A Counter-Intuitive Trio, Catalina Hernández Cabal and Lila Ann Dodge
A site-specific improvisation duet, investigating the questions: How to dwell in tension? How the contradictory becomes a strength? How to enact and embody a counternarrative?

De esas cosas no se habla, Paulina Camacho Valencia
This piece considers the tensions between the narratives families construct around forbidden topics and the ways in which we sweep things under the rug and make excuses for unacceptable behavior for the sake of appearances. ​

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Exo, Alicia De León
A piece that explores the exotization and consumption of Latin American culture, bodies, livelihood, and/or spaces. 
 

Flashpoints: Critical Frictions in the Arts and Education, Sarah Travis

Participants will be invited to engage in a method of embodied reflection on flashpoints around their experiences in the arts and education. Flashpoints are particularly vivid moments of friction when sociocultural differences carried in the body make themselves manifest in conscious experience. The anticipated outcomes are that participants will gain increased sensitivities and skills as reflective practitioners as artists and/or educators. 

 

“The Painted Folktale: John Dunkley’s Formation of a New Narrative in Colonial Jamaica," 
Rebecca Lawder (U Missouri)

Jamaican painter, John Dunkley, is largely celebrated in Jamaica as the first truly “intuitive” artist. Dunkley’s somber scenes of Caribbean life, created almost exclusively with a pallet of neutral grays, blacks, and browns, have had an indelible influence on subsequent modern artists in Jamaica, the Jamaican diaspora, and the greater Caribbean.  Through his landscapes, he reexamines colonial imagery to form an extraordinary interpretation of the culture of colonial Jamaica in the 1930s and 1940s. Exemplified in Dunkley's 1938 painting, Spider’s Web (Jerboa), Dunkley incorporates seemingly arbitrary animals within the tropical landscape; however, through further analysis, these creatures prove to carry significant meaning as the artist taps into common Jamaican spider tales, World War II iconography, and biblical narratives. This essay will decode Dunkley's mysterious landscapes in order to further explore how Dunkley is constructing a counternarrative of the colonial Caribbean experience that is at once political, personal, and universal. In his created landscapes, Dunkley fabricates his own folklore out of Jamaican traditions, current events, and African tales, that places the Black Jamaican as the central figure, and possibly the victor of his own narrative.  This paper will further examine how Dunkley is able to subtly alter the landscape through his use of animal symbolism in order to both reflect on his personal experience in colonial Jamaica and add to the contemporary process of decolonization.

“The Negotiation of Icaros in Shipibo Textiles for Sale," Alexandra Macheski (UCSC)

Amid the rise of “shamanic tourism” which promises the healing powers of the jungle to be a cure-all for travelers’ congested lives, Amazonian material culture has become a sought-after commodity. Contemporary Shipibo textiles made for tourists in the Peruvian Amazon, are a popular souvenir for those seeking an “authentic” piece of Indigenous Amazonian culture. Part of the allure of these textiles are their abstract patterns,which are called ícaros, or the melodic chants of the world which are spiritually alive. Because these patterns seem similar to the ícaros on textiles worn by Shipibo people, tourists believe their newly bought textiles embody the same magical strength that they do for the Shipibo. Contending with that idea, this paper examines how Shipibo textile makers, primarily women, deliberately guard the vitality of the ícaros from touristic consumption. From a visual studies perspective, I address the methodological, material, and aesthetic differences between the ícaros in Shipibo tourist textiles with those made for daily community use and what those differences reveal about the protecting of cultural knowledge in a touristic market. I argue that tourist textiles visually imitate the presence of the ícaros worn by the Shipibo community to facilitate the visibility of Shipibo culture on a global scale without “selling out.” This study makes claims relevant to other Amazonian Indigenous visual cultures and is an intervention in the lack of Shipibo scholarship in the fields of Latin American Studies and Art History.

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“Fables of Lycanthropos: The Sympoiesis of Wolves and Humans in Sanctuary,”
Austin Hoffman (UIUC)

This presentation utilizes a philosophic anthropological lens to analyze intersecting and entangled narratives of sanctuary, wildness and multispecies agency in the anthropocene through a case study of America’s most iconic predator: the wolf.  Whereas indigenous peoples revered wolves, European colonizers saw them as ravenous killers threatening their way of life; such feelings were exacerbated by the pastoral themes of the Bible. This narrative of the wolf as a profane interloper in the colonizer’s God-ordained mission was eventually appropriated by the U.S. government to justify the systematic extirpation of the species in the name of manifest destiny. Fictions surrounding the wolf were taken up once again in the late 20th century, as some environmentalists, fearing the wolf’s looming extinction, began breeding wolves and dogs together in an effort to preserve “pure” wild genes. Others chose to capitalize on the fetishization of the animal and began selling them as pets. This phenomenon led to a niche industry of wolf sanctuaries populated by refugees of the exotic pet trade. This study draws from two years of observations while living at one such sanctuary, Mission: Wolf, which rearticulates the life stories of rescued animals to educate the public about the differences between domesticity and wildness.  Humans often author narratives about animals to further their own political projects with little regard for veracity. In the case of the wolf, its nature remains largely opaque to us because it is obfuscated by the collective weight of competing mythologies, folklore, histories, and the frictions that occur between them. Following theoretical innovations of the “non-human turn” in the social sciences, this presentation uses multispecies ethnography to offer a counternarrative to anthropocentric ontologies of human-animal relations by situating the sanctuary as a contact zone where the anthropos is reconstituted through an interspecies community that creates and cultivates ecological responsibility.  

 

“Performing the Hyphenated Self: Creative Praxis and Critique,” Sara Deniz Akant
(Graduate Center, CUNY)
What is the relationship between bodily performance and textual language? How does the performance of language via an accented voice work to negatively or positively re-inscribe the body of the performer? How does the performance of particular expectations and stereotypes relate to the artistic practice of resistance? Can there be a performance of affect that "escapes management," a performance of affect that "doesn't fit the neoliberal construction of it" (Gaines)? How might physically embodied performance guide the poetics and politics of assimilation, imitation, and "simulation"? If the "colonized world is divided into two" and "decolonization is truly the creation of new men" (Fanon), then how can the performance of a text do decolonizing work? How can performance tap into the "atmosphere of uncertainty that surrounds the body" (Bhaba) or the "radical ambivalence" that marks a creative act of resistance (Gaines)? 

 

In this study, I look at the relationship between bodily performance and textual language in a series of poems and performances titled "Perihan's Promise," in order to investigate the construction of a mixed or passing identity via affect, erasure, caricature, and voice. I explore the uses of "happiness" and "the happy object" (Ahmed) to in the creation and erasure of a hyphenated identity. I consider the effects of combining technology and bodily gesture on stage, as well as the place of accented performance in the making and unmaking of a voice marked by race and gender, nation and state. In each instance, I ask what is needed to generate space for multiple subjectivities: Western, American, Oriental, Turkish, alien, other. I situate this also as a pedagogical stance: bodily performance in our classrooms can be used to soften the institutional barriers that invariably exist between teacher and student, individual and collective, the guarded internal mind and the external moving surroundings. 

 

Citations:  

Ahmed, Sara. "Happy Objects." The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. London: Duke University Press, 2010.  

Akant, Sara Deniz. Babette. Rescue Press, 2015. 

- ---. "Perihan." The Poetry Foundation, 2017. 

Bhaba, Homi. "Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the postcolonial prerogative." The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. 

Fanon, Frantz. "On Violence." The Wretched of the Earth.  

Gaines, Malik. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible. New York University Press, 2017. 

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“Blurring Boundaries: Radical Depictions of Gender Identity in Franz Gertsch’s Photorealist Paintings and Lissa Rivera’s Photographic Series Beautiful Boy," Maria Garth (Rutgers)

Photorealism may be one of the most misunderstood styles of the twentieth century, in part because of the ambiguous relationship of photorealist paintings to their source material, the documentary photograph, and more specifically, the personal snapshot. This paper takes as its focus a comparative study of Swiss painter Franz Gertsch’s 1970s photorealist paintings, which depict his androgynous muse in the process of makeup application, and contemporary 2010s
photographs by American photographer Lissa Rivera from the ongoing series “Beautiful Boy,” which show her genderqueer muse wearing makeup and feminine clothing. Specifically, I juxtapose Gertsch’s painting Marina Makes Up Luciano (1975) with Rivera’s photograph Boudoir (2015) in order to interrogate how the slippage between the medium specificity of
photography and painting in Gertsch’s photorealism and Rivera’s painterly photographs speak to the tension of real and fake in art.

Working collaboratively with their respective subjects, Gertsch and Rivera deploy the narrative and technical visual shorthand of the snapshot portrait as a way to explore the friction between reality and fantasy in their depictions of gender identity. Both artists use aesthetic strategies of subjective and representational blurring of boundaries by applying visibility as a political gesture that has the power to selectively reveal or hide. They do this by calling on the visual modes of photography in a way that casts the relationship of fact and fiction into doubt and, in the process, confronting the hegemonic limitations of medium separation. I argue that for Gertsch and and Rivera, pushing at established codes of social legitimacy and conceptions of truth is an emancipatory project that challenges dominant power relations in art and society through the use of performative fiction. In disrupting the status quo by embracing difference as a form of political resistance, both artists examine alternative realities as a means of constructing new worlds through art.

“Ron Mueck’s Uncanny Bodies and the Modal Transgression of the Cordon," Cyanne Topaum (UIUC)

The Australian artist Ron Mueck creates sculptures of human beings with unusual proportions and shapes. These sculpted bodies provoke a sense of the uncanny in viewers, but not uncanniness as it is understood within a Freudian framework. What is uncanny about the works of Ron Mueck has more to do with representations of the body within what Jacques Rancière calls le partage du sensible and the way Mueck's sculptures challenge the “natural order of bodies” within this “distribution of the sensible.” When looking at Mueck's uncanny sculptures, a sense of bodily possibility is created in the viewer. Mueck's bodies perform in ways that bodies are not supposed to, and that is partly what gives them their uncanny quality. At its core, his art seeks to disrupt the normative regulation of bodies that serves to cordon off bodily modalities that exist beyond the distribution of the sensible. The act of cordoning creates a regulation on the kinds of bodies that can be manifested. The police cordon presents us with an embodied line of symmetry that ontologically restricts our sense of bodily modality by suggesting that there is “nothing to see” beyond the cordon.  La politique, or politics, is Rancière's idiosyncratic term for “acts of subjectivization that challenge the 'natural order of bodies' in the name of equality.” In the context of Ron Mueck's art, politics consists in the way his sculptures challenge the regulation of bodies by depicting figures that do not play by the laws of proportion dictated by the distribution of the sensible. Mueck's art takes great pleasure in transgressing these boundaries, breaking through the cordon and disrupting regimented configurations of bodily symmetry by making the lines of authority askew.

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“The NSK State as Counter-Narrative," Nicoletta Rousseva (UIC)

The notion of the East European artist as dissident, always reacting against and rejecting the status quo, ought to be challenged. This is not to say this narrative is false or the political desire to which it attests contrived. Rather, the problem with casting art’s politics in terms of dissent alone is that this approach captures only part of the story, so to speak. As such, it obscures important artistic responses that exceed an understanding of politics as binary, and reactionary, and privilege opposition as the only viable alternative, the only vehicle for artistic critique.  In this presentation, I propose an alternative that thinks the politics of post-socialist art positively, and in terms of a leftist rather than liberal tradition. In place of lingering Cold War-era biases that inform scholarship on art in the region, I take seriously the ambiguities and affinities artists concede when grappling with their relationship to politics and with the complex experience of life during socialism. To this end, my primary case study is the Slovene art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst, or NSK. NSK’s artwork demonstrates that when socialism collapsed in Eastern Europe, and especially in the former Yugoslavia, artists’ commitment to the socialist project did not always follow suit—it did not disappear outright. Instead, such political affinities became more complicated, even frustrated, as artists faced the difficult task of contending with socialism’s real failings together with its still tangible merit. In their on-going artwork, the NSK State in Time, the collective takes socialism’s most fraught institutional form, the state, as its key site of inquiry by replicating its institutions and motifs. In so doing, their artwork confounds narratives of artistic dissent that oppose the socialist state, and instead asks whether there is still value in its beleaguered form. 

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“Narratives of Home and Displacement in Community-Based Art," Noni Brynjolson (UCSD)

In many large urban centers around the world, processes of gentrification have been accelerated during the past decade by real-estate speculation and the development of arts districts and creative city paradigms. What happens to the stories and memories of those who are evicted or priced out, and how might these narratives and cultural practices become part of a broader sociocultural movement? This paper explores the prevalence of storytelling and narrative in community-based art that deals with urban displacement. I focus on the Oakland-based Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a collective of artists and activists who have produced dozens of interactive, online maps that visualize evictions and displacement, and are accompanied by oral histories. The stories tend to follow a similar narrative: they are about growing up in San Francisco neighborhoods, living there for decades, witnessing changes, and then being evicted. Many of the storytellers express feelings of loss, not just of their home, but of their community as well. In reflecting on the project, I consider Francesca Polletta’s analysis of the political power of storytelling, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings on the aesthetics of narrative and intersubjectivity. Why are the storytellers in these projects interested in sharing their experiences of displacement? Who is the audience for this type of work and how are they interpellated? What broader questions are raised regarding the evocation of empathy, the possibilities of storytelling as an impetus for action, and the roots of these types of projects in the tradition of social documentary? The maps and stories produced by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project have been used by community organizations to advocate for rent control and affordable housing, and in this way, the project suggests possibilities for art to work against displacement. In examining this initiative, I consider how narration produces visibility, and how drawing attention to the stories and cultural practices of displaced individuals and communities can be used as a radical political tool. 

“The Spectacle of Violence in Alfredo Jaar’s The Sound of Silence," Luna Goldberg (SAIC)

In March 1993, Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist took a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a young famine-stricken Sudanese toddler eyed by a vulture several feet away. Carter had been documenting the famine in South Sudan, and the young girl depicted in his image had collapsed on her way to a nearby United Nations feeding center. Carter had watched from a distance for some twenty minutes to capture the scene. Once the image had been taken, he chased away the vulture and left the child behind, on orders given to photojournalists “not to touch famine victims for fear of spreading disease.”1 Shortly after it was taken, the image was bought by the New York Times and reproduced by newspapers worldwide. Hundreds of people wrote asking what had happened to the girl, and many criticized Carter for not intervening. Three months after receiving a Pulitzer Prize for the image, Carter died by suicide. In 2006, Alfredo Jaar created an installation dedicated to Carter’s image, The Vulture and the Little Girl. The work took the form of a vessel that visitors could enter to watch a film retelling the narrative behind the image, and detailing instances from Carter’s life around the taking of the photograph. While Jaar’s film focused on the photograph, the story was told through text; short sentences written against a black background and silence, in white pulsating font mimicking the flash of a camera.This paper takes The Sound of Silence as a case study analyzing how Jaar’s interactive work is able to reenact the spectacle created by photography, through the production of an installation using mechanisms comparable to that of the camera.Through a deconstruction of The Sound of Silence,I argue that the piece simultaneously replicates and subverts the effects of the image on its viewers by historicizing the photograph and framing it according to a new logic emphasizing its auteur as opposed to its subject.

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1"The Vulture and the Little Girl," Rare Historical Photos, December 24, 2013, http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/vulture-little-girl/.

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“Pepón Osorio’s Embelequero Aesthetic In The Scene of the Crime," Raquel Flecha Vega (UIC)

On February 26th, 1993 police entered the Whitney Museum of Art on New York City’s Upper East Side to investigate a violent crime. Amidst a chaotic scene of downturned furniture, broken glass, and heaps of scattered décor appeared a shrouded female body face down in the center of the room. Though the personal effects found throughout the heavily inventoried room hint at her identity, she remains obscured from view. However, this horrific image cordoned off by the yellow caution tape of police and forensic specialists is no ordinary space. It is a work called the Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) by installation artist Pepón Osorio that was apart of the Whitney’s first “political biennial,” a watershed moment for mainstream U.S. museums. Though art historians like Jennifer Gonzalez have described the work as a fantastical space and “countersite,” many critics and scholars have limited their analyses to surface features, insisting on its literalness and disturbing character. Moreover, the significance of the undisclosed figure, as well as Osorio’s interventions in form and medium, remains understudied. In this paper, I use the topos of visibility adapted from art historian Krista Thompson as my conceptual point of departure. Specifically, I use historical and visual analysis to consider the play of figure, space, formal composition, and iconography rendered in Osorio’s signature embelequero (embellishment) aesthetic. In doing so, I demonstrate the complex ways in which the installation works to trouble binary constructs of identity, signifying the shrouded figure within a fictional world of spectacle and displacement. Moreover, the Scene of the Crime offers a broader critique still relevant today by highlighting the frictions at the edges of the white cube space: between high and low art and between the subject and the subject’s formation in the age of mass consumerism.

 

“Embedded in Black and White: Recontextualizing Monument Avenue Through the Photographic Archive," Charlsa Hensley (U Kentucky)

The release of the Monument Avenue Commission Report in July, 2018 was the culmination of over one year of research and collaboration with community members on how the city should approach the contentious history of Monument Avenue’s five Confederate centerpieces. For nearly a century, the monuments have loomed over a predominantly rich, white neighborhood. What they have symbolized has been a matter of debate ever since they were unveiled, but the recent publicity accorded to confederate monuments has led to calls for city leaders to reconsider the place and purpose of the monuments in public spaces. The majority of the Monument Avenue Commission Report is dedicated to the task of recontextualization through various means. Recontextualization of the monuments should not only consider the city’s current constituency, but also the lives, testimonies, and representations of Richmond’s Black residents as the monuments were built. While the recontextualization of Monument Avenue should reference instances of racial exclusion, there is another racial history embedded in the very structure of the street. Beyond the monuments and all their subjugating connotations, there are the hidden staircases and the back alleyways for workers; there are the dark, blurry figures in construction scenes; and there are a few photographs buried in the Valentine Museum Cook Collection of Richmond Virginia of African-Americans in Confederate celebrations that accompanied the monuments’ unveilings. A comparative case study of photographs from the Cook collection of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century scenes in Richmond, Virginia reveals that while Monument Avenue and its confederate celebrations benefited the city’s upper-class white constituency, its messages extended far beyond Richmond and its Confederate veterans. By bringing to light images and testimonies from the archive that highlight African-American presence, a counter-narrative emerges detailing the racialized construction of power in post-Reconstruction Richmond through the city’s most famous neighborhood. 

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