The Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber Program Curator,
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

“Some Reflections on Discursive Space”

Is it possible to forge a space for discourse within the art museum?  At a moment when buzz words such as “audience engagement” are becoming de rigueur and as programming increasingly merges with curating, what role do these activities have and what promise do they hold? Through a discussion of her past projects, Klein will reflect on whether intimate, unscripted experiences can be both catalyzed and firmly rooted within the walls of an institution while still having mobility, resonance, and relevance beyond.

Associate Professor, Department of English,
Wayne State University

“Andy Warhol’s Skin Problems”

“Andy Warhol’s Skin Problems” examines Warhol’s recurring, career-long preoccupation with the color-line, arguing that Warhol’s Pop praxis, and the centrality of liking and likeness to it, is fundamentally inflected by the racist and anti-racist politics of the early 1960s . It focuses on Warhol’s attunement to the representation and mediation of skin color, suggesting that Warhol’s work invites us to consider how the importance of media specific, aesthetic oppositions between black and white, and between black and white and color shape how we come to “know,” “see,” “feel,” and “experience” racial difference.

Daimler-Benz Associate Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum

“Max Beckmann and the ‘End’ of Neue Sachlichkeit”

This talk will examine the work of Max Beckmann and the notion of Neue Sachlichkeit, typically translated as New Objectivity, in 1920s Germany. The artist, and his 1927 Self-Portrait in Tuxedo in particular, stand at the nexus of key debates at the time about painting, the painterly, and the post-expressionist rise and supposedly swift end of Neue Sachlichkeit.

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.