SHERA Panel at CAA

Dear SHERA Members:

There will be an official SHERA panel this year at CAA in Seattle. Sarah 
Dadswell, the organizer of the panel and one of the speakers, requested 
that the abstracts be distributed to SHERA members, as they did not appear 
on the CAA Conference website.

If you are attending the conference, please take note of this panel, as it 
is sure to be fascinating.

Pamela Kachurin



CAA Annual Conference/Abstracts for SHERA panel
5:30-7:00pm, February 19 2004


Dear SHERA Members:<br><br>
There will be an official SHERA panel this year at CAA in Seattle. Sarah
Dadswell, the organizer of the panel and one of the speakers, requested
that the abstracts be distributed to SHERA members, as they did not
appear on the CAA Conference website.<br><br>
If you are attending the conference, please take note of this panel, as
it is sure to be fascinating.<br><br>
Pamela Kachurin<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>CAA Annual Conference/Abstracts for SHERA panel <br>
5:30-7:00pm, February 19 2004<br><br>
<br>
Consuming the Avant-Garde: Russia, Eastern and Central Europe<br>
Chair: Jane A. Sharp, Rutgers University <br><br>

</b>This session explores the relationship between the producers,
mediators and consumers of avant-garde art and visual arts of the region.
It draws on current research which transcends the popular perception of
this art as homogenous, and highlights the on-going process of re-mapping
the diversity of the avant-garde heritage and its influence on the global
stage. Many issues relating to the production and consumption of the
avant-garde in the first two decades of the twentieth century have been
mirrored in the final two decades. This session will consider questions
pertaining to the increased access and consumption of the avant-garde;
the targeted audience; the implication of new bourgeoisies; taste,
fashion; media manipulation and marketing strategies; the concept of the
independent avant-garde artist; financial and bureaucratic pressures of
governmental establishments versus new galleries and patrons of
art.&nbsp; In light of the social, ethnic, economic, political and
cultural changes, which have taken place in the respective countries,
this session will also consider whether methodologies of the avant-garde
and curatorial practices maintain their relevance today. <br><br>
<b>Constructing identity: The image of Russian Futurism 1910-1914 in
contemporary Russian media<br><br>

Sarah Dadswell, University of Sheffield, UK<br><br>
</b>Peter Bürger argued that what distinguished the avant-garde of the
early twentieth-century from previous modernist groups was its ability to
revitalize art and bring it back from the social abstraction, autonomy
and elitism of the academies into the social sphere with a dialogic
progression or development with the public. Taking into consideration the
increasingly market-led economy of the 1910s, where wealthy
industrialists rather than the State were the principal patrons of new
art forms, this paper explores the relationship between the ever-dominant
role of the art critic and the development of an identifiable Russian
Futurist artistic movement, through the medium of visual representations
in contemporary Russian media.<br><br>
It is not by chance that the heyday of pre-Revolutionary Russian Futurism
coincided with the explosion of newspapers and other printed media, in
particular a thriving Penny Press and cheap popular fiction. Based on my
proposal that social empowerment of the lower-classes and marginal
inhabitants of Russian urban society constituted one of the multiple
subtexts of Russian Futurism of this period, I will argue how the
abundance of Futurist images in contemporary media transcended the issues
of illiteracy and broadened public access to the Futurist discourse. The
images will be discussed in terms of ‘constructing celebrity status’,
Futurist manipulation of the media, recognition of a Futurist aesthetic,
and targeted audience.<br><br>
<br>
&nbsp;<br>
<b>“Five o' clock on the sun”: Women artists' film and video in Estonia
and Hungary<br><br>

Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Southampton, UK<br><br>
</b>The proposed paper aims to address women's investment in video and
film (as visual arts media) and the impact of feminist politics on these
practices in diverse, but ultimately interconnected, socio-cultural
contexts in Eastern Europe, in this case Hungary and Estonia. The paper
will consider the work of specific artists to address received and/or
radically reformulated notions of avant-garde practice and to examine the
ideological contexts framing the production and circulation of this body
of work. In the West - a term often defining a 'centre' for 'peripheries'
that it produces - film and video have mostly been associated with the
emergence of a neo-avant-garde the political impact of which remains the
subject of an ongoing debate. Today the move from feminism to
'post-feminism', occurring simultaneously in 'centres' and 'peripheries'
because of the processes of globalisation that have redefined our
relationship to the rhythm of history as such, has intensified the
complexity of such debates. By focusing on specific cultural spaces, the
argument will deploy a politically motivated comparative methodology to
reflect on the implications of situated readings for feminist theory at
large but also to avoid the pitfalls of a debilitating cultural
relativism. The title of this paper, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s phrase, ‘five
o'clock on the sun’, is used here to highlight the difficulties
encountered in intercultural research projects that attempt to read and
'explain' meaning by mobilising a dialectical space for the articulation
of critical differences that hardly negate the impact of persistent
totalities.<br><br>
<br>

<b>What is Dead When A Russian Nonconformist Dies? <br>
<i>Obituaries of the &quot;Golden Ages&quot; of Timur Novikov<br><br>
</i>Ivor A Stodolsky, University of Helsinki, Finland<br><br>
</b>Obituaries of the Leningrad/Saint-Petersburg avant-garde artist and
cultural ideologue Timur Novikov (1958-2002) have described his death as
signifying the &quot;end of an era&quot;. The current paper sets out to
delineate the <i>multiple eras </i>obituarists have invoked in their
description of Novikov, whose creative activities dominated Petersburg
avant-garde movements across the Soviet/post-Soviet watershed. Narratives
of the end have a rightful place in the genre of obituary, but this is
clearly also the locus of symbolic post-mortems and trend-setting for
future historical evaluation. Hence an eye is also kept on the
ideological and institutional position of the obituarists themselves.
Concepts from Bourdieu and Bakhtin will be adapted to the debate on the
Russian intelligentsia of the period, forming a theoretical background
and methodology. Ostensible eras of foremost interest are: the
underground culture and avant-garde of 80s Leningrad, the bacchanalia of
perestroika, Russian postmodernist irony, and the post-Soviet age of the
revival of pre-revolutionary Russian culture.<br><br>
<br><br>
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