Author: Alexander Brier Marr

Rochester and Native Art in the 1930s

When a young, pregnant woman fell through a hole near the uprooted Celestial Tree above the dome of the sky, no one knew where she would go. The world below was inhospitable to her, covered in water. As Sky Woman fell, duck-creatures carried her on their wings to rest on the back of a great turtle. A muskrat then emerged from the water carrying a bit of soil from the sea floor. Smearing it on the back of the turtle, the earth grew wider. Sky Woman walked across the expanding ground, beginning Seneca inhabitance of the earth.1 In 1936 when Ernest Smith completed his painting of the Sky Woman diving into a dark and watery world, many people believed Seneca culture continued a long fall. Centuries of encounter deeply affected pre-contact Seneca culture. The dispersal of land holdings, introduction of Christianity and flooding of Seneca world with new goods all impacted the character of daily life. Finding deep fault with the effects of settler society on the Seneca world, Director of the Rochester Museum …

CFP: “Temporalities of Material Culture,” April 5-7, 2013, University of Rochester

Published by Alexander Brier Marr

CALL FOR PROPOSALS “A Matter of Time: Temporalities of Material Culture” 9th Visual and Cultural Studies Graduate Conference University of Rochester, April 5-7 2013 As cultural critics have noted over the past thirty years, we seem to be living in an age of dematerialization. Increased information transfer speed, the disintegration of boundaries between private and public, and the commercialization of image networks have provoked anxiety regarding the control of objects and images. Yet, taking a critical stance toward the temporal thrust of this thinking–its teleology, its faith in progress–we seek to historicize the anxiety as merely another renegotiation in a continually evolving relation of time and matter. Has our relationship to material objects ever been fixed? While indebted to the work of material culture studies, we invite papers from a wide range of topics of relevance and disciplines that address questions of materiality and temporality. We understand the relationship between material and time to develop in at least three distinct ways: material in our time, material that generates temporalities, and material that endures. Possible topics …

CFP InVisible Culture, Issue 20: Ecologies

Published by Alexander Brier Marr

Ecologies InVisible Culture, Issue 20 InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites papers that consider “ecologies” for Issue 20. We imagine ecologies primarily as organizational spectrums. Political philosopher Jane Bennett argues that attuning our critical sensibilities to the animism of images and objects might “induce a stronger ecological sense.” Similarly, art historian David Joselit suggests that relations between images amount to ecologies of form. Following such thinking, this call for papers signals a desire to flesh out the ecological metaphor vis-à-vis image relations. How do images generate connections? How does an ecological engagement with the visual world alter definitions of life? This issue theme explores the complex relations of nature and culture, image and thing, subject and object, rooted in liveliness. Visual culture scholars have long asserted that things lead social lives, linking up and separating as they traverse networks. Yet notions of life – of objects and things, their power to define and destabilize us as subjects, as well as the liveliness of nature – animate networks, creating ecological systems of thingly …

Now (Exclamation Point) Visual Culture

Published by Alexander Brier Marr

Nick Mirzoeff’s choice to add the declarative, the imperative, the ambiguous shift-1 keystroke that turns the pinky on its side and flips the bird on the number pad (frankly a radical move in the usual topography of typing) requires a pause for consideration. Perhaps the uncertain terms of this punctuated provocation are metonyms for the larger ambiguity present in the “epistemological anarchy” (WJT Mitchell) that is Visual Culture/Studies. Mirzoeff’s ! is thus rightly undisciplined. The slammer remains decolonized, so let’s keep that “Now” likewise unbordered and, more importantly, out of time. So plead University of Rochester PhD student Abby Glogower, a student of histories whose subjects pre-date the Now in both the temporal and the imaginary. Where, she asked, is the place for the scholar of the past in a field that addresses and theorizes the nowness of the present. Whereas the present matters, Abby raised the important issue of making room for scholarship that challenges the foreclosure of history’s old hats. In any case, history is itself a theory. When Hamlet said to Horatio, “There …