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AHSC Meeting, November 2004 |
Dr. Stacey Loughrey Sloboda, University of Southern California
"Captivating Signs: Chinoiserie and the Visual Language of Imperialism"
In the 1796 Royal Academy summer exhibition, four watercolors of Chinese landscapes by William Alexander signaled a new type of British visual engagement with China. These landscapes were awash with recognizable signs of China. Pagodas and temples cover hilly garden landscapes. Mandarins under parasols sail past the walls of the garden in curious and quaint boats. Industrious boatmen navigate the placid shores of the river for their passive female passengers. The icons comprising these images were familiar to Royal Academy audiences from the teapots and japanned furniture that many would have had in their own houses. However, these landscapes were not the chinoiserie of everyday objects, but were new, seemingly authentic documentary images by a young artist recently returned from the Qing court at Peking.
William Alexander (1767-1816) accompanied the first British Embassy to China from 1793-95 as one of two official artists hired to document the experience of the Embassy. As the first British visitors permitted to travel within inland China, the Embassy images promised to provide the British public with new and authentic pictures of all aspects of Chinese culture. However, this paper will show that Alexander’s experience in China, while unprecedented for an English artist, was characterized not by unmediated visual access to an authentic Chinese culture, as his exhibited and published images claim, but rather by confinement, occlusion, and the repetition of existing visual stereotypes. His mobility restricted for much of the Embassy’s time in China, Alexander’s images are not documentary, but rather are a self-conscious expression of his removal from the scenes he was meant to record. The artistic result of this veiled sight was a system of pastiching sources and recycling stock images that conformed to a picturesque chinoiserie that was both recognizable and consumable to his British audience at the beginning of a new period in the history of Sino-British relations. The very symbols – pagodas, junks, and quaint fishermen – that legitimate a claim to authenticity in Alexander’s work, were the pastiched and repetitive symbols of imperial stereotype.
This paper is concerned with the ways in which picturesque imagery became part of a wider imperial strategy of knowledge in the early nineteenth century. Colonialism was made possible, strengthened, and sustained by cultural practices and the creation of systems of knowledge. As such, British imperialism was based on the idea that the world was knowable through the senses. I argue that Alexander’s images of China explicitly acted as a strategy of imperial power. His images document Chinese life and culture in a way that was meant to make that culture knowable and manageable. However, they are fraught with the sense that empirical, and thus imperial, knowledge of China was impossible. Alexander’s work created a new image of China for that was taken up in an emerging discourse of imperialism based in equal parts on empirical observation and imperial imagination. As such, the fixed and repetitive signs that Alexander used to form his new vision of China recreated a stereotyped vision of China that worked in the service of an imperial project of knowledge and control.
Julia Bourbois, Autry National Center
Work-in-progress: "Arms and Armor in Portraits"
Armor is an integral component of the visual culture of the 16th century. Many art historians study paintings without noting the armor in them. No doubt art historians have seen many examples of early European armor as nearly every collection has some. So why look to paintings of this military fashion? Portraits provide important insights into the past. Armor appeared frequently in portraiture because of its symbolic value and aesthetic qualities. Portraits depicting armor provide significant information about the armor and their commissioners. Portraits of armor enabled the subjects' image of power to be immortalized and dispersed throughout the courts of Western Europe. This presentation will discuss how portraits lend to establishing provenance, assist in dating armor, establish the original appearance of armor, and display the owner's artistic refinement and status as a military leader. Particular attention will be paid to the portraits of Prince Federico da Montefeltro, Alfonso I d'Este, Alfonso d'Avalos, Francesco Maria I della Rovere, Henry II of France, Emperor Charles V, and Philip II of Spain.
Robert Summers, Graduate Student, UCLA
Work-in-progress: "Shame/less: A Queer Warholian Spectacle"
Recently, Stephen Barber and David Clark posed a series of questions about shame:
What pleasures and pains flourish, what lives are possible when one is born into a world that is experienced aslant? What unpredictable futures await those for whom being shamed is a condition of personal and political efflorescence rather than emaciation and incarceration? What new optics will need to be created through which even to glimpse the fecund boundary zones, at once fierce and playful, of ‘shame-creativity’? -- Stephen Barber and David Clark, “Queer Moments,” in Regarding Sedgwick, 27.
With these questions in mind, I would like to tie the experience of shame, the production of art, and the practice of art history together. I desire to see what “unpredictable futures” can come about, what “new optics” can be created, and what practices can be articulated for the re-thinking and re-imagining of contemporary art history.
First, I will focus on shame in order to explore this powerful affect in relation to contemporary productions of art and the practice of art history. Secondly, I will make a counter-intuitive argument, and it is an argument that no self-help book or psychologist would claim: shame, for some people, is a powerfully productive affect and an experience that enables creativity. For example, Andy Warhol’s large production of “obscene” prints, Polaroids, and paintings – such as his Torso series (c. 1974-78), Sex Parts photographs (c. 1976), and Oxidation paintings (c. 1980) – which all triggered shame during and after their production in both the artist and in some viewers and participants. Also, I will explore his chronic self-presentation as a shame-based, awkward, and swish artist. As a more recent example, I will look at the African-American performance artist/drag queen Vaginal Davis whose stage acts and artworks are a continuation and reconfiguration of Warhol’s own “obscene” artworks and his shame-based self-presentations in the public sphere. On that note, I will argue that the production and performance of shame is usually done in a rather shameless way, which is certainly the case with queer artists such as Warhol and Davis. Furthermore, looking specifically at Warhol and Davis allows me to explore the similarities and differences when shame is experienced and deployed by artists of different races, classes, and historical locations. Indeed, shame is not a singular or similar experience for all people.
I believe that we must tether together shame and shameless because, after all, they are but a suffix apart, and a good deal of the productivity of queers resides precisely in the extraordinary capacity they obtain for not only clinging stubbornly and defiantly to the “stigmatized” and “perverse” objects of their specific desires and life histories, but they do so shamelessly. Furthermore, queer artists such as Warhol and Davis invest objects with a near-inexhaustible source of vitalizing energy and potentiality. Indeed, where would, or what would, queer art and artists be if there was not an affect such as shame? And, where would, or what would, queer art historians be without this affect and artists such as Warhol and Davis?
I have been focusing on queer art and artists, but the queer art historian is tied up in the work that is done by queers, and this is an odd triangulation of objects, subjects, and affects in which queer productivity and creativity is enabled, nourished, and deployed. More specifically, with regard to the practice of art history I believe that shame, shameless, and queer can lead us down different paths – or even the same old ones, but with different motives and movements. The coming together of shame, shameless, and queer creates a subjective and relational experience of others and the world. Therefore, I argue, this is definitely worth exploring so that we may open up the practice of art history to other identities and identifications in and around art in order to inform and expand our present understanding of contemporary artistic subjectivity – and specifically queer artistic subjectivity – as well as the meaning, work, and use of queer art and the queer art historian.
Dr. Paul Zelevansky, Artist and writer
"22 Ideas About Pictures"
Utilizing a step-by-step structure that mimics L. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 22 IDEAS ABOUT PICTURES is a work-in-progress composed of a series of one-page visual/verbal propositions about the meaning and metaphysics of pictures. Incorporating varied graphic examples, 22 IDEAS describes, analyzes and reflexively enacts strategies that make pictures alternatively formidable and unreliable as representations of reality. For example, like many pictures, the clip art doorman inserted here is a synthesis of three presentational strategies: it acts out a possible event from everyday experience; it attaches an ideal or conventional meaning to that circumstance—in this case emphasizing the doorman’s promise to serve; and finally, it uses a graphic style and characterization to locate its message within a particular emotional frame and cultural milieu: a doorman, like a salesman, is assumed to be both calculating and obsequious in his quest for success, so the cartoon smile, service uniform, and open palm gesture can be seen as both demeaning and disarming. But inserted here within this abstract, such clip art also represents the purposeful, if not aggressive, stance of other pictures that make their particular strategic call in anticipation of an affirmative audience response.
Why 22 IDEAS? Why 10 Commandments, 7 Deadly Sins, or 3 Stooges? There was opportunity, there was circumstance, and there was the self-justifying logic of an argument in search of a concrete form. While each of the 22 IDEAS is a discrete example of what it describes, the proposed AHSC talk--incorporating music, sound effects and slide images--will focus on a selected group that together will make the case for the whole set.
“Open every day to serve you.”
Dr. Jeanne Willette, Otis College of Art & Design
"Theory Matters: 'The Terrible Nearness of Distant Place'"
In the best postmodern fashion, my title has been appropriated from Cornell West who once said “Race Matters” and who is now saying “Democracy Matters”. The second part of my title has been taken from an African scholar, Okwui Enewzor, who is concerned, as we are all, about the Now. In a time of Post-Theory, after September 11th when the world changed, how can theory still be meaningful in the face of practices that defy our abilities to either articulate our horror or to bring an end to the terror? What is the position of the art historian and what is the role of the artist and how can an educator of today bring theory and practice together for the new generation of cultural producers? Although research has entered into this project, this is not a presentation of research but, frankly, more of fragment of ongoing discussions and an attempt to continue a conversation about where we are since the events of 9/11. Did theory ever matter? Does theory still matter?
I want to bring together two different but related realms---the classroom where I have to convince students that they should care about philosophy and the art world where I have presented my concerns about the intersection of art and theory. A task was given to me a year ago: to teach an introductory course in Modern and Postmodern theory to sophomores in Fine Arts, finding the nexus between theory and practice. The request came from the Fine Arts Department to fulfill the student’s need for a survey course to lay a foundation for the rest of their education in theory, all the way through graduate school. Of course such a scope, spanning the late Eighteenth Century to the early Twenty-first Century, necessitated an old-fashioned survey course---if it’s the thirteenth week, it must be Foucault---and I had to make hard choices. Who would be included and what would be excluded were only half of the job. The other half was to make sure that Western philosophy could be connected, in the student’s minds, to their current art making practices. But pedagogy is but a launching pad for this paper.
Less than two years ago, Okwui Enewzor asked the question: ‘What is the Avant-Garde Today?” and wrote of “The Postcolonial Aftermath and the Terrible Nearness of Distant Places”. Like many of us, he sensed the end of the Western familiar and our uneasy entry into a world without Hegel and the comfort of “progress”. “The Terrible Nearness of Distant Places”. This is where the Fall of the Twin Towers comes into play as a misprison of Adorno’s famous phrase “After Auschwitz”. Although no one would ever suggest that 9/11 was even remotely commensurate with Adorno’s subject, the question can be raised---Was September 11th an “event”, in the sense that Adorno and Lyotard wrote? Was the “event” the result of a differend, a differend between East and West that re-places us, not in the future but in the past? If Modernism and Postmodernism were founded upon secularism, then how do we respond to a profoundly religious culture that used Debord’s concept of the spectacle to light up our television screens and to turn collective entertainment into collective horror? As mass media remorselessly shaped our perceptions of what we experienced through selection of images, Benjamin and Adorno seem chillingly relevant. It is possible for theory and practice to come full circle for artists and their audiences. Today, theorists, from Said to Spivak to Virlio to Derrida, seem now to be prophetic and insightful, perhaps showing a way for the artist to act in the nexus and to show that theory matters.
Cynthia Rogers, Graduate Student, CSU Long Beach
Work-in-progress: "The Feminization of Christ"
The body of Christ, illustrated in the Renaissance, exhibits a curious trend toward feminization. With the inclusion of a bleeding wound that never heals and the promise of “life everlasting”, it is apparent that the Renaissance Christian visual program is participating in gender-bending. Questions arise. Why is it seen necessary to give Christ feminine reproductive qualities and properties? Is the previous Pagan mythology retro-fitted into a new Christian dogma? Does the Goddess, in Neolithic examples depicting the life-giving sacred triangle that bleeds and insures the continuation of the cycle- of- life in agriculture and humans have any relevance to this new Christian mythology? Does the Renaissance Church use the body of Christ to create a gender politic? Looking “anew” at these pious, and yet very common depictions of Christ’s bleeding wound, I fast- forward our gaze to the early feminist art of the 1970’s and juxtapose images from their vehement visual program that may cast a different light on Renaissance images of Christ.
Dr. Kenon Breazeale, CSU Northridge
"Identity Theft? Fine Arts Simulations at Forest Lawn and the Venetian"
My proposed talk would use Umberto Eco’s essay, “Travels in Hyperreality” as the basis for an analysis of two ambitious projects that recreate landmark European art and architecture: Forest Lawn at Glendale (the original Forest Lawn) and the gargantuan new Venetian Hotel Casino in Las Vegas.
“Travels in Hyperreality” was an early attempt to define what would become a central focus of postmodern theorizing—America’s naïve and supposedly destructive affection for the copy, the simulation, or as Eco called it, the Absolute Fake. Eco’s essay may have manifested a sneaking affection for aspects of American ersatzness embodied in Disney animatronics, restaurants shaped like hats, etc. But the attempted reproduction of fine arts was another matter. The precipitating moment of Travels in Hyperreality was a trip through California where Eco encountered numerous kitsch reproductions of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Out of that trip seems to have come the conviction that violating the identity of European landmark art and architecture constitutes a crime against history. In what he termed his “Last Beach” theory, Eco claimed that the U.S., in terrible parody of Rome’s evisceration of the Greeks, had taken to salvaging the surface of a civilization it was in truth savaging. Given Eco’s usual tone of high irony, his seeming insistence that fine arts be granted status as guarantor of authenticity and hostage of history is notable. In this paper I want to honor and interrogate Eco’s charges as starting point for analyzing aspects two immensely ambitious simulations of Old World Fine Arts with a capital A: Forest Lawn and the Venetian.
In that his attitude reflects a widespread bias, Eco was right. There is a difference; art does matter. Or to put it another way, our arguably cynical culture has chosen to make the metaphysical category Fine Arts a repository of sincerely cherished values associated with truth. One can take as proof of this fact the ridicule heaped on Forest Lawn, (most famously Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One) and that again greeted the Venetian when it opened in the late 1990’s (every major newsweekly ran a sneering article), the crime in both cases felt to be exploitation of blatant inauthenticity in service of the most mercenary ends. So why create these huge projects that seem to invite mockery, at least from the art, literary and journalistic establishments? Here’s my central premise. Because in the very act of simulation—the formulation of a relationship between the copy and its referent—a model of what constitutes history is proposed and controlled. This isn’t just acquiring status by getting next to great art a la Norton Simon. This is recreating it, and the rewards of so doing have proved irresistible to a certain type of American entrepreneur, be it the pious impresario of pre-need funeral planning, Hubert Eaton, or the colorfully mobbed up Vegas billionaire, Sheldon Adelson. The body of my paper is a focus on how each monument (and its creator) presents itself as a re-creation of its original and in the process makes a statement about what authenticity means in the history of culture.
Forest Lawn stressed a narrative of continuity, (very much in the manner of a Western Civ history textbook, where a spotlight glides across the globe from the Mediterranean to western Europe to the east and finally west coast United States). Everything from guidebooks to narratives emerging from hidden loudspeakers to educational exhibits to Eaton’s biography itself worked to create a web of indexical relationships between the Forest Lawn reproduction and its referent. All this in support of Forest Lawn’s claim to seamlessly link Old World and New via the “authentic copy”. In making this argument I’ll focus on two examples: the stained glass reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper and the faux English village church Wee Kirk O’ the Heather. A major emphasis will be the status everything gives to Eaton as connecting link—his declared sense of mission, his compulsive travels in pursuit of accredited art world authorities and his self-assumed mantle of “master builder”. It’s my conclusion that Forest Lawn, as conceived by Hubert Eaton, perfectly mimicked the obsession with genealogy that, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, underwrote the construction of WASP identity.
The Venetian Hotel Casino presents an almost opposite model of cooptation. In line with current marketing theory, the Venetian is an attempt to create a luxury-associated brand name. It does so by merging the identity of namesake city and hotel in a way that maximizes a cloud of vaguely nostalgic associations and deliberately erases the systematic continuities of chronology and geography that are so basic to Forest Lawn’s logic. Further, hotel and city have been annealed by a very specific legal maneuver: in 2002 its owner, Sheldon Adelson managed to obtain an international proprietary trademark on the hotel’s name. In a sense, the city has lost the rights to its own adjective. My focus in analyzing the Venetian will be on the resultant disconnects and paradoxes. For example, the casino décor features huge, accurate copies of ceiling paintings by Tiepolo and Veronese that strike a weirdly claustrophobic, out of context note. Yet there is no information at all which would let the visitor know the extraordinary effort of simulation s/he is witnessing. (In scale and attention to detail, the Venetian is completely different from “themed” hotel casinos like New York, New York and the Bellagio) Another example will be the completely unmediated juxtaposition of massively scaled art historical simulation with the hotel’s tiny Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum that exhibits “real original” fine art. (Highlighting, by the way, the disorienting drift between signifier and signified is the anxious need manifested by the Guggenheim staff to assert that they are museum not hotel employees.) In sum, while Forest Lawn proposes an elaborately logical rationale to justify copying, the Venetian seems to deny that any meaningful difference exists between original and reproduction.
In conclusion, I’ll bring the conversation back to Eco and pose the question of which (if either) version of “absolute fakery” is more sinister—Forest Lawn’s proprietary webs of time and space connection, or the Venetian’s airy dismissal that authentic identity, much less history itself, matters.
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