VISUAL STUDIES IN A STATE OF EMERGENCY

April 4-5, 2003, Cornell University

The symposium will bring together scholars and practitioners at the intersection of visual production and academic practice, artworld and theoryworld, to consider the implications of critical aesthetics for the global public sphere.

“Visual studies’ is the academic recognition of the centrality of the visual in contemporary life. Rather than being a simple addition to existing university forms, it has the capacity to alter those forms. Idioms of the visual are nomadic, defying the borders staked out among academic disciplines, high/ low and sub- cultures, nation-state polities, and ethnic identities – questioning the territorial limits and linear histories on which such differences traditionally depend.

What does the academic recognition of these nomadic practices entail? How can “Visual Studies” support their creative and critical effect. How does their criticality challenge the primacy of the visual itself? How do aesthetic practices, in the context of the new media, become political practices in a STATE OF EMERGENCY?

Participants in the Symposium will be asked to give presentations that open up discussion among themselves and with the audience.

Visual scholars and practitioners from the region (where programs of visual studies are particularly well developed) are encouraged to attend this Cornell Symposium, in anticipation of future collaborations.

PROGRAM: VISUAL STUDIES IN A STATE OF EMERGENCY (April 4/5)

Friday, April 4: Session 1: "Cyber-Activism, Performance, and the New Politics"

Participants: BAGHDAD SNAPSHOT ACTION, THE YES-MEN

Saturday, April 5: Session 2: “The Nomadic Body”

Participants: PAUL VANOUSE . PHIL MALLORY JONES

Session 3 “Challenging the Primacy of Vision”

Participants: JORDAN CRANDALL. JENNIFER FISCHER AND JIM DROBNICK

As background for the symposium, here are some of the issues that have been raised in discussions of the Cornell Program for Visual Studies.

1. IMAGINATION. How do image-idioms interact with the traditional languages of history, literary criticism, social theory, and science? How does aesthetic pleasure become critical? Can intellectual reflection and creative practice be framed in a new way?

2. GLOBALIZATION. How can “Visual Studies” open up a space of critical reflection that transcends the insularity of theoryworld and artworld, and connects meaningfully to a larger public sphere? Can we conceive of changed relationships between artists and educators, curators and critics, intellectuals and publics? How does the education of critical imagination taking place within the academy meet the challenges of the global public sphere, and the inequities of representation within it?

3. CURATION. “Visual Studies” encourages the integration of museum, cinema, and performance programming into academic work, of urban studies into theory and history of architecture, and of computer science into arts and humanities. “Visual studies” also links the university to the general culture in a different way. How is a university arts festival different from more commercially motivated venues? What happens to the matrix of knowledge and power when professors function inventively as curators, and when artist/image-producers are understood as practicing theorists? How is the production and reception of visual culture affected? How is “art” redefined?