Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2005-6: Word and Image

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 17
  • Publication
    Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Confrontation with Postmodernity
    (2006-04-01) Leone, Gerard
    This presentation, like the others of this panel, concerns itself with interactions that take place between those who create a work and those that study it, those who practice and those who theorize, not that they are exclusive characterizations. In the particular case of my project, the interaction between practitioners/theorists and a critical establishment is an adversarial one, or many times seems that way. My project is titled: Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Confrontation with Postmodernity. The immensity of the material the Venturis have produced and the variety of issues involved in tackling a term like postmodernism makes for many tangents and a far longer paper, what I'm concentrating on in this presentation is the issue which sparked this project: Robert Venturi believes there is a pervasive misconception about his work. How did this come about?
  • Publication
    Made in the USA: Rewriting Images of the Asian Fetish
    (2006-04-01) Chang, Maggie
    "My voice reveals the hidden power hidden within." A woman of Asian descent appears to be an entertainer, possibly a courtesan or geisha, wearing a pseudo-Chinese dress and hairdo; her hands are curled in front of her in an "Oriental-like" gesture as if she is dancing, and her head is tilted coyly with a cryptic smile (Figure 1). She gives a sexually suggestive expression and gaze but hesitates to speak. Another version with the same woman reads, "In silence I see. With WISDOM, I speak." These advertisements make up one part of the "Find Your Voice" Virginia Slims campaign. The campaign consisted of four different ads, each featuring women of distinctive races with stereotyping text.
  • Publication
    Vladimir Dimitrov-Maistora’s Bulgarian Madonna: Creed, Criticism, Propaganda
    (2006-04-01) Assenova, Valentina
    Of life-size height, with crossed hands on her lap, she watched me calmly and intensely, aware of her beauty and immeasurable power. Behind her, in bright hues glowed flowers and fruit. The woman appeared as if she herself was born of their gleam, but at the same time she does not merge with it, her image does not get lost in its light. She distinguishes herself; she stands apart, filling the canvas with the lightness of the nuanced tones of her festive dress, with the piercing whiteness of her face and hands. Unsurpassed in her beauty, the Mona Lisa, and also magnificent like her in dignity, the Bulgarian Madonna.
  • Publication
    Naked Power: The Phallus as an Apotropaic Symbol in the Images and Texts of Roman Italy
    (2006-04-01) Moser, Claudia
    Representations of the phallus abound in both the art and the literature of the first-century A.D. Roman world. On frescoes in both private homes and public buildings, on amulets, statues, etchings, tripods, drinking cups and vases, exaggerated phallic images, these purportedly apotropaic symbols protect the inhabitant, the passerby, the wearer, the user from outside evil. The contemporary Latin literature, Roman satire and elegy in particular (Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Horace, Tibullus), and the Priapea, a collection of poems about the phallic god Priapus, offer descriptions of the phallus and its functions that both coincide with and differ from the material examples. This paper will investigate these correspondences and discrepancies between verbal and artistic representation, and, in particular, what these similarities and inconsistencies reveal about the public function of this private imagery in the contemporary culture of ancient Roman Italy.
  • Publication
    Artist Statement
    (2006-04-01) Flake, Rebekah
    I am a senior majoring in German and minoring in art history, and am especially interested in German visual culture in the twentieth century. My thesis topic is the role that publicity and fame play in the preservation of architecture, specifically in German mass-housing developments built in the 1920s and early 1930s by progressive architects working in the Modernist style. In my opinion, what was written about them over the years influenced their reputation and has led historians to hold the physical structures in high regard. The significance of the architecture stems in part from the fact that: a) the architects themselves were eager to publicize and promote their theories; b) there were many exhibitions and therefore catalogs, press releases, and critiques drafted of avant-garde designs and applied arts; and c) these buildings fulfilled a much-discussed and often-politicized need for urban housing in post-World War I Germany.
  • Publication
    CartoGraphica
    (2006-04-01) Krueger, Tara
    The best way to begin a discussion about maps is to define what a map is and what it does. A map is a way of cataloging information with a relational property; it is an interpretive explanation of spatial relationships. It need not represent Earth, and it need not even be real. Some of the most interesting maps chart places that don’t even exist. There are as many kinds of maps as there are things to show on a map. They can show politics, geography, topography, statistics, regions, cultures, places, transportation, demographics, history, and more. The one common feature of them all is that they show, in some way, space; whatever else they do or do not display, they show something that is physically related to other things.
  • Publication
    Magrebines: Historical Representations of North African Women in 19th-Century French Oriental ism and Post-1950s North African Narrative
    (2006-04-01) Mendola, Tara
    The theme for this year's Penn Humanities forum is that of 'word and image,' a broad topic indeed. Even after deciding that my project would broadly focus on the interactions between French Orientalist and North African narrative and painting, I lacked a focus for the project that would marry it firmly to this theme. Finally, I arrived at what had always been the most obvious connection: the image of the so-called "Oriental" woman. Despite my initial fears of such a focus becoming reductive, it has in fact shed a revealing light on the interplay of these two discourses. As can be imagined, however, any attempt to attack this multivalent image without first limiting one's scope temporally, theoretically, and geographically will not only expand to an unmanageable size; it will also once again reduce the huge variety of the Arabo-Islamic nations to one reductive sigil, that of the "Arab woman." This essay will therefore confine itself to the Maghreb region, comprising the modern nations of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Further, I am concentrating on the two major temporal points: mid-to-late 19th century French Orientalist painting and narrative, and post-1950's North African francophone and Arabic narrative.
  • Publication
    The Curatorial Voice in Contemporary America
    (2006-04-01) Bubbers, Lisa
    Originally I looked to curatorial practices to investigate the theme of 'word and image' due to the interplay of words such as wall texts, brochures, catalogues and promotional cards in conjunction with the art as image. When I approached the research I began to see these various texts as a framing device, or filter, for the work. My research into curatorial practices in contemporary art examines the field's historical growth and present condition. If in this talk the explicit relationship between words and images seems lost, it is not lost, but rather embedded into the intrinsic nature of exhibition. A viewer utilizes texts to narrate an exhibit, those texts are manifestations of the curator's thoughts and intentions for the show, and these intentions are formed by a theoretical foundation. My interests grew from the microcosm of text and image relations to the larger history and condition of exhibiting contemporary art and the curatorial profession. A curator can speak personally about his or her own views of how to set up a show, but when exhibiting art is considered generally and historically, many issues come into play. Most important are issues of the art market, the institutional system, the power of the curatorial voice, and the capacity the exhibition has to echo a cultural current.
  • Publication
    The Contemporary Haggadot: Interrelations between Text and Iconography
    (2006-04-01) Breger, Sarah
    In discussing Passover the Bible states that "in every generation a person is obligated to view himself as if he too had journeyed out of Egypt." Jews have taken up this call, and on the night of April 12th Jews from all over the world will sit down to retell and relive the Exodus at a Seder - the festive meal of Passover. Indeed eighty-three percent of American Jews report that they attend Seders as opposed to the fifty-three percent who report to belong to a Synagogue.
  • Publication
    You Must Be a Duet in Everything: An Examination of the Body in Wyndham Lewis's Tarr
    (2006-04-01) Schneider, Lindsey
    Wyndham Lewis is a much-ignored Canadian born British artist who alongside Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce (all of whom he was friends with at various points in his life) helped form what we now call English High Modernism. Along with Ezra Pound in 1914, he founded the only avant-garde English art movement: Vorticism. Lewis was in his early thirties by that time, and had already joined and left the Bloomsbury Group. Although Vorticism is Lewis's creation that gets him the most attention, his work defies classification: the list of his writings contains literature, philosophy, sociology, political science, journalism, short stories, art critiques, two autobiographies, travel essays, drama, and poetry, and he edited numerous journals, while he painted dozens upon dozens of paintings and drew feverishly before he went blind in the early 1950s. His visual style in his paintings ranges from 'normal' representational portraits, to cubist, futurist, Vorticist, and various non-representational styles.