University inaugurates Gertz Distinguished Teaching Series 1/10/08
Alfred University will inaugurate the Fred L. Gertz Distinguished Teaching Series in Art History and Theory during the spring 2008 semester. The series is funded through the generosity of Dr. Marlin Miller Jr., a 1954 alumnus of the University and a member and former chairman of its Board of Trustees, in memory of Gertz, who taught technical writing and who was a dean of students at the University. The funding will support what Dr. Suzanne Buckley, AU's provost, calls a "significant effort to bring visiting scholars and practitioners in arts criticism to campus to support discourse and criticism in the arts. We see this as an initiative to enhance the visibility, standing and intellectual tenor of the visual art programs at the University, especially our planned major in art history and theory."Additional support for the series, a joint venture of the offices of the Provost, and Deans of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Art and Design, will come from the Provost's office, the dean of the School of Art & Design and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.The inaugural series is entitled "Matters of Perception: Articulating Hybridity." The organizing committee envisions the series as exploring topics and issues in the visual arts and visual culture through different disciplinary perspectives, including cognitive science and philosophy, anthropology, film theory, gender studies, material culture theory and design history, as well as art history and criticism. Each of the speakers for the first Gertz Distinguished Teaching Series will visit the Alfred University campus for two days, presenting a public lecture and conducting a seminar for faculty the first day, and offering a seminar for graduate students, which will also be open to all interested, the second day. Opening the series will be susan pui san lok, research associate in art, philosophy and visual culture at Middlesex University, School of Arts, England. She will present "Golden," an interdisciplinary creative piece that explores the shifting identities and processes of migration in diaspora and what it means to be second or third-generation "British Chinese."Her public lecture will be held at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 28, in Holmes Auditorium in Harder Hall. The graduate seminar will be at noon Tuesday, Jan. 29, in Moka Joka coffeehouse, also in Harder Hall. Other speakers will include:Anna Munster, a senior lecturer in the School of Art History and Art Education at the University of New South Wales, as well as deputy director of the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics. Her latest book, Materializing New Media: Embodiment and Information Aesthetics, was published in 2006 by the University Press of New England. Her lecture, "An aesthesia of networks,"
will be held at 4:30 p.m. Feb. 11 in Holmes Auditorium, Harder Hall. Her graduate seminar will be at noon Feb. 12 at Moka Joka. Alexander Galloway, associate professor in New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture,
Education and Human Development, will speak on "The Chain of Triumph and the Web of Ruin: An Analysis of the Network Form" at 4:30 p.m. Feb. 25 in Holmes Auditorium. His graduate seminar will be presented at noon Feb. 26 at Moka Joka. Alva Noe, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, who will deliver a talk on
"Novel Experience" at 4:30 p.m. April 7 at Holmes Auditorium, with a graduate seminar scheduled for noon April 8 at Moka Joka. Noe is spending a year as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin).Bernadette Wegenstein, who is an associate professor in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, and a visiting associate professor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at The Johns Hopkins University. Her talk, "The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty," is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. April 14 in Holmes Auditorium, with a graduate seminar scheduled for noon April 15 in Moka Joka. Michael Rakowitz, associate professor of art theory and practice at Northwestern University. He will deliver a lecture entitled 'Circumventions" at 4:30 p.m. April 21 in Holmes Auditorium, and a graduate seminar at noon April 22 in Moka Joka. To circumvent is to get around the rules, to find loopholes, to initiate idiosyncratic solutions, to employ subtle metaphor to highlight problematic situations. Rakowitz combines architecture, design, agitational techniques, and a poetic sensibility to create installations and performances that touch on issues of power, visibility, and memory.
His paraSITE shelters are custom-built tents for homeless people that attach to the hot exhaust vents of buildings, creating not only a heated abode but one much more visible than a cardboard box. "Rise" conducts the smell of Chinese pastries from a Chinatown bakery to the decidedly un-local art exhibition in an adjacent building. And in
"Minaret," Rakowitz uses an alarm clock bought in Jordan to broadcast the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, to a city where minarets are otherwise quieted. For his contribution to the conference, Rakowitz will speak about these works as well as his recent ongoing project, "Return."Transcripts of the lectures will be compiled and published
electronically and in print. Members of the committee include the chairman, Dr. Gerar Edizel, professor of art history, as well as Dr. Mary Drach McInnes, associate professor of art history; Dr. Ezra Shales, assistant professor of art
history; Barbara Lattanzi, assistant professor of expanded media; and Linda Sikora, professor of ceramic art, all from the School of Art & Design, as well as D. Chase Angier, assistant professor of dance, and Dr. Elizabeth Ann Dobie, professor of art theory, both from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
