HGCEA at CAA 2012, LOS ANGELES
HGCEA Emerging Scholars
Thursday, February 23, 12:30 PM–2:00 PM
Concourse Meeting Room 409AB, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
Chair: Timothy O. Benson, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
"Viva Durero! Albrecht Dürer and German Art in Nueva España"
Jennifer A. Morris, Princeton University
In the early modern period, settlers and missionaries from the farthest reaches of Europe traveled to the Americas with the goal of converting the New World into a Christian paradise. With them came a number of artworks that circulated widely and served as prototypes for the "hybrid" art forms of colonial America described by George Kubler and others. This paper examines the presence and impact of German art in the New World in particular, using the transmission and imitation of Albrecht Dürer's prints in Nueva España as a model for the interaction between Indo-American and German art in New Spain and hence for the reception of Central European styles in colonial art at large. By considering the afterlife of Dürer in the New World, this study demonstrates that Central European art was pervasive and continuously influential in the Americas, serving important artistic, religious, and political functions in a spiritual battlefield.
“'Opium Rush': Hans Makart, Richard Wagner, and the Aesthetic Environment in Ringstrasse Vienna"
Eric Anderson, Kendall College of Art and Design
In 1871, critic Wilhelm Lübke characterized the paintings of Viennese artist Hans Makart as “gemalte Zukunftsmusik.” Lübke intended no compliment. Drawing a comparison to composer Richard Wagner, Lübke denounced Makart’s art as mere surface, lacking intellectual or moral value. Both Wagner’s “colossal masses of sound” and Makart’s “nerve-tingling colors,” he wrote, offered only a stupefying narcosis for the sensation-addled parvenu of the Ringstrasse: “an opium rush, received through the ear or the eye.”
Around 1900, the Viennese critic Ludwig Hevesi offered a striking reassessment, celebrating the decorative, psychologically immersive character of Makart’s paintings, and especially his decorated interiors, as a sophisticated and elegant means of escaping the crises of modernity. Taking Hevesi’s remarks as a starting point, this paper will reconsider the relationship between Makart’s interiors and Wagner’s concept of immersive experience, taking into account links to Aestheticism, the Secession, and fin-de-siècle theories of mental life that informed Hevesi’s analysis.
"Architecture on Moscow Standard Time"
Richard Anderson, Columbia University
Focusing on the 1930s, this paper explores architecture’s relationship to the Communist Party’s politics of time. After the competition for the Palace of the Soviets of 1932, Party officials prescribed the use of “both new techniques and the best techniques of classical architecture” in future projects. Although this event has long been interpreted as a negation of the agency of the avant-garde, this paper presents the architectural debates that followed as symptoms of the chronotope—the time-space—in which they unfolded. Concretely, it traces the ways that leading architects—Moisei Ginzburg, Aleksandr Vesnin, Ivan Leonidov, among others—responded to the proposition that a progressive, socialist architecture could arise only from the “critical appropriation of architectural heritage.” By attending to rarely-discussed projects and texts, this paper shows how Soviet architects articulated a theoretical program that would position socialist architecture ahead of the West, paradoxically, by turning to the past.
Picturing Urban Space in Central Europe since 1839
Thursday, February 23, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM
Concourse Meeting Room 403A, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
Chair: Miriam Paeslack, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
When the daguerreotype took Europe and the world by storm within weeks of its publication in Paris in 1839, a tremendously powerful tool for the urban imagination was born. While veduta- and street-painters had been meticulously documenting and spontaneously sketching the city in the earlier decades of the century, photography soon was able to capture motion and urban life. This opened up a whole new range of topics and issues in city imagery.
This panel investigates the cross-fertilization between 19th century city photography and urbanization in central Europe, for example in Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Vienna, Prague and or other Central European cities. It addresses the “pictorial turn” in urban representation that was triggered by the arrival of photography, and its repercussions for other visual media. More specifically, it asks about the different visual languages, expectations, and functions of urban representations found in diverse media – photography and film, but also drawings and paintings - since the 1840s. How have these different media impacted our perception of the city, and what were their respective means of “constructing” the city? How did urban growth, the urbanite’s sense of identity, and the image of the city interact? How did the urban image’s evolution relate to urban development?
Visual and architectural historians, human geographers, and artists are encouraged to submit proposals for presentations studying the spatial, structural, social and/or cultural encoding generated by urban imagery. Such studies could focus, for example, on the way that urban imagery addresses relationships of space and time/history or how national identity figures into such imagery. Proposals comparing two or more cities, and urban imagery from the 19th through the early 20th centuries respectively are welcome, as are proposals by artists working with historic imagery or relying on historic urban imagery as a point of reference.
"The Invisible City: Architectural Imagination and Cultural Identity Represented in Competition Drawings from Sibiu 1880-1930"
Timo Hagen, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Sibiu, the European Capital of Culture in 2007, was the center of Transylvania for centuries, and around 1900 characterized by its population’s cultural diversity. At this time the townscape was changed substantially by a wave of new building projects. In addition to the buildings actually built, drawings submitted to architectural competitions provide a deeper insight into contemporary architectural discourses: often revised or dismissed, these sketches form the image of a city existing only on paper. In my presentation I explore principles, which led to the selection of the drawings for those buildings that were eventually executed. I analyze how architects tried to affect decisions through elaborate drawing designs, highlighting the buildings’ aesthetic value and the associated concepts of cultural identity. The broad spectrum of building types shed light on the diversity of competing cultural identities in Sibiu during the period, while drawings reveal how visual representations helped communicate such identities.
"Picturing the Nation: The Multifaceted Image of Hungary at the 1896 Millennium Exhibition in Budapest"
Miklós Székely, Ludwig Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest
This presentation discusses and critically reflects on the meaning and importance of ephemeral exhibition architecture at the 1896 millennial festivities in Budapest, Hungary through its photographic representation. The lecture aims to show how politics influenced not only the architecture of the exhibition venue – a city within the city – but also its photographic representation, which was used to convert it into a national lieu de memoire. Pavilions were dedicated to express the nationalist politics of the re-emerging Hungarian political class, which aimed at reinstalling the country’s image as independent, economically and politically strong European nation. For that purpose, surviving monuments were re-erected in ephemeral versions for the millennial festivities. This exhibition and its pavilions was also one of the last examples of historicism-based cultural policy at the turn-of the century. After 1900, the Hungarian pavilions in universal exhibitions emphasized the vernacularism based modernist side of Hungarian culture.
"Architecture, Monuments, and the Politics of Space in Kolozsvár/Cluj"
Paul Stirton, Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
In 1902 János Fadrusz’s equestrian statue of the Hungarian Renaissance king Matthias Corvinus was unveiled on the main square in Kolozsvár, Transylvania, marking out this central locale as a distinctively Hungarian space in a region with an increasing majority of Romanians. It also inaugurated a competition for cultural dominance of the urban landscape by rival ethnic groups that lasted throughout the inter-war period (when Transylvania was ceded to Romania), the Communist period, and even after 1989. This paper addresses both the transformation of the city squares and their interpretation through ritual celebrations and photographs that served to focus attention on certain features and to heighten their symbolic importance.
"Urban Space as a Visual-Haptic Experience: Stereoscopic Views of German Cities, 1880-1910"
Douglas Klahr, University of Texas at Arlington
In the second half of the nineteenth century, stereoscopic views of European cities became immensely popular, and those of German cities dominated the market in Central Europe. Stereographs often delivered sensations of depth that were haptic in intensity, a result due not merely to binocular optics, but also to the kinesthetic relationship between viewer and device. The stereoscopic experience therefore was phenomenological, establishing a realm of psycho-corporeal space unlike any other visual medium, in which the sensation of depth was corporeal rather than intellectual. Stereoscopy therefore seemed ideally suited to provide an illusion of depth, which is the sine qua non in pictorial depictions of urban space, yet consistently delivering this illusion was problematic. This talk addresses the challenges that stereographers encountered when photographing urban spaces, which lead them often to depart from iconic images of German Cities that were marketed in widely-distributed viewbooks during the same period.
"Picturing Contested Space and Subjectivity in the Urban Milieus of Budapest and Vienna"
Dorothy Barenscott, Simon Fraser University
Examining the powerful role that urban spaces have played in the social imaginary of nation and Empire, this paper explores the new media forms of photography and film as they appeared at key historical moments in the interconnected development of Budapest and Vienna’s urban character in the fin de siècle period. Arguably, these new media forms operated as a powerful visual patois that celebrated and exposed the most pedestrian and de-institutionalized visions of a modern world—ephemeral and fleeting moments that competed with and broke the illusion of grand monuments dedicated to abstract concepts of nationhood and citizenship. What were the new spaces produced by photography and film in the dual capital cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire? And how did they affect the difficult histories and distinct perceptions of time-space, but also the competing theories of modern subjectivity and picture-making, that would emerge out of both places by WWI?
HGCEA RECEPTION
Thursday Feb 23, 6:30-9 pm,
at the Los Angeles Theater Center,
Rehearsal Room B, 4th floor.
514 South Spring Street Los Angeles, CA 90013
HGCEA Board Meeting
Friday, February 24, 12:00 PM–2:00 PM