ABSTRACTS OF PRESENTATIONS
Monday, June 2
SEMINAR INTRODUCTION:
Jolene Rickard
Margo Machida
Cheryl
Younger
LECTURE:
"Primitivism," Modernism, and Modernity: Anthropology and the
Category of "Art"
Fred
Myers
This presentation will explore the linkages between the ideological structure of an aesthetic doctrine of Modernism and notions of the "primitive," much of which was illuminated in the response to the MoMA’s exhibition in 1984 "‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art: The Affinity of he Tribal and the Modern." It has been within these debates that some of the central features of art’s ideological functioning– the way the category of "art" operates—have been set forth. The promise of such debates is not merely of questioning art’s supposed isolation (autonomy) from other spheres of activity but to place modern art aesthetic activities more completely with the specific historical nexus of modernity. One part of the presentation will discuss the relationships between "primitivism" and the critique of modernity instantiated in modern art and its ideologies, with the way many modern artists looked to the art and/or world view of the "primitive" as a means of challenging established beliefs. A second part of the presentation will consider how the doctrines of modern art, which I regard as an ideological response to modernization, have informed the anthropological study of nonwestern arts.
Tuesday, June 3
FILM:
Bontoc Eulogy
Marlon
E. Fuentes
This presentation will focus on the formal issues of narrative construction used in the film, Bontoc Eulogy, specifically how it relates to the historical context of representational strategies employed in the trajectory of Empire. Using Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, the Volkerschau, and the World’s Fair (and beyond) as markers in a continuum of conquest, the role of autoethnography and imagemaking as a counter-narrative will be discussed.
Film produced,
written, directed, and edited by Marlon E. Fuentes
LECTURE:
Vermeer,
Bosnia, Photography and the Shifting Frames of History
Shelley
Rice
A discussion of the relationship between criticism, art, history and the continual evolution of historical events, based on Lawrence Weschler’s "Inventing the Peace" article from The New Yorker.
LECTURE:
Traveling Home From Faraway
Maria Antonella Pelizzari
This presentation will draw ideas from current writings on travel, exile, immigration, and the need for roots. Photography will be examined as a system of non-verbal description and as a mimetic device in relationship to one place, Italy.
The visual material will trigger various questions, and will open the discussion. How did photographers construct and/or deconstruct a country’s image? How did they retain impressions from the place, and how did they fabricate their subjective system of orientation? Did they reiterate the imagery codified by tourism, or did they deviate from a prescribed path? Ultimately, how can photography today reveal a country’s physiognomy? And how does computer technology intersect with photography as an artifact of one’s cultural memory?
ARTIST PRESENTATION:
The Heavens
Linda Connor
The Heavens is a slide presentation weaving together Ms. Connor’s photographs and images that she has selected and printed from an Observatory’s glass-plate archive. Linda is exploring The Heavens as a material place and a place of emotional and cultural projections, beliefs and desires.
Wednesday, June 4
LECTURE:
A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE : Domestic Space, Vanitas Paintings and Some Seventeenth-Century Women Artists
Anna Novakov
For women living in the seventeenth-century, the spaces of the interior and exterior, and the public and private, were rigid and clearly defined. In Northern Europe, with the development of a strong middle class, the domestic space of the home often became a microcosm for larger issues involving moral codes and social status. It is in the complex, structured space of the home that the genre of Vanitas paintings flourished. These types of flower or still life paintings served as righteous reminders for housewives, while at the same time becoming a type of artistic practice thought suitable for notable women artists including Clara Peeters, Maria Van Oosterwyck, and Rachel Ruysch. Vanitas are symbolic works which have been re-investigated by contemporary artists such as Linda Connor. They can be read as points of intersection between the desires of men and women, the community and the individual, and the public space of the city and the private space of the home.
LECTURE:
The Journey of the Spirit After Death
Duane Michals
What happens when you die? I’ll let you know.
PANEL:
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Participants: Linda Connor
Shelley Rice
Duane Michals
Linda Connor, Shelley Rice and Duane Michals will discuss the relevance of The Tibetan Book of the Dead to contemporary photographers.
ARTIST PRESENTATION:
The Shy Woman Singers
Joanna Osburn-Bigfeather, Muriel Miguel, Leota Lone Dog, Karina L. Waters.
We will first open with an honoring song (using the big drum). After the honoring song we will show a 15 minute clip from Songjourney by Arlene Bowman. We will then facilitate a brief discussion about women drumming, the meaning of different songs and protocol, and then perform 3-5 songs (on both the big drum and hand drums). After our drumming we will open up the discussion for questions and further discussion of the issues facing Indian women who drum, and why it is important to us, our community, and ourselves as artists.
Thursday, June 5
LECTURE:
Canon-izing Culture: The Intellectual and Cultural Canon Wars in Early Modern Europe.
Tom Dandelet
This presentation will explore the emergence of competing systems of knowledge in the Renaissance, Reformation, and Baroque periods. Rather than assuming the traditional evolution from Renaissance to Reformation to Scientific Revolution as a march of intellectual progress, this presentation will explore how competing ideas and related aesthetic priorities often served to stifle innovation, limit artistic and cultural production and canon-ize particular ideas and aesthetics at the expense of other competing worlds of experience and representation.
LECTURE:
Indigenous Knowledge in A Transnational Moment
Jolene Rickard
The articulation of "art as Indigenous knowledge" reconfigures the permeable intellectual, social and political borders in the fields of art history and cultural studies as identified by the west and Native American communities. This research locates the Native artist as a cultural worker forging a cohesive Indigenous cultural space in counterbalance to the intellectual and material dissection carried out by the west since contact. Argued through a predominantly Iroquoian world view, in conjunction with multiple Native American artistic examples, this discussion targets the most important sites for reclaiming Indigenous cultural authority.
ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Common Threads
Phyllis Galembo
I will explore in my lecture the common threads that have united my photography from my earliest work in the 1970’s dealing with ceremonies, holidays and fabricated images to recent images (1990’s) of carnival clothing in Haiti and Brazil., Discussion will include personal experience while photographing in sacred spaces in Nigeria, Brazil and Haiti. The portraiture will provide visual information on the various deities in these countries and will help gain a better understanding of traditional African religious practices often misunderstood. Through photographs I will provide new insights and understanding of the presence of African cultures in the Americas.
Friday, June 6
LECTURE:
Re-Visioning Visual Culture in a Post-colonial Context. An Analysis of Cinematic Imagery in the Urban Public Spaces of India
Preminda Jacob
The street environment in an Indian city is a dense saturation of images that emerge from a haze of dust and heat. The most dominant imagery is that derived from the vastly powerful entertainment cinema industry; India being the largest producer of feature films in the world. However, this aspect of contemporary visual culture is dismissed for the most part by scholarly and artistic communities, in both India and the West, as more of the urban trash that obliterates India’s artistic heritage. In this paper I propose reading this profusion of culturally hybrid, visually spectacular images as constructing an alternative or magical reality outside the cinema theater and on the street. This interpretation is supported and extended by considering context-specific theories of gazing, or, the particular relations between viewers and viewed in this culture.
ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Good And Bad Hair: Photographs by Bill Gaskins
Bill Gaskins
We live in a society where image and personal appearance affect our relationships as human beings on a daily basis. A personal choice of hairstyle can mean the difference between acceptance and rejection by groups and individuals. however, the choices made by African Americans often affect the wearer and the viewer in unique and sometimes life-altering ways. Good And Bad Hair is the title for a series of photographs that document and celebrate expressions of African American identity through hair styling, and its role as an essential feature of African American culture.
On one level, the viewer is presented with a variety of popular and personal approaches to wearing ones hair. At another level, these photographs isolate what amounts to a bold, assertive departure from the common definition of American beauty that excludes the essential physical features of African people. This narrow definition of beauty has created a race-based measurement for what is considered "good" and "bad" hair. These photographs identify African Americans from different regions of the United States, from the drama of hair styling competitions, to the theater of the street, who expressively symbolize their sense of self and, often unconsciously, the sense of an African identity through their hair.
This body of work brings attention to this dynamic form of personal expression and provides a creative agent for discussing the many issues surrounding this expression through a book of photographs, accessible to all.
Saturday, June 7
LECTURE:
Higher Education and the Crisis of Public Intellectuals
Henry A. Giroux
This talk will focus on the attack being waged by the right and corporate cultures on the role the university might play as a democratic public sphere. It will focus on the legacy of cultural studies as one critical tradition that can be used to defend higher education as a public sphere and the role that pedagogy might play in both the broader attempt to reform higher education and to educate students to be critical cultural workers willing to fight for a democratic society.
LECTURE:
"I’ve Got You Under My Skin:" Race and the Metonymic Mask of Vision
Judith Wilson
"Race" imagines the visibility of fundamental genetic difference. As such, it attempts to fill the gap between perception and knowledge–a space of tremendous social and psychological anxiety. A futile effort to control illusory or contingent meanings, race representation tends to disguise relationships between politico-economic power and the power to produce/distribute/assign meaning to cultural symbols.
LECTURE:
Race, Pedagogy, and the Demonization of Youth in Dangerous Minds
Henry A. Giroux
This talk situates the political representation of youth within a broader discourse on the race and how such representations take on the force of legitimating and reinforcing the current attack that is being waged in the media upon poor, urban youth of color. At stake in this presentation is an attempt to develop an analysis of how cultural pedagogy has become a powerful force in shaping public discourse about youth.
Sunday, June 8
LECTURE:
Altars: Ancient Traditions, Contemporary Forms
Amelia Malagamba
Altars as installation art have become a major conduit for the art of Latina women in the United States, particularly for Chicana artists such as Amalia Mesa-Bains and Carmen Lomas Garza, among others. Altaristas have brought into the public sphere the everyday lives and the private sphere of women in their communities. They have created a new aesthetic from tradition which has blurred the borders between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ art. This new aesthetic, called domesticana, was coined by Amalia Mesa-Bains during the rise of rascuache, and was conceptually developed by Tomas Ybarra Frausto. The presentation will address the importance of understanding the cultural context in which this aesthetic has developed, and the roles the personal and collective memories have played in the contemporary creation of altars as forms of installation art.
ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Illuminating the Invisible
Charles Biasiny-Rivera
This presentation will be an inquiry into the Spiritual aspects as it relates to photography. Rational theory seems to have replaced the sacred in art, leaving a large vacuum as to how art functions in contemporary society. Using a slide presentation of my own and other photographers works I will examine the usage of sacred iconography in modern times.
ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Jamaica, Music, Art and Culture
Albert Chong
I will give a ninety minute slide talk with music. The music is some of my favorites and some that has had a major influence on my life. The music also helps track my work in relation to the cultures I have lived in, and much of the music is filled with stories about Jamaica. I will also read some of the essays I have been writing recently. Some about immigration and will also read a work from the Jamaican Dub Poet Michael Smith. I will then take questions from the audience.
LECTURE:
The African Influence in "American" Popular Culture
C. Daniel Dawson
The African influence on American cultures is not a matter of choice, it is a matter of a long living historical continuity. The contemporary Americas (i.e., the current political states found in South America, Central America/Mexico, North America/Canada and the Caribbean) are the creation of three great cultural groups: the Native American, the European and the African. By definition, if you are "American" you are already part African in history and cultural traditions; you have been born into a historical and social mix that is from its inception partly African. But, the intellectual heritage and cultural treasures brought to the Americas by Africans are often dismissed as merely popular r culture, not "high art", or overlooked because they have become the national culture and through the passing of time their origins have become obscured. This presentation will explore and celebrate the African influence in the creating and sustaining of American cultures. There will be a particular emphasis on the areas of African American culture that have become a valuable part of world culture such as music, art, dance, athletics, and philosophy.
This presentation is designed to educate participants about the importance of the African contributions to world culture; illustrate how all people of the Americas are at least part African in culture; identify and discuss at least two important African ethnic groups, i.e., the Yoruba of Southwest Nigeria and the Bakongo of Central Africa, and to show their influence in the formation of contemporary American culture; show how African social and political models were important in creating new socio-political states like Brazil and Cuba; uncover the hidden heritage of Africans in "white" America, e.g., culinary practices, greeting and degreeting patterns, speech habits, etc.; and , give the audience the tools to recognize and overcome the unconscious "deficit model" that is often used to assess the African contribution to American culture, and in the process help those from an African based cultural background develop a more positive self-perception, self-esteem and identity. In conclusion, this slide presentation should help all those who attend to identify and honor that part of themselves that is African in origin and practice.
Monday, June 9
LECTURE:
Putting Together a Book Project (and Thinking About the Audience and the Future for Personal Photography Books)
Abigail Heyman
This presentation will discuss problems of translating a photographer’s personal work - the work that expresses their personal style and/or their personal concerns about the world - in a "book" form. We will discuss issues of design, sequence, pacing, production, and marketing. Consideration will be given to photographers’, editors’, publishers’ and audiences’ needs and points of view. We will include consideration of forms that provide new ways to get visual photographic material to audiences - that may be more feasible financially, and in some cases be more effective in reaching their audience, than traditional books. The final product should be true to the photographer’s intentions, financially possible - in some way - for the publisher, and valuable for the audience, which should be large enough to make it all worthwhile.
LECTURE:
Digital Environments and Human Consciousness
Fred Ritchin
How does the advent of digital mediation change the ways we think about ourselves? To what extent can we influence the dialectic?
LECTURE:
Ex-centric Postcards: Photography and its Cultural Context
Victor Zamudio-Taylor
My presentation, in the form of three ‘postcards’, examines cultural context of photographic activities as an approach to understand formal aspects as well as issues of representation and power from cultural locations that contest and potentially undermine hegemonic art histories. The first postcard addresses a re-reading of aspects of Manuel Alvarez Bravo and the cultural heterogeneity of modernity. Based on the critical work of Nelly Richard, the second postcard deals with Eugenio Dittborn’s photo-based aesthetic strategies and their concern with cultural memory. The third postcard focuses on three artists from Mexico in whose photographic work, performativity, site and deconstruction of stereotype are central concerns: Gabriel Orozco, Luz Maria Gordillo and Miguel Calderon.
ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Beyond the Map
Olivia Parker
As I show some of my work I will speak of the differences between visual and verbal thinking. While working, I tend to switch back and forth between a visual-intuitive mode and an editorial-verbal mode. Both modes are important to me but I will emphasize the possibilities and complexities of the visual-intuitive mode in approaching the spiritual, in bridging to other cultures, and for traveling beyond the edge of the map.
Tuesday, June 10
LECTURE:
Contemporary Japanese Photography
Yoshiko Suzuki
The focus of this lecture will be the politics of the Japanese photographic world by specifically studying, as an example, the exhibition Portfolio ‘98: Contemporary Japanese Photography, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. There will be a discussion of current trends and forces in the Japanese photo world and how some of these factors affect young photographers as well as a brief overview of the history of Japanese photography.
LECTURE:
Secrets and Lies: Maintaining the Historical Record
Peter Palmquist
This presentation will be an overview of Mr. Palmquist’s twenty-five year obsession with finding biographical information about the photographers of yesteryear with an emphasis on tracking women photographers.
LECTURE:
A Matter of Interpretation
Barbara McCandless
The Amon Carter Museum is dedicated to the study of American art through exhibitions, publications, and programs. Placing an emphasis on understanding the historical and cultural context of the art, it is perhaps the only art museum whose curators are just as likely to have degrees in American Studies or American History as in Art History. This influences our exhibition choices and manner of interpretation. I will discuss examples of some atypical exhibitions and how we present them in the context of an art museum.
ARTIST PRESENTATION:
Hybrid Culture
Guillermo Gomez-Peña
"I am a migrant performance artist. I write in airplanes, trains and cafes. I travel from city to city, coast to coast, country to country, smuggling my work, and the work and ideas of my colleagues. I collaborate with artists and writers from various communities and disciplines. We connect with groups who think like us, and debate with others who disagree. And then I carry the ideas elsewhere. Home is always somewhere else. Home is both, "here" and "there", or somewhere in between. Sometimes it’s nowhere.
I make art about the misunderstandings that take place at the border zone. But for me, the border is no longer located at any fixed geopolitical site. I carry the border with me, and I find new borders wherever I go.
I travel across a different America. My America is a continent (not a country) which is not described by the outlines on any of the standard maps. In my America, "West" and "North" are mere nostalgic abstractions -the South and the East have slipped into their mythical space. For example, Quebec seems closer to Latin America than to its Anglophone twin. My America includes different peoples, cities, borders, and nations. For instance, the Indian nations of Canada and the United States, and also the multiracial neighborhoods in the larger cities all seem more like Third World micro-republics than like communities which are part of some "western democracy". Today, the phrase "western democracy" seems hollow and quaint.
When I am on the East Coast of the United States, I am also in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. There, I like to visit Nuyo Rico, Cuba York and other micro-republics. When I return to the U.S. Southwest, I am suddenly back in Mexamerica, a vast conceptual nation that also includes the northern states of Mexico, and overlaps with various Indian nations. When I visit Los Angeles or San Francisco, I am at the same time in Latin America and Asia. Los Angeles, like Mexico City, Tijuana, Miami, Chicago, and New York, is practically a hybrid nation/city in itself. Mysterious underground railroads connect all these places -syncretic art forms, polyglot poetry and music, and transnational pop cultures function as meridians of thought and axes of communication.
Here/there, the indigenous and the immigrant share the same space but are foreigners to each other. Here/there we are all potential border-crossers and cultural exiles. We have all been uprooted to different degrees, and for different reasons, but not everyone is aware of it. Here/there, homelessness, border culture and deterritorialization are the dominant experience, not just fancy academic theories."
(From: The Free Art Agreement, The New World Border, City Lights, 1996 by Guillermo Gomez-Peña)
Wednesday, June 11
LECTURE:
Funding for Individual Artists
Claudine Brown
What funders are looking for and how to approach them.
LECTURE:
Lessons from the Local
Faye Ginsburg
This presentation, including some video clips, will concern itself with what larger lessons can be learned from cultural activism in minoritized communities. Current work on globalization (such as Ben Barber’s influential book, Jihad vs. MacWorld), while pointing to important developments in the homogenization and privatization of culture worldwide in the wake of transnational capitalism, tends to erase the significance of local efforts to create new cultural possibilities, political spaces, and "counter publics" that are countervailing tendencies to these broader trends.
LECTURE:
Investigating the Nature of the Investigation: Art-making and Pedagogy at the Close of the Century
Carol Becker
This lecture will examine where we stand in relationship to the goals of modernism and postmodernism, the attempts of these movements, as well as the avant-garde in artmaking to improve society, where art and artists have fit into what has been called the "human project" and how the education of artists must be changed to empower artists to position themselves within society as we find it at this time. It argues for a serious evaluation of the education of artists and the end of the myth of romance associated with art and artists. The lecture will have two distinct parts, an analysis which will lead to the need for a new attitude towards educating artists as well as a new set of much more ambitious goals as to the relationship of artists to society.