ART HISTORY DEPARTMENT
Dissertation defense
Debora Faccion Grodzki, PhD candidate
“Creative Recoveries: Making Art with Antonio Dias”
Committee members: Tom McDonough (chair), Kevin Hatch, Julia Walker, Simone Osthoff (Penn State University, outside examiner)
Monday 28 November 2022 – 2:00 PM Eastern Time
This defense is open to the public and will take place on Zoom: https://binghamton.zoom.us/j/4591433726
On Thursday 8 December, Tom McDonough will participate in a book launch and discussion celebrating the release of Jacqueline Humphries: jHΩ1:), published on the occasion of Humphries’s 2021 solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The evening will feature a conversation between Daniel Marcus (Associate Curator, Wexner Center for the Arts), Courtney J. Martin (Director, Yale Center for British Art), and McDonough. The program begins at 6:30 PM and will be held at the ground floor space of Greene Naftali, 508 West 26th Street, New York. Admission is free and open to the public.
VizCult: The Art History Department’s Visual Culture Workshop
presents
Brian M. Lione, International Cultural Heritage Protection Program Manager,
Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute.
“Safeguarding Iraq’s Cultural Heritage 2009–2022: Partnerships, Recovery and Stabilization”
Wednesday November 16 at 5:15 pm in FA 143
Open to all!
On Friday, October 28, 2022, Art History doctoral candidate Joonsoo Jason Park delivered his paper “An Artwork You Will Not See: Wheatfield—A Confrontation (1982) by Agnes Denes” at the international graduate student symposium, Undisciplining the Disciplines, at Yonsei University, South Korea. As an interdisciplinary conference ranging from English to Art History, this conference was sponsored by the Department of English Language and Literature BK21 Project at Yonsei University, as well as by the Institute for Asia and Asian Diasporas at Binghamton University of the State University of New York.
On Wednesday, October 26, Art History doctoral candidate Pei-chun Viola Hsieh delivered the lecture “Spheres of Indeterminacy: Tactile Politics in Wang Te-yu’s Inflatable Art” at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at Binghamton University. Viola is a Doctoral Fellow at IASH this semester.
Cinema did not die with the digital: it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest cinema laid the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. In Endless Intervals, he introduces a theory of semiotechnics that explains how discrete intervals of machines came to represent something like a mind—and why they were feared for their challenge to the uniqueness of human intelligence.
Examining histories of early cinematic machines, Kirkwood locates the foundations for a scientific vision of the psyche as well as the information age. He theorizes an epochal shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that demonstrates how cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche—a model that was at once mechanical and semiotic, discrete and continuous, physiological and psychological, analog and digital.
Recovering largely forgotten and untranslated texts, Endless Intervals makes the case that cinema, rather than being a technology assaulting the psyche, is in fact the technology that produced the modern psyche. Kirkwood considers the ways machines can create meaning, offering a theory of how the discontinuous intervals of soulless mechanisms ultimately produced a rich continuous experience of inner life.
Join the artist, Michal Heiman, in conversation with John Tagg (SUNY Distinguished Professor of Art History) about her recent work including the Dress Project and Michal Heiman Tests.
Tuesday, October 25, Noon-1 pm EST/ 8-9 pm IST. Registration link: https://binghamton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0pf-mpqTspH9EGrn5jX3IOg8wCoEdsP5ow
Michal Heiman (b. 1954, based in Tel Aviv) is an artist, curator, member of the Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, theorist, and activist whose work inhabits the spaces between art and therapy, photography and diagnosis, theory and praxis. As installations, video, sound, photography, performance, and archival displays, her work has been shown in venues such as the University of Melbourne Museum of Art, Documenta X (Kassel), Le Quartier (Quimper), The Jewish Museum (New York), The Museum of Modern Art (Saitama City), The Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), the American University Museum (Washington DC), and the American Jewish University (Los Angeles).
John Tagg looks at forms of photographic practice that were not previously part of the History of Photography and writes about photography not as a self-contained medium but as a complex apparatus whose social effects and effects of meaning are multiple and diverse. His interests extend to the ways in which we construct histories of cultural technologies and visual regimes and to the range of theoretical debates that, since the 1970s, have transformed the business of art history. His publications, which have been translated into more than fifteen languages, include The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988), Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics, and the Discursive Field (1992) and The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (2009).
Photograph of Heiman by Anton Sarokin
Photograph of Tagg by Jonathan Cohen, University Photographer
On Tuesday 18 October, Tom McDonough, Professor of Art History, will hold a question and answer session with artist Tony Cokes following his talk for the Wexner Center for the Arts. The event will be held virtually at 5:00 PM. More information, including RSVP for the Zoom link, may be found at https://wexarts.org/talks-more/tony-cokes.
VizCult: The Art History Department’s Visual Culture Workshop
presents
Tom McDonough, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Art History Department, and a frequent essayist on contemporary art and artists.
“Wolfgang Tillmans and the Problem of Politics”
October 19 at 5:15 in FA 143
On Friday 7 October, Tom McDonough, Professor of Art History, will hold a conversation with artist Liam Gillick about A Variability Quantifier (2022), a weather station he has designed for Fogo Island, Newfoundland, Canada. Known colloquially as The Fogo Island Red Weather Station, Gillick’s artwork forms part of a larger collaborative project that unites 28 arts organizations around the world through the World Weather Network in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada and Fogo Island Arts. Their dialogue takes place 5:00 – 6:00 PM in the Gathering Hall at the Fogo Island Inn. For more information, see: https://www.fogoislandarts.ca/fia-x-liam-gillick-a-variability-quantifier/.
VizCult: The Art History Department’s Visual Culture Workshop
2022 Fall Semester
presents
Claire L. Kovacs, Curator of Collections + Exhibitions at the Binghamton University Art Museum
“SisterSerpents’ Provocations”
Wednesday, September 28 at 5:15 PM in FA 143
This year, VizCult, the department’s visual culture workshop, enters its twenty-sixth season, having run continuously since Fall 1997, undeterred by financial crisis, pandemic or the vicissitudes of academic fashion. VizCult is more than just a speakers’ series. It has shaped a unique space within the life of the department in which we can come together to share current work in progress and experience ourselves as an intellectual community–something that often gets lost in the rush of administrative and teaching deadlines. All are invited to come along and participate.
Beijing Inside–Out Museum is currently showing a major new survey exhibition, “Infinite Realism: Humanism in Chinese Photography from the 1920s to the 1980s,” co-curated by Carol Yinghua Lu and Dengyan Zhou (PhD 2016). The exhibition, which continues until December, traces the emergence of alternative realist practices that challenge the formula of socialist realism, foregrounding individual photographers’ humanistic vision as observers and recorders of momentous social upheavals through the camera lens.
Dengyan Zhou teaches the history of photography at Beijing Film Academy. Her research has been published in Literature and Art Studies, Theory and Criticism of Literature and Art, the Chinese Journal of Art Studies, Contemporary Cinema, Trans–Asia Photography Review, Photographies, OSMOS and Chinese Photography.
Binghamton Art History 