Visualizing the Riot

Dr. Eddie Chambers, Assistant Professor, and Rose Salseda, Doctoral Student, University of Texas at Austin;

Please submit proposals to eddiechambers@austin.utexas.edu and rsalseda@gmail.com

Throughout the twentieth century, riots have been an intermittent yet pronounced aspect of urban history. Primarily due to the violence they embody, riots draw particular types of attention from mainstream media and arguably pass into history, as well as the popular imagination, in various skewed and problematic ways. In contrast, many artists have made fascinating, sophisticated works that reference specific episodes of rioting. Surprisingly, given the power of the artworks and the devastating effects of rioting, scant curatorial and scholarly attention is paid to how artists visualize riots. Therefore, this session seeks to address some of these seldom-considered issues. The co-chairs seek proposals from art historians, curators, and artists who have explored the visualization of riots. In addition, they hope to secure contributions that critically examine the dominant tropes of rioting, such as burning buildings, looting, and so on, that have become a familiar aspect of mainstream reportage.

See the official 2014 CFP at http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2014CallforParticipation.pdf (CFP listed on page six).

Art History Lecture Series and CLAVIS present:

Rachel Weiss

“Lupe at the mic”

Thursday, April 18, 4:00 pm

Art Building, Room 1.120

“Lupe at the mic” recounts the 2009 performance in Havana for which Tania Bruguera installed a microphone in the patio of the Wifredo Lam Center and invited people to speak, unfiltered, for a minute each. Among those who took her up on her offer was famed dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez, which meant that the piece was an instant scandal and, additionally, succès de scandale. Despite that inherent element of melodrama, there was an unsettling vacuum of catharsis produced by the event, and in fact, it was in its afterlife as rumor, YouTube video, and blog post that the work achieved greatest density. This talk will think through some of the resonances, contradictions, and quandaries raised by the piece and by its reception in various quarters. It is part of a larger project Weiss is currently working on about upsetting experiences of art.

Writer, educator and lapsed curator, Rachel Weiss is Professor of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has published extensively on contemporary art in journals, magazines and newspapers in the US, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia. Major publications include Making Art Global: The Tercera Bienal de la Habana (Afterall Books), To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art (University of Minnesota Press), Por América: la obra de Juan Francisco Elso (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas: co-author and editor) and On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias by Luis Camnitzer (University of Texas Press: editor). Among her major curatorial projects is included the pioneer exhibition Global Conceptualism 1950s-1980s: Points of Origin (Queens Museum of Art, NYC: co-director with Luis Camnitzer and Jane Farver)

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Tonight, April 4, 7:00–9:00PM, the Benson Collection hosts its 11th annual ¡A Viva Voz! celebration of U.S. Latin@ culture. This year’s speaker is Lalo Alcaraz, cartoonist, artist, and writer.

The evening includes an exhibit of Alcaraz’s unique and thought-provoking artwork, with comments by Dr. Flaherty on Alcaraz’s contributions chronicling Latina/o ascendency in the U.S. since the early 1900s. In 2002, Alcaraz created “La Cucaracha,” the first nationally syndicated Latino political comic strip, which runs in a broad spectrum of newspapers.

Light refreshments will be provided. This event is free and open to the public.

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On Thursday, April 11th, at 5:30pm in ART 1.102, the Center for Arts of Africa and its Diasporas (CAAD) will host an artist’s talk with internationally renowned artist and writer Coco Fusco, in conversation with Dr. Flaherty.

Fusco’s multi-media work explores and challenges cultural issues of race, gender and socio-political inequality. From a closed-circuit television series, a performance based on military courses in prisoner interrogation, and online video-streaming, Fusco’s work combines artistic practice with political commentary and social media. Her work has been exhibited at two Whitney Biennials, and recently at Tate Liverpool and Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue de Delme in France. Fusco is also the author of A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (Seven Stories Press) and editor of several books.  She is also the Director of Intermedia Initiatives at Parsons The New School for Design.

This talk is free and open to the public.

We hope to see you there!

Continuing according to CLAVIS’s investigative spirit, the Spring 2013 Permanent Seminar sessions introduce a number of important changes that will hopefully deepen critical discussions on the study of art in Latin America and its resonances beyond the continent. To promote more in-depth discussions, we have planned this semester’s meetings as three clusters centered around a specific theoretical approach.

We look forward to you joining us! As before, all of our meetings take place in CLAVIS (ART 3.434), and everyone is welcome to come. You can also stream our discussions and participate online.

Read below for the information on this semester’s sessions.
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February 26, 7:00 pm

Book Presentation: Sebastián Vidal, “En el principio. Arte, archivos y tecnologías durante la dictadura en Chile,” with commentary by Andrea Giunta and Luis Vargas-Santiago

Session in Spanish

Este libro es un trabajo historiográfico sobre la estrategia documental de los artistas de los años setenta y ochenta y de su tránsito desde la dictadura a la democracia. De escritura crítica y amena, el autor centra su atención en el uso de archivos y de las tecnologías en el arte contemporáneo tales como el video y la computación, tomando como casos paradigmáticos In the Beginning de Juan Downey y el teatro Aleph; la Exposición retrospectiva Santiago punto cero de Gonzalo Mezza; el primer y único programa de televisión especializado sobre video y arte en Chile En torno al video cuyo principal ideólogo es Carlos Flores; y Satelitenis, una video experiencia en la que participaron Eugenio Dittborn, Carlos Flores y Eugenio Downey.

“En el principio. Arte, archivos y tecnologías durante la dictadura en Chile” es un libro fundamental para todo aquel interesado en historia del arte y arte contemporáneo en Chile.

Publicado por Metales Pesados 2013.

http://www.metalespesados.cl/editorial/

This book is a historiographical work about the documental strategies of Chilean artists during the dictatorship and the early years of democracy. In a highly readable, sharp prose, the author analyzes in depth the use of archives and technologies such as video and computers in contemporary art. Here, Vidal works with paradigmatic cases like the first video performance in Chile ‘In the Beginning’ by Juan Downey and The Aleph Theater Company; the pioneering computer exhibition in Chile ‘Santiago punto cero’ by Gonzalo Mezza; Carlos Flores’ ‘En torno al video’, an original TV program specialized on video and art; and ‘Satelitenis’, a video mail art experience produced by Eugenio Dittborn, Carlos Flores and Juan Downey.

En el principio. Arte, archivos y tecnologías durante la dictadura en Chile is a fundamental book to anybody interested in art history and contemporary art in Chile.

Published by Metales Pesados, 2013.

http://www.metalespesados.cl/editorial/

Sebastian Vidal. Ph.D. candidate in art history at The University of Texas at Austin, Fulbright grantee. M.A. and B.A. in Theory and Art History at The Universidad de Chile, B.A. in Art Education at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He worked as archive researcher at Centro de Documentacion de las Artes at Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda CCPLM (2005-2010). He has lectured at ARCIS, Central, and Diego Portales Universities in Santiago and published in diverse print and electronic media. In addition, he has worked as a curator in the exhibitions Devota: Arte Contemporáneo and China Boulevard at CCPLM in 2009, Ultimate Melée Warrior Doom at SAM Gallery in 2010, and Tierra Baldía at CCU Art Gallery. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis, “The Visual Arts during the Chilean Transition,’’ works as a columnist for the art magazine arteycritica.org and is the graduate coordinator of CLAVIS (Center for Latin American Visual Studies) at UT Austin.

March 21, 6:00 pm

George Flaherty, “Death and the Maidens: Regina Teuscher, Regina, and the Afterlives of Mexico’s ‘68″

Among the hundreds of students and supporters murdered by the Mexican government on October 2, 1968 at Tlatelolco, one—Ana María Regina Teuscher Krüger, a 19-year old medical student and hostess for the impending Mexico City Olympics—captured the imagination of various writers. Unflinching photographs of Teuscher by photojournalist Manuel Rojas Aguirre on a morgue examination table were published in Siempre, inspiring Antonio Velasco Piña fictionalized biography, Regina: El 2 de octubre no se olvida (1985), one of the bestselling yet controversial and understudied texts to emerge in response to the massacre. Pretty, young, and educated, she was the face of a modern, liberal Mexico spoiled. Yet, taking her mediation and icon-ization into account, Teuscher also offers a provocative model for writing the history ’68, which has turned in large part on the romanticization of the movement and the evacuation of its political agency by conservative forces. Velasco Piña imagines the student movement as a millenarian groundswell and the massacre as a neo-Mesoamerican sacrifice, offering not a history of “what really happened” but a radical hospitality toward figures and polemics that fall outside the by now canonized representation of ’68, a worthwhile project given the multiple and unanticipated afterlives of the event in contemporary Mexico.

Dr. George Flaherty. Assistant Professor of Latin American and U.S. Latino Art, Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin. George specializes in visual and spatial cultures in post-1940 Mexico and its borderlands, with research interests extending to film and media studies and subaltern studies. George is currently completing a book manuscript, Hotel de México: Dwelling in and on ’68, that investigates Mexico City’s 1968 student movement and its representation. This project has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art), the Social Science Research Council, Society of Architectural Historians and a Fulbright-García Robles grant hosted by the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

April 17, 6:00 pm

Rachel Weiss, “To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art. The Role of the National Museum of Fine Arts”

Rachel Weiss will analyze how the artwork/movement of “New Cuban Art” has been historicized through its institutionalization in the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba. This analysis requires to consider not only the work itself and the context in which it arose, but also how its use value is reassigned in the process of its subsequent entry into historical accounts and, moreover, into markets. According to Weiss, it is the latter entry that is, arguably, of much greater consequence for the ongoing production of visual art on the island. This study contemplates the work of artists like Kcho, Los Carpinteros, Tania Bruguera, Abigaíl González, Carlos Garaicoa, Manuel Piña, Iván Capote, José Luis Marrero among others.

Rachel Weiss. Writer, educator and lapsed curator, Rachel Weiss is Professor of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has published extensively on contemporary art in journals, magazines and newspapers in the US, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia. Major publications include Making Art Global: The Tercera Bienal de la Habana (Afterall Books), To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art (University of Minnesota Press), Por América: la obra de Juan Francisco Elso (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas: co-author and editor) and On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias by Luis Camnitzer (University of Texas Press: editor). Between her major curatorial projects is include the pionner exhibition Global Conceptualism 1950s-1980s: Points of Origin (Queens Museum of Art, NYC: co-director with Luis Camnitzer and Jane Farver).

If you are not at the CAA, a week after this, on Friday, February 22nd, at 11am, Rose will present at the Refashioning Blackness: Contesting Racism in the Afro-Americas conference, sponsored by the Warfield Center and LLILAS. This paper, “All Mod Cons: Minimalism, Race, and Post-Identity Politics,” also discusses the work of Juan Capistran.

Congratulations, Rose!
We are looking forward to both presentations.

Juan Capistran, White Minority, 2005-07, 4 panels each 90”x19 1/2”, overall 96”x81”, acrylic and flocking on canvas

“A Latino New Wave: Minimalism, Race, and Postidentity Politics in the Art of Juan Capistran”

In this paper, I visually analyze All Mod Cons (2005-2007), a series of artworks by Los Angeles based multimedia artist Juan Capistran (b. 1976), and explore the artist’s use of Minimalism and his critical engagement with race within the context of postidentity politics. Inspired by the art of canonical artists from the mid-twentieth century, Capistran’s cycle of artwork consists of five mixed media paintings and sculptures characterized by a Minimalist aesthetic of simplified, geometric forms and a restricted palette of mostly blacks and whites. Though All Mod Cons is distinguished for its pared down aesthetic, the young Latino artist frames his striking and streamlined visual style through an intricate, conceptual web that incorporates various pop cultural and musical references. Interestingly, through his particular practice of Minimalism, Capistran counters the very visual language he relies upon to create his series of artworks. Unlike many of the artists who forged Minimalism, Capistran places value on racial politics as a valid topic for artistic exploration. For instance, much of the conceptual basis of the black and white striped painting White Minority (2005-2007), a re-interpretation of Frank Stella’s Zambezi (1959), lies in the tenuous nature of Stella’s assertion that black is “neutral” or a “non-color.” It is also dependent upon the racial ambiguity present in the title of Stella’s  painting, which he named after a Harlem jazz club—a club labeled “black and deviate” by art critic William Rubin as he discussed the artist’s work. On one hand, the title of White Minority signifies the minoritarian status of the color white as it covers less area space than black. Thus, Capistran expresses the tenets of Minimalism that honors formalism and non-objective art. However, the artist appropriated the title of White Minority from one of the most popular and racially controversial songs by the Los Angeles area punk band Black Flag. Recorded in 1978 by the band’s Puerto Rican singer, Ron Reyes, the song parodies the ranting of an imagined, xenophobic White supremacist who fears the threat of becoming a racial minority. Therefore, through the use of racial allegory, Capistran’s painting also suggests the minoritarian status of the White race. Consequently, the artist repackages the visual language of Minimalism as a radical and engaging style of art for the political and racial realities of contemporary Los Angeles, a city where people of color outnumber Whites and where the population of Latinos, alone, nearly equals the White population. Yet, Capistran’s refusal of labels such as “Latino” or “Chicano” for his artwork complicates his artistic validation of the politics of identity and race. A Mexican immigrant who grew up in Los Angeles after the initial wave of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, Capistran does not hold a strong relationship with Chicano activism and believes that racialized labels for his artwork restricts his exhibition opportunities as an artist and limits his audience. Grounding my discussion of Capistran’s artwork within the histories of Minimalism, Punk Rock, and the politics of race in art history and in Los Angeles, specifically, I reveal the possible ways in which younger generations of Latino artists, like Capistran, participate in a postidentity politics that, in a seemingly contradictory manner, honors race-based activism, but eschews racial identity.

The organizing committee will select a limited number of papers, privileging those that establish dialogues for enhancing the seminar’s aims. Abstracts should be 3000 characters with spaces. The deadline is March 1 and may be submitted to seminario.neovanguardias@gmail.com. Presentations may be in English, Spanish or Portuguese, the working languages of the seminar. The organizing committee will communicate its selections and offer further guidelines for the presentations by March 30.

The seminar will cover the travel and accommodation, inclusive of board, of those researchers who are selected.

Prof. George Flaherty, Assistant Professor of Art History & Associate Director, Center for Latin American Visual Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Prof. Andrea Giunta, Chair in Latin American Art History and Criticism & Director, Center for Latin American Visual Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Prof. Cristina Freire, Vice-Director Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo

Prof. Inés Katzenstein, Director, Art Department, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires

Prof. Carmen María Jaramillo, Dean Program of Visual Arts, Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano

For more information about “Connecting Art Histories” see: http://www.getty.edu/foundation/funding/art_history/current/connecting_art.html

For more information about CLAVIS see: http://utexasclavis.org/

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Getty Foundation “Connecting Art Histories” Initiative

Grounds for Comparison: Neo-Vanguards and Latin American and U.S. Latino Art

Synchronicities, Contacts and Divergences

First Research Seminar

Bogotá 2013

June 1-9

Host: Carmen María Jaramillo

Universidad of Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano

Understanding originality and innovation to be proposals that contribute to the interpretation of change and formation of a transnational field, this inaugural seminar explores tensions between the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century (both Latin American and European) and the neo-avant-garde that emerged between 1960 and 1990, approximately, in Latino and Latin American art. To date this relationship is fraught by theoretical and methodological difficulties posed by scholarly literatures that have assessed these phenomena, by no means homogenous or coordinated, largely in terms of derivation and creative exhaustion with regard to hegemonic centers of the art world. This perspective has foreclosed analysis of the historical significance of key moments in postwar art and their critical and innovative potential in comparative terms. The reappearance of collage and assemblage, and of grid and monochromatic painting, to name only a few vanguardist techniques, was a self-reflexive return, offering a critique of postwar societies. Neo-avant-gardes consciously forged formal and informal networks that linked colleagues and strategies beyond their local scenes or nationalist histories. We seek to investigate these synchronicities that emerge from both contact and divergence. Through their critical comparison we expect to produce conceptualizations of postwar art history that generate and invert rather than merely add to global/dominant narratives to date.

The Bogotá seminar has three principal purposes:

1. Juxtapose and develop close case studies (for example, the analysis of a single work based in deep research in the field) in a seminar setting to reveal points of contact and divergence between parallel neo-avant-garde artistic scenes.
2. In order to discuss theoretical and methodological approaches that contribute to a synchronous historical perspective, that considers contacts and divergences, problematizing comparison itself.
3. Ultimately debate the productivity of this tension between the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-garde, leaving room for alternative or not yet codified conceptualizations.

Possible topics to explore:

• (Re)Defining the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes and their productivity for Latin American/Latino art
•  The interpretive possibilities and limits of critical comparison
• Collectives and collaboration: Critical masses and the formation of informal or parallel institutions
• Abstractions
• Conceptualisms
• Relations with popular culture
• Re-contextualization (collage and assemblage)
• Participation
• Performance
• Dictatorship and authoritarianism: Violence and censorship as conditions of artistic expression
• Intervening in space and place: materialization and dematerialization, territorialization and re-territorialization
• International networks: mail and video art
• Repetition, seriality, copy
• Explorations in the transit between analog and digital technologies and languages
• Neo-avant-garde’s relationship to discourses of modernity, postmodernity, the “Long Sixties”

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Conectando historias del arte

Zonas de comparación: Neo-vanguardias y arte latinoamericano / latino

Sincronicidades, contactos y divergencias

Primer seminario de investigación

Bogotá 2013

Anfitrión: Carmen María Jiménez

Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano

Entendiendo la originalidad y la innovación como propuestas que contribuyen a la interpretación del cambio y la formación de un campo transnacional, este primer seminario internacional explora las tensiones entre las vanguardias históricas del comienzo del siglo XX (tanto las latinoamericanas como las europeas) y las neo-vanguardias que emergen aproximadamente entre 1960 y 1990 en el arte latinoamericano y latino. Hasta el presente esta relación está atravesada por dificultades teóricas y metodológicas planteadas por la literatura académica que ha evaluado este fenómeno, que de ningún modo es homogéneo o está coordinado, en términos de derivación y agotamiento creativo respecto de los centros hegemónicos del mundo del arte. Esta perspectiva ha cerrado el análisis del significado histórico de los momentos artísticos de posguerra, la visualización de su potencial crítico e innovador en términos comparativos. La reaparición del collage y el assemblage, de la geometría y de la pintura monocroma, considerando sólo algunas de las técnicas vanguardistas, implicó un retorno auto reflexivo que dio lugar a una crítica de las sociedades de posguerra. Las neovanguardias conscientemente generaron redes formales e informales que vincularon artistas y estrategias más allá de las escenas locales o de las historias nacionales. Tratamos de investigar las sincronías que surgen del contacto, pero también de las divergencias. A través de su comparación crítica esperamos producir conceptualizaciones productivas de la historia del arte de posguerra que generen e inviertan las interpretaciones meramente aditivas que hasta el momento ordenan las narrativas globales/dominantes.

Palabras clave: abstracción de posguerra, experimentación en los años sesenta, conceptualismos, crítica institucional, críticas de la modernidad

El seminario de Bogotá tiene tres propósitos principales:

1. Yuxtaponer y desarrollar casos de estudio (por ejemplo, el análisis de una obra en particular basado en un intenso trabajo de investigación de archivo) a fin de revelar puntos de contacto y divergencias entre escenas paralelas de la neo-vanguardia.
2. Con el propósito de discutir aproximaciones teóricas y metodológicas que contribuyan a una perspectiva histórica sincrónica, que considere contactos y divergencias, problematizando la comparación en sí misma.
3. Finalmente, debatir la productividad de la tensión entre vanguardias históricas y neo-vanguardias, con el objeto de visualizar conceptualizaciones alternativas que no han sido aún codificadas.

Posibles tópicos a investigar:

• Redefinición de las vanguardias históricas y las neovanguardias y su productividad para el análisis del arte latino y latinoamericano
• Posibilidades interpretativas y límites críticos de la comparación
• Colectivos y colaboración: conceptualizaciones críticas y formación de instituciones paralelas o informales
• Abstracciones
• Conceptualismos
• Relaciones con la cultura popular
• Re-contextualización (collage y assemblage)
• Participación
• Performance
• Dictadura y autoritarismo: violencia y censura como condiciones de la expresión artística
• Intervenciones en el espacio y el lugar: materialización y desmaterialización, territorialización y reterritorialización
• Redes internacionales: mail art y video art
• Repetición, serialidad, copia
• Exploraciones en el tránsito entre tecnologías y lenguajes analógicos y digitales
• Relaciones entre las neo-vanguardias y los discursos de la modernidad, posmodernidad y los “largos años sesenta”.

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Conectando histórias da arte

Áreas de comparação: Neo-vanguardas e Arte latino Americana / Latino Arte

Sincronicidades

Primeiro Seminário de Pesquisa

Bogotá 2013

Responsável: Carmen Maria Jimenez

Universidade de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano

Entendendo a originalidade e a inovação como propostas que contribuem para a interpretação da mudança e da formação de um campo transnacional, este primeiro seminário internacional explora as tensões entre as vanguardas históricas do início do século XX (tanto latinoamericanas como européias) e as neovanguardas que surgem aproximadamente entre 1960 e 1990 na arte latino-americana e latina. Até hoje essa relação atravessa dificuldades teóricas e metodológicas levantadas pela literatura acadêmica que avaliou esse fenômeno, que de modo algum é uniforme ou está coordenado em termos de derivação e exaustão criativa sobre os centros hegemônicos do mundo da arte. Esta perspectiva limitou a análise de significado histórico dos momentos artístico do pós-guerra, a visualização de seu potencial crítico e inovador em termos comparativos. O reaparecimento de collage e da assemblage, da geometria e da pintura monocromática, considerando apenas algumas das técnicas vanguardistas, implicou um retorno autoreflexivo que deu lugar a uma crítica das sociedades do pós-guerra. As neovanguardas conscientemente geraram redes formais e informais que vincularam artistas e estratégias para além das cenas locais ou das histórias nacionais. Tratamos de investigar as sincronias que surgem  do contato e também  das diferenças.

Através de sua comparação critica esperamos produzir conceitualizações produtivas da história da arte do pós-guerra que gerem e invertam as interpretações meramente aditivas que até o momento organizam as narrativas globais/dominantes.

Palavras-chave: abstração do pós-guerra, experimentação nos anos sessenta, conceitualismos, crítica institucional, crítica da modernidade.

O seminário em Bogotá tem três objetivos principais:

1. Justapor e desenvolver estudos de caso (por exemplo, a análise de um trabalho específico com base em uma intensa pesquisa de arquivo) para revelar pontos de contato e divergências entre cenas paralelas da neo-vanguarda.
2. Discutir as abordagens teóricas e metodológicas que contribuem para uma perspectiva histórica síncrona (que trabalhem processos síncronicos ou pontos de convergências assincronicos) problematizando a comparação em si.
3. Finalmente, debater a produtividade da tensão entre vanguardas históricas e neovanguardas, a fim de visualizar conceitualizações alternativas que ainda não foram codificadas.

Possíveis temas para investigar:

• Redefinição das vanguardas históricas, as neovanguardas e sua produtividade para o estudo da  arte latina e latina-americana.
• Possibilidades interpretativas e limites críticos para a comparação.
• Coletivos e Colaboração: conceitualizações críticas e formalização de instituições paralelas ou informais.
• Abstrações
• Conceitualismos
• Relações com a cultura popular
• Recontextualização (collage e assemblage)
• Participação
• Performance
• Ditadura e autoritarismo: violência e censura como condições da expressão artística
• Intervenções no espaço e lugar: materialização e desmaterialização, territorialização e reterritorialização.
• Redes internacionais: mail art e vídeo-arte
• Repetição, serialidade, cópia
• Explorações no trânsito entre tecnologias e linguagens digitais e analógicas
• Relações entre as neo-vanguardas e os discursos da modernidade, pós-modernidade e os “longos anos sessenta”

Preliminary bibliography / Bibliografía preliminar / Bibliografia preliminar:

Anderson, Benedict. 1998. The Specters of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. New York: Verso.

Buchloh, Benjamin. 2000. Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American art from 1965 to 1975. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Burger, Peter. 1984 [1974]. Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Camnitzer, Luis. Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation. Austin: University of Texas Press.

DaCosta Kaufmann. 2004. Toward a Geography of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Debroise, Olivier ed. 2006. La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en México, 1968-1997. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México: Turner.

Elkin, James. 2006. Is Art History Global? New York: Routledge.

Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Freire, Cristina and Ana Longoni ed. 2009. Conceptualismos del Sur. São Paulo: Annablume.

Fusco, Coco ed. 2000. Corpus Delecti: PerformanceAart of the Americas. New York: Routledge.

Giunta, Andrea. 2007. Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties, Durham: Duke University Press.

Gonzalez, Jennifer. 2008. Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Jaramillo, Carmen María. 2005. Arte, política y crítica: una aproximación a la consolidación del arte moderno en Colombia. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Krauss, Rosalind. 1985. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Moreiras, Alberto. 2001. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies.Durham: Duke University Press.

Poggioli, Renato. 1968. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Ramírez, Mari Carmen ed. 2004. Inverted Utopias: Avant-garde art in Latin America. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Unruh, Vicky. 1994. Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1989. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso.

Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás. 1991. “The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine eds. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Esteban Buch is directeur détudes at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. A specialist on the relations between music and politics in the twentieth century, he is the author of six books, namely, in French, Le cas Schönberg (Gallimard, 2006), La Neuvième de Beethoven (Gallimard, 1999; English translation by The University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Histoire d’un secret (Actes Sud, 1994); in Spanish, The Bomarzo Affair (Adriana Hidalgo, 2003), O juremos con gloria morir (Sudamericana, 1994), and El pintor de la Suiza argentina (Sudamericana, 1991). He is currently director of the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et les Langages (CRAL), and director of the Master in Music programme of the EHESS.

Lecture on Stravinsky’s The Rite of the Spring on the 100 anniversary of its premiere

Scandal at The Rite: Games of distinction and dreams of barbarism

Wednesday, February 6 * 5:00PM * ART 1.120

For a century, the 1913 riot has pursued The Rite like a shadow, or like some strange alter ego. Between them they came to signify the end of the world of yesterday, the triumph of modernity, even the first fruits of the Great War or totalitarianism.
The first performance was described as disrupted from start to finish by displays of hostility such as laughter, shouting, hoots, hissing, as much as by signs of approval, just as noisy, provided by another section of the public, including friends of the performers. And the general assertion, that because of the racket in the auditorium it was very difficult to hear Stravinsky’s music and even harder to listen to it.
The Rite of Spring is itself the expression of a conflict between norms. It is even the paradox of legitimate transgression that retrospectively justifies its inclusion in the canon of modern art. For those who admired it the most, The Rite was an irreducible singularity called to become a new law, that of the Messiah or that of the Revolution. For those most hostile to it, it was not exactly a bad work, but a work that, by a sort of passage to the limits of the bad, interrogated the criteria of evaluation of the bad itself. With his costumes and scenery, Nikolai Roerich, who in himself alone embodied the alliance between art and archaeology, contributed to the creation of an authentic scene shared by performers and audience. But Stravinsky’s music and Nijinsky’s choreography, for their part, tended to bring to a crisis the modes of representation of cultural otherness. This lecture analyzes the keys to the riot in order to understand the articulation of an avant-garde project that connected references to other cultures with artistic experimentation.

Human Rights and the Arts Workshop

With Esteban Buch and Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UT-Austin

Tuesday, February 5 * 2–3.30PM * CLAVIS, ART 3.434

The purpose of this workshop is to contribute to create a space of interdisciplinary research and discussion about cultural history during the last Argentine dictatorship. The workshop is directed to students and scholars in different arts and cultural practices. As a departure point, we will consider different cases within the field of music: the national anthem as a political instrument of the regime, the commissioned work to Alberto Ginastera for the 4th anniversary of the foundation of the city of Buenos Aires, Astor Piazzolla’s recording dedicated to the Mundial 78, the work of Gustavo Beytelmann in exile. This workshop focuses on clues that allow a better understanding of the 1978-83 period from a more general perspective that will include the analysis of rock, folklore, tango, disco music and other communal/celebratory practices in counterpoint with the repressive action of the regime. The workshop seeks to contribute to a debate about key concepts that organize both the memory of the Proceso and its historical study: collaboration, hegemony, State terrorism, and resistance.

Dr. Esteban Buch’s visit at The University of Texas at Austin is made partially possible by 

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Diego Bianchi: Into the Wild Meaning

February 1 – March 9, 2013

The Arcade – Visual Arts Center, UT Austin

Curated by Sterling Allen

Into The Wild Meaning, a solo exhibition by Buenos Aires-based artist Diego Bianchi, is a platform for the inspection of objects and their ability to serve as parts of a whole. Each object is given a new purpose by the artist through his roles as builder and performer.

The Arcade will serve as Bianchi’s lab for Into The Wild Meaning, where he will make rudimentary sculptures from collected objects, appliances in a state of disuse, and parts of other things. The viewer is invited to explore this construction site, where gathered groups of objects become hybrid forms, somewhat anthropomorphic, but still clinging to their material origins. The tenderness with which Bianchi accumulates and fastens together these objects is at odds with the often repulsive and haunting forms that he tends to favor and construct. This juxtaposition prompts the viewer to question their position to the al of his work and their surroundings, both inside the gallery and ultimately beyond.

In any work labeled ‘sculptural,’ the viewer’s body, by default, becomes a component of the experience and understanding of the work. In past installations, Bianchi makes this object-viewer relationship more visceral by activating the work with his own body. Like an array of stage props, he calls the sculptures to action through their potential to shift in space and time. This highlights the artist and viewer’s acute awareness of the materiality of sculpture and exacerbates the strong physical and psychological presence of his work.

Into The Wild Meaning is funded in part by Ann L. Daughety and CLAVIS–Center for Latin American Visual Studies.

Diego Bianchi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1969, where he still lives and works. He studied graphic design at Buenos Aires University and was a recipient of the prestigious Guillermo Kuitca grant from 2003–2005, one of the few programs in Argentina that establish mentorships for young artists. In 2006, he was in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Since 2009, Bianchi has been a lecturer for the ‘Anti-Project’ course at Di Tella University, in which he places art within the contingent confines of everyday reality to subvert any ingrained perceptions of art’s potential and meaning. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in Argentina, Spain, and the USA. Recently he participated in both the Lyon and Havana Biennales.

Sterling Allen received his BFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin in 2003. He is currently the co-director of the artist collective and exhibition space Okay Mountain, which he founded in 2006 with eight other Austin artists. As a solo artist and in collaboration with Okay Mountain, he has exhibited and organized numerous projects at venues throughout the United States and received several residencies, including the Artpace International Artist-In-Residence Program in San Antonio, Texas. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College.