesbian in popular culture, exemplified by a surge of Instagram accounts dedicated to lesbian imagery, history, and dating, motion pictures portraying historical lesbian narratives (Lizzie, The Favorite, Colette), and the announced reboot of The L Word (a 2004-2009 tv-show that follows the lives of a fictional lesbian friend group in LA). Yet, at the same time, there seems to be an increasing reluctance to use lesbian as an identifier and a turn in scholarship toward queer as a universalizing term. How can we make sense of these opposing trends? What accounts for the simultaneous rebirth and death of the lesbian? Is there a way in which images, which work across time, give insight into our current position? As the late Barbara Hammer powerfully stated in 2019, in her last interview before she died: “We don’t want to forget the lesbian, and we don’t want her to be lost.” This panel solicits work examining what is gained by a return to the lesbian and what is lost with her death? Is the term too outdated, essentialist, and/or exclusive or is it worth saving? What does finding or remembering the lesbian look like and what does it offer? How do contemporary or historical lesbian artists or lesbian art help us understand this current moment and help us determine the future of the lesbian?


Dancing in the archives: choreographers’ drawings as resources for art historians (19th-20th centuries)

Pauline Chevalier, Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris
Email Address(s):
pauline.chevalier@inha.fr

While images of dance— whether in painting or prints, in set or costume designs—have been extensively researched, the reliance on drawing by choreographers during the creative process is a field still largely unexplored by art historians. Nonetheless, numerous international dance archives hold drawings by choreographers; materials ranging from meticulous ground plans to elaborate “tableaux vivants”, drawings meant to render the succession of images that would impress the audience. These forms of innovative and non-codified dance notation prove to be invaluable resources for art and dance historians alike.

Via the examination of modern notations, this panel will investigate the unique manner in which choreographers have used drawing as a thinking tool and a means of constructing the body through visual references. The presenters will show how the use of drawing, from an expressive geometry to complete representations of the body, has been a way to examine choreography beyond dance as part of a wider creative endeavor, deeply rooted in the material and visual culture of fine arts. Art historians looking at dance archives can not only enrich the knowledge of dance history but also contribute to a material and interdisciplinary approach of drawing as an intermediary tool allowing the page to become the stage. Drawing on findings from a research program at the National Institute for Art History in Paris (France), this panel also intends to focus on the epistemological dimension of such a study, as dance resources invite scholars to combine the kinesthetic approach with the art historian’s gaze.



Gold Argues the Cause: Textiles, Materials and Technologies in Eurasia, 1200-1400

Amanda Phillips, University of Virginia
Email Address(s):
ahp2n@virginia.edu

The study of historic textiles has long been dominated by a focus on style, and in particular on the ways in which styles moved between geographic areas. This is especially true for objects made during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a period in which trade routes across Eurasia were radically reshaped by series of conquests, new alliances, and treaties. This panel moves beyond long-held but hazy notions of style transmission to insist on the importance of the study of the materials and techniques used in textile crafts. Three papers center respectively on Ukraine, Anatolia, and the Mongol territories; together they consider the impact of transfers of technology, and how they were effected by re-settlement, artisan migration, and exchange. Using evidence from recent excavations, Warren Woodfin argues against prevailing notions of the conservatism of Byzantine embroidery techniques, combining formal and technical analysis. Eiren Shea considers the rise in the making and use of gold thread on an animal substrate, linking it to a new rage for gold-woven textiles, which was in turn enabled by the spread of weaving technologies under the Mongols. Amanda Phillips links a previously unstudied Ottoman textile—inscribed with the name of a Sultan—with commercial workshops staffed with artisans who moved between centers in the Islamic world, willingly and unwillingly. As a whole, the panel makes two greater historiographical arguments: one for immense potential of close-looking and technical art history, and the second for the role of human migration in technological and artistic innovation.


Intimate Aural Aesthetics: Methodologies for Cultivating Inclusive Participatory Spaces of Deep Reflection

Andrew Demirjian, Independent Artist and Rashin Fhandej, Fellow, MIT Open Documentary Lab
Email Address(s):
ademirji@hunter.cuny.edu
rashinf@gmail.com

In an era of constant and divisive media environments, how can intimate sensory experiences create more inclusive spaces for deep reflection and actions toward positive social change and engagement?

The artists presenting in this session are interested in exploring the capacity of sound in augmented, virtual and immersive environments to bring communities together, transgress borders and expose gaps in how we frame our views.

Collectively, these artists share an interest in cultivating phenomenological engagements with sound that create a visceral haptic or perceptual experience for the listener/participant.

The panel will share practice-based methodologies for creating participatory and collaborative environments that require public interaction to activate the artwork.



Letterpress Printing in Chicago: Its Current State, History, and Legacy– a Roundtable Discussion

Catherine Ruggie Saunders, and Martha S. Chiplis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Email Address(s):
cath215@aol.com
martha@chiplis.org

Letterpress Printing in Chicago: Its Current State, History, and Legacy–
a Roundtable Discussion

Chairs: Cathie Ruggie Saunders and Martha Chiplis

Participants: Vida Sacic, Jen Farrell, Jill Gage, Jeremy Botts, Ben Blount

As an important railroad hub and home to historic Printers Row since the 1885 construction of Dearborn Street Station, Chicago has been a center for letterpress printers who served their community from the 1800s until today.

Letterpress printing speaks with a voice, increasingly varied, which continues to be heard. With universities adding letterpress to their curriculum, design firms meeting client’s demands for the “different” kind of visual statement that letterpress can give, and artists taking on the medium to tell their stories, the letterpress resurgence is palpable.

Letterpress as a technological innovation with continuous dominance in the printing industries for nearly five centuries has, despite digital advances in the industry, much to offer current and future generations of artists, designers, and collectors.

In this roundtable, we will discuss the following: what has happened in recent history that has affected letterpress within academic programs and outside of them? How has the use of the media by artists and designers changed? How do you build a support network for letterpress within a school–with faculty, administration, and students–and without–with librarians, private artists, and the letterpress community at large? How do you pass on the love of letterpress, and the knowledge of it, to students today?



Transcultural Chinese Art: Queer & Feminist Perspectives

Jenny Lin, University of Southern California
Email Address(s):
jennyling@uoregon.edu

Contemporary Chinese art has become increasingly visible in recent years. Books such as Wu Hung’s Contemporary Chinese Art and exhibitions like Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World contribute valuable narratives to the Western European and North American-dominated field of contemporary art. However, Chinese art surveys, like contemporary art’s “global turn” more generally, are often limited by nation-state boundaries and predominance of heteronormative patriarchal voices. Nation-based categorizations ignore Chinese cultures’ expansive heterogeneities, local contexts, and transnational flows; hetero-male figures dominate the pantheon of contemporary Chinese art, further exposing the burgeoning field’s limitations. Defying these limitations, this session examines queer and feminist art related (but not bound) to “China” – considered as transcultural construct vs. contained/containable nation. Inspired by Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturation, originally theorized vis-à-vis American colonialism; queer feminisms, illuminated by art historians such as Amelia Jones and Erin Silver; and queer China studies, developed by Petrus Liu and others, this session posits transcultural, queer and feminist perspectives as capable of broadening the field of contemporary (Chinese) art. Presentations examine artists Jon Wang, Simon Leung, and Ren Hang’s queer visions of cosmopolitan Chinese cities; Ma Liuming’s performances as ecofeminist-queer interventions; hybridity in Yee I-Lann’s porcelain installations; and the transcultural queer feminisms of curator Abby Chen’s WOMEN我們 exhibition. This session considers contemporary Chinese art outside national confines, highlighting intersectional identities and perspectives (building on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s formulation) of artists representing, critiquing, and/or otherwise imagining “China” in transition.


"At the Head of the Table”: Women Art Museum Directors in the 21st Century [Special Topics Forum]

Joanna P. Gardner-Huggett, DePaul University and Rebecca J. DeRoo, Rochester Institute of Technology
Email Address(s):
jgardner@depaul.edu
rjdgsh@rit.edu

Women now comprise 50% percent of the Association of American Art Museum Directors’ (AAMD) membership. The CAA Committee on Women in the Arts and Museum Committee wish to recognize this important milestone by bringing together several women directors working at both public and academic art institutions for a dynamic conversation about equity, access, and representation. Amidst historic and recent data-driven efforts to promote diversity within museums, to expand “seats at the table” for women and art professionals of color, this session will facilitate a unique and collaborative dialogue that will explore women directors’ efforts “at the head of the table.”


Abolitionist Aesthetics: Necropolitics, the Carceral State and Trans-Queer Resistance

Lorenzo Triburgo, Oregon State University (Online)
Email Address(s):
lorenzo@lorenzotriburgo.com

This panel examines trans-queer art and artists in resistance to the neoliberal carceral state (Dillon, 2017). The four presenters consider intersectional critiques of prisons, policing, surveillance, and administrative violence and investigate various visual strategies employed to dismantle narratives that render queer bodies disposable. Following individual presentations, the panelists will engage in a discussion facilitated by Nicole Fleetwood, Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University and expert in the field of art and incarceration.

The crisis of mass incarceration has made its way into mainstream politics in the last 5 years in part due to the transgender activists of color who have been at the forefront of prison abolitionist movements for the last 5 decades. While mainstream media displays a seemingly insatiable visual appetite for trans and queer bodies, these same transgender women, and trans-queer people--particularly of those of color and possessing low-socioeconomic status, continue to experience violence at increasingly high rates (Stanley, 2015).

If we are to understand the prison industrial complex as an infrastructure of oppression upheld in part by the dominant narrative that people of color, poor people, and queer people are ‘dangerous’ (to the white-capitalist-heteropatriarchy), it is critical to examine the visual language of criminalizing queerness, and further consider the work of artists grappling with efforts to shift the narrative while remaining wary of the traps of visibility.



Medievalism Out of Bounds

James Eynon Fishburne, University of California, Los Angeles
Email Address(s):
jefishburne@gmail.com

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century revivals of medieval European literary, artistic, and architectural styles have been copiously studied. The intersection of medievalism in its various forms with reactionary politics, white supremacy, budding nationalism, religious awakening, and the circumvention of stagnant academic standards have long been established. The analysis of these intersections has been mostly conscripted within specific geographic parameters: Northwestern Europe and the Northeastern United States. This session seeks to explore the phenomenon of medievalism outside these boundaries, geographic or conceptual. It looks to expand and nuance our understanding of the cultural impact of the Middle Ages, broadly conceived, in modernity, beyond the scope of these topics and regions. In particular, it seeks to examine the role of medievalism in shaping artistic movements, regional design vernaculars, and cultural identities not traditionally considered within the orbit of its legacy. From Latin America to the Western United States, and from the Parisian avant garde to the collecting of Islamic art in Hawai‘i, this session sheds new light on the full scope and impact of that historic discourse.


Pen to Paper in the Digital Age: Artist's Correspondence and Writings from the Nineteenth Century

Elizabeth Gorayeb, Wildenstein Plattner Institute
Email Address(s):
jennifer.gimblett@wpi-art.org

Artists' writings and correspondence provide fascinating portraits of the individual and have become indispensable references for scholarship. Letters provide as much information in their content as they do their form, offering slivers of detail concerning the author's daily lives and artistic practices, and can correct previously-held notions derived from anecdotal sources. Accessibility to these documents, both in translation and in their material form, has the ability to transform scholarship and deepen our understanding of the author's interior world. In anticipation of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute’s forthcoming publication, The Letters of Edgar Degas by Theodore Reff, we celebrate several nineteenth-century painters whose writings have become integral to our discussion of their respective oeuvres.

Our discussion will center on the ways scholars have used and continue to use these documents in their research, speak to the challenges inherent to their translation, interpretation, and preservation, and how these sources benefit from greater accessibility through digitization. We reflect upon the endeavor of creating tomes of artist's writings with the art historians who have consolidated, translated, and offered their insights into the correspondence and writings of Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin.



From Being to Doing: Curating Contemporary Chinese Art

Ihnmi Jon, Binghamton University
Email Address(s):
ijon1@binghamton.edu

The curator Gao Minglu (1998) states: “As a guest curator from Mainland China, my chief concern has been to present the artworks in a theoretical framework within which contemporary Chinese art makes sense to a Western audience.” This “translation model,” by which we mean the curatorial practice that renders new Chinese art legible in light of Euro-American frames of reference, served as a primary curatorial approach in the 1990s. Subsequently, other curatorial approaches have complicated a unified “Chinese” art history, working on regional and synchronic developments that have variously augmented, informed, or displaced older notions of what Chinese contemporary art is. This panel scrutinizes a range of curatorial practices that have engaged with contemporary Chinese art—whether object-based or processual—both inside and outside China from 1990 to the present. Revisiting multiple sites, places, and communities where works were to be created, installed, and presented, panelists analyze cases in which the interests and aspirations of Chinese curators, critics, artists, and other stakeholders are interconnected, sometimes working in concert with each other, and at others at cross purposes. Our goal is to draw attention to diverse regimes of value, identity, creative practice, and imaginaries that complicate our understanding of what has been referred to as “Chinese contemporary art” beyond conventionalized art historical periodizations, precepts, and genealogies.


Asian Art as Global Art

Deborah S. Hutton, The College of New Jersey
Email Address(s):
dhutton@tcnj.edu

The field of art history has long been structured by discrete geographical units. Realizing the limitations of nation-state-based narratives and seeking to decolonize the discipline, art historians are increasingly questioning these geographical divides. Honored as a Distinguished Scholar at the 2018 CAA Annual Conference, Wu Hung argued that Chinese art history is global art history. Wu is not alone in invoking the global. Informed by border-transcending contemporary phenomena—climate change, disease, migration, trade, and communication, to name a few—many art historians who specialize in discrete geographical regions now also are pursuing a global dimension in their research. Panels at recent CAA conferences have, for example, explored the art of nomadic peoples across the Eurasian steppes, the circulation of art in the Indian Ocean world, and the hybrid forms of the Manchu Qing court. Artworks demonstrating “flamboyant circulation,” such as the Safavid carpet that becomes a samurai costume, vividly make the point that Asian art is part of a long, global history. But, how much of this global history makes it into the classroom?

This lightning-round panel brings together six scholar-teachers from various institutions to discuss strategies for infusing introductory and intermediate undergraduate courses with an understanding of the global nature of Asian art. Largely geographically and temporally organized, teaching materials often retroactively apply the nation-state structure to art history by default. This panel, in contrast, discusses ways to bring the dynamic, inter-regional, and global approaches that characterize research in Asian art history to bear on teaching.



Contemporary Art and the Curatorial Agenda in University Art Galleries and Museums

Abigail Satinsky, Tufts University Art Galleries and Amy Powell,
Email Address(s):
abigail.satinsky@tufts.edu


This roundtable conversation brings together contemporary curators in university art spaces to discuss their curatorial agendas in institutions of higher education. Drawing from a campus’s material and intellectual resources in the service of visiting artists, exhibitions, and publications, they each navigate institutional histories, advocate for the central role of contemporary art in the production of knowledge, and are responsible to specific pedagogical objectives in studio practice, social sciences, and humanities. In addition to their work in university environments, these curators share concerns to build community among broader publics. They each prioritize questions of difference and work to decolonize, critique, and unsettle expectations of what higher education and arts institutions do and whom they address.

Using specific examples from their respective curatorial programs, participants will discuss the possibilities and challenges of producing contemporary art alongside scholarship, leveraging institutional resources, and how to set intentions for a research program while working alongside a university’s strengths and blindspots. They will compare strategies and consider what unique skills their work offers for contemporary curating more broadly. They will address such questions as: how do we think of the institution as material that contemporary artists can work with to broaden, expand and/or critique pedagogical and research initiatives and university culture? How do overlapping mandates for university galleries and museums as both public facing and pedagogical platforms drive programming and “community” engagement? What does the university want from us and what do we want from it?



Customizing Books Around Images in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1700

Jennifer L Nelson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Email Address(s):
jlnels@umich.edu

Art historians, codicologists, and historians of the book have increasingly come to recognize that printed books, like other categories of book, such as codices, were ‘permeable’ rather than ‘fixed’ objects. Just as manuscripts were mutable, their material form and constituent parts manipulable, so too, printed books could be adapted to need or use, their format altered to fit a wide spectrum of functions, in response to contingent circumstances of all kinds. Our session focuses on the ways in which pictorial images anchored processes of customization specific to the printed book. How did the presence of images condition alterations to the physical structure of the book—through insertion or interpolation, subtraction or deletion, adjustments in the ordering of folios or quires, amendments of image or text? Although our primary interest is in printed books and print series bound like books, we shall also consider how meaningful alterations made to incunabula and early printed books often followed (though also diverged from) the patterns such changes took in manuscript codices. In particular, we are interested in exploring the manner and meaning of autograph insertions—both written and drawn—into printed books, and conversely, of printed images embedded or interpolated into manuscripts. Throughout “Customizing Books Around Images,”the emphasis will fall on the hermeneutic functions of the modifications made by makers and users to the structure of their books.


Fashion as Power and Protection

Caroline M Bellios, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Email Address(s):
cbellios@saic.edu

Fashion as Power and Protection

This panel seeks to extend and elucidate an ongoing conversation being had by three fashion and design scholars whose work and practices share the common themes of power and protection as a utility of costume. The 90-minute format with be broken up into 3 main sections (Camouflage, Commemoration, and Community) with each presenter both introducing one area and presenting their research in the other two related areas with dynamic visual aids, culminating in mini group discussions between each themed section guided in part by audience-interactive materials and question prompts. As women centering feminine concerns (both historic and modern) within fashion, we hope to engage the audience in our research to expand and thoughtfully challenge its scope. What better way to center women in fashion than framing it within the kind of conversations women have together to make sense of our world and support one another? These tête-à-têtes always reveal some truth about ourselves, but with our consent and on our turf. We hope to invite the audience into this intimate space.



Art and Frontier

Ittai Weinryb, Bard Graduate Center
Email Address(s):
weinryb@bgc.bard.edu

A frontier is an imaginary boundary that divides space into two: that which belongs to you and that which does not. It is the edge of your own human cognition; it creates a theoretical (and sometimes physical) line between the known and the unknown, designating a geographic realm where the rules of conduct and cultural practice differ from the center. Ultimately, a frontier offers ways to question conceptualizations of self and identity through geographic proclamations of alterity—mapping personal, social, and political perspectives onto the visible world. By looking back into conceptualizations of the outsider and its agenda of spiritual and economic domination via varied technologies of art and material culture, we can glean an understanding of how personal and cultural identity can play out spatially and materially and result in a fraught legacy of colonialism.


Beyond the Frame: Women, Technology, and Intermedia Visual Arts

Hannah B. Higgins, Univ Of Illinois-Chicago and Nicole L Woods, University of Notre Dame
Email Address(s):
higgins@uic.edu
nwoods@nd.edu

This panel brings together scholars and curators exploring pioneering women artists whose experimental work, beginning in the 1960s, productively intersected with a wide range of subjectivities, locations, technologies, media, and temporal frames. Of particular interest are the ways in which rise of “intermedia,” and its theorizations, delimit the hybridity of new genres initiated within Fluxus, Minimalist music and dance, experimental film and video, performance, concrete poetry, new media, and other creative enterprises in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Visual artists under consideration here directly address the distinct types of knowledge their diverse intermedia practices perform or disable. Thinking about the epistemological, ideological, and aesthetic aims engendered by their work in experimental poetry, video sculptures, computational drawings and process art—as well as what their blind spots can reveal about the period concerns for art—may help us to reflect more critically about how we write about women artists who aim to disrupt the disciplinary boundaries of art and technology.


Decolonial Practices: A Report from the Field

Lisi Raskin, Rhode Island School of Design
Email Address(s):
raum101@gmail.com

What does the decolonization of our artistic, teaching, and curatorial practices actually look like? What steps are necessary to transform these positionalities into vectors for affective, activist, and dematerial art practices that undermine imperialist capitalism and the colonial origins of the museum and university? How do we create pathways into higher education that don’t saddle subsequent generations with untenable debt? And how do these questions point to systemic problems and potentialities within the greater ecology of our respective fields?

This panel resolves to share models and foster evolution so that the concepts, language, and methods required to perform anti-oppression work may flourish. Embodying the urgent need for decolonial practice, this interdisciplinary panel reports back on ways we have intervened and affected change as art historians, artists, curators, and educators working within the oppressive structures of higher education and exhibition production. This panel will highlight specific instances of interventions that yielded decolonial outcomes resulting from an audit of our positions within our fields of practice, a dismantling of our biases and practices of collusion, and our (re)orientation toward practices that interfere with the paradigm that privileges hegemonic positions by default.



Gender and Identity in the Visual Culture of Ancient China

Yan Sun, Gettysburg College and Yan Liu, Northwestern Polytechnical University
Email Address(s):
ysun@gettysburg.edu
fionaliu1202@yahoo.com

The construction of gender and identity through visual culture and mortuary practice in ancient China is at the core of this panel discussion. Using the overarching concept of agency theory developed in art history and archaeology, the panellists will investigate how aspects of visual culture, such as diagrams, imageries, and artefacts and written language were utilized to articulate the multiple aspects of gender identities from the Bronze Age through the Tang Dynasty (c. 2000 BCE to 907 CE). The dynamic intersections between gender, politics, and power, and perceptions of the afterlife and cosmologic thinking will also be carefully considered to address the processes and motivations behind gender creation and/or recreation. Yan Sun examines how the gendered identity of married noblewomen were carefully presented by the lineage she was married into through visual culture in tombs and how that construction was closely tied to the Western Zhou political establishment; Constance Cook looks at visual representations of the human body on newly discovered pre-Han bamboo divination manuals and addresses how cosmological thinking impacted the formation of the representation of the gendered body; Yan Liu discusses how female identity and power were constructed in funerary contexts through the study of dynamic interactions between people and artefacts;and Leslie V. Wallace investigates how the construction of gendered space in the tomb of Tang crown prince Yide was visualized through the selection of iconographic representations of avian imageries. Collectively, the panel will offer new insights about gender and identities in ancient China.


Hot Art, Cold War: European Encounters with Post-War American Art 1960s-1970s

Claudia Hopkins, University of Edinburgh
Email Address(s):
C.Hopkins@ed.ac.uk

Strong assertions have been made about the internationalization of American art as an instrument of cultural imperialism, enabled by the intervention of political agencies in the US that used the aesthetic openness represented by American art to reinforce notions of American/capitalist “freedom” within Cold War politics. This session will shift attention away from US political intentionality to the European experience of American art. The reception of American art in West-Germany, France, and Britain is fairly well known, but how might our understanding of the rise of US art in Europe change when considering hitherto neglected regions in Eastern/Southern Europe? How did art professionals/artists deal with the cultural differences and even untranslatability that emerged in their interactions with American art? Focusing on case studies drawn from examples in the USSR, GDR, Spain, and Italy, this session foregrounds the diverging ideological, aesthetic, and pragmatic issues that impacted on the cultural translation of American art in these contrasting contexts. Modes of encounter varied, from secretly reading and translating texts about American art at one extreme, to seeing US art in New York at the other. As the result, the assimilation of the “other” varied. GDR critics debated American and Socialist art to define what “modern/contemporary” art meant. In Francoist Spain, Equipo Crónica found a “third way” when repurposing Pop Art for a critique of their time. Overall, the notion of a homogenous discourse on US art, the concept of “influence,” and the cliché of American art as “universal” are called into question.


Complicating the late 19th-Century Visual Culture: Photographies in Asia

Jeehey Kim, University of Arizona and Tingting Xu, University of Chicago
Email Address(s):
jeehey@gmail.com
forbuycds@hotmail.com

This session aims to investigate various photographic practices in Asia during the nineteenth century, when the introduction of photography and diversification of its practices accompanied the process of modernization and the European imperial powers’ expansion to the region. Exploring photographic practices in China, Japan, Korea, and India, the session attempts to shed light on the ways in which both local and Western photographers diversified the visual culture of Asia during the nineteenth century. In addition to revealing the hitherto little-known photographic culture of the region, the speakers attempt to ruminate on the history of the nineteenth century photography, including methodological issues and conceptual frame of modernity.


Indecent Exposure: The Body in the 21st Century Creative Process

Robert Ladislas Derr,
Email Address(s):
derr.rola@gmail.com

This panel examines the body as material conceptualization for artists in the 21st century. Perennially depicted throughout history, the body communicates vitality and experience. It is a common subject, especially indispensable in art performances, a medium taking center stage in the global arts community. However not so understood, may be the way in which artists today utilize and depict the body. From male and female nude bodies establishing agency, contextualizing the queer mother, to implied presence of the body, artists engage and complicate relationships with audiences. Robert Ladislas Derr chairs the discussion with an introduction to the body as subject, his use of his own body to manifest contexts, and forwards the panelists. Thea Fitz-James addresses the aesthetic critique of nudity as a binary between art and pornography. Dr. Jennie Klein examines Sheilah ReStack’s construction of queer maternal constructions. Through Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, Holly Hughes asserts the body is its irreducible medium. Cynthia Pachikara tests visual attentiveness of the body in movement and space with silhouettes and shadows. Whether mediated, live, or suggested, the body instinctually captivates and connects, pulling us in.


Locality and Memory in East Asian Art

Kathy Yim-king Mak, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Email Address(s):
kathy.mak@polyu.edu.hk

East Asia has a rich history of honoring specific locations through representing, symbolizing, inscribing, or reconstructing relevant elements in art. However, little research has considered those articulations as a form of remembrance through which members of a society employed to commemorate or reshape certain realities. This panel invites scholars to explore the relationship between depicting and remembering specific locales in art across Chinese, Japanese and Korean communities, from the early modern through the contemporary periods. Specifically, it investigates how artistic portrayal of different subjects—landscape, cityscape, monument, or portrait—evokes in viewers memories of specific locations, and how the evoked memories were consumed for utilitarian purposes. In other words, this panel examines the interconnection between art and memory beyond paradigms of storage or retrieval. Instead, it explores their dialectic relationship and instrumentality as they intersect with the question of place-making and remembering.


Global Conversations 2020: Things Aren’t Always as they Seem: Art History and the Politics of Vision
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: CAA-Getty International Program
Cristian Emil Nae, George Enescu National University of Arts, Iasi
Email Address(s):
cristi_nae@yahoo.co.uk

The politics of seeing in art history may be understood as a power struggle of interpretations conducted from divergent perspectives: past and present, right and left, neo imperialist and decolonial, industrialist and environmentalist, as well as the entire spectrum between these and similar binaries. This Global Conversation, an annual session organized by the CAA-Getty International Program, intends to articulate the responsibilities of art historians in our current sociopolitical situation, problematizing the relation between art history and the politics of vision from the perspective of global art history: who should be seeing what, how it has been seen, how should it be seen, when or where it should be seen, not (yet) or never seen. The four papers in the panel articulate these questions by focusing on the afterlife of art, and interrogate the reuse and abuse of images and artworks in a context different from an original one. Drawing on case studies from East-Central and South-Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, they investigate artifacts subjected to institutionalized interpretive recontextualization. Thus, they also debate the implications of art historical interpretation as an epistemological device capable of shifting the meaning of images and artworks according to various ideological pressures, and view art history not only as a site of epistemic violence, but also as struggle for epistemic justice.


Painting Pedagogy in DIY Times

Julia Morrisroe, University of Florida
Email Address(s):
julia01@ufl.edu

How do students study painting today? In our DIY culture, where YouTube videos demonstrate any task and Instagram holds our student’s attention, how does this impact the way students learn in the studio? As painting constantly redefines itself and enlarges its opportunities in and through other media, is this reflected in current painting pedagogy? How does painting’s historical privilege, it’s exclusionary history and its promotion of the individual artist engage, challenge or exclude our current students? Is there room for the slowly developed skills of painting in the evolving interdisciplinary curriculum of art schools? This panel will present an in-depth examination of contemporary painting pedagogy at a range of institutions.


ARTificiality: Aesthetics of Embodiment in Digital Art

Liron Efrat, University of Toronto
Email Address(s):
liron.efrat@mail.utoronto.ca

“The computer's most profound aesthetic implication is that we are being forced to dismiss the classical view of art and reality which insists that man stand outside of reality in order to observe it”

(Jack Burnham, 1969)

Considering the extensive use of digital technologies by media artists, Burnham’s early contention is now being revalidated while gaining new meanings. As new technologies continuously intervene and expand the familiar boundaries of artistic media, the experience of art’s consumption, and consequently the social politics of the art-world, we seek to explore how computational technologies are employed to establish a sense of ARTificiality. In this context, ARTificiality relates to artistic explorations of artificial, mediated, or expanded forms of embodiment. Embodiment here is considered in its broader meaning, to approach both the physical and sensual realms of expression as well as the psychological aspects of identity construction in relation to digital technologies.

Each paper re-considers dichotomies familiar in art’s theory discourse, such as artificial vs. natural; actual vs. virtual; and fake vs. authentic, while using them to analyze the embodied experience in artistic installations involving four different digital technologies: Augmented reality art (Efrat), Robotic art (Ehrlich), Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (Weinberg), and Social Media interventions (Goldberg). As these forms of art tend to migrate from traditional exhibition spaces to being directly integrated with the fabric of everyday life, we explore how they bring forth and reflect on the contemporary ARTificiality of the human condition.



Art in Transwar Japan

Namiko Kunimoto, The Ohio State University
Email Address(s):
namiko.kunimoto@gmail.com

In renowned 20th-century historian Carol Gluck’s words, the “...long postwar was one consequence of the original sengo [postwar] consciousness that wished and hoped for—although not necessarily believed in or lived—a history that could begin again at noon, August 15, 1945.” Writing in 1993, Gluck describes a notion that remains popular in art historical scholarship to this day—namely, that art (and much else) in Japan began anew following the explosion of the atomic bombs, reinforced by exhibitions and scholarship that privilege artists who were born in the 1930s and came of age in the postwar period. How might the notion of “Transwar art” allow us to challenge this conventional periodization? More than simply identifying continuities or ruptures, the concept of “transwar art” requires that we move beyond the presumed division of pre- and post-war Japan and its analogous binaries, including: fascism/liberalism, militarism/pacifism, and imperial divinity/popular sovereignty. This panel considers transwar continuities of design in the service of commerce and the nation, evaluates the aesthetic and political conversion of major artists, considers the weighty colonial freight and ethnoracial dimensions of transwar artworks, and investigates the influence of “active humanism” from the 1930s to the 1970s.


Centering the Student Experience: Using Data to Improve Student Learning

Amy D. Babinec, South Suburban College
Email Address(s):
amy.babinec@gmail.com

How do we know what students are learning? How can we find out if students are meeting our course goals? And how can we design assignments that help students learn? The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning provides a dynamic framework for hearing directly from students to guide syllabi, assignments, and class projects. This session will suggest several strategies to improve student learning in art and art history courses, based on data collected at a variety of colleges and universities. This session will also share the findings of the ongoing research project Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT), demonstrating how small instructional changes can make a difference in student performance, grades, and retention. Participants will leave with strategies and a framework for using data to improve student success.


Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity

Rachel Epp Buller, Bethel College
Email Address(s):
rachel@ddtr.net

The artists, performers, writers, and thinkers of this panel examine culturally conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of maternity. While the maternal body has gained currency in much popular culture and the contemporary art world, in too many instances, the maternal potential of female bodies – whether realized or not – still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those whose do not. The artists and scholars of this panel discuss how maternal expectations shape creative work and designed environments, and they simultaneously highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.

Using both critical and creative presentation styles, panelists draw attention to ways in which cultural, geographic, ethnic, or religious contexts can determine what is “appropriate” for an artist who is a mother, for a mother who is an artist, and for artists whose bodies may be seen as potentially maternal. Panelists consider art addressing infertility and reproductive expectations; ancestral bodies and kinship in Indigenous contexts; collaborative processes that intentionally – and defiantly – incorporate family into artistic practice; and “inappropriate” bodies as speculative entry points into navigating the design and relations of possible futures. Our discussant connects the presentations to broader contexts by asking “What was, is, and will be at stake in undoing the mothering body’s (in)visibility?”



ROLE CALL: Gender Roles, Performative Imaginaries, and Decolonial Feminist Critiques

Amy J. Bowman-McElhone, and Jennifer A Baez, Florida State University
Email Address(s):
amybowman82@gmail.com
baez.jennifer@gmail.com

This roundtable panel facilitates a hemispheric, trans-American dialogue centered on the politics of the body in relationship to the visuality of race and performative gendered imaginaries as subversions of Western patriarchy. Through a set of decolonial feminist critiques, this panel addresses the articulation and slippages of gender roles, including the self-representation of the female body by contemporary Peruvian artists, gender and indigeneity in 19th c. Columbus monuments, and the performance of fe/male drag in U.S. -based performance and post-conceptual art as an incomplete pose that disrupts heteronormative definitions of gender inculcated by first wave feminism.

The format features four panelists: three art historians, one visual artist, and a discussant. Each panelist will introduce their topic through brief introductions and an artistic presentation/performance with dialogue facilitated by Dr. Lesley Wolff, whose research considers the gendered imaginaries of foodways framed by feminist approaches to the body, viscera, and critical eating studies.

The roundtable engages in a critique of gendered subjectivities, social and aesthetic categorizations and the interaction of language, bodies, and images attendant to the complexities of race and gender roles in relation to transnational and transhistorical concerns, rural/urban dynamics, and the movement and slippages of the gendered categories of consumers and producers. These hemispheric critiques of power, gender, and representation provide a vital linkage between decolonial approaches and the Western/Anglo art historical and gendered narratives that such methodologies de-center and destabilize.