Soundings from the Painterly Pacific: A Symposium
Featuring Chriscinda Henry, Jeff Moser and Angela Vanhaelen
April 12, 2013, Arts Building160
Coffee at 9:45, Papers 10 am-12:30 pm, discussion over lunch
鈥淲hat do artists do during wars? 鈥� Is direct confrontation with conflict the only way for art to take war in?鈥� So asks Svetlana Alpers in The Vexations of Art (2005). Noting the marginal place of war in seventeenth century Dutch art, Alpers appeals to an oblique engagement with conflict that she calls 鈥渢he painterly pacific.鈥� Fluid and suggestive, Alpers鈥檚 phrase positively invites further thinking. In dialogue with Media@平特五不中鈥檚 2012-3 theme of 鈥淢edia, War and Conflict,鈥� this symposium uses Alpers鈥檚 phrase as prompt for considering ways in which artists, beholders and even objects variously displace or placidly conceal violence. Borrowing our title from Soundings from the Atlantic, Oliver Wendell Holmes鈥檚 classic meditation on photography, the symposium poses the painterly pacific between mood and place, between medium and liquid geography.