Please join us on March 5th at 6pm for the next lecture this year in the Work-In-Progress Lecture Series, by our own Professor Bert Winther-Tamaki. The lecture is “Charismatic Concrete: Visual Culture and the Material Imaginary of Japan’s 1980s Bubble Economy.” Dinner will be provided.
Abstract: The peak years of Japanese economic power coincided with an extraordinary appetite for concrete. Cities, coasts, and mountains were transformed into stony gray masses. Photography, architecture, anime and other visual arts imbued this hardening of the environment with Japanese tropes of indigenous tradition, sensitivity to nature, and sublime disaster. But despite its assiduously cultivated aesthetic appeal, such was the charisma of concrete that it also haunted the popular imagination as one of the preeminent media of the anxiety and tedium associated with the drab, harsh, and degraded infrastructure of daily life.
This lecture is sponsored by Art History, Visual Studies, Illuminations, and the Humanities Center.