Le 21 Novembre à 12 h
Godfre Leung
Département d’arts visuels
100 Laurier, Ottawa
Salle: LRR114
Title: Support an Art Historical Fan Fiction
Description: This talk will rethink some of the classic texts of art history to write a speculative fiction of The Fountain, usually credited to Marcel Duchamp but sometimes to the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. In analyzingThe Fountain against the grain, as a medium-specific modernist sculpture as opposed to as a readymade or a work of proto-conceptual art, this talk will expound on the multiple meanings of the term “support” and what they mean for contemporary artistic practice—support in the formal sense of a sculpture’s base, pedestal, mount, or exhibition space; in the practical sense of funding and other forms of sustenance to an artist’s ability to live and create, house, and sell work; and in the feminist sense of historically uncompensated domestic labour, usually performed by women in “support” of a household. Art historical texts discussed include “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” by Linda Nochlin, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” by Griselda Pollock, and “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” by Rosalind Krauss. Also discussed will be the practice of several young Canadian woman artists who create non-monument-scale and non-site-specific indoor sculpture under the conditions of a high-density art world.
Bio: Godfre Leung is curator at Centre A: The Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. He is also a visiting scholar in the Department of Art History, Visual Art + Theory at the University of British Columbia and has previously held teaching positions at the Eastman School of Music, Ontario College of Art and Design, and St. Cloud State University, where he was an associate professor of art history. His programming work includes Pausa: Barbara Held and Benton C Bainbridge at Kiehle Gallery and International Pop at the Walker Art Center, which traveled to the Dallas Art Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art. His criticism has recently appeared in Art in America, Canadian Art, and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, among other magazines. He has also written for publications by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, and most recently the exhibition catalogue Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Empty Forest, published by The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2017, he was awarded a Minnesota Emerging Writers Award from the Jerome Foundation and a Visual Arts Fund Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for his art writing practice.
For image: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, God, ca. 1917, Philadelphia Museum of Art).