Associate Professor of English and Film Studies, Bryn Mawr College
“Wer“ Aesthetics in Contemporary Queer Thai Cinema
This talk explores queer film aesthetics deployed by artists and filmmakers in Thailand in response to censorship measures. The paper articulates a local Thai manifestation of camp that I call “wer” aesthetics. I read “wer” aesthetics as a complicit critique of Thai nationalism and a manifestation of a regional film aesthetics.
Chair of Archaeology, University of Southampton
“Truth and Beauty in the Artistic Engagement with Antiquity: British History Painters and the Representation of Ancient Egypt”
In the second half of the nineteenth century a flourishing tradition of history painting emerged as a result of the intense engagement with the material culture of the ancient world. In Britain key historicist artists, such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter and Edwin Long, produced highly evocative visions of antiquity, which were densely populated with archaeological references. This talk explores how these artists responded to the fast growing collections of antiquities in museums and how their paintings had a profound impact on the conception of the past.
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.
Director of Museum Studies
Bryn Mawr College
“Envisioning African Origins: Race, Evolution & Identity in the Natural History Museum”
How is Africa envisioned in the natural history museum? This talk explores how human origins exhibitions and their museum visitors work to mutually produce anthropological ideas about Africa. This is a product of dynamic interplay between museum iconography and popular folklore circulating outside the museum that often continues to stigmatize African people as evolutionary spectacles.
Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities
Bryn Mawr College
“Looking Back at Nazi Buildings: Some Reflections on Architecture and Ideology”
In light of recent scholarship on Nazi architecture, Professor Lane will offer reflections on the international reception of her first book, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945 (originally published in 1968 and reissued in 1985). Raising questions about how to evaluate political content in architecture, she will consider connections between political ideology and the style, function, and memories of buildings.
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 20th 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.
