National Graduate Seminar
June 4–14, 2001

Monday, June 4

SEMINAR INTRODUCTION - 2:30 PM

Cheryl Younger and Sarah Farsad

WELCOME- 3:15 PM

Lorie Novak

The Department of Photography and Imaging (www.nyu.edu/tisch/photo) has hosted and co-sponsored the National Graduate Seminar since its inception eleven years ago.  Departmental Chair, Lorie Novak will offer the Welcome.

Lorie Novak is an artist and Chair of the Photography and Imaging Department at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.   Novak's recent Collected Visions computer-based installation debuted at the International Center for Photography in November 2000 and will be on view at the Zilka Gallery at Wesleyan University this coming fall.

LECTURE  - 3:30 PM

Richard Schechner:  Performance Studies and Performance Processes

Richard Schechner will offer an overview of performance and performance studies.  Using theoretical, historical, and intercultural perspectives, he will explain why performance studies programs were created and what they do.  He will relate contemporary avant-garde performance to traditional and ritual performances in various cultures.  He will suggest several contexts for rethinking performance and performance processes.

Richard Schechner is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.  He is also the Editor of TDR: The Drama Review-The Journal of Performance Studies.  Schechner is the artistic director of East Coast Artists and formerly the founding director of The Performance Group.  He has directed plays in the USA, India, mainland China, and Taiwan.  Schechner is also the author of many books, including  PERFORMANCE THEORY, BETWEEN THEATER AND ANTHROPOLOGY, THE END OF HUMANISM, and THE FUTURE OF RITUAL.  His PERFORMANCE STUDIESÑAN INTRODUCTION will be published in 2002.  Schechner is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including ones from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.   He has also been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College and an Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton.   At present, in addition to his NYU positions, he is an Andrew H. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. 

Tuesday, June 5

LECTURE - 10:30 AM

Erika deVries: Blurring of Art and Live

This lecture will explore  how early performance photography weaves in and out of the boundaries  between life and art, from the directed tableaux of Lewis Carroll to the self portraiture of Frederick Holland Day.

Erika deVries has an MFA from the School of the  Art Institute of Chicago.  Her videos have been exhibited at the Knitting Factory, New York Underground  Film and Video Festival in London, and the XV Kasseler Internationaler Film Und Videofest , Kassel Germany.  Her exhibits and performances  have been shown from  LACPS and the Bronx Museum.  "Miss Fancy Pants" has been reviewed in Playboy, The New Art Examiner and Chicago Tribune.   She teaches at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Middlebury College and NYU's Tisch School of the Art , Photography and Imaging Department. Eriika's work is currently on exhibit  in NEW PHOTOGRPHY at Arena @Feed Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

LECTURE - 1:30 PM

Kathy O'Dell: Working Backward in Time: Photography, Performance, and Personal Narrative

What, precisely, is the relationship of the photographer to a performance artist whose work he or she is documenting?  What is the relationship of the viewer to the photographic documents that result from this collaboration?  What kind of stories get told (to others or to ourselves) about what took place in any given performance?  How do all these issues affect the history of work performed live?  Performance art of the early 1970s, when documentation of performance was almost exclusively produced in grainy, black-and-white, snapshot-like photographs, serves as "ground zero" in an investigation of these questions. 

Kathy O'Dell is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.  She has lectured and published widely on contemporary art and performance, with articles appearing in Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Art & Text, LINK, Lusitania, Performance Research, and TDR.  She is one of the founders and editors of LINK: A Critical Journal on the Arts in Baltimore and the World and recently chief edited LINK        on Hysteria (fall 2000).  She is the author of Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and is working on a book titled Art Since 1947 and the Ideology of the Star System.

LECTURE - 3:30 PM

Martha Wilson: The Franklin Furnace Going Virtual

A laptop lecture which reviews the history of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. and the decisions it made in becoming a "virtual institution after 20 years of collecting, exhibiting and presenting in real time and space in Lower Manhattan.

Performance artist Martha Wilson is the Founding Director of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.,  a museum in lower Manhattan which, since its inception in 1976, has presented and preserved temporal art: artists' books and other multiples produced internationally after 1960;  temporary installations; and performance art.  Franklin Furnace now exist entirely as a virtual museum on the Web.  Trained in English Literature, Ms.  Wilson was teaching at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design when she became fascinated by the intersection of text and image.  As an artist, she has performed in the guises of Alexander Haig, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Tipper Gore.  Ms. Wilson lectures widely on the book as an art form, on performance art, and on "live art on the Internet."

Wednesday, June 6

LECTURE - 10:30 AM

Danwen Xing: Chinese Avant-Garde

This presentation offers unique and rare documentation of performance art and avant-garde art in China in the 1990's.

Danwen Xing was born in Xi'an China.  In fall of 1998 she came to New York through a grant from the Asia Cultural Council.  Xing received her MFA at the School for Visual Arts with a major in "Photography and Related Media. "

LECTURE - 2 PM

Shelley Rice: Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Cindy Sherman

She will offer a discussion of the show and book of the same title, and the issues surrounding women's self-portraiture in the twentieth century.

Shelley Rice is a New York based critic and historian who teaches at New York University and School of the Visual Arts.  She is the author of Parisian Views (MIT Press, 1997) and the editor of Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman (MIT Press, 1999). Recipient of a Fulbright senior research grant to France, a Fulbright Senior Lecturer grant to Turkey, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hasselblad Center research grant, Danforth and National Endowment for the Arts Critic's Fellowships, PEN/Jerard Fund Award for a nonfiction essay, two National Endowment for the Humanities grants, two New York State Council on the Arts grants, and the Logan Award.

LECTURE - 4 PM

Michael Gonzalez and Nelson Santos: Visual AIDS

Founded in 1988, Visual AIDS strives to increase public awareness of AIDS through the visual arts, creating programs of exhibitions, events, and publications, and working in partnership with artists, galleries, museums, and AIDS organizations.  By mobilizing the visual arts communities, Visual AIDS raises money to provide direct support to artists living with HIV/ AIDS.  These services include: representation in the Archive Project, the largest national slide archive of works by artists with HIV/AIDS, and used by curators, galleries, museums, and historians.  Free photo-documentation of art work; artists' material grants to artists on low income; emergency grants; free access to lawyers for estate planning; opportunities to exhibit work; quarterly newsletters; advice and advocacy are made available. The presentation will include the Visual AIDS Archive Project and a discussion concerning the influence  art, activism, and photography has had in the fight against AIDS.

Michael Gonzales teachs Art History, including the History of Photography, at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where he is completing a Ph.D. in the area of photography and AIDS.  He is a volunteer at Visual AIDS.

Nelson Santos is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York.  His work has been exhibited nationally in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Miami.  He is currently the Assistant Director for Visual AIDS in New York.

ARTIST PRESENTATION - 7:30 PM

Eleanor Antin will offer video clips and slides of her work.

Eleanor Antin is an artist/filmmaker working for many years in installation, photography, video, film, performance, drawing and writing.  Antin has an international reputation.  She has had one-woman exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Wadsworth Antheneum, etc. as well as a major 30 year retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which published a book catalogue Eleanor Antin by Howard Fox.  The retrospective also traveled to Washington University in St. Louis and is currently touring through the U.K. with a new British Title and catalogue Eleanor Antin, Real Time Streaming.  She has created major installations at the Hirschhorn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Jewish Museum in New York City, among others.  She is represented in major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, etc.

As a performance artist she has appeared in venues around the world including the Venice Biennale and the Ford Theatre in Washington, DC.  Several of her mixed media, groundbreaking  works such as "100 Boots, " "Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, " "The Angel of Mercy, " "recollections of my Life with Diaghilev," "The King of Solana Beach," "The Adventures of a Nurse, " are frequently referred to as classics of feminist postmodernism.

As an artist she is represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York.  She is also represented on the West Coast by the Craig Krull Gallery in Los Angeles.  She has written four books: Being Antibova (Astro Artz), Eleanora Antinova Plays  (Sun & Moon), 100 Boots (Running Press) and the forthcoming Man Without a World (Green Integer).  She has made 9 videotapes, among them "Representational Painting 1971," "The Ballerina and the Bum 1973," "The Little Match Girl Ballet 1975," "The Nurse and the Hijackers 1977," and "From the Archives of Modern Art 1989," (all tapes distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix). 

She has written, directed and produced narrative films, among them the feature "The Man Without a World" 1991 (Berlin Film Festival, USA Film Fest., Ghent Film Fest., London Jewish Film Festival, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Women in Film, etc.) and "The Last Night of Rasputin, " 1989 (premiered with a live performance in a two-week run at the Whitney Museum). (All films are distributed by Milestone Film, and Video, NYC.) Video installations include "Loves of a Ballerina," 1986, "Vilna Nights," 1993, and "Minetta Lane," 1995. 

Her most recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Achievement Award in 1998.  Antin has been a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego since 1975.

Thursday, June 7

LECTURE - 10:30

Jan Cohen-Cruz: Found in Translation: Artmaking Modeled on Ideas

The twenty-first century is not going to be about the exclusivity of forms anymore; it's going to be about ideas."–Carol Becker

Consider, for a moment, that your artistic medium of choice is beside the point.  That your work begins with an idea, a goal.  Let's be more specific and say it falls into the broad project of using art to impact policy. Such was the premise of a course I taught this past spring to young photographers and other visual artists, actors, performance artists, filmmakers, directors, and a designer.  Ostensibly, the course was an inquiry into questions including: What models exist for art that impacts public policy? How does such work inform our sense of what, besides individual expression, constitutes art? When does active engagement with public issues put problematic constraints on art, and when does it further creativity and enhance the work?  But I realize that the course was also an experiment in approaching art via content rather than form, as usually occurs in our schools that tend to be organized into discipline-based departments.

In my presentation, I'll show examples of work by three of the artists that we looked at in that class, and get students up on their feet to try a fourth. I'll interlace these experiences with insights from the students concerning what they learned by looking at art through the lens of another medium.

Jan Cohen-Cruz is a scholar/practitioner of activist and community-based performance.  An Associate Professor in the New York University Drama Department, she co-edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism  and edited Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology.  Jan directs TSOA's interdisciplinary community arts initiatives, frequently partnering with Chair of Photography and Imaging, Lorie Novak.  She also serves on the faculty advisory board to the school's Center for Art and Public Policy.  She is currently producing commongreen/commonground, a collectively created play with 40 community gardeners, students, and river advocates from the Bronx, Harlem, East Village, Brooklyn, and NYU.

LECTURE - 1:30 PM

Susan Otto: Performance Anxiety: Cultural Interfaces and Acting Out.

This lecture will examine the role of performance and representation in contemporary new genre and new media work in the United States and Europe.  Examining "the subject" within several different theoretical contexts, this lecture will investigate the impulse to perform and record these actions on film, video tape or installation ephemera.  Installation and new media work often efface physical contact between subject and viewer, influencing the representations of the subject defined by the traces left in an art gallery, on the web, or in print.  What is the difference between witnessing a spectacle and witnessing the aftermath of a spectacle?  How has the impact of emerging technology given artists different venues of performance other than a traditional live exchange?  Following a trajectory of the history of photography and representation, where is the modern realm of the "self portrait"?  How has modern technology culture changed our understanding of a "live" event, public displays of subject based art work and the will of the artist to represent themselves in their work?

Susan Otto is a cross media artist and writer who is an Assistant Professor in the CADRE Laboratory for New Media in the Digital Media Art area within the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University.  Her work has been shown in many international venues including the Silverstein Gallery (NYC), Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (Los Angeles), Randolph Street Gallery (Chicago), ArtExpo in Guadalajara (Mexico), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), the Basel-Liste Art Fair (Zurich), the Adlercruetz-Bjorkholmen Gallery and the Smart Art Fair (Stockholm).  Her critical writing has appeared many magazines including: zingmagazine, Art in America, Framework (LACPS), Afterimage, New Art Examiner, etc.  She has published numerous catalogue essays including Herstories (Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY), Martin Sjoberg (self-published), and Locus + : A History of Public Performance Art in England (Newcastle, UK).  She has written a book about cross media art:  The Things You See When You Don't Have a Grenade! (Smart Art Press, Santa Monica). 

Susan Otto is developing the cross media track within the Digital Media Area as a companion to the networking and systems branch of the Digital Media emphasis in the School of Art and Design.  Cross media involves utilizing film, video, projections, installation, text and writing, sound, and performance elements in artmaking.  Professor Otto implemented this curriculum at California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA), where she worked with students in all disciplines.  She has been a member of many panels discussing cross media including New York University and the Society for Photographic Education and is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant.

ARTIST PRESENTATION - 3:00 PM

James Luna's Performances: Expression without Compromise

James Luna will present a slide overview of past installations and performances  his work, offer a performative example of recent work and discuss pertinent  issues.

James Luna is a Luiseno Indian and lives on the La Jolla Indian Reservation.  In addition to being an artist, he works as a full time academic counselor at Palomar College near his home in North County San Diego, California.

Luna believes that installation/performance art, which employs a variety of media such as objects, audio, video, and slides offers "an opportunity like no other for Indian people to express themselves without compromise in traditional art forms of ceremony, dance, oral traditions, and contemporary thought."  His installations have been described as transforming gallery spaces into battlefields, where the audience is confronted with the nature of cultural identity, the tensions generated by cultural isolation, and the dangers of cultural misinterpretations-all from a Native American perspective.  Using made and found objects, Luna creates environments that function as both aesthetic and political statements.  As a "Rez" resident, he draws from personal experience and probes emotions surrounding the way people are perceived within their cultures.

In his installation/performances, Luna addresses the mythology of what it means to be "Indian" in contemporary American Society and exposes the hypocrisy of the dominant society which trivializes Indian People as romantic stereotypes.  Luna's installation/performance art is provocative, often dealing with difficult issues affecting Indian communities, including socio-economic problems, substance abuse, and cultural conflict.  He confronts these issues head on, using humor and satire as both counterbalance and salve, to take on what he describes as "the first step in recovery."  Demanding a level of audience participation, he challenges viewers to examine their own prejudices.  As one reviewer wrote "The rich reward of Luna's probing performance pieces is learning more about cultural perceptions, learning where the edges are, where the discomfort starts. . . His voice and his imagery carry the gift that a good artist can bring-the enlarging of our conscience and the increased awareness of what it means to be human."

ARTIST PRESENTATION - 8:00 PM

Carolee Schneemann: Disruptive Consciousness

Carol will offer a survey of her work, which includes early pieces in France, performance based experimental films and installations.

Carolee Schneemann is a pioneer visual artist who has transformed the dynamics of the body, installation, and performance.

She will discuss resistance and radicalization in contemporary art presenting a history of her own work.  Recent video works and a sequence of slides will examine the unpredictable directives of live performance, the unconscious and the materials through which her installations, films and videos take form.  Her motives for addressing new technologies, social issues and the latent cultural taboos surrounding sensuality will be discussed with the audience.

The history of Carolee Schneemann's work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.  Her work questions the exclusivity of traditional western categories by creating a space of complimentarity, mutuality, and integration and she has transformed the very definition of art especially with regard to discourses concerning the body, sexuality and gender.

The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, recently featured a retrospective of Schneemann's work from 1963 to 1996, entitled "Up To and Including Her Limits."  Other recent exhibitions include: "Between Performance and the Object" traveling from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angles, "The American Century" at the Whitney NYC, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Schneemann has published widely. Her books include Parts of a Body House Book (1972); Cezanne, She was a Great Painter (1976); ABC - We Print Anything - In The Cards (1977); Video Burn (1992); Early and Recent Work (1983); and More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979, 1997).  Forthcoming Publications include Body Politics: Notes and Essays of Carolee Schneemann for MIT Press, and a selection of her letters (Edited by Kristine Stiles) for Johns Hopkins University.

Friday, June 8

LECTURE -  1:30 PM

Eva Sutton: Interactive Prints

Any interactive system which offers changeability also raises the question of authorship.  Although the choices for change available to the viewer are finite (because they are contained within the software's finite database), the viewer is able to leave the image in an altered state.  The capacity for viewer intervention, even in a deterministic system, undermines the a priori control which artists have traditionally had when creating static work.  Not all decisions are made by the author in advance.  The author provides the context, in the form of an Ôaesthetic system,' but some, and potentially many, choices are made after the fact, by the viewer.  Artbots: the Artbots project also underscores a phenomenon which increasingly pervades the artmaking process and contemporary culture at this time in history; namely the phenomenon of technology functioning both as mediator and separator between the artist and the work.  No longer manifesting itself through the immediacy of the physical gesture made by the artist, contemporary work often utilizes a great deal of complex technology, thereby creating a wide gap between the artist and the expression itself.  The Artbot project widens this gap to the extreme, allowing the technology to function as an autonomous entity in making art.  The bot is the creator; a proxy artist, no longer requiring the presence of a human.

Eva Sutton is an artist and programmer living in New York.  Her current work explores the boundary between static images and interactive databases in which users change the visual state of the system without interrupting the Ôrealistic' continuity of a Ôwhole' image.  Her interactive print "Hybrids" was feature in "Paradise Now," recently at Exit Art, which explored artists' responses to current issues in genetic engineering.  Eva has had a previous life as a software engineer working primarily in the fields of biotechnology and large-scale database management, and later as a senior network administrator at the School of Visual Arts in New York.   Her work has been featured at Aperture, SIGGRAPH, the National Center for Photography in Paris, and the online site Digital Imaging Forum (www.art.uh.edu/dif), www.genomicart.org and www.pbs.org.  She has lectured on issues in art and technology at Princeton, NYU, Cooper Union, and the Hong Kong Center for the Arts.  Currently, Eva is an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design where she has developed the curriculum in digital media and is designing a digital media graduate program.  Her current focus at RISD is to use off-the-shelf technology in building robots which function as aesthetic and performative systems.  She is also forging a formal liaison between artists at RISD and computer scientists at Brown University to develop interactive paradigms for virtual and immersive systems.

ARTIST PRESENTATION - 3:00 PM

Lucretia Knapp: Differently Gendered

My early photographic work slips along the femme/butch continuum, displaying not only the costuming of the artist but the transformation from one type of gendered identity to another.  I will discuss how gender has been played out by many performance artists, specifically women, and how a butch identity may throw a significantly different wrench into the works.  I will present a selection of images that represent a number of performative spaces: the traditional photographic still, the video screen, the internet, and the cut-and-paste electronic image.

Lucretia Knapp was born in Wheeling, West Virginia and grew up in a small town in Ohio.  Formative experiences that continue to influence her work are movies she saw while growing up in the 60's (horror films that have a sideshow element and deal with isolation and the monstrous, i.e., Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Fifty Foot Woman).  From early desires to move against or beyond the norm her interests range from the paranormal, magic shows and horror, to identity and technology.

Curious about why Marnie by Alfred Hitchcock, made such an impression on her as a child, Lucretia studied the film and wrote "The Queer Voice in Marnie" which was published in Cinema Journal, Vol. 32, number 4, Summer 1993, and republished in Out In Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays On Popular Culture, edited by Alexander Doty and Corey Creekmur, pp 262-281.

She presently teaches photography, multi-media and video production at the International Center of Photography, New York University, and the School of Visual Arts.  She is also a teaching artist for the Mew Museum of Contemporary Art.

LECTURE - 4:30 PM

Carol Flax: The Web as Performative Space

Since its debut in the early 1990's, the web has been a space which has in many ways defied definition or even understanding.  It's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, talked about "...the power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained weblike way..."  He saw this space as malleable and filled with potential for creativity.  Although the web is now very much part of most peoples lives, we are still figuring out how to exist in this non-physical state.  How do we deal with non-linear, multi-dimensional spaces that we truly can't enter.  This presentation will look at ways in which the Web is being used by artists to answer some of these questions, and to expand our notions of interaction, presence, and even artmaking as form and practice.  It will look at the work of a number of artists who do Web works which involve the audience in interesting and innovative ways and discuss some of the current theoretical notions about our relationship to the web as a performative and participatory space.

Carol Flax  is an artist and educator living in Tucson, Arizona. Her work using digital technologies takes many forms from interactive installation to Web works. Her current project, Journeys:1900/2000, was commissioned by curator Alison Nordstršm and was completed in residence at the Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University. This piece, using interactive technologies plays with notions of memory, presence and the idea of voyage as a metaphor. The project opened in Florida in October, 2000 as part of the exhibition, Voyages (per)Formed and will travel for two years. It opens at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston in November, 2001. Carol has exhibited internationally including shows in Paris, Scotland, Germany and the Netherlands. Her extensive U.S. exhibitions include such shows as Iterations at ICP and TechnoSeduction at Cooper Union, both in New York, Ruins in Reverse: Time and Progress in Contemporary Art at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY, along with shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Camerawork, The George Eastman House and elsewhere. Carol has received numerous awards including a 2000 National Endowment for the Arts Creation and Presentation Grant. She was awarded a 1996 residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and 1993 residency in Inverness, Scotland. She has been commissioned to do numerous public art pieces and her artwork as well as her writing has been widely published. She is in numerous public and private collections including the Seattle Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography. Carol has an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She teaches Photography and Digital Media in the School of Art at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Saturday, June 9

ARTIST PERFORMANCE - 1:00 PM

Barbara Jo Revelle: Consuming Mexico: Looking for Zapatistas

This performance incorporates still imagery, video, true stories, testimony, ceremony, song and other speech acts.  Since my first road trip through Mexico as an eleven-year-old girl, traveling there has radically rearranged my ideas about race, privilege, tourism, politics, dislocation, and how to live one's life.  Recently on sabbatical I traveled by bus all over Chiapas (a state at war since 1994), Oaxaca and Quintana Roo, sometimes accompanied but more often alone, shooting hundreds of rolls of film and 34 hours of video, writing, exploring the landscape of my own fear, longing and alienation; and confronting loneliness, estrangement and political disillusionment.  At the same time I encountered the hope, fierce integrity, and defiance of many people, from a blind high-wire circus performer to an alcoholic beach-hustler turned scuba-instructor who saved my life; from indigenous peasant revolutionaries to a medicine man who cured President Bush (the old one) of cancer.  Along the way I have had to rethink many assumptions and ask many questions, such as what can be represented by an outsider in encounters with human beings from another culture, how, and whether?

2. Between the System and the Street

I will discuss several of my other photo-related performance pieces, ranging from the three week on the road piece "Moving," to "The Caribbean Code," a five week performance of living on the Miami River; to "Reading," a 91 day performance in San Francisco, and "Sorting," a photo-related piece that necessitated my living in a gallery in Phoenix, Arizona for a month.  I have always been interested in investigating the relationship between performing (as an archivist, collector, photographer, journal-keeper, etc.) and everyday lived experience.  Moreover, I think meaning inheres in relationships.  For me, single images, like glimpses of life from an elevated train, are poignant, but have little to do with understanding anything.  I've always been attracted to constructing meanings by combining photographs with other photographs, words, videotapes, audiotapes, animal noises, gravestones, wedding cakes, agitprop posters, wallpaper, and certainly with performance.  One's experience always exceeds one's vocabulary anyways.  The reach of language is often to name the unnameable.  Similarly, I often find that I am trying to make and configure photographs to suggest something not quite visible.  So the space between the pictures, the words, the objects, and the performance gestures is a place for a sort of flying leap to try to bridge the gap between what I can utter, what I can show.  I hope that the words, utterances, gestures and acts don't explain away the picturesÑat least not in any schematic or objective way.  I intend for the text, the performance and the images to disrupt each other and subvert any easy reading one might have alone.  I like to think I am working with a system of inferential association like the imagist technique of Ezra Pound and mixing that up with guerrilla politics and cultural criticism, but who knows.  The audience decides.

Barbara Jo Revelle is a photographer, film/video maker, installation, public and performance artist and a feminist.  She has taught art theory and practice in many places over the past 25 years, including the San Francisco Art Institute, UCLA, The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Arizona State University, New York State University College in Buffalo, the University of Colorado and she is currently Director of the Photography Program at the University of Florida at Gainesville.  Revelle has exhibited nationally and internationally in over 125 group and 25 solo exhibitions.  She has won 27 awards and fellowships including a major NEA. Her work, which is owned by over 40 public collections here and abroad, has received critical attention in Art Forum, Z Magazine, Ten/8, Art Week, Afterimage, the New Art Examiner and many other journals.  In 1991 Revelle completed a two-city block long photo-based, computer generated tile mural - "A People's History of Colorado," one of the largest public art murals in the world, and since that time she has completed five other major photo-based public art projects around the country.

ARTIST PRESENTATION - 3:30 PM

Jo Harvey Allen:  A Survey Of Her Performance Pieces And Philosophies

Jo Harvey Allen is a performer.  She acted in such films as All the Pretty Horses, True Stories, Fried Green Tomatoes, and The Client; starred in TV productions;  and written and hosted radio plays on NPR.  She has written and directed a number of original performances such as Counter Angel, Hally Lou, As it is in Texas and co-authored (and played the lead in) Chippy, and the opera Pioneer.  She has performed across America including Zellbach Hall, Berkeley, CA, Wadsworth Theater, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA., Lied Center University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, Hancher Auditorium, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, San Antonio Arts Association; San Antonio, TX, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, Architectural Institute of London, Bass Concert Hall University of Texas, Austin, TX.  She has written books, Cheek to Cheek, Duckdown Press, The Beautiful Waitress (yet unpublished) and recorded CDs (some with her husband Terry Allen).  Installations include The Beautiful Waitress, in Nebraska and Santa Fe, Drawing and Sculpture Installations at the College of Santa Fe and Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO.

Sunday, June 10

PANEL DISCUSSION - 1 PM

Teaching:  Performance in Photography - WHY?

This panel will survey several photography and image based programs that integrate performance into their curricula.  They will discuss how and why it is used, why it is an important component in teaching and various strategies they have used. 

Barbara DeGenevieve

The intersection of photography, video and performance are significant beyond the "performative" nature of what takes place in front of the camera.  Photography and video are lens related media whose products are direct analogons of what has appeared before the camera, and performance is based in actually seeing an image in an unmediated form that takes place for an audience.  I will be basing my comments on the issue of representation problematized by these specific media-the apparent veracity inherent in photography, video and performance.  Not surprisingly, these are the media of greatest contention in the arts, the media hit hardest in the battle over censorship and dangerous ideas.  The interdisciplinary structure of the School of the Art Instit