What does it mean to experience a work of art? What does it mean for a work of art to register—even enact—an experience? Would it be possible for an art historian working now, in experiencing a work of art, to sense some aspect of lived experience from another time, another place? Although words such as Presence, Directness, and Immediacy remain in relatively low esteem among art historians—our access to the past and to works of art usually held to be a matter of severe mediation—why can we not insist on the directness and uniqueness of our own experience?
The experiences in question might be special occasions, where time seems to stand still, or they might be more like the steady-state hum of unremarkable daily life; or they might be both.
Programme
Friday 23 March 2018 (DAY 1)
12.00 – 12.30 Registration (Front Hall)
12.30 – 13.00 Opening Remarks: Alexander Nemerov and David Peters Corbett
13.00 – 14.45 Session 1 – Chair: Jo Applin (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
Lucy Mackintosh (University of Auckland): “A Long-Forgotten Art”: Two Māori Flutes in the Peabody Essex Museum
Yinshi Lerman-Tan (Stanford University): Living Still: John F. Peto’s The Cup We All Race 4
David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld Institute of Art): Exile and subjectivity: Experience in the Writings of Sadakichi Hartmann
14.45 – 15.15 TEA/COFFEE BREAK (Seminar Room 1)
15.15 – 17.00 Session 2 – Chair: Robert Slifkin (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU)
Saul Nelson (University of Oxford): Experiencing Absence in the Early Work of Louise Bourgeois
Jo Applin (The Courtauld Institute of Art): A Schizoid Politics of Experience
Tilly Scantlebury (The Courtauld Institute of Art): Being and Having, Looking and Living: Catherine Opie’s Being and Having Series and the Queer Communal Experience
17.00 – 17.15 Comfort break
17.15- 18.30 Plenary: Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University): A Day in the Life of Helen Frankenthaler
18.30 Reception (Front Hall)
Saturday 24 March 2018 (DAY 2)
10.00 – 10.30 Registration (Front Hall)
10.30 – 12.15 Session 3 – Chair: Jennifer Jane Marshall (University of Minnesota)
Xiao Situ (Yale University): “Divine Happening”: Experiencing Titus Kaphar’s Another Fight For Remembrance (2015)
Theo Gordon (The Courtauld Institute of Art): Fantastic Experience?: Sex and Violence in the Art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Robert Slifkin (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU): On Dennis Oppenheim’s Marionette Theatre
12.15- 13.15 Lunch (provided for speakers only, in Seminar room 1)
13.15 – 15.30 Session 4 – Chair: David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
Madeleine Harrison (The Courtauld Institute of Art): A Warmer Life: Isabel Bishop, Experience and Fantasy
Jennifer Jane Marshall (University of Minnesota): Experiencing Empathy: The Work of Art, the Problem of Race, and the Sculptor William Edmondson
James Hall (Southampton): The American Self-Portrait: Expressive or Masked?
Jennifer Greenhill (University of Southern California): Pressing Buttons: Kodak and the Subtle Art of “Idea Advertising”
15.30 – 16.00 Closing Remarks: Alexander Nemerov and David Peters Corbett
16.00 END