As part of his activities as the Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Visiting Scholar at Yale University, Distinguished Professor of Art History John Tagg has organized an international conference on photography and Britishness, to be held at the Yale Center for British Art on November 4-5. Follow the link for the complete program, which includes talks from Martin Parr, David Alan Mellor, and doctoral candidate Rotem Rozental.
Abstract: The European tattoo is among the most mythologised and misunderstood folk art forms in Western cultural and art history; it is only in the past 20 years that new in-depth scholarship has begun to clarify and deepen historical understandings of this rich art form. Recent archive research has revealed new resources for the study of indigenous European tattoo iconography and practice, including collections of photographs, drawings and preserved tattooed skin specimens. This presentation will focus on a comparative study of these collections, framed within the broader context of 19th century criminological interest in the tattoo, and pathological interpretations of European tattoo iconography. Within this context, the tattoo as a surface signifier represented a kind of peculiar ‘social symptom’ of underlying psychological malaise, which could be ‘read’ and diagnosed from the formal aspects of the tattoo marks themselves, if one applied the appropriate interpretative tools.
Congratulations to doctoral candidate Melissa Fitzmaurice, who has been awarded the Gill Family Graduate Student Fellowship for travel to the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference in Glasgow to present her paper Fascist Medievalism: Architecture, Authority and Dissent in Rome.
Diane Butler, director of the Binghamton University Art Museum, will give a tour of the museum from noon-1 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, highlighting the fall 2016 exhibitions now on view, including “Baseball in Cuba,” “The Bard in Bold” and mini-exhibitions downstairs curated by graduate students. She will talk about important research initiatives currently under way and give a sneak peek “behind the scenes” to show the daily operations of an art museum.
Faculty and staff can register with the University Center for Training and Development and University retirees can register with Retiree Services at 607-777-5959 or via e-mail.
For more information, contact Corinna Kruman or call 607-777-5959. This program is co-sponsored by University Retiree Services and the Employee Assistance Program. Any retirees requiring a garage parking pass for the event should stop at the Information Booth at the University’s main entrance.
Vivian Maier (American, 1926 – 2009) New York City, September 10, 1955. Gelatin silver print; printed later. Image size: 12 x 12 inches / Paper size: 20 x 16 inches. ©Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.
On October 20, Distinguished Professor of Art History John Tagg will present a lecture at the Des Moines Art Center titled “The Camera and The Street,” in conjunction with the current exhibition Vivian Maier: Through a Critical Lens:
Stepping back to set the street photographs of Vivian Maier in a larger context, John Tagg examines the long and varied history of the camera and the street and the complicated issues of performance and pleasure, property and privacy, power and the public domain this history raises.
Born in the North-East of England and trained at the Royal College of Art in London, John Tagg writes on forms of photographic practice not previously considered part of the history of photography, including police and prison photography, social surveillance, urban records and other archival systems in which the photograph is made to serve as a document. From here, his interests have extended to the ways we construct histories of cultural technologies and visual regimes, and to the theoretical debates that have transformed the history of art and photography since the 1970s. Author of The Burden of Representation, The Disciplinary Frame and other books, Tagg lives and works in upstate New York, where he is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Associate Professor Nancy Um will be speaking at today’s Learning @ Lunch on strategies for gauging student learning in large classes. Learning @ Lunch is an open, informal lunchtime forum to discuss instructional topics with campus experts. This gathering, co-sponsored by the Binghamton University Libraries and the Center for Learning and Teaching, is open to all who would like to attend.
Abstract: Chief modeler Giuseppe Gricci constructed the Porcelain Room (1760-65) at the Royal Palace of Aranjuez at the commencement of Charles III’s reign (1759-88) as King of Spain. Gricci ambitiously tested the limits of porcelain with an elaborate rococo design. The room’s innovative technique, which employs porcelain as both the framework for the walls and ceiling and the medium for the design is a visual tour-de-force. The rococo ornamentation, including flora, shells, animals, exoticized figures, and arabesques, offers the viewer a luxurious sensorial experience. The room delights in the material’s decorative appeal through color and surface, creating a nearly three-dimensional tactility and a heightened playfulness of the very material itself in its ornamentation and in its mimetic replication of other materials, such as silk and lacquer—challenging the possibilities of porcelain as a medium for art making and innovation.
Congratulations to Andrew Walkling, Dean’s Associate Professor of Early Modern Studies, whose book Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688 was recently published by Routledge as part of the Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series:
Masque and Opera in England, 1656–1688 presents a comprehensive study of the development of court masque and through-composed opera in England from the mid-1650s to the Revolution of 1688–89. In seeking to address the problem of generic categorization within a highly fragmentary corpus for which a limited amount of documentation survives, Walkling argues that our understanding of the distinctions between masque and opera must be premised upon a thorough knowledge of theatrical context and performance circumstances. Using extensive archival and literary evidence, detailed textual readings, rigorous tabular analysis, and meticulous collation of bibliographical and musical sources, this interdisciplinary study offers a host of new insights into a body of work that has long been of interest to musicologists, theatre historians, literary scholars and historians of Restoration court and political culture, but which has hitherto been imperfectly understood.
A companion volume will explore the phenomenon of “dramatick opera” and its precursors on London’s public stages between the early 1660s and the first decade of the eighteenth century.
Binghamton Art History 