Insightful Histories (Asynchronous)
The Broken Body: A Study in Golden Age Spain View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ilenia Colon Mendoza
Disability scholarship in seventeenth-century Spain reads bodily perfection as equal to spiritual perfection. Early modern writers such as Ruiz de Alarcón, who himself was disabled, offer imperfection instead as a prism through which to better see moral lessons. One of the moral lessons he includes in his comedies is the act of giving charity to those that embody imperfection. Alarcón challenges the concept of lo ideal warning that the ideal is often times a lie and that truth is instead revealed by the non-ideal, the imperfect, and the disabled. The imperfect body of the beggar boy in Jusepe Ribera’s Clubfoot Boy (1642), is akin to the broken body of the Supine Christ (c. 1615) by Gregorio Fernández. The boy’s imperfection places him and the viewer closer to God. These broken bodies serve as devotional mediators in Counter-Reformation Spain and offer new insights into the multifaceted constructions of dis/ability.
Nobody Gets to Rewrite These Things: These are My Histories - Epistemologies of Women of Color in Art for Social Change View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pilar A Kasat
Against the backdrop of a highly unequal and volatile world, hundreds of artists, activists, and communities create art as a way of making sense of their realities, challenging the status quo and imagining new ways of being. Art for social change (ASC) is a community-based creative practice associated with social justice and the empowerment of communities. Inspired by thinkers from the Global South, these emancipatory practices have become broadly accepted, seen as contributing to community participation, and as a way of engaging with minoritised communities. This paper focuses on the processes of ASC in the context of a colonial settler society and women of colour. From a feminist perspective from the global South and using a case study of women of colour, this paper examines how ASC unfolds at the intersection of complex racial relations, where art making and story-telling shape unique possibilities for personal and community connection. The paper argues that whilst the ongoing dominant power relations embedded in Australian coloniality continue to be extremely challenging, the processes of ASC encourage women of colour to find their own voices when anchored in their culture, identity, and sense of place. The paper further demonstrates that ASC can be empowering and decolonising especially for women, as it encourages them to use their own arsenal of gendered resilience to foster resistance to domination, as well as critical hope, through the reinvention of personal power and alternative narratives.
Brief Considerations of Portraiture in Nineteenth Century Art History: Histories, Stories, and Journeys View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Luis Alcalá Galiano
The history of humankind could be told as a journey or narrated as a story. From the earliest beginnings of its artistic consciousness, humanity has recorded everything around itself. Humankind did it out of instinct, out of necessity, out of pleasure, or just for the sake of it. And yet, is there anything more common to all stories and all journeys than the face-subject? Regardless of the artistic medium, neither the historical moment nor the aesthetic theory that feeds each representation, when it comes to a portrait it could be said that we are facing with both story and journey, trapped in the pictorial surface. The aim of this study is none other than, broadly speaking, to raise the importance of the portrait as a pictorial genre. It is focused on the relationship between the pictorial portrait and the photographic portrait, specifically in the nineteenth century. The conclusion to be drawn is as follows: while at first photography was nourished by painting, there came a point of inflection that initiated the boom of the pictorial portrait to the point that the influence was reversed.
Negotiating Nostalgia: Fragmentation, Temporality, and Materiality in the Sound Art of Christian Marclay and Susan Philipsz View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amanda Hodes
Recorded sound is often engaged in a complex relationship between past and present. As theorist Salomé Voegelin argues in Listening To Noise and Silence, the sounded past is made simultaneously present through the immediacy of sound in the act of bodily perception (170). In such a way, sound art pieces tend to be in conversation with conceptions of nostalgia, which have been generally under-examined in discussions of sound art. The term nostalgia here does not denote naïve idealism or sentimentality but rather describes the commodification of past time within the present. By applying the nostalgia theories of Svetlana Boym and David Banash, I aim to understand how nostalgia informs the work of notable sound artists Christian Marclay and Susan Philipsz, focusing specifically on materiality, fragmentation, and temporal shifts. To do this, I explicate four works by the artists in light of nostalgia theories, drawing comparisons between the ways they treat and engage with the concretization and commodification of time. This paper thereby works toward developing a new approach to the diverse and highly interdisciplinary field of sound art while also highlighting how nostalgic impulses can undergird even the most forward-looking, experimental art.
Opening Australian Art History: The Case of Henry Dearing View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anthony White
The paintings and drawings of Henry Dearing came to the attention of the art world in 1944 when the artist’s depictions of country life appeared in the Australian literary journal "Angry Penguins". Since that time, there have been several exhibitions and scholarly examinations of Dearing’s art. However, ingrained attitudes of artists, curators, and writers have obscured the works’ deeper significance, artificially restricted the scope of Australian art history, and ignored the broader questions posed by Dearing’s work about the categories habitually applied to discussions of modern art. Dearing’s works, many of which feature the itinerant labourer and trick cyclist Alfred Tipper, were interpreted during the 1940s by members of the Angry Penguins circle — including Albert Tucker and John Reed — as inherently primitive, innocent, and natural. In this way, Dearing’s work was excluded from any meaningful comparison with the work of contemporary, professional artists. In 2015, the art historian Nancy Underhill argued that Dearing’s works were a hoax perpetrated by the artist Sidney Nolan, thereby disconnecting the works from their origin in the lived experience of itinerant labour in rural Australia. In opposition to this double exclusion, I argue that Dearing’s depictions of labour are a profound artistic commentary on the opportunities and hazards of rural life in 20th-century Australia. Furthermore, I show that by celebrating the activities of Tipper, a skilled individual making a splash in an unusual profession, Dearing’s works were closer to the aspirations of the Angry Penguins artists than has previously been allowed.
Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Fiction Can Act as Philosophy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Boylan
This paper follows my 2019 monograph: Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Fiction Can Act as Philosophy. I set out some of the key arguments from my book using examples from English and American literature as well as from my own published novels. It is my contention that certain sorts of argument in philosophy are best addressed by fiction while others are best addressed by "direct-discourse" logical presentations. I consider the criteria for each.
Opened Books: The Perception of the Page View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Altea Grau Vidal
This paper questions why conventions associated with the page generate such an impact on the way we engage and read an opened book. Through a practice-based research, I investigate how the illusion of mirroring and echo, the fold and the suggestion of text, generate a fundamental shift in the perception and reading of the double page. The enquiry focuses on identifying which elements are bonded to the symbolic image of the opened book and how these can be unmasked to become a discursive space and material support to express visual ideas within a fine art context. In order to understand why the double page becomes an expanded space for site-specific practice, I analyse the following key aspects: the notion of reading in the space of the page; the perception of formal elements such as mirroring, echo, and reflection as transferors of connotations; the fold as a metaphorical element; and the double page as a site. The research analyses how the dual form of the page originated and how it has forged an image icon becoming one of the most important vehicles for the transmission of ideas and culture and investigates how connotations associated with the book condition the way we read and absorb meaning. The exploration of Stephane Mallarmé’s last and revolutionary poem Un Coup de Dés frames and marks the point of departure by revealing new ways of approaching the materiality of the page to develop non-linear narratives.
Is There Really Equality in the Art World, or Is His-tory Repeating Itself?: The Art and Market of Cecily Brown View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ainslie Gatt
Cecily Brown, born 1969 in London, is a contemporary painter who lives and works in New York; today, she is one of the few female artists whose artwork sales command over the million-dollar mark. Brown's style of Abstract Expressionism blended with her subject matter of sexualised content has been a consistent leitmotif in her paintings since she began her professional career in the 1990s. Her oeuvre is not representing a new genre of imagery, nor is it standing in the shadows of the original New York Abstract Expressionists of the 1940 and 50s, all of whom had long passed. Her oeuvre represents an emerging trend of signifiers—the female artist—and signified—sexual and graphic subject matter—in New York in the 1990s. Her art was innovative because it flipped the body politics of identity and desire and subverted the male gaze. Or was it so innovative? Brown's oeuvre draws from the abstract expressionists—the most masculine of art genres, sexualised imagery, and painting—which through the nineties was considered dead—to position herself as one of the world's most expensive female artists on the market. I suggest that society's attitude towards art has not been as progressive with female equality as one would think. To be one of the world's greatest female artists, she must look to the past and represent what has been canonical to arts 'his-tory'.
The Filipino Festival as an Offshoot of Indigenization: The Foreign as Seen in Religious Practices and Culinary Arts View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tyrone Nepomuceno
Filipinos are always beset with the question of identity and seeking definitive answers to this proved to be futile. The Filipino identity, which is indeed shaped by the nation’s historical experiences have shown a mixture of the indigenous and the foreign, resulting to a continuous evolution of diverse culture and the arts. Social Anthropologist Frank Lynch, SJ in his observation of Philippine cultural patterns wrote: “Today’s native is yesterday’s visitor.” A process of inculturation from the coming of Asiatic influences to the arrival of the Spanish became an inescapable process that gave birth to the unification of separate polities, indigenization of the foreign, and the so-called Filipino culture as we know it. The central Filipino concept of celebration seen in Religious Festivals with emphasis on rituals and culinary elements shall be dealt with in this study. It is a viable choice for Filipinos are known to be one of the ‘most Christian’ people in Asia, and known to attach celebrations to religion. The festival is indeed the best specimen to analyze indigenization, for Christian rituals passed on by Spain became undeniably Filipino in character easily and the banquets prepared in celebration of the sacred, was filled with food of foreign origins, infused with Filipino elements. This study, using the Filipino Festival, gives a picture of an identity and culture that continues to evolve by indigenizing whatever beneficial and complimenting foreign elements of the arts come in contact with its people.
