American
Photography Institute
National Graduate Seminar
June 5-16, 2000
A Curriculum For A New Millennium
2000 Program Abstracts
All programs are schedule in the Dean’s Conference Room on the 12th Floor of 721 Broadway unless otherwise noted below.
Monday, June 5
9:15 am — Assemble in Dorm Lobby promptly at 110 E 14th St.
MUSEUM VISIT - 10:00 pm
Visit to the Whitney Museum of American Art to see the 2000 Whitney Biennial.
WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION - 2:00 pm
Cheryl Younger, API-NGS Director
WELCOME - 4:00 pm
Lorie Novak, NYU TISCH Photography and Imaging Department Chair
LECTURE - 4:00 pm
Overview
of the History of Visual Education
Nathan Lyons
This presentation will trace the evolution of photographic education in the 19th and 20th centuries.
LECTURE — 7:00 pm
Higher
Education as Big Business
Stanley Aronowitz
This talk will address the graduate subordination of colleges and universities to the corporate agenda. For public education vocationization. For elite private education the imperative of careers and upward mobility. Neither have much to do with education. In the end to have an education requires the return of higher education to its highest aspirations: to help students become informed citizens in a democratic society.
PANEL — 8:30 pm
The
Politics of Knowledge in Higher Education
Greg Anderson
This presentation will attempt to delineate the extent to which inclusion under the current banner of multiculturalism and diversity represents a vehicle for substantive social change, or a new and more invidious form of cultural appropriation. To this end, the site for a critical examination of knowledge and race in America will be the university and college system. The reason for focusing on the education, is that presently a battle is afoot in our schools over what constitutes an American curriculum. Demands by marginalized groups for a greater awareness and closer coverage of their neglected histories of oppression, discovery, achievement, and contribution, have generated what Hazel Carby——speaking of the university system in the United States——identifies as the "multicultural wars of position," forged over issues of textual inclusion within the academy. Carby observes that student handbooks across America are chalked full of the United Color of Benetton type ads promoting an idealized university setting where freedom and diversity rules supreme. However, the multicultural images portrayed by university calendars are constrasted against an educational backdrop featuring such events as the dismantling of affirmative action legislation in California and Texas.
By ascertaining the role that race plays in maintaining a monopolization of the cultural and material resources required to gain access to institutions of higher education in America, I hope to convey the need to go beyond accepting prima facie, the cultural and political elevation of "people of color" to the "status of icons within university curriculums" as irrefutable proof of the benefits of inclusion. In doing so, the challenges posed by proponents of cultural studies as a self-affirming vehicle for identity formation, this paper will argue that inclusion of racialized texts within university curricula is a necessary but insufficient condition for guaranteeing the enhancement of access to higher education for people overdetermined from without.
The
Public and the Private in Education
Floyd
Hammack (NYU)
Current efforts at reform in education are mainly based on how to increase and more evenly distribute the private benefit of education, not the public benefit. This presentation will describe and critique this emphasis and detail some of its negative consequences. It will be argued that in the future, our educational system must gain a greater balance between the public and private benefits.
Tuesday, June 6
ID CENTER — 8:45 am
E12th ST (between 5th and University Place)
LECTURE — 10:00 am
Business
Segments in the Curriculum
Mary Virginia Swanson
In response to the lack of practical information offered to students in most BA/MFA programs, Mary Virginia Swanson will present a broad overview of the marketplace for contemporary photography and image professionals, with an emphasis on professional practices necessary for artists to make the most of all opportunities. Among the topics to be discussed:
- Placing your personal work in today’s commercial market: finding clients, self-promotion and related skills
- Making a living with your camera vs. with photography: Career options for today’s emerging image professional
- An overview of creative partners (Galleries, Commercial Representatives and Stock Agents) and business partners (accountants, lawyers, insurance agents) that may contribute to the success of an artist
- Issues surrounding professional paperwork and copyright protection for your images
- Securing resources to sustain your personal work: fundraising overview
- Utilizing local resources and web resources in your classroom
- Importance of establishing internship programs, Career Day programs and long-term alumni relations at your institution.
LECTURE — 1:30 pm
Interpreting
Images
Terry Barrett
To see an image but not to interpret it is not to see it at all. This presentation offers a set of principles that guide interpretation of art. The set is eclectic, drawn from critics, aestheticians, and literary scholars, and tested in practice with groups of viewers in schools and museums and community centers.
LECTURE — 2:30 pm
Considering
Studio Critiques
Terry
Barrett
Studio Critiques are an essential means of teaching art at the college level. This presentation is a report of research that critically examines critiques from the points of views and in the voices of both instructors and students. Recommendations are offered for improving critiques for both instructors and students.
LECTURE
— 3:30 pm
Bringing
Theory and Criticism into the Studio
Deborah Bright
There is no practice without theory and no theory without practice. Yet it often seems as though students "forget" what they learn in photo history and critical studies courses once they cross the studio threshold. This "forgetting" is exacerbated by the fact that differently trained and specialized faculty teach theory and technical courses, often within entirely different academic departments. This encourages the perception that "theory" is to be compartmentalized and mastered as a reified body of knowledge onto itself and not as a conceptual tool-kit whose insights can be used actively in the field, much as one would consciously choose one lens or format over another. How can this "two worlds," often separated in the photography curriculum, be integrated in practice? As a critic-practitioner with twenty years’ experience bridging the gap, I will discuss teaching strategies from basic photo to graduate studies in detail, highlighting a recent studio/critical studies course I taught at Harvard for photography concentrators.
PANEL DISCUSSION — 5:30 pm
Terry Barrett and Deborah Bright will discuss pertinent issues raised by each of their presentations.
DISCUSSION — 8:00 pm
Photography
and its "Authority over Imagination"
Nathan
Lyons
Establishing a rational for the development of an Institute for the study of Media and Childhood Learning.
Wednesday, June 7
LECTURE — 10:30 am
Visual
Culture Studies as Methodology versus an Academic
Discipline
Nick
Mirzoeff
In the past few years, visual culture has become a buzz word in many art and art history departments. Visual culture does not define its subject by medium or by time period. Rather, it focuses on the interaction between image and viewer and the dynamically changing place of the visual and visuality in modernity. This seminar will ask: what does the visual culture approach mean for the practice of photography and of photographic history and criticism? Should visual culture now seek to create departments in its own image or is it rather a symptom of a new convergence of media and intellectual practice?
DISCUSSION — 2:00 pm
Using
Visual Culture Studies as a Tool for Investigation
rather than as a Discipline
Nick
Mirzoeff
LECTURE — 3:30 pm
An/Other
Sacrifice. Dead Narratives of "Othered"
Women
Jolene
Rickard
Premise: Dead Narratives of "Othered" Women
This discussion is located at the crossroads of 19th to 20th century Indigenous North American and Euroamerican exchange. It is set against the backdrop of the preeminent icon of the sublime, Niagara Falls, the epic Iroquoian legend about the "Thunderbeings," and vanity. The American public embraced this vortex of cultural expression and misrepresented it with the popular mythology of "The Maid in the Mist."
The promise of a virginal scantily clad brown Indian body rowing over the brink of the falls to her death forms the basis of the perversion. The stereotypical construct aptly named by scholar, Rayna Green as the Pocahontas Perplex applies to this image. Articulated in her influential article, The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of the Indian Woman in American Culture, 1975, Green outlines the cultural icon of the "Indian Princess" which has constrained the image/meaning of Native women within white, American culture:
...as a model for the national understanding of Indian women, [Pocahontas’] significance is undeniable. With her darker, negative viewed sister, the Squaw --or anti-Pocahontas...-- the Princess intrudes on the national conscious and potential culture waits to be resurrected when our anxieties about who we are make us recall her from her woodland retreat.
Activist, Debbie Wise Harris reinforces this position in her article, Colonizing Mohawk Women: Representations of Women in the Mainstream Media, 1991,
Green is specific about the "rules" of this Pocahontas Perplex: ..Indian Women have to be exotic, wild collaborationist crazy or "white" to qualify for white attention.
Based on Nelson Graburn’s notion of the "Fourth World of Art" and Ruth Phillip’s construct of "tourist art," the relationship between contact, trade, tourism, economics and cultural confluence will be discussed within a post to neo-colonial framework.
Thursday, June 8
LECTURE — 9:00 am
We
Know We Are Beautiful And Ugly Too: The Tyranny
of the Positive Image in African American Culture
Bill
Gaskins
After centuries of images in the public sphere that fix the identities of Black people as less than human. Many African Americans, from the commercial photographer the to the family snapshooter, have attempted to challenge these identities through the photograph.
The historical demands of a conservative Black American middle class for so-called "positive" images of African American people in the American culture industry, have merged with the market-driven priorities of contemporary book publishers and photographers. This has led to a relatively small, but important group of monographs that fix an African American identity as monolithic, uncomplicated, virtuous, and/or he/sheroic (i.e. I Dream A World, Songs of My People et, al)
The commercial success of these books; their effect on the ways African American identities are perceived; Black middle-class anxieties over complex representations of African Americans and the effect of these anxieties on Black artists, will be the subject of this presentation.
LECTURE — 10:30 am
London
(and other) Bridges: The Study of Photography
and Visual Culture
Joanne
Leonard
My presentation will sketch an overview of my teaching concerns and interests informed by my experiences in US programs and through travel. Though I’m full time faculty as Professor at a School of Art and Design, I’m also a Professor in both the Women’s Studies Program and the Program in American Culture. My interest for some time has been to create a program at the university in visual culture, which, like my own position, straddles areas not yet regularly associated with the study of photography. As part of this interest, I traveled to London last year to find out more about art programs there - where programs typically offer more cultural/critical studies that US Art Programs. I’m also concerned about issues such as difficulties for women within the academy and about who will teach as well as what is taught.
LECTURE — 7:30 pm [Room 1057]
The
Power of the Line
Natalie
Bookchin
"Postmodem" cybercultures have generated powerful new tools and spaces for artists (and others) to work, play and gather. These new sites foreground communication over representation, collaboration, impermanence, immediacy and performance over traditional object making. Mainstream and underground computer culture - hacking, software production, and gaming - inform much of this current practice as much as older genres of video art, performance, conceptual art and public art. These social and electronic networks can be optimized for distribution, dissemination, creation of new alliances, direct communication and collaboration between geographically and politically dispersed groups of people. In this presentation I will discuss a few possibilities, politics and problems of these net "spaces."
Friday, June 9
LECTURE — 9:00 am
Performance/Photography/Pedagogy
Robert Blake
Susan Jahoda
What is performance? What does it mean to perform? How does performance engage multidisciplinary resources, as pedagogy, to further critical and creative practices?
This talk will offer a spirited introduction to the role and histories of "performance pedagogies" as a parallel discourse and activity within photographic curricula. We will speak from our experience as teachers, image-makers, and performers and provide a bibliographic selection of texts and sites to begin the process of assembling diverse sources and resources.
LECTURE — 10:30 am
The
American Social History Projects
Donna Thompson
PANEL DISCUSSION — 2:00 pm [Room 006]
Through
the Viewfinder: Mid-century New
York Artists in Photography, Film, and Mass
Media
Moderated
by Alyosha Goldstein
[This program is co-sponsored by Grey Art Gallery and is a part of public programs associated with the Grey Art Gallery exhibition ofthe photographs of Rudy Burckhardt]
Investigating the roles played by photography, film and mass media, this program explores the New York art world’s dynamic rise to international prominence in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Saturday, June 10
LECTURE — 10:00 am
Museum Education Programs
Quantity
or Quality
Sarah Farsad
Anthony
Hubberman
Victoria Law
The Education Department was established at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980. One of the Museum’s institutional goals is to foster understanding of contemporary culture and to expand the audience for recent art.
The Visible Knowledge Program (VKP) high school art program was initiated in 1984 to foster the development of critical thinking skills and provide opportunities for high school students to interact with artists, critics, and curators. We now work exclusively with NYC Board of Education High Schools and the program is year long, intensive, and multidiciplinary. This year we are working with six schools. One of the questions that we continually face is how many students are actually reaching and which is more important, quality or quantity.
This panel will discuss the issues of quality vs. quantity in audience development starting at the high school level. The New Museum focuses it’s outreach program to high school aged audiences because this is a group that is particularly underrepresented in the development of art audiences. For example, The Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Natural History and the Whitney do not offer free admission for high school aged students. Their discounts do not take into account that often times five or six dollars and subway fare may actually be an impossibility for a teen from a low income background. So, how can museums expect to foster a wide variety of audiences if they do not consider the economics of their audiences? Simultaneously the Education Department of all major museums deals with these same economically impoverished groups——but in very small numbers. We would like to address the issue of quality and quantity in light of funding.
Funders are often impressed by numbers:
- how many students do we target, is there a change in there test scores?
- how quickly can we expand the program?
- how many artists can we work with at one time?
- how is our program replicated via the internet?
PANEL DISCUSSION — 11:30 am
Two-year Colleges vrs. Liberal Arts Colleges - Our expectations
Audrey
Mandelbaum
David Najjab
Shuichi
Murakami
PANEL DISCUSSION — 2:00 pm
New
Program Changes at University of Texas, Austin
Allucquere
Rosanne Stone
Preserving identity while promoting change is Job Number One And A Half, whether we speak of individuals, social groups, corporations, or institutions. The ACTLab, former flagship for the University of Texas' New Media program, has been in the thick of this conundrum since its inception.
New Media emerged as a hot topic roughly seven years ago. Recently it has caught on in a big way, with all that that implies in terms of funding, exposure, hype, and the bandwagon effect. If one pauses for thought, however, it immediately becomes clear that in a Moore's Law universe (i.e., every eighteen months the speed of computer processors doubles and the cost halves), nothing seven years old is in even the vaguest sense new, except as our pocketbooks may have kept us as individuals from adopting it.
Nor is raw technology the only thing that changes. Theory, philosophy, and methodology evolve in a hot technological soup under which capital keeps fanning the fire. Insofar as one of the obligations of Theory is to make visible the protean workings of Capital, nothing theoretical stands still. As with parasites and hosts, everything New Media-ish co-evolves at a burning pace. Yet if you know how universities work, you realize that change is the hobgoblin of academic minds.
When the term "New Media" replaced "Interactive Multimedia" (which had replaced "Slide Projectors and Phonographs"), many of us breathed a sigh of relief. We had made it into the Twentieth Century. The relief lasted perhaps four years. By that time it had become clear that anyone who could spell "theory" could and did lay claim to God's speaking to them about New Media, and Lo and behold, in many minds New Media did not mean making things, it meant writing about them --the magic one-removal-from-experience which seems to be the distance of choice for so many who are otherwise quite perceptive about the pitfalls of non-participant observation.
There is or was a record company called Stiff Records. Its motto was: "If It's All Things To All People, It's A Stiff." So with New Media, and thus, chillun, did the stiffening of New Media lead to Media Mortis, and discontent and disillusion in the ACTLab.
Now think, if you will, of a tiny, brightly colored exotic tropical fish. The fish lives in a little cave, but knows that the cave is about to collapse. A few meters away there is another cave, fresh and sturdy. Ravenous sharks patrol the intervening waters. The fish knows that in order to survive, it must dash from the old cave to the new one without being eaten by the sharks. This, I will explain when we are all gathered, is the current model for what ACTLabbies do. Identity survives by continually rearticulating itself to itself across radical changes in social and epistemic substructures. Collective structures reproduce themselves by risking themselves in novel conditions. Their wholeness is as much a matter of reinvention and encounter as it is of continuity and survival.
The ACTLab lives and thrives. It has successfully eluded the sharks, and I, although handicapped by getting tenure, have managed not to eat my own brain, as tenure normally requires. The ACTLab has, in fact, evolved, on the fast track to the future. Our faculty has doubled, and we now infest a huge sound stage jammed with wonderful toys. We have, in fact, gracefully danced right out of New Media. I'll tell you some funny stories about reinvention and encounter, continuity and survival, in the radically new field of Convergent Media. With luck, it won't have stiffened by June.
LECTURE — 4:00 pm
Teaching
"Subversion," Does it Have a Role
in the Curricula?
Sue Wrbican (moderator),
Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
Vicki Crayhon
Paul
Badger
Through time, various artists have engaged their work as a subversive activity——in opposition to government, religion, the dominant culture. It is work that challenges the viewer’s ideas and beliefs, and cause them to contemplate the issues addressed in the work. This panel will discuss such work, creating artwork as a subversive activity, the techniques used in these endeavors, the inclusion of this methodology in a formal curricula, and the contribution photography has made to artists working in this tradition.
Sunday, June 11, 2000
DISCUSSION SESSION — 2:00 pm
A Mission Statement
Monday, June 12 through Thursday June 15
WORKSESSIONS
Thursday, June 15, 2000
PRESENTATION — 1:00 pm
ArtLink
International Young Art
Leslie Mehrem
Friday, June 16, 2000
PARTY!!!
— 6:00 pm