BARD COLLEGE Art History Program
Euodos and Frankish goldsmiths, Julia Flavia, intaglio, 90 and 800 AD. Paris. Bibliothèque National.
Senior Project Presentations May 16, 2013
SENIOR PRESENTATIONS PROGRAM May 16, 2013
Farewell Message from Professor Susan L. Aberth Chair, Art History Program This year we have had a wide range of senior projects, reflecting the diversity of interests and approaches of the 2013 art history graduating class. Although we thought we knew you well, you surprised us many times with your passion, dedication, and originality. The Art History faculty are very proud of your accomplishments and are also satisfied that our untold hours of dedication to you paid off handsomely. As always, we are prepared to see you flounder, search, transform, and ultimately flourish in the outside world. We encourage you to give us periodic updates on your jobs, academic pursuits, and other accomplishments as our alumni mean a lot to us. I want to thank you and my colleagues for the honor of serving as director of the program for these past three years, and I wish the incoming director, Julia Rosenbaum, the best of luck in her new position.
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SENIOR PRESENTATIONS PROGRAM 2013 Art History Majors James Bayard Farr Bryant Julia Carter Lolita Cros Ashley Duhrkoop Lillian Dumont Kelsey Hoffman Jin-Woo Jun Sophia Kay Coralie Kraft Sarah Lettiere Colin McFadden Aline Menedez Emma Pelman Charlotte Petty Bianca Ryseck Sebastian Sarmiento-Moreno Emma Schmiedecke Frances St. Amant Deidre Thompson Marissa Unger Rebecca Van Kollenburg
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JAMES BAYARD Title: Ryan Trecartin Dismantles the Apparatus of Mastery Adviser: Noah Chasin
The ambition of this project is to retain the plurality of identities and strategies within Ryan Trecartin’s early work, and to simultaneously offer reading strategies for the complex and vertiginous cyberspace that Trecartin has left for us to explore. Engaging both on and offline realities, his work embraces the connections and complications he finds between them. It is within this energizing fusion that that his multichanneled approach creates an intimate portrait of queer culture in the twenty-first century. Working to understand the complicated valences of A Family Finds Entertainment, Tommy-Chat Just E-Mailed Me, and I-Be AREA, I hope to unearth the ways through which Ryan Trecartin explores his own identity as an artist, character, and destabilizer of gender roles.
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FARR BRYANT Title: Wallflower Redux: Uncovering the Symbolism of the Wallpaper in Three Historic Hudson Valley Villas Adviser: Laurie Dahlberg
This project examines the wall treatments of three Historic Hudson Valley villas: Montgomery Place (1803), Wilderstein (1852), and Olana (1872). The seemingly innocuous nature of wallpaper breathes life and energy into each room it decorates. It is itself alive and constantly oscillating between being background noise and the pinnacle of decorative importance. Wallpaper not only sets the stage but is the stage itself. The wall treatments of these houses not only hold meaning as indicators of class and gender, but they also visually transport a viewer through the evocation of the exotic and the eclectic. Wallpaper specifically acts as the primary foundation for interior decoration. It is first to be installed, and in many cases the last to be taken down. The colors and designs found in a room’s wall treatment set the tone for the rest of the decoration. Although wallpaper is essentially a backdrop for a room and its occupants, it holds significant weight as a decorative scheme in itself, as it spans a larger surface area than any other form of decoration, visually and physically demanding the viewer’s attention.
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JULIA CARTER Title: Luis Buñuel’s Surrealist Dinner Parties Adviser: Richard Suchenski
My project analyzes the way that Luis Buñuel uses the concept of the dinner party to explore his personal surrealism in his films. I devote chapters to the films Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Viridiana, and El ángel exterminador. The medium of film lends itself to surrealist purposes, as photography captures the real, yet it can be distorted, blending the real and the dreamlike, which is a core aspect of surrealism. Buñuel uses the dinner party within his films to serve as a blank canvas of the ‘real’ that he turns ‘surreal’ in order to disrupt the social order.
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LOLITA CROS Title: It is in the Desert that Miracles Happen: Contrasting Experiences of Spirituality at Nancy Holt's “SunTunnels” and Donald Judd's “Marfa” Adviser: Noah Chasin
The idea of finding a secluded place in the 1970s has become a real challenge in the 2000s because of globalization, technology and the lack of privacy we face everyday. Looking at Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels and Donald Judd's Marfa, I analyze the influence that these artists had over the evolution of the sites, and how both of them were confronted with the influx of people and the development of tourism. These sites, which were originally treated as a sort of art pilgrimage, have lost their uniqueness and their authenticity in becoming gentrified. What Judd and Holt were trying to avoid in New York City was replicated on the sites of the Sun Tunnels and Marfa.
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ASHLEY DUHRKOOP Title: Atomic Bodies Adviser: Noah Chasin
Conceptualize the passage of time as centrifugal. One could argue that this type of force was initiated in Japan on August 6th, 1945, and again three days later. The detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki propelled the ultimate movement away from the center. This, in turn, initiated a storm of progress in the postwar period. Japan’s postFukushima reality, after the nuclear meltdown of March 11, 2011, is one product of that advancement. The very possibility for the disaster which occurred at the Fukushima nuclear plant begs the question: after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why nuclear energy at all? This project analyzes performance art by Japanese artists in the post-Hiroshima and post-Fukushima periods to explore the dematerialization of the art object in tandem with the dematerialization of the human body in terms of atomization and dispersion. The artworks discussed in this project explore the relationship between our body, the space that it occupies, and its technological extensions. Several thresholds are crossed, including the canvas, the skin, and the threshold between technology as a tool and as a weapon.
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LILLIAN DUMONT Title: "Other"-hood and Brotherhood: Representations of Subculture, Masculinity, and the Homoerotic in Bruce Davidson's "Brooklyn Gang" Adviser: Noah Chasin
This project examines the photographic series "Brooklyn Gang" by Bruce Davidson, a portrait of a youth gang subculture living on the margins of society during the conformist years of the 1950s in the United States. The paper evaluates the male-on-male gaze during this period, and the conversations that the photographs initiate with contemporaneous literature and popular media.
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KELSEY HOFFMAN Title: “Living Tableaux of Queerness:” The Living Middle Eastern Displays of the World’s Columbian Exposition Adviser: Laurie Dahlberg
In 1893 at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition Americans visited exotic cultures without ever leaving home. At the exposition were “living displays” of the Middle East that incorporated people, goods, and architecture to create a unique type of exhibit. Visitors could imagine themselves walking through the streets of Cairo or visiting a lavish Moorish palace while still remaining firmly in the western world. These living displays stemmed from a tangled history of anthropology, museum display practices, and Orientalism that resulted in a more complicated existence than might appear to be the case. In this project, I use these living Middle Eastern displays at the Columbian Exposition as a case study for understanding how the living display stands out as a particular moment in American visual culture, and how they were both a product of a mixing of certain trends as well as the starting point of a whole new wave of representations. The displays throw light on how the representation of the Middle East has shifted, changed, and stayed the same over the years.
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JIN-WOO JUN Title: Regarding the Uncertainty of Our Hyphens: Locating Hybridity in the Imaginary Landscapes of Do-Ho Suh Adviser: Noah Chasin
In our globalizing world, migration is immigration. Immigration takes many different forms: exile, retreat, opportunity. Globalization has fashioned a culture of immigration, as people become cultural commodities, tokens of the exotic. It speaks to the death of individual subjectivity over the birth of objectified cultures. In this transient landscape, the representation of hybridity is challenged. It follows a long process of belonging, colliding, and hyphenating identity. Migration takes more than a one-way ticket and a mode of transportation. It requires a pack of nonperishable certainty and a can of preserved sanity for the unknown years of dementia while surviving without a Home. Using language as a medium of performative translation, this project attempts to bridge the languages of hybridity located within the imaginary landscapes of Do-Ho Suh, a Korean-born artist in search of his hybrid identity and his “perfect home.”
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SOPHIA KAY Title: Deconstructing Monuments: Rachel Harrison and Mike Kelley’s Engagement with the Subjectile
Adviser: Noah Chasin
Rachel Harrison’s sculptures from If I Did It and 57 photographs from Voyage of the Beagle address the same desire to expose and subvert the artificial boundary between the private subject and the open-ended object as Mike Kelley’s exhibition Framed and Frame. These pieces reflect the subjectile, which is the support or surface of a visual representation that can stand in for the object and subject of an image. Philosopher Jacques Derrida’s “Maddening the Subjectile” condemns the traditional function of the subjectile that is an inert screen that supports representations shaped by cultural conventions. His essay maddens the subjectile in order to dismantle traditional means of representation so self-expression is unmediated and projected directly from the individual. Harrison’s and Kelley’s works recall the maddened subjectile because they re-present ready-made representations of a subject, but simultaneously challenge the idea of pre-existing identity. These artists’ works reveal how subjecthood is not something innate but is shaped by culture. Harrison and Kelley embrace the fractured, unbounded subject that is freed from the grips of social constructions.
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CORALIE KRAFT Title: Architectural Anxiety: Italian Architecture in the Short Fiction of Henry James Adviser: Julia Rosenbaum
My project focuses on architectural description in Henry James’ short stories. Henry James incorporates a profusion of architectural details in his stories, and the attributes that he chooses to emphasize draw out subtle themes in his texts. He uses architecture to evoke significance in two distinct ways. In the first, the architectural context (often its historical associations) reveals something about the scene. In the second practice, James’s illustration of a structure, conveyed through the eyes of a narrator or protagonist, proffers minute details that denote a fuller understanding of a character or theme. James is especially taken with ancient constructions undestroyed or in ruins. The three texts that I examine concern an American’s encounter with the power of Italian art, and as such they convey James’ own anxiety about aesthetic experience as well as his conception of a culture so closely tied to its past.
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SARAH LETTIERE Title: Weegee’s Utopian Village
Adviser: Julia Rosenbaum
My project is about Weegee’s The Village, a book of photographs taken in Greenwich Village during the late 1940s and early 1950s. I begin by discussing the ways in which Weegee rhetorically and photographically maps the Village. His choices paint the neighborhood as a safe, yet freeing utopia. He frames much of the harmony within the Village’s built landscape as a result of public art: The culture of the Village helps create community and art serves as a universal language. Thanks to feelings of unity, people feel free to be themselves. In his photographs and written introduction, Weegee underscores that the Villagers’ celebration of difference helps further social progress. The Village presents Weegee’s romanticized vision of the Village. His book is a relic of a time and place that cannot be replicated.
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COLIN MCFADDEN Title: Crossing in Style: Interwar Ocean Liner Design
Adviser: Julia Rosenbaum
My project considers ocean liner design between the World Wars. It begins by considering a shift in design from prewar liners to the “Ile de France,” examining the reasons for this shift by looking to the 1925 Paris Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts. In the second chapter, I examine the “Normandie” widely considered one of the most beautiful ocean liners ever built. By utilizing technological advancements while also maintaining a high level of luxury, the “Normandie” epitomized the industrial and the decorative. Finally, I consider the promotional art for ocean liners, and I argue they can be understood by looking to the driving ideas behind the 1927 Machine Age Exhibition and the Museum of Modern Art's 1934 Machine Art Exposition.
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ALINE MENEDEZ Title: Mexico Through the Eyes of Marion Greenwood Adviser: Susan Aberth
American artist Marion Greenwood was the first woman of any nationality to paint an independent mural in Mexico. An all-consuming passion for sketching and painting people of all types and races brought her to the country in late 1932. During her stay in Mexico (1932-1936), she completed three murals: Market Place at Taxco (1933), Landscape and Economy of Michoacán (1933), and Industrialization of the Countryside (1934-1936). By the time she arrived, the murals being created in Mexico City as a part of the Mexican Muralist “Renaissance,” were charged with political symbolism. In her first two murals, however, Greenwood avoided this political discourse, and instead focused on depicting scenes of the everyday life of indigenous populations. It was not until she painted Industrialization of the Countryside that she incorporated a variety of political symbols. I begin by arguing that Greenwood was not the first woman commissioned to paint a mural in Mexico despite being foreign, but because she was. Additionally, I argue that although she thought of muralist Jose Clemente Orozco as a guiding force, her works, especially Industrialization of the Countryside, instead reflect a dependence on Diego Rivera’s oeuvre.
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EMMA PELMAN Title: Clarence John Laughlin: The Southern Gothic in Photography
Adviser: Laurie Dahlberg
The photographer Clarence John Laughlin (1905-1985) gained little recognition for his prolific body of work. His unique style is often referred to as "Southern Gothic" because of the literary quality his manipulated photographs embody. This project explores the qualities of Laughlin's photographs that render them as part of the Southern Gothic genre, as well as how his style marked him as an outsider in the world of American photography in the 20th century.
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CHARLOTTE PETTY Title: Art and Education: America’s Struggle to Define the Role of the Arts in the Public Sphere Adviser: Julia Rosenbaum :
This project examines two moments from the past century in which arts educators have attempted to bring art into the public sphere as a way to combat a sense of disconnect between the citizen and the greater community. Each chapter addresses a moment in which educators have sought to teach through art rather than about art. My first two chapters present the early twentieth century as a case study of this dynamic. I focus on Chicago between 1900 and the 1930s, examining the work and writing of sculptor Lorado Taft, educator and philosopher John Dewey, and head of the Works Progress Administration Holger Cahill. Each employed a different, yet overlapping, use of art as an educative tool for the public. The final chapter of my project considers arts education in the United States today and how the ideas of these early twentieth century theorists have reemerged to remedy the problems of standard-based education.
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BIANCA RYSECK Title: Man’s Answer to Nature’s Call: The Private Space of the Public Restroom
Adviser: Noah Chasin
Using public restrooms as the basis for delving into the paradoxical relationship between public spheres and private space, I examine how the public toilet confronts the dilemma of providing a private space conducive to the intimate needs of its users while still remaining public. The first exploration of this inquiry is the public restroom as a space defying the widely accepted dichotomy between private and public. Emerging out of this transgressive “event” is the tension resulting from the creation of privacy by users versus the other people simultaneously in the restroom in conjunction with the restriction of privacy by design.
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SEBASTIAN SARMIENTO-MORENO Title: The Work of Francisco Salazar: A Meditation on Cardboard Adviser: Susan Aberth
Since the 1950s, Francisco Salazar has created a body of work composed entirely of monochromatic white works on cardboard. Despite the inherent simplicity of these works, Salazar has accomplished an astounding sense of variation within these pre-ordained parameters. He has relinquished gesture and color to allow his works an autonomy that characterizes their effect. Essentially, it is a work that systematically arranges light and shadow—it is perpetually animated by the play of light and the infinite variations of the space surrounding it. My senior project revises the placement of Salazar within the multinational lexicon of modernity; it analyzes the work from a European, Latin American, and specifically, Venezuelan perspective. I spent the summer of 2012 interviewing the 76-year old artist in Paris, where he has resided permanently since 1967.
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EMMA SCHMIEDECKE Title: From Muse to Musician: Portraits of Women and Music at the Turn of the 20th Century Adviser: Laurie Dahlberg
"From Muse to Musician: Portraits of Women and Music at the Turn of the 20th Century" discusses the transformation of the woman in portraiture from the allegorical muse to the female professional through the presence of music. The project highlights the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John White Alexander, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, John Singer Sargent, and Augustus John as evidence of this transformation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It discusses how music and musical iconography was used in their portraits to describe both the women they were painting and illustrate the changing roles of women in society, as well as how painting music influenced their relationships with the women they painted.
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FRANCES ST. AMANT Title: Conception, Conversion, Curation: Agency and Identity in the History of the Julia Flavia Intaglio
Adviser: Diana Depardo-Minsky
My project examines how ownership of a piece of art informs interpretation, as demonstrated through spoliation and repeated reuse of a single object. I focus on an intaglio portrait, in aquamarine, of Julia Flavia, a minor Roman princess, mainly remembered for rumors of an affair with her uncle, Domitian. In tracing the history of the use and ‘applied’ meanings of the intaglio, three distinct interpretative agendas emerge: dynastic, religious, and art-historical. The intaglio, by extension of its series of collectors, transitions from a gem intended to display concrete means of imperial legitimacy, to a ‘placeholder’ for the Virgin Mary as the crest of a Carolingian reliquary, and finally, to a museum piece. The project positions the gem within the matrix of its own history and explores the relationship between these identities, and the ways that they function as a whole to generate a cohesive analysis of the intaglio.
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DEIDRE THOMPSON Title: A Negress of Noteworthy Talent: Kara Walker’s Alternate Histories of the American South
Adviser: Julia Rosenbaum
Kara Walker rose to prominence in 1994 with her large-scale silhouette, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred be’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. Since then she has continued to shock and outrage viewers. In this project, I discuss Kara Walker’s silhouettes set in the slavery-era South. The means by which the history of the South has been sanitized, forgotten or corrected prompts Walker to create her own version of the South. Classic texts such as the glossy romance of Gone with the Wind or The Klansman inform her art. Her alternate histories, their comment on the South, the relics of popular culture they utilize and their reception by both black and white audiences is my focus.
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MARISSA UNGER Title: Illuminating the Grail: Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval and Its Continuations Adviser: Marisa Libbon
My project explores the visual programs of two illuminated manuscripts, one containing Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval and its Continuations, and the other a redacted version of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. The desired trajectory of the grail legend, from the authors of Chrétien de Troyes, Robert de Boron, Manessier, to the anonymous writer(s) of the Cycle, becomes apparent through the treatment of the manuscript miniatures. Combining visual and literary analysis, I look at how the images respond to the text, arguing that they offer insight into how the grail and its heroes were constructed and received in the fourteenth century.
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REBECCA VAN KOLLENBURG Title: Evolving Artist/Audience Agency in the Trajectory of Feminist Performance Art: Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll, Annie Sprinkle’s Post-Porn Modernist, and Narcissister’s Narcissister is You. Adviser: Laurie Dahlberg
In my project, I map out a schematic portrayal of feminist body art through the lens of three separate female performance artists’ works. I examine the social biases towards women and women’s sexuality, how politics and science have evolved over time and how that affects a woman’s own notion of her sexuality and ability to critique or display that in a public art space: I consider commodification versus “art for art’s sake,” the shift in audience perspective/agency, as well as how media has influenced the accessibility of these artists.
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Graduating Seniors!
The Art History Alumni Association of Bard College invites you to become a member and stay connected
Please email arthistory@bard.edu the following information:
Name Mailing Address Email Address Telephone and/or Cell Phone Number Any immediate future plans
http://inside.bard.edu/arthistory.
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2013 The Alexander Klebanoff Award for Outstanding Achievement in Art History
Awarded to a student whose Senior Project demonstrates extensive scholarship and daring originality. The student should demonstrate a commitment to art and artists in and around Bard College and show both a deep appreciation for and diversified understanding of art history.
Recipient: Lillian Dumont
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2013
The Jean French Art History Travel Award
An award given annually to second semester juniors in the Art History Program for expenses relating to their Senior Project
Recipient: Abraham Rosenthal
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2013
The Art History Program Travel Prize
Recipients:
Nicholas Carbone and Jean Wong
Faculty Susan Aberth, Chair Norton Batkin Betsy Chunko Teju Cole Noah Chasin Laurie Dahlberg Diana Depardo-Minsky Patricia Karetzky Susan Merriam Julia Rosenbaum Luc Sante Richard Suchenski Tom Wolf
Art History Department Fisher Arts Annex (845) 758-6822, ext. 7158 arthistory@bard.edu