Visiting Film and Video Artists and Speakers Series: John Knecht

Special installation at the University Art Museum: Ambra Polidori

The University Art Museum is showing a newly acquired work by Mexican artist Ambra Polidori (b. 1954) that challenges official evasions and inactivity around the 2014 disappearance of forty-three students in the Mexican state of Guerrero. The work has been sensitively installed by Juanita Rodriguez Congote, a doctoral student in the Department of History, in a way that also invites participation via the museum’s Facebook page as a digital parallel to the original’s sharable postcard format. There will be a gallery talk on the installation. Watch the museum’s Facebook page for details.

Next VizCult: Annual Ferber Lecture, Laura Weigert, Rutgers University, TODAY

This paper interrogates the value of the term “tableau vivant” (living picture) to describe the figural groupings that adorned processions in fifteenth and sixteenth century France and Flanders. Vital to the tradition was the arrangement of human beings to represent biblical, mythological, and historical characters. The earliest pictures and written testimonials of this artistic practice confirm, however, that it also incorporated figures composed of a variety of materials and technologies; both animate and inanimate figures could be considered enlivened. This feature helps us account for one of the most surprising aspects of late medieval stagings: the appearance of naked female figures. In turn, it challenges assumed distinctions between media and a conception of animation rooted in a human presence.

Gallery talk at University Museum on Thursday

In conjunction with the current exhibition, Milton Glaser: Modulated Patterns, a lecture entitled “Milton Glaser Illuminated” will be given at the Binghamton University Art Museum on Thursday, April 27, 5:00 pm by Steven Brower, director of the “Get Your Masters With The Masters” MFA at Marywood University. Brower is the designer/author of myriad books and former creative director for Print Magazine, and former art director for The Nation and The New York Times. He was also an associate at the Push Pin Group, co-founded by Milton Glaser.

All exhibitions and events at the museum are free and open to the public. For more information visit binghamton.edu/art-museum.

Faculty Activities: John Tagg in Sinij Divan

Distinguished Professor John Tagg‘s essay “Everything and Nothing: Meaning, Sense and Execution in the Archive” appears in issue 21 of the anthology Sinij Divan (Blue Divan), translated by Alexei Garadzha. The anthology is published by Mockba in Moscow, and this issue is devoted to contemporary art and theory. 

Next VizCult: Annual Ferber Lecture, Laura Weigert, Rutgers University

This paper interrogates the value of the term “tableau vivant” (living picture) to describe the figural groupings that adorned processions in fifteenth and sixteenth century France and Flanders. Vital to the tradition was the arrangement of human beings to represent biblical, mythological, and historical characters. The earliest pictures and written testimonials of this artistic practice confirm, however, that it also incorporated figures composed of a variety of materials and technologies; both animate and inanimate figures could be considered enlivened. This feature helps us account for one of the most surprising aspects of late medieval stagings: the appearance of naked female figures. In turn, it challenges assumed distinctions between media and a conception of animation rooted in a human presence.

Alumni Activities: Na’ama Klorman-Eraqi in Photography and Culture

Congratulations to Na’ama Klorman-Eraqi (PhD 2013), whose article “The Hackney Flashers: Photography as a Socialist Feminist Endeavour” has been published in the current issue of Photography and Culture:

This article discusses the photographic and cultural activities of the Hackney Flashers, an all-women socialist feminist photography collective that operated in the London Hackney borough during the 1970s. The paper explores this group’s ‘ photography projects, the feminist and political arguments they posed, and the various debates informing their practice. This study examines the platforms in which the Hackney Flashers exhibited their projects and their distinct political and visual strategies. The study also considers the Hackney Flashers’ disputed entrance into the Fine Arts institution through their participation in Three Perspectives on British Photography: Recent British Photography at the Hayward Gallery (1979) and the subsequent breakup of the group. It reviews the context of the Hackney Flashers’ participation in this exhibition, considers their contribution to the show, and analyzes the context of their negative reception.

Faculty Activities: Tom McDonough at the ICP

Image via http://www.galleriesnow.net.

Associate Professor and Chair Tom McDonough will be speaking today at a workshop organized by Hands Off Our Revolution, hosted at the International Center of Photography in New York in conjunction with the exhibition Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change:

Hands Off Our Revolution, a recently launched global coalition of artists and cultural practitioners, is dedicated to affirming the radical nature of art.

Join us for their second New York event in which artists, cultural practitioners, and public intellectuals discuss the way art counters the rising rhetoric of right-wing populism and fascism and its increasingly stark expressions of xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, and unapologetic intolerance.

Alumni Activities: Sharon Smith and Hala Auij in Doha

See below for information about two talks presented by Binghamton Art History alumni Sharon Smith (PhD 2009) and Hala Auji (PhD 2013) in Doha!

 

Faculty Activities: Tom McDonough at the Barnes Foundation

Image via http://www.barnesfoundation.org.

On April 15, Associate Professor and Chair Tom McDonough will take part in the symposium Flânerie and the Politics of Public Space at  the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, held in conjunction with the special exhibition Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie. McDonough’s talk is titled “Crowds without Company.”

Since the 1990s, French artist Philippe Parreno has explored the forms taken by the modern crowd. McDonough will discuss Parreno’s early performances, installations, and recent films as they consistently figure diverse forms of collectivity and provisional community in a contemporary moment marked by the crisis of the public sphere.

Alumni Activities: Dengyan Zhou wins Distinguished Dissertation award

Congratulations to Dengyan Zhou (PhD 2016), whose project, “The Language of ‘Photography’ in China: A Genealogy of Conceptual Frames from Sheying to Xinwen Sheying and Sheying Yishu,” has been selected by the Graduate School as a Distinguished Dissertation for the year 2016!

Summer Session Course: “Art and Corporate Culture: From Fluxus to the Yes Men”

Instructor: Wylie Schwartz wschwar1@binghamton.edu

Binghamton University Department of Art History

Distance Learning Summer Session Course July 10 – August 11, 2017

This course explores the relationship between contemporary art and corporate culture. We begin with the corporation itself, in its postwar incarnation, as we examine the ways corporations have mobilized art and design, as well as the artists and designers whose work helped shape these emerging fields. From here, we consider Conceptual art as operating in terms of what Benjamin Buchloh referred to as an “aesthetics of administration.”  We go on to examine several case studies of artists and artist groups whose artistic practices specifically intervened within the sphere of corporate culture, whether as a form of institutional critique, such as Hans Haacke’s critique of Mobil sponsorship at the Museum of Modern Art, or the protests against BP sponsorship of British cultural institutions, or, as a form of collaboration, as in the case of the Artist Placement Group (APG) in postwar England. From there, we pivot to what we might call the “postmodern” corporation and the age of digital technologies, questioning how the subversive impulses of Paris in ’68 became folded into a new corporate culture, exemplified in the tendency of advertising to appropriate contemporary art, such as the case of Honda’s “Cog” commercial mimicking Fischli and Weiss’s “Lauf der Dinge.” We go on to examine how artists such as Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons turned themselves into corporations — the “branded” artist as it were, as well as the Conceptual play with that conceit in groups like Readymades Belong to Everyone. The course will conclude with a closer look at artistic practices that attempt to subvert that impulse by the Yes Men and other activist groups.