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JANUARY
Wednesday, January 23- 12:00-1:00 PM
CFA 303
BYOBrain Brown Bag Series: Edith Balas, Hoka-Néni Symphony Project
Friday, January 25 - 12:00-1:20 PM
Baker Hall 154R
Center lunch meeting
Thursday, January 31 - 4:30 PM
Hunt Library-Fine and Rare Book Room, 4th Floor
Mary Chamberlain, Ph.D., Oxford Brookes University, UK
Culture and Nationhood: George Lamming and the Imagining of the West Indies
Co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh
FEBRUARY
Wednesday, February 6 - 4:30 PM
Hunt Library-Fine and Rare Book Room, 4th Floor
CAS Research Forum: Elaine A. King, Ethics and the Visual Arts
Reception to follow
Wednesday, February 20 - 12:00-1:00 PM
CFA 303
BYOBrain Brown Bag Series: Beryl Schlossman, Art, History, and Images of the Feminine in Baudelaire's Paris
Thursday, February 28 - 12:00-1:20 PM
Baker Hall 154R
Center lunch meeting
MARCH
Thursday, March 6 - 4:30 PM
Location: Adamson Wing (Baker Hall 136A)
Matthew Reynolds, Ph.D.
Fellowship Lecture - Breaking Ground: Art and Urban Redevelopment in Hollywood, CA
March 10-14 - Spring Break
Wednesday, March 26 - 12:00-1:00 PM
CFA 310
BYOBrain Brown Bag Series: Osman Khan, Return to Sender
Friday, March 28 - 12:00-1:20 PM
Baker Hall 154R
Center lunch meeting
APRIL
Wednesday, April 2 - 12:00-1:00 PM
CFA 303
BYOBrain Brown Bag Series: Jon Rubin, Tent Show TV
Saturday, April 12 - 4:00 PM
Frick Auditorium, University of Pittsburgh
A rediscovered Piano Sonata by Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988)
Lecture/Recital with Franco Sciannameo and pianist Donna Amato
Co-sponsored by the Società Dante Alighieri and the University of Pittsburgh
Tuesday, April 22- 4:30 PM
Baker Hall 154R
CAS Research Forum: Special guest speaker Frédérique Desbuissons, Associate Professor of Art History
Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France
Portrait of the Artist as Beer Drinker: Gustave Courbet
Reception to follow
Thursday, April 24 - 12:00-1:20 PM
Baker Hall 154R
Center lunch meeting
Wednesday, April 30 - 4:30 PM (tentative date)
Location: TBA
CASSA Year-End Research Presentations & Awards
Reception to follow
MAY
Thursday & Friday, May 29 & 30 - 9:00 AM-5:00 PM
University Center
Lensless Imaging Symposium
For times, locations, and other details: http://www.f295.org/symposium2008/
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BYOBrain Brown Bag Series:
Art, History, and Images of the Feminine in Baudelaire's Paris
"Art, History, and Images of the Feminine in Baudelaire's Paris" provides a central theoretical focus for a major application of comparative and historical techniques for the study of European literature, art, and culture. Schlossman's goal is to enhance the understanding of early French modernism through an interdisciplinary approach to Baudelaire's use of visual images in his literary art. Her project explores the relationship between Baudelaire's works and the fine arts, and Baudelaire's impact on modernism. It examines the influence of French literature and culture on theory in light of Walter Benjamin's theoretical treatment of Baudelaire and Paris during the Second Empire. She will discuss her recent research trip to Paris.
Hoka-Néni Symphony Project
Dr. Edith Balas, Professor of Art History, will discuss her project to create a multimedia symphonic performance inspired by a series of paintings and their interpretation: seven paintings that narrate a coherent story will be shown one by one on a large screen, while the audience listens to the commissioned symphony and reads an interpretation of the paintings. The series of paintings, entitled Hoka-Néni, is the work of Valentin Lustig, a Hungarian-Romanian artist residing in Switzerland. The subject is the life and temptations of an ordinary housewife from Cluj in Transylvania, who faced persecution in WWII. The music is being written by Eduardo Alonso-Crespo, an Argentine composer.
Return to Sender
The project Return to Sender reconstitutes ‘limbs’ out of junk mail (unwanted/unsolicited paper mail) and attaches these ‘limbs’ back onto trees whose branches have been cut. The project is an exploration of consumerism in light of ecological and environmental concerns erstwhile offering a recycling response that is more provocation than solution to current green and sustainable practices. The project also hopes to engage various neighborhoods and residents in shared participation of construction and installation of the limbs.
Tent Show TV
Tent Show TV is a storefront for the research, production and exhibition of experimental video works that are based entirely on the surounding Garfield/Friendship neighborhood. Exploring the neighborhood as a complex social, physical and economic eco-system, works produced through TSTV will be exhibited and distributed through its neighborhood storefront, programmed onto Pittsburgh Cable Television, and presented and archived on the TSTV website. Ideally, this will be the pilot for an institution that can move nomadically throughout Pittsburgh, each season relocating to a new neighborhood and storefront while maintaining its context-specific approach.
CAS Research Forum:
Elaine A. King, Professor of Art History, Theory and Museum Studies, College of Fine Arts
Ethics and the Visual Arts
Join the Center for the Arts in Society for a discussion of Elaine A. King's newly published anthology, co-edited with Gail Levin, Ethics and the Visual Arts.
New technologies not only have the potential to be consciousness transforming, but also they can function to diminish the critical and analytical abilities of the viewer and user. Ultimately, attitudes about the future will depend upon our shared and collaborative efforts to address the ethical dilemmas posed by technology in its many guises. Probably the most famous analysis of technology and society—or rather the technological attitude that gives rise to artifacts—is Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977). This research forum will address a contextual orientation to Heidegger’s ideas about technology, and will examine the relationship of ethics and new media and how to consider the actions of producers / creators and the consequences of certain acts on a greater social community. Is there a way to connect actions and consequences? Is new media technology altering our sense of social responsibility?
Special guest speaker Frédérique Desbuissons, Associate Professor of Art History
Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France
Portrait of the Artist as Beer Drinker: Gustave Courbet
That Gustave Courbet (1821-76) drank beer would have had a minor, anecdotal value in the history of his artistic career if his contemporaries had not turned his taste for the drink into the crux of a cultural, perhaps even ethnic interpretation of Realism. When his sometime champion, the writer Francis Wey, attributed Courbet’s self-indulgence and the decadence of his painting to the artist’s acquaintance with Nordic barbarians who preferred beer, he brought to a head several decades of material and symbolic associations. Join us as Professor Desbuissons argues that what was at stake in Courbet’s painting and his consumption of beer were one and the same: the betrayal of French classicism.
Desbuissons is the author of several articles on the French artist Gustave Courbet, as well as the author of a forthcoming monograph. She is a participant in the international symposium organized by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris to coincide with the current exhibition of Courbet which will travel to New York to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008.
Matthew Reynolds, CAS Fellow, 2007-08
Breaking Ground: Art and Urban Redevelopment in Hollywood, CA
The city of Hollywood, CA is currently in the midst of a thirty year, multi-billion dollar urban renewal project. At one time, the corner of Hollywood and Vine was the most famous intersection in the world; a point where the ordinary and the extraordinary, fame and anonymity, fantasy and reality converged. But since the 1960s, Hollywood Blvd. is as synonymous with tacky memorabilia shops, fast food restaurants, and pornography theaters as it is with the glory years of movie production.
The Hollywood Redevelopment Project (HRP) is an attempt to transform this “seedy” location into a tourist-friendly theme-park designed to profit from a nostalgia for the city's golden years.
But this rebirth raises a number of problematic issues concerning the complicated intersection between the visual arts, cinema and the city. What image do tourists expect when they visit Hollywood and where and how was that image itself produced? Who will benefit from the Hollywood Redevelopment Project, and who will be left out? This lecture investigates the social and political dynamics of the HRP and the role of art in the gentrification of urban space.
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