“Pictorialism Must Go”
A lecture by Farid Masrour
Philosophy Faculty Candidate
Wednesday, January 30
Thomas Library 224
4:15 PM
Category Archives: Events
Visiting Filmmakers and Media Artists Series
Visiting Filmmakers and Media Artists Series
Spring 2013
WEDNESDAYS
5:45-8:30PM
Temple University
Annenburg Hall, Room3
January 17-19, 2013 INTIMATE COLLABORATIONS
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
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
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.
February 20 – Roya Z. Rastegar
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.
February 27 – Marc Siegel
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.
March 20 – Dr. Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts
Dr. Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts
Professor, UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures
“Haptic Visualities in Devotional Diasporas of Shirdi Sai Baba”
Visual images are integral to the transnational networks of a dynamic contemporary religious movement based upon the life and teachings of Shirdi Sai Baba, a South Asian saint who lived in the western Indian state of Maharashtra from the mid-1800s to 1918. Shirdi Sai Baba defied religious nationalism, refused to self-identify as either Hindu or Muslim, and accepted the devotions of all castes and faiths, thus offering an alternative to communal ideologies. This presentation will explore how images actively shape devotion and impact this fast-growing movement’s expansion in communities of India, Mauritius, Germany, Ghana, and the US. In addition to documenting the history, production, and dispersal of images, it will focus upon the efficacy of the images through locally-defined understandings of indexicality that ensure the presence and proximity of the Saint despite diasporic dislocations and the digital reproduction of images. “Haptic visualities” and “corpothetics” will be discussed, as well as the role of new media and the blending with Eastern Orthodox icon traditions in the dissemination of Shirdi Sai Baba’s images around the world.
March 27 – Amy Powell
Amy Powell
Associate Professor, History of Art
University of California, Irvine
“A History of the Picture as Box”
In his 1948 essay, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” Clement Greenberg described the illusion created by Western easel paintings not as a window onto a world but instead as a box-like cavity cut into the wall. This description seems particularly apt when it comes to late medieval and early Renaissance experiments with pictorial illusionism. My hope is that tracing something of this metaphor of the box (rather than the Albertian window) will give us purchase on certain overlooked aspects of modern easel paintings and their pre-modern precursors—to begin with, their more sepulchral aspects.
April 3 – Miriam R. Levin
Miriam R. Levin
Professor of History and History of Art
Department of History, Case Western Reserve University
“City, Exposition, Museum in Modernity’s Perspective”
At the close of the nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization marked the end of the traditional understanding of society as rooted in agriculture. Paris was both the cultural capital of the 19th century and an international symbol of modernity. This lecture will discuss the efforts of Paris-based urban elites under two different political regimes to construct an urban-centered, industrial-based culture—an entirely new social reality based on science and technology. The synergy they created among expositions, urban rebuilding and museums provides the foundation for a new understanding of modernity’s history in which science and technology were constitutive.
