The annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium
is the longest running symposium of its kind in North America. Initiated
in 1965, the symposium provides a forum for graduate students from our
department and from universities across North America to present original
research in a scholarly format. Generally held each spring, the symposium
is organized around critical themes and issues addressing the current state
of art historical scholarship.
Although the symposium is entirely run by graduate
students, it would not be possible without the generous support of such
organizations as: the UCLA Friends of Art History, the UCLA Art Council,
the UCLA Graduate Student Association, the Center for Student Programming,
and the Department of Art History.
35th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student
Symposium
ARTifact
April 22, 2000
9:30AM to 5:00PM
UCLA Campus: Charles E. Young Salon, Kerckhoff
Hall
Keynote Presentation, 1:15PM - Allan McCollum,
Contemporary Artist
Schedule of Speakers and Abstracts
Previous Symposia
Questions should be directed to us at ahsympos@humnet.ucla.edu.
This Symposium is sponsored by the UCLA Department
of Art History, Friends of Art History, the UCLA Art History Graduate Student
Association, the UCLA Graduate Student Association, and the UCLA Campus
Programs Committee of the Program Activities Board.
Getting here...
If you need a map of the UCLA campus, please click
here . Daily parking is available on-campus and can be purchased for
$6. at the entrances. The closest on-campus parking to Kerckhoff Hall is
located in parking structures 6, 8, and 9.
Schedule
9:00-9:45 AM Continental Breakfast
9:45-10:00 AM Welcome: Professor Robert L. Brown,
Department of Art History, UCLA
10:00 AM-NOON Morning Panel, Respondent: Saleema
Waraich, Department of Art History, UCLA
NOON-1:00 PM Lunch
1:15-1:30 PM Reconvening, Kenote Speaker Introduction
1:30-2:45 PM Keynote Address, Allan
McCollum, Artist
2:45-4:45 PM Afternoon Panel, Respondent: Colette
Apelian, Department of Art History, UCLA
4:45-5:00 PM Closing Remarks
Allan McCollum
Texts about and by the artist can be found
here.
Abstracts
"Ideal Image" or Exception
to the "Rule?"
The Wieng Sa Buddha and Gupta Stylistic Influence
in Early Mainland Southeast Asia
Paul Lavy
Gupta-period art from northern India (ca. 4th-7th
cent. C.E.) is frequently argued to have been an important stylistic source
for the earliest sculpture from the areas of what are today Thailand and
Cambodia. Virtually all important studies of Preangkorian sculpture (pre-802
C.E.), including the recent catalogue that accompanied the Millennium of
Glory exhibition of ancient Cambodian art (1997), consider the Gupta style
to have been the major formative influence in early mainland Southeast
Asia. Rarely, however, are direct comparisons between Gupta and Southeast
Asian works made or effectively argued. Nor, due to the lack of any clear
archaeological evidence, are the connections or contacts between these
regions ever explained. The Wieng Sa Buddha (found in Peninsular Thailand),
with its unmistakable Gupta affinities in terms of style and iconography,
has provided scholars with the only presumed example of a Gupta export
to Southeast Asia. Reevaluation of this tiny (7 in.) relief and its place
in the development of early Southeast Asian styles and Buddha imagery,
however, raises questions about its origins and the commonly-held assumption
of Gupta stylistic primacy in ancient Southeast Asia.
The high regard for Gupta art in India and the
west has developed in tandem with the notion that the Gupta period represents
"the classical phase of Indian art." This idea was first expressed in 1927
by the eminent art historian, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and has been continually
perpetuated in the art historiography of the last seventy years. The culmination
of the Gupta-as-classical paradigm came in 1978 with Pratapaditya Pal's
well-known exhibition and accompanying catalogue, The Ideal Image: The
Gupta Sculptural Tradition and Its Influence. Included was the Wieng Sa
Buddha, a piece that has frequently been published but never thoroughly
analyzed.
For Pal and others, the Wieng Sa Buddha represents
a clear example of a Gupta work made for export and one of the few known
transmitters of Gupta style to Southeast Asia. Close stylistic analysis,
however, reveals features that are consistent with mainland Southeast Asian
artistic styles. The Wieng Sa Buddha, therefore, may have been a locally
made copy (of a Gupta Sarnath original) rather than an Indian export. Furthermore,
the iconography of the Wieng Sa image is extremely rare in Thailand and
Cambodia. Thus the Wieng Sa Buddha, while perhaps reflecting the spread
of general Gupta stylistic characteristics to Southeast Asia, can no longer
be seen as a source of specific influences. In short, it is a poor candidate
to serve as a linchpin in arguments that privilege Gupta stylistic influence
in early mainland Southeast Asian sculpture.
Creating Traditions:
Competing Excavations and the Political Uses of Invented Language
Hans Bjarne Thomsen
In 1819, the scholar Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843)
published a controversial work that was to have wide impact on not just
Kokugaku
thought
but also the language and arts of contemporary Japan. The book, the Jinji
hifumi den, supposedly marked the discovery of Japanese alphabets,
the so-called jindai moji, pre-dating the introduction of Chinese
characters. According to Atsutane, the alphabets constitute the world's
first written language that had been handed down from the gods to the Japanese
long before the arrival of the imports from the continent.
Atsutane's theory was to have wide repercussions
as inscriptions in the new alphabets began to appear on the art and visual
culture of the nineteenth century: in calligraphy, on stone inscriptions,
in Shinto rituals, and even in the design of paper currency. Excavations
also supposedly revealed ancient Japanese artifacts with jindai moji
characters.
Later in the Meiji and into the Showa, these "uniquely Japanese" characters
were taken up by State Shinto and figured in the dialogue vis-à-vis
the newly conquered territories: the inscribed objects dug up in Japan
competed in a sense with the inscribed bronze vessels excavated in China.
In 1953 Yamada Yoshio finally sets an end to the controversy by proving
conclusively the characters to be later forgeries and the once popular
topic disappeared almost entirely from scholarly discourse.
This paper proposes to reexamine these invented
alphabets and to postulate on their origins and function. It will be seen
that they, rather than stemming from the gods, come from Japan's neighbors
to the west: while some are direct copies of the Korean alphabet created
in the 1440's, others stem from Chinese Ming and Qing dynasty studies of
inscriptions found on excavated artifacts from earlier dynasties. The fundamental
irony of the jindai moji remains that, although proclaimed by scholars
and artists to be uniquely Japanese creations, they ultimately are as foreign
to Japan as the Chinese characters that they supposedly predate.
Counterfeit and Artifact
in Trompe l'Oeil's Paste-up Memories
Meredith Davis
The late Nineteenth-century American artists William
Harnett and John Frederic Peto were "re-discovered" in the 1940's by Downtown
Gallery owner Edith Halpert, who marketed their paintings as relating to
both the (highly saleable) American Folk Art Tradition and to a 'surrealistic'
aesthetic. They were quickly bought up by the likes of Nelson Rockefeller
and Alfred Barr, who admired their formal strengths and apparent links
with modernist sensibilities. Most of the art historical scholarship that
has followed the reintroduction of this work onto the market has been focused
on reinserting these stranded painitngs into history, on giving them an
authentic and stable relationship to a historical context. This paper will
emphasize that the relationship of these works to history in general, or
to a particular historical moment, is uncertain and unstable at best.
After a brief discussion of the structural conditions
of trompe l'oeil as a mode of represntation, the first part of the paper
will argue that trompe l'oeil is itself a problematic non-artifact, an
expressly ahistorical,inauthenitc mode of painting. Trompe l'oeil occupies
an uneasy place within art historical discourse because of its periodic
reemergence over several millenia of the history of Western painting, which
theatens the developmental ideal within the discipline. The broader question
this provokes will be: What is the place of the artifact outside of a teleological
model of history: is it the Benjaminian monad, a "chip" of messianic time?
In the case of trompe l'oiel, I prefer Hubert Damisch's idea that there
are some objects which function as "models for thought" do not obey the
laws of history.
This analysis leads to the second part of my paper,
which consists of a discussion of how the imagery of the paintings address
these very issues. The illusionistic surfaces support a range of objects
with legible historical implicationsranging from the public to the very
private: Civil War pistols, tattered letters, stamps, ticket stubs and
currency. I will focus on the prevalent representations of money in these
works, suggesting that this imagery echoes the structural conditions of
trompe l'oeil itself, moving beyond the largely iconographic analyses of
the represntations of currency which have been written
Raiding the Refrigerator:
Representing Canada in the Cold War
Alan C. Elder
In 1957, Canada's National Industrial Design Council
(NIDC) organized a display for an international design exhibition in Milan.
This exhibit focused on the development of the "new town" of Kitimat by
the Aluminum Company of Canada. Along with furnishings and photographs
taken from the workers' and guest quarters in Kitimat were a series of
objects that had received the NIDC's Design Award. The Canadian government's
use domestic objects to represent ideas of modern nationalism during the
Cold War period is not an isolated case. Signs of domestic comfort became
weapons to be used by opposing forces alongside their display of military
arms. In 1959, this battle reached its peak when American Vice-President
Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev engaged in what would
become one of the most famous verbal sparring matches of the Cold War.
Standing in a mock-up of an American kitchen, the two statesmen debated
the strengths of their political ideologies based on the qualities of their
respective kitchen designs in what came to be known as the "kitchen debate."
Home appliances, along with the kitchen spaces themselves, heightened awareness
of the technical innovations and the introduction of new, more "modern,"
materials--many developed by the international war machines active in World
War II. But what does Canada's representation at the Triennale di Milano
indicate about the nation in 1957?
The Second World War had thrust Canada onto the
international stage as an autonomous nation. During the immediate post-war
period, Canada strove to maintain its newfound autonomy while simultaneously
struggling with the sometimes contradictory influences of Britain and the
United States. Through its development of social, economic and cultural
policies, the nation attempted to extradite itself from its old world ancestor
and differentiate itself from its continental partner. In this paper, I
will analyze the Canadian government's display in Milan in order to investigate
the way that Canada represents itself as separate from the old worldliness
of Britain and the rugged individuality of the United States. Through its
focus on contemporary materials and products made from aluminum, the NIDC
presented Canada as a modern nation that encouraged new industry and technology.
These technologies and industries, along with the utopic vision that formed
the basis for the planning of Kitimat, are used to depict Canada as a sophisticated
and caring nation. Simultaneously, the physical location of Kitimat in
the northern half of British Columbia enabled the designers to utilize
traditional elements of Canadian identity--the rugged North and the white
male conqueror--in new ways. The landscape was now being civilized with
modern design and technology, rather than conquered by force. Finally,
the juxtaposition of a photograph of a male Alcan worker with domestic
objects in the display allows for a blurring of traditional gender binaries.
No longer is he a hard-hatted, hard-headed industrial worker; instead he
is portrayed as a sophisticated individual working in a modern technological
sphere in a civilized community. His presence calls for a rethinking of
the dichotomies of male/female, producer/consumer, public/private. My paper
investigates the suitability of softening these traditional classifications
in order to form a visual representation of Canadian identity.
During the Cold War, the struggle for ideological
supremacy was not only taking place outdoors, but inside--in the kitchen
as well. And the siege for domestic superiority has resurfaced. On Thursday,
13 January 2000, Bill Gates, when announcing his retirement as Microsoft's
chief executive officer, stated that he was going to "focus 'almost 100
per cent' on the company's next generation of software." This next generation
of software--unlike the academic and security based technological innovations
of the recent past--is destined for the kitchens of the world. As Simon
Tuck noted in the Globe and Mail the following morning, "The guy who runs
your computer wants to take over your kitchen." The kitchen remains a contested
site for the transformation of everyday lives. In 1957, it also served
as a fitting metaphor for the construction of a new Canadian identity.
The politics
of perpetuation: Samoan necklaces and the legacy of collecting
Tobias Sperlich
The aim of this paper is to explore how ethnographic
objects were active in creating their own histories and how they can be
seen to act as links between a variety of discourses today. These processes
will be exemplified by Samoan sperm whale necklaces ('ula lei) collected
in German colonial Samoa around the onset of the 20th century
and now housed in German museums. Coming from a cultural background that
valued these necklaces as exchange objects and ornaments of rulers, their
meaning and function have frequently and dramatically changed in the process
of collecting and exhibiting them.
Collecting in Samoa in the late 19th/early
20th century was heavily influenced by such paradigms as salvage
ethnography and evolutionary documentation. As such, 'ula lei were
valued mainly because they were seen to give testimony of a soon-to-disappear
culture and of technological advances of "savage" industries. Thus they
were no longer regarded as gifts by the people who were in contact with
the objects but entered the commodity phase of their existence (cf. Appadurai
1986). At the same time, the 'ula lei was used to portray Samoa
and Samoans in terms of exoticism and notions of paradise and thus illustrates
a longing for the paradise that Germany had obtained in Polynesia (Western
Samoan became a German colony in 1900).
Subsequent shifts in anthropological focus made
it possible to regard 'ula lei in German collections as the expression
of internal Samoan social relationships, manifested in the exchange rituals
in which the necklaces would take part. Yet, they were still seen as passive
objects, detached from their contextual Samoan framework. Recent work on
the "entanglement" of objects with history and individuals (e.g., Thomas
1991) and the recognition of objects' agency (e.g., Gell 1998) allows one
to now view these objects as not only having a history, but as agents active
in the creation of that history. Having experienced and formed the history
associated with them, 'ula lei today act as a nexus between a multiplicity
of discourses, past and present, including the collector and the museum,
museum ethnography and colonialism, Samoa and Germany.
Dante's Bones
Jeffrey D. Feldman
In 1933, Italian craniologist Fabio Frassetto
(1876-1953) published Dante's Bones (Bologna: Instituto di Antropologia),
a study that used Dante Alighieri's skeletal measurements to test the authenticity
of major artistic representations of Italy's most famous poet. Frassetto
distinguished between good and bad art by overlaying cranial drawings onto
a given image of Dante. In this paper I read Dante's Bones to theorize
the implications Frassetto's approach to connoisseurship held for the visual
and narrative link between racism and culture in fascist Italy. I argue
that the broader context for Dante's Bones was the development of an Italian
ethnology based on the creation of mask- and portrait-based racial typologies
using photographs and plaster casts collected in the African colonies.
As a result of these studies, Italian racist science developed a visual
agenda. Accordingly, the analysis of skeletal structure in relation to
surface elements in the human face became the most sophisticated methodology
to determine racial authenticity. By analyzing portraits of Dante as if
they had skeletal inner structures, Frassetto ushered in the language and
logic of racial essentialism not just to one chapter in Italian art history,
but to central "corpus" of Italian cultures.
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