Parallax: Changing Perspectives in Visual Culture

a 2008-2009 Series of Public Conferences

The series is made possible by a grant from the Anonymous Fund.

Queer Theory, Visual Culture
October 13-14, 2008

Coming over a decade after the field-defining publications of the early to mid 1990s, this symposium critically revisits the questions of the queer theorization of visual culture, the deep critique within queer theory of certain modes of visibility, and the transformative promise of critical/visual tactics of queering. In particular, this conference explores how the term queer works against the more defined categories of identity such as gay, lesbian, and “straight,” and, instead, hints at those “unspeakable” categories of identity that remain in tension with, but somehow beyond, strict taxonomy and stable representation. The mini-conference begins with lectures and discussion-based workshops by two influential queer theorists whose work importantly engages the visual: David L. Eng and Ann Pellegrini.
All events are in the lower level of the Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Avenue.

Monday: October 13:

1:30pm-3:30pm: Workshop with David L. Eng: "Racial Reparation". Chazen Museum of Art, Room L166. Seating is limited. Advanced registration and reading are required. To register and gain access to the readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu.

5:00pm: "Sensational Publics and the War on Terror", a public lecture by Ann Pellegrini, Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L150.

In the past decade, affect has emerged as a critical term for queer studies, visual culture studies, and performance studies, among other interdisciplinary domains.  Arguably, this turn to affect has gained added urgency in the wake of 9/11 and the mobilization of U.S. public feelings towards war.  Indeed, one of the questions animating this talk is the odd turn of phrase whereby President Bush transformed a "war on terrorism" into a "war on terror."  What does it mean to declare war on a feeling?  How does such a declaration articulate space for some affective formations, and the subjectivities condensed around them, and exclude others?  What are the stakes of being located in excess to organized public feelings? 

6:30pm: "The Queer Space of China", a public lecture by David L. Eng, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and a core faculty member in Asian-American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L150.

This presentation explores the emergence of gay and lesbian life in contemporary China in relation to liberal distinctions between public space and private desires.  Following anthropologist Lisa Rofel's recent scholarship on expressive desire, I investigate the ways in which Chinese gays and lesbians are positioned as individuals who are uniquely capable of embracing their private desires and thus are at the vanguard of a new modernity in China.  In addition to focusing on public culture in Shanghai, I plan to speak about Stanley Kwan's 2001 film Lan Yu. 

Tuesday, October 14:
10:00am-Noon: Workshop with Ann Pellegrini: "Queer Structures of Religious Feeling". Chazen Museum of Art, Room L166. Seating is limited. Advanced registration and reading are required. To register and gain access to the readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES:

DAVID L. ENG is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and a core faculty member in Asian-American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.A. in English from Columbia University. His areas of specialization include American literature, Asian American studies, Asian diaspora, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, queer studies, and visual culture. He is author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke, forthcoming) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001). In addition, he is co-editor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003), with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple, 1998), and with Judith Halberstam and Jose Muñoz of a special issue of the journal Social Text (2005), "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" He is currently at work on two new projects, a study of neoliberalism and desire in Chinese cinema and an analysis of political and psychic reparation.  

ANN PELLEGRINI is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University. She received her Ph.D. in cultural studies from Harvard. Her publications include: Love The Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York University Press, 2003);  (March 2004); Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997); Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, coedited with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz (Columbia University Press, 2003); “After Sontag: Future Notes on Camp,” in The Blackwell Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (London: Blackwell, 2007 [in press]); “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive,” in Critical Theory and Performance, second edition, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, in press); and “Consuming Lifestyle: Commodity Capitalism and Transformations in Gay Identity,” in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, ed. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan (New York: New York University Press, 2002): 134-145.

Co-sponsored by Asian American Studies, LGBT Studies and the Department of Art History.

Photography and the Technologies of Empire and Race
November 4-7, 2008

This conference convenes scholars and practitioners distributed across the disciplines on campus to discuss the ways in which we implement, interrogate, and intersect photography with studies of empire and race. The conference provides a timely intervention in the wake of a watershed period in the history of U.S. empire in which photographs (particularly the Abu Ghraib prison photographs) challenge our understanding of the powers of photographic images. The conference's research colloquium will advance an exchange of ideas on theory, practice and research methods in the study of photography as a technology of empire and race and also within a comparative global scope and broad temporal sweep that will allow consideration of the diversity of local practice and historical change.

Tuesday, November 4:
Noon-2:00pm: "Institutionalizing the Popular Memory of Slavery in Britain and North America," a workshop with Marcus Wood. Seating is limited. Advanced registration and reading are required. To register and gain access to the readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L166.

5:30pm: "Photography, Slavery and Intimacy in America and Brazil: Freedom and the Moment Out of Time," a public lecture by Marcus Wood, Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L150.

Because of the comparatively recent dates of slavery abolition in North America and Brazil photographs recording some of the processes and experiences of slavery emancipation were made in large numbers. These Daguerreotypes, glass negatives, albumen prints, tin types and cartes-de-visite constituted a wholly new and different slavery and emancipation archive from that which went before. My talk will consider the interpretative, narrative, aesthetic and indeed temporal aspects of these early photographs which might differentiate them from the preceding visual art which had claimed to represent the experience of slavery emancipation.

Thursday, November 6:
Noon-2:00pm: "Photography, Race and Reproduction," a workshop with Shawn Michelle Smith. Seating is limited. Advanced registration and reading are required. To register and gain access to the readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L166.

5:30pm: "The Politics of Pictorialism:  Race and Eroticism in the Photographs of F. Holland Day, " a public lecture by Shawn Michelle Smith, Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160.

Historians of photography have generally understood pictorialist aesthetics as a misguided effort to elevate photography as an art form through the imitation and emulation of painting and printmaking.  This talk reconsiders the politics of pictorialism through an analysis of F. Holland Day's fascinating photographs.  It suggests that Day’s ethereal aesthetics offer a politics of theatrical beauty and symbolism that challenges scientific ways of seeing and engages in turn-of-the-century debates about race and sexuality.

Friday, November 7:
9:00-11:00am: Research colloquium in Photography and the Technologies of Empire and Race. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L166. Participants include Guillermina de Ferrari (Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese), Marcela Guerrero-Medina (PhD Candidate, Art History), Tom Jones (Assistant Professor, Art), Nancy Mithlo (Assistant Professor, Art History and American Indian Studies), Heather Sonntag (PhD Candidate, Languages and Cultures of Asia), Suzette Spencer (Assistant Professor, Afro-American Studies), K.L.H. Wells (MA Student, Department of Art History), and Beth Zinsli (PhD Student, Department of Art History).

11:00am: Gallery talk by curators Heather Sonntag and Beth Zinsli, Kohler Art Library, Chazen Museum of Art.
Travel, Typology, Technology: Photography and the (Re)Production of Empire
This exhibition of historical photographic objects developed around a question central to our individual research: what was the role of photography in the creation and maintenance of empire? We present nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs from the Belgian Congo and British colonies in the Middle East as case studies for the ways in which photography galvanized the (re)production of empire through visual images. In addition, the juxtaposition of photographs from diverse global colonial projects, including the Philippines, Central Asia, and the Caribbean, expose photography as a key technology for disseminating ideologies about race and empire around the world during the colonial period.

1:00pm: Gallery talk by curator Heather Sonntag, Special Collections, Memorial Library
(Un)Binding Empire: French & Russian Imperial Albums
This exhibition compares two visual projects from Napoleonic France and Tsarist Russia. Elaborate and encyclopedic, the Description of Egypt and the Turkestan Album demonstrate the scientific scope and ambitious scale of the modern colonial survey. Co-sponsored by the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia.  

2:00-3:00pm: Gallery talk by curators Marcela Guerrero and Amy Powell, Steenbock Gallery at the Wisconsin Academy, 1922 University Avenue.
Impermanent Archive: Photography and the Technologies of Empire and Race
How does the body function like a camera? How does the eye work like an archive? Impermanent Archive brings together photographic objects whose images, fixed with chemicals on paper, question the ways that photographs also fix group identity and ethnicity. As sites of power plays between subject and object, these works unhinge and unsettle the archive’s claims to historical and psychological permanence, revealing the instability of the image and the changing nature of time.  This exhibition is co-sponsored by the Center for Photography in Madison and the Visual Culture Center.

5:00-8:00pm: Reception at the Steenbock Gallery at the Wisconsin Academy, 1922 University Avenue.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES:

MARCUS WOOD is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. His books include Radical Satire and Print Culture (Oxford University Press, 1994), Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (Manchester University Press, 2000), and Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford University Press, 2003). His forthcoming book, The Horrible Gift of Freedom, considers Brazilian and North American slavery propagandas in comparative perspective. His article "Atlantic Slavery and Traumatic Representation in Museums: The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum as a Test Case" appeared in the June 2008 special issue of Slavery and Abolition on Public Art, Artifacts and Atlantic Slavery. Professor Wood is also a painter, installation artist and filmmaker.

SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH, Associate Professor in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is an artist, historian, and critic interested in the history and theory of photography. She received her PhD in American Literature and Culture from the University of California, San Diego. Her publications include Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004); American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 1999), Lynching Photographs, co-authored with Dora Apel (University of California Press, 2008), "Second-Sight:  Du Bois and the Black Masculine Gaze," in Next to the Color Line:  Gender, Sexuality,  and W. E. B. Du Bois, eds. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (University of Minnesota Press,  2007),  350-377; "Afterimages:  White Womanhood, Lynching, and the War in Iraq,"  Special Issue:  "Strange Fruit: Lynching, Visuality, and Empire."  Nka:  Journal of Contemporary African Art.  Number 20 (Fall 2006):  72-85; and  "The Half of Whiteness,"  Special Issue on Photography and Literature, Forum on Photography and Race, English Language Notes 44:2 (Fall/Winter 2006): 189-194. She has received a Tanner Humanities Center Fellowship from the University of Utah, an Irene Diamond Foundation Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and a Center for the Humanities Fellowship at Oregon State University.

Co-sponsored by the Global Studies Program and the Departments of Afro-American Studies, Art History and Languages and Cultures of Asia

Perception
February 12-13, 2009

The Visual Culture Center and the Eye Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are committed to fostering research collaborations and dialogue that connect the analysis and practice of the visual across the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences. This conference on “Perception” represents a fundamental part of our initiatives to further the links between disciplines around common interest in the role of visual representation in scientific practice. The conference is dedicated to the question of how we might reconcile and combine research in the neuroscience and physiology of perception with historical, critical, and theoretical work premised on the socially, historically, and culturally constructed and variable nature of perception.

Conference events are free and open to the public, though online registration is required.

Thursday, February 12
6:00pm: “Slow Looking: Whatever Happened to Selective Attention?” Public lecture by Barbara Maria Stafford, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Emerita, at the University of Chicago. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L140.

While researching Echo Objects, I became increasingly aware of the intense scientific focus (as well as media focus) on the brain as primarily a self-organizing, largely inward-directed autopoietic system recursively preoccupied with its own functions. To be sure, Gerald Edelman and other neural Darwinists and neural constructivists as well as cognitive scientists, such as Andy Clark, who fall on the side of distributed cognition, emphasize the importance of reentry, plasticity, and the dynamics of connection-making. Nevertheless, it is notable that from the early writings of Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana to the current publications of Douglas Hofstadter, what tends to get emphasized are the ways in which the brain’s activity is intrinsically in phase with things going on in the external world largely without our being conscious of it.

As I argue in the concluding chapter of Echo Objects (“Impossible Will?”) , there are enormous social consequences (especially when coupled to the new reality of “tailored” medicine and the “chemical brain”) of this almost fatalistic “trapped in illusion” position. (Consider, for example, what I term the extreme phenomenology of Thomas Metzinger who is not alone in holding this thesis.) In this project, I am thus interested, first, in analyzing the ways that different art formats variously engage and make viewers aware of the fact that our brain activity is both unpreventably isomorphic,or in phase with things going on inside of us and in the outside world and simultaneously capable of breaking that unreflective alignment.

Friday, February 13
9:00am-5:00pm: Research colloquium, including panel presentations, workshops and lunch. Pyle Center Auditorium, 702 Langdon Street. Registration is free and required.

Conference Schedule
9:00 AM Introductions

9:30-10:30: What is perception in your field?
Moderator: Shiela Reaves, Professor, Department of Life Sciences Communication
Sabine Gross, Professor, Department of German
Barbara Blodi, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences

10:30-11:00 AM: Coffee Break 

11:00–12:30: Faculty Research Presentations
Moderator: Michele Basso, Associate Professor, Department of Physiology
Ben Singer, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Arts
Aimee Arnoldussen, Neuroscientist, Wicab, Inc.
Ann Smart Martin, Stanley and Polly Stone Associate Professor of American Decorative Arts, Department of Art History, and Director, Material Culture Program
Brad Postle, Associate Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry

12:30—1:30 PM: Lunch

1:45-2:45: Experiential Workshop with Marshall Flax, MS, Certified Low Vision Therapist and Director of Vision Rehabilitation Services, Wisconsin Council of the Blind & Visually Impaired
Workshop Description: Visual perception, by definition, begins with the eyes.  But what if the eyes, or parts of the visual system, are damaged? How would that affect one’s perception?  Through the use of low vision simulators, participants will have the opportunity to see the world with impaired visual acuity and/or compromised visual fields.  While the immediate impact of limited functional abilities will be obvious, the relative value of the elements of color, contrast, lighting and image size can also be experienced. And what do we know about perception when the visual system does not work?  One area of exploration is with the BrainPort, a device that presents a visual image on the tongue.  Does the blind person using the BrainPort “see” the world with the tongue?

3:00-4:00: Workshop with Barbara Stafford, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Emerita, University of Chicago
Advanced readings are required

4:15-5:00: Graduate Research Presentations
Moderator: Jill H. Casid, Director, Visual Culture Center
Willow Hagge, MFA Candidate, Department of Art
Matthew Rarey, Ph.D. Student, Department of Art History
Carrie A. Roy, Ph.D. Student, Scandinavian Studies, Folklore, and Material Culture

5:30pm: Exhibition reception for STEREOPSIS, 734 Gallery (734 University Avenue)
Stereopsis is a process of perception. Two distinct and dis/located eyes, each with a different view of the world, come together to form the sensation of spatial depth. Stereopsis takes this as a point of departure, presenting a series of works in open-ended dialogue that ask us to rethink the relation between perception and the experience of knowledge. Curated by Willow Hagge, MFA Candidate, Department of Art, and Matthew F. Rarey, PhD Student, Department of Art History.

BARBARA MARIA STAFFORD is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Emerita, at the University of Chicago. Her work has consistently explored the intersections between the visual arts and the physical and biological sciences from the early modern to the contemporary era. Her current research charts the revolutionary ways the neurosciences are changing our views of the human and animal sensorium, shaping our fundamental assumptions about perception, sensation, emotion, mental imagery, and subjectivity. Stafford’s most recent book is Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, University of Chicago Press, 2007.

"Perception" is presented in collaboration with the UW Eye Research Institute and co-sponsored by the Global Studies Program, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and the Department of Art History.

Worlding Visual Culture: Transnational Feminism and the Visual
April 8-10, 2009

This conference is dedicated to bringing into contact three important strands of transnational feminist work on the visual, namely questions of political representation and public praxis within transnational feminist theorizing and critique, the extension of transnational feminist theory to the analysis of the global flows of visual media, and visual culture studies work (scholarship and exhibitions) on transnational feminist film, performance, and visual art.

Wednesday, April 8
6:00pm: "Technologies of Unbelonging," Public lecture by Ranjana Khanna, Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies and Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L150.

This talk addresses the work of contemporary artists Isaac Julien and Mona Hatoum, and the manner in which each cite different technologies in their works.  It engages with Heidegger's understanding of "techne" but refigures that concept with an eye to transnational feminist use of technology and the ideologies of belonging.

Thursday, April 9
10:00am-Noon: Workshop with Ranjana Khanna. Chazen Museum of Art, Room 120 (inside the University Avenue entrance to the Museum). Seating is limited, advanced registration is required. To register, and for access to the workshop readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu

6:00pm: "Screen Eroticisms: Technology, the Body and Explorations of Female Desire in the Work of Carolee Schneemann and Pipilotti Rist," Public lecture by Amelia Jones, Pilkington Professor of the History of Art at Manchester University. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L140.

This paper addresses a profound technological and ideological shift in the visualization and conceptualization of eroticism in screen-based culture from the 1960s to the 1990s through a comparative analysis of two major feminist screen-based projects: Carolee Schneemann's Fuses (1964-7) and Pipilotti Rist's Pickelporno (or, in English, Pimple Porno; 1992). By focusing on these two pieces, each produced by a key figure in the history of contemporary and (more specifically) feminist art, the essay seeks to cast light on three major and interrelated shifts in the following areas:  1) feminist and broader social conceptions of eroticism and sexual agency;  2) the articulation of a vital female erotic power through specific screen-based media (16mm film and video, respectively), each having its own potential to render the human subject differently; and 3) artistic strategies for exploring the relationships among the body, the camera, the resultant screen image and space. Ultimately, by showing how each artist pushes technological capacities of each medium (film and video) to render different modes of female sexual agency, the essay will point to broad transformations in beliefs about sexual identity and embodiment in the contemporary period.

Friday, April 10
9:00am-Noon: Research colloquium in "Worlding Visual Culture: Transnational Feminism and the Visual," featuring presentations by Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis (Evjue-Bascom Professor of African and African American Art History and Visual Culture, Department of Afro-American Studies), Jane Simon (Curator of Exhibitions, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art), Amy L. Powell (PhD Student, Department of Art History), Lucy Traverse (MA Student, Department of Art History), Jessica Brown-Vélez (PhD Student, Department of Theatre & Drama), Sonia Meyers (MA Student, Department of Art History), and Pritika Chowdhry (Artist and MA Student in Visual Culture Studies). Chazen Museum of Art, Room L170.. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L170.

1:00-3:00pm: "Seeing Differently: Identity and the Visual," a workshop with Amelia Jones. Chazen Museum of Art, Room L170. Seating is limited, advanced registration is required. To register, and for access to the workshop readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES:

AMELIA JONES, Pilkington Professor of the History of Art at Manchester University, studied at Harvard, Pennsylvania, and UCLA where she took her PhD. She specializes in many different aspects of modern and contemporary art including feminism and art; performance, body and video art; and Dada. She has curated many exhibitions and is the author of Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994), and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998), as well as the primary survey essay in the Phaidon book on The Artist's Body (2000). She has also edited several books: Contemporary Art, 1945-2003 (2005; the book includes 25 newly commissioned and written essays by internationally known experts exploring the history of art discourse and practice within successive decades and addressing key themes in contemporary art); Feminism and Visual Culture (2003); Performing the Body/Performing the Text (with Andrew Stephenson, 1999); and Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's 'Dinner Party' in Feminist Art History (1996). Jones is currently working on a book project on Identity and the Visual, which draws on sources from aesthetic philosophy to art history to neuro-science and the psychology of self-identification to explore the problem of how the visual functions in our navigation of the world around us as well as in the more specialized arena of the visual arts.   The book will present a deep historical and theoretical analysis of how identity has functioned historically and continues to function in relation to structures of visuality and the discourses and institutions associated with the visual arts, and provide a new theory of identity in relation to visual culture. Relating to this new work on identity politics, Jones has co-edited a special issue of 'Signs: A Journal of Women and Culture', with Jennifer Doyle, on the topic of Gender Beyond Sexual Difference: Rethinking Feminisms and Visual Culture (2006).  

RANJANA KHANNA is Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies and Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University. She works on Anglo- and Francophone Postcolonial theory and literature, Psychoanalysis, and Feminist theory. She has published articles on transnational feminism, psychoanalysis, autobiography, postcolonial agency, multiculturalism in an international context, postcolonial Joyce, Area Studies and Women's Studies, and Algerian film. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the present (Stanford University Press, 2008). Her current book project in progress is entitled "Asylum: The Concept and the Practice."

"Worlding Visual Culture" is co-sponsored by the Global Studies Program, the Women's Studies Program and the Department of Art History.

Visual Culture event archive
Co-sponsored event archive