Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar
Associate Professor of History, Theatre, and Medieval Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Modern War, Medieval Imagery: The Visual Impact of Medievalism during World War I”

Although the First World War is usually understood as a quintessentially modern conflict, the politics and ideologies that led to the war’s outbreak were profoundly shaped by the meanings attached to Europe’s medieval past. Indeed, the war itself was figured as a continuation of medieval wars for sovereignty and self-determination. The visual culture that shaped the propaganda campaigns of the war, and that influenced popular understandings of it, were accordingly saturated with medieval imagery.

Assistant Professor
Bi-College Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Haverford College

“Art Journals as Interlocutors of Change: White Birch and Modern Japanese Art”

Founded in April of 1910, the art journal White Birch (Shirakaba) redefined modern Japanese art for a new generation of artists and writers. One of the first art journals to reproduce the works of Rodin, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Matisse, White Birch provided a critical framework for introducing and discussing European modernism. In this paper I will examine the function of the art journal as a new medium of artistic exchange within early 20^th century Japan. I will argue that the dual role of the art journal – as both a physical object and a virtual space – aspired to create new audiences and foster the exchange of ideas through the development of alternative spaces and artistic communities. Through their affiliation with White Birch aspiring artists and writers reframed the debate on modern art by subverting government established styles and exhibition formats that reinforced the cultural and political objectives of Japan’s nation building efforts. In the process, these activities opened a critical space that allowed artists and writers to explore and complicate the changing status and boundaries of modern art in Japan and East Asia more broadly.

Postdoctoral Writing Fellow, Haverford College
Curator of The Wall in Our Heads: American Artists and the Berlin Wall
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery (October 23-December 13, 2015)

“You Are Entering the American Sector”: Shinkichi Tajiri, Sculpture in Exile, and the Reconstruction of the Berlin Wall

In conjunction with The Wall In Our Heads exhibition at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, curator Paul M. Farber will discuss the work of Japanese-American sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri, a professor at the Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin in 60s and 70s, who produced over 500 photographic images of the Wall. Living in exile from the United States after his family was interned during World War II, Tajiri experienced the effects of U.S. power and presence in the divided city and wrestled with the evolution of the Wall’s physical and social landscapes.

Senior Fellow, Department of the History of Art
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

“The Arabesque between Kant and Comic Strip”

The roots of the modern arabesque are manifold. The sinuous curves of the Rococo are one; Raphael’s grottesche and its ancient predecessors another. Yet a more surprising root is the avant-garde writing and metaphysics of the German Romantics. Looking to the arts for inspiration, philosophers and writers turned to the arabesque to quench their thirst for a synthesis of man and nature, of finite and cosmic spirit through an idiom that is endlessly inventive, constantly creates new forms, and never takes on definitive embodiment. However, when the visual arts sallied forth to reconquer this ornamental domain, traditional genres such as painting and fresco found themselves ill-equipped to realize the arabesque in its new theoretical complexity. Consequently, not high art, but the pages of books became the locus of the most inventive visual applications of the Romantic arabesque. Ultimately, only the comic strip could produce a visual arabesque equal to the pervasive irony, subversive power, and self-reflexive discursivity of its literary sibling.

Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow, New York University

The Paradoxical Fetish of Humanitarian Ephemera

The humanitarian mobiles associated with international first response present bold images of temporary refuge, and yet belie spectacular permanent infrastructures and a hardware of transportation and communications networks etched into territories in the global South. This paper examines aesthetics and technopolitics in the histories and social lives of a range of artifacts designed for ephemerality, from sheltering textiles to hastily-produced borderlands. As unexpectedly architectural interventions into emergency contexts, these portable objects and spaces contour a problematic desire for impermanence while enacting settlement through the production of the commodity. This paper examines this process through various scales of humanitarian ephemera—materially urgent, subtly temporal, and ultimately spatial—interrogating an ambiguity in forms of architecture (and humanitarianism) we think we see.