Art History

A lecture by Mark R. Eischeid
Thursday, September 10th
11:50 AM

Mark R. Eischeid is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon where he teaches history, theory, and design. He received his MFA in Art Space + Nature from the Edinburgh College of Art, an MLA from UC Berkeley, and a BS in Applied Earth Science from Stanford University, and he is currently pursuing a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the history, theory, critique, and aesthetics of 20th and 21st century landscape architecture.
Mark has previous professional experience in geology, and is a licensed landscape architect (California).  Mark is also a practicing artist, and has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the UK, Japan, Denmark, and Greenland.

Exploding the Infinite: The Sublime Landscapes of Dan Riley

The perception or suggestion of the infinite has been cited as one of the mechanisms by which we judge an object or an environment to be sublime.  In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke described the “artificial infinite” as one of the identifying characteristics of the sublime.  Burke suggests that the artificial infinite can be expressed as a sequence or repetition of uniform elements or as spaces with obscured or indeterminate boundaries or limits.  Dan Kiley, a pioneering and distinguished practitioner of 20th century modernist landscape architecture, consistently spoke of his desire to express a sense of infinity in his designed landscapes.

Kiley’s design philosophy parallels Burke’s definitions, as evidenced through selected design projects, writings, and interviews.  Kiley’s use of the grid to repeat landscape elements (trees, hedges, lights, benches) through various landscape types (allées, avenues, bosques, orchards), coincident with the creation of continuous spaces and indeterminate boundaries, exemplify how he intended to create a sense of infinity in his designed landscapes.  This talk will illustrate Kiley’s expression of the artificial infinite through his work at the Miller Garden (1955, Columbus, Indiana), North Christian Church (1964, Columbus, Indiana), and the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park (1988, Kansas City, Missouri) based on recent fieldwork.

Acts of Political Uncertainty: Towards a Daily Practice of Resistance

When : Tuesday, September 8th, 2015, starting at 6:00pm, open to the public
Where: Lázló Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building, Bard College

Jeanne van Heeswijk’s lecture will demonstrate how active forms of citizenship can engage constituencies and communities in critical public issues. Van Heeswijk will describe how the complexities of our cities can be employed as the performative basis for the production of new forms of sociability, collective ownership, and self-organization.

The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism is made possible through a five year-grant from the Keith Haring Foundation.  The Keith Haring Fellowship is a cross-disciplinary, annual, visiting Fellowship for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at both the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project at Bard College. The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism was established to allow a distinguished leader in the field to investigate the role of art as a catalyst for social change, linking the two programs and presenting original research in an annual lecture.

Jeanne van Heeswijk is a visual artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalize the local.”  Van Heeswijk embeds herself as an active citizen in communities, often working for years at a time. These long-scale projects, which have occurred in many different countries, transcend the traditional boundaries of art in duration, space, and media, and questions art’s autonomy by combining performative actions, meetings, discussions, seminars, and other forms of organizing and pedagogy. Inspired by a particular current event, cultural context or intractable social problem, she dynamically involves neighbors and community members in the planning and realization of a given project. As an “urban curator”, van Heeswijk’s work often unravels invisible legislation, governmental codes, and social institutions, in order to enable communities to take control over their own futures. Noted projects include Hotel New York P.S. 1 in New York (September 1998 to August 1999); De Strip (The Strip) in Westwijk, Vlaardingen (May 2002 – May 2004); Het Blauwe Huis (The Blue House) in Amsterdam (May          2005 – December 2009); and 2Up 2Down/Homebaked in Liverpool (November 2011 – present); Freehouse, Radicalizing the Local in Rotterdam (September 2008- present).

Her work has also been featured in numerous books and publications worldwide, as well as internationally renowned biennials such as those of Liverpool, Busan, Taipei, Shanghai, and Venice. She has received a host of accolades and awards for her work including most recently the 2012 Curry Stone Prize for Social Design Pioneers, and in 2011, the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change.

For more information on The Keith Haring Foundation  – www.haring.com
For more information on the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College – www.bard.edu/ccs
For more information on the Human Rights Project at Bard College – http://hrp.bard.edu

Speed Listening by Blind Readers and the History of Audio Time-Stretching

a Talk by Mara Mills
Talking books for blind readers spurred the commercialization of mainstream
audiobooks after World War II, but the two formats soon diverged in terms of
reading strategies. Mills will discuss the cultural imperative
for aural speed reading that drove early time-stretching innovations in the
magnetic tape era, allowing playback rate to be changed without affecting pitch.

Friday, April 3rd
Olin 102
1:30 pm
Q & A to Follow

Carolee Schneemann

Meat-Joy

Carolee Schneemann, multidisciplinary artist. Bard College alumna, Class of 1959. Transformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.

Thursday, March 12, 2015
Weis Cinema, Bard College
6pm

Peter Christensen
Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Rochester

will give a talk

Modes of Transmission in Late Ottoman Architecture

This talk will examine the nature of architectural culture and production within the late Ottoman empire. In its last century of existence, the Ottoman empire bore witness to both a rapid dissolution of its territory and an extensive modernization of its cities and its infrastructure. This talk will examine these two phenomena, seemingly at odds with one another, specifically by looking at the ways in which various forms of transmission between Ottoman authorities, foreign powers, and internal minority populations shaped this milieu. The talk will demonstrate how ambiguity, as both a political and visual concept, gained credence in this context and established itself as a productive, rather than incidental, aspect of nineteenth century architectural culture.

Guillaume Gustave Berggren, Railway workers of the Anatolian Railways, c. 1892. Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Wolfenbüttel.

February 27
1:30pm
Weis Cinema

THE GROUP PHOTO AND THE”POLICY OF DISAPPEARANCE” IN STALIN’S RUSSIA

Assistant Professor Fine Arts and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Robert Slifkin

will give a talk
“The Empty Room and the End of Man”

During the 1960s and early 1970s many artists in the United States created works that through their monumental scale, use of refracted light, and architectonic enclosures encouraged viewers to engage in an expansively spatial manner so that the gallery itself became an aesthetically-charged site. Many of the original viewers of these works experienced these unconventional, frequently austere, and affectless objects and installations as threatening and even aggressive. Drawing upon the original reception of some of the most significant public exhibitions of minimal and postminimal art (taking the work of William Anastasi, Dan Flavin, Dennis Oppenheim, and Bruce Nauman as key examples) this paper will argue that these works and ‘environments’ (to use a word often invoked around such art) produced experiential situations that served as imaginary figurations of what the world would look and feel like without human inhabitation or if the viewer was the last person on the Earth. By creating works that imagine uninhabitable or empty physical spaces or, through their massive size or spatial expansiveness, encourage a mode of spectatorship and photographic reproduction that occludes other people, these works channeled a larger cultural anxiety concerning the threat of nuclear annihilation that fundamentally inflected, however unconsciously, significant realms of postwar American culture well into the 1970s.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014
7:00 pm
Olin 102

Free and Open tot he Public

Sanctified Sandals—Polemics and Prophetic Relics in an Era of Technological Reproducibility
Barry Flood, Professor of Humanities, Institute of Fine Arts and College of Arts and Sciences, NYU

Monday, November 10, 2014
Olin, Room 102
5 pm
Although recent controversies about the historical representation of the Prophet Muhammad have focused on figural paintings, these were relatively rare and circulated in a limited milieu. More commonly, the Prophet was represented metonymically, by depictions of his footprint or sandal, for example. The most famous relic of the Prophet’s sandal was kept in Damascus; from the twelfth century onwards, images of this sandal relic were generated by tracing its outline. Such tracings were believed to circulate the blessings (baraka) conferred by this cherished vestige through contact with the body of the Prophet. The copying of the sandal relic continued into modernity, when new print technologies and photography were applied to the reproduction of its image. The deployment of modern technologies of mass (re)production to the circulation of the relic as an image may be related to debates within Islam about the acceptability of relics, shrine veneration and mediation, debates that continue until the present day. However, the ability of mass-produced images to transport and transmit the charisma of the original relic also raises interesting questions about the nature of images, copies and mediation.

Sponsored by: Art History Program; Middle Eastern Studies Program; Religion Program.

Theater and Performance and the LAIS Program present a lecture by
José Estaban Muñoz

“Feeling Brown: The Performativity of María Irene Fornés and Tania Bruguera”

Tania Bruguera, El Peso de la Culpa, 1997-99

Wednesday, May 1, 2013, 6:30 pm

Fisher Center, Resnick Theater Studio