Surrogates: Embodied Histories of Sculpture in the Short 20th Century.

This symposium reconsiders the relevance of the human and humanism for twentieth-century sculpture. In the decades between 1914 and 1989 (Eric Hobsbawm’s “short century”), sculpture, which had long served as the repository for idealized representations of humankind, began to remake the contours of the body: not as copy or exemplar, but as functioning model, prosthesis, and surrogate. During this same period, competing definitions of humanity emerged from global warfare, queer and feminist activism, postcolonial nationalisms, the Civil Rights movement, and post-Bandung internationalism—ideas that challenged a modern vision of the human forged by the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. What role did sculpture play in developing this vision, and how might it serve to re-imagine or dismantle it?

The symposium will take place in person and be streamed via Zoom. Registration is not required.

Organized by Joanna Fiduccia (Yale University) and Jordan Troeller (Freie Universität Berlin), the symposium is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

https://embodiedhistoriesofsculpture.yale.edu

PROGRAM:

THURSDAY, September 29

5:30–7 pm: Mother Right: Carola Giedion-Welcker and the Prehistory of Modern Sculpture
Megan R. Luke, University of Southern California

FRIDAY, September 30

9–11 am: Embodiment
Aaron Glass - What is a Mask? Indigenous Ontologies of Carving and Kinship
Christa Noel Robbins - Figure Painting
Robert Slifkin - Sculpture as Cenotaph, or, Minimalism and Mortality

11:30–1 pm: Interiority and Figuration
Elise Archais - Firm Boundaries: Melvin Edwards in the 1960s
Namiko Kunimoto - Performing Memorial Sculpture: Shimada Yoshiko, Bourgeois Liberalism, and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism

3–5 pm: Infrastructure
Patricia Ekpo - Site, Specificity, and Antiblackness: Maren Hassinger’s Freeway Sculpture
Kajri Jain - Concrete Becoming and Unbecoming
Irene V. Small - Walls, Skins, Organic Things: On the Sociality of the Threshold

5:30–7 pm: Anne M. Wagner in conversation with Joanna Fiduccia and Jordan Troeller

SATURDAY, October 1

9–11 am: The Body Politic
Caitlin Meehye Beach - Edmonia Lewis’ Relief Work
Aglaya Glebova - Sculpture’s Growing Pains: Vera Mukhina, 1936–37
Sanjukta Sunderason - To ‘Absorb the Broken World Through the Human Modular’: Meera Mukherjee’s Ashoka at Kalinga (1972) as Epic Form

11:30–12:30 pm: Curatorial Panel
Patrizia Dander, Museum Brandhorst
Keely Orgeman, Yale University Art Gallery

3–5 pm: Enlivenment/Everyday Objects
Paisid Aramphongphan - “The Skin is Faster Than the Word”: Some Notes on the Body’s “Thingness”
Sarah Hamill - Skins, Husks, Coffins, Voids: Mary Miss in the 1970s

5:30–7 pm: Scott Burton’s Embrace
David J. Getsy, University of Virginia