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November 2, 2013 Conference Chair, Lawrence Jenken

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November 2, 2013 Conference Chair, Lawrence Jenken Abstracts from the Annual Meeting in Greensboro North Carolina October 31 – November 2, 2013 Conference Chair, Lawrence Jenkens Emily Ackerman. The Graduate Center, CUNY. Glamour/Photography: Edward Steichen, George Hurrell, and Nickolas Muray’s Celebrity Photographs, 1920–1935 The celebrity was born in the 1920s and 1930s. It was during these two decades that her image was codified into one of glamour, class, and idealized perfection that still informs mass culture to this day. It was also during these two decades that advertisers first began to utilize photographs of stars to sell products such as lotion, soap, and silverware. Photographic glamour, evoked through the pose, lighting, and shape of the female body, became the ultimate tool for persuasion in this era. From Hollywood to New York City, portrait photographers such as Edward Steichen, George Hurrell, and Nickolas Muray developed signature, yet widely imitated, styles for depicting the celebrity figure in magazine articles, film stills, and advertisements. This paper argues that these pioneering celebrity photographers were responsible for constructing a new, modern ideal for the representation of femininity. It also contends that the embodiment of glamour, though by no means limited to the photographic medium, was responsible for the ascendency and eventual dominance of photography in twentieth-century mass culture. Amanda Adams. Virginia Commonwealth University. Mapping the Battlefield: Sally Mann’s Last Measure, 2001–2002 Largely ignored by the art world, contemporary Southern artists have often been considered subordinate to artists working in major metropolises because of the perceived lack of conceptual content in their work. To ameliorate this stereotype, it is necessary to redefine “contemporary” and “southern artist.” Hal Foster’s “contemporary” is an amalgamation combining historical materialism with interdisciplinary references while valuing heterogeneity; it is free from historical determination and an object of institutionalization. It is not just participatory, relational aesthetics but instead an expanded definition that esteems experimentation, contradiction, and endless references. Perhaps that is where the Southern artist fits best: between the contradictions, linking genuine Southern-ness to historical context, landscape, and place in a way that surpasses mimetic depiction of earlier work. Sally Mann’s photographs of Civil War battlefields exist within this crux. Titled Last Measure (2003), these site-specific markers deconstruct nostalgia while maintaining a slippery historicity that oscillates between mappings of narrative and fact. If we look at an unlikely precedent, Guy Debord’s The Naked City (1957), which considers space a social product, it becomes clear that Mann’s photographs map out a socio-contextual discourse to create an alternative Southern identity that considers the language of landscape, remembrance, and authenticity. Brad Adams. Berry College. garden 65: apex “The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world.” Michel Foucault Garden 65: apex is comprised of fifteen paintings that mix the aleatory and the programmatic, essentially a grid of 4 1/8” x 4” rectangles whose uniform color (and concurrent values) is generated by atmospheric noise. The 108 rectangles that make up each painting are built from the same thirteen base colors, either singularly or in combination of varying proportions with each other. The location of each color and its value is determined randomly. The outcome, at 49½” x 36” each, is work that represents more its production than a particular image and is dependent on the context of the larger body of work to be understood. Adams’s ongoing investigation into the idea of the garden would be augmented by translating the series from the wall (and acrylic on stretched canvas) to the format of Pecha Kucha whereby 12 x 9 becomes equal to 20 x 20. Roshi Ahmadian. Case Western Reserve University. Artistic Exchanges from the Apadana to the Parthenon The Parthenon frieze has been the subject of much scholarly literature in recent decades and remains an unanswered question to this day. Many have attempted to explain its iconographic program, publishing at times creative theories about what it represents. Since the Parthenon frieze was the first of its kind to be built at such magnitude in Greece, some have argued that it was inspired by neighboring examples, specifically the reliefs at the Persian Palace of Darius at Persepolis, the Apadana. This paper demonstrates that while similarities in treatment of subject matter, iconography, and function exist between the two friezes, it is perhaps more accurate to classify them as parallels rather than imitations. Chad Airhart. Carson Newman University. Southern Roots Stay Home: The Southern States Art League and the Push for Regional Art Awareness and Patronage In 1927, New Orleans artist and proselytizer Ellsworth Woodward castigated the current fashion to collect non-local art with a warning. “You will be the sufferer because you have failed to understand that art must always begin at home.” His remark echoed the mission of the Southern States Art League, a group he founded that encouraged regional art appreciation and patronage in the American South. To this end, Woodward and the league battled the trends that embraced internationalism and the recognized art centers of New York and Paris. The call for a new regionalism was inspired by a traditional, many times controversial, southern love and loyalty for home, as well as by the necessity to create regional art schools, galleries, and collectors. Indeed, the demand for southern art awareness was great and the cause rallied with rhetoric aimed to foster a profound sense of place. The essay surveys the important strategies and conflicts of the league and examine the most important artists, patrons, exhibitions, and cities of Dixieland’s burgeoning art scene. Kathe Albrecht. IDSVA and American University. Steampunk Art: Victorian Nostalgia or Machine Anxiety? Technological and scientific advancements greatly affected society in the late nineteenth century. Economic, social, and political changes revolutionized daily life. Factories fueled the economic engine, and widespread migration to the cities gave rise to a new urban culture. The late twentieth century experienced similar technological advancements that created tensions between the individual and society. During this period, the genre of steampunk emerged. Some consider steampunk simply costumed performance, while others feel that it is a philosophy and art form. Because steampunk blurs temporal lines by mixing Victoriana with futuristic fantasy, some consider it a pastiche. All agree that steampunk embraces the fantasy concept of time travel, has a particular focus on the Victorian period, a parallel interest in the future, and expresses a machine aesthetic. Albrecht argues that the genre of steampunk addresses late twentieth-century anxiety concerning science and technology. It does so by referencing the Victorian period, when man successfully conquered the threatening machine of the age: the steam engine. Steampunk rebels against a take-over by twentieth- century machines: digital media’s gripping manifestations, the powerful cyborg, and the eye of the all- seeing camera. Steampunk seeks to empower the individual within society by rehabilitating the notion of subjectivity, or human autonomy. Cristina Albu. University of Missouri–Kansas City. The Anti-Retinal Bias of Participatory Art Theorists The consolidation of the participatory art genre in the last two decades has expanded the notion of art spectatorship and the criteria for the evaluation of art reception. While Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of “relational art” primarily focuses on art practices that catalyze convivial dialogue between art participants, Claire Bishop’s theory of “participatory art” highlights the potential antagonism subsistent in social relations triggered by artworks. The participatory art categories they define imply biased exclusions despite their apparent breadth and flexibility. Both Bourriaud and Bishop banish from their respective theoretical framework artworks that encourage interpersonal exchanges by functioning as visual interfaces between art participants. Their skepticism towards the participatory qualities of these works carries the imprint of Marcel Duchamp’s anti-retinal attitude and Guy Debord’s critique of the society of the spectacle. In this paper, Albu examines works by Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer that have generally been associated with “interaction” rather than “participation,” although they trigger responses that depart from a binary dialogue between the viewer and the art object/art environment. This paper calls for a reconsideration of less immediate exchanges between art participants and less explicit socio-political implications of participatory art. Kelly Rae Aldridge. Stony Brook University. Fruits of Empire: Michael Rakowitz and the Fates of Plates The boundaries of art have expanded to accommodate myriad materials and practices, but remain circumspect of food unless blanched of its association with culinary art and reinscribed as still-life, performance, or found-art. Both museums and restaurants traffic in aesthetic consumption, but art institutions tend to mask the socio-economic underpinnings of objects more aggressively to retain a shard of the myth of autonomy. Aldridge contends artist Michael
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