Program of Events: Speakers
Here's a list of the scholars who will be presenting work at POCP. Click on their names to read their abstracts.
- Chiara Bernasconi - "The role of art in the 'White Night' events and the success of a new global format"
- Perry Cohen - "Beyond the Femininity Card: Transgender Athletes in the Olympic Games"
- Katrina Enros - "The culture and cultural policy of Quebec: Building tension at the Place des Arts"
- Seth Feman - "The Museum of Modern Art as Late Christian Ritual: Alfred Barr, Faith, and the Cold War"
- Wanda L. Fenimore - "NASCAR Racing as Ritual Communication"
- Jeffrey Gower - "Resurrecting Cultural Heritage Using Public Funds to Promote Tourism: A Case Study of Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D Martin House Complex in Buffalo, NY"
- Zane Norsworthy - "Gifting in Black Rock City: Examining the Paradoxical Nature of the Gift at the annual Burning Man Festival"
- Perry Price - "New on View: Contemporary Artists and the Reinterpretation of Cultural Institutions"
- Kim Williams - "After the Cold War? The International Spy Museum and the US Security State"
- Fan Yang - "The Dual Spectacle of the West Kowloon Cultural District – Space, Landmark, and Culture in Hong Kong: 2001-2005"
Abstracts
Bernasconi - "The role of art in the 'White Night' events and the success of a new global format"
The White Night events have emerged as one of the most recent formats to engage audiences for contemporary art in all its forms. These events have taken place one night a year in various cities throughout the world, utilizing urban spaces as the backdrop for the display of contemporary art. The particular use of time and space in this event raises questions about how they are defined. The events can be viewed in one or all of the following ways: a case of urban curatorial practice; a new form of a festival or carnival; the most recent form of cultural consumption; or even an attempt to create a new public domain. Simple generalizations cannot explain the complexity of this event. In different countries, White Night has taken on its own specific operating structure, in response to different cultural and institutional norms which nevertheless pose new questions about the city as a space for ‘staging’ the arts. Is it the city that is put on stage through the arts, or the opposite, the arts as the protagonist on the urban stage? What kind of public domain is created through the arts for one night?
The first White Night event in Paris proved to be an artistically successful effort in democratizing contemporary art. However, when the city council’s winning formula was applied in other cities, it resembled something akin 19th century World Fair. Exporting White Night to other cities should not be seen as a panacea for improving the urban cultural scene. Many art projects are not included in the event and here the importance of measuring success becomes crucial. Recommendations on how different art forms and practices can coexist and how reciprocation can enrich an ‘art-scene’ at a national and international level are needed.
Cohen - Beyond the Femininity Card: Transgender Athletes in the Olympic Games
From 1968 to 2000 every female competitor at the Olympic Games was required to submit to gender verification testing in order to compete in women’s events. For most women the testing was seen as a mere formality and slight invasion of privacy. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) cited it as a minor inconvenience since once a woman “passed”, she was granted a femininity card and was not required to submit to any further testing. However for some women, the gender verification was a life altering experience. Several world class athletes were cut from their national teams, had their funding, medals and records revoked when they “failed” the femininity test, and saw their vocation as athlete destroyed in an instant. Although official sex testing ended in 2000, de facto sex testing continues today in the form of visual and other inspections. The 2004 Stockholm Consensus which grants transgender individuals the right to participate in the Olympic Games may seem like a tremendous step forward, however a critical reading of this policy reveals that its actual purpose is far different from its stated purpose. By highlighting the category of sex, it reinforces sex and gender binaries and enables the IOC to justify the maintenance its sex testing program. This seemingly inclusive policy consistently challenges the participation rights of athletes who do not conform to gender normative appearances and behaviors (Sykes, 2006).
This presentation provides a brief history of sex testing and transgender sport participation and quickly moves to a discussion of the purposes of sex testing and the ramifications of the Stockholm Consensus. I conclude with a discussion of how the Stockholm Consensus, and the sport participation of transgender athletes, affects not only sport and athletes, but reinforces traditional notions of masculinity, femininity and gender normativity. Finally, I argue the power of sport can and must be harnessed as a means to deconstruct these normative ideals.
Enros - "The culture and cultural policy of Quebec: Building tension at the Place des Arts"
Quebec’s culture and cultural policies are quite unique relative to the broader geographic context of Canada and North America. Quebec's political climate feeds these cultural differences, intensifying their distinct nature, ever highlighting their separateness. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the city of Montreal went through an intensive period of urban enrichment under the leadership of Mayor Jean Drapeau. It can be argued that Drapeau aimed to use this cultural building plan in order to combat the increasing feeling of unrest amongst the Québécois, fueled by the preceding Quiet Revolution. Drapeau shrewdly played both sides of the ensuing debate, federalists and sovereignists; his diplomacy birthed various major projects in Montreal, and of particular interest to this paper, the construction of the Place des Arts. The Place des Arts' unique position as an architecturally symbolic site of tension, a locus for pointing to the specific cultural differences between sovereignists and federalists, makes it an important case for study.
The destruction of sites following major revolutions, wars, and crisis is common practice, as is the reconfiguring of sites as momuments to tragedy, but aside from the catharsis these activities provide, it is the building of new cultural sites that truly signals an era of cultural change. The cultural centre, a hybrid space for theatre, opera, dance and at times, visual art, was a unique phenomenon of the post-WWII era. By comparing some of these sites to Place des Arts, a broader context for understanding Quebec, and the types of political circumstance necessary for this kind of community building, can be established. The victors at the tail end of the Quiet Revolution remained unclear, and in the intial phase of its conception, the story Place des Arts would recount, still unresolved. By analyzing the history of Place des Arts, this paper will conclude whose culture the centre supplanted, and whose it supported.
Feman - "The Museum of Modern Art as Late Christian Ritual: Alfred Barr, Faith, and the Cold War"
In the early 1940s, Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, likened his ideal museum to a cathedral. In addition to an awesome architectural façade, the space would function ritualistically, channeling visitors through 29 bays, each a 24-foot square, as if circumambulating in pilgrimage. Guiding visitors from one art-movement to the next – a neo-Impressionist room to a Cubist one, Cubism to Constructivism – visitors would ascend a hierarchy of styles. Always moving toward increasingly nonfigurative work, the art would progressively detach from earthly referents and transcend, triumphantly, into the realm of abstraction. When a change in policy enabled Barr to realize his collection in the MoMA’s newly completed, iconic building, Barr delightedly called it the museum’s “declaration of faith.”
Critics often notice this sense of spiritual uplift and ritualized ascent in museum structures in general and the MoMA in particular. Yet they typically employ religion in their analyses as a convenient analogy or they observe its trappings as an ideological ruse. My essay suggests that the religious sensations at the MoMA are both more than a metaphor and more than the imprint of economic or social interests – that is, willful and genuinely devout. By reassessing the permanent collection in light of archival information about Barr’s mid-century religious involvement – for example, his proposals for religious art exhibitions and his association with the National Council of Churches – I argue that the embodied ritual sequence he designed for visitors expressed his interest in cohesively narrating modernism as much as it put into practice his Christian faith. By addressing the religious thinking on cultural programming that often remains hidden in pain view, my paper goes on to ask additional questions about the nature of faith in a “secular” age and about religion’s interaction with other ideologies at work in the museum.
Fenimore - "NASCAR Racing as Ritual Communication"
With 75 million fans, NASCAR is the undisputed no. 2 spectator sport in the United States, behind only the NFL. As a capitalist venture, NASCAR, the corporation, is “going global” with offices in Canada and Mexico along with broadcast partnerships with media conglomerates in these countries. While many people declare racing as just cars going around in circles, there are many social and institutional systems involved such as capitalism, nationalism, competition, gender, and race. In this paper, I investigate how sports offer an example of the ritual view of communication, according to James Carey’s model (1988). My analysis begins with situating NASCAR racing as a mediated ritual and continues by investigating how the NASCAR Busch race in Mexico City on March 4, 2007, exhibits characteristics of the ritual and transmission views of communication. Finally, I attempt to link the ritual elements with cultural hybridity and the transmission elements with cultural homogenization.
Gower - "Resurrecting Cultural Heritage Using Public Funds to Promote Tourism: A Case Study of Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D Martin House Complex in Buffalo, NY"
Frank Lloyd Wright, the iconic American architect, designed several buildings and houses for Buffalo clients in the early part of the twentieth century. Among those located in the prosperous industrial city were the Larkin Company Administration Building, America’s first modern office structure, and the Darwin D. Martin House, an exemplar of Wright’s Prairie-style designs. However, the fortunes of many Wright clients ebbed along with the contraction of Buffalo’s industrial economy. The City of Buffalo razed the Larkin Building after it failed to sell at a tax sale in 1950. The Martin House sat empty for almost two decades into the 1950s before it was divided into apartments, and the new owner demolished significant sections in 1960.
The Martin House Restoration Corporation (MHRC) was founded to coordinate the several private and institutional groups that were interested in renovating the Martin House and rebuilding its pergola, carriage house and conservatory. Since its formation, the MHRC has received over $35 million through public grants and private donations. The estimated final cost of the renovated and rebuilt Martin House Complex is $50 million. The MHRC received the Martin House deed in 2002, and while still a work in progress, the Complex opened for tours in the fall of 2006.
The words “Buffalo” and “tourism” are rarely used in the same sentence. However, the possibility of bringing throngs of culture seekers attracted to the Frank Lloyd Wright “brand” is a bright prospect for the economically-depressed Western New York region. This paper focuses on the use of public funds to generate culturally-driven tourism, and the economic viability of public investment into cultural heritage.
Norsworthy - "Gifting in Black Rock City: Examining the Paradoxical Nature of the Gift at the annual Burning Man Festival"
This paper will address the ways in which cultural programming at the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada creates a sense of community and culture that is subversive to mainstream consumerism through experience, immediacy, and self-expression by inverting the values of the “default world” through the process of gifting. This unique system operates within a temporary community that lasts for approximately one week a year where all commerce operates within the gift economy (with the exception of an ice store and coffee shop at center camp). There are no corporate logos and corporate sponsorships are forbidden. I will discuss how this could be considered a form of culture jamming and how the gift economy at Burning Man is cultural programming that subverts mainstream consumer capitalism.
This process of gifting aims at replacing consumption with experience. One of the events 10 principles is devoted to gifting and states: “Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or and exchange for something of equal value”. I will argue using the works of Georges Bataille, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and other sources in an attempt to establish a framework for concepts in gift economy and then in turn apply them to the gift economy of Black Rock City.
Price - "New on View: Contemporary Artists and the Reinterpretation of Cultural Institutions"
In the decades since Raid the Icebox, a number of museums have volunteered to collaborate with artists, granting unencumbered access to collections for the production of unique installations and exhibitions. Perhaps the most famous example is artist Fred Wilson’s 1992 exhibition Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society. Wilson had been producing installations challenging institutional racism when he was invited to work with the collections of the almost one hundred and fifty year old historical institution. The resulting exhibit combined an institutional critique of the museum’s collection and exhibition practices with an alternative presentation of the region’s history aimed at engaging audiences previously ignored by the society.
Despite the institutional criticism of Mining the Museum, other cultural organizations have been eager to reproduce the success of the exhibition. Museums hope these collaborative exhibitions will engage new and diverse audiences while featuring the collections normally relegated to storage. Yet the educational and interpretive possibilities of such a collaborative process have the potential to help audiences question the narrative and information presented by museums and cultural institutions. This paper will examine of the successes and failures of these exhibitions to reach audiences, the alternative narratives represented, and the institutional motivations or politics that encourage similar collaborative efforts.
Williams - "After the Cold War? The International Spy Museum and the US Security State"
Utilizing as its central texts the public relations materials and Cold War exhibits of Washington, DC’s privately-funded International Spy Museum, which opened to the public in 2002, this paper will interrogate the ways in which the museum’s focus on cold war espionage relies on and reifies a Cold War triumphalist narrative that justifies and legitimates U.S. geopolitical unilateralism in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. I illustrate the textual, visual, aural and architectural methods by which female sexuality is explicitly conflated in the museum with the dangers of state-based violence and the threat of Soviet/Russian espionage. I argue that this tactic makes a duplicitous femme fatale of the Soviet Union (and, by extension, its successor state, the Russian Federation) in order to facilitate the museum’s use of the Cold War as a cautionary tale to justify the “war on terror.”
Located at the intersection of feminist international relations theory, transnational feminist cultural studies, and the recent work on gender in/and/of nations and nationalisms, my work has as its foundation a mode of inquiry that assumes the operation of media and popular culture texts as sites of public pedagogy that make meaning and, therefore, directly affect material conditions and experiences—including the process of national identity construction. I argue in this paper that the performative (re)production and reification of a feminized Russian national identity at the International Spy Museum constructs knowledge about the Russian Federation out of the unresolved histories of the cold war, thus contributing to the continuing discord between the United States and Russia since 1991.
Yang - ""The Dual Spectacle of the West Kowloon Cultural District – Space, Landmark, and Culture in Hong Kong: 2001-2005"
In 1998, following Hong Kong’s return to China’s sovereignty after 155 years of British colonial rule, the newly established Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government ambitiously proclaimed that the city was to become the world capital of culture, attracting unprecedented numbers of investors and tourists alike. This vision, defined in particularized “cultural” terms, has come to dominate the Hong Kong mediascape between the years of 1998 and 2005, whereby the officials’ arbitrary decision to construct a grandiose West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD) provoked fierce public debates.
Through an analysis of the narratives surrounding the WKCD controversy, particularly regarding its canopy-shaped landmark design, I argue that the discursive exchanges between the WKCD’s official representation and its ostensible “public opinion” gathering constitute a double-spectacle that is at once imagined and staged. As imagined, it embodies a hegemonic notion of culture that is bound up with the capital-friendly leisure industry, whose claim to produce “the culture for all” in a hyper-visible, fixed “center” works precisely to conceal its socio-economically determined exclusiveness. As staged, the publicly demanded, government initiated consultation reveals the “enclosed openness” of a nominally participatory democracy within which pre-selected choices are made available for public voting. At the same time, the WKCD debate, emblematic of “post-colonial” Hong Kong’s spatial politics, presents a case in which “decentered,” competing understandings of “culture” serve to subvert its officially endowed meaning and complicate both its discursive and material possibilities.