Author: Lynn Cunningham
New Book from Professor Gregory Levine: “Long Strange Journey: On Modern Zen, Zen Art, and Other Predicaments”
Congratulations to History of Art Department Professor Gregory Levine on his new publication, Long Strange Journey: On Modern Zen, Zen Art, and Other Predicaments, with the University of Hawaii Press.
ISBN: 9780824858056
From the publisher website:
“Long Strange Journey presents the first critical analysis of visual objects and discourses that animate Zen art modernism and its legacies, with particular emphasis on the postwar “Zen boom.” Since the late nineteenth century, Zen and Zen art have emerged as globally familiar terms associated with a spectrum of practices, beliefs, works of visual art, aesthetic concepts, commercial products, and modes of self-fashioning. They have also been at the center of fiery public disputes that have erupted along national, denominational, racial-ethnic, class, and intellectual lines. Neither stable nor strictly a matter of euphoric religious or intercultural exchange, Zen and Zen art are best approached as productive predicaments in the study of religion, spirituality, art, and consumer culture, especially within the frame of Buddhist modernism.
Long Strange Journey’s modern-contemporary emphasis sets it off from most writing on Zen art, which focuses on masterworks by premodern Chinese and Japanese artists, gushes over “timeless” visual qualities as indicative of metaphysical states, or promotes with ahistorical, trend-spotting flair Zen art’s design appeal and therapeutic values. In contrast, the present work plots a methodological through line distinguished by “discourse analysis,” moving from the first contacts between Europe and Japanese Zen in the sixteenth century to late nineteenth–early twentieth-century transnational exchanges driven by Japanese Buddhists and intellectuals and the formation of a Zen art canon; to postwar Zen transformations of practice and avant-garde expressions; to popular embodiments of our “Zenny zeitgeist,” such as Zen cartoons. The book presents an alternative history of modern-contemporary Zen and Zen art that emphasizes their unruly and polythetic-prototypical natures, taking into consideration serious religious practice and spiritual and creative discovery as well as conflicts over Zen’s value amid the convolutions of global modernity, squabbles over authenticity, resistance against the notion of “Zen influence,” and competing claims to speak for Zen art made by monastics, lay advocates, artists, and others.”
Exhibit: Love across the Global South
Love across the Global South: Popular Cinema Cultures of India and Senegal explores interconnections between South Asian and African popular cultures through film posters, footage, and memorabilia. Focusing on the circulation of Bombay cinema, South Asia’s largest film industry, in Senegal, West Africa, the exhibition foregrounds the role of transnational film cultures and fan clubs in shaping affinities across the Global South. Highlighting archival material held by UC Berkeley—including a collection of twentieth-century popular film magazines and films housed at the Media Resources Center—the exhibition harnesses library holdings to nuance campus debates on race, globalization, and visual representation while experimenting with new curatorial practices that emphasize Afro-Asian connections in an expanded Indian Ocean imaginary. The exhibition is curated by Sugata Ray (Assistant Professor, History of Art), Ivy Mills (Lecturer, History of Art), Liladhar Pendse (Librarian, Central Asian and Eastern European Studies), and Adnan Malik (Curator for South Asian Collections, South/Southeast Asia Library). The Mellon Curatorial Preparedness Initiative funded Curatorial Assistantships for History of Art Department graduate students Shivani Sud and Randip Bakshi.
The exhibit runs from October 6, 2017–March 1, 2018 in the Bernice L. Brown Gallery, Doe Library.
New Book from Art History Faculty Member, Lisa Trever
Assistant Professor Lisa Trever in the History of Art department has published The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru, with Harvard University Press as part of the Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology Studies Series.
From the publisher website:
The archaeological site of Pañamarca was once a vibrant center of religious performance and artistic practice within the ancient Moche world. During the seventh and eighth centuries CE, architects and mural painters created lofty temples and broad-walled plazas that were brilliantly arrayed with images of mythological heroes, monstrous creatures, winged warriors in combat, ritual processions, and sacrificial offerings.
This richly illustrated volume offers a nuanced account of the modern history of exploration, archaeology, and image making at Pañamarca; it also offers detailed documentation of the new fieldwork carried out by the authors at the site. That fieldwork led to the discoveries of 1,200-year-old mural paintings, presented here in detail for the first time. Created in a cultural context a thousand years before the use of written scripts, the art and architecture of Pañamarca cannot be studied via ancient histories or commentaries, but only through layers of physical evidence from archaeological excavations and documentation. This volume will serve as a definitive reference work on mural painting at Pañamarca, as well as a new primary resource for Pre-Columbian studies and for studies in global ancient art, architecture, and archaeology more broadly.
Digital Humanities Grant Opportunities for Art Historians
3D Photogrammetry For Cultural Heritage Workshop
CFP deadline December 1, 2017.
A one-week training workshop (March 25-31, 2018) at UCSC on photogrammetry for early-stage graduate students. Participants in this workshop will gain intensive hands-on experience in the techniques and processing workflow for photogrammetric recording for cultural heritage projects, presented within the context of a critical engagement in discussions of the politics of digital knowledge production. Click here for more information: ARC Photogrammetry Workshop Call UCSC.
Research Project: Ed Ruscha’s “Streets of Los Angeles”
CFP deadline January 19, 2018.
Scholars from a wide range of fields are invited to submit proposals for research projects investigating Ed Ruscha’s “Streets of Los Angeles” archive—including, but not limited to digital humanities, cultural geography, architecture, art history, photography, and visual culture. Interdisciplinary approaches and team-based projects are particularly encouraged. Selected researchers would collaborate with Getty Research Institute (GRI) staff as part of a larger research-technology project, which seeks to digitize and make publicly-accessible a portion of the archive in innovative ways. The goal is to publish resulting scholarship at the close of the project. For more details, click here.
CFP deadline Janurary 5, 2018.
This Getty Foundation supported workshop will support interdisciplinary teams focused on the hard questions of Digital Art History as a discipline, a set of methods, and a host of technical and institutional challenges and opportunities.
Participants will gather from June 4-16, 2018 in Venice, Italy at Venice International University, with follow-up activities taking place over the course of the 2018-19 academic year, and leading into a follow-on gathering in Summer of 2019 that will operate as a writing and digital publication workshop, building upon work done over the course of the year by the project teams and in collaboration with our wider network.
NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants
CFP deadline January 16, 2018.
Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (DHAG) support digital projects throughout their lifecycles, from early start-up phases through implementation and long-term sustainability. Experimentation, reuse, and extensibility are hallmarks of this grant category, leading to innovative work that can scale to enhance research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities.
This program is offered twice per year. Proposals are welcome for digital initiatives in any area of the humanities.
Photography Class Views Rare Artists’ Books by Ruscha and Others
A photography class from Art Practice taught by Matthew Smith visited the Art History/Classics Library last week to view some of our rare artists’ books. The students viewed several artists’ books by Ed Ruscha, including TwentySix Gasoline Stations, Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, and Some Los Angeles Apartments, all from the collections of the Environmental Design Library and the Art History/Classics Library.
Ruscha’s TwentySix Gasoline Stations is often considered to be a seminal work in the history of artists’ books, and has influenced many artists over the years. The students also viewed several works influenced by or appropriated from Ruscha:
Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations by Jeffrey Brouws
Twentysix Road Kills by Daniel D. Teoli, Jr.
Twentysix Charging Stations by Ginger R. Burrell
Another Twentysix Gasoline Stations by Gregory Eddi Jones
Undergraduate Research Talk by Gabriella Wellons
Are you an undergraduate student who is curious about the research process? Would you like to hear about the experience of one of your peers? Join us Wednesday, November 8th for a talk by Gabriella Wellons, undergraduate in Art History.
Ancient Graffiti and Emulation of Moche Mural Wall Paintings
Gabriella Wellons, History of Art
Wednesday, November 8th, 12:10-1:00pm
Moffitt Library, Fourth Floor
During her summer travel to north coastal Peru, UC Berkeley senior Gabriella Wellons created a graphic record of graffiti at the Huacas de Moche archaeological complex, the site of a former urban and religious center with two monuments (Huaca del Sol y Huaca de la Luna), located within the Moche Valley. Her honors thesis will explore the relationships between ancient graffiti, murals, and ceremonial spaces, and the possible purposes and meanings of incised imageries set within the context of Moche visual culture. Gabriella is a recipient of the Haas Scholars Program, Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program, International Studies Institute (IIS) Undergraduate Merit Scholarship, George A. Miller Scholars Program and the Digital Humanities at Berkeley Summer Institute Fellowship.
Workshop: Image Copyright for the Dissertation and Beyond
Join us for a workshop and discussion on image copyright, designed for graduate students working with visual media.
Wednesday, September 27
12:00-2:00 in 308A Doe Library, (inside the Art History/Classics Library)
Presented by:
Rachael Samberg, Scholarly Communications Officer
Lynn Cunningham, Art Librarian
Welcome back! Art History/Classics Library Fall Hours Begin 8/23
Welcome back students and faculty! Fall hours for the Art History/Classics Library begin August 23rd.
On exhibit at BAMPFA, “Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos”
The Art History/Classics Library recently acquired an exhibition catalog from an exhibit currently up at the Berkeley Art Museum until October 1, 2017, Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos.
The catalog features contributions from UC Berkeley History of Art Professor Lauren Kroiz, BAM Curator Apsara DiQuinzio, and Curatorial Assistant, Valerie Moon.
From the publisher website:
“Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos accompanies the first museum exhibition dedicated to American artist Charles Houghton Howard (1899–1978) since 1956. Howard, part of a circle of artists that included Alexander Calder, Gordon Onslow Ford, Grant Wood and Ben Nicholson, had an active and distinguished career in midcentury America and England. His enigmatic, meticulous paintings, often intimate in scale, bridge figurative, Surrealist and abstract currents in modern art. Though his work evolved over his career, Howard said that all of his pictures “are closely related … They are in fact all portraits of the same general subject, of the same idea, carried as far as I am able at the time.” The first scholarly publication on Howard, this fully illustrated volume includes essays by Apsara DiQuinzio, Robert Gober and Lauren Kroiz, a reprint of one of Howard’s own essays from 1946, an illustrated chronology and exhibition history.”
New Publication Co-Authored by Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson
UC Berkeley Professor, Julia Bryan-Wilson, contributes to a new publication: Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen. About to Happen, accompanies an exhibition which will travel to the Berkeley Art Museum in 2018-2019.
ISBN: 978-1938221156
From the publisher website, Siglio Press:
Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean at the sacred mouth of the Aconcagua River, About to Happen serves as a lament as well as love letter to the sea. In this artist’s book, Chilean-born artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña weaves personal and ancestral memory while summoning the collective power to confront the economic disparities and environmental crises of the 21st century.
Collecting the detritus that washes up on shore, Vicuña assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas—little sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire, which she sometimes makes as offerings to be reclaimed by the sea. These acts of creation and erasure mirror the ways in which her work inhabits and enlivens the liminal spaces between the remembered and forgotten, the revered and the discarded, the material and the dematerialized.
About to Happen, which accompanies an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. Vicuña’s nuanced visual poetics—operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile—transforms the discarded into the elemental, paying acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.