 Welcome, welcome to our graduate student symposium in the history of art now and it's I'm gonna take my mask down Now when it's 26th year Hosted by the barns in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania Temple University and Bryn Mawr College This symposium is one of the premier forums for new research and new ideas in the field Speakers come from nine top PhD programs in the area For most of it its history the barns foundation was sort of cultishly devoted to one single way of looking at art Some of you some of you know this Thankfully, that is no longer true Over the past 15 years we have become an institution that actively produces new knowledge about our own Collections bringing in more contemporary methodological approaches to the way that we talk about our holdings even as we continue to seriously engage with barnsian formalism much of this new research has been done in close partnership with Scholars from the incredibly lively academic community in this area So this event is is very special to us for so many reasons It represents the dynamism of the field it represents partnership. It represents community We're honored to be hosting it. I would like to thank our co-organizing institutions Penn, Bryn Mawr Temple Special thanks to David Kim for his leadership on the organizing committee and for his Very beautiful introduction last night to the to the keynote talk Thank you to Byron Hammond for his brilliant talk last night Which was a feat of international detective work inductive logic and dynamic storytelling It was quite a thing to behold Thank you to Aliyah Palumbo wherever you are Aliyah For the for the extraordinary care that she put into organizing every single aspect of this event Thank you to our excellent AV team and to our associate curator Cindy Kang for moderating one of today's sessions and of course Thank you to all the presenting students for sharing your work with us and to their Advisors for being here to support them and so with that I would like to invite Aaron Powell up to the Podium to introduce our first speaker. Oh, I forgot to say that after each talk We're going to hold hold sessions until until the end of the session Hold questions until the end of the session Thanks Good morning everyone. Thank you Martha and thank you to the barns too It's a wonderful opportunity to be here and hear some exciting new work Good morning. My name is Aaron Powell's an assistant professor of art history at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University And it is with great pleasure that I am here with you today to introduce Dr. Brittany Emmons-Strupp Dr. Strupp is a recent graduate of the PhD program in Art History at Temple University She also holds an MA in Art and Architectural History from the University of Virginia and A BA in Art and Art History from Colgate University where she graduated with honors magna cum laude In addition to her academic credentials Dr. Strupp is an emerging curator of note She has contributed to major Reinstallation and exhibition projects in American art at a number of East Coast museums Including the National Gallery of Art the Baltimore Museum of Art and our own Philadelphia Museum of Art Most recently Dr. Strupp assisted Crawford Alexander Mann former curator of prints and drawings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum with an exhibition that is currently on display at Sam in Washington DC Entitled Sergeant Whistler and Venetian Glass American Artists in the Magic of Marano and you should go see it if you haven't had a chance yet Her talk today is drawn from her dissertation which she successfully defended at Temple this past November That project is called between impressionism and realism the early career of Robert Henry This dissertation work Reexamines the early career of an artist who traditionally has been regarded as the quintessential American realist and her work reveals the Transnational influences historical perspectives and artistic confabulations that consistently shaped his career output Her talk today is entitled the dignity of life Robert Henry's portraits of Chinese Americans and without further ado I give you Dr. Strupp. Thank you Very excited to take my mask off Thank you Erin so much for that kind introduction and a special thanks as everyone will probably say to the Barnes Foundation and to Alia for all of your answering all of my many questions Into the department the Tyler School of Art and architecture at Temple University I'll just get started as Erin said Robert Henry's regarded as the quintessential American realist and the outspoken Representative of the Ashkan artists who captured scenes of daily life in New York City at the turn of the 20th century as A group the Ashkan artists with Henry at their helm believed art should reflect real life and be inclusive of the Lower classes rather than only the exclusive upper classes Inspired by his influential philosophy of artistic practice Henry's followers learn to embrace their individuality and to represent their engagement with the social and political realities of light modern life in America through art For his own part, however, Henry largely avoided the social critique and reform minded politics Embraced by many of his students and followers which includes John Sloan and George bellows Instead Henry painted individuals from different races and cultures in order to capture the individuals in a character or spirit on canvas And as a group he titles these portraits my people Working in response to the outbreak of World War one in 1914 and the 1913 Armory show Henry updated the my people project nearly a decade after he began painting them in his search for a modern means of expression Most relevant to our modern moment. This project takes a second look at his problematic portraits of Chinese Americans Which were painted in La Jolla, California between July and September 1914 Conventionally read through lens of quote-unquote realism broadly defined this small group of surviving portraits have been closely associated with the work of the Ashkan realists Not quite honest representations of contemporary individuals and not painted in direct response to contemporary social issues However, these images illustrate the fluidity of realist representation at this time Rather than paint the lived realities these portraits are tempered by Henry's imagination popular culture and the Japanese ma of James McNeil whistler the Impressionists and the symbolists encountered while a student in Paris In an effort to redefine his work following the Armory show where European modernism and abstract American audience and working in response to the outbreak of World War Henry incorporated principles of Asian art with contemporary imagery of Asian peoples to create a new aesthetic distinct from earlier efforts While Chinese and subject Henry modified his knowledge of Japanese art learned through various 19th century precedents such as world's fairs and French Modernism to update his aesthetic He adapted existing representations of Chinese Americans in the United States from painting and photography through careful cropping Indistinct spaces and evocative color to create stereotyped images of Chinese Americans There were as representative of an imagined cultural authenticity as they were portraits of real individuals While his paintings arguably perpetuate popular stereotypes of people about peoples of Chinese heritage Henry's intention was to restore an ideal relationship between cultures, which he felt was threatened by World War in 1914 Writing in the craftsman and is well known and off-quoted essay my people Henry explained his project retroactively in 1915 And I quote the people of The people I like to paint are my people whoever they may be wherever they may exist the people through whom the dignity of life is Manifest that is who are in some way expressing themselves naturally along the lines nature intended for them This thing that I call dignity in a human being is inevitably the result of an established order in the universe Any right understanding of the proper relation of man-to-man and man-to-universe would make war impossible I am looking at the in each individual with the eager hope of finding the dignity of life the humor the humanity the kindness Something of the order that will rescue the race in the nation. That is what I have wanted to talk about and nothing else In locating the dignity of life and his trainee subjects Henry I hope to restore an invented order and pre-war balance in the world He expressed this through his sitters physical appearance which he modified to reflect his perception of their mother country's essence rather than their more Americanized qualities in Reasserting their cultural heritage and I believed he was reconstructing older forms of racial difference Which he connected to a more peaceful moment in world history? Through his restorative project Henry positioned himself to recuperate both the American race and the nation at a pivotal moment in American history His application of an Asian or Orientalizing aesthetic to his portraits of Chinese Americans is his attempt to re-achieve or achieve that pre-industrialized state by reculturing his sitters and thus re-associating them with their quote-unquote native China In part because of Henry's editorializing and preference for unassimilated individuals in these portraits and because of his distinct interest in formal issues Henry's efforts challenged the straightforward realist approach with which his my people portraits are most often associated This however has led to valid interpretations of Henry's portraits as racist and culturally insensitive Because he does not acknowledge them as distinct individuals within a modern American society so much as invented cultural icons The importance of this project to Henry and its relative modernity were also related to his desire to reinvent himself and make his art relevant Relevant again after the Armory show There the naturalism of his project was compared unfavorably with the highly abstract work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp Henry painted a new subject in a new style with his portraits of Chinese Americans Experimenting freely in an effort to modernize the my people project These portraits were as much a reflection of his the artist's perspective and effectual connection to his subject as they were representations of individuals But they are complicated by the relationship to real people and real cultural inequalities in the early 20th century And this has led to much misunderstanding surrounding Henry's portrait subjects from this period In contrast with Henry's other my people portraits from Spain Ireland Holland and rural Maine for example His portraits of Chinese Americans are marked by their more decorative treatment reliant on to see distinct color harmonies culturally specific costume and Recognizably Asian subjects Rather than limit the racist undertones of his portraits through aesthetic exercises and tonal arrangements However, Henry emphasizes the racialized identity of his sitters as a way to highlight cultural difference By painting aestheticized and romanticized portraits of Chinese Americans He could celebrate them as a distinct race or culture Something that he believed was ultimately lost through immigration in the process of his Assimilation while also benefiting from the period fascination with the exotic quote-unquote other Despite focusing on a distinct cultural group Henry's knowledge of Chinese culture was very limited He did not paint the lived experience of the individuals he encountered in California as he had in previous portrait groups But rather his perceptions of them as mediated through Western descriptions in popular culture including photography or dance performance Newspaper clippings which he pasted in his boyhood scrapbook, and I show you these two I discovered among many in his boyhood at his boyhood home Part of Henry's inspiration for his portraits of Chinese Americans may have been closely related to his experience with Asian cultures at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition Numerous images of Chinese and Japanese displays and individuals were published and distributed commercial commercially as ethnographic Repertorial and souvenir photographs Although Henry's portrait should be considered in relation to these popular images distributed the fair and afterwards Indeed he looked to them for a distinct cultural signifiers Henry had a different end goal and his project was decidedly more complicated than a xenophobic representation or ethnographic comparison of different races Rather than represent nameless women men and children without differentiating between them allowing one individual to stand in for the whole He painted each figure with discernible features and costume and identified most of them by name His portrait of Chao Choy for example probably represents Mary Chao Choy whose name was found and confirmed in local census records Henry also recorded her name Mary in his record book But his retention of only her child Chinese family name and not her full name underscores his interest in racial difference and authenticity Because Henry's paintings drew an ethnographic photography in popular culture However, they are irreversibly linked to this tradition and this understandably changed Henry's portraits of Chinese Americans While his stated purpose was cultural authenticity all of his subjects were recommended to him by his student Alice Klauber who found him models in nearby San Diego and brought them to La Jolla to pose Klauber had spent a significant period of time in the quote-unquote Orient and through her travels She acquired a large collection of Asian art which she later Donated to the collection at the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery and Klauber was actually named an honorary curator of Oriental art there in 1940 As a quote-unquote expert in Asian art She likely influenced Henry's understanding of the subject and the related communities is more Chinese than American Most images of Chinese people in Chinatown's in the early 20th century were crafted to maintain an image of them as unchanging in the face of on rushing modernity Images of quote-unquote old Chinatown and unassimilated Chinese immigrants Became especially valued after the 1906 earthquake destroyed much of San Francisco's Chinatown They became what Anthony historian Anthony Lee has referred to as quote-unquote purveyors of otherness Freezing the Chinese experience in time and preserving the fantasies of tourists This certainly appealed to Henry who sought unassimilated subjects for his my people project As Lee's pointed out however the destruction of San Francisco was also a chance for Chinatown's in California and across the country and their inhabitants to Redefine themselves and modernize their communities Consequently, Henry not only encountered Chinese American subjects second hand through a middle woman He also met them after 1906 when Chinese American populations were rapidly evolving But old Chinatown persisted in visual imagery providing Henry with a lasting model for his representation of the other Period interest in people of Chinese heritage and Chinatown's fueled the proliferation of imagery. Oops. I'm behind. Sorry Fueled the proliferation of imagery of Chinese Americans as existing in the past Most of these images were produced by white artists primarily photographers like the prolific Arnold Genth and then distributed across the country Representations of women and children were especially valued because they were perceived novelty in Chinese quote-unquote bachelor societies a direct result of racist legislation like the 1875 page act which prohibited the immigration of Chinese women to the United States and His paintings exist squarely within this tradition He's often praised for the honest and even individualized appearance of his sitters But his treatment of composition color palette and costume countered this honesty with racializing undertones about a perceived Chinese For example rather than paint children in the Western attire They likely wore in their day-to-day lives Henry painted them in brightly colored silk jackets and dresses As young girls and candy colored outfits and sweetly submissive poses He perpetuated the image of China girls as innocence or China dolls This impression was enhanced through their setting He positioned them in front of nondescript backgrounds of pure color complimentary of their skin tone and perceived cultural countenance Rather than painting them in a contemporary Californian setting Back from rounds for most of his surviving For most of his surviving portraits of Chinese Americans are painted in variegated shades of yellow a highly stereotyped reflection of their skin color Or blue or rose a complimentary shade to the quote-unquote yellow of their skin to create carefully planned color harmonies and expressive Carefully planned and expressive color harmonies Even more so than the adults Henry was interested in children He emphasized Victorian ideals of innocence and purity in children, which he equated with racial and cultural authenticity In truth, however, these children were almost certainly American born in 1914 possessed westernized names in daily life and probably received schooling through both Chinese public schools and missionary run private schools as Clouber's contacts the models may also have worked for her in some capacity as house staff a vocation many young Chinese girls assumed in California at this time as A result the Chinese types Henry had desired to paint were perhaps not as representative of a race as he had hoped Henry's disappointment with the level of acculturation these immigrants had experienced by 1914 was palpable in his letters to the East Coast and in his record books One of his earliest models Jim Lee a vegetable merchant was described by Henry as quote a Chinaman But hardly the type I wanted to middle class and to American very little of the mystery of China rather only the transition in him and quote And I painted three portraits of Lee despite his perceived shortcomings as a model And in one these portrait appears quickly painted and sketch like in comparison with Henry's other portraits of Chinese Americans Creating a feeling of spontaneity and by extension authenticity Henry then amplified the more stereotyped aspects of Lee's appearance in order to make him a more racialized subject The brilliant color and animated brushstrokes also suggests the 19th century French modernisms of Claude Monet Pierre Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh encountered by Henry during his extended stays in France and at the Armory show Marking these as a direct response to that work In other words, there are important slippages as Henry manipulates the hyper modern visual language introduced at the Armory show To portray Chinese Americans like Lee is existing in an idealized past Like Lee's portrait Henry's Chinese lady ignores evidence of social change instead painting a monumental portrait of an unnamed woman Her ample figure painted larger than life is exaggerated and takes the form of a seated Buddha creating a feeling of deep stillness Additionally Henry's composition suggests traditional Chinese ancestor portraits and builds continuity between disparate artistic traditions Through her frontal pose the lack of shadow and the vacant and ambiguously empty space And Henry may have seen examples of such ancestor portraits in Klauber's personal collection in California The darkness of her body is offset by the by the jarring and vibrant ochre of the background Which is disconnected from the sitter and almost appears gilded adding a level of veneration to this icon-like portrait The combination of European and Eastern religious iconography is striking and adds a come an apparent As to the apparent exoticism of the painting Finally Henry's contrived yellow and yellow color palette of stereotyped skin and bold background both reinforces her racialized identity And functions as an aestheticizing color harmony similar to Whistler's monochromatic or tonally limited portraits In addition to Jim Lee and the Chinese lady Henry completed portraits of at least four different she female child models as We've seen before Mary or Chao Choi was the first Chinese American subject Henry painted in California and she embodies his goals for painting following the Armory show Like the adults she's posed in traditional looking clothing and painted in carefully strategized palette Designed to complement her child likeness and stereotypical features with what Henry scholar Valerie and leads has described as quote Horsaline skin slanted eyes and dark hair In the end Henry's project was never to capture people as they looked but as he experienced them as representatives of their respected races and cultures Raising questions about power and agency They exist between past and present as idealized figures not completely real and not completely imagined This museumization of a people are the concept of freezing a group of people in time and reinterpreting them allowed Henry to de-Americanize these Chinese Americans In the process he was able to redefine the possibility of modern art as a restorative to what he considered a corrupt world culture After the Armory show and after the outbreak of World War one. Thank you so much Have to de-mask because I just can't talk with these bloody things on Um Hi there, I'm sorry I just wanted to introduce myself. I'm Anthony Colantuano professor of early modern European art at the University of Maryland in College Park I Want to join with my colleagues here in thanking the organizers of the symposium Which not only showcases the work of our graduate students, but also each year Reassures us that the future of our beloved discipline, which we have also carefully cultivated for so many years is in very good hands and today it falls to me to introduce my Advisee Tony Queen and Indeed, I feel most privileged to be able to work with such a talented student in 2019 Tony earned his BA in art history at New York University With high honors and departmental honors working closely with my esteemed colleague in Italian Baroque art Professor Louise Rice He came to the University of Maryland's Department of Art History and Archeology already well in command of his field and in 2021 he earned the MA with a brilliant thesis titled Guido's compendio disegno colore and the idea of summary forms Tony is currently completing his PhD coursework in the field of Baroque art Mainly Italian, but I don't think exclusively. We'll work on that also serving as the department's GA For undergraduate advising and contributing in countless ways to the department community His presence is such that ever since he came to the department. I have taken to signing my internal emails as that other Tony In the area of research what I most admire about Tony's work is the penetrating historical intelligence critical acumen and methodological resourcefulness with which he attacks Interpretative problems a variable onslaught of inquiry that leaves no stone unturned until the work of art yields up its long-held secrets As you'll see he's also gifted with what I like to call the nose for news and ability to find exciting Consequential and previously unexplored topics amidst the mountainous remains of our vast art historical field I leave it to Tony qui to explain the mysterious and intriguing Intriguing title of his paper today in omnium finite the figure tool conchetismo and atomic matter in Salvatore Rosa's Democratist in meditation Thank You professor Colin Twono and thank you all for being here You will see that there's a slight change of title here, and I will explain later why the change has happened in March 1651 two friends gathered in front of a painting one was collector and curator Niccolò Simonelli and the other was painter Salvatore Rosa Together they looked at Rosa's Democratist in meditation which was soon to be exhibited at the pantheon Although it was not uncommon for friends to discuss paintings like this Meeting had some special importance in a letter to his friend Joe Bambatista Ricciardi Rosa wrote that quote In a week from tomorrow I'll exhibit my painting of Democratist on the feast day of St. Joseph at the pantheon And I swear to you my friend that I have worked on this picture continuously for eight more days and can say that I have raised it to a degree of perfection Having added some other anatomical fragments to it with an ancient tripod And I have harmonized everything together wonderfully, but since fame is a whim of fortune We'll have to wait and see what's important is that until now no one else has seen it except for Simonelli as I have kept it locked up in a room I'll tell you everything that people say about it in detail and quote In today's talk, I want to use the painting as a window into the intellectual space inhabited by people like Simonelli and Rosa so that the representation of an ancient philosopher and The conversation that it inspired might tell us something new about the artist and his world We cannot eavesdrop on the private exchange between the curator and the painter, but a few things must have stood out Engaged with academic institutions and as manager of elite private collections Simonelli would quickly notice some of Rosa's recurring motives He could to begin with point out the array of morbid things that suggest the immediacy of death The uselessness of knowledge and the gravity of life The nocturnal owl a dead raptor with its talons and hefty volumes the severed head of a boar Crawling yet uprooted vines Scattered books with torn pages and dirty covers a dead rat next to the artist's signature, and of course the troubled Democritus clad in black He could also point to the antique objects the terminus figure marking the limit of life and Incense burner recalling pagan rites of magic the ram-headed armrest of a couch out of use a carved stone relief a broken obelisk and Earn with bones sticking out of its mouth a decrepit sarcophagus no longer able to hold its skeletal resident Ionic and composite capitals fallen from their hides friends with Antiquarians and Egyptologists Simonelli knew the subject well enough to make the right point that these ancient things contextualize the philosophers life and remind us that all civilizations no matter how brilliant must fall apart Finally he could talk about the assortment of dead things on the ground as Another form of vanitas Reminders of death and human folly the skeletons show the inevitable outcome of mortality and recall a distant past Which makes them effectively both morbid and ancient These categories belong to familiar iconographies that have been studied by art historians and to great effects Richard Wallace, Wendy Roworth and Katerina Vopi have related this image to Antiquarianism, Vanitas, satires and melancholy, which are threads that inform my reading Rosa was versed in all these topics and his mastery of these discourses was probably why he Chose Simonelli to preview this painting, which was a secret at the time Simonelli traveled among literati circles and managed princely collections to check the paintings legibility by him Ensured that the artist's sophisticated work could make sense to most of the Roman elites In today's talk, however, I want to believe that there were things that Rosa needed to explain even to Simonelli Things that did not make immediate sense to even the most educated eyes This need for complication to suggest there is more than just a compilation of conventional Econographies comes from Rosa's editorial intervention in turning the painting into print Rosa added a provocative adage Demarcatus omnium durisor and omnium fina di fiditore, which is to say Demarcatus he who laughs at everything is downfounded at the end of all things Here Rosa makes two important points that this is an extraordinary representation of Demarcatus who usually laughs at everything and that this shows the moment When the philosopher no longer laughs when he is confused if you get or in the face of all things coming to an end Even for Rosa who is rarely humble to claim to visualize Finae omnium the end of everything is still a rather ambitious conceit Yet as we have seen this painting does encapsulate an almost encyclopedic range of matters From ancient architecture to modern books live animals to ossified remains Rosa fills his image with things of divergent nature and from distant periods These objects relate to the finality of life and the transience of material Where the morbid the dead and the ancient all denote the fragility of human endeavors So from the outset the democratizing meditation does show the end of everything and Rosa's point about universal finality Is consistent with the early modern tradition of vanitas? That said I believe a more metaphysical process is also taking place here Since this is not a portrait of just any philosopher, but Demacritus one of the founders of atomism We must begin by approaching his portrait in atomic terms According to Demacritus the world is made of small Indivisible particles that are fundamental to any matter and its properties Take the objects on the ground for example the atomist theories bone atoms are inherently different from flash atoms So when something dies and the flash atoms dissipating to the void Bone atoms which are heavier and therefore less prone to motion stay put and constitute what we perceive as white skeletons But this logic Rosa's Demacritus divides the two states of matter amid transformation on one side We have recently dead things Whose atoms are yet to scatter and on the other we have long dead things whose bone atoms are all that remain Since atoms are impossible to visualize and since the atomist mechanism sounds rather esoteric You might think that this is a far-fetched way to explain the painting such are reasonable doubts But here I believe that Rosa was indeed thinking in atomist terms After all the artist himself had written a satire where he describes how quote the colosseums They fall the terminuses they tumble the world is made of dust and its grandeur contains nothing Human vanity is smoke a warm life is a comic pretense that draws and be guile us But it is only the cradle for a tragedy these right this passage is a perfect comparison To the painting it uses the morbid the ancient and the dead to show everything's downward progression But more importantly, and I think this is where a key argument must be made Rosa's invocation of life's empty contents and deteriorating nature was conveyed in a language of Atomic atomic decomposition According to Rosa it is because the world is made of dust and because appearance is nothing That things always fall apart Life can only temporarily hold matter before Adams returned to chaos this as Democritus is witnessing In this sense we can interpret his anatomical forms as evidence of atomic composition and natures Annihilating momentum a bucranium a boar's jaw a screeching baboon were dehydrated fish I'll illustrate the immutable essence of life and its destiny for cosmic emptiness As Rosa wrote about the world being made of dust about the omnipresent Nothingness which are Democritus notions he painted matter rather be it morbid that were ancient to show Perpetual and universal decomposition leading to the end of everything whereas Rosa put it in omnium vinae Rosa probably needed to explain this metaphysical vision to Simonelli and in the process He probably also had a few clever puns to make For centuries Italian artists had used bones antique sculptures and animals You see where this is going you study Compositeo the art of composing images by arranging various materials into a coherent program In Vico's nighttime study session the dad the ancient and the morbid become the literal matter for artistic is annual Rosa's Democritus also bears striking resemblance to Vico's confused perhaps even hopeless draftsman Who must learn the art of catching everything's essence via graphic forms a process not unlike the atomic Rhetoric in which everything is analyzed and distilled in granular terms At the same time the chaotic windswept setting also refers to Sergio's design for the satirical stage Where the rustic setting provides a pastoral conceit about human art of this So apart from its relation to the artist's own poetic output about nothingness in Adams Rosa's painting is also a verbal game that shows off his ability for intelligent composition Well, it is full of decomposing things It is also composed according to the tradition of good disennial where both object studies and the overall Composition convey the essence of diverse matters According to Rosa's letter. He was still adding objects days before the exhibition and he was confident that he had elevated the painting to a degree of perfection The problem then is that this painting does not strike its viewer as embodying perfect harmony From the outset it is disorganized Excessive and without a clear narrative So to understand the kind of perfection that Rosa had intended and boasted One must have knowledge about both his source materials and his verbal widths and then Understand them according to the scientific logic and conceptual layers that Rosa has intended Rosa's democrat is therefore probably sustained hours of discussion in his studio Where I'm sure the clever and often pompous Rosa had a great time unfolding the painting Where even someone like Simonelli probably needed some help unpacking the many strands of information and interpretation that Rosa has intended This is why the element of confusion embodied by the dumbfounded Democritus was necessary for Rosa to highlight as he wrote on the print that democrat is he who laughs at everything is now bewildered This however should be another source of confusion for an early modern viewer Democritus had always appeared as he who laughs at everything Life's meaninglessness world's endless puzzles as we see in emblems where at the world's end Heraclitus weeps. Well, democritus laughs But rosa made his democrat is fundamentally different from the norm Instead of the heedless and jocular philosopher that both brahmante and rubens portray Rosa's democrat is sad halted confused. Whereas rosa describes him if he did or Here the philosopher resembles dearest melancholia and rafael's heraclitus The theme of confusion thus unites the paintings are historical quotations Especially as deur and rafael's inventions are already about troublesome knowledge about thoughts without resolution According to rosa democrat has now seen the horror of atomic decomposition Learned the bleak truth of everything's fatal destiny and therefore stopped laughing So that he who always laughs is now dumbfounded at all things end in omni infine defictor It is not easy to make sense of democrat's confusion At least not at first with rosa's rich iconographies Labyrinthian metaphors and intricate rhetoric It is one thing to make sense of his many motives on their own Yet quite another to synthesize their connections and understand Why such a crowded messy or even chaotic array of objects can convey a unified theme But along a universal message This talk tries to show that all together rosa's collection of things not only represents immense materiality But it also dramatizes the complexity of visual understanding And demands a viewer's holistic grasp of art science philosophy and literature As confusion translates into meaning the artist's unique cultural consciousness Rewards a viewer's sustained attention and their labor of interpretation Where it is in understanding bewilderment that we arrive at clarity In this constant shift in turn of meaning the artist gives substance to his model the omni infine defictor As a painting meant to confuse and then dazzle the scrupulous woman audience Rosa's democrat has challenged even someone as high-brow as simonelli himself And perhaps it should fascinate someone as modern as us. Thank you Hello, I'm Stephen Campbell from Johns Hopkins University. I'm here to introduce Jason Minkiewicz I've known Jason since spring of 2016 when I was a fellow in residence at the Clark Institute in Williamstown And Jason was a teaching assistant in art history at Williams College having just completed his MA Before Williams. He had studied at Vassar getting a BA in art history with a correlate sequence in German studies And in the course of those years, he also acquired, excuse me, a mastery or partial mastery of Russian in Moscow, Holish in Krakow And French at Williams as well as a couple of years of Swedish and an undergraduate As an undergraduate and Estonian Through several language courses in Tallinn and Tartu So we were fascinated and impressed and kind of jealous He then came to Hopkins to work with my wonderful erstwhile colleague Molly Warnock And he's currently a Leonard Lauder pre-doctoral fellow at the Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum Jason's dissertation Is on the Russian avant-garde artist student collective Affirmers of the new art I'm going to butcher its actual name Ut Verdeitele Novogo is Kustva Abbreviated as Unovis And also with a particular attention to the collective's founding figure, Kazimir Maljevich He argues that the political collectivist convictions served as the precondition for the emergence of geometrical abstraction And traces the group from its founding at the People's Art Academy in Vitebsk in 1919 To its proliferation to various sites across the new Soviet states To its afterlife after the group's formal disbanding in 1922 But it's and it's long after life where it continues to influence Artistic education throughout the Soviet Union and also central and eastern Europe It's the ability to range between this historically panoramic and then the sort of critical study the deep analysis of works of art is One of the goals of our graduate training at Johns Hopkins And Jason came in knowing how to do this. He has a really strong sense Of the moral and intellectual Imperatives and critical demands of art history of art history as a form of care And um, I'm sure we're going to see some of that today in a paper entitled abstraction and an analogy and analogy in Borvo Verwocka Thank you, Jason Thanks, Stephen for that generous introduction and thank you everyone here Aliyah, especially for organizing the symposium. I'm very excited to hear papers and talk more with you about everything that's going on. So My paper today looks at a somewhat early and understudied moment in the history of modern art in Russia When a group of artists organized around Kazmir Malavich and a style of geometrical abstraction He called suprematism became involved in textile design Between 1915 and 1919 these artists now most known for their austere and withholding non-figurative paintings Entered into arrangements with artisan workshops in rural villages where suprematist designs were embroidered onto textiles like scarves versus pillowcases Commodities in short but dream commodities with neither mass production nor even sale ever realized They were exhibited though in a number of very well attended shows in Moscow The photograph of the first in 1915. I'm sorry the first the first of which in 1915. I'm showing right now This episode largely unremarked in histories In accounts of russian of the russian avancard demonstrates that the heady and rarefied art of suprematism was in fact born with an unexpected nearness to lived life That it's emergent both in the form of quotidian objects and execution through a kind of collective labor was built into its practice from the start For many of these artists abstract painting Was bound up in Malavich's sweeping philosophical campaign to disclose the world as a unified and undifferentiated entity Within this monistic metaphysical structure any notion of an individual is nonsensical For any apprehension of a person entails in the same movement an apprehension of its inextricability from a collective social fabric And so it has been with difficulty and fascination that I try to triangulate the speculative Theoretical aspirations of suprematism With its actual formal manifestations I'm sorry And so it has been with difficulty and fascination that I try to triangulate the speculative collectivist Theoretical aspirations of suprematism with its actual formal manifestations, let alone the workaday realities of collective or collaborative labor Today I want to float analogy as a conceptual structure with which to assay these varied relationships What aesthetic form might disclose about the constitution of social life and work And what paths collaboration might have opened in developing suprematist form To begin to explain what I mean by the by an analogical understanding of abstraction I want to borrow a comparison used by the scholar Maria guff to open the first chapter of her book the artist's producer constructivism in revolution These are two paintings by uh, casimir mulevich done in 1915 and almost certainly exhibited the 010 last futurist exhibition of painting in petrograd the same year The show is most remembered uh for the debut of his suprematist composition black square mulevich's room here is on the left On the left, excuse me, and we can see the black square in the upper corner Um, it was known as well for uh, the conflict between mulevich's suprematist painting and the constructions of latemia tatlín On the right is a photograph of one of tatlín's corner counter-release now lost Its severe agglomeration of metal planes curved and harshly angled aim at disclosing qualities proper to the materials of which it's of which it's composed A commitment to the material reality of the world which mulevich's work as the story goes appears to deny We know from contemporary photographs of mulevich's gallery at 010 that the work on the right Simply titled suprematism and now in the state russian museum in st. petersburg was included in the exhibition While the presence of four squares on the left now in saratov is likely though insecure In four squares mulevich splits his canvas roughly evenly along the uh, the vertical and horizontal axes dividing it into four equal or roughly equal quadrants Moving clockwise from the upper left the canvas's recursive squares go white black white black Deriving the work's checkerboard effect from the structure of the support itself In this account four squares organizational motivation to borrow guff's term via sussur relies less on individual creative creative subjectivity Subjectivity of some kind we might note though is nonetheless a plan mulevich's initial decision to paint the painting Then it does the parameters of the painting itself Far more typical of mulevich's work is the st. petersburg picture guff's counter example Foregoing the equilateral format of four squares The work on the right adopts a portrait's dimensions in a widely varied range of geometric geometric forms arrayed in a steep diagonal from the work's upper left to its lower center sharply acute triangles point from the corner to a rectangle sorry sharply acute triangles point from the corner to a rectangle itself tilted downward to the left An orientation echoed by a cluster of rectangular forms roughly three quarters to the right across the upper register The tenet of kinship between these forms is undone however by myriad variously disposed forms abounding throughout the composition An inventory could include the straw-colored trapezoid the most conspicuous element of the composition shifted a skew from the form of shared axis It set atop a red almond aperture within which a dot dash jumble floats about The inventory could also include the horizontal bands roughly halfway down the work the four repeated but irregular brackets mid-right The variously angled rectangles of various widths tilting and leaning in various directions Clustering toward the bottom of the work as if drawn down by low gravity the list goes on To describe what she calls the chaotic articulation of the st. petersburg's suprematism guff follows mulevich's student fwadistochiminski in characterizing its arrangement of forms addressed to painting's traditional compositional problems of balance and relationality as baroque her account her account though caught between The attention between willed creative composition and the drive to evacuate individual subjectivity from the fabrication of works of art That became the determining concern of the constructivists leaves mulevich here These constructivists their work heterogeneous as it was Was unified an attempt to subvert the perceived historical imperative of modern western art as creative self expression Orienting itself toward a notion of utility a term variously understood as the interrogation of materials with the aim of uncovering and cultivating properties Um properties of use to a post-revolutionary society or more directly dissolving art into industrial production to manufacture actual useful objects Where does this leave a work like suprematism then with its ambition to reassort the Contiguity between art and life embodying what mulevich In an essay accompanying the x the paintings exhibition at zero ten termed the new painterly realism His argument goes something like this A suprematist painting shows form itself unbeholden to a thing in the world It reveals the fact That even a figurative painting and ill-Europeans Ivan the terrible and his son is his named example Is not identical with what it represents an obvious point. He seems nonetheless compelled to make Um Instead even rapines painting is built up from painterly form in the same way mulevich's is But the forms of rapines composition are veiled by the representational function to which they're subordinated If suprematism discloses the the real nature of the new painterly realism How does it stand within relation to the world in which it moves? Mulevich for his part provides no clear answer Indeed his refusal to define suprematism positively is a curious feature of his text Instead the new art is described negatively in terms of what it is not namely all art previously For example, he writes For example, he writes In a in intending to transmit the living form of nature Artists transmitted its corpse in a picture. They should have created but they merely repeated or later The art of painting the word sculpture was a kind of camel loaded with all the trash about elisks salamese princes and princesses Painting was the aesthetic side of the object, but it was never an independent form an independent end in and of itself As demonstrated by arena sakno Mulevich's manner of argumentation here and elsewhere shares if not derives its structure from a form of christian apologetics dominant among Orthodox thinkers many of whom wrote broadly on contemporary politics and culture and were active within mulevich's milieu Apophatic or negative theology is founded on the premise that god cannot be cognized by rational thought nor described in human language Instead the mind can only direct itself toward the divine through an infinite through infinite negative statements about what he is not Scriptural examples abound From the gospel of john no one has or can see god or from first timothy He lives in unapproachable light from job. His ways are unsearchable and unfathomable, etc Mulevich too suggests that his notion of an all-encompassing reality cannot be captured in reason Demanding instead intuitive perception in its place At risk of ascribing to mulevich a level of philosophical knowledge that cannot be substantiated by the historical record I feel compelled to acknowledge the apophatic models pre christian roots and plateaus parminides In this dialogue socrates attempts to resolve the ostensible contradiction between individual being and the unity in which it is part A concern we'll see mulevich shares too If i am one how am i composed of many parts that are at once themselves and themselves me and yet unlike one another How do I think of some of myself as something beyond myself that is both plural and unified and sometimes neither Through a series of critical negations we could call it his via negativa plateaus socrates stages the logical jam of part and whole He turns onto the frontage road Analogy arrives as a sideways reconciliation of this paradox Just as one is both one and part of a whole so too is the day one yet in many different places at many in different times Analogy is a natural complement apophatic theology It points toward the ineffable like the godhead by offering up a statement like god is love to say that Though the object of my love is unknowable. It shares the same relationship between devotee and divine As does loved and beloved Anna upon logos word, of course, but in greek also ratio Analogy claims not identity between the objects of comparison, but the identity of a shared relationship Pen is to paper as brushes to canvas not because a pen is a brush nor paper canvas But because each pair shares the relationship of mark making To return to the st. Petersburg picture. We might think it along mulevich's own words when he writes There exist three beginnings in man One attempts to make his personality keep its purity that his eyes should transcend the frontiers of commonness The other wishes to rule to make everything subservient to itself and to become the crown The third annihilates itself in itself in the name of commonness Wishing to make the masses rebel in the name of unity It wishes that all should have before them one form of world structure So that the universe as a monoform should travel more quickly toward infinite perfection The painting seems caught between mulevich's first and second imaginings of man Holding intention the autonomy of individual form and the composition in which it's part Shapes next to one another declare camaraderie through things like shared parallel edges Or the general compositional tumble from the top left to bottom center But any sort of totally subsuming compositional organization is undermined by greater or lesser deviations The fourth bracket in the left center group for instance dropping a step below the other three Reasserting the autonomy of the painting's individual elements within the overall composition I'm claiming rather simply that mulevich's paintings analogize his philosophy of community With a painting like moma's white on white from 1918 analogous to the total dissolution of the ego He claims his is endgame Indeed the thorny relationship between individual and collective and in particular the primacy of the latter Was a major concern in modern russian thought from Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky to Plechenov and Lenin Leading mulevich's contemporary the philosopher Nikolay Vajaev to term it the russian idea Why the analogical function of mulevich's paintings matter, however, is an open question I want to suggest that the collective relations analogically modeled in mulevich's suprematist paintings Were to some greater or lesser degree active in forms of collaborative labor from their earliest instances For the 010 exhibition is not where what would come to be known as suprematism made its debut Nor was the 1913 production of victoria over the sun as mulevich's writing is suggested and people familiar with this material might know what i'm talking about um In november of 1915 just one month before the opening of 010 a number of embroidered textile designs featuring abstract Geometrical designs debuted at the exhibition of contemporary decorative art held at the lemerice gallery in moscow Organized by mulevich evan puny and ksenia bogoslovskaya This exhibition brought to public attention the fruits of a collaboration between modern russian artists and women artisans from the villages of verbovka and scopci Which is now known as vesila nivka The arrangement was initiated by the artist alexandra ekster who introduced mulevich to the artist and aristocrat natalia davidova Whose family owned the verbovka artiel Um, which is a word for this kind of artisan workshop in russian The scopci artiel is unfortunately less well documented Though we do have reason to suspect it focused more on reviving traditional ukrainian handicraft design than did verbovka These women-run workshop collectives were designed in part to incorporate rural women into the wage economy from which they had been historically Excluded charged instead with sustaining their male farming counterparts whose activities were no longer able to generate adequate income in the late imperial financial system Hoping to generate new income for the artel davidova who herself had close ties with many members of the cultural elite Solicited textile designs from mulevich as well as a number of artists who would later join his supremacist campaign In the group in journal called supremas These arrangements would continue Until the late 1910s with works being shown at a second exhibition in moscow in 1917 and included in the state exhibition of applied art Of the applied art workshop in moscow in the moscow museum Of fine arts the following year, excuse me I think the blank slide might have been a little confusing. Um Is there a way to advance to the next slide? There we go. Thank you While mulevich's designs Were shown only in the 1915 show the artists olga rozanova, liubov popova, nadiaz al udotsova and davidova herself Would contribute the majority of the later designs and here we can see two reconstructed spreads from the first unpublished issue of supremas which was to feature a section devoted to the Decorative arts and contain photographs of some of the realized designs I want to conclude with a design by mulevich to suggest Excuse me to suggest that the particular developments in his practice may well emerge as analogs to the kind of work realized in verbovka The inventory of the 1915 exhibition indicates mulevich contributed three designs two for scarves and one for a pillow Which was later realized and exhibited in 1917 and we're seeing a picture of the pillow now Obviously the work on the left excuse me The design was based on the work on the left An untitled suprematist composition from 1915 Which is an inversion of the embroidered design as the verbovka artisans Outline the composition onto the reverse of the fabric and fill the shapes in with darning stitches Because embroidery is done by leading thread in and out of the pillowcases warp weft matrix The differently colored components of the embroidered design do not in fact overlap one another This is unlike an oil painting where a painter could if they wanted layer painted shapes on top of one another in order to communicate recession This is not the case in many of mulevich's suprematist paintings Perhaps he was envisioning the manufacture of his embroidered designs when in painterly realism of a footballer for 19 from 1915 He's not first paint a solid yellow trapezoid over which he draws his cobalt line But actually two separate shapes um, whose upper and bottom edges respectively lie flush with the form that cuts through it And this is a device that we can see visible in the prime canvas peeking through the You know the gaps between the blue and the yellow Perhaps mulevich was thinking of verbovka 2 and perhaps analogically to consider the admittedly uneven relationship between designer and fabricator When he went on to attempt to reconstruct or to restructure the art academy in vtab school me a few years later There he would introduce an ostensibly more de-hierarchized and democratic model of pedagogy and collectivized artistic production We know from a letter to michel matushan that mulevich was electrified by this collaborative opportunity calling it a great treasure But lamenting that he would not be able to be present in verbovka himself These arrangements with world craft workshops were accorded major significance within the early bolshevik administration In which its members occupied key positions Within the commissariat for the enlightenment known as narcompros whose subdivisions oversaw the administration of the arts mulevich headed the subcommittee for the preservation of historic monuments rizanima was brought on to as the director of the subdivision of applied arts a position she shared with alexander redchenko Where redchenko committed himself to industrial production rizanima's role suggests an interest in absorbing traditional craft production and its laborers Otherwise administered by trade unions into the collective artistic program of the early soviet state And so verbovka becomes a means of extending suprematism's collective analogy beyond the canvas or the workshop to the very fabric of a centralized cultural bureaucracy where hierarchical hierarchical distinctions between media and geographical distance to boot Are dissolved into a fantasy of a collective mission and a shared vision of a world But even there the collective gizam flickers and fades as contingencies intrude the individual persists Indeed the individual rizanima seemed to carry the weight of these collective enterprises alone And with her untimely death in 1918 the short-lived alliance between rural artillery and the avant-garde in turn unraveled Thank you Up to the stage please. Thank you so much for those Just fascinating talks when we um, you know that the paper topics the titles come in Um, I think before we have the abstracts and we try to put them into the sessions Where the things sort of seem like each other these were completely different Um in every way, um, but you know, so interesting. Um, just very Different and interesting. I think Methodological approaches, so I've got a couple of questions for each of you and um, and then we will open it up Um, I will start with You know, it was it was really interesting. Um to hear about the fact that these Chinese-American communities were actually in the process of changing a lot and modernizing and yet Henry Um, just kind of painted that out of those portraits. Um, right in favor of Representing something sort of like more authentic and and and stable Um, it is you know, it it reminds me a lot of Gauguin going to Tahiti Um being disappointed by how modern Tahiti had become And then proceeding to ignore all of that and just paint his his fantasy Um, so so what you're talking about it's got all the kind of you know, it's it's classic Primitivism, um, and I guess so my question is I'm I'm curious why you don't use the word At all in your talk I do use it in the dissertation I do use it in the dissertation It's not forgotten. Um, I don't use it in the talk just because the way I had described it in the dissertation it actually ends up being a break between Primitivism or Analyst and the Japanese ma which is described as three stages from Japanese array to Japanese ma which is an and Kind of an evolution Of the level of assimilation of these Japanese forms and ideas Primitivism for me was It felt limited actually Because it he does have this kind of process of evolution even though he shows these things as kind of existing in an idealized past It just felt limiting in the sense that I don't think he was trying to do the same thing quite as as Gauguin was um Not articulating this very well I figured that there was a sort of deliberate reason to to to not There was that that language. It just got really big really fast. Um I kind of simplified it for the sake of our talk today, but it is incorporated And I do I do think that what he's trying to do is is to kind of look back as a way to look forward Does that make sense? Um Yes, and so Thank you. I also was just wondering How were these so you said that these these portraits were exhibited? During his lifetime twice and how were they? How were they received? By critics where they talked about as being sort of very truthful representations Yeah, so they were first exhibited while he was in california at the panama california exhibition in 1915 so like a little world's fair next to the panama panama pacific exposition at the same time um, and they got They they didn't get a lot of press there. They were kind of just rushed over but when he came back to new york, he displayed the mimic beth gallery, which was his primary dealer and they were Picked up by the local press like the new york times and macormick william macormick describes them as He's really fascinated by the idea that henrye can actually individualize these figures There's a sense that you can't tell the difference for a general new york audience between different asian peoples so That's kind of the where they focus is on the the realism of these things the idea that you can Connect these two individual people as opposed to just like a type or a Yeah, I thought that was an important distinction in your paper the the the fact that they he was individualizing them but also Still creating this kind of fantasy Yeah, exactly. Yeah Okay, thank you tony The other tony mentioned your methodological resourcefulness And creativity, I mean I love your talk. It was you know, it was like hanging on every word I I guess I'll say first of all that I found it. I found it really convincing That the confusion that he creates that roza was creating is deliberate And that he was thinking in atomist terms I Wonder I I was I liked the way that you were imagining this exchange between simon alley and roza But I I guess I'm I just have a question about Why you did it that way? Because you could have made the same argument without that and so You know, what was your thinking that led you to Kind of taking us through this imagined exchange Um, thank you. So I think a large reason for this kind of organization is to Realize the cultural consciousness that he has was intended for a contemporary audience And I think simon alley really embodied The type of audience that he was working He's painting for in the sense that you know, I think it's easy to think. Oh all this very elaborate organization is for this Anonymous viewer groups that can somehow decipher it. But what I think it's really interesting is that he seemed really Um insistent that this was meant For a type of people that he could communicate with in both literary and visual terms and I Discovered thanks to alexandra horror. Um that you know, he actually wrote about You know having this one friend who has the privilege to See the painting before its grand opening and I'm just really curious what would someone of his own social circle react to the kind of intellectual puzzles that he's weaving basically um not only to contextualize the social Considerations of the painting but also to kind of give a name to the process to realize, you know, there were actual people that he was Probably thinking about and I think That's a large aspect of rosa study nowadays is that he's such a socially engaged painter, you know, he had friends who were professors healers you know Religious figures and scholars So he was making art for a very specific group and I think that changes how we recreate the rhetoric that he was using Thank you. Yeah, I um This and this this idea that he is sort of deliberately confusing the viewer Um, but then the viewer is ultimately rewarded through, you know by the through the labor of of Bringing in all of these different areas of knowledge and interpreting it Um, I I wonder though if the viewer is if if what he meant to do Is not reward the viewer is to ultimately just frustrate the viewer and that's where the despair comes from like it's like And I said I'm sure this is what you were saying, but I guess I'm just saying it again Is that it's like putting the viewer in the position of Democritus feeling that You know all these individual details that have meaning on their own or not Like adding up to anything in the end. Yeah, and I think that's absolutely right in the sense that we're really meant to sympathize with Democritus in this way in the sense that we're witnessing him witnessing something that is also bothering us Um, and I totally think many of the viewers of the time probably didn't get the painting Um, I think that's also why he had to add the explanation two years later when he was making the print Right on to the oh, we and there's the point to this And and and and you know the painting had a terrible time On the market nobody wanted to buy it for several years So I don't think he was as popular as he thought it would be especially because I think just the structure itself It's just so complicated. Um, that's why I think he really wanted a simonelli to prove Read the painting before he put it out because it could really just be nonsense. I think to other people Thank you. Um And jason, um, you know also just fascinating. Um, first of all learning that That that suprematism kind of started in this embroidery workshop Is that fair to say? Um, or had a moment where it was You know, I I don't want to necessarily sort of like chronal chronology is this in a way that um, you know I might not be able to necessarily defend but the they they did sort of um emerge simultaneously and it's just you know Kind of hugely fascinating and I think it's totally fascinating and the fact that this is the first public That it's sort of suppressed in the literature because that's not our what, you know our understanding of what it's supposed to It's supposed to be withholding as you say not about like live life about that which just It's so interesting. Um and you know your whole argument about the the part to the whole and um and the paintings um analogizing his philosophy of community um this idea that If i'm understanding correctly are sort of um that the Which one the the white on white? Being about the annihilation of the self the annihilation of the ego um I think so here's my question. Um If that's what he's getting at And if it's if it's relating back to sort of his experience designing for this workshop Isn't that in some ways like the ultimate expression of the ego? Yeah, I think there's a Yeah, great. Thank you. Um so I mean It's very interesting because I think that this relationship between you know part and whole an individual and collective isn't one in which Either term is sort of subsumed in the other and one comes out kind of free Because like a major term from a lavage is intuition creative intuition intuition intuitive reason as opposed to sort of like racio-insination or like rational thought and so it just sort of seems that like these things if they disclose anything isn't some kind of like Meaning or message like a sort of like aboutness, but that they sort of like embody a relationship between things that Doesn't require like a sort of identity of the term So it's not that like a form is like a square as a person and the composition is a collective necessarily But that the relationship between those two things is shared or paralleled in some ways And I think that this is something that obtains as well in the way that like the ego like the single creative ego ends up sort of playing out, um, especially in the way that Mulevich was acting in the early Bolshevik administration because he's kind of contriving it like every instance to bring so many different Areas of art including I think this textile production under his own purview under the auspices of a sort of collective mission, but it's really not necessarily like A dissolution of individual artistic egos that then become a sort of unified collective movement But more like a dissolution of individual artistic egos that Are subsumed under his um So yeah, I think these things are just like kind of constantly intentioning constantly being negotiated on the fly um And then yeah, it's you know for a whole host of historic reasons cut very short before it kind of comes into anything I think it ever dreamed for itself Thank you. I also wonder if um, if you've thought about how gender plays into this at all Yeah, it's really interesting and something that I want to get into you know a little bit more as I develop This is a part of my second chapter. One thing I would say is that there's a really fascinating book That was written recently about the way that women labor collectives figure into the sort of Russian imagination of community um in the night like from essentially Tolstoy to um, soviet cinema and It just it kind of comes up all the time and usually in a really funny way as a sort of foil to Rational argumentation and things so I know in Chernyshevsky's what is to be done, which is this novel About you know, kind of like labor collectives and things. Um, that ends up becoming The basis of Lenin's what is to be done this kind of very long pamphlet he writes in 1902, I believe The chair is the same title but in it the two there are two male main characters who are just kind of constantly debating fruitlessly about you know What to do? um, and all the meanwhile there's this uh woman character who Is visited by these three personifications of various sort of like feminized traits and she ends up forming this very utopian um sewing collective um, so this is one example in which uh these sorts Of arrangements maybe have like a sort of like literary or you know um other sort of manifestation within the Russian imagination and so I just think yeah the whole the whole gender dynamic that like this sort of Other to the current state of things is being figured as the feminine both. Yeah within sort of like literary and um cinematic production throughout the 19th and 20th century, but then it's also in an instance like this being Sort of literite literalized. Yeah Thank you. Um, I'd love to um open it up to questions from The audience there's a couple over there For you, Tony, I just uh, love the talk I was very convinced by your emphasis on how democratis is represented as uh, not laughing as what Everyone would have expected so right away rosa Is convincing us of his genius, which is typical of rosa. I wanted to ask um beyond his playful Playfulness and in his inversions Do you see the democratis as a self representation? Because it's such a despairing Image and we know that he suffered so many personal losses at at this point in his life So i'm wondering about the atomism and the epicureanism is Is he questioning faith here? Did you Think of it in those terms. It's very unorthodox in the context of Catholicism in the period so um, thank you kathleen for the question. Um, and I think First of all, I think in the When it was exhibited, I think maybe some people didn't realize he was democratis I think um, there are contemporary records as you know, if people referring to this as a heraclitus because it's the iconography And I think that's probably why he added the caption specifically saying. Oh, this is Cognitus. This is not heraclitus. And you know, I'm doing all this Um to turn him into a different figure and I really I think um your point about and this kind of autobiographical reference in the figure of democratis is spot on because um First of all, I think he's self portrait, which we have seen in the beginning really has shares a lot of similarities with The democratis portrait and I think the way that he was writing at the time That's seen to suggest that he was thinking in democratis terms about, you know Things falling apart in his personal life in his career, but I also think there's a different angle That is worth noting So when he came back to Rome from Florence and started putting out these images, he had Really high ambitions where he left Rome in disgrace and came back to kind of rule the whole audience So I think there was genuine positive ideas about, you know, his into intellectual power about his sophistication Um, so I think the negative message of the painting itself might not have translated immediately to the exhibition itself But I think over time especially in turning the painting into print and you know, kind of Reworking the painting into a caption about the print. He definitely was thinking much more um about His personal life and his realization about especially, you know, the painting that he had very high hopes wasn't selling. So figure, right? Jason I had a question about how one broadly Distinguishes the seduction towards a political reading that I think you brilliantly outlined um in malevich's work from Contemporaneous movements that are also all about the relationship of the individual and the collective and I'm thinking here Of everything from vitalism to theosophy At the same historical moment in other european countries, these issues are bubbling forth And they're not read in political terms. So I'm wondering Are we being seduced by the nascent sovietism to give this that read or And is it more proper to instead understand russia in connection with these other national arts? Yeah, this is very it's interesting and I mean I mean the interest in russian things like, you know, the fourth dimension, uh, piotr spinsky writes this, you know Book called like toshium organum. That's supposed to be the sort of like third in Like, you know, like a totally like new like metaphysical reappraisal of the world after akin and Aristotle or something but Uh, I guess it just seemed that its manifestation in the russian context is one that uh, even before malevich is kind of historically bound up In politics and the idea of a sort of notion of collectivity The thing that I try to do in my first chapter is tease out a little bit of this intellectual prehistory I suppose to me even more compelling than these sorts of You know readings of like theosophy in the fourth dimension, which tend to be what malevich has spoken of most You know in connection with I've really found the sort of particular theological discourses of the late 19th century to be very interesting mainly these ideas that particularly about the icon as it being a sort of um Not a representation of an individual face of christ, namely But rather that christ is somebody who can who you know, we are created in the image of contains within himself all individual likenesses That's sort of you know shine forth and then the encounter with the other like another human being in life by this sort of You know person christ person connection ends up also disclosing the fact that there's some sort of like Shared thing that is prior to individuality Um, so it's a loose way. I mean, you know, I don't want to sort of uh have such a Have a sort of like weak concept of analogy that literally anything can be a sort of like analogous parallel to anything else Which you know, I think is a danger that maybe this talk nears, but But I think that these sorts of yeah, like these discourses on the fourth dimension and these ideas of a Of metaphysical unity that do not have sort of like discrete separations are really really I mean we might want to say like epistemologically in line with these theological and social readings that are just so Interesting, and I mean malavage's own writing Even though he's not referencing these things exactly is borrowing the rhetoric almost verbatim, which is to me fascinating I actually have questions for both tony and for britney, but I don't want to take up too much time. So Can I ask them back to back or should I take a break and let somebody else? I want to ask tony first because I know more. I think I'm closer to tony's field Um, I do. I've known a lot less about britneys. Anyway, um, stop wasting time. Um, tony I think you're absolutely right. I'm very persuaded by the um the conceit That's at work in the the the change of identification that the playing with codes representing the philosopher Heraclitus turned into democratus Really does reveal the importance of titling and of the kind of pr work that artists do through prince culture about the work there's also A pair of the last question a tradition of identifying artists as gloomy philosophers Because they are hoarders of bones and grizzly body parts and asari talks about artists, you know Like a gloomy philosopher keeping dead men's limbs under his bed And then becoming ill with the With with the decay. Um, what I need to know more about though is polvere powder dust If if this is your link to atomism, I just need to know about with the semantic Field for you know the reference to atoms Muntasso for instance uses Lucretius Lucretius is never put on the index. It's around, you know art Poets are imitating Lucretius in italian I'm just wondering is polvere a synonym for atoms. Can it be? It seems to me it resonates far more with the book of athlesiasticus and with the The meditations of Marcus Aurelius like all this dust, you know because um atomists tend to refer to particles um as using As things, you know, they're very very tiny, but they're not dust dust suggests formlessness atoms have a kind of a form they're described as semina, you know semina erum seeds Um, so I just need to know more. Maybe you have a way of sort of building on that claim Um, thank you for the question And I definitely think that's where a lot of tension is is the poem the satire helps me To contextualize how he was thinking about this process of decomposition, but I I agree that it's not entirely Um plausible that he was thinking in exactly atomist terms so the way I always think um You know, I would rather say he was thinking about The the rhetoric of things being granular of things, you know Not having steady forms that are, you know internal to any object like dust, you know, they they scatter they they are formless in the sense that um atoms might might be and um, and I don't think rosa was an expert on democratis He does have a friend who was teaching greek philosophy at pisa at the time So I think he might have had references From his friend about, you know, how this process is working, but I don't think necessarily he was thinking exactly, um You know howters as literal atoms and I In the original script, I I talk a little bit about gassendi and you know, and you know the actual ways that his contemporaries were talking about Adams and he's very different and so I don't think he Rosa was an atomist and I think he was using the conceit of atomic Um transformation to make a point about this general This organization of matter that it's not specific to any branch of philosophy in that sense. Um, that's my current understanding and I do think um You know, it's kind of worth going back to all the poetry's and rethink what genuinely, you know, um, he meant by those words. Yeah I think if you want to ask the question to to britney and then We'll break for lunch. Sure thing. Um, unless there's somebody else we want to have a go. Okay Um, britney, this is really compelling. I didn't know this material at all and one question that occurred to me Just, you know, in my mind as I was listening to and looking at those extraordinary and disturbing portraits Was I just, you know, for instance, um in chinese communities Portrait studios um portrait photography by chinese photographers how chinese Subjects are presented through photography. Do they tend to reproduce this kind of cultural coding? You know this dominant cultural coding or, you know, do we find them contested in any way? It's probably not somewhere you wanted to go but You was wondering if it's something you thought about Yeah, and just quickly coming back to martha I should have mentioned that my dissertation focus is largely on orientalism in japanese but because of a connection to james mcneal whistler So he's not looking at go gone so much as someone like whistler Um, so it's a different focus for him. If that makes sense in terms of the photography that's of actual chinese communities by chinese photographers and chinese artists um They it's very mixed so they they're representing themselves is evolving essentially Most of the photography is going to be family photography um, there's not a lot of Well, it's mostly family photography and you can see them kind of evolving in these photos So older generations tended to wear especially women tended to wear a traditional attire And it wasn't always like the festival attire that is essentially what these girls are wearing Um, it's kind of a dumbed-down version of their festival attire in terms of color and that um, but then So the older generations would be wearing more traditional clothing men were typically Wearing business westernized business attire because they're they're more out in the community As public figures and I think there was a strong effort to Not assimilate but to kind of fit in Because there was so much anti Asian sentiment at the moment especially with you know the page act and and um All the legislation that happens in the 1880s Um, but you do see kids wearing hybrid clothing So you'll have girls with big bows. You'll have them wearing But then wearing these kind of more traditional outfits in some photos. It's very mixed They're kind of all over the place But yeah, the self representation is it is showing the evolution whereas henry is very much showing this kind of frozen moment or this kind of devolution Thank you