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.

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Visiting Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies, Colgate University,

“False Matches: Short Film, Young Cinema and the Situationists”

In a 1960 issue of the journal, Ésprit, Michel Mesnil proposed that, united by their demographic and their cinephilia, dynamic French filmmakers of the late 1950s must be understood as a veritable movement: Jeune Cinéma, or Young Cinema. This same group of directors was attacked by the Situationist International (1957-1972), a postwar avant-garde, as both products and vectors of a society of spectacle. This talk analyzes the differing approaches to cinema which divided these two groups by investigating their common inspirational source: the court métrage, or short film.

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.

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

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.

Roya Z. Rastegar
Visiting Assistant Professor and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Bryn Mawr College

“Sundance & the Curatorial Challenge of American Independent Film”

Film festivals have increasingly become a dynamic curatorial mechanism for defining film culture. This talk explores how the Sundance Film Festival – as the foremost showcase for American independent film – has entangled the production, distribution, and exhibition of independent film with its imagined relationship with the snowy, mountainous terrain of Park City, Utah. Distinctions of racial identity and nationhood – manifest visually through fantasies of discovery, exploration, and mastery over the festival’s physical landscape – pose a curatorial challenge to the future of American independent film.

Marc Siegel
Assistant Professor, Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies
Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany

“Lensable Belief”

In this talk, I analyze an important factor in the mobilization of star images within the  queer New York underground film scene of the 1960s, namely belief. My argument hinges on the term “lensable belief” introduced by Ronald Tavel, the screenwriter for numerous Andy Warhol films and co-founder of Theater of the Ridiculous, in his own fascinating writings about fellow artist Jack Smith’s obsession with the star of 1940s Hollywood escapist fantasy films, Maria Montez.

Amy Powell
Associate Professor, History of Art
University of California, Irvine

“A History of the Picture as Box”