Author Archives: visualculture

November 20 – Gennifer Weisenfeld

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Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University,

“Gas Mask Parade: Japan’s Anxious Modernism”

An army of schoolgirls marching through Tokyo, their faces an anonymous sea of gas masks. Perhaps one of the most iconic images of the anxious modernism of 1930s Japan, photographer Horino Masao’s Gas Mask Parade reveals the vivid yet prosaic inculcation of fear in Japanese daily life through the increasingly pervasive visual culture of civil defense. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in late 1931—the beginning of its Fifteen Year War—marks the onset of a period of intense social mobilization and militarization on the homefront as the warfront expanded on the continent and throughout the Pacific. Surveillance, defensive barriers, physical protection and prophylaxis became standard visual tropes of communal preparedness. Analyzing a diverse range of media from hortatory government posters to commercial design, this paper will explore the interocular construction of an anxious visual culture of civil defense evident in Japanese photography, advertising, and urban space.

Weisenfeld

April 12 – Michelle Ortíz Film Screening & Panel Discussion on Immigration

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“Aquí y Allá”:  Migration, Art, and Social Justice
Friday, April 12, 7:00 pm
Bryn Mawr College, Thomas Library 224

*Refreshments offered prior to talk at 6:30pm*

“Aquí y Allá” is a short documentary chronicling a transnational public art project that connected Mexican immigrant students in Philadelphia with youth in Chihuahua, Mexico to create a permanent mural in South Philadelphia. Following the film screening, the panelists will discuss the immigrant rights movement and the critical role art plays in the struggle for social justice.

Panelists:
Michelle Angela Ortíz
Creator, Director, and Lead Artist of the “Aquí y Allá” Mural Project

Erika Almirón
Executive Director of JUNTOS, a Latino immigrant community-led non-profit organization in Philadelphia

Amada Armenta
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania

Moderator:
Jennifer Harford Vargas
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Bryn Mawr College

Reception following panel in the Thomas London Room.
Free and open to the public.

Made possible by the generous support of the Bryn Mawr College Center for Visual Culture, the departments of English, History of Art, Spanish, and Growth and Structure of Cities, the Dean of Graduate Studies, the Pensby Center, the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, the Center for Social Science, the Program in Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Peoples and Cultures, and the 1902  Lecture Fund.  Additional support provided by Enlace and the Intercultural Center, Swarthmore College.

Ortiz Event

February 7 – Tacita Dean Film Project, Arcadia University

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February 7 – April 21, 2013
JG a film project by Tacita Dean

OPENING EVENT
Lecture by Tacita Dean

Thursday, February 7, 6:30 p.m.
Commons Great Room (map #14)

Reception follows; film will be on view from 6:30 to 10 p.m.

Event is free; Reservation required.
Please register online.


Arcadia University Art Gallery is pleased to announce the presentation of JG by internationally acclaimed British-born, Berlin-based artist Tacita Dean. Commissioned by and made for the gallery, JG is funded by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and will be on view from February 7 through April 21, 2013.

JG is a sequel in technique to FILM, Dean’s 2011 project for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. It is inspired by her correspondence with British author J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) regarding connections between his short story “The Voices of Time” (1960) and Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork and film Spiral Jetty (both works, 1970). The new 26 1/2 minute work is a looped 35mm anamorphic film shot on location in the saline landscapes of Utah and Southern California using Dean’s recently developed and patented system of aperture gate masking. An  unprecedented departure from her previous 16mm films, JG tries to respond to Ballard’s challenge–posed to her shortly before he died–that Dean should “treat the Spiral Jetty as a mystery her film would solve.”

For more information and shuttle registration, please visit Arcadia University Art Gallery.

January 17-19, 2013 INTIMATE COLLABORATIONS

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INTIMATE COLLABORATIONS CONFERENCE

January 17th to 19th, 2013

Terrace Room, Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania

Preceded by:

PERFORMANCE/DISCUSSION

Alicia Hall Moran: the motown project

Thursday, January 17th, 2013 6:00 pm

Amado Recital Hall, Irvine Auditorium, First Floor

3401 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA

How do we describe the intimacies that are born through works of art? What do intimate aesthetic collaborations bring into view or fail to make visible? What do different modes and forms of artistic collaboration yield (or at the very least promise) aesthetically, philosophically, or even politically? How does the work of theorizing artistic intimacy ultimately impact the way we think about art history as a practice or a discipline? What does intimacy require of us as scholars, critics, lovers, and producers of art? These are just a few of the questions that animate Intimate Collaborations, a conference which looks to foster new modes of intimate exchange between art, artists, and historians of art on the occasion of a momentous exhibition of some of the richest artistic collaborations of the second half of the 20th century.

Intimate Collaborations is a conference inspired by, and organized to coincide with the Philadelphia Museum of Art?s exhibition, Dancing Around the Bride: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Marcel Duchamp. It will address the strange and complex intimacies that emerge when relationships between artists take form through the process of art-making. Dancing Around the Bride is the first exhibition to explore the interwoven lives, works, and experimental spirit of Duchamp and Cage, Cunningham, Johns and Rauschenberg. Intimate Collaborations seeks to conceptualize and expand upon the possibilities set in motion by these artists for thinking the category of collaboration more broadly.


SPEAKERS

Kaja Silverman, Douglas Crimp, Andrew Uroskie, Catherine Craft, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Jonathan Katz, Tara McDowell, Homay King, Huey Copeland, Bibi Obler, Anne M. Wagner, Kate Kraczon, Alex Klein, Danny Snelson, Mashinka Firunts, and Avi Alpert

For more information and free registration:

http://kajasilverman.com/intimate-collaborations-conference.php

January 30 – Susan L. Talbott

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Susan L. Talbott
Director & CEO
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut

“Patti Smith’s Symbolic Portraits”

The pioneering artist, musician, and poet, Patti Smith has made her mark on the American cultural landscape throughout her 40-year career.  From her earliest explorations of artistic expression with friend and vanguard photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1960s and 70s to her profound influence on the nascent punk rock scene in the late 1970s and 80s Smith’s singular vision is expressed with unfiltered emotion.  In October, 2011 the Wadsworth Atheneum presented Patti Smith:  Camera Solo, featuring seventy of her Polaroids and silver gelatin print photographs. I was privileged to curate this traveling exhibition, (opening at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto in March) and to interview Smith for the accompanying catalogue. Smith’s images are totemic and sometimes elegiac, paying homage to those she admires. She portrays her heroes through the depiction of their intimate belongings, their tools, their even their graves.  Her focus on symbolic portraiture will be the subject of this talk.

Co-sponsored by the Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center

 

 

February 6 – Min Kyung Lee

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Min Kyung Lee
Post-Doctoral Fellow in Modern Architecture
Department of Art, Swarthmore College

“Printing and the Inaccurate Production of Urban Space in Modern Paris”

By the late eighteenth century, all governmental plans of Paris were
based on ground surveys drawn into orthogonal compositions. Because the
plan of the city and the urban terrain no longer resembled each other
pictorially, fidelity was established by (1) the verification and
repetition of new quantitative surveying practices; (2) visual
compositions through scientific rhetorical strategies; and (3) the
reproduction of those graphic results through new printing technologies.

The aim of engineers, architects, and administrators in the making of
urban plans was to construct not only correspondence between
representation and reality but also to eliminate divergences between
printed representations. Generally, the objective relationship between
representation and reality relates to a definition of “accuracy”, which
describes the degree to which a representation approaches or diverges
from the object of representation. “Precision” is related to an image’s
internal coherence, i.e., the greater the precision, the fewer
inconsistencies within and between representations. As printing
technologies improved, these two values merged, according the map’s
exact reproduction to be the operative basis for the planning of new
spaces. This lecture discusses the role of cartographic printing in the
making of modern Paris for architects and administrators, while also
demonstrating how the value of exactitude was based on not the
equivalence but the difference between the map and the city.