The Color of Money: A Conference on Visuality and Economics

University of California, Irvine, 2002

 

 

CONTENTS:

 

¬®            Conference Schedule

 

¬®            Abstracts

 

¬®            Select Bibliography

 

¬®        cfp

 

Schedule

 

Friday,April 26

 

 

3:00 Coffee

3:45 Introductory Remarks

4:00 Panel: Bourdieu/Practice

      "Critical Design: Recent Strategies for Blurring the Markets forArt and Design"

       Ross K. Elfline, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

       "The Domestic Interior as Conceptual Portrait"

       Brian Goeltzenleuchter, University of California, San Diego

       "No Free Lunch: Rirkrit Tiravanija's Meals"

        Benjamin Lima, University of California, Irvine

5:00 Discussion

       Moderator: Analisa Leppanen-Guerra, UC Irvine

5:30 Keynote : Lynn Spigel, Professor, School of

         Cinema-Television, University of Southern California

        "Inside the Smart Home: From TV to Telerobotics"

6:45 Discussion

7:30 Closing Remarks

 

 

 

Saturday,April 27

 

10:00 Coffee

10:45 Opening Remarks

11:00 Panel: Carnival/Spectacle

          "When the Anti-Capitalism Movement Takes To the Streets:Public Protest As Public Ethnography"

           Greg Tanaka, University of California, Los Angeles

           "The Spectacle and 'the becoming consciousness of man': GuyDebord's Society of the Spectacle"

           Shelleen Greene, University of California, Irvine

           Noon Discussion

           Moderator: James D. Herbert, UC Irvine

12:30 Lunch

2:00 Panel: Cinema/Industry

       "The Buying Game: Miramax's Transformation from Independentto Studio Subsidiary"

       Alisa Perren, University of Texas at Austin

        "The Beauty of Global Capitalism: On Keanu Reeves"

        Gerald Sim, University of Iowa

3:00 Discussion

        Moderator: Akira Mizuta Lippit, UC Irvine

3:30 Keynote : Allan Sekula, Professor, California Instituteof the Arts

        "Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea"

4:45 Discussion

5:30 Closing Remarks

Paper Abstracts

 

 

Critical Design: Recent Strategies for Blurring the Markets for Art andDesign, Ross K. Elfline, School of the Art Institute ofChicago

 

While the mid- and late-1990s saw a trend toward "design art,"the vast majority of these works remained non-functional. Two artists inparticular, Andrea Zittel and Joep van Lieshout, have been noteworthy in theirdesire to buck this trend by creating fully functional works, which thusapproach the design object. More importantly, they have establishedorganizations, based on a corporate model, for marketing their works. AndreaZittel exhibits her designs under the guise of A-Z Administrative Services. Thoughthis serves primarily as a performative space for the artist, it alludes to aninnovative strategy for distributing art. Joep van Lieshout created Atelier vanLieshout in 1995, complete with marketing and public relations departments inplace to seek large scale design commissions, while still exhibiting workthrough the established institution of the art gallery.

 

Atthe same time, designer Constantin Boym has taken issue with the role of thedesigner by creating non-functional works for mass-production. His souvenirs of"Buildings of Disaster" question both the purpose of the designobject and our relationship to it.

Together,these three artists and designers have created and marketed objects that arecritical of the discipline of design itself. Existing in the liminal spacebetween art and design, they question whether this distinction is evennecessary.

 

RossElfline is completing his master's degree in Modern Art History, Theory andCriticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his research hasfocused on topics ranging from the commodification of the art object tonarrative theory and Minimalist music. Previous to his work at SAIC, Rossattended Grinnell College where he earned a degree in economics, concentratingon issues of wealth and income distribution. For this conference, Ross ispresenting a paper that comes out of his master's thesis.

 

 

 

The Domestic Interior as Conceptual Portrait, Brian Goeltzenleuchter, University ofCalifornia, San Diego

 

Optingfor a skeptical view of Pierre Bourdieu 's theories regarding thesociology of art and taste, this paper begins by acknowledging the poor dualitythat exists when considering the consumption of art (or visual culture) withinthe context of image construction--at one end the social marker, and at theother end the aesthetically pleasing object. Instead, my work argues for hybridsocio-aesthetic configurations that attempt to explain representations of selfthrough visual artifacts in a "passion-oriented" way. By this I referto French sociologist Antoine Hennion 's work with musicamateurs. Hennion 's use of the termamateur evokes both its English usage as one who follows a pursuit withoutattaining professional status, and its French usage as a lover or admirer. Withthe latter usage in mind, I begin a critique of conceptual class portraiture,suggesting that passion is both conditioned and generative. I use as a point ofdeparture my series of paintings entitled, Collaborations .The paintings 'subject is the domesticinterior as conceptual portrait--a metaphoric representation of a person bymeans of a literal representation of that person 'sliving space. I argue these portraits derive their meaning both from thepredetermined symbolic status of the objects displayed, and from the passion-generated manner in which each object isacquired and presented.

 

BrianGoeltzenleuchter is an interdisciplinary artist who uses hybrid forms toinitiate playful and unexpected dialogs regarding western traditions relativeto the construction of the home. He recently received an MFA in the Visual Artsfrom University of California, San Diego.   Goeltzenleuchter 's work has appeared at various venues in the United Statesand Europe. He recently finished two projects in Holland--an exhibition atPhoebus Gallery, Rotterdam and a temporary public artwork for the city ofUtrecht. Currently,he is a candidate for interdisciplinary studio positions at institutions inWashington, Missouri, and Maine.

 

 

 

No Free Lunch: Rirkrit Tiravanija's Meals, Benjamin Lima, University of California, Irvine

 

In Untitled (Free), at the 303 Gallery in New York in 1992, the artistRirkrit Tiravanija arranged for two spaces in the gallery to be put to unusualuse. In the front room, normally used for displaying art, Tiravanija placedobjects that were normally stored in the back room -- including paintings,supplies such as light bulbs, appliances such as a microwave oven and aminifridge, along with the gallery owner, Lisa Spellman, at her desk. In theback room, normally used for storage, Tiravanija installed a refrigerator withsupplies such as eggplant, broccoli, and beans, along with portable cookers,tables and chairs. Here the artist, with his associates assisting and sometimesstanding in for him, prepared and served curry for the duration of the exhibit.

 

This work, and other occasions where Tiravanija has played out domestic rituals ingallery spaces, provokes at least two kinds of responses. For those insiderswho are personally acquainted with the artist, the dealer and the other guests,the dining ritual functions as a kind of gift exchange, as described by MarcelMauss. For those outsiders who arrive anonymously and are not known to thatsocial network, however, multiple options are available, including: a fullparticipation and induction into the network; an observation while feeling excluded; or an indifferent observation.

 

This paper considers Tiravanija 's work in terms of theideas of Mauss, as well as those of Pierre Bourdieu in The Logic ofPractice, and of John Cage in Silence, arguing for the necessity ofmatching Tiravanija 's "socialphenomenology" to a "social physics," and suggesting that thework be viewed in terms of an unobstructed interpenetration between art andlife.

 

BenjaminLima is a graduate student in the PhD Program in Visual Studies at theUniversity of California, Irvine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the Anti-Capitalism Movement Takes To the Streets:Public Protest As Public Ethnography, Greg Tanaka, University of California, LosAngeles

 

As Americans come to understand the limitations of representative democracy andglobal capitalism, new alternatives are needed that make public spaces morefriendly to individual identity development and agency. One such alternative is"participatory democracy" in which each member of a society is givenboth voice and a duty to participate directly in civic governance.

 

Accompaniedby slides and a brief video, this paper examines the violence of police at theDemocratic National Convention outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles onAugust 14, 2000. While 12,000 protestors railed against the WTO, the Democraticparty, and what many perceived to be a selling out of the democracy to bigbusiness, police advanced on the crowd in full riot gear. As the police firedpepper spray and hard rubber bullets the size of golf balls on a peaceablydispersing crowd, the local media arguably under-reported the severity of thesepolice actions.

 

What Iwill argue is that these events were nonetheless recorded by members of theindependent media (e.g. Parachini, 2000) and by 200 "legal observers"placed in the field by the National Lawyers Guild (e.g. Cruz, 2000). Some ofthese frames are presented here. In recording this police violence, thesepractitioners filled a vacuum created by the official media's abdication of itsduty to inform a democratic public and, I will further argue, changed thenature of ethnography. Through continuing efforts of "publicethnography," an evidentiary foundation is being established by which torationalize and assess the efficacy of a global social movement toward direct,participatory democracy.

 

GregTanaka (BA Williams College; MBA Harvard; JD Georgetown; ABD in Anthropology,UCLA) teaches human development and social change, ethnographic methods, andsocial and political contexts of human development at Pacific Oaks College. Hehas published articles on autonomous community building as an alternative toglobal capitalism, critical race theory, gender and sexual orientation,intersubjective storytelling, and intercultural education. He has a book inpress on interculturalism in higher education and is completing a second bookon race, capital and participatory democracy. Editor of Unity &Difference journal, he is a 1996 recipient of the James Clavell LiteraryAward.

 

 

 

The Spectacle and 'the becoming consciousness of man':Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle,  Shelleen Greene, University of California,Irvine

 

GuyDebord's Society of the Spectacle is an astute, albeit pessimistic examinationof modern capitalist society. The prevalent interest in the effect of new modesof industrial production on human relations stems from Debord's involvementwith The Situationist International, the leftist student movement of the late1960s. Particular to the Situationist critique of modern capitalism is anincorporation of the effects of visual media on contemporary consumer society.Central to our discussion is the place and significance of the"spectacle" in modern society. Why has our culture incorporated thevisual to such an extent that Debord is compelled to state that the spectacleis a "social relationship between people that is mediated by images".By claiming the spectacle to be a social relation, we understand Debord'sconcern does not center on the image as such, but rather, the implications ofimage-excess and mass culture. Essentially, Debord's text on visual culture canbe read as a profoundly ethical examination of human society.

 

Tofurther our discussion of the spectacle, it is necessary to examine the work ofGeorge Bataille. We may illuminate several aspects of Society of the Spectacleby drawing on Bataille's re-reading of Hegel via Karl Marx and AlexanderKojeve. From an examination of two of Bataille's essays, "Hegel, Death andSacrifice" and "Sacrifice, the Festival and the Principles of theSacred World," we suggest that Debord's pessimism with mass culture stemsfrom the belief that modern society has no "real" spectacle, orrather, a spectacle that brings about as Bataille states, an "intimatelife" that allows for the development of human self-consciousness.

 

ShelleenGreene is a graduate student in the PhD Program in Visual Studies at theUniversity of California, Irvine.

 

 

 

The Buying Game: Miramax's Transformation fromIndependent to Studio Subsidiary,  Alisa Perren, University of Texas at Austin

 

"The Buying Game" provides a case study of thesale of Miramax to Disney in April 1993. Miramax was among the first of theindependent distributors to become studio subsidiaries in the 1990s. Inaddition, this company played a crucial role in framing the discourse ofindependence both before and after it became a part of the Magic Kingdom. Thispaper examines the ways that both the company and its films changed over thedecade. Further, I explore the relationship of Miramax's changes to largershifts in the structure, conduct and films of New Hollywood.

 

This paper has three parts: The first section examinesMiramax's status within the industry prior to April 1993. This section focuseson the controversial marketing of The Crying Game and the importance ofthis film's financial and critical success to Miramax's future fortunes. Thesecond section looks at the industry and press discourse surrounding the saleof Miramax to Disney, and the ways that this sale stimulated many people toevaluate the nature and meaning of independence in Hollywood. The third sectionsurveys Miramax's film slate over the rest of the '90s, assessing how thecompany altered its production, acquisitions, and distribution strategies withthe infusion of Disney money. Miramax's responses to the controversiessurrounding Kids ,Dogma and Oare discussed, along withthe company's increasing emphasis on genre films such as Scream ,TheFaculty and Scary Movie . The presentation concludes with aconsideration of the implications for independent film in light of the"mainstreaming" of Miramax and the emergence of other studio-basedspecialty divisions.

 

Alisa Perren is a doctoral candidate in the Radio-TV-Filmdepartment at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently working on amanuscript tracing the development of Miramax in the 1990s.

 

 

 

The Beauty of Global Capitalism: On Keanu Reeves,  Gerald Sim, University of Iowa

 

"The Beauty of Global Capitalism" argues thatthe films and star discourse of Keanu Reeves are inflected by specific visualconstructions of his persona and identity that are in turn heavily implicatedin Neo-Marxist theories of postmodern culture and spectacle: His aestheticbeauty is a reification of the economic substructure. Reeves' star text revealsthat he is inexorably associated with racial ambiguity; patterns andobservations that recall Miriam Hansen's work on Rudolph Valentino. wheremultiple planes of identification resulted in a discursive formation within hisstardom that Hansen argues enabled female consumers to experience a level ofparticipation in the public sphere. For Reeves' fans, however, the publicsphere is one that has been increasingly if not completely dominated by globaleconomic capital, where he carries a distanced, "Generation X"persona. Reeves' raciality differs from Valentino's in that postmodern racialformations render it politically impotent. The 1967 Supreme Court rulingstriking down anti-miscegenation shortly preceded the complete breakdown ofMarxist idealism in 1968. Multiracial bodies that proliferated since then arethus governed by the ideology of Late Capitalism. Therefore, the two mostprominent characteristics of Reeves' star discourse -- his ambiguous exoticismand "lost boy" persona -- are girded by the cultural logic andunderpinned by the capital flow which combine to make him a postmodern icon,that elide more progressive interpretations of his subjectivity, and thatefface the subject itself.

 

GeraldSim is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Comparative Literature at the Universityof Iowa, with interests in American cinema, National cinema, political economyand film music.

Selected Bibliography on Visuality and Economics

See also the Behindthe Screens studyguide.

 

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The Color of Money: A Conference on Visuality and Economics
Friday, April 26 - Saturday, April 27, 2002
Organized by the graduate students of the Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies,
University of California, Irvine

CALL FOR PAPERS

Wealth and poverty are consistently powerful stimuli for visual production, whether in celebratory, ambivalent or condemnatory modes. Products of the mass media, as well as both marginal subcultures and the elite art-world, must articulate themselves through and against the framework set by general economic conditions. We invite submissions that both subject these products to rigorous visual analysis, and frame them within the historical and economic circumstances of their appearance.
Submissions may address all visual arts and media, including film, television, and fine arts. Suggested themes include:

Hollywood vs. Independent
Recent high-profit successes in "independent" film have caused an influx of wealth and affluence into an industry traditionally known for low-budget production, yet high aesthetic quality. The money-making potential of independent film has also prompted Hollywood cinema to adopt new film aesthetics and marketing strategies. What are the financial and aesthetic differences (if any) between Hollywood and Independent cinema? What is the impact of economic conditions on the relationship between the Hollywood and Independent film studios? How have the Internet and digital film technologies affected the nature of both industries? Is there presently an alternative cinema to challenge both Hollywood and Independent film productions? What roles do marginal and international cinemas play in the current film market?

Society Portraiture
Commissioned portraits have been a powerful medium for the wealthy classes to visually articulate their own ideology. What transformations occur between the older examples, traditionally designed for viewing by members of their own class, and those from the age of the mass media that verge toward celebrity and are more broadly available for identification or envy? How does old money visually differentiate itself from new money?

The Artist and the Bourgeois
We are interested in theorizations of the interdependency of visual producers and their sponsors in the commercial class, who are bound together by an "umbilical cord of gold," as Clement Greenberg writes, but who nonetheless have a history of mutual mistrust. How has the model artistic career moved from an ideal of bohemian poverty to one of savvy entrepreneurship?

Representations of Wealth
Patrons regularly use visual art to legitimate their wealth, or advertise their taste or virtue. How effective are tributes to the piety of wealthy patrons incorporated into the visual field itself, or alternatively present as textual benedictions accompanying an exhibition? What is the effect of representations of greed and accumulation, whether from a perspective of approving, individualist adulation, or alternatively from one of moralistic or socialistic censure? Can this be seen in terms of a thematization of excess, waste or superfluity?

The Convulsive Boom
What are the visual symptoms of the social transformations accompanying an influx of wealth into a society? Whether from trade, manufacturing, colonization, technology, or speculation, new sources of wealth demand new cultural representations, in circumstances ranging from the South Seas Bubble and Tulipomania to the Gilded Age, the Roaring 20s, the Affluent Society and the dot-com bubble. What is the function of visual productions in either smoothing over the contradictions produced by these new alignments, or highlighting them in progressive or reactionary protest?

Art Booms
How do the economic conditions of the art market affect the form and matter of art? How does an art-market boom affect the development of lavish materials and exhibitions? How are ostensibly autonomous works of art and their makers assimilated by the promotional functions of the mass media, making media stars of the artists and inflating the market for artworks? How can we generally rethink the relations between the economic cycle and the spheres of art practice and commerce?

 

 

 

 

 


Abstract Deadline:
Monday, December 17, 2001

Please forward 250-300 word abstract/CV via email to thecolorofmoney@uci.edu or via FAX to (949) 824-2509.
For questions or comments, please contact Shelleen Greene <greenes@uci.edu> or Benjamin Lima <blima@uci.edu>.