 I'm Jane Blocker. I'm a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota. And I'm delighted to be here to talk with these brilliant young people about their work. Completely short format of this event, so I did write a little bit of something, a little something. So on the face of it, there's not much that connects the three captivating papers presented for us today. They comprise a series of ornate frames around works of art made in different styles, media, and historical contexts, 1895, 1959, 1988 to 1991. But they hang here together in barnsian fashion. And our eye wanders a bit aimlessly from the odd leg of a man striding quickly past an enormous mural, a leg that seems to be amputated by the large concrete planter on the sidewalk, to a rank of adult legs and feet in a blurry photograph of a child, to the soles of boots and horse hooves in a rather homely bronze sculpture. Or our eyes are darted from the mirrored surface of an astronaut's helmet to the shining glass curtain wall of a skyscraper, to the glint of sunlight on the hindquarters of a metal horse. My remarks here are like the odd little ironwork hinge that hangs among these works, its crudely wrought curves visually rhyming with and pointing to the serendipities that we might miss were it not for the collection of this quirky group of papers hanging together on the same wall. I begin with Emily Warner's quotation of Clement Greenberg, the art of painting increasingly rejects the easel and yearns for the wall. It may well be that my attraction to that bit of text is a result of my anxieties about the contemporary political situation and the yearning that seems to have overtaken many world leaders for the perfect blankness and alleged security of walls. But again, in Barnesian fashion, I am beckoned to begin from my own idiosyncratic perspective rather than from some more respectable historical narrative. The wall is, in fact, a significant and interesting feature of all three of the papers which study abstract expressionist murals, relief sculptures on the wall of the soldiers in Sailor's Arch, and the more Trumpian walls that are erected along borders and in our national imaginary to protect our supposed exceptionalism and imperial aspirations. If we think in terms of the wall's ontology, we learn from Emily how the abex mural functioned interchangeably, how these decorated walls could be picked up or put down by the constantly shifting tenants of post-war speculative office buildings. The mural wall becomes a contentless, decorative blank. The claims on which were exchanged among business interests like gallery walls upon which may be hung, whatever corporate brand is in favor. The blank wall as a site of exchange, reflection and commerce makes its appearance in Spencer Wigmore's paper as a stone substrate to which bronze relief sculptures cling. The walls of the soldiers in Sailor's Arch passively, blankly reflect the figures of Lincoln and Grant, the horses they straddle, and the patriotism of military pageantry on parade. The wall in Spencer's hands is cold, brutal, mutilating. It slices up the bodies of men and animals alike. The Birkeland reliefs cut through, he says, with an uncanny reminder of absent limbs leaving fragmented bodies within a field of empty bronze. That emptiness is a screen on which 19th century viewers projected horse bodies as a means to mitigate human loss. The harsh modernist edifices of the post-war skyscrapers erected in Lower Manhattan similarly slice up a once familiar territory, the body of the city and its comfortable sense of neighborhood in place, obliterating one mode of being, one epistemology and replacing it with another. The amputating effects of the wall may also be seen in the mind where they prohibit entry into the past appearing unexpectedly as a form of forgetting. Lee Krasner's mural with its mosaic tiles mortared in gray grout tries to remember the very thing that its existence has forced into oblivion. It is, as Emily says, a ghostly echo of the masonry structure that used to occupy the site. For Laura Elida, the wall of forgetting cuts two ways, first as loss and trauma, second as strategic erasure. Vic Muniz's prints of photographs of drawings of printed and mass-produced photographs bury the imagination what Roberto Tejada has called the image environment, deep, deep, deep behind the blank wall of Muniz's image crypts, cold and white as marble which, as Laura explains, omit national identity as a way of resisting imperialist narratives. There is also sound. The wall is a hard surface that acts to reflect and amplify sound. The ghostly echoes, their resonating hollow bellies of horses, their bronze skins pulled drum tight. The reverberations of the barrel vaulted archway and finally the subaltern's voice vibrating through and resounding beyond the very structures designed to block her path and keep her out. This is, of course, not nearly the end of our looking at these papers, but our time in this gallery is drawing to a close and another space awaits us. So I invite us together to linger here just a bit longer and marvel at what we see. So with that, I'd like to invite all of you to have questions and bring your readings to the papers. And if you can't, I do have questions, I can't. But, question for Emily. I'm curious about Krasner's response or involvement in the project. Yeah, thanks for asking that. In presenting this, I was torn between showing an overview of all these examples versus going into depth on one of the projects. I'm glad that you're giving me a chance to do that a little bit with Krasner. Krasner had first design murals when she was on the WPA mural project in the 1930s, but none of those were ever realized. We still have the studies for them, they're still extant, but they didn't end up happening for various reasons. So her first actual successful mural comes basically not through government funding, but through the rise in corporate sponsorship of art and the building boom of the 1950s. She had also worked more recently with Mosaic, so she had done a number of Mosaic or a couple of Mosaic tabletops and also at least one, possibly more rectangular pieces that were Mosaic. The way that she got involved in this project was that Eurus Brothers vice president at the time was a man named BH Friedman who would go on to write the first biography of Pollock, energy made visible in the 70s. And he was already an arts writer in addition to kind of being a businessman and he would eventually then quit his business job and just devote himself to writing about art. So he knew the Emory Roth, I've looked at the blueprints for this and there was room for the mural from the very beginning of the planning stages. I think they understood that this was something that other buildings were doing and it was getting some attention and it must have been Friedman who was the connection to then Lee Kraussner who he already knew. An interesting thing about the process and making this you probably noticed that the Mosaic tesserae are very unusual. They're not the little regular cubes that you usually see. So they actually would take the what are sometimes called like the pancake that comes out of the furnace and break them. So that cragginess comes from the process of just having them broken and then putting them in. And the final thing that I'll say about the process is that they did not handle the materials because union restrictions prevented them from doing that. So if you were painting a mural that was being installed, you could paint it yourself but if you were attaching it to the wall that impinged on a union responsibility you had to be a member of a union to do that. So Kraussner and Stein supervised that process but they did not actually do it themselves which was supposedly a source of frustration for Kraussner who had worked with Mosaic before. But that was sort of the fabrication process that they worked on. That's true for the Hoffman mural that I showed and sort of for all of these other murals. The most popular manufacturer, fabricator of these was the Vincent Foscato workshop which imported tiles from Venice. And then I think they were located out and I believe it was Queens where their studio was where they would put the work together. I have a question for Laura. I was fascinated by your discussion of amnesia and forgetting and what is lost through that process. But it occurs to me that there's another question that could be asked here which is simply what is added by munez? And are there certain images where we can think more of additions rather than forgettings and if so how is that significant for understanding of his work? Sure, I mean that's a very good question. When I was initially looking at these works I was thinking more about what he added differently because when you look at certain images you can see obviously that he is modifying so my initial intake when I first encountered these images it was more about the additive process. But as I was examining them I was much more, I felt like there is much more about loss than modifications. And I don't, looking at all of the images as a series I don't think that he is adding as much as he is actually leaving out. So for instance even in images of the Vietnam or the kiss he is removing the sailors, he's removing the military, American presence, he's removing the built environment. So I don't see so much of him adding as opposed to, I feel I see it more being much more about loss and absence than I see with additions. I do think that there are images where he reduces for example the Kent State image. He doesn't incorporate any of the built environments. He has, the campus is completely left out and he creates, he delineates the perimeter of the plaza where she is, like he emphasizes that and puts a lot of emphasis on her. So I guess it's not so much like an additive process but he puts more emphasis on figures that might be, it prevents us from distracting our eyes and looking at other things in the image. So I would say that maybe that's a form of just like adding to our attention, adding to our focus on specific figures but I think his work is much more about what he left out even in terms of his process of not looking the way that he describes his process is that he's not looking at these images at all and he's just doing it from his memory which is very hard to believe because these images are spread among, even if he wasn't looking at them from Life's book, he would be encountering them in the world. So I think that's why when I'm talking about forgetting, I talk about the staging of forgetting because it's very hard to believe that he wasn't encountering these images but that's a very good point. Beth, come back. Yes, I also have a question for Laura and it's also about forgetting. So the late great Umberto Eco has a wonderful essay on the art of forgetting, ours Oblivionis and in that essay he makes a really insightful move and suggests that forgetting is not so much about the failure or the absence of memory but as a result of a surplus of memory, an overloading of memory in some cases and I wonder if that insight, whether you've encountered it or not before would pose a kind of challenge to your reading of Moonies or whether your analysis already, in a sense, accommodates that in a way you're not articulating yet. That's, thank you for your point. I think that's actually a very interesting question because I think just by thinking like, in terms of the surplus, just by thinking that Moonies is remembering images that are not from his own culture, I think it's already kind of capitalizing on this on like other people's images, other people's memories. So I would say that perhaps, he has to have this surplus in order to forget, like it's kind of an interesting thing to think about. I also have been really interested in theories, in queer theories. For example, Jack Halberstein has a very great essay on, it's called Dude Where's My Fallis, where he is discussing how the two characters of Dude Where's My Car, that famous movie, Jesse and Chester, they are very forgetful and this forgetfulness, this amnesia that takes place, allows them to have a sort of gender fluidity. So I'm interested in kind of like that space and I guess like Umberto Eco is very important in other theories like even Foucault discussing like the counter memory, but I think like I'm more interested in that space that you can read between and I think that Moonies is doing that by rendering and by photographing and by blurring. So I think that's very interesting but thank you so much for your question. I was gonna suggest to you that, you know we sort of looked at Pierre Noura and Andreas Hoysen as your kind of people but there are this whole other group of people thinking about memory, I'm thinking like of Mark Auger's book Oblivion in which it's not about you have memory and then you lose it, it's that forgetting and remembering are, he describes it as where the water meets the sand, like you can't have one without the other, that they're mutually constitutive things and that memory is just purely ontologically something that is fragile, otherwise we wouldn't need to keep doing it, you know like they wouldn't have had to do the commemorative issue of Life Magazine if everyone remembered everything in it, right? So you have to keep doing it and similarly nationalism or national identity and there I'm thinking about Homi Baba's work and like it's not just that you say this thing once and everyone gets it, it's a thing that has to be constantly reasserted precisely because it's so fragile so I'm wondering if maybe looking at those folks might be more productive in some ways or looking at people like Rebecca Schneider who's whole thing is about performativity and memory as opposed to sort of thinking of objects that might take you in a different direction. Now I've taken over the conversation in a way that I didn't want and you had this great question I can just tell by your face. I actually have two unrelated questions for two different speakers. So the first is to Spencer, I was curious about why if what you're thinking is behind keeping the title of your paper from the quote a spunky and skittish creature and I ask because I understand that came from the 19th century critic and maybe somebody else who knows horses can disagree with me but I would say that's definitely not a horse shown in a skittish animal the way that it's shown and I think you get at that but I guess I was wondering, I mean it's not shown a skittish horse, in fact a lot of equestrian statues show horses in that way with the rolling eyes and head up and ears pinned back not just in that sort of half mast I'm hanging out kind of way so I just wanted to ask you about that and then while you think I had a second question for Laura, I just wondered if you could talk about the absence of the American flag on the space suit is so striking, it seems to me that the reverse happens with the John Lennon photo where New York City remains plastered across the t-shirt so I wondered if you thought if you could respond to what you thought was going on there. So spunky and skittish I liked because it was catchy and so that was the big reason that remains in the title but it is, I have sort of read a lot of that criticism against the grain because these are almost universally negative reactions but I think in many ways it's an indication of how dramatically they break from this 19th century discourse because I know the sort of trajectory of an equestrian sculpture over time is really dynamic and there's a renaissance sculpture be much different than the present but in the 1890s my sense is that the anthropomorphized control over a horse is particularly strict and rigid as exemplified in the Shaw Memorial where it's really yanked quite aggressively back into a symbol of command or they play a particularly sentimental role where a dying horse will sort of symbolize human tragedy and trauma. So I think in that regard the amount of leeway or the amount of loosening of the reins that would be entitled to a horse would be perhaps disconcerting for someone particularly familiar with those conventions if that's what answers your question because I think yeah the horses both horses are absolutely the opposite of spunky and skittish unless you stand at one particular angle where you can tell that he sort of tried to create the sort of interior shaking of the head that a horse will do when sort of standing still which just seems to be a sign of this sort of private presence of the horse if that answers your question. No absolutely and if I could just add it this is somewhat indelicate but often on these equestrian statues their masculinity of the horses is very emphasized and I couldn't tell from these but is that understated or reflective of the actual state of the real horses? It is extraordinarily obvious. I think these really address masculinity in three ways that I could address really briefly the first is that from my knowledge of bronze horse anatomy clinker is a stallion whereas billy is gelded which would have been a sort of historically accurate sort of thing and the sort of stallion also functions as a symbol of grants ferrility so there's that. The second level is at the level of the gaze where the expected viewer is essentially white and male. The type of viewer that is expected to be able to know and evaluate a horse and their capabilities in the 1890s is typically a white upper class man someone who would have been friends with Thomas Akins and the sort of quarter master figure would have also been male within the Civil War almost certainly white given the sort of social position he would have been placed in. And the third level is the one where I'm still sort of struggling to figure out is the masculinity as it relates to Akins' own biography because while I didn't address this he buys billy during a moment of intense personal instability. He's been asked to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy for removing the loincloth from a male model in front of women students and this trip is often sort of thought of as his sort of heroic recovery from this rough trauma that he has to experience and that horses are really evident in all of these letters but although no one can really know for sure I mean when you really revisit the circumstances of his infamous departure from Pafa it tends to border on sexual harassment almost and so I think in a strange way the sort of unconditional support that an animal offers runs into perhaps almost to this really unpleasant male discourse of the trauma of facing the consequences of sexual misconduct or something like that. So I guess it's something I'm still trying to sort out. Thank you. Sounds like a great David Mamet play. So responding to your question about comparing erasing the flag or forgetting the flag but leaving New York City with John Lennon I think with the, it's a very good observation in comparison, he also if you look at Eogema he also maintains the flag because these are I think with the flag in Eogema and also the New York City stamp in John Lennon's shirt these are pretty obvious and kind of related to the image as we know it. So I think that Muniz, when you look at the series even when they were displayed, they were, Muniz is not very, he's maintaining the main characteristics or qualities of the pictures as they are reproduced in life. So you actually have to go very carefully and you have to see like the subtlety. So in the New York, in John Lennon's photograph rendering and photograph for instance, he forgets the entire background or forgets, I'll put it in quotes. So the entire like the skyscrapers that you see because John Lennon is over, this is a photograph overlooking his, the penthouse where he's renting. So you can kind of see images of the built environment of New York City. So it is more related to like forgetting this, the space, the place where he is and even though there is reference to New York City if you actually look closely at John Lennon, he even kind of blurs his like very well-known like round glasses. So all of a sudden John Lennon becomes just like a regular dude in New York or a regular dude somewhere else with a New York City t-shirt. So I think that there's that play too kind of like erasing or forgetting every like pieces of American influence in people like John Lennon who really wanted to be in New York City. And that image was used as the vigil image for John Lennon's death. And so I think that there are, it's not so much that he's going to forget all the obvious or not render all the obvious signs, especially because in that case like the New York City t-shirts, the first thing that you see, but like the flag is like this tiny thing that you actually have to go close and you have to pay attention to these very subtle moments of forgetting. Well, and that image is really interesting too because like New York, it's like this memory that people have in the New World of the old York and you know like Lennon coming from England and this sort of national displacement that you're sharing. This is more of a comment for Spencer and it has to do with the solid smooth bronze surface behind the horses and figures that have been referred to or characterized as walls. And I just have a question about that and that from what I saw, they seem to be smooth and planar and they're plastic like the sculptures and metaphorical and I think while it might be tempting to think of them as walls, it might also be useful to think of them as a threshold. Relief sculptures often characterized or conceptualized between two thresholds. One on the front side of the relief as it enters reality and one on the back side of the relief as it suggests a continuum through the pictorial space. And so that backside, that undifferentiated backside I think maybe has something more to do with a picture playing into a kind of oblivion or abyss rather than a solid wall. Yeah, so that's, my memory is correct that sort of Hilda Brand's writings on relief sculpture and my sense is that Acons is much more interested in what's happening in front of that plane. I mean it's something absolutely to be thinking about the sort of bodies that are vanishing into that space but he's really, because he works in such high relief is really because in all of his other works he's really fascinated with all of the perspectival problems that that creates and trying to reconcile perspective against that plane. But it's something fun to think about for sure. Hi, this is a question for Laura. I'm wondering if you want to differentiate between an active process of editing and this inability to recall what you're calling, you know, forgetting. Because I think in an active process when I was looking at one of the Vietnam images, one of the images that was totally eliminated was that of the soldier in the left side of the frame. And that could be too, for me that could be very intentional editing and a restatement of what the picture is about. So it's hard to know what actually he edited or forgot. So I think in the case of, I think in terms of addition what I see that it's more explicit is how he is carefully printing the, photographing these in soft focus to lose resolution and perhaps in some of the images you don't see so much of the background or the details because of this process of active editing. So I would say this is the case for JFK Jr's picture of his rendering. I think that the blurriness of that image, actually there are probably more details there that we can't see because of the blurriness of his editing. So I think that that's an example of an active editing. In terms of images like the Vietnam where he leaves out the military presence, that soldier or even the case in Times Square he actually doesn't render the sailors. I think that's more of him not really recalling. So I'm not sure. And this has been a challenge in my own research because I haven't really had a chance to talk to Muniz. I'm not sure how these images were produced if he erased, if it was an act, like you were suggesting this active perhaps erasure or just not recalling and not including in the renderings. So this has been one of the challenges that I have been encountering at this point of not really being able to talk to him because he's always busy and he's not really responding to me. So this is something that I would be very curious in terms of are these drawings still exist? If they do, how do I compare the drawings to the photographs that he took? And that would be something that I could think about in terms of active editing and forgetting. I have a question for Emily. Thank you so much. I'm curious, you briefly alluded to the murals as skins for these buildings. And I'm wondering if you could speak more to that and if this sort of epidemic connotation or characterization has anything, any bearing on their temporal dimension? So whether it's something that could be seen as something that could be shed or something that was meant to be a permanent aspect of the building when it was originally conceived. That's a great question. I think I probably used the word because I was thinking in sort of an architectural language about how this kind of architecture is often described as kind of skin and bones architecture, where the curtain walls can stretch around it and hung on the bones. And you do even see some specific examples. I think in the period of people basically talking about these murals as being like the soul or the heart inside that kind of skin and bones if that was so empty. But that's a very good point to think about the other connotations that that might have. And certainly in terms of some of the textural stuff. I mean, I feel like the Krasner mural might be the best example of that versus the others because it really does much more than the others have. And this has something to do with its installation, but there's something very beguiling and fascinating about the surface, but you can't get close enough to figure it out the way you can with some of these other murals. The other thing I would compare it to if we're thinking about skin is it has a quality of almost kind of snake skin or embossed leather. Something like that, the way in which it reflects the light. So yeah, that's a great point that I hadn't really thought about, I'll have to think about it a little bit more. I do think that the sort of texturing of the surface there does seem to impart. And maybe this could go back to this question of sort of human, but in a different sense, right? Like a kind of not just temporal as enduring, but something that maybe ages and you think you use the word sheds or something like that. Certainly something that the fissures through which you see kind of the cement might be a retolence of that. Thanks. Thank you all for excellent talks. I have my questions for Emily. And it has to do with the critical reception to these murals functioning almost as kind of psychologically therapeutic foils to the problemativeness of the buildings. And I'm wondering whether there was any most kind of specific theorizing. I know that there was some things going on in Europe in regard to murals for hospitals and public housing in which there was actually specific discussion of how certain color shapes forms, often more in relation to abstraction than to representation. Were similar things going on in the States at this time in relation to the murals on which you've been working? Yes, not the murals I was talking about today, but actually in the 1930s and early 1940s, you see a lot of that. So one of the mural ensembles that I deal with in the dissertation is a group that was installed in the Chronic Diseases Hospital, recently demolished by Cornell because they're building their campus on Roosevelt Island. But there was a series of WPA supported murals by abstract artists installed there. And we have a wonderful document from Ilya Blotovsky who I showed you a brief picture of some of his later work. And that's exactly how he himself describes the mural that he's created. And he, it's actually quite specific. I mean, he talks about how if you're, this was a hospital for the chronically ill, and if you're chronically ill, depictions of allegories of medicine are maybe not so cheerful. But then also pictures that try to bring in the outside world might also be isolating. So for him, and I think this is a continuation of the notion that what abstraction can uniquely do that other forms of art can't do is sort of play on the sensorium or play on the psychological, you know, the psychological apparatus of the individual directly, right? That has some kind of direct therapeutic attention to that. There's also, if you look through sort of, modern hospital and these journals from which I have from the 1930s, early 40s, there is interest from the scientific and medical side too about what colors one should use specifically. And it's a much more scientific approach and it doesn't tend to look at, it's not looking for artists for this job. This would be something that like, you know, the building commission or the superintendent might come up with and you would paint the walls according to that certain scheme. Another interesting kind of side note for that is the Balotovsky mural that is put in in this hospital, this abstract mural replaces another mural that was sort of a collage, a sort of sports collage that involved women playing tennis. And allegedly, this was recorded in a few interviews, the old men who sat around in this room, they would get really sort of obnoxious about this and flirt with the nurses. And so it was sort of, that makes the therapeutic aspect of the mural that comes in, having it's a very kind of, you know, dampening and sort of controlling effect, right? Like this will calm everybody down. And then just quickly to tie it back to these murals that I was talking about today, what's so interesting to me is there's this just proliferation of public abstraction going on in New York City and in other cities, but in New York City at this moment. And there's a lot of sort of theorizing that gets thrown at it, but it doesn't really sort of need it. There's just, there's a lot of it happening and it's, the theories tend to, the common theory they tend to come back to is this is about a new alliance of art and architecture, which doesn't say a whole lot. So at this moment there seems to be, now I should say, I guess I can feel David getting, no, this isn't true from the architectural side. There's a real theory of sort of monumentality and what the art can add to the buildings. But from the point of view of the patrons and the artists who are making these, it seems to be, you know, finally the chance to realize large-scale abstraction, which they've been wanting to do before and the theorizing about it isn't quite as careful as maybe you saw when there were fewer opportunities like in the 30s for these murals to actually be realized. Am I getting a signal from these ladies that maybe we do need to move on to the next gallery at this point? And while I'm gonna hold you all hostage here for a minute, while I've still got modernists in the room to, well first of all, thank you so much. Thank you for a great talks and a good discussion. I just want to plug another symposium that we have coming up in a couple of weeks on Saturday, April 15th, and I'm gonna ask Aaliyah to hand out this little informational sheet about it. April 15th, it's a Saturday. It's called Flannery and the Politics of Public Space. It'll be here in the auditorium. It goes all day long and it's in connection with the exhibition that we have on right now, Person of the Crowd, The Contemporary Art of Flannery. This symposium brings together scholars of 19th century art, scholars of contemporary art, also writers and artists to talk about flannery as a strategy in the 19th century, but also for artists working today. We're gonna be talking about some of the politics involved with being a flanner, some of the assumption that the flanner is a white male, which was first challenged, I think, by Janet Wolff. Doreen St. Felix is an up and coming, young African American writer. She's written for The New Yorker and she's gonna be doing a talk called Black Mobility on Strange Terrain from Phyllis Wheatley to Beyonce that talks about who is the black flanner. So there's all sorts of, I think there are gonna be lots of interesting conversations happening. We're also gonna be talking about where flannery happens now. It's not just in physical space. So much of it is virtual. Cyber flannery, the idea of observing and following people, where does that happen now? So please come. Thank you.