Histories and Change
Floating from the Past to the Present: Staging "Have a House" in 1972, 2015 and 2017
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yang Chen
Under the influence of "Happening," The Play was founded by artist Keiichi Ikemizu in Osaka, Japan in 1967 and active until the present. In this essay, I compare The play’s original intention of the flow of the consciousness with the two contemporary restagings to discuss how curatorial decision changes the final representation of the work and their historical and curatorial significance. IE was first performed from 5 to 10 August 1972, which was shorter than their initial plan due to an unexpected typhoon. The artists built a wooden house with a floatable styrofoam base and lived inside. At the end of the trip, the house was burned on a weir. In 2015, IE was recreated for the Dojima River Biennale 2015 in Osaka and re-performed from where it ended in 1972. This time it only floated one day and was later exhibited in the gallery space. In 2017, IE travelled to the Venice Biennale 2017. The house floated around thirty minutes at the preview within the harbour. After the float, it was exhibited on the shore.
“The Negro Book” That Never Was: The Social Justice Vision of Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chase Clow
Between 1945-1955, Ansel Adams and his collaborator, Nancy Newhall, worked on a project they referred to in their letters as “The Negro Book,” a project intended to fight prejudice and raise the status of African Americans by highlighting their various contributions to the United States. Although this work never saw the light of day (publishers refused to print it), their letters provide a fascinating glimpse into their social justice goals and the ways Adams and Newhall were affected by the changing political climate post-WWII. Their letters also reflect debates about art and documentary photography. Prolific and passionate writers, they corresponded frequently, sometimes daily, resulting in a corpus of over one hundred relevant extant letters. Distilling their correspondence to reveal their chief concerns, both political and artistic, and telling their story within the context of the broader social milieu, this talk sheds new light on little known dimensions of their long and productive careers.
Querido David Alfaro Siqueiros: Figuring Women’s Rights and Roles in the Revolutionary Art of a Post-Revolutionary Mexico
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Tyner, Israel Romero Escobedo
The 1910 Mexican Revolution called for emancipation from systemic repression, but maybe not surprisingly, as in most revolutions, it left women’s rights off the revolutionary agenda. Mexican women who took up arms—and paintbrushes—for the new republic, were expected to lose the gorro frigio, button up their blouses, and go home to play supporting roles. Should it surprise us that in calling for a revolutionary new art (public, collaborative and monumental), the 1924 Manifiesto del Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos Pintores y Escultores described just the sort to suit its muralist authors (ignoring not only women’s rights but women’s art)? Digging at the roots of a Mexico weak on women’s rights and strong on femicide today, this paper prods hegemonic attitudes toward women in Mexico’s intellectual heyday of revolutionary change, and asks what no one asked manifiesto-author and reigning social designer Siqueiros: “What’s your position on women?” Because this wasn’t a question asked in time, we don’t find written clues, but look for answers in the “artist-soldier’s” works. Iconographic analysis, contextualization and de-coding imagery reveals more than the expected, a surprising twist: not quite feminist outcry, but a subversion of dominant themes, and maybe… subtle intervention.
Prehistoric Performance in a Postmodern Context: Australian Aboriginal Dreaming in Contemporary Music and Movement
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Timothy Soulis
“Prehistoric Performance in a Postmodern Context: Australian Aboriginal Dreaming in Contemporary Music and Movement” examines Aboriginal performance of the “Dreaming” in its pre-historic form and in its re-imagined manifestation in current theater, music, and dance. The original Australians—the oldest continuously surviving culture in the world—used song and dance to embody, communicate, and preserve the spiritual core of the Dreaming, a collection of creation legends that have long guided the First Inhabitants of Australia. The method of the current study is to briefly describe Aboriginal Dreaming and its traditional expression in music and movement, consider the effect of 200 years of British imperialism on the Dreaming performances, and then examine the renaissance of Aboriginal performance art during the post-colonial period of the last 50 years or so. Indigenous artists have blended traditional music and movement with contemporary Western styles of realistic playwriting, musical theater, and dance-theater. The result restores the prehistoric Dreaming performance tradition, but unified with modern artistic forms in a uniquely postmodern hybrid. The implicit value of this study on how an ancient art form has been re-interpreted for today’s world is a heightened respect for the importance of artistic creativity for cultural expression and continuity.
