Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

Revitalizing Cities: Adaptive Reuse of Historic Structures

Sara E. Sharpe — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:05:29 PDT

Adaptive reuse is employed when revitalizing an existing infrastructure while maintaining important aspects of the cultural architectural heritage and promoting sustainability. The option to turn away from older structures and build new is a large problem in cities such as Detroit. Historic preservationists are trained to observe a structure’s potential before walking away. Meanwhile interior designers obtain the skills to rejuvenate such buildings for a new use. Case studies have shown the benefits of these two professions teaming up to apply adaptive reuse on historic structures for modern purposes. By studying the creative space planning methods and historic preservations standards used in documented adaptive reuse successes from cities such as Baltimore, MD, Pittsburgh, PA, and San Francisco, CA, areas such as Detroit can also experience success.

Incorporating Historic Preservation into an Accredited Interior Design Program, Reasoning and Application

Jenna M. Woodcox — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:55:23 PDT

Due to the recent decline of the economic situation in the United States, more credibility needs to be established in regard to the professions that are deemed “luxury career paths”. This essay focuses on interior design and historic preservation integration. This literature is intended to bring more credibility and awareness to the interior design field to show outsiders the potential and importance it holds. Most importantly, this proposal is for current designers who are not working in the field, to not give up hope for their design careers and think of ways to reinvent themselves (like choosing a specialty) to make themselves a diverse and sought after job candidate. Examined, is the design profession as a whole and details of the accreditation standards of an interior design program. Historic preservation is an excellent opportunity for designers to make a difference in the world, of only it was explored more often. Nearly every professional career begins at the educational level, therefore recommendations are made to incorporate preservation into an accredited interior design curriculum in several different formats, taking into consideration the different formats programs may conduct themselves. As a current graduating Master student in interior design, my inspiration for this work was to take my areas of interest (interior design, education, and historic restoration) and make them relate-able to those in, and interested in the interior design field.

Creating with Code: Critical Thinking and Digital Foundations

Brad Tober — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:05:28 PDT

While students are often attracted to opportunities to learn how to use software applications commonly employed by digital artists and designers, the fact remains that time spent on purely software-based instruction in the classroom is time that could arguably be better spent on exploring the broader conceptual issues of making digital work. This presentation begins to frame an argument for the comprehensive integration of code-based technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Processing/Java, openFrameworks/C++, and Objective-C, into digital art and design foundation curricula. This integration holds the potential to position code-based technologies as new media for teaching art and design alongside relevant critical and analytical thinking skills, and not solely as media through which art and design work can be executed. In addition, a focus on promoting engagement with the tools used to create software, rather than simply on the use of software applications themselves, serves to empower students as they develop critical awareness of their individual processes.

Re-Purposing the Elderly Body

Charlotte H. Wellman — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:05:26 PDT

In cross-disciplinary scholarship, an emerging “trash” discourse considers the implications of excessive production and consumption and their inevitable corollary—the sense that all things are disposable. Nature has been reconfigured as a landfill, an artificial landscape of discarded matter. Objects possess a shrinking lifespan, quickly replaced by a newer upgrade. Driven by a need for constant rejuvenation, consumers fetishize the new and dismiss obsolescent products. I wish to posit aging – more specifically, the elderly female body—against the “landscape” of trash in order to engage its vocabulary of entropy and decay as well as to deploy the repurposing of discarded materials as a means to reconceptualize aging. In her film, The Gleaners and I (2001), Agnes Varda interposes her body between the spectator and her consideration of different forms of gleaning in France. Our awareness of her mediation recasts the symbiosis of women and nature in terms of aging. The organic matter recovered by gleaners functions metaphorically to “repurpose” Varda’s aging perspectives and continuing immersion in and engagement with her environment and intersecting communities. While Varda’s documentary is concerned with organic waste, inorganic landfill—particularly “old” technologies—also informs perceptions of youth, age, and life cycles.

Elke Krystufek and the Obessive Production of Person

Melanie E. Emerson — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:05:25 PDT

Elke Krystufek’s artistic practice has centered almost wholly on duplicate and substitute images of herself, specifically emphasizing the female body and its position within the discourses of art history and gendered identity. While an earlier generation of feminist artists used their bodies as subject and object of their work in order to critique stereotypes and forcefully dismantle barriers that excluded women from the public sphere or labeled them objects of desire, Krystufek uses similar tactics to point to the fact there is no longer a private space. Identity is not solely the property of an individual, but rather an open space for collaborative contribution. The juxtaposition of personal narrative and cultural history is used to call attention to the slippage between the realms of public and private, and the implications such transmuted boundaries have on perceptions of self and other. Through various media Krystufek reworks common notions of feminine identity in order to force new readings. By using re-appropriated characters and scenarios as a starting point she is able reframe the argument, but rather than trying to reclaim an excluded history Krsytufek writes a new history that can be continuously rewritten, thus offering alternative hybrid concepts of the self.

Female Flesh and Medieval Practice in the Later Middle Ages

Megan E. Marzec — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:05:23 PDT

My work explores the importance and presence of the female body in medieval religious practice as exemplified in medieval art, religious texts and hagiographies. My research shows that while the reasoning behind female imagery and imagery of the nude is disputed, the prevalence of mandorla-like images, images of the female nude, and images displaying the femininity of Christ suggest the meaningfulness to the medieval viewer. I discuss extensively Julia Kristeva’s writing on the woman as abject and the artistic experience as an element of religiosity. For this research I analyzed works by various artists including Robert Campin, Jan Gossaert and Jacob Cornelisz, as well as explore Caroline Walker Bynum’s work Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, and The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century by Brigitte Cazelles.

A Sketch of the Affective Classroom: Abject Art

Patrick Kinsman — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:05:21 PDT

Abject art is highly affective, meaning that it generates strong sensations and feelings in viewers. In a classroom, high affect art demands that these reactions be integrated into the relationships between instructor, students and artwork. The affective classroom is then a classroom which summons high affects and walks a careful line between non-dialogic "shock" and a group therapy session, in order to understand affective relationships as proper material for learning. Affect is interactive and communicative by definition, but is unpredictable and uneven. Using my 2012 seminar in Abject Art, I outline the development and experience of teaching a semester of high affect art.

Show me the Semiosis: Grounding Post Structural Theory in Physiological Experience

Michael T. Arrigo — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:05:19 PDT

Most of my art students experience a very down to earth epistemological relationship to the world. There is what there is. Middle America is a land of dualisms: matter and spirit, mind and body, good and evil. In this uncluttered black and white world, post-structural theory seemingly has little to offer but a range of unnecessary and unattractive grays. This presentation describes how I overcome my students’ resistance to intellectualizing perception and art making. I use a physiological perspective that grounds students’ investigation of art and meaning in an investigation of themselves, their bodies, their perceptual responses, emotional reactions and cognitive processes. I meet them where they are and lead them to “discover” polysemia, semiotics, deconstruction, pleasure in genre, the gaze, the over-estimation of consciousness and the myth of authorial intent. This physiological approach provides students with a set of critical frameworks to enrich their understanding of art, however, it also points to where theory often falls flat. Despite all of the decoding, associating and analyzing, it all comes back to a simple, irreducible relationship. There’s me and that thing in front of me. It doesn’t get much more down to earth then that.

Snapshots, Clichés and Simulacra

Millee Tibbs — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:00:37 PDT

In his essay “Photography,” Kracauer critiques the abundance of photographic images in illustrated newspapers stating, “The blizzard of photographs betrays an indifference toward what the things mean.”[i] Current digital imaging technologies have turned this blizzard into a complete whiteout. Never before have people had such access to image-making technologies and the ease with which the images are now disseminated. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the snapshot has evolved little and remains a visual cliché - a banal vessel of personal sentimentality.

In this paper I will discuss the use and fetishization of snapshot images in both my own studio practice and by other contemporary artists. I will focus on simulacra as the process through which the meaning of a place or thing becomes distorted, inflated, and manipulated as its representation propagates, and how the repetition inherent to snapshot imagery transforms the relationship between the thing photographed and its meaning. As a point of departure I will examine an archive of snapshot images of the disused train station, the Michigan Central Depot in Detroit as an example of how a place becomes both an icon and a cliché through the repetition of its representation.

[i] Sigfried Kracauer, “Photography,” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, Harvard University Press, 1995,p. 58

Dreaming in Analog: The marriage of vintage photographic process and the contemporary world.

Lynn M. Lee — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:00:33 PDT

"Dreaming in Analog: the marriage of vintage photographic process and the contemporary world" discusses a choice in the photographic arts. That choice is, by many contemporary artists, to take a step back. Slow down. Revisit analog photography as it was originally used. However, because of the fast-paced world in which we live, even these slow, lovely processes are able to be created, completed and shared globally via digital technology and the Internet.

Photography Whatever We Want It to Be

Jyl A. Kelley — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:00:30 PDT

Contemporary photography has evolved from an orphaned art into a mainstay for global imaging culture. Today anyone can make a picture or image, manipulate it, montage it, and publish it on the Internet. Photographic art practice will always answer back to its history but more importantly and inherent in its digital form and distribution, photographic art is responding to the modern ubiquity of the digital image and digital age.

The Self in Multiple: The Lithographic Portraits of L'Artiste (1832-34)

Sean DeLouche — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:45:19 PDT

Portraits, especially those outside the medium of oil-on-canvas, have been a neglected and often disparaged subject in nineteenth-century French art history, despite their overwhelming prevalence during the time period. This paper contributes to our understanding of the modern manifestation of the portrait by examining a suite of lithographic portraits of cultural celebrities that appeared in the newly established art journal L’Artiste during the July Monarchy (1830-1848), the constitutional regime long associated with both the social and political rise of the bourgeoisie as well as the development of an extensive commercial and celebrity culture. Executed in the sketchy and lively medium of lithography that recalls the tradition of private portrait drawings, the portraits in L’Artiste achieved similar effects but, ironically, were disseminated en masse to a growing market of anonymous consumers with no direct connection to the sitters. This paper reexamines the modern nineteenth-century concept of the self (an aspect central to portraiture studies) as one that is a product of an increasingly complex network of perceptions and representations. The portraits in L’Artiste prompted diverse cultural consumers to project their fantasies onto the celebrities, who, then as now, served as discursive touchstones for an array of private and public concerns.

Passability and Impassability of Two Gates

Nogin Chung — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:40:50 PDT

This paper examines the relationship between spectators and two installation pieces--Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates (2005) and Do Ho Suh'sGate (2011)-- and complicated, if not contradictory, meanings they convey. Both of the works create an environment for viewers to navigate either in New York City's Central Park or in the Seattle Art Museum, to feel soft textures and airy movements of fabrics the gates are made out of, and to experience the visual by being exposed to either interactions between nature and orange gates or a multi-media display on the surface of the gate featuring animations based on traditional East Asian paintings and serial photographs of the artist's childhood home. Since viewers are asked to pass the gates in these, there is no separation between the pictorial world of art and our mundane world of daily existence. However, viewers realize impassibility of the two gates since they prevent viewers from entering the implied interior space. They are forever destined to meander around over seven thousand gates outside or to circle around the walls of the architectural space unable to enter inside. This paper will argue spectatorship enhances the meaning of passability and impassability of the two works.

Intimate Distance: Negotiating the Urban/Suburban Divide

Whitney L. Sage — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:40:46 PDT

As a native of Farmington Hills, a suburb thirty minutes outside of Detroit, I have always had a peculiar relationship with the city. As a child I visited Detroit often for family outings to the DIA and Tiger Stadium. Hours later we would be driving on I-96 returning west. All of my early memories of Detroit are happy and warm, however they are seen through the rose-colored glass of wide cultural and geographic separation from the city. In this way, my artwork, which discusses Detroit’s past and present through literal representation, radiates nostalgia and expresses both a sense of intimacy as well as separation. These three characteristics are always present within my art, though sometimes unconsciously, regardless of the thematic content of any one specific piece. In my recent work images of Detroit buildings are intimately created through the use of hand-made, domestic processes like quilting and embroidering, though distant through the depiction of architectural exteriors that maintain space between the seer and the building itself. Detroit and identity are major themes within my art and as a result, my suburban relationship with the city serves as both content and an obstacle in my everyday artistic practice.

How to Produce Articulate Artists

Peter J. Barr PhD et al. — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 08:10:10 PDT

This twenty-minute Powerpoint presentation will describe the team-taught, year-long Foundations Core Concepts Program at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. It has been in place since 2006 and has successfully integrated a course previously called "Language of Art" (taught by an art historian) with hands-on studio assignments previously taught in a stand-alone design course (taught by a studio professor). We have found that this hybrid approach is extremely effective in developing sensitive and articulate art majors who are prepared to integrate design concepts into all of their artworks and to analyze and describe eloquently both personal and historical works of art. This presentation will include a description of the theoretical underpinnings of this program, an overview of the course learning outcomes, examples of two unusual and unusually effective student projects, and a summary of the evidence of the program's effectiveness.

From Playground to Fetish: The Identity of (the) Mary Jane

Georgina Ruff — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:55:07 PDT

Cartoon characters Buster Brown and his sister Mary Jane both wore Mary Jane shoes in 1905. The style was practical for active children – easy to don and securely fastened to busy feet. Yet by the turn of the 21^st century, Mary Jane styles have been adopted by the high fashion industry and fetish culture in forms that are considerably less practical for certain forms of activity. This research traces the transition of the Mary Jane through the twentieth century, from the feet of children to the pages of Vogue and ultimately the couch of Freud. Along the way, this trajectory is analyzed to determine how the functionality of Mary Janes shifts from the playgrounds of childhood to the catwalks of adults.

The Prosthetic Aesthetic: An Art of Anxious Extensions

Tiffany Funk — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:45:09 PDT

The difficulty in ascertaining how the “prosthetic” functions across disciplines derives from the sometimes parallel, and often antithetical definitions given for what it constitutes. Many art historians use the prosthetic to illustrate psychoanalytical methodologies, largely ignoring physical technological devices, cybernetic body augmentation and its social effects – subjects expounded upon by many influential media and cybernetic theorists such as Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Prosthetics are not merely psychic trauma nor virtual signifier, but material artifacts marking autonomy, ability and disability, amputation and extension. A re-evaluation of prosthetics in contemporary aesthetics brings us closer to narrowing the uneasy gap between art historical and media discourses, and greatly enriches undervalued or mis-read artworks meant to explore subjectivities and their uneasy relationship with their various extensions. This paper concentrates on the crisis in autonomy as broached by Freud in his “Civilization and its Discontents”, and how Marshall McLuhan’s description of extension informs the “Aesthetic Prosthetic,” as exemplified in some of the sculptural works of artist Paul Thek.