The interactive calendar at the right lists all public lectures, teaching and travels. If you click on the links you can get more information about venues and schedules of events.
If you’d like to invite me to lecture, please check availability, and then send an email here.
Lecture topics are listed at the bottom of the page. Some have links to previews of the Keynote (PowerPoint) presentations; those are pdf reductions and do not include the full texts, transitions, or films. They are just meant to give an idea of what the talks include.
Lecture Topics
The following topics are available for 2009-10. Note the excerpts from the Keynote (PowerPoint) lectures are just meant as samples; they don’t contain the full texts of the talks, and they are not kept up to date. These are also available in HD (1920 x 1080) and SXGA (1280 x 1024). Ask your audiovisual technician if your projector can accommodate resolutions beyond XGA (1024 x 768).
- What is an Image? (report on the state of thinking about what visual objects are, based on the 2008 Stone Summer Theory Institute conference). See sample slides here.
- Links Between Religion and Contemporary Art (a report following on from the book On The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, including material based on criticisms, and a report on the book Re-Enchantment). See sample slides here.
- Four Models of First-Year Art Education, Why They Are Incompatible (on the Bauhaus, the academic model, and two others, which together comprise the major possibilities for educating artists). See sample slides here.
- The Emergence of the New PhD in Studio Art (a report on the emerging “terminal” degree, as it is being implemented around the world)
- Visual Practices Across the University (report on the book of that same name, which was an attempt to consider how people in all departments of a university use and interpret images, and how a first-year course might use that material to introduce visuality into a university education). See sample slides here.
- Representations of Pain (on photos of Chinese torture and their relation to formal analysis as it is practiced in art history: this is a very hard lecture for some audiences). See sample slides here.
- Problems Posed for Film Theory by Scientific Films (a consideration of temporality, instantaneity, and duration in film theory, and the ways that scientific films challenge those formulations)
- Unsolved Issues in Contemporary Art Criticism (discussion of the conceptual, institutional, and practical problems in art criticism; based on What Happened to Art Criticism? and The State of Art Criticism). See sample slides here.
- Is Art History Global? (report on a book of that name; lots of statistics). See sample slides here.
- Kunstwissenschaft and Art History, Two Forgotten Subjects (on the history of the discipline, including concepts of Bildwissenschaft and visual studies). See sample slides here.
- Thoughts on the Future of Art History (an undergraduate lecture, on the “threat” of visual studies, the relation between art history and other fields that study visuality, the worldwide spread of art history, and the subjects art historians study). See sample slides here.
- Problems in Photography Theory (report on the book, Photography Theory, with emphasis on the sources of incoherence in current theorizing on photography). See sample slides here.
- Thirteen Unsolved Problems in the Theory of Landscape (on the current conceptualizations of geography, landscape, and its representation, following on from the book Landscape Theory). See sample slides here.
- Incoherence and Coherence in the Art World (a discussion of the 7 books in the Art Seminar series, which involved over 300 scholars; each book revealed a different kind of incoherence — this talk is best for upper-level graduate seminars)
- How To Use Your Eyes, And How Some Animals Use Their Eyes (exercises in seeing, and the relevance of animal vision for understanding human vision — good for general cross-university audiences, undergraduates, etc.) See sample slides here.
- The Concepts of Empathy and Sympathy (a philosophic paper on absorption, immersion, theatricality, self-awareness, and other related concepts in contemporary art theory). See sample slides here.
- Sources of Theorizing on the Body in Recent Art (aimed at upper-level undergraduate art history, visual studies, and studio art students, but also suitable for a graduate seminar). See sample slides here.
- Strategies of Museum Display (lecture first given at MoMA, about the application of theories of modern and postmodern art to the strategies of museum installation; this is a half-hour presentation, not a full lecture, suited for upper-level undergraduate and beginning graduate seminars). See sample slides here.
- Can Pictures Think? (a talk on the various theories that have been mobilized to articulate the impression that pictures–especially paintings and drawings–somehow possess a quality that is like thought, or can themselves propose thought, or give voice to thought; for PhD and theoretically-inclined MFA students). See sample slides here.
- Current Problems in Visual Studies (includes material on art history survey courses, and a critique of the political efficacy and ambition of visual studies). This is related to the Stone Summer Theory Institute for 2011, “Farewell to Visual Studies.” See sample slides here.
- The End of the Theory of the Gaze (this is a version of the talk listed above, with animal and human vision examples, but geared to graduate seminars, and beginning with a critique of the current theory of the gaze)
- Limits of Materiality in Art History (on recent attempts to broaden art historical interpretation to include tactility, materiality, matter, and substance; the talk considers talk about materiality as a trope in art history, and argues that art history generally avoids close encounters with the substance of painting and other arts) See sample slides here.
- The North / South Dichotomy in Albrecht Dürer (an examination of Dürer’s prints, in closeup, for signs of “Northern” [German] and “Southern” [Italian] forms, as in Erwin Panofsky’s account; for printmaking students and undergraduate art history students). See sample slides here.
- The Shapes of Art History (an undergraduate lecture on the different arrangements of art history’s periods, following on from Stories of Art; this lecture can be accompanied by a workshop in which everyone draws their own diagrams of art history). See sample slides here.
- The Detail (on the limits of close reading and close looking; examples include details of paintings, and a critique of the book What Painting Is; Neolothic artifacts; images that are perceived as painful or shocking; and theorizing on details in recent art historical writing)
|
|