Please follow the link for a profile of Assistant Professor Brian Wall and his book, titled Theodor Adorno and Film Theory: The Fingerprint of Spirit and released this month by Palgrave.
Month: March 2013
Next VizCult: Na’ama Klorman-Eraqi, Binghamton University
Faculty Activities: Kevin Hatch at Miami University
Assistant Professor Kevin Hatch will give a talk on Thursday, March 21, hosted by the Department of Art within the School of Creative Arts at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The talk considers the complexities of medium, genre, space, and spectatorship that have attended the rise of the large-scale projected-image installation in contemporary art, using recent work by Steve McQueen as its case study. For additional details, see the Miami Art Department website.
Harpur Cinema presents “A Different Path”
Harpur Cinema’s “Forces of Nature” series features “A Different Path” (Monteith McCollum, USA, 2010), a film by a member of the Binghamton University Cinema Department, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 15, and Sunday, March 17, in LH-6.
In “A Different Path”, sidewalk activist Senior, a Critical Mass trumpeter, city Kayak-er and others use ingenuity and humor to solve their modern mobility dilemmas in an automobile-centric environment. Combining animation, cinematography and original music composed by McCollum (adjunct lecturer of cinema) and performed by Michael Louis Johnson, this film is an artistic and poetic treatment of personal struggle and environmental concern over livable cities. “A gripping, soulful film,” writes June Chua, Toronos Rabble.ca. Special note: McCollum will introduce the film on Friday, March 15, and will answer questions after the screening. “A Different Path” premiered at South by Southwest in 2010 and was nominated for the Pare Lorentz Award of the International Documentary Association.
Admission is $4. For questions or information, call 607-777-4998 or e-mail nwlostow@binghamton.edu. For more information about McCollum and his film, follow the link.
Visiting artist Margaret Maugenest at Rosefsky Gallery
Visiting artist Margaret Maugenest welcomes spring at the Rosefsky Gallery with an art installation of large diaphanous paintings on silk and other smaller works. She will give a presentation on her evolution from large paintings to small and then to painting on silk at 5 p.m. Friday, March 15, in the gallery. The colorful large silk paintings on display are from a series she calls “Painted Light.” The panels are hung from the ceiling. Because of their translucence, they interact with light as well as their surrounding environment. The smaller pieces in the exhibition show some other materials with which Maugenest likes to work, such as watercolors on cigarette papers and Japanese Shikishi Paper Boards.
Maugenest was born in Indonesia of Asian and European descent. One of her Dutch forebears, Abraham Toorop, came to Indonesia in the 1700s. He was an indigo maker. Another relation, also a Toorop, was a batik artist in Central Java. Maugenest dedicates her silk installation to their memory.
The Rosefsky Gallery is open from noon-4 p.m. Monday through Friday. The show will run through March 22.
Next VizCult: Noam Elcott, Columbia University, TODAY
Monday at CEMERS: Jerrilynn Dodds
CEMERS
The Harpur College Dean’s Workshop
presents
Jerrilynn D. Dodds
Dean of the College of Sarah Lawrence College
Professor of Art History
Cantiga 169
Ambivalence in the Urban Fabric: Alfonso X’s Colonial Project in Murcia
Monday, March 18
3:00 LN 1106
The Cantigas de Santa Maria lay out a complex narrative of the Colonial project of King Alfonso X of Castile. He must, on one hand, consolidate conquered lands, incorporating a social and economic fabric that depends on its indigenous Muslim populations. He must also, however, present the image of a polity that unequivocally reflects the reign of an unquestioned Christian church. The tensions borne of this ambivalence are felt in interesting ways in the exploration of Castilian attitudes towards the mosques of submitted populations, and their conversion into churches.
Graduate Student Activities: Wylie Schwartz and Arcades Project
Doctoral student Wylie Schwartz is soliciting proposals for the fourth edition of Arcades Project, a ‘curated art markeplace’ that Wylie co-founded in 2011. This year’s guest curators are Mara Baldwin, Assistant Director of the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, and Clara Hess, a visual artist and co-director of ‘Complimenta,’ an artists’ residency program in Ithaca.
Arcades Project, started in 2011, is a curated, one-night event for the exhibition and sales of limited edition works produced by small and independent presses, artists, and other creative practitioners (art books, book arts, prints, image and text works, artist multiples). Arcades also hosts workshops, performances, screenings, and readings. Arcades, although an opportunity to sell work, is an event that hopes to subvert the expected context of commerce by switching themes and locations every year. This May will be the fourth incarnation of the Arcades Project– an event that wears many guises, at once a museum, a mall, a swap shop, a school, a pub, & a party.
Please follow the link for more information or to submit a proposal.
Next VizCult: Noam Elcott, Columbia University
Graduate Student Activities: Maria Salva
Aerial view of Persepolis. Image courtesey of Google satellite view.
MA candidate Maria Salva will present her paper “Building Modern Persepolis: Imagined Antiquity, Modern Splendor, and the Ruins” at the symposium “Competing Visions: Changing Landscapes in the Past, Present, and Future,” to be held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst this Saturday. Follow the link for more information and see below for the paper abstract.
This paper explores the way the ancient Iranian archaeological site of Persepolis has been created, built upon, and performed upon over the course of the twentieth century, especially as a part of the process of cultivating historical nationalism in Iran under the Pahlavis. Much of the site’s basic structure and iconic features were first made visible by the work of European orientalists such as Ernst Herzfeld, who conducted the first major excavation starting in 1931. But even from early on, the site was altered by new building. In 1932, Herzfeld’s team reconstructed a section of the ruins built under Xerxes to function as a modern office and museum space. As Persepolis gained ideological potency under the Pahlavi regime in Iran, it was utilized as a nationalist, pre-Islamic icon. Persepolis became a model for what was imagined as the revival of ancient splendor in the drive toward rapid modernization through performances enacted on its grounds, including the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts, held annually from 1967-77, and the 1971 international banquet described as celebration of 2,500th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian Empire. These programs backfired, and the extraordinary displays of decadence only increased public dissatisfaction with the regime, thus adding to the drive to revolution that ultimately ousted the Pahlavis. The structures which had been added adjacent to the ancient part of Persepolis in 1971 was left standing, and footage from the celebration was continually re-played on television as a reminder of that regime’s severe injustices and failures. The “tent city” which had been built to accommodate foreign guests from the highest positions in international politics thus remains visible at Persepolis today as only the steel frames. In the concluding section of my paper I examine a work by the British artist Michael Stevenson which replicated one of these tents for the Basel Art Fair in 2007. His representation of the modern ruins in sculpture and photography for a contemporary arts event brings the discussion full circle, to a new representation of a politicized history.
Lalaine Little profiled in Discover-e
Please follow the link for a profile of doctoral student Laine Little, emphasizing research conducted for her dissertation, titled “Portable Devotion: Philippine Christian Visual Culture 1521-1815. “For her project, Laine has spent time in the Phillipines for on-site research, and has also received grants from the Lilly Library at Indiana University and the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Graduate Student Activities: Josh Franco
Image courtsey of Alison Kuo, from the exhibition Colorful Food at Eleven Seventeen Garland in Austin, Texas.
Please follow the links to doctoral student Josh Franco’s recent interviews with Alison Kuo and Fabian Barba in zingmagazine‘s online zingchats. Josh also spoke with the San Antonio-based Más Rudas Collective (MRC) in the summer of 2012 in advance of their installation at Artpace, a conversation which can be read here.
Last summer, Josh also was invited to travel to the Netherlands to participate in “The New World (Dis) Order and the Challenge of Social Justice: Ethics and the Decolonial Option,” a summer course held at the Roosevelt Academy in Middleburg in partnership with the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. Josh received funding for his participation from the Clifford D. Clark fellowship and from Utrecht University.
Binghamton Art History 