Next VizCult: Cağatay Doğan, Binghamton University, TODAY

Abstract: This talk will examine the visual construction of place and the identity of Istanbul by the Turkish Republic’s “state photographer” of the 1930s, Othmar Pferschy. State-sponsored publications promoted the republican regime’s aspirations to create a modern nation. Istanbul photographs played a crucial role in domesticating the Ottoman past as landscape and museum in contrast to the iconic modernist spaces of Ankara. Pferschy’s private archive and the rising photojournalism of the 1950s provides us with an opportunity to explore the fate of the republican visual regime of amnesia and iconization, in the broader context of transition to a multiparty system, the rise of mass media, and rapid urbanization.

Faculty and Graduate Activities: John Tagg, Dengyan Zhou, and Rotem Rozental in British Art Studies

Issue 4 of the refereed on-line journal British Art Studies, published by the Paul Mellon Center in London and the Yale Center for British Art, has just gone live. It includes contributions by John Tagg, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Art History, and Dengyan Zhou (PhD 2016) to a debate on photographic practice and theory at times of crisis, together with the entire proceedings of the recent conference on “Photography and Britishness” Tagg co-organized, including the outstanding presentation by current doctoral candidate Rotem Rozental. 

 

Graduate Activities: Debora Faccion in Hyperallergic

Nomes dos Mortos (Names of the Dead) from Nuno Ramos’s 111 Vigília, Canto, Leitura, 2016 (via 111 Vigília).

Congratulations to doctoral candidate Debora Faccion, whose article on Nuno Ramos, titled “An Artist Remembers a Prison Massacre in Brazil, Where Police Impunity Reigns” has recently been published in Hyperallergic:

From November 1st to the 2nd, the artist Nuno Ramos held a 24-hour vigil in São Paulo for the 111 people killed in the Carandiru massacrein 1992. The November dates marked the passage from the Day of All Saints to the Day of the Dead, and coincided with the numbers 11-1. The massacre, one of the major violations of human rights in Brazil, was carried out by the police in reaction to a prisoner revolt in the Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo. After many years of impunity, in 2013 and 2014, 74 policemen involved in the massacre were convicted to hundreds of years in prison. However, the trial that sentenced the policemen was repealed in September, aggravating the sense of injustice and senseless violence perpetrated by the police in São Paulo today.

Click here to read more.

Next VizCult: Cağatay Doğan, Binghamton University

Abstract: This talk will examine the visual construction of place and the identity of Istanbul by the Turkish Republic’s “state photographer” of the 1930s, Othmar Pferschy. State-sponsored publications promoted the republican regime’s aspirations to create a modern nation. Istanbul photographs played a crucial role in domesticating the Ottoman past as landscape and museum in contrast to the iconic modernist spaces of Ankara. Pferschy’s private archive and the rising photojournalism of the 1950s provides us with an opportunity to explore the fate of the republican visual regime of amnesia and iconization, in the broader context of transition to a multiparty system, the rise of mass media, and rapid urbanization.

Graduate Activities: Mariah Postlewait and Lauren Cesiro

Congratulations to doctoral students Mariah Postlewait and Lauren Cesiro, who have been selected as HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) Scholars for 2016-18: 

The HASTAC Scholars fellowship program is an innovative student-driven community of graduate and undergraduate students. Each year a new cohort is accepted into the program. More than 800 HASTAC Scholars in dozens of disciplines have been sponsored by 145 colleges and universities–ranging from small liberal arts colleges to large Research 1 institutions. We are building a community of students working at the intersection of technology and the arts, humanities and sciences.

Faculty Activities: Nancy Um in Berlin

The Barenboim-Said Akademie, Berlin, Germany.

This weekend, Associate Professor Nancy Um will be presenting the paper “Aromatics, Stimulants, and their Vessels: The Material Culture and Rites of Merchant Interaction in Eighteenth-Century Mocha” at the conference The Mercantile Effect: On Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World During 17th–18th Centuries, held at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin. For the complete program, click here.

 

Faculty Activities: John Tagg at the Yale Center for British Art

On November 30, Distinguished Professor of Art History John Tagg will deliver the Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Lecture at the Yale Center for British Art, titled “‘Knocking around between money, sex, and boredom’: Walker Evans in Havana and New York.” The lecture series, jointly sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery, was established to honor the memory of Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, director of the Gallery from 1957 to 1971. The event will be live streamed.

The title comes from a short memoir of his arrival in Havana written by Walker Evans in July 1933, after returning from a thirty-day trip to Cuba. Evans was recalling his first meeting with his guides, the Fernandez de Castro brothers, but his phrase encapsulates much about his own life at this time, raising issues invariably kept at bay in writing on Evans that have an undeniable if hard to focus relation to the understanding of his photographic work from this period. Moving between Havana and New York City, the lecture will ask not just about the passage between work and biography, but about sex and work and what is secured in the refusal to speak about them when looking at photographs by Evans.

Born in the northeast 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. Tagg, the author of The Burden of Representation (1988) and The Disciplinary Frame (2009), among other books, is spending the fall semester at Yale as the Andrew Carnduff Ritchie visiting scholar.

Material and Visual Worlds speaker series: Martin Bolt, Corning Museum of Glass

Marvin Bolt has co-curated two exhibitions that opened this year at Corning Museum of Glass: Fragile Legacy: The Marine Invertebrate Glass Models of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka and Revealing the Invisible: The History of Glass and the Microscope. Dr. Bolt, a specialist in telescopes, joined CMoG from the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum in Chicago, IL, where he was curator of the history of astronomy and vice president for collections at the Adler’s Webster Institute for the History of Astronomy. There, he curated numerous permanent and temporary exhibitions including, Telescopes: Through the Looking Glass (2009-present) and Evening Amusements! Popular Astronomy, 1750-1930 (2002-2003). He is the author of Telescopes: Through the Looking Glass (2009), and co-authored The Universe Unveiled: Instruments and Images Through History (2000). He is co-editor of the 2-volume The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (2007).

Reception today at University Art Museum

The University Art Museum is hosting a reception from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursday, November 10th for the exhibitions curated by graduate students currently on view in the Nancy J. Powell Lower Galleries. Each student who curated an exhibition will give a short talk, and refreshments will be provided. 

Keith Arnatt: Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, curated by Alexandra Feim ’15, MA ’16, features photographs recently donated by John Tagg, Distinguished Professor of Art History, and Luisa Casella. The Wedgwood Revolution was curated by Erin Annis, graduate student in history; Picturing Children at the Turn of the Century was curated by Mariah Postlewait, graduate student in art history, and consists of carte de visite photographs, ambrotypes, and other early photographic media that were recently given to the museum by Gil and Deborah Williams of Binghamton. Finally, The Kabuki Stage in Japanese Woodblock Prints features prints on loan by Binghamton resident, Tony Antes, and was curated by Lucie Nelson, emeritus curator at the Binghamton University Art Museum.

Admission to the museum is free. For directions and museum hours, visit artmuseum.binghamton.edu.

Next week at CEMERS: Ronald L. Martinez, Bernardo Lecture

Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies

26^th Annual Bernardo Lecture

November 10, 2016

5:30 Casadesus Hall (4:30 Reception in Green Room)

Ronald L. Martinez, Professor of Italian at Brown University,

 Cleansing the Temple: Dante and the Defense of the Church

Readers of the Commedia are familiar with Dante’s severe judgment of contemporary popes. The attacks are explicable as part of Dante’s strategy of defending the Church itself, which the poet saw as imperiled by papal avarice and political ambition. From the reference to the biblical punishment of Uzzah for touching the Ark of the Covenant in Epistola XI, urging Italian cardinals at the 1314 conclave to elect a Pope favorable to Rome, we know that Dante anticipated accusations of meddling in Church affairs. And meddle he did: the representations in the poem of the Church, in guises both historical and typological (Ark of the Covenant, Temple, Bride of Christ, etc.) comprise an ambitious program by which Dante identifies with the role of protector and purifier of the Church, modelled chiefly on scriptural episodes of Christ cleansing the Temple, a longstanding staple of anti-simoniacal reform within the Church itself. A series of passages in the second half of Paradiso (Cantos 15-16, 18, 22, 27) elaborate Dante’s investment in this role, one that is repeatedly linked to the poet’s condition as an exile. 

Graduate Activities: Mariah Postlewait in Toronto

From October 28-29, doctoral student Mariah Postlewait participated in the third annual interdisciplinary conference Truth, Lies, and Manufacturing Memory hosted by Humber College’s School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the International Festival of Authors (IFOA). Mariah presented her paper, “‘We Always Lie to Strangers’: Strategies of Subverting and Recasting Identity in the Ozarks,” at the IFOA headquarters at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, Canada.  

Next VizCult: Gemma Angel, Cornell University, TODAY

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.