Workshop Events

Race as Ocularcentrism

Jennifer A. González

Department Chair and Associate Professor Department of Art History and Visual Culture University of California, Santa Cruz

Tuesday, October 6, 2009 @ 10:30am-12:30pm L166 Elvehjem Building (Chazen Museum of Art)

Please join the Mellon/White Workshop, Visualities beyond Ocularcentrism, for a workshop with Professor Jennifer A. González, "Race as Ocularcentrism."

Workshop readings:

  1. 1. Jennifer A. González, "Renée Green: Genealogies of Contact," in Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (The MIT Press, 2008): 204-49.
  2. 2. Jennifer A. González, "The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy and Digital Art Practice," in Camera Obscura 70, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2009): 37-65.

Advanced registration and reading are required. To register and gain access to the readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu.

Jennifer A. González is Department Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz. She writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation art, digital art and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space (exhibition space, public space, virtual space) by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender. Her book, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008) examines the work of contemporary artists who use installation art as a way to stage a critical assessment of race politics in the United States. Subject to Display was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. In addition to installation art, Jennifer Gonzalez has written on contemporary digital art and specifically on the visual representation of the body. Several of her articles and book chapters focus on the cyborg body or the hybrid body as both symptoms of and metaphors for cultural transformation. The visual representation of new forms of corporeality often signal a utopian hope or distopic unease with new technologies and imaginary futures. Her publications include "The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy and Digital Art Practice," in Camera Obscura 70, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2009): 37-65; “Morphologies: Race as Visual Technology” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New York: International Center of Photography, 2003); and "The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage,” in Race in Cyberspace, Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, Gil Rodman, eds., (New York: Routledge, 2000).

Stephen Palmer

Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science University of California, Berkeley

Friday, October 9, 2009 @ 11:00am-1:00pm 382 Memorial Library

Please join the Mellon/White Workshop, Visualities beyond Ocularcentrism, for a workshop with Professor Stephen Palmer.

Workshop readings:

  1. 1. Palmer, S. E., Gardner, J. S., & Wickens, T. D. (2008) Aesthetic issues in spatial composition: Effects of position and direction on framing single objects. Spatial Vision. 21, 421–449.
  2. 2. Palmer, S. E. (1991) Goodness, Gestalt, Groups, and Garner: Local symmetry subgroups as a theory of figural goodness. In G. Lockhead & J. Pomerantz (Eds.) The perception of structure: Essays in honor of Wendell R. Garner. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
  3. 3. Arnheim, R. (1982) "Balance," from The power of the center: A study of composition in the visual arts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 10-41.

Advanced registration and reading are required. To register and gain access to the readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu.

Stephen Palmer is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on visual perception, a topic closely related to his color photography. He is the author of Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology, an advanced, interdisciplinary textbook on visual perception. He is currently working on a new book about color: Reversing the Rainbow: Reflections on Color and Consciousness.

Kickoff Workshop

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 @ 6:00pm-8:00pm 212 University Club

Please join the Mellon/White Workshop, Visualities beyond Ocularcentrism, for its official kickoff workshop. Advanced reading is required. To gain access to the readings, please email Matthew Rarey, mrarey@wisc.edu.

Workshop readings:

  1. 1. Martin Jay, “Dialectic of EnLIGHTenment” in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (University of California Press, 1993): 83-147
  2. 2. Constance Classen, “The Scented Womb and the Seminal Eye” in The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination (Routledge, 1998): 63-85
  3. 3. Johannes Fabian, “The Other and the Eye: Time and the Rhetoric of Vision” in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (Columbia University Press, 1983): 105-141

Sense Organs

Wednesday, November 18; 6:00pm-8:00pm in Room 212 University Club.

To gain access to the readings, please visit http://www.visualculture.wisc.edu/mellon.html

  1. Carla Mazzio, "Sins of the Tongue" in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1997): 53-79
  2. Jordana Rosenberg, "Butler's 'Lesbian Phallus'; or, What can Deconstruction Feel?" GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.3 (2003) 393-414
  3. Merleau-Ponty, "The Body as Object and Mechanistic Physiology" and "The Experience of the Body and Classical Psychology" in Phenomenology of Perception (London & NY: Routledge 2002): 84-111
  4. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, "1440: The Smooth and the Striated" from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 474-500.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Hallucination, Delirium, and other Modes of "Sensory Distortion"

Wednesday, December 2; 6:00pm-8:00pm in Room 212 University Club.

To gain access to the readings, please visit http://www.visualculture.wisc.edu/mellon.html

  1. Michael Taussig, "Author's Note: A User's Guide" and "Lightning" from My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): ix-xix, 227-36
  2. Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. (New York: Schocken Books, 1978)
  3. Marina Warner, "Light" and "Shadow" from Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century, (Oxford; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006): 121-66
  4. Paul Stoller, "Introduction: The Way of the Body" and "Embodying Colonial Memories" in Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997): 3, 48-73.

Light refreshments will be provided.