2017 Abstracts

Abstracts for the Annual SECAC Meeting in Columbus, Ohio October 25th-28th, 2017 Conference Chair, Aaron Petten, Columbus College of Art & Design Emma Abercrombie, SCAD Savannah The Millennial and the Millennial Female: Amalia Ulman and ORLAN This paper focuses on Amalia Ulman’s digital performance Excellences and Perfections and places it within the theoretical framework of ORLAN’s surgical performance series The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan. Ulman’s performance occurred over a twenty-one week period on the artist’s Instagram page. She posted a total of 184 photographs over twenty-one weeks. When viewed in their entirety and in relation to one another, the photographs reveal a narrative that can be separated into three distinct episodes in which Ulman performs three different female Instagram archetypes through the use of selfies and common Instagram image tropes. This paper pushes beyond the casual connection that has been suggested, but not explored, by art historians between the two artists and takes the comparison to task. Issues of postmodern identity are explored as they relate to the Internet culture of the 1990s when ORLAN began her surgery series and within the digital landscape of the Web 2.0 age that Ulman works in, where Instagram is the site of her performance and the selfie is a medium of choice. Abercrombie situates Ulman’s “image-body” performance within the critical framework of feminist performance practice, using the postmodern performance of ORLAN as a point of departure. J. Bradley Adams, Berry College Controlled Nature Focused on gardens, Adams’s work takes a range of forms and operates on different scales. Recent work moves from intimate drawings, to medium-sized paintings, to installations taking up the space of a basketball court. The work is often guided by “rules” using repetitions and ruptures of marking systems in the drawings; painted grids whose color and value is determined by atmospheric noise; and thousands of dollar-sized printed papers arranged to form a labyrinth. As such the work engages with the capricious and the predictable, chance and the formulated, the generative coupled with the predetermined, fecundity and decay. These gardens then are not literal depictions of place but rather representations of controlled nature. Bryan Alexis, University of Arkansas at Fort Smith How Much Do I Charge for This Logo? Shepherding Design Entrepreneurs through the Freelance Work Minefield Steering through the maze of networking, job selection, fees, contracts, collection, and pro bono work, all while doing their part in maintaining the integrity of the profession, can be a bit overwhelming. This presentation focuses on what professors can do to help students navigate the freelance world. Pamela Allen, Troy University Art Is a Business In 2003 Allen attended a workshop called “Your Art Your Business,” at the Wiregrass Museum of Fine Art in Dothan, Alabama. The instructor was business consultant Susan Wolf. This concept “Art is a business” resonated with Allen until 2009 when she decided to offer “The Business of Art” as a Special Topics elective course for Fine Art Majors. Today the Department of Art and Design at Troy University offers seven courses that approach the topics of entrepreneurial thinking and career preparations. The department assists students with career planning, portfolio development, and personal branding, as well as provides work experiences with clients, grant writing with and for civic originations, and internships with firms, museums, and local artists. This mantra “Art is a business” is a much different perspective than when Allen started teaching in 1990. As the chair of the department, she now holds a stronger sense of responsibility to see that students find success beyond graduation and hopes academia is moving in a direction that gives art majors a stronger sense of worth when approaching the job market. Thalia Allington-Wood, University College London “The Earth Grows Stones Like Teeth”: Sculpting Living Peperino in Sixteenth-Century Italy In sixteenth-century Italy a statue’s lithic source could capture the imagination. Cosimo Gacci invented a transportation myth for the marble of Giambologna’s Sabine, in which Hercules carried the precious block to Florence using a magic rope. Agostino Del Riccio enthusiastically recorded stalactites from as far away as Hungary at the Boboli gardens. The grotto of Villa di Castello displayed animals carved from a dazzling array of stones, their exotic origins announcing the wealth and global connections of their Patron. But what of statues made from un-quarried stone? At the Sacro Bosco of Bomarzo (ca. 1550–1580), sculptures were carved from peperino boulders found naturally in the landscape, a fact often noted but rarely investigated. Exploring scientific theories on the formation of peperino in this region, alongside contemporaneous geologic events, this paper considers how the cinquecento visitor might have understood these rooted rocks, in relation to generation, environmental anxiety, and geological time. If the spugne-filled Renaissance grotto materially dramatised stone’s watery creation, here the lithic forces are subterranean, fiery, and violent. Rock at the Sacro Bosco provided a tactile encounter with the earth’s forceful, potentially destructive power, as well as a lithic metamorphosis belonging to truly epic history. Kasie Alt, University of Texas at Austin Fragmentary Viewing in the Gardens at Schwetzingen Built in the late eighteenth century, Elector Carl Theodor’s (1724–1799) palace at Schwetzingen included extensive landscape gardens encompassing several styles. Creating a boundary between two sections of the garden was the “Perspektiv,” a fresco of a picturesque landscape painted on a free-standing wall curved to catch the sunlight, which enhanced the image’s illusion. Such illusions were often used in early modern landscapes to elongate limited space. At Schwetzingen, however, the real garden extends beyond the wall, creating an alternate landscape complete with an artificial ruin, a cascade, and a series of canals. In order to physically and visually access this actual garden space, a visitor must relinquish the picturesque landscape depicted in the “Perspektiv.” This paper argues that the “Perspektiv” reverses the “image as window” trope, interrupting the physical and visual mastery of the visitor by blocking their view and path to the rest of the landscape. In order to fully grasp the space, a visitor must immerse him/herself in the gardens, yet by doing so the viewer’s experience is deliberately and necessarily fragmented. This creates an experience of the landscape that continually defers the visitor’s satisfaction in contemplating the whole, emphasizing the fragmentary experience of embodied viewing. Jordan Amirkhani, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Francis Picabia: Painter-Poet-Polemicist The career of the 20th-century Franco-Cuban artist, provocateur, and Dada leader Francis Picabia has long been understood through his continual engagement with and reinvigoration of painting. An artist known for changing styles as often as he changed his clothes, Picabia maintained a constant writing practice, which included eight volumes of poetry, two film librettos, one novella, and over forty polemical essays. While Dada’s radicality as a movement is often contextualized through its subversive reconsideration of the relationship between text and image, Picabia’s individual writing practice points to new strains of intertextual exploration at work in transatlantic Dada, the significance of poetry and “the lyric” within the historical avant-garde, and the ways in which writing and poetry play crucial roles in the formation of Picabia’s multiple alter egos, identity performances, and critique of individual authorship. Laura Amrhein, University of North Carolina School of the Arts Finally! A Theory of Collaboration for Foundation Learning A theory of collaboration is not simply an issue of multiple parties working on a complex project. For example, each collaborator might have a particular expertise and hand off performance, which is sometimes referred to as a collaboration “pipeline.” In the many steps of collaboration, those in earlier steps do not necessarily engage with those in the later steps down the line. A second example is where all collaborators have similar expertise making the workload lighter, sometimes referred to as collaboration “teamwork” similar to a barn-raising. Here, all may be present but no new challenges are put forth to stretch learning. Instead, combine the two in a process of immersing oneself in the discussions and activities and challenging one’s own expertise to grow and evolve through the team collaborative project that is at times uncertain. This type of collaboration embraces the diverse expertise of the pipeline but through full team participation from beginning to end. For the majority of the time, one is placed outside of their comfort zone. It is this model that nurtures the new discovery of becoming which is shared and reaffirmed by the group and raises the value of this collaborative approach higher. Langley Anderson, Radford University Deceptive Scale: The Science of Art Art is significant to the world of science that surrounds us. When Anderson observes specimens from our natural environment, she is intrigued by the aesthetic organization of these objects— billowy curves of lichen, delicate articulations of insects, undulating patterns of a hornet’s nest. The design of

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