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Event Dates
Jan 23, 2009 - Jan 24, 2009
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919 Broadway
Nashville, TN 37203
Phone: 615.744.3247
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Homewood Suites by Hilton - Nashville Airport
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ARTIST ERIC FISCHL TO SPEAK AT PAINT MADE FLESH SYMPOSIUM AT FRIST CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents a major symposium Jan. 23–24, 2009, in conjunction with the exhibition Paint Made Flesh, a revisionist study of post-World War II art. The symposium features keynote speaker Dr. John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, and figurative artist Eric Fischl in addition to five noted professors and curators.
Paint Made Flesh, on view at the Frist Center Jan. 23–May 10, 2009, presents paintings created in Europe and the United States since the 1950s in which a wide range of painterly effects suggest the physical properties and cultural significance of human flesh and skin. The exhibition offers a rejoinder to the modernist orthodoxies of the mid-to-late 20th century, which favored abstraction or conceptual art, by contending that paint’s material properties make it well suited to convey metaphors of human vulnerability through images of the figure. The exhibition includes works by Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, John Currin, Eric Fischl, Lucian Freud, Leon Golub, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Pablo Picasso, Daniel Richter, Jenny Saville and others. Organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the exhibition will travel to the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) and to the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester (New York).
The symposium will offer compelling conversation about the role of figure painting as it has defined psychological and socio-historical conditions in Europe and the United States since World War II.
In addition to Eric Fischl and Dr. Elderfield, speakers include Dr. Michael Bess, chancellor’s professor of history at Vanderbilt University; Dr. Emily Braun, distinguished professor, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University New York; Dr. Susan H. Edwards, executive
director and CEO of the Frist Center; Mark Scala, chief curator of the Frist Center; and Dr. Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in art history and director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas-Austin.
Symposium Schedule
Friday, Jan. 23, 2009
5 p.m. Registration and Reception
6:30 p.m. Keynote Address
Dr. John Elderfield
“Painting Flesh and the Part that Governs”
Dr. Elderfield’s lecture will address the relationship of paint and bodily representation in critical examples drawn from the classical modernist art of the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries—from Edouard Manet to Willem de Kooning. Among other topics, Dr. Elderfield will explore how the manner in which flesh is painted reflects the status of the self-indulgent pursuit of pleasure that accompanied the foundation of modernism.
Saturday, Jan. 24, 2009
8 a.m. Registration and continental breakfast
9 a.m. Opening Remarks
9:15 a.m.
Dr. Susan H. Edwards
“The Influence of Anxiety: Painting the Figure in Cold War America”
Dr. Edwards will speak on the persistence of figurative painting in American art from 1947 through 1989. During the period of the Cold War, American art practice, including production as well as critical and commercial reception, was dominated by formal aesthetics. Abstract painting was touted by some as the only relevant avenue for the medium. Dr. Edwards will discuss the enduring viability of alternative paths and how artists working against the grain did so with anxious commitments to their own individual voices.
9:45 a.m.
Dr. Emily Braun
“Skinning the Paint”
For more than three generations, from Francis Bacon to Jenny Saville, British painters have been obsessed with analogies between the painted surface and physical desires and human vulnerability. Dr. Braun will consider the ways in which images by these artists are neither humanistic in the traditional sense of treating the body as whole and perfect, nor inhumane in the sense of casting a purely clinical eye. Instead their works are filled with an often violent, if piercing, lyricism—the result of viewing and sensing the body from new, unorthodox perspectives.
10:15 a.m. Break
10:30 a.m.
Dr. Richard Shiff
“Drawn on the Body”
Dr. Shiff’s presentation will explore the link between painting and corporeality with an emphasis on German art of the postwar generation that includes examples from older Europeans as well as from younger ones. During times of political insecurity and moral ambiguity, the hard fact of material, corporeal presence can be affirming and assuring. Visual artists of the 20th century have been appreciated for establishing a material ground for cultural practice, if only because the traditional pictorial arts such as painting— handmade and labor intensive—engage the body directly. The depicted subject of painting is often the human body itself. More importantly, the painter’s own body becomes the indexical origin of whatever he or she represents (sometimes with ironies added).
11 a.m.
Mark Scala
“Fragmentation and Reconstitution in Contemporary Painting”
Mark Scala’s presentation will propose that works by certain contemporary painters convey historical situations in which the globally homogenizing forces of economics, technology and communications are challenged by compulsions to define the self in terms of nationality, ethnicity, religion, or political viewpoint. In depicting the body as fleshless or in a state of transformation, these artists remind us that the individual is reflective of the larger “body” of society, with all its splits, seams, and shifting moods and values. If such works mirror a condition of entropy, do they also offer a way of restructuring the self to adapt to change?
11:30 a.m. Question and Answer Period
Noon Lunch
1 p.m.
Eric Fischl
“Painting is Dead”
Eric Fischl will discuss the disappearance of the body from painting and sculpture using two key points as markers in the development of modernism: Vincent van Gogh cutting the lobe of his ear off, and 100 years later, the American performance artist Chris Burden having himself shot.
2 p.m.
Dr. Michael Bess
“Networked Bodies, Sculpted Minds: The Future of Human Biological Enhancement”
Dr. Bess, who has written and lectured on the social and cultural impacts of technological advances in medicine, genetics and prosthetics, will address the potential for the wholesale reconstruction of human identity in the next century.
3 p.m. Closing Remarks
Symposium Registration
Registration for the Paint Made Flesh symposium is $30 for students and faculty; $35 for Frist Center members; and $50 for all others. The cost includes all lectures, evening reception and continental breakfast and lunch. For more information or to register, call 615.744.3247 or visit www.fristcenter.org.
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