Mid-America College Art Association Conference
- The annual MACAA conference is for the professional benefit of its membership. Conference costs are met through registration fees and MACAA membership.
- Conference coordinators, program chairs, and session chairs have the responsibility of informing all participants of MACAA conference policies when persons are accepted and/or invited to participate in sessions.
- Participants may give only ONE paper or be on ONE panel. Each participant may chair a session in addition to giving a paper or being on a panel.
- Please note: every conference participant must be a MACAA member and registered for the conference. This includes all presenters. Register Here
Call for Papers (Deadline April 10, 2012)
Below is a list of 2012 MACAA Conference sessions being advertised in the call for papers (download here.) If you’d like to submit a paper for consideration, please submit directly to the session chair. Include the following items as attachments to your email to the session chair prior to the deadline date of April 10, 2012:
- A completed MACAA Paper Submission form
- Your current curriculum vitae
- Full paper (optional)
Gut Check: Art or Just a Bad Bit of Beef
Session Chair: Jeffrey M. Adams, The Kentucky School of Craft
Email: jadams0429@kctcs.edu
In blink, Malcolm Gladwell, author of the The Tipping Point, takes as his subject the notion of “thin slicing”, our ability to discern significant events from a very narrow period of experience. Gladwell asserts that spontaneous gut decisions are often more insightful as predictors of events and outcomes rather than more thoughtful and considered reasoning. How do we make those leaps of intuition when it comes to observing and digesting what we perceive as art or non-art? We all have experienced instinctive spilt second reactions to objects. Often, they fall either within or beyond our willingness to define them as a product of the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp coined the phrase “infra-thin”, a term for measuring the almost imperceptible margins of difference between two seemingly identical items. This panel seeks submissions from those willing to take on the issue of when and/or how an object crosses over from its civilian role into that of a functioning artwork.
Good Work! Incorporating Service Learning into Graphic Design Curriculum
Session Chair: Anne Beekman, University of Findlay
Email: beekman@findlay.edu
This presentation discusses the benefits and challenges of using Service Learning in graphic design classes. The presenter has been using Service Learning components in every class taught for over seven years. Advice will be given on coordinating with on-campus program staff and local non-profit agencies to give students real-world work experience. Tips on logistics, planning, and privacy issues when working with community organizations will be addressed.
By providing examples of actual projects used in the classroom, the presenter will offer insight into making pro-bono design work an invaluable educational experience at introductory through advanced levels in undergraduate programs. It will be shown how students donate their time to local non-profit organizations within a structured curriculum. In doing so they gain portfolio pieces, while giving back to their community. Not only do students bear the responsibility of creating high-quality artwork that fulfills communication needs, they also learn professional and business practices. This includes interacting with clients throughout the design process, dealing with budgets, model releases, purchasing stock images, and even writing copy.
Assignment briefs for in-class projects include detailed lesson plans and objectives. Samples of published student work includes advertising and collateral design, posters, book design, and website development.
Finally, it will be shown how Service Learning can be a positive experience for all involved. It builds good will and makes economic sense, to the benefit of the student, the community, the faculty and the entire design profession.
Interdisciplinary/Transdisciplinary Approaches to Design Studio Education
Session Chair: Sherry F. Blankenship, Ohio University
Email: blankes1@ohio.edu
Case Study: Socrates in the Studio This paper will present a case study, through visual examples, that proposes that integrating other disciplines into the design studio expands design thinking and encourages the development of a personal design philosophy. Since design practice typically partners with other disciplines such a business, education, sciences, humanities etc. in developing a design appropriate to the situation, problem, client and users, so too can the studio investigate other disciplines in conjunction with design. In this way, the design studio can increase the students’ understanding of design while also exploring disciplines that bring new knowledge and unique perspectives together in achieving an appropriate design. In this case study from Ohio University (USA), graduate students read Plato’s Phaedrus and excerpts from Derrida both of which entertain the advantages and disadvantages of writing and speaking. Taking works both from the past as well as the present provided a basis for designed works in which students began by creating traditional book layouts using the Phaedrus text and then created more experimental/interpretive works that ranged from videos to posters to packaging to express personal understanding of the works and/or to explore the meaning of the texts. This interdisciplinary studio approach empowers and encourages students to read texts in a multitude of disciplines and informs/expands their design thinking so that they are able to act as visual translators as well as auteurs. I do anticipate that other panelists for this session could include presentations that address integration of other fields in design and/or inclusion of theory as a way of design thinking.
Getting Them Talking, Innovative Critique Strategies
Session Chair: Steven Bleicher, Coastal Carolina University
Email: stevenbleicher@gmail.com
Getting students, especially foundation students, to open up and talk at a critique is very difficult – much like herding cats. They are afraid to voice their opinions and stand out from the crowd. Fitting in, being apart of the group is especially important to students in this category and age group. It’s the faculty member’s job to set up an environment where they can open up and talk.
Since the critique is at the heart of analyzing a student’s completed artworks and designs, it is essential to get all of the students to speak up and discuss the work. The critique forces students to verbalize and use the vocabulary of art and design. It hones their logic and reasoning skills as well as teaching them to analyze a work of art or design based on the criteria on for a given project.
How can you set up a safe environment - a place where students feel comfortable to talk? What strategies do you employ? How do you get a conversation started and then keep it going? This session will explore different critic strategies and methods. Papers are sought that address critique strategies and ways to get students to talk and verbalize their feelings and opinions in classroom full of peers.
Residual Media, Art and Collaboration
Session Chair: Chris Burnett, University of Toledo
Email: chris.burnett@utoledo.edu
This session considers residual cultural forms and the artistic collaborations that cluster around them. “Residual” here follows Raymond Williams' usage referring to media and artifacts created in the past but still actively clinging to and meaningful in the present. The residual embraces the many ways that contemporary artists are innovatively retrieving and reevaluating discarded artifacts, fashions, and older types of media. The realm of the residual may also relate to landscape reclamation projects that reconnect the public to abandoned sites and reorient the appeal of past ruins for the present and future. Of special interest to the session is the collaborative dimension that current reclamation projects or residual media projects give rise to. In connecting residual media, art and collaboration, the session invites presentation proposals that address such questions as these:
How do new media and old media compare as platforms of collaboration?
How have attitudes toward craft changed (or been restored) with collaborative involvement in residual media?
How do the use of found materials in art motivate collaboration in production as well as in the appreciation of collective memory?
What are the changing attitudes toward obsolescence and ruins, and how are they shifting from isolation and nostalgia to more dynamic, collective associations?
What opportunities are there for landscape architects and artists to rebuild community as they reconstruct residual public spaces and parks?
Whether neglected, abandoned, or trashed, this session invites proposals that explore how artistic collaboration can recycle, reconfigure, and renew a practical sense of community itself.
Critical Theory in the Midwest: The State of the Discipline
Session Chair: John J. Corso Jr., Oakland University
Email: corso@oakland.edu
Critical theory and continental philosophy were all the rage in the 1980s and 90s. But are they still relevant in the new millennium? Are Midwestern universities and museums continuing to invest in art theory and criticism? Have regional presses changed their publication strategies regarding theoretical offerings? What critical lineages do art historians and critics cite in their works? This panel invites academics and art professionals of any specialty to explore current uses of critical theory in their scholarship and/or teaching. Topics might address post-structuralism, deconstruction, hermeneutics, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and any related discourses. Presenters might consider how critical methodologies are being taught in the Midwest. Most importantly, presenters should reflect on the regional resources and/or challenges that distinguish critical practice in the Midwest from other regions. That is, are there appreciable differences in Midwestern theoretical approaches when compared to our peers in other regions? Both traditional and creative proposals are encouraged.
There’s No Success Like Failure
Session Chair: Haylee L. Ebersole, Ohio University
Email: haylee.ebersole@gmail.com
This panel examines the meaning of failure and it's role in contemporary art practices. Contemporary artists strive to expand and challenge normative thought, and do so through the recognition of failure and the pursuit of the unknown. The artists presented in this panel address these ideas across a variety of mediums, utilizing traditional forms of drawing, printmaking, and ceramics in combination with new media, performance, and video.
Intersections: Art, Science and the Environment
Session Chair: Barbara J. Giorgio, Ball State University
Email: bgiorgio@bsu.edu
Collaboration between the arts and sciences has helped to create new ideas, processes and knowledge. By working together we open up new ways of seeing and experiencing the world around us and the current relationship between art-making, science and ecology. How can we work across art and science to enable a creative discourse about ideas that shape the perception and the experience of our changing environment? Can artistic practices inspire engagement in environmental issues, and sustain engagement through ongoing activities?
This session seeks out those curious about the critical and intriguing topics that combine art, science and the environment. An interdisciplinary view about interpreting the world around us that embraces the natural environment and art by combining a fascination with how people create, interacts with, and impacts the landscape they inhabit.
What Does Community in Community College Really Mean?
Session Chair: Steve Glazer, Henry Ford Community College
Email: sglazer@hfcc.edu
As we find ourselves firmly embedded in the second decade of the 21st century, several of the traditional aspects of education have gone through major changes. Being at the forefront of worker retraining, increased enrollment (often with decreasing skills) and community involvement and commitment are our community colleges. A group of community college panelists will discuss what makes their programs stand out in this remarkable time.
Relocating Surroundings: Absence in Art
Session Co-Chairs: Shreepad Joglekar, Kansas State University; Nathan Heuer, Victoria College; Erin Wiersma, Kansas State University; Mike McMann, Kansas State University
Email: sjoglek@ksu.edu; nateheuer@gmail.com; ewiersma@ksu.edu; mcmann@ksu.edu
This panel of artists will discuss the relationship between human experience and the environment, using their work in drawing, painting, photography, and digital imagery as evidence. The members of the panel each explore unique approaches to the relationships between people and social, computational, psychological, and physical environments. One of the most powerful ways of examining the relationship between human experience and these environments is through the traces, residue and patterns in psychological and experiential spaces. A common theme in the work of the panel artists is the absence of the figure, the decentralized subject that is both an agent in the work and is absent from it. In their creative investigation, the artists engage in explorations of their inner and outer surroundings, and often their artworks can be considered as byproducts of these explorations. The panel will engage in a conversation with the audience about the conceptual similarities between the works and the work’s context in the broader themes and currents in contemporary art.
Change Your Mind, Change Your Practice: Or Why You Should Consider a Collaborator for Your Next Project
Session Co-Chairs: Paula Katz, Herron School of Art and Design; Joel W. Fisher, CUNY City College; Justin Thomas Leonard, Bowling Green State University-Main Campus
Email: katzp@iupui.edu; joelwfisher@gmail.com; justinthomasleonard@gmail.com
Over the last several decades, collaborative social practices have become an important and fundamental part of the spectrum of work labeled “contemporary art.” Today, community engagement has become exceptionally interdisciplinary with participants emerging from various intellectual and academic backgrounds. For truly engaged artists this way of working is not simply about investigating a growing international trend; it is an explorative process with deeply embedded roots in research, pedagogy and shifting ideological expectations.
Through presentations by artists, curators and other scholars that work under the diverse rubric of “social engagement” encouraging greater awareness of political and social issues through their practices, this panel explores the nature and importance of the process of collaboration in and of itself. Conversations will provoke a new thoughtfulness on why this way of working yields results quite different from solitary artistic practices. It also explores how this way of working achieves superior results from every aspect of producing work: planning, making and exhibiting as well as the disadvantages that can also result.
Teaching Cruel and Abject Art
Session Chair: Patrick Kinsman, Herron School of Art and Design
Email: rkinsman@iupui.edu
Maggie Nelson’s book The Art of Cruelty asks if cruel art is worth ingesting. This panel is broadly interested in the challenges, methods and goals of teaching confrontational, shocking and difficult art, from any time period. This is a contextual question: for example, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ was provocative enough to be attacked, but students in the classroom may not find it shocking. Similarly, students may question the legality of established art such as Vito Acconci’s Following Piece or seek to invalidate Chris Burden’s Shoot on grounds of self-harm.
Specifically, we are concerned with pedagogical strategies: how can one effectively teach this type of art, accounting for its affective (emotional) power? What are the desired outcomes; are we, or should we be, invested in retaining the high affect of this kind of work? How can student reactions be measured and, where necessary, addressed? Are student reactions to this work changing over time, and how?
Papers for this panel might address:
- “Abject” artists: Mike Kelley, Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pope.L, Cindy Sherman, Vienna Actionism, Matthew Barney, Carolee Schneemann, Martin Creed, Francis Bacon, Orlan, and others
- Feminism: Kristeva’s abject, Judy Chicago, Hannah Wilke, Catherine Breillat, others
- Identity politics: Queer abjection and/or the problematic relationship between identity politics and violent and/or overtly sexual or abject art
- Censorship: The NEA 4, Pleasure and Danger, Mapplethorpe, Wojnarowicz, others
- Other and related topics, including studio production, religion and art, and animal cruelty, are welcome.
- What social constructs are identified through the use of images of appendages?
- How are roles of class and gender played out through design or decoration?
- In which ways do shoes and other coverings emerge as signs of identity?
- How do footprints or other markers connote memory?
- How do innovations in prosthetic devices and artificial limbs alter our sense of the real and the (im)possible?
Strange Movements: The Art of Appendages in Contemporary Practice
Session Chair: Claire Lieberman, Illinois State University
Email: clieber@ilstu.edu
What is it about limbs – feet, fingers and arms, ears, noses and toes - that capture imagination across all media? This panel seeks to understand ways in which appendages provoke new thought and representations in current art practice. As implements, design components and conveyers of fantasy and erotic appeal, they serve not only as subject matter, but also as instruments of creative production. From plaster cast to erotic fetish, appendages have long played a role in artists’ vision and viewers’ perception. When removed (physically or contextually) from the body, they constitute dynamic components in the theater of human complexity. Expanding to the non-human realm, a fin, a fang, a claw or tentacle immediately calls up frightening fantasy.
By way of example, consider images of feet. One has only to view the tortured beauty of Géricault’s “Study of Feet and Hands,” the religious associations of “Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles” (Durer, Tintoretto), or the pastoral bronze, “Boy with Thorn,” to recognize the poignancy of feet as source imagery. The “foot” is delivered as design element in furniture or vessels, both decorative and for structural support. A broader conjecture of foot is revealed as emblem of freedom as the constraint of movement is a primary obstacle to liberation – think “Freedom Walk.”
This panel seeks projects, exhibitions or writings relating to walking, dancing, kicking, stomping, grabbing, poking, clutching, grasping and reaching – in short, the actions or symbolism of all things that stick out from the body! Its significance lies in our universal fascination with truncated body parts and the provocative way artists reinvent them.
The Dynamic and Multi-Dimensional Process of Foundations
Session Chair: Marlene H. Lipinski, Columbia College Chicago
Email: marlene.lipinski@yahoo.com
Process is an intrinsic part of art and design. This panel will investigate how process is approached in the Foundations program. Panel members will present successful examples of stages of processes containing concept and technical developments that lead to a satisfying product.
Digital Foundations: Merging New Media with Art School Traditions
Session Co-Chairs: Arnold P. Martin, University of Wisconsin-Madison/Milwaukee; Meg Mitchell, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Email: arnie.martin@gmail.com; msmegmitchell@gmail.com
Digital Foundations is a growing trend in art schools across the country providing new opportunities to merge digital tools with traditional techniques in art education. Along with creating new educational opportunities this trend also presents new challenges in integrating hybrid art practice in institutions geared for traditional material and technique based curriculum. Creating a new discipline at a time when many art schools are headed in the direction of integrated or non-media-specific practice can be a challenge in itself not to mention finding space in already tight curriculum requirements for new foundations courses. Tension between the new and the traditional can be a major hurdle in terms of institutional practice and as a result educational institutions often play catch-up with practice in the field at large. Foundational education in digital tools and media literacy is therefore an important topic of discussion. This panel seeks papers and presentations that explore innovations in this rising area of art education. The goal of the panel is to create discussion across a range of topics related to digital foundations in art schools. Papers exploring techniques, concepts, institutional practices, and issues of teaching and pedagogy, from various points of view (faculty, graduate students, etc.) are all welcome.
Making Bullshit: Serious Play and Failure in Arts Education and Professional Practice
Session Co-Chairs: Phil McCollam, University of South Florida St. Petersburg; Ellen Mueller, Colorado State University-Pueblo
Email: mccollam@mail.usf.edu; ellen.mueller@colostate-pueblo.edu
Artist and
designer Paula Scher describes play as an opportunity to create without limit,
producing new works that are devoid of the solemnity that is manifest within
day-to-day professional practice. Solemnity, Scher explained, is work targeting
and ‘accepted by appropriate audiences.’ Serious play, in contrast is
‘spontaneous,’ ‘accidental’ and ‘imperfect.... [it] is about invention... not
perfection.’ Scher’s iconic work is born from serious play. This concept also
occurs in critical theory, such as Henri Lefebvre’s volume II of the Critique
of Everyday Life, where he suggests that art and play are linked through
their ‘transfuctional’ nature (that is, to have may uses, and at the same time
none at all).
These concepts are not new: they are phenomena that occur during the natural
development of social creatures. As artists and educators, it is important to
nurture ‘serious play’ as an integral component of our practice, creating
environments that are open to experimentation and in which failure is a
non-issue.
Making Bullshit is aimed at creating an open discussion between
educators within all artistic disciplines — traditional and new media
arts, design, art history, etc. Potential topics include techniques for
integrating serious play in the classroom, debate about when to implement
serious play vs. solemnity, historical context, comparisons with other artistic
and educational tools, case studies: recollections of serious play in action
(practiced or observed), the relationship between play and failure, artistic
practices embracing play, critical theory on the topics of play and/or failure
in artistic practice.
Please Pack Your Brushes and Go. Work of Art: The Next Great Genius
Session Chair: Robert Mertens, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Email: mertensr@uww.edu
From Courbet onward the idea of the avant-garde artist as passionate outsider and anarchist has been fixed in the public mind. A recent phenomenon has emerged to perpetuate this sensibility in the form of realty TV. Work of Art: The Next Great Artist has just concluded its second season on cable TV. The show follows the format of other survivor television models that employ; an elimination challenge, an absurdly tight schedule; judges one-upping each other with caustic remarks where a winner is selected and losers chastised, criticized for their lack of courage and passion and voted off the island. Confrontational confessionals by contestants are interspersed throughout the competition. While the formula closely mimics other popular shows such as Top Chef and Project Runway, Work of Art attempts to embrace a high/low sensibility by combing the aspirations of Mathew Arnold’s vision of what constitutes high culture and its influence over cultural meaning systems with Kant’s vision of the artist as expressive angst ridden genius, alongside the voyeurism of reality TV with its profitable diet of conflict and search for authenticity. Does the very existence of this phenomenon alter or accurately reflect the way in which we understand cultural capital? What does such a parody say about the current state of art making in art schools when its values can be so easily appropriated and commodified? Does the show perpetuate the idea of the public’s perception of the crazed outsider artist or repudiate it? Is the parody just too close for comfort?
Proposals that promote, challenge, or interrogate these or other manifestations are invited from all specializations.
Authentic Auras and Anachronistic Process
Session Chair: Robert Mertens, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Email: mertensr@uww.edu
Lionel Trilling writes in Sincerity and Authenticity that art is expected “to provide an audience with examples of authenticity”; and that what is valued as true and real can only be experienced by relying upon intuition, inspiration and revelation. Nearly forty years later, philosopher Andrew Potter reflects upon both this and Walter Benjamin’s tracing the loss of the “aura” to conclude that living a meaningful creative life may now be impossible within the confines of our massified and commodified culture. According to Potter, more than ever we pursue an authentic form of life, but outside of, or in opposition to contemporary experience. Potter identifies Trilling’s ethic of authenticity as the motivating principle inspiring a secular search for uniqueness, integrity and originality, which he calls “the foremost spiritual quest of our time”. Reflecting an urgent sense of anxiety over the cultural loss of the authentic self, there has been a contemporary emergence of disparate and anachronistic groups celebrating a model of opposition. The Antiquarian Avant-Garde pursues obsolete photographic processes as a “rebellion against hegemony by rediscovering…forgotten 19th-century processes which had lost the struggle for commercial viability”; ILSSA (Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts) manifests “a protest against contemporary industrial practices and values” and promotes “production by antiquated means”; the veneration of vernacular aspiration and uncorrupted revelation is institutionalized in the American Visionary Art Museum and in comprehensive museological publications such as Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds. What constitutes cultural authenticity and has this been irreversibly co-opted by corporatism? Is it in fact possible to create an authentic experience within a mediated environment? What does the pursuit of, and interest in, anachronistic practice say about the nature of the authentic? Are these movements a product of the commodification of culture or of the devaluation of cultural capital? Does this phenomenon encourage a new fetishization of unique physical objects and the mark of the hand? Do such movements represent an act of nostalgia or cultural subversion? Can a commercially viable process attain authentic status? How would digital authenticity be identified? Proposals that either promote, challenge, or interrogate these or other manifestations are invited from all specializations.
Materials Making Meaning
Session Chair: Armin Mühsam, Northwest Missouri State University
Email: amuhsam@nwmissouri.edu
Our own art expresses how we perceive and interpret the world and what choices we have made but what if the very materials we create our art with are the constituting part of the message? This studio session’s main ambition is to look at these “acts of artifacts,” to make the connection between the activities of the artist and the activities of materials/things. How can materials mediate a relation people have with them while at the same time point to the content the artist wants to communicate? Where does the material take on a life of its own, possibly to the point where things become beings? Might concepts even take on the nature of material? Practicing artists as well as art historians are invited to introduce their studio practices or their theoretical musings based on the exploration on these or closely related ideas (transformation comes to mind).
African American Artists in the Midwest
Session Chair: Julia R. Myers Ph.D., Eastern Michigan University
Email: jmyers@emich.edu
While American art history tends to be fairly parochial with its emphasis on East Coast artists, African American art history seems to suffer even more strongly from this bias. This session will be devoted to African-American artists or art institutions in the Midwest. The Great Migration from 1913-1949 brought hundreds of thousands of black Americans to Midwest industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. And some of these people and their descendents made art. Indeed on a trip to Detroit in 1964, Langston Hughes said, “Harlem used to be the Negro cultural center of America. If Detroit has not already become so, it is well on its way to becoming it.” Literary historians have frequently taken up the topic of Midwestern African-American writers, but this is far less true in the case of black visual artists. In line with the conference's content session of Community and Collaboration, papers treating African American mural projects in the Midwest are especially encouraged, as are papers dealing with the educational outreach activities of artists and art institutions. However, all papers dealing with Midwestern African-American art from all time periods, colonial to the present, are welcomed for consideration.
Cease-fire: The Positive Influence of Our Returning Military Veterans
Session Chair: Christopher S. Olszewski, Savannah College of Art and Design
Email: chris_olszewski@me.com
At the time of the MACAA Conference, the War in Afghanistan will have raged for more than ten years. Thousands of lives have been affected. There is an increasing number of veterans returning from combat and entering Institutions of Higher Education. As a professor, I want to address the presence of returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq and how this contributes to the classroom dynamic.
As visual thinkers, how do we engage/handle the challenging perspective and psychological effects of the student's wartime experiences? How as a professor have you fostered creative solutions? How does this new type of student affect critiques, reviews, projects and outcomes? How have you addressed these issues? What successful teaching experiences have you had?
Throughout the Twentieth century there is a rich legacy of veterans contributing to the dialog of Art, Art History, Theory, Criticism, Ethics and Politics such as Otto Dix, Richard Diebenkorn, Leon Golub and HC Westermann. What kind of creative impact will this new influx have on the twenty first century? This panel will discuss the influence and contributions of war veterans in the studio, classroom, community and the creative global society.
Post-Photographic Forms, Mutations and Digital Hybrid
Session Chair: Min Kim Park, Purdue University
Email: minkimpark@gmail.com
We are in a particular moment in photography’s history where many contemporary photography works reference a diversity of genres and involve a broad range of image- making processes, which I have also explored in my artistic practice. Examining my work in relationships to other contemporary artists has allowed me to reflect on current trends in photography and its varied mutations. For example, American artist Sean Snyder downloads amateur snapshots from the Internet, taken by American soldiers stationed in the current conflict in Iraq, and present them systematically in a grid format. Most of the images depict stereotypical scenes: exotic desert sunsets, smiling children receiving sweets from US troops, and unveiled caches of rebel weapons. They encourage comparisons and pose the question if the photography is betraying the ideology of the soldier-photographer who took them. Another example is Israel artist Elad Lassry and American artist Amanda Ross Ho; their artistic intent is to look at photography simply as a picture devoid of a traditional view of photography as depiction. By combining commercial and object photography, photography and erotica, studio portraiture and collage, Photoshop and issues of design, appropriation and photojournalism, their photographs have no intended ‘home,’ a concept they explore by attempting to create works that are somehow void of authorship or index. My work expands on the idea that the meaning of an image taken of anything today is so exhausted. There is no longer any such thing as ‘photography,’ and one can’t extract a simple definition from the medium given the circumstances. How to maintain the status quo of photography in a time where its definition is being continued blurred. Considering the last five years of photographic practice, one might conclude there should be reconsideration in the term “picture making” in a digital age because we have shifted to an immaterial time where the photography as a physical object has evaporated,’ as contemporary photographer Elad Lassry says. Has Photography finally met its end, transforming into so many post-photographic forms and digital hybrids? For this presentation I will examine the current shifts and trends in photography and relate them to my artistic practice.
Collaboration and Education in Detroit
Session Chair: Thomas L. Pyrzewski, Wayne State University
Email: tpyrzewski@wayne.edu
Gallery and museum colleagues from the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), Detroit Artists Market (DAM), Wayne State University (WSU) Galleries and College for Creative Studies (CCS) Center Galleries will share their organizations’ missions and discuss how they interact with one another.
Individual gallery and museum fundamentals will be defined, including the following: budgeting, marketing, exhibition and season design, and facility operations. Each organization’s mission will be clarified by addressing their advantages and limitations. An emphasis on education will follow.
Specific content will include the interpretation of works at the DIA, WSU and CCS Galleries’ roles in academia, MOCAD’s newly developed education department, and DAM’s special opportunities for art students and faculty.
Each organization provides a unique educational experience for their visitors. Fruitful relationships between organizations have developed through cross promotion and collaboration. The outcome has been local, regional and national exposure for the wide range of educational opportunities that Detroit galleries and museums have to offer.
Indeterminate Objects: Results May Vary
Session Chair: John Richardson, Wayne State University
Email: af5343@wayne.edu
Architects, urban planners, insurance agencies, and city codes will often position a structure that exists within a town but does not fit a common category as an “indeterminate object.” More often than not, public art is described in this way.
The role of this kind of object may not be functional in the way that a set of stairs or a sidewalk can be, and even when it is, it typically announces itself as special, rather than as utilitarian and ordinary. The object may delight some and confound others.
The philosopher George Santayana spoke to this idea when in the Sense of Beauty he wrote, “The indeterminate in form is also indeterminate in value. It needs completion by the mind of the observer and as this completion differs, the value of the result must vary. An indeterminate object is therefore beautiful to him who can make it so, and ugly to him who cannot.”
This session offers artists the opportunity to present works of art that are indeterminate; objects that may be sculpture, may be other forms of art, or perhaps not art at all, works that ask for completion.
Artists whose practice results in works not easily categorized are encouraged to apply. Six to eight artists will be selected to present challenging work. In particular, current graduate students and emerging faculty are sought.
Playing With Meaning of Another’s Making
Session Chair: Brian Seymour, Temple University
Email: brian.seymour@temple.edu
Considering the translation of meaning through the remaking of known works of art. Have all the rules changed when contemporary artists re-create, re-fashion and re-present works of another’s making? In 1999, Cai Guo-Qiang won the Golden Lion Award at the 48th Venice Biennale with a work entitled: Venice Rent Collection Courtyard. The geographical marker in the title is meant to distinguish it from a very famous Chinese sculptural group of the same name produced during the Cultural Revolution. The work staged by Cai varies from the original in key ways, but in the aggregate amounts to a restaging of the piece.
This session invites papers that look beyond familiar tropes, like appropriation and allusion, familiar in contemporary art to explore “original” works or art that play with the wholesale re-presentation of well-known works from history. Papers might consider moments where known works are granted new life in an entirely fresh place and time.
Themes to be investigated might include authenticity, translation, copyright and norms of the globalized art world.
Creative Process Beyond the Studio
Session Chair: Eric Troffkin, Wayne State University
Email: troffkin@wayne.edu
In “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention,” psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers the idea that “…creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon.”
While it remains natural, for many artists, to focus on their individual part in this creativity equation, creative process can involve, and even invite, influence and participation. Artists may work in teams, or partner with community groups, where they serve as facilitators. Artists may take up the role of instigator, prompting public response and participation. Public artists respond to requests for proposals, frequently addressing issues and conditions specified by project funders and constituents. Indeed, some historical periods of exceptional creative productivity can be linked, as Csikszentmihalyi notes of Renaissance Florence, to the intense involvement of an art patronage structure.
This panel invites considerations of artwork, artists, and creative process that examine and expand our awareness of their “systemic” inter-relatedness. Submissions are sought from artists and designers, curators and organizers, and historians and critics alike.
Contemporary Feminist Art: Old Themes, New Variations
Session Co-Chairs: Harry J. Weil, Stony Brook University; Deborah Frizzell, William Paterson University
Email: weil.harry@gmail.com; thefrizz@optonline.net
In 1971 Linda Nochlin posed a question that would change the art world's attitude toward feminist art and spearhead an entirely new branch of art history: why have there been no great women artists? Forty years later feminist artists have emerged as a strong force in the art establishment with the founding of the Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and the groundbreaking exhibition “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution.” Feminist art production can be traced to the early 1960s as an outgrowth of the second wave of feminism. It centered on reflecting women's lives and experiences, as well as rallying call to subvert the foundations of the art establishment. These early pioneers developed a visual rhetoric focused on the female body as a site for social and cultural commentary and reassessing the erotic, the sacred, and the taboo - this included, Ida Applebroog, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kubota, Lorraine O’Grady, Yoko Ono, Saar, Carolee Schneeman, Nancy Spero, and Martha Wilson, amongst others.
This panel will assess a younger generation of artists and their relationship to the feminist art practices of the 1960s and 70s. Of interest is the visual rhetoric of feminist art from the past and how it has developed and changed over the decades. What issues continue to dominate the field of feminist art? What has happened to the female body in art, where has it gone and what are its political and social implications today? Of particular interest are presentations addressing the work of contemporary feminist artists, or artists “read” as feminist, who have been marginalized or underrepresented: women of color, Latin- and Asian-American artists, LGBT artists. Exploratory themes are welcome from art historians, curators, artists, and interdisciplinary scholars.
Laid Waste: Dead Matter, New Landscapes, and the Politics of Trash
Session Chair: Charlotte H. Wellman, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
Email: cwellman@edinboro.edu
Contemporary analysis of global warming and “green” conservation measures confront us with the environmental and political implications of the use and abuse of resources, matter and space. The generation of material waste and its impact on communities has taken many forms, including Lucy Walker’s documentary of Vic Muniz’s “trash” in Wasteland (2010), Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I (2000) and Chris Jordan’s photographs of landfills of obsolete, discarded technology.
This session calls for scholars committed to investigating the ways in which the generation of organic and inorganic waste has engendered new perspectives on the individual, community, and geography. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged. Literal and metaphorical intimations of generation and regeneration, obsolescence and decay also demand redefinitions of embodiment, the life cycle, and what it means to be human (or not). The phenomena of over-consumption and technological obsolescence and its opposite, the conservation and recycling of resources, also suggests the need for new models of self and community and their relationship to matter, space and place.
Aesthetic Practices of Contemporary Midwestern Abstract Painting
Session Chair: Tommy White, Cleveland Institute of Art
Email: twhite@cia.edu
What are the aesthetic practices of contemporary Midwestern abstract painting? Does this particular genre have a regional style like other disciplines from the Midwest? In order to promote a greater dialogue, this session will use a Pecha Kucha method and is open painters, historians, and theorist dealing with contemporary abstraction.