2-3 May 2012, Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), 2 rue Vivienne, 75002 Paris (open to all, free admission).
Organized by Dr Jason E. Hill (INHA) and Dr Elisa Schaar (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
This two-day international symposium considers the dynamic interplay of the fine arts and the technologies and structures of the mass media across the long narrative of American art history. Taking as an occasion the ‘Warhol: Headlines’ travelling exhibition that premiered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the autumn of 2011 and that systematically explored Andy Warhol’s artistic preoccupation with the visual culture of journalism, our program aims to grant visibility to the exciting correspondences or tensions that emerge when such disciplinary boundaries as have fractured the study of the fine arts and more instrumental communicative media are, even if only temporarily, set aside. The spectrum of research encompasses moments of intersection between fine arts discourse and the various technological and historically specific modalities of mass media culture from the sixteenth-century printing press and the nineteenth-century panorama to the experimental cinema of the sixties and our present social media sphere.
Programme: Wednesday May 2 (Auditorium)
- 10.30 Welcome and Introductory Remarks, Jason E. Hill and Elisa Schaar, Veerle Thielemans (Terra Foundation Europe), Ségolène Le Men (Université Paris X Nanterre)
11.00 Stop Press
- Molly Donovan (National Gallery of Art, Washington): Warhol’s Headlines: Social Consciousness Like you Read About
- Jason LaFountain (Harvard University): Inc.: the Art of Living, Print Media and the Puritans
- John Fagg (University of Birmingham): “a clean sweep of the truck”: Clutter and Commercial Illustration
12.30 Break
12.45 In the Loop
- Filip Lipinski (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań): The Virtual Hopper. Nighthawks Between Dissemination and Desire
- Annie Claustres (Institut national d’histoire de l’art): La médiatisation de l’objet manufacturé dans les années 1980
3.00 On Location
- Maria Slowinska (Freie Universität, Berlin): Negotiating the Materiality of Site: Prada Marfa
- Nenette Luarca-Shoaf (University of Delaware): Intermedial Encounters with the Mississippi River, ca. 1850
4.30 Intermedia
- Juan Carlos Kase (University of North Carolina, Wilmington): “The Content of Any Medium Is Always Another Medium »: Experimental Cinema and the Televisual Mosaics of Paik, Yalkut, and Warhol
- Christian Delage (Université Paris 8): Jason Moran in the Mind of Thelonious Monk: a multimedia experiment involving narration, graphic art, video, and still photography
Programme: Thursday May 3 (Salle Vasari)
- 11.00 Welcome and Introductory Remarks: Jason E. Hill and Elisa Schaar, Jean-Loup Bourget (École normale supérieure)
11.15 Jacks of All Trades
- Michael Lobel (Purchase College, State University of New York): John Sloan: Between Art and Illustration
- Sara Doris (Northeastern University, Boston): Media/Art: McLuhan and Warhol in the 1960s
- Stephanie Schwartz (University College, London): Film Stills: Paul Strand and the Invention of Documentary Film
2.00 Show Business
- James Boaden (University of York): Parker Tyler, Myra Breckinridge, and Queer Surreal Fandom
- Richard Meyer (University of Southern California): ‘Photography is Elastic’: Weegee’s Cock-Eyed View of Hollywood
3.15 MoMA and Media
- Kristen Gresh (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston): New(s) Pictures on the Walls of the MoMA at Mid-Century
- François Brunet (Université Paris Diderot): Photography in 1938: Taft’s American scene vs. Newhall’s medium
- Ursula Frohne (University of Cologne): The impact of INFORMATION: American Art in Competition with New Media Culture
5.15 Traffic
- Jorge Ribalta (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona): Public photographic spheres
- André Gunthert (EHESS, Paris): The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Appropriation
6.15 Closing discussion
Sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art and co-sponsored by The Courtauld Institute of Art and by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris in partnership with the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre la Défense and the Université François Rabelais de Tours.