Matthew Feliz, Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art, Bryn Mawr College
“‘Hanging on the Telephone’: The Video Installations of Christian Marclay”

This paper focuses on the ways that Christian Marclay’s video installation,Telephones (1995), analogizes the spatial and temporal structures of telephones and televisions.  The paper places Marclay’s installation in dialog with analyses of video that privilege the reflexive and narcissistic conditions of the medium, offering a reading of the work that foregrounds the ways in which it disrupts the hermetic loop that has come to define the aesthetic structure of the medium.

Johanna Gosse, Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art, Bryn Mawr College,
“Marilyn, Wonder Woman, and the Feminist Motion Study“

This talk examines two experimental “motion studies” of the eroticized female body: Bruce Conner’s 16mm film MARILYN TIMES FIVE (1968-1973), and Dara Birnbaum’s landmark work of video art, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-1979). Though they both focus on iconic sex objects and are morphologically similar, these works nevertheless reflect two distinct approaches to the readymade image, visual pleasure, and identification. This talk considers how and why Birnbaum’s video invites a feminist interpretation while Conner’s film tends to frustrate, and even defy, the terms of such a reading.