Undergraduate and Faculty Activities: “Acquiring Art for the Museum” featured in Binghamton University Magazine

Anne McHugh championed the purchase of Käthe Kollwitz’s Tod Frau und Kind (Death, Woman and Child). It can be seen at the Art Museum through June 20. Photograph by Jonathan Cohen for Binghamton University Magazine.

University Art Museum Director Diane Butler’s course “Acquiring Art for the Museum”–and the acquisition that resulted, Käthe Kollwitz’s Tod Frau und Kind (Death, Woman and Child, advocated by Annie McHugh ’16)–are featured in the current Binghamton University Magazine:

Agostino Veneziano’s engraving was the first to go. Albrecht Dürer’s Satyr Family and Whistler’s Longshoremen were next.

Diane Butler, director of the Binghamton University Art Museum, watched with eager anticipation as her students made tough choices about eight prints they had come to admire. With each round of voting, a piece was crossed off the list. The final ballot would reveal which print would be purchased for the Museum’s permanent collection.

To read more, click here.

Talk today at University Art Museum: Richard Lee, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Fernand Braudel Center

Next VizCult: Chris Butler, Griffith University, TODAY

“The Politics of Inhabitance and the Possibility of Spatial Justice”

Wednesday, April 29, 5:15 pm
University Art Museum

Two versions of modernism – two forms of inhabitance. A ‘fibro’ shack in the shadow of the legendary ‘Torbreck’ tower block, Highgate Hill, Brisbane, Australia, 2000.

Contemporary philosophical accounts of the relationships between dwelling and modernity have been particularly influenced by the work of two twentieth-century writers: Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard. Certainly Henri Lefebvre’s writings on space and inhabitance are critically engaged with Heidegger’s reflections on the intimate connection between dwelling and ‘Being,’ and with Bachelard’s depiction of the poetic force of the home. However through his linking of spatial aesthetics to a politics of concrete utopianism, Lefebvre attempts to move beyond both Heidegger’s formulation of the problem of dwelling and the aura of nostalgia that surrounds Bachelard’s poetics of domestic space. In this paper, I will explore how Lefebvre’s intellectual engagements with these two thinkers were pursued in his writings on the right to the city and in his direct contributions to a number of architectural and urban planning projects in a number of cities around the world. Lefebvre’s reworking of the question of dwelling will be compared with reflections on this topic that appear in the architectural philosophy of Massimo Cacciari and Manfredo Tafuri. In doing so, I will argue that Lefebvre provides a way of understanding how everyday spatial practices and the ordering of the built environment are structured by a politics of inhabitance – a politics which defines the very possibility of spatial justice.

Chris Butler is a lecturer in the Griffith Law School at Griffith University in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Faculty Activities: Nancy Um at the Getty

Associate Professor and interim chair Nancy Um has been selected to attend the UCLA digital art history summer institute in July. Beyond the Digitized Slide Library is an eight-day summer institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, with major support for the program and its participants provided by the Getty Foundation. Participants will learn about debates and key concepts in the digital humanities and gain hands-on experience with tools and techniques for art historical research (including metadata basics, data visualization, network graphs, and digital mapping). For more information, click here.

Graduate Activities: Kasia Kieca at Cornell

Lewis W. Hine, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1932).

 

On May 2, Master’s student Kasia Kieca will be presenting a paper, titled “Industrial Visions: The Politics of Assemblage in Lewis Hine’s Men at Work (1932),” at Cornell University’s Department of German Studies graduate symposium, On Seriality:

In 1932, American photographer Lewis Wickes Hine published Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines, a photobook marketed to adolescents. In this publication, Hine juxtaposed photographs he took for the Empire State Building’s public relations department with photographs of men working on various industrial operations which he had taken for multiple commissions around the United States. In the introduction of the book, titled “The Spirit of the Industry,” the reader is asked to consider the laborers who make the functioning of modern society possible: “Cities do not build themselves, machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men.” This paper will argue that despite this heroizing credo and Hine’s insistence that his camera was capturing the “human side” of industry, Men at Work instead underscores the alienation of the early twentieth-century worker from both his place in the larger industrial operation and from the goods he was laboring to produce. Through the dynamic and sometimes incongruent arrangements of photographs and text, this book presents only isolated moments of industrial operations. Indeed, there are no photographs of completed projects. Published amidst one of the worst years of the United States’ economic depression, Men at Work is further complicated by the volatile socio-political context in which it emerges. This paper will aim to place this book within its larger historical context, while arguing that the meaning created by its fragmentary assemblage is one that eluded even Lewis Hine himself.

Next VizCult: Chris Butler, Griffith University

“The Politics of Inhabitance and the Possibility of Spatial Justice”

Wednesday, April 29, 5:15 pm
University Art Museum

Two versions of modernism – two forms of inhabitance. A ‘fibro’ shack in the shadow of the legendary ‘Torbreck’ tower block, Highgate Hill, Brisbane, Australia, 2000.

Contemporary philosophical accounts of the relationships between dwelling and modernity have been particularly influenced by the work of two twentieth-century writers: Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard. Certainly Henri Lefebvre’s writings on space and inhabitance are critically engaged with Heidegger’s reflections on the intimate connection between dwelling and ‘Being,’ and with Bachelard’s depiction of the poetic force of the home. However through his linking of spatial aesthetics to a politics of concrete utopianism, Lefebvre attempts to move beyond both Heidegger’s formulation of the problem of dwelling and the aura of nostalgia that surrounds Bachelard’s poetics of domestic space. In this paper, I will explore how Lefebvre’s intellectual engagements with these two thinkers were pursued in his writings on the right to the city and in his direct contributions to a number of architectural and urban planning projects in a number of cities around the world. Lefebvre’s reworking of the question of dwelling will be compared with reflections on this topic that appear in the architectural philosophy of Massimo Cacciari and Manfredo Tafuri. In doing so, I will argue that Lefebvre provides a way of understanding how everyday spatial practices and the ordering of the built environment are structured by a politics of inhabitance – a politics which defines the very possibility of spatial justice.

Chris Butler is a lecturer in the Griffith Law School at Griffith University in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

The Department of Art and Design presents the Senior Show, May 8

Graduate Activities: Amanda Beardsley at the Frick Symposium

An image of Harvey Fletcher’s “Long Distance Symphony” Stage, 1933 (Science News Letter, May 11, 1940).

Last weekend, doctoral student Amanda Beardsley participated in the Frick Symposium on the History of Art, presented by the Frick Collection and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Amanda joined graduate students from across the northeast in this long-running event, presenting her paper, “Celestial Mechanics: Harvey Fletcher and the ‘Gospel of Modern Science’,” on Friday afternoon:

In 1940, physicist and “father of stereophonic sound,” Harvey Fletcher stood on stage at Carnegie Hall playing recordings of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in one of his first exhibitions of stereo sound. Fletcher, representing Bell Laboratories, was interested in “creating a wall of sound” that could produce a perfect replication of sound’s most “pure form.” Responses to Fletcher’s presentation were unanimous: sound now had a new ability to be louder than ever with “spellbinding” and even “terrifying” effects. Fletcher had succeeded in “sculpting sound” that “echoed” and “crashed” as mightily and sublime as nature itself. As a consequence, the world rushed to utilize the impact of stereo in popular religion and culture spanning from audio-visual production to radio broadcasting.

As a project largely contingent upon collaboration with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, what was the motivating power behind Fletcher’s innovation and why did it gain such rapid traction? Is there a means of producing belief by making use of the material and scientific properties of sound? This paper argues that Fletcher’s relationship with Mormonism is telling of the entanglement of religion and science throughout history. Looking to his affiliation with Mormonism and media technology, I argue that Fletcher’s work on acoustics has been instrumental in constructing a historically and religiously specific ideal believer and cosmology. The attempt to perfectly map sound onto the believer attests to the larger spectacle of popular religion, and, subsequently, the traces of religious ritual found in popular spectacle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Faculty Activities: John Tagg at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa

On April 16, John Tagg conducted a doctoral seminar in photographic theory at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in the Departimento de Ciência da Comunicacao. He also delivered a public lecture, “Everything and Nothing: Meaning, Sense and Execution in the Archive,” in the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Video of the lecture and question period will be available online shortly.

Graduate Activities: Melissa Fitzmaurice and Dengyan Zhou featured in Inside Binghamton for Graduate Excellence Awards

Congratulations to doctoral students Dengyan Zhou and Melissa Fitzmaurice, both recipients of Binghamton’s Graduate Excellence Awards for 2014-2015 and both currently featured in “Inside Binghamton”:

Melissa Fitzmaurice – Art History

Called inspiring and engaging by her nominators, Melissa Fitzmaurice brings to the classroom a deep knowledge of her subject matter and an ability to communicate complex concepts to a diverse group of students. She is extremely gifted at leading students through difficult material, nimbly responding to their pace and clarifying points as needed. She also finds creative ways to reach out to students who may be foundering, helping them to realize they are capable and allowing all of her students to push themselves intellectually by finding that motivation through genuine curiosity. Like all good scholars, she flows her research seamlessly into the classroom where she has offered a wide range of courses, including as instructor of record for four original undergraduate courses. Students praise her energy, commitment and clarity, as well as her flexibility in the classroom. Her friendly, funny and endlessly kind manner serves her well.

Dengyan Zhou – Art History

An active young scholar who is sought after as a collaborator, even by more senior scholars, Dengyan Zhou is using unstudied archival materials and close readings of historical sources to trace the shifting terms of photography, rather than its material output alone, to explore the cultural and intellectual backgrounds that conceptualized and substantiated the adaptation of photography in China. She uses unpublished materials and firsthand interviews with important pioneers of the Chinese photography community, along with restricted institutional archives and private collections in China that she has accessed. She has an impressive publication record of two book chapters, two books co-edited and several articles authored or co-authored in journals and conferences including the Journal of Journalism and Communication, Chinese Photography and War, Suffering, Intellectuals and Visual Memory. She has also published an interview and a translation, co-curated an exhibition at Shanghai Library in China, and participated in several local and international, professional projects.

Graduate Activities: Digital Platforms Workshop

Graduate Activities: Anwar Ibrahim, dissertation defense

The Department of Art History

is pleased to announce that, on,

Thursday, April 23, at 2:00

in the Art History Commons, FA 218,

Anwar Ibrahim,

candidate for the doctoral degree in Art History,

will defend his dissertation,

“Politics, Controversy and Design in Post 9/11 American Mosques: The Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, Roxbury, Massachusetts,”

before a committee composed of Professors Nancy Um (Chair), Julia Walker, and Kent Schull (History).

The defense is a public event and open to all. We look forward to a lively, instructive and informative discussion and invite you all to attend.