 wonderful. I hear the music fading, which I think is my cue, which is just to say welcome back from lunch. Thank you again so much to our speakers from this morning for getting us off to such a wonderful start. So I'm very happy to just get us kicked off for the afternoon for our second session, which will be co-chaired by me and Pamela Lee. And just to get us started with our introductions, I'll welcome up Homey King, Professor of History and Art and the Eugenia Chase Guild Chair in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr to introduce her student. So Homey, if you want to come join us. Hi everyone. It's my great pleasure to introduce Meg Henkel, who is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she is writing a dissertation on the history of stereoscopic imagery from 19th century photography through contemporary VR. Her previous talks include a brief history of the Viewmaster at the International Conference on Stereo and Immersive Media in Portugal and a presentation at the Université's Art Association of Canada in Banff. She is the recipient of an Arreté Fellowship at Bryn Mawr and a Library of Congress National Stereoscopic Photography Research Fellowship, among other awards. She has curated exhibitions at venues, including Automat and Practice Gallery, and published catalog essays in conjunction with the Philadelphia Incubation Series. Her talk today is entitled A Stereographic West, The Transformation of the American Landscape in the Photographs of Alfred A. Hart. Thank you. And a thank you to the Barnes and especially to everybody who's been involved with organizing. This presentation focuses on the medium of the stereograph in the work of Alfred A. Hart. Hart was a prolific but overlooked photographer who documented the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad. Oops. Can we go back? Thank you. Hart was a prolific but overlooked photographer who documented the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad in nearly 400 stereographs from 1865 to 1869. At the time, stereographs were the most common format in which photographs circulated amongst the public. Stereographs present two slightly different photographs side by side that produce the illusion of three-dimensionality when viewed through a stereoscope. While a great number of studies on Hart's contemporaries have focused on frontier photography in its two-dimensional presentation, far fewer have expressly considered these photographs in 3D. By examining the work of Hart, I argue that the stereograph introduced a new pictorial practice developed around the mechanism of binocular vision. By producing the illusion of depth optically rather than linearly, stereoscopic illusionism redirected compositional emphasis away from the vanishing point and instead to features of the foreground and margins of the image. The specifically stereoscopic configuration of pictorial space, I argue, encouraged formal experimentation in photography that rejected traditional landscape depiction in favor of pronounced optical effects. Rather than imagine the West as a picturesque ideal, Hart's stereographs instead presented it as an optical curiosity that was strange and unfamiliar. Hart's work occurred within a particularly rich moment in photographic production in the United States. Between 1861 and 1874, dozens of photographers produced many of the earliest photographs of the American West as they accompanied state-funded geological surveys of California, the construction of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads, and four federally-funded geological surveys of the regions between California and the Rockies. Their work resulted in hundreds upon hundreds of photographs of rocky outcrops, mountain waterfalls, winding rivers, desert canyons, and miles of forest. While in the first half of the 19th century, paint and ink imagined the unexplored frontier as a fantasy ideal of manifest destiny, by the second half hundreds of photographic landscapes became lasting emblems of the West's imminent closure. Through the camera, the frontier no longer represented possibility, but became determinately known, fixed on glass in silver nitrate and salted collodion. Over the past 50 years, photographs of the frontier have found a legacy on the gallery wall in numerous exhibitions that have reconsidered them within an art historical landscape tradition. Timothy O'Sullivan, for example, was virtually unknown in his lifetime, but has since become a canonical figure in the history of photography. His matter-of-fact approach and affinity for abstraction has been praised largely for its prescient modernist sensibility decades before its time. Some scholars have called attention to the ways this aesthetic reception elides the documentary premise under which photographers were hired, as well as the three-dimensional format in which the 19th century public would have viewed these pictures. Rosalind Krauss was one of the first to raise this issue in 1982, when her essay Landscape View, Photography's Discursive Spaces critiqued a wave of museum exhibitions devoted to frontier photography. More recent studies by Robin Kelsey, Francois Brunet, Glenn Willamson, and others have since nuanced Krauss' claims, highlighting how photography served many different purposes that were both functional and aesthetic, and the fact that photographers had considerable artistic agency. Still, if you have asked the question, what is the significance of these photographs in 3D? My argument that the stereograph rejects perspectival depth is in many ways counterintuitive. Often the stereograph is as understood as an intensification of perspective. In fact, Krauss pivots much of her argument around this assumption. Jonathan Crary's techniques of the observer famously argued that the stereograph marked a point of rupture in the tradition of classical perspective. My argument, which is closely aligned with Crary's, relies on several understandings about the optical illusion of depth. We are accustomed to the idea that in western painting, a two-dimensional picture relies on linear perspective to create an illusion of infinite space. The single lens camera is the mechanization of this Albertian system of orthogonal lines and diminishing scale. By contrast, stereoscopic depth effects result from an optical illusion that leverages the binocularity of human vision. When two nearly identical photographs taken roughly two inches apart are presented to each eye simultaneously, the brain reconciles the additional visual information on the left and right peripheries by visualizing form in the round. This means that the stereograph distinctly prefers subjects in the foreground, where the discrepancy of their position in relation to each lens is the greatest. Without these features in the foreground, a stereograph that is otherwise compelling in 2D risks falling flat, literally in 3D. For example, John Carbet's picture of the Union Pacific Railroad could not be more diagrammatically Albertian in its central placement of a vanishing point and an implied linear geometry that disappears on the horizon. In two dimensions, this construction seems to suggest an infinite expansion into space. In 3D, however, the space is abruptly shallow. Because the stereo camera registers binocular disparity only to the things closest to it, the first six or seven railroad ties in a lone male figure emerge from the foreground. The rest of the picture appears flat, like the painted backdrop of a movie set. In the stereoscope, the path down the railroad does not extend infinitely into the world beyond, but rather smack into the limitations of its own illusion. Another example, Hart's Entering the Palisades, follows the familiar formula of the picturesque, designed to guide the viewer's eye through space. Real and implied lines in the form of rail tracks, a river, and mountain crest converge towards the central vanishing point in the distance. Kiaros Giro dramatizes the image and helps further guide the eye. Hart, who was originally trained as a painter of moving panoramas, would have been familiar with these conventions. In fact, his picture even bears a remarkable similarity to Storm and the Rocky Mountains of 1866 by artist Albert Bierstadt, known for his oversized presentation of the Western landscape. For all of the picture as grandeur of Hart's view, however, because there is little in the scene close to his lens, the picture appears flat when viewed in the stereoscope. Rather than enhancing the depth effects of two-dimensional linear perspective, the stereoscope diminishes it. By contrast, Hart's Humboldt Gate reconfigures the landscape in order to maximize its three-dimensional impact. Here, new rail construction in the foreground does not vanish towards a point at the center of the image, but instead strikes across the frame horizontally. Rail lines parallel the flatness of the picture plane rather than the viewer's perpendicular line of sight. When viewed in the stereoscope, this composition is quite compelling. The objects nearest the lens, the rail beams, what looks like a utility pole on the right margin, are the most prominent features to emerge. Gravel becomes the source of fascination. In the stereoscope, these objects form a distinct ledge over which the rest of the landscape fades into a subdued flatness. Here, the railroad's prominence hints at a greater narrative of the landscape's own reconfiguration both visually, as modernism would soon supplant earlier traditions, and literally as the landscape transformed under the influence of Western expansion and industrialization. This expansion took place as much above ground as below. Scholars have discussed the complex mixture of scientific curiosity, capitalist gain and settler colonialism under which photographers were hired to document the West. Many of these photographic endeavors occurred against the backdrop of the 1859 discovery of the Comstock load, a massive repository of silver ore located in Virginia City, Nevada. The promise of silver helped accelerate the construction of the railroad along a route of profitable mining towns, and many of the geological surveys on which photographers later accompanied were funded with the understanding that they too could help identify additional resources below ground. Timothy O'Sullivan, for example, visited the mines of Virginia City in 1868, where he produced the earliest underground stereographs of a mine using a makeshift magnesium flash. During his visit, he attended an exhibition of 90 of hard stereographic views held at a local studio. It is fitting that the American Western landscape was so widely documented in stereographic form. Not only were stereocameras small enough to transport into the depths of the earth, but their pictures required the viewer to mine its image in search of something beyond surface level. The stereographic West was as much a documentation of the landscape above ground as it was of an implied subterranean landscape bearing silver, a material integral to photography. Hart's frequent documentation of new tunnel construction is as suggestive of this below ground landscape as it is a self-referential exploration of stereography. The subject of the railroad tunnel was especially compatible with the optics of the stereograph. Tunneled walls that skirt the edge of the frame offer a continuous volumetric depth marker as they recede from the camera's lens. Stereo expert Denny Pelloran has previously noted that the arched top of the tunnel mimics the same arched framing of many stereographs of the period, as well as the arched top of the home stereoscope eyepiece, which itself mirrors the morphology of the human brow. The tunnel vision of the stereoscope is at full tilt in pictures like tunnel number 12, Strong's Canyon, where repetitious beams enclose the foreground and the vanishing point veers off frame. Snow gallery around crested peak takes on a cinematic quality as rays of light cascade through open beams. The visual analogy of the tunnel to the stereoscope extends to the eye itself in pictures like Grizzly Hill tunnel and tunnel number three, which feature portals under construction. As the viewer peers into the stereoscope and the image comes into focus, rocks and boulders closest to the camera begin to swell, take shape, and crystallize. It is at this moment that the spectator's eyes, so carefully positioned in the stereoscope and fixed straight ahead, align with the tunnel's dark aperture that also appears to stare back, pupil to pupil. The construction of the Central Pacific Railroad included the engineering of 16 tunnels, including summit tunnel, pictured by heart as a craggy grotto that appears concave in 3D. Illuminated with a mirror, this photograph's exposure lasted approximately 15 minutes. Tunnels like this one were carved 1 to 2 feet at a time a day in a dangerous process that required workers to drill holes into hard granite that was then detonated with gunpowder or nitroglycerin. Tunnels were initially blasted at their full width, but not at their full height, which was slowly raised with each new explosion. One can see the traces of this incremental backbreaking process where an additional illusion of length results from a ceiling that lowers as it recedes. Photographs like laborer and rocks are among Hart's many pictures featuring railroad workers that show the removal of stone following such an explosion. Clusters of activity within the shallow foreground result in dynamic optical effects when viewed in 3D. It is difficult to distinguish the workers from stone in 2D, but in 3D these figures separate from one another and are crystal clear. In a sense, Hart's photograph makes visible a labor force often forgotten by history. Recent studies by Gordon Chang and others have acknowledged the lack of historical records that chronicle the lives of railroad workers, 90% of whom were Chinese. In June of 1867, the year in which this photograph was likely taken, workers went on strike for eight days to protest exploitive labor practices and unequal pay. At the time it was the largest strike, labor strike in the United States to date. It is worth observing too that Hart's foreground is similar to another composition. Corbe is the stone breakers of 1849, which features two laborers in the immediate foreground with their backs turned to the viewer. The painting stirred controversy for its monumentalized portrayal of working class subjects. Here in both Hart and Corbe, perspectival depth is exchanged for a space that is so shallow, it obstructs a wide-angle view of the landscape and instead forces a confrontation between viewer and laborer. To conclude, I have argued here that the stereograph, by producing depth optically rather than linearly, introduced a new pictorial practice that challenged photographers to reconsider landscape composition not for its infinite expansion into space but for what was closest to the camera. Hart's attention to comparatively small subjects, to the abstraction of rocks and beams, to tunnels, even to laborers, repositioned the camera's lens away from the grandiose subject of the panoramic view. No longer constrained to the conventions of the picturesque, Hart's stereographs drew attention to the constructed nature of the perspectival image itself while illustrating the railroad's own linear construction. Tunnels became a useful visual allegory for the tunnel vision of stereoscopic scene, the feat of their engineering mirrored by the novel materialization of their geometric illusion. By rendering the landscape into an unexpected image that transforms before one's eyes, the stereograph de-familiarized the American West and turned it into an optical curiosity. Thank you. That was really interesting Meg, thank you. I'm Margaret Worth from the University of Delaware and I'm very pleased to introduce the next speaker, Genevieve Westerby. Genevieve came to UD from the Art Institute of Chicago where she was a research associate for a number of years and she worked on their wonderful digital catalogs of French paintings which many of us have used. At UD she held a three-year Mellon fellowship in our curatorial track PhD program and as part of that track she's interned at the National Gallery in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She also has published an article while being a grad student that grew from one of her seminar papers on Mary Cassatt's early exhibition practice and that was in Women's Art Journal in 2021. Her dissertation research re-evaluates Impressionist landscape painting in the context of eco-critical approaches, infrastructure studies and environmental history. She's already done a tremendous amount of research in this area on engineering and extraction projects and the waterways of France and the many responses to them by painters and printmakers as well as writers and geographers and the mass press. Her dissertation includes studies of materials extraction as you're going to hear today but also of changes in fishing practices, water management and flood control, artists' choices of motifs, of whirl and urban and suburban riverine landscapes. Extraction ecologies are really multifaceted. They may deplete resources, reshape land and water and operate within systems of use and labor and production and they certainly impacted the visual environment of the rivers of France, a very common motif in Impressionist painting. Genevieve has been particularly active in presenting her work including at CAA and she's going to be presenting a version of this work at the International Conference in Paris in May as part of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and the title of her talk as you can see, whoops not yet, is Impressionism and Extraction Ecologies on the Sin and I hope there can be a conversation about how things are made visible I think in these first two papers. Okay I think I've been given a new clicker, we'll see how that goes. Thank you Dr. Worth for that very kind introduction. I want to thank the Barnes for hosting us all today, bringing us all together and especially Aliyah for all of her fantastic organizational work that she's done and thank you to all of you for coming today. So with that, let's see how this goes. Yes okay great. So the extraction of sand from rivers was essential to the modernization of France in the 19th century. While it was a century's old practice, beginning in the 1830s civil engineers ordered sand dredging on an entirely different scale as part of their project to turn the sun into a hydraulic highway. The work was carried out by teams like those in Alfred Sicily's The Senate Port Marley Piles of Sand in which two pale yellow mounds of dredged sand anchor the foreground. While the primary aim of this dredging was to facilitate navigation, the extracted sand itself was increasingly valuable. As George Eugene Houseman began to rebuild Paris in the 1850s, as railways radiated out from the capital and as dams, canals, and sewers were built to control the nation's water and waste, the demand for sand quickly outstripped what such river maintenance projects could supply and its extraction was industrialized. As sand piles began to line rural river banks and urban keys, Impressionist painters Sicily and Armand Guillama featured them in their paintings together with the depictions of the human labor on which the growing industry relied. While scholars have looked to these pictures and their views of men at work to reveal the degree to which the sun was a workplace, as well as a site of leisure in the 19th century, my focus today will be on the sand itself to explore its status as a finite natural resource, the shifting methods of its extraction, and its place in the landscape. Not immediately evident in Sicily's view of Port Marley, a variety of new infrastructure projects were undertaken along France's rivers throughout the 19th century that aim to create a predictable and reliable transportation network that unified what were largely natural and separate river basins and created an interconnected and consistent network that could meet the needs of a rapidly industrializing capitalist economy. On the sen, this transformation was accomplished primarily through canalization, a method of river management that introduces dams and locks to maintain a suitably deep navigation channel. The dams subdivide the river into a series of segments where water levels can be individually regulated. The nearly half-century project to canalize the lower section of the sen, that is between Paris and the inland seaport of Rouen, began in 1838 with the construction of dams in Paris and at the downriver village of Biseaux and eventually comprised of nine dams with a company in locks. Each, I've circled each of them here on this map on the left. Additionally, clusters of islands were joined together to help control the river's current and its bed and banks were dredged to further define the primary navigation channel and to keep this new infrastructure operational. Among other benefits, these projects together reduce the travel time between the capital and the coast from 35 days to as few as two or three by the end of the century and help to make the sen the main artery of the nation's system of rivers. Keeping the river navigable for commercial traffic required periodic campaigns of dredging. These projects were planned by the civil engineers of the Pont de Chausset, which was France's public works department, but they were executed by qualified contractors who would compete for these jobs at public meetings. The poster on the left, for example, advertises one such meeting at which a contract to dredge a section of the river between two bridges in Paris would be awarded. The watercolor survey map on the right shows a section of the send downriver from Paris near Port Marley where dredging was planned in the main navigation channel indicated by the yellow section. Maps like this provide a window into the precision with which engineers monitored the riverbed and the precision they expected from their contractors, who in this case were ordered to remove mere fractions of a meter in certain spots. Once selected, contractors were required to follow the engineer's detailed instructions and were subject to regulations that typically limited workers to a single boat and to a strictly localized site during a set number of weeks or months. It is likely this kind of small scale manual maintenance dredging project that we see underway in a trio of landscape views of the send near Port Marley by Sicily. The artist moved to a village nearby in the early spring of 1875 and it was here at Port Marley that he would paint some of his most important river views. Like many of the impressionists, the mid-1870s was a transitional period for him. He was adjusting his technique and reflecting on the subject matter of his paintings in a new way. Rather than picturing the riverine landscape in scenes of bourgeois leisure like Claude Monet or Pierre Auguste Renoir, Sicily represents the send as a workplace and a site of resource extraction in this sequence of views. In the Art Institute of Chicago's picture, for example, a series of doubled motifs guide us through the picture. From the two sandpiles resting on the bank in the foreground, past twinned anchoring poles, and onto a pair of two-man dredging teams working in the middle ground, a visual link is formed between the work required to keep the river navigable and the material that resulted from their labor. In most cases, the amount of sand produced by such campaigns was sufficient to meet the existing need in the first half of the century. But by the time Sicily pictured sand dredging near Port Marley, demand was far outpacing whatever material this kind of waterway maintenance project could supply. Houseman's transformation of Paris created an enormous need for building materials generally and for sand specifically. It was used in the construction of apartment blocks in wider boulevards and new train lines, and perhaps ironically, the sand was also returned to the river. When mixed into mortar and cast into concrete, it joined the cast iron and timber armatures used to construct the locks and dams engineers used to control the river. Entrepreneurs took advantage of this new market and began to operate on an industrial scale primarily in sections of the Seine River Valley to the southeast of Paris. Rather than relying on contracts issued by engineers, such businesses purchased or rented large tracts of land adjacent to the river, which they turned into sprawling sand pits. For example, the company Maureen Corville purchased roughly 20 acres near Quasi de Hois in 1878 where they established a pit. Workers first removed up to 30 feet of soil in this alluvial plane to reach the sand deposits below the waterline. A small channel was dug to connect their pit to the Seine seen here in the postcard on the top left, through which tons of extracted sand were transported on barges to the keys of Paris for processing and sale. Steam-powered mechanical dredgers of the kind featured in the postcard on the bottom left were primarily used due to their ability to extract sand quickly, efficiently, and nearly around the clock. The large amorphous shape of the pit that resulted from 25 years of mining can be seen in the map on the right extending perpendicular to the river. Evidence of this type of industrial scale extraction was a recurring theme in the work of Armand Guillemot. The artist developed his landscape style while working alongside Kimi Pizarro and Paul Cezanne in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and his pictorial choices similarly tended to focus on working-class labor and growing signs of industrialization. However, as James Rubin has observed, whereas Pizarro focused on smaller scale factories and rural centers, as in the work on the left, Guillemot was instead drawn to views of industry on a far larger and more intensive scale than any other impressionist, as in the work on the right, in which the smoke from the riverside forges at Ivory billow into the sky at sunset. His choice to picture the heavy machinery and backbreaking human and animal labor that sustained the increasingly industrialized sand supply chain was due, in part, to his proximity to this subject. In the picture on the right, for example, we see a towering pile of sand on the edge of the quai d'en jus, which was mere steps from Guillemot's Paris studio. On other occasions, the artist walked further upriver to the quai de Bercy or took the train out to Ivory. Sites where industrial-scale sand merchants, including Maureen Corvel, unloaded their barges. This work was underway in the pastel on the left, in which a large steam-powered crane is offloading sand from a barge onto the bank nearby. In this detail, we can even make out the name Maureen Corvel written in white on the side of the crane. In the picture on the right, the artist provides a broader view of the operation with the crane anchored at the center alongside the riverbank. As the only impressionist to consistently hold a job outside of art making, Guillemot may have also had an affinity for the work underway at these sites. He was working as a clerk at his uncle's shop when he first started taking art classes and had moved on to the Paris Orlean Railway when he began to study drawing at the Academy Suisse. While both positions meant long hours and a six-day work week, at least the latter came with a free rail pass. Beginning in 1868, he took a job at the Pont de Chaussée, digging ditches three nights a week. This new position had the dual benefit of higher pay and finally allowed him to paint during the day to capture scenes like these of men unloading and sifting sand. Like Guillemot's work, that of his models was equally grueling but also low-paid and often dangerous. The largely itinerant and immigrant workforce employed by Maureen Corville, for example, endured 14 to 16-hour days, seven days a week, and those working on sand dredgers and cranes frequently fell victim to mechanical accidents and drownings. These bright impressionist river landscapes testify, therefore, to a facet of working class labor. However, they also reveal the exploitation and industrialized removal of a non-renewable resource. As engineer and sand expert Michael Whelan reminds us, quote, industrial sand production relies largely on the work of rivers, eroding, transporting, sorting, and dumping deposits of an attractive commercial quantity and quality of sand, end quote. And it's important to remember that this work happens on a geologic scale, time scale. Indeed, by the late 19th century, some already observed that sand was being removed at an unsustainable rate. It was one of the reasons that Maureen Corville and other dredging companies went to the trouble of opening sand pits. As historians of the industry have suggested, it was recognized as early as the 1870s that the remaining supply of usable sand in the sand was quickly diminishing. And by the 1930s, the river was almost completely depleted of sand. What I would like to suggest then is that in choosing extracted sand as a painterly subject, Sicily and Guillemot's landscape reveal an aspect of the extraction ecologies that depleted natural resources and transformed the landscape in the 19th century. With this phrase extraction ecology, literary historian Elizabeth Carolyn Miller sought to suggest a tension between these terms and how they were formulated in the industrial era. Extraction by definition presumes the ability to remove something from nature. While ecology, a term first used by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, suggests a web of interdependencies and connections from which no single part can be removed. Particularly relevant to this period, Miller notes that quote, just as new ecological and evolutionary theories of the natural world were coming to recognize the profound interdependencies of its many parts, new industrial technologies were perfecting the capacity for the removal and derangement of these parts, end quote. An interest in the tension of modern life between leisure and labor, rural and urban, tradition and modernity, and perhaps most relevant to the discussion at hand between nature and industry, is a hallmark of Impressionist landscapes. Attending to the tension between extraction and ecology provides another productive way to understand these landscapes of dredged sand, as well as Impressionist views of other extracted natural resources. This tension is at work in Monet's The Coleman, for example, in which men covered in black dust work to unload coal-laden barges more near the riverbank at Anyer. These barges likely traversed the canalized was and sand rivers to bring this extracted resource from the mines located on the northern border to the urban center where factories like those in the background burned this fuel and suffused the air with coal smoke. Like Guillemot's landscapes with sand piles, Monet's picture is about more than human labor. Indeed, whether coal or sand, these artists depict matter out of place, removed from the rural and suburban periphery and transported to the urban center for reuse as a commodity. With his attention to the extracted sand piled up on the keys of Paris, Guillemot alerts us to a material and transition. The sand now rests in a new urban ecosystem. Its extraction from the sun's bed, banks, or alluvial plane gave rise to the tension it now represents. Removed from nature, this finite resource is ready to be processed into a commodity and become an integral component of the anthropogenic landscape. These pictures by Sicily and Guillemot help us to reflect on how and where we have extracted sand historically and on our continued exploitation of it today. I would like to conclude with a picture by a friend and ardent follower of Guillemot Paul Signac. In his sweeping view of the sand at the Ponte Cronelle, he depicted two piles of sand in the foreground. When I visited the same spot over 120 years later, I found barges filled with sand moored to the same key. Today's sand is the second most exploited natural resource in the world after water, and as was the case in the rapidly industrializing and modernizing Paris of the 19th century, our current demand continues to outpace the available sources for sand. We need it for everything from concrete, asphalt, and glass to silicon for computer chips, and it continues to be extracted from riverbeds, banks, and floodplains. But in this now global market, we have turned to the global south in our continued exhaustion of this finite resource. Thank you. Hi, I'm Sarah Rich, I teach at Penn State University, and I am the current director of the Center for Virtual Material Studies, which facilitates graduate and postgraduate research into historically important materials for cultural objects. I'm grateful for this opportunity to introduce my student Annalise Palmer, a second-year master's student at the Pennsylvania State University's Department of Art History. In 2020, Annalise received her bachelor's from Center College at Danville, Kentucky, where she wrote a thesis on analytical models of choreography and the work of Tricia Brown and Yvonne Reiner. Her current research focuses on the rise of experimental dance practices throughout the 20th century, emphasizing choreographers whose dance practices realized often embodied the conceptual and aesthetic concerns of the art world. Annalise's background as a trained dancer influences her understanding of research into paradigms of choreography, combining corporal practice with critical theory to navigate topics of kinesthetic autonomy, physical limitation and expressive fallacy. Annalise was recently awarded a university fellowship, a university-wide enticement at Penn State to continue PhD work. She also received recently a Creative Achievement Award in recognition of her strong leadership skills and service to the graduate student body in the Department of Art History. Her paper today is a small portion of her master's project, which addresses choreographer Deborah Hay and her use of technology and information systems in the Cold War era. Please join me in welcoming Annalise to the lectern. Thank you, Sarah, for your kind words and thank you to the Barnes and everyone for being here for the sake of time. I'm just going to get started. So, on October 13, 1966, an audience sat in New York's 25th Street Armory facing a translucent Mylar curtain. Opposite the curtain were eight chairs, a music stand and mysterious electronic devices. Eight figures filed into the empty space, each took a seat on one of the chairs and picked up the adjacent device. A ninth figure positioned himself behind the music stand, lifting both hands like an orchestral conductor. Three performers emerged from behind a heavy panel of curtains. Two walked with measured gate, while the third stood atop a platform that slowly rolled across the stage, guided by remote control devices. For roughly 25 minutes, the performance continued at a slow pace. Bodies and machines roving about the gymnasium. The work was solo, the multimedia performance choreographed by Deborah Hay. Solo was part of a larger performance series titled Nine Evenings Theater and Engineering, organized by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Kluver. Nine Evenings used technology as a springboard for artistic experimentation, as Rauschenberg and Kluver invited artists, composers and dancers to collaborate with several engineers from Bell Laboratories. Among this ensemble was the prominent philosopher Marshall McLuhan, whose publication Understanding Media, published two years prior, would have been relevant to Nine Evenings' goal of merging technology with avant-garde art production. Moreover, McLuhan's role as a consultant aligned with his next essay, Cyber Nation and Culture, published in 1967 as part of Charles Deckard's book, The Social Impact of Cybernetics. Recombinated in Nine Evenings, and more specifically in Solo, acknowledged the prevalence of McLuhan's new Cyber Nation and positioned technology as irreversibly intertwined with the sociopolitical systems of power and subordination. In Solo, remote control technologies act as a twofold metaphor for systems of control, found within choreography and more generally within society. As described in her program notes shown here, quote, the principal visual elements of the piece are moving performers, lights, darkness, platforms and movement. It is my main intention to make all these elements equal in energy and invisibility. By equalizing performative elements, human or not, Hay emphasized the role of the individual actant as necessary to, but inseparable from, the performative apparatus. He intensified further notions of egalitarianism by claiming her choreography for Solo was improvisational. Such a statement was in line with post-modern dance practices of the decade, as choreographers increasingly divested themselves of total locomotive control over the other, and thus redefined the relational dynamics of Western dance. Solo appeared egalitarian, yet relied on an invisible systemization of control manifest at the technologic, choreographic and sociologic levels. Solo presented bodies, both again human and nonhuman, as equivalent entities and recast the choreographic as a type of remote control system. Performers submitted to an objectification of the self in which the individual responded to their situational relationships to other performers, in addition to the prescriptive commands of the choreographer. Like the electrical body of the remote control carts, performers yielded to an externalization of control and thus rendered their bodies as mere tools that act and react. Ultimately, the multiplicity of performing bodies condensed and distilled the dancer's respective actions to behave as a singular algorithmic entity, visually and physically one system that must consciously adapt to the movement of other performers. Haze choreography reconsidered the body as object, as machine, and as system, visualizing the type of corporeal subordination that overwhelmed Cold War socio-political environments. Solo revealed the systemization of bodies through the visual and theoretical language of algorithmic programming, or cybernetics, and thus embodied an unspoken fear of self-control, or non-self-control. Like scholars Michelle Cuo and Deborah Garwood, I frame much of my work on hay through the social and technological theories of cybernetics. Though hay didn't refer to cybernetics as source material, the leadership of Kluver and the consultation work of McLuhan ensured that the issue of cybernetics would pervade solo. The importance of cybernetics, however, might best be summarized by Norbert Wiener, whose book, shown here, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, provided the technical language and methodology necessary to navigate algorithmic systems of command. As Wiener explained, quote, It is the purpose of cybernetics system, cybernetics to develop a language and techniques that will enable us indeed to attack the problem of control and communication in general. In control and communication, we are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful, the tendency for entropy to increase. Cybernetics suggests that different bodies continually self-regulate, fighting nature's, oops, sorry, self-regulate and readjust according to the status of their shared environment. The individual bodies do not self-correct because of free will, but do so by design. Self-regulation is not only for the sake of efficiency or order, but for survival. Wiener's analysis on the human body as a cybernetics system was a pertinent development in the discourses of power. In his book, Wiener compared the rapid computing machine to the central nervous system. The body should organize, store and respond to feedback individually, but can benefit from exterior interventions like medication, therapy, or surgery. In his analysis, Wiener suggests that the human body is not only programmatic, but predictable. McLuhan, however, explained, quote, and moving from the neolithic age to the electric age, we move from the mode of the wheel to the mode of the circuit, from the linear single plane organization of experience to the pattern of feedback in the circuitry and involvement. Thus, we now experience a growing need to build the very consequences of our programs into the original design and to put the consumer into the production process. Technology accelerates the circulation of feedback to a point of inundation. Self-regulation is not enough. McLuhan's electric age requires the social actants to become preemptive of environmental change and therefore become conscious of their subordination to, or complicity in, complex social structures. Although individuals have agency, their positionality within a community requires a level of involvement that negates free will. Solo realized the cybernetic schema of McLuhan and Wiener, integrating the biopolitical theories of control and organization into the very choreographic structure of dance. He tested cybernetics through the conventions of choreography and technology, commanding the general trajectory of bodies to reveal a systemic and systematic tendency for success and more covert systems of relational power. At the technological level, Solo relied on team or theater electronic environment modular. This system remotely activated the eight remote control carts, their controllers, a CB radio channel for on and off stage communication, and several other transmission systems. To make such a complex system legible, engineer Herbert Schneider made system context diagrams demarcating multi-level communication across space. In Solo, there are two distinct zones as shown here, each relating to the spatial operations of the performance. Along the left most edge of the drawing is a column with four mechanical system categories. The label sound appears at the top, followed by light, motion, and voice communication respectively. Four additional categories line the top most edge of the diagram. Along the left most edge of the drawing is a column, oops, sorry, from the left to right they read CC for central command, then off stage, on stage, and balcony ceiling. Although less distinct in their demarcations, the latter categories represent the spatial zones of the armory, what audiences can and cannot see. When read together, the diagram forms a flow chart, the lines and shapes interconnecting like the surface of a circuit board. Schneider's diagrams visualize the theatrical effects of team and effectively mapped out the currents of electrical and corporeal motion. One could trace the systematic flows of the performance from left to right, locating areas of input and output. The diagram insinuated a complex of interaction, which placed the engineer at the apex of mechanical control. However, in the active space of the performance, such hierarchical delineations became translucent through the wireless devices. The diagram acts as a visual manual for both team and Solo. If the viewer chooses to read a said manual, they become privy to each level of technical control. Without that knowledge, the remote control operator appeared as the primary source of power, remotely directing the platforms and by proxy, the bodies. Nevertheless, the systematic environment of Solo was under Hayes' purview. Although choreography is an intangible set of parameters, it coordinates the trajectory in tone of bodies in a way that alters the performance's reception. As choreographer, Hayes stipulated the action of the dancers as well as the technical engineers offstage, the remote control operators, their mobile carts on stage and their mobile carts on stage through the very technological and corporeal hierarchy. In Hayes' coupling of human dancers or actors with the remote control carts, she effectively blurs the perceptual distinction between biological and technological bodies. Wireless technologies complicated the relational dynamics of agency. The carts appeared as self-propelled, another type of dancing body that roved across the floor. Choreograph moments of interaction between dancers and platforms heightened the perceptual blurring of forms as platforms lifted or carried dancers in a pseudo-potatou or patatois. Telecontrolled cart became effective tools for the movement of bodies, but also affectual partners, acting, affecting, and performing in real time. Hayes' visual play with choreography and remote control systems produced an additional sense of corporeal transference, where machines became bodies and bodies objects. A clip from solo features Haye atop one of the platforms, slowly rolling past the camera. Haye turns her body to present a view of her profile. With one leg slightly in front of the other, her arms hang down at her sides. A metallic sound rings throughout the armory. Haye's arms slowly lift and float upwards above her head to a fifth position, keeping the meditative pace as before. She begins a deep bend in the knees. She is expressionless, a distant form that does not acknowledge the presence of others. Physically, her movements are fragmentary. Static poses interspersed with clunky transitions rather than a fluid sequencing of motion. She begins by separating the upper body from the lower body, forming two corporeal zones. The port de bras mimics the iconic pose of the ballerina with a soft curvature of the arms that frame the face. Below, however, the knees that begin a de plie in parallel. The motion is angular, if not awkward. Two layers of remote control emerge. On the one hand, remote control operators translocated bodies in space via platforms, momentarily robbing the dancers of agency. As more dancers interacted with the carts, the space became a mock exhibition in which static forms atop white pedestals constantly moved about behind the translucent barrier of the mylar curtain. It was as if the operators searched endlessly for the right layout, rearranging the bodies as if they were art objects. As a result, the audience became complicit viewers who partake in the aesthetic and formal comparison of objects on display. Under the gaze of the audience and the operators, the flesh of the performer hardens to stone, subject hood into object hood. On the other hand, the dissection of the body into discreet kinetic zones mimicked a programmatic division of labor. As dancers biologically fragmented energy into sections, they asked the viewer to decipher the ambiguity of their form as autonomously active or externally automated. Wirelessness extended beyond the propulsion of carts and for a moment, one questioned the self governance of bodies, which articulated motion like an automaton or programmatic system. Even so, the dissonance between the internal and external systems of control complicates further when one considers the role of the choreographer. In a classical setting, the choreographer directs the dancer through the theatrical conventions of codified gestures, storyline and musical measurements. Such elements coordinate the body, providing it with expressive masks and corporeal shapes to shift between. Ballets replete with stories in which characters surrender themselves to outside control. For instance, the whimsical willies of Giselle or the robotic dolls of Kapalia and the Nutcracker, fictional persons whose expressivity suspends notions of disbelief. Further illusions could be made between the systems of control and solo in these classical ballets, since each invests in the conception of an external automation of motion. However, the greatest difference between solo and these classical ballets was the implementation of choreography, as Haye claimed the work was improvisational. While Haye's choreography focused less on elements of narrative guidance or locomotive patterning, as was typical of ballet and even modern dance at the time, solo still had a level of cohesion that muddied Haye's use of a term like improv. There was an extemporaneous quality to solo, as several dancers appear to wander for most of the 25 minutes. Even so, there were several coordinated sections that deny any pretense of spontaneity. Yes, Haye probably allowed dancers to generate their own sequences of motion, but when it comes to such a complex dynamic of interaction between both bodies and machines, one should assume the existence of a choreographic score as well as previous group practice. With repetition, motions that were initially improvisational become temporal and spatial markers for the self and for the group. Success relied on the individual's ability to follow the score while performing as part of a group. Visually disparate and confusing, bodies seem to operate autonomously of one another. But through the cohesion of Haye's improvisational score, the individual parts become part of a whole. Choreography remotely and invisibly controls the body of the dancer, providing each with a task or a job that needs to be completed with a specific expressivity, articulation, and pace. Harkening back to Wiener's description of the cybernetic system, Solo produces a controlled environment in which individual components work separately or together on a series of tasks that may be modified and adjusted through the exterior command of the operator and cart from the operator or cart, but the dancers respond to the essential control of the choreography. The work transforms into an observable self-organizing system in which the mechanical and organic bodies work towards the goal of the performance. As such, the group dance operates as a singular entity in which particular bodies flatten to mere parts and converge to perform as one, giving the work its title, Solo. One could argue then that Haye's choreography becomes a type of cybernetic system in which bodies are not autonomous but automated. Viewers of Solo may track the system's efficiency through its ability to decrease entropy, and yet, on the night of Solo's first performance, several mechanical effects failed. Despite the aid of Bell Laboratory's team, technology created an obstacle that dancers had to preemptively work against. Critic Lil Picard opens her review up in Downmad Avenue by noting that, quote, things just didn't click at the recent 96th Regiment Armory Festival, a sentiment repeated by several other critics. In Solo, voice communications malfunctioned, wireless lighting systems didn't work, and most of the carts remained immobile. Returning to the model posed by Marshall McLuhan, Solo operates as a cybernetic system whose transference of information, the motion of the dance, compounds with technology. Actors in Solo's had to navigate Haye's choreographic structure, respond to actions of other bodies, and then anticipate technological failure. Individuals participated in a subjectification of the self for the sake of the performance's success. Solo echoes the sentiments of McLuhan who stipulates a codependency of the human form in this new era technology. As humans extend their power through the automated machine, there is also a precarity of self that yields in response. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Erin Powell, Associate Professor of Art History at Temple University, and I'd like to start by adding my thanks to the Barnes for hosting this wonderful event and also to all the graduate speakers for these fascinating papers. I'm looking forward to the conversation after this panel. First, though, it is with great pleasure that I introduce Allie Prince to you today. Allie is currently a PhD student in art history with Temple University's Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She is also a scholar, painter, and curator devoted to bringing fresh attention to the creative and cultural diversity of modern and contemporary Appalachian art. Allie's soon-to-be-completed dissertation project is titled Appalachian Regionalism, Reimagining Modernism on the Periphery of American Art, and it aims to remap the conventional boundaries of the U.S. art world during the 19th and 20th centuries by developing an eco-critical framework for understanding the entangled histories of art, craft, race, and class, labor, and artistic education in the United States. Across the five chapters of her project, Allie develops a conceptual model for understanding how artists with Appalachian roots regularly brought the visual language of mainstream modernism into dialogue with regional craft skills learned through kinship networks, a local knowledge of flora and fauna, and family legacies deeply impacted by labor and resource extraction. In this way, Allie's work engages larger art historical debates involving environmental justice, artistic access, and relationships between the local and global, while suggesting an exciting new model for expanding the economic and ethnic diversity of art history in the Americas. Allie's scholarly writing has been published in Panorama, the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, as well as in recent publications such as the 2023 exhibition catalog from these Hills, Contemporary Art in Southern Appalachian Highlands, and the forthcoming edited volume, Queering Appalachia's Visual History, a collection of queer Appalachian photographers that will be published later this year by the University of Kentucky Press. Allie's research-based artwork, which is another important facet of her practice, was recently featured in a 2022 group show, Women's Work Redefining Appalachian Traditions, and a 2023 solo exhibition titled Into the Mountains, which was at the William King Museum of Art. Allie's dissertation research has been supported over the past several years by the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Center for Curatorial Leadership, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. She is currently the Tara Foundation Curatorial Reinstallation Fellow with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she is working closely with Anna O'Marley to rethink and diversify the presentation of artworks in this Auguste collection in order to tell new stories about the lived experiences of artists in the Americas. The paper Allie will share with us today is titled Extraction in the Alleghenies, John Kane's Naive Eco-Criticism. Please join me in welcoming Allie to the podium. Thank you so much, Dr. Pals for that lovely introduction, and thank you to the Barnes again for hosting this and bringing us all together for this symposium. Self-taught artist John Kane emigrated to the Appalachian region early in his lifetime, and as a Scottish migrant with little means was thrust into the booming extract extraction industry as a laborer, Kane held fast to his Scottish heritage in America yet was welcomed into Appalachian Folkways most profoundly in Pittsburgh, developing an affinity for its beauty and culture. In 1891, when an accident working for the B&O Railroad left him disabled, Kane taught himself to paint landscapes and began showing a simultaneous longing for Scotland and a disdain for the pollution of coal and steel industries on the pristine Appalachian countryside in his compositions. After submitting to the Carnegie International late in life in 1927, Kane became a household name between the wars and part of museum collections like MoMA, the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation, and has since been widely collected for his folk influences. To date, the work of John Kane has never been reviewed from an eco-critical perspective for its negative content against the commodity extraction industries of Appalachia. This paper will explore Kane's eco-critical gaze as a laborer who worked in extraction through his landscapes of industrial Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas in the toll that the extractive industry was taken on his adopted homeland of Appalachia. John Kane was born in West Calder, Scotland in 1860 to a working-class family and after losing his father at a young age started working in shale mines at the age of nine to provide for his mother and six siblings. It is interesting to note when considering Appalachian culture throughout this presentation that the Scottish Highlands mimic that of the Appalachian Mountains and were part of the same mountain range prior to the supercontinent of Pangea splitting into pieces which perhaps created cultural similarities due to the harsh conditions. It most certainly created similar ecological conditions for mining and extraction. In 1879 at the age of 19, Kane followed his brother and stepfather to America after their recruitment to work in the steel trade in Braddock, Pennsylvania, which was at the time also a hub for the booming anthracite coal industry. His first of many labor-intensive jobs in America were the Coke ovens of Connellville, Pennsylvania, consequently owned by Henry Clay Frick, an industrialist who would later become a prominent artwork force and partner to Scottish American steel baron Andrew Carnegie. Coke, a derivative of coal, is a hard and porous fuel with few impurities made by heating coal in the absence of air in large ovens. It was in Connellville that he experienced his first near-death experience in the mines when a miner accidentally lit the straw feed for the mules of flame and he and 18 miners narrowly escaped the subsequent explosion. Kane then moved on to Edgar Thompson's steelworks, there we go, in Braddock around 1894, later moving south to labor and mining towns all over Appalachian, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. In 1891, while working as a street paver in Pittsburgh, he lost his leg on the Beano railroad tracks to an engine without lights, forcing him to rethink his abilities as a hard laborer. It was here that his painting career began and he learned to mix colors and clean brushes for the press steel car company. Painting steel box cars outside of Pittsburgh, Kane married in 1897 and over the course of the next few years lost his job due to the stock market crash of 1901 and coupled with the death of his infant son in 1904 and his family fleeing his ailments spiraled into alcoholism. He again wandered Appalachia in search of work, taking up jobs as a carpenter and house painter when available, continuing to paint on discarded materials, eventually making his way back to Pittsburgh after World War One. Kane honed his painting practice over many years, spending time at the Carnegie Museum of Art admiring Pittsburgh landscape artists like Aaron Henry Gorson, a fellow immigrant of Lithuanian descent who was credited with creating the Pittsburgh School after studying at PAFA and recording in detail Pittsburgh's mountains and rivers along with modern industrial technology. This no doubt influenced Kane along with works by David Gilmore Blythe and John Alexander White who was painting a mural commission glorifying Andrew Carnegie's industries in the halls of the museum during one of Kane's visits. It was also during Kane's museum visits that he learned of the Carnegie International, a source of pride for artists from Pittsburgh and the largest art event of the year which was established by Carnegie in 1896. Kane idolized the fellow Scottish immigrant and by default had worked in many of his industrial iterations. He would later dedicate a painting to Carnegie despite many workers associated with Pittsburgh's steel distesting him entitled Andrew Carnegie's Birthplace in 1928. In 1925 and 1926 Kane submitted to the Carnegie International only to meet with rejection for submitting works that were copies of religious paintings found in the Carnegie Museum collection. In 1927 he submitted an original work seen from the Scottish Highlands a painting reminiscent of his childhood in Scotland but also his assimilation into the Scottish Appalachian community and was accepted with the help of an enthusiastic juror but not without controversy due to his lack of training and blue collar immigrant status. Despite this he became one of the most prominent self-taught artists of the following decade showing in Pittsburgh at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia the Phillips Collection in Washington DC and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Kane's ove reflected industrial and pastoral landscapes, portraits and American historical motifs featuring Abraham Lincoln and John Brown. His sense of composition and attention to detail are often attributed to his working class perspective and firsthand knowledge of the subjects. While it is important to note that Kane made many pastoral and industrial landscape views of Pittsburgh especially after 1930 I will be focusing on landscapes that were made in concomitant years that show industry and pollution increasing with each artwork. It seems as if many scholars have read his propensity towards Pittsburgh landscapes with industrial elements as his admiration for modernity and technology through industrialization industrialization but I propose that he is in actuality was showing his disdain for the destruction of the environment around him in certain circumstances. As a Scottish immigrant who was assimilated into Appalachian culture in northwestern Pennsylvania, Kane deeply related to his own Scottish highlands and was aware of the extractive destruction of Appalachia. Many Appalachians had generational ties to Scotch-Iris immigrants that ventured across the Atlantic Ocean to begin a new life in what was the original frontier of America in the 17th and 18th centuries bringing with them music folk art and specific dialects. Kane must have had some knowledge of the history of Appalachia as well as kinship practices and this in turn calls the nostalgia towards his homeland visible in many of his compositions. The first painting I would like to analyze in Kane's oeuvre is Homestead from 1929. The city of Homestead was made notorious in 1892 after workers of Henry Clay Frick engaged in a labor strike at the Homestead works of the Carnegie Steel Company called by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Frick was staunchly anti-union and called for the involvement of the Pinkerton's and the National Guard resulting in the deaths of nine laborers and his condemnation for excessive force. Kane had knowledge of this event and was against striking although he had participated in them throughout his history as a laborer yet depicted no details in the painting that could allude to Homestead's dark labor history. Homestead at first glance seems to be somewhat pastoral if you ignore the polluted ore coloring the Monongahiller River the disrupted westward blowing mass of smoke and smog and the thin noxious mist that envelops the small town of Homestead at the foot of the towering smokestacks. Trains pass in opposite directions on either side of the river also pluming smoke into the air. Kane has paid attention in every small detail in the canvas rendering individual windows of the houses of Homestead each steel bar of the Homestead high-level bridge as well as the trusses of the railroad tracks. Homestead's tainted Appalachian hills which resemble those of Kane's Scottish homeland prior to the rise of industrialism can be seen in the upper left of the painting as a small section of pastoral mirage and detriment because of the mass of debris headed towards it. Homestead was included in the 1929 Carnegie International and was subsequently purchased by Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller and is now in MoMA's collection. Two years later in 1931 Kane completed the Monongahiller River Valley Pennsylvania which showed further advancement of the industrialism of Pittsburgh and was also featured in the Carnegie International that same year. Attention is paid again to the smokestacks and the smoke filtering into the air as trolley cars, box cars, a steamboat hauling coal and trains including one with Baltimore and Ohio scrolled across it consequently the line that led to the loss of his leg power forward in the name of industry. Machinery has taken over the composition as the pastoral elements struggle to compete. Faceless workers toil in the background as part of the scenery backlit by massive iron structures all under clear cut rolling Appalachian hills. Again as in Homestead the pollution is directed towards homes on the hillside but not as flagrantly and the sky is noticeably darker with pollution. Kane's study for the Monongahiller River also seems to reflect the pollution of the painting even though he has focused solely on the iron structures seen behind the workers in the composition and the only medium used was pencil and paper. One of Kane's most environmentally critical paintings is industry's increase from 1933 completed a year before his death from tuberculosis in 1934 within the composition of industry's increase also called prosperity's increase. One can almost feel the sensation of struggling to breathe through rampant effluence from heavy industry as the entire composition is tainted with a brown scum. Smoke billows from chimneys, trains and barges and the Monongahiller River is again the color of iron as a barge carrying coke dubbed the prosperity charges along. An American flag marinates in the quote coal weather unquote a term coined by Corina Weidinger in her 2019 essay for criticism eco-criticism and the Anthropocene in 19th century art and visual culture about representations of coal mines and art in 19th century Belgium yet it is wholly fitting in describing the atmospheric conditions in Kane's landscapes of Pittsburgh. Coal weather is triggered by intensive coal extraction and burning which releases sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and carbon dioxide. Further complicated by pollution of a region's water the cloudiness typical of evaporation combines with pollution to create smog through which the sun can barely shine changing the topography of its land and damaging its ecosystems. Kane's pollutive truths are laid bare and they take on an autobiographical element to his previous labor intensive professions in coal, steel, rail and most importantly painting. Based on previous conclusions and praise from critics his autobiography Skyhooks written from retold oral histories by journalist Marie McSuegan in 1938 and the general opinion of folk art's purpose it has become common knowledge that Kane's intention in his depictions of industry, labor and environment was that he quote found beauty everywhere unquote. On the cover of Skyhooks Kane's partially nude self-portrait is strategically placed within a background of industry and pollution in which he did not paint himself perhaps to strengthen the idealized narrative of his extractive labor background. I propose that Kane was proud of his labor background in his adopted city of Pittsburgh but also keen to show the visible environmental effects of unchecked industrial development. He may have idealized in part the harsh reality of Appalachian extraction but misinterpretation and simplification of his true intentions because of his working class status played a part in Ms. McSuegan's interpretation. A fact mentioned by Louise Lippincott and Maxwell King in their 2022 book American Workman The Life and Art of John Kane. Self-taught artists are just as rich in eco-critical content as trained fine artists and in Kane's work it is overt but he has been pigeonholed into a box of the proud laborer painting what he sees unaware of nature's demise. In 2021 curator Catherine Jettleson wrote about Kane and gatecrashers the rise of the self-taught artists in America focusing on his contributions to Pittsburgh and modernism and dubbing his artistic phenomenon quote a hybridization of americaness unquote in contextualizing how his work fit into the scope of regionalism nativism and precisionism all of which were important artistic ideologies at play between the world. Precisionism was at the time of Kane's discovery at the 1927 Carnegie International in Vogue as seen in Elsie Drake's Pittsburgh from the same year. Kane was the antithesis of precisionism according to Jettleson lacking sleek linear abstracted forms smooth surfaces without a trace of brushstrokes and it's accompanying elitism and glorification of the machine. Additionally by the time Kane took on the subject matter of Homestead and the Monogahila Valley the steel industry that they depicted was drawing to a close along with precisionism and both paintings represented a golden age of the anthracite industry that no longer existed but remained acceptable in his folk style. Jettleson also poses that quote Kane was not ideologically engaged with regionalist opposition to Manhattan centrism or urophilia as an untrained artist but his work rehabilitated the degraded reputation of Pittsburgh unquote which one journalist in 1868 famously dubbed hell with the lid taken off. Kane showed alongside regionalist painters before and after his death and had the support of Henry Luce who was known to collect works of the regionalist triumph for it. One thing that Kane shares with the regionalist despite attention paid to a particular region of the country is the propensity to use his hands as a laborer and craftsman which modern technology was seeking to remove. Kane's distinct regionalism was not just that of Pittsburgh but of Appalachia as he exhibited aspects of folk life craft and fine art as well as religion labor and elements of flora and fauna distinct to the long-term creative traditions of the area. Kane was the first self-taught painter of the 20th century to be recognized by major museums after his 1927 acceptance into the Carnegie International. Undeterred by two failed earlier attempts and generated considerable media attention giving American art more cultural clout and paving the way for other self-taught artists he did not live to see the glorification of the artist as worker during the new deal and the subsequent projects that led artists to be respected in their quest to represent America both regionally and nationally through the WPA the FSA or the Department of Labor where he had a post-humus exhibition in 1935. It was during the new deal era that artists had the ability to depict ecological turmoil and garner attention for it for the first time in American art and perhaps Kane had could have cemented his true feelings about industry and the environment and made his case as a self-taught eco-critical artist had he lived to see it. Thank you. I want to call all of our speakers back up to the stage as well as Pamela Lee. I'm realizing I think we maybe need one more chair so I will grab it. So I will just kick us off. I just want to thank you all so much for this wonderful panel of papers which I think we somehow got incredibly lucky. I know that these were all nominated by their departments and yet somehow they came together in this really coherent panel that I think helped me at least really think through both the similarities and differences across as you were so many of you were speaking to the exploitations of and the extraction of labor and natural resources but then you did it through all of these very different mediums so we had dance we had painting we had photography and then also speaking to different let's just say objects so sand coal technology and which I'm very silver even as an extracted metal which I'm really grateful for and in terms of how it opens up how we think about these historic mediums and the styles and visualities that these artists can help enable us to see now and I think that's been a kind of theme for me at least across from Pamela's wonderful talk last night on of this kind of toggling between visions of the past and also what it enables towards our visions of the present we have just to sort of talk maybe structurally we have a kind of wonderful set of interlocutors here and so for this conversation Pamela and I can both we can both ask questions and then we'll open it up to the audience I also though want this to emerge as a conversation so I would also encourage the the the speakers you know if you have questions for each other to please chime in and I guess maybe to get us kicked off with a question just because it's still sort of in my mind Ali with your paper which I do think in many ways brought so many of the threads of the papers together for me and I think for me and I think this is maybe with Pamela's wonderful talk last night still ringing in my mind and especially the conversation afterwards about the mediums of art and art history itself's embeddedness in systems of industry of white supremacy of war and and then also with this trajectory of papers which got us started with where we had coming before your talk the idea of ecological extraction where Genevieve you I thought really helpfully the way that you structured ecological extraction as sand both being removed and extracted from its environment but also never really leaving it in the sense that it's constantly feeding into systems of industrial ecologies you know right sort of on the same sense sometimes in the dams themselves and Ali your talk on John Kane really made me think about the ways in which artists in art history and art history is also part of that kind of closed circuit of ecological extraction I mean I was just amazed by the kind of roll call you had of you know all of the people that fund us to this day I mean Carnegie Frick I mean the fact that John Kane himself was working sort of both first literally for Carnegie and in this extraction of a coal in a direct way and then indirectly through his art which in a sense is being you know shown in these spaces that are rehabilitating Carnegie's reputation in such a way that is also enabling these extractive ecologies and their persistence and so this is a very long setup but it's just to say it made me wonder Ali if you could just speak more to this question of I'm just really curious about Kane's embeddedness in this system and what he you know when you talk about his eco-critical gaze do you see that as one that is about I guess in a sense is that coming from just his vision that we can see now looking backwards or do you kind of read between the lines as he is navigating all of these wealthy patrons and donors that he's kind of doing this in a coded language that can speak both critically but also get collected by them I guess I was just curious to hear more about how Kane himself I mean they know a lot of it is requires a kind of reading between the lines but how you see himself as positioning himself within that complex system well he definitely I definitely had to read between the lines and putting all of this together but he's kind of I see him caught in this like cyclical situation and I don't think he thought that he was going to be a famous artist or that he was going to have you know the the exposure that he had towards the end of his life but I also think that he I think he was critical because he could see what was happening to the landscape but I also think that people were stewards people that were stewards for his work were kind of taking advantage of things like Mick Swegen who basically translated these oral histories into his autobiography I think she you know made it a class discussion in the autobiography and he was you know deceased at that time so he really couldn't have like a dialogue with what she put in here in that situation so I think that he had a voice but that voice was overshadowed by what they wanted him to look like in terms of this like working class self-taught artist um so I think it's a complicated situation and you know we're not going to know the answer to a lot of the questions but I definitely think he had the know with all to know what was happening to the environment and he had a comparison of what happened in the UK because it's the same mountain range that was split also mined so um yeah I hope that answers or clarifies your question yeah no thank you um and maybe I'll then just ask one more question and then I want to turn it over also to Pamela but I guess I'm just thinking so we've coal on the one hand and you know if I'm again I think I'm still caught in this question of art histories and if there's one over determined perhaps one of the most over determined categories of art history is of course the self-taught artist I mean that again tends to be such a small box that we put artists in and in order to see their work we have to kind of carve away so many years of criticism and and art history itself but impressionism also kind of feels like another one of those art historical categories um that is so um you know the that is so codified within art history that sometimes we have to kind of you know push away the weight of that that art history um in order to see oppressionism to see the works afresh and I thought your paper was so wonderful in doing that and I guess I was just curious um about the I think this was um uh Margaret had sort of mentioned this very briefly in your intro and it did make me think about it about like why like what did they see in sand like the depiction of sand itself like what did that impressionist what did that vision I mean are there things that can help us see or understand or know about sand um through that style through that particular vision that it brings to us uh it's a good question um it's something I'm still kind of thinking through as I'm as I'm writing this chapter uh some especially um scholars for Armand Guillama have suggested that it's you know kind of very a formal choice you know and that it provides a nice um coloristic kind of contrast to you know the blue of the river or maybe um you know other aspects of the landscape so I think to some degree you know that is as a part of it but I think um also the sand itself was probably just you know a part of the of the river landscape that they're encountering so um you know I'm not sure how much I think I tried to kind of dance around this in the paper a little bit like I'm not sure um how much they were um actively drawn to it or if it just happened to be like a part of the landscape that particularly caught their eye um a comparison that I'm still sort of trying to think through um and maybe it's you know um obvious to more than just me but um when I see these these towering sand piles I'm also reminded of Monet's haystacks it's like another yeah it's another you know kind of pyramidal um material in the landscape um and thinking about how those two things kind of compare and contrast both materially and you know as a um you know aspect of agriculture or um extraction and you know how they're piled together um all things that I'm still kind of thinking through but um yeah that does seem to be some sort of um aspect to that shape that was um something that they were interested in yeah thank you and you had a wonderful this is just a quick comment which just really for me was so helpful I think it reframed that one of the ways in which I think about um you know that modernist moment I always you know I tend to think about it you know from teaching art history 101 about you know all these new populations of people coming from the countryside the suburbs into the city and the way that you framed a modernity that was about the sand um that we could sort of that we could equally understand modernity in terms of the transportation of sand into the city and the visualization of that um I just want to thank you for that because I think I will I will never see uh the period the same uh after you drawing my attention to that but I want to turn it over to Pamela also for questions hi yes it's working um I'll just very quickly follow up on this last exchange by saying that a phrase that's I that I thought was very um uh that really captured not just what you were trying to argue but what the entire panel was presenting was the notion of matter out of place I thought that was um that crystallized no pun intended so much of what I think um many of you are doing here today and on that point I want to say as well congratulations with Ali to all of you and to the graduate students this morning for such inspiring work and for um showing in many ways that's the history of arts healthy that it is moving forward and it's doing all sorts of really interesting new things so so thank you for that so um to the questions um I was asked to respond to uh Megan Annalise and um again uh really terrific projects you have at hand and I'll start with Meg by asking first by saying um what what's surprising that you showed to all of us is that for all the interest in uh the stereograph and the stereoscopic camera that we've never really thought about them in terms of 3D visually and it's it's shocking years after the fact of Jonathan Quarry that we have not done that so I really appreciated your attention to the visual dimensions of how these works function and uh to what they might suggest about modes of visuality that have been less claimed uh so called by the history of art um and I guess I wanted to ask you to tell us a little bit more about where you see the project going um relative to the final statement which is about the optical curiosity which is about the dethroning of Albertian vision or linear perspective in um our appreciation of these artifacts um and you hinted at that a bit when you talked about the labor specifically of the the Chinese laborers the indentured servants in the mines and the mountains and tunnels um I want you to maybe open up for us a bit the relationship between the formal and the social specifically on the side of the viewers who would be consuming these images for whom these new optical curiosities were something uh not just a form of everyday entertainment as we know but something um incredibly novel in uh the circulation and dissemination of photography so could you speak a little bit to that hinge between the formal innovations that's taking place here and the larger sociological or social relation that is necessarily being brought to the fore in the consumption of the stereo view yeah thank you um while the rest of the project kind of jumps in time next to the view master which is sort of an interesting continuation of where we sort of start in the 19th century with these photographs of the west um eventually we see stereographs become associated with various tourist sites these eventually become national parks and tourist sites and stereographs in a way become these collectibles these sort of tokens of having been to these places or even if you hadn't been to these places um things that you could sort of experience from your parlor room or your living room um the way the places these particular photographs from heart disseminated is sort of interesting because um heart worked as an independent contractor and so the central pacific railroad purchased some of his negatives and then printed and uh serialized and captioned and uh then disseminated those stereographs and then he also printed through his separate publisher these same stereographs and so there's this process of curation that the central pacific railroad did which i think is interesting because in some ways their curation the captioning which would have been done by a publisher um in some ways re-inscribes these sort of kind of more interesting if not subversive sort of things happening in the 3d picture back into this vocabulary of manifest destiny and so and often these pictures were um republished as lithographs which were then embellished and made into very different pictures from what we sort of experience in 3d um i don't know if that really answers your question well it begins because uh the the other half of the question which is um the question was in some ways reducible to um issues of reception um it gets us back to the question of production that um i was also very curious about um the first being what it was the technical dimensions of the stereographic camera that either delimited or enabled the kinds of formal choices that that heart was making on the one hand but also this very helpful information that you just provided about the curation of the images that then have come been passed down to us so when you said uh that he had a great deal of agency i think that was your word um in the in the images that he took i was wondering a little bit about um the fact that these survey photography initiatives were extremely complicated as you know um so the editorializing or the curation then comes at the end clearly with that yes correct um i think photographers for the most part were largely left to their own devices to photograph in the way that they wanted um i know for timothy oceleven on his surveys he sometimes operated by himself and the rest of the survey crew would move on ahead so there was little oversight i think in the sense when they were actually sort of on location photographing um but the way these photographs have then gotten reinterpreted according to various people who have been interested in in them is interesting and my understanding glenn willamson has a great book on this but my understanding is that the railroad was a little bit more interested in the picturesque presentation um than the more kind of abstract and more unusual unusual one great thank you so much so um and lisa i wanted to congratulate you as well uh for bringing our attention to a work that is not as often discussed as many of the other um performances within nine evenings um so thank you very much for that and thank you for the deep dive into the cybernetic dimensions of deba haze piece maybe you could help us out uh both the panel in the audience um a little bit with where you see that work relative to the rest of nine evenings and the general reception which you highlighted as one that was deeply negative um beyond of course the technical failures which were uh you know routinely rehearsed in the media at the time um and going back to the origins of of the events and the motivations for thinking about the relationship between art and technology at that moment such that a clover and a russianberg would argue that technology particularly at that moment needed art uh to um well to prevent it from doing all sorts of catastrophic things yeah so i guess uh there are many thoughts i have here but one is how you see solo um in terms of anything like an imminent critique of technology relative to the technogetopianism that is happening in many of the other pieces um and then maybe because i'm completely ignorant on the subject um if you could tell us a little bit about choreography and the historicization relative to cybernetics if this is one of the first examples that uh that you explore or if there's a way that you might theorize the relationship between homeostasis and choreography in general so that was okay i think a lot yeah um to kind of start um i started with solo because i found a publication by rosalyn krauss where she mentions that debora hay by the 70s is practicing this weird thing called cellular consciousness and it would essentially be me telling all of you like right now we're all dancing because our cells are moving and um i kind of spiraled and i found this piece so none of her works from the 1960s besides this one that i can find so far are documented so that's particularly why i was so interested in it and also you know uh there is the kind of deep dive into postmodern dance is still relatively new with yvonne reyner being the kind of primary figure um and lucinda child was also in this so um as i move forward with this project i want to continue looking at yvonne reyner um steve paxton um and lucinda child because they are dealing with things that are quite similar um yvonne reyner's peace discrete carriage uh is her walkie talkie controlling people on stage to move um pick things up put things down and and lucinda child's they're in these uh sonar controlled carts um that are encased in mylar so they're like in a glass case almost so kind of putting that in reference i wanted to look at this piece because debora hay is so under discussed um moving into i think your other questions of choreography and like this idea of homeostasis and cybernetics you have to remember at this time especially in western dance like the idea of what these women and steve paxton are doing is so new and weird and like unimaginable for the regular dancer um you have ballet which is incredibly coordinated and usually never choreographed by women they're typically male ballet masters um and then you get into martha graham louis or the horton and the uh hosé limon and it's incredibly modern dance emotional and like internalized but it's still highly technical this dance solo is not even all dancers some of them are like robert rouschenberg wasn't it um uh donnell judd's wife was in it all uh julie judd olga cluver billy cluver's wife was in it so it's this weird experimentation with yes choreography as a way of controlling but also like can this can this work like can we self correct in a way and the way i always frame it is coming from a dance background um when you're off stage and something happens and you're with your group you think like oh crap blah blah forgot her glove everybody take off your gloves like it is this process of self adaptation and like if somebody's slightly off center you move off center with them it's an unspoken process and even if you're not a dancer you practice this every single day you know if you're walking on the street and somebody's on the right side you move kind of behind that queue um yeah so like i think and this is what i try to get at is that it's kind of revealing a sort of deeper level of cybernetic self regulation that is so prevalent to historical conversations but is also like embedded within dance as this sort of unspoken practice of uh core like kinetic movement how do you respond not only to the choreographer but to one another to the stage to the music so i think that's that's very helpful um it puts in mind two phrases in the paper that um i i think helped to surface for for me as a listener uh the potential for seeing um the work not just as a critique not just as an affirmation but the notion of the externalization of control um and then the effective partnerships that's that's uh you bring up later in the paper so so that was um for me quite generative uh but it also does make me want to ask about the notion of control just generally um and the inflection that might have been brought to the fore in the work um because of course when we think of of control we think of the system idea of control we think of bad things we think about hierotic powers etc etc but i guess you're suggesting that there is a little bit more room to move within this then is that fair it's it's weird and it's hard because this is something i'm still like grappling with because it solo is like an imperfect model of both norbert weiner's model of cybernetics which is super clear cut central command networks chain reactions um easily fixed and if it doesn't get rid of it um or fix it um and then mcluen which decentralizes that power so that you're constantly wondering well am i in control of myself or is this some innate biology is it the choreographer is it the music like if you go historically thinking she has and in the video she has a mock orchestra you have the orchestral conductor so it's this question of like who's in control are you in control of yourself and in a way yes i think it is kind of saying there is a little free like free will but at the same time i i don't know i keep going back and forth with and the problem is i don't know what she's arguing because she doesn't have any archives on this but it's it is this question of who's at the center of control but more so like am i in control of myself which is kind of paramount to the times as well wondering you know during the cold war how can i control my own body in the space am i in control of my own body like mentoring candidate i mean you have so many things going on and it's kind of playing out in real time so i have one a little more time yeah um and it begs the question that for me uh is becomes glaring when you see those figures on pedestals being moved around most of them women um it begs a question around gender clearly about the fact that this is a work that has been under research and artists has been under research uh that someone like nivon reyner trisha brown has been um they have been more adequately discussed within history of art but i think provide an opening for for all of us to think about a kind of proto-cyber feminist moment um and if you had thoughts on that that again think about those women on pedestals being sort of moved shuffled without control across the floor of the armory yes i have that about that um especially because so of the eight platforms and this is part of the issue is that i don't have access to this full video i don't have the full 25 minutes um only three of eight platforms worked so i don't know what would have originally like what was intended let's say to happen or if anything was intended to happen with those gendered bodies on carts but the fact of the matter is they are gendered bodies on carts and if you um in my slide i had a portion where like it's not even one body on on cart sometimes it's two bodies on carts one laying down somebody standing over top um there are other sections where they're off of carts and walking together like arm in arm and it did open these questions of like what does that mean for the female body to be on display and like maybe be on display underneath of a male body on display lying down for somebody to look at um yes so yes the answer is yes i've thought about it i don't have a clear answer um this paper is like constantly digging a deeper hole but i'm excited to think about stuff like that and think about like um donna haraway like these questions of is it better to almost be this sort of hardened body that can't be read or whatnot so thank you i do want to also open it up to the audience for questions from you it looks like there are some um thanks to all the speakers these this is a wonderful array of papers and again i have so many questions i was going to ask annalees um about lucinda childs but thankfully she's told us something about annalees about lucinda childs i was thinking about the street dance piece which is um from 1964 which was not characterized in cybernetic terms or isn't as far as i can tell but in terms of information systems but i'm going to ask meg instead um about um perspective and as a renaissance artist during i get a little bit anxious when people like over you know use use prescript over prescriptively to try to talk about a whole range of modes of pictorial organization between the 15th century and the 19th and i'm just wondering i find your argument utterly compelling about the about the the um the photography the um but is there a particular locus of perspective in the 19th century that you have in mind where is perspective and we know it's probably in academic manuals um in the training in the boozow is it in dioramas is it an architectural drawing is it in theater design um um because i'm just thinking when you show the corbea it just like says um what kind do what painters actually care about perspective you know uh in the 19th century you look even gelom his modes of you know organizing a painting spatially are so much more sophisticated than the so-called albertian or single vanishing point system so is it a do you think there's some kind of conscious you know i mean he doesn't have to be um deployment against a particular dispensation of of albertian perspective thank you um i had in mind uh painting that preceded even the corbeas and the others i was thinking of the hudson river school tradition in landscape painting um and kind of just academic painting and academic principles of organizing space perspectively thank you all for really um engaging dynamic papers um and i had a question for you which uh i apologize if this seems a little off topic but i'm hoping it does circle back to what you're interested in i just want to even talk a little bit more about the mylar and its role in the piece um is it something of a sculpture element is it um as the filming suggested is it something that might be shifting the experience of the dancers and the mechanical elements um the few shots where we were looking through the myla mylar they definitely merge um i'm curious what mylar kind of iconography was at the time what if it was a standing for you mentioned um other artists were using it in dancer performance pieces so could you just talk about the mylar a bit more and how it might fit into hay's work and also into these larger issues that you're interested in yeah so um a couple things mylar was used by a lot of artists um i think i want to say steve paxton's work or i want to say steve paxton's work was this weird mylar tunnel tube that was inflated with air so you could walk through it and it was supposed to be this weird embodied experience of and it wasn't clear it was colored so it was like i don't know videos of it i feel very uncomfortable watching i'm like oh i don't like that it's like shiny and kind of pulsating or moving almost as you walk by it um and again and loosened a child's piece they're kind of enclosed in mylar but in solo specifically it is hung in the front of the audience on three panels i believe um and i believe that's the only work that used it i'm not totally sure but hers is the only one that i can see images because a lot of times the cameras are on the other side of mylar um and in part of my uh conversation about you know these pedestals i talk about like the idea of a mock exhibition and although i don't know i think it's a relatively new material as far as i'm aware they were trying to use as many new un uh non accessible materials as possible for this event like sonar and for red vision like technologies that were used in wartime that have not been released to the public yet um so mylar i'm not exactly sure where it stands i'm assuming it's a relatively new material but in this piece i think about it almost hindering your view and playing into that illusionistic effect of bodies as objects uh potential machines almost because they kind of solidify with the it's not a wonderfully clear material and it is framed like uh almost like a cage or like a barrier that you have to look through um i think about it like when you're standing at x and at an exhibition and watching them or well an unopened exhibition and they're moving stuff almost like you have a better view of these bodies as things less than people so yeah i could say maybe one or two things to the question and to your response which is um i mean warhol's silver clouds after all my mylar and it was billy cluver who helped engineer uh the clouds within the dance by merc cunningham finally um there is a piece that's i think it was brandon joseph wrote many years ago which made a connection or association between the silver clouds and television which i think would be an interesting thing for you to pursue in terms of both the objectification as well as the domestication of the subjects you might be performing in front of these these screens yes it definitely makes sense i think that anyone living in pittsburgh at the time was probably like oh yeah he's just depicting like what we see every day um but someone outside of pittsburgh looking at that work was like holy crap it is really like disgusting in pittsburgh um but believe it or not and i'm sure you know this like the 19th century was worse than the 20th century in terms of pollution in pittsburgh um but i don't in terms of the audience question like are you asking from like kane's perspective if he like wanted to know or from like the entity of like the conglomerate that he was a part of of like carnegie all the things are you asking from that perspective okay i think that carnegie like uh and this kind of like doubles on my question or like the question i answered earlier like i think kane was unfortunately kind of like a pawn to be like oh yeah what look what we do you know it's kind of like the same deal with like opioids and things in apalachia where it's like oh we're taking all these things from the land but we're using the money that we're making to like show these beautiful art things and like so what if people die or are maimed or whatever like look what we're bringing to the world so i think that um you know kane was kind of like the american dream like he started out as like an immigrant who was working class and then he rose to the like great artists of america um but i i absolutely think that you know before eco criticism existed that there were audience members looking at these works and being like holy crap this is intense but again the pitts burgeans were like what we see every day so i hope that answers your question thank you um i'm sorry to go backwards but i just had one more brief thought about mylar which is that um coming also from a background as a dancer you're usually dancing on mylar taped to the ground i don't know the history of that like i don't know how far back that goes every performance i've ever been in we're dancing on mylar and it's you know like peeling quarter sized pieces of dead skin off of our feet because it's like it's generally the surface and so i wondered if there's anything about like a horizontal vertical reorientation also because with rautchenberg in the piece like you know he makes a horizontal bed vertical and then patricia brown also like walking on the wall she reorients walking so i'm just curious if that might be a dimension to sort of something that might otherwise be on the floor is um but yeah i don't know if they were ever dancing on mylar in the 60s just just to that do you and i don't i i've never danced on mylar do you mean marley flooring like it's dance on mylar okay i was like i was like i've not heard of this so okay so yeah um i have no clue and i'm assuming if i am thinking of dance studios like martha graham goes on and on and on about her wood floors and how they have to be so much elevated above the concrete to save her dancers knees and whatnot so i don't know if they were dancing on mylar at this point i'm assuming probably not um i don't even know if they're dancing on marley yet if i'm being completely frank and this is at this is a gymnasium so it would have been all wood floors um and i don't think they put anything down that i could see in my images um the putting it on vertical though i haven't put a lot of thought into besides the idea of like a screen or a barrier but it is something that i probably should look further into considering you know like you said it wasn't just robin robert roushmanberg's like putting it on its side but also he did works with trisha brown where i think they took themselves off the floor and onto the wall to walk um and a couple pieces like literally translocating the body and defying gravity so that is something that would be worthwhile looking into thank you uh i think we have time for one more short question so um thank you all so much my questions for jenevieve um jenevieve perhaps i i just want to keep thinking about returning to the materiality of the objects that you're looking at um and not necessarily an analogy between sand and paint because i think i don't know if that holds up but i was really happy to see you bring in the syniac at the end um because so much of what i was thinking about in your talk was about how sand is something so granular and yet is being put into these huge mountains and so you have this issue of scale but you also have a question of like form and deformation and i think you know so much of the narrative exhausted and incorrect right narratives around impressionism are about about deformation and the dissolution of form and i think bringing in some of the artists that you bring in sissli gioma um we see actually a far more object-centric view of the impressionist landscape and i think there's been a lot of movement in 19th century studies to overhaul the optical you know narrative of of the new 19th century modernism and of of impressionism i think it's often done through still life and through figure painting and so i really loved that you did this through landscape which is of course our you know genre for opticality so i wondered if you could just speak a little bit to that too and perhaps it was so nice to see meg's images of um you had a sand dune by timothy selvin right and and and you know the the rock formations the incredible solidity um and if you could just speak a little bit about how the artists that you're looking at and perhaps sand as well um can can speak more generally to the question of tactility and the kind of both the consolidation of the object as well as steam materialization uh yeah thank you for that um uh yeah i guess i will just say at the start that um for me personally and hoping for everybody in the room now when you start thinking about sand you see it all over the place you know it's um uh as i started working on this project i just started seeing sand piles all over the place but um how they're described materially is definitely something that i'm still thinking about i think the syniac is a very nice example that i want to dig more into because you know his pointless technique obviously lends itself quite well to depicting something that is as you say granular and you know like what we would think of as sand and um you know the ones by sissily and giama are an odd or combination of um impressionist short broken brush strokes that are kind of defining this thing that um you know is very granular so it's it's it's something i need to think about a little bit more and it's difficult with the giama works because a lot of them as i'm sure you saw are in private collection so i haven't had a really good chance to see them in person and you know get a good sense of of the of the surface but it's definitely something that i'd like to work more on and um just circling back to the brief thing i said about haystacks versus sand piles i think something else that i'm thinking about is how when it's piled up it um sand is more um reliance still on natural forces you know there's this thing the angle of repose that sand will always just kind of self correct itself into the pile that it is so um that's something that i'm still trying to unpack a little bit more of it's being extracted for human uses and turned into a commodity but it's still kind of retaining this natural shape that's based on basic natural phenomena so yeah thank you all right well i just want to thank everyone so much i think these are conversations that will really continue not an end but let's continue the conversation so thank you for the wonderful set of papers i do want to do another round of applause okay and we'll continue the conversation now for a 20 minute coffee so we'll come back what time should we come back aliyah