History of Art graduate students give short presentations followed by discussion.
Jennifer Gear, "Audience for an Epidemic: Memorializing Plague in Seventeenth-Century Venice"
Thirty-five years after the devastating plague of 1630-31 in Venice, Antonio Zanchi completed his commemorative work for the stairway of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, The Virgin Appears to the Plague-Stricken. This painting, with its scattered corpses and accumulation of contaminated goods, fear-inducing pizzigamorti (body clearers), and triumphant sacred intercessors, is an exercise in dramatic effect. It seeks to elicit a visceral response in viewers, evoking fear and revulsion, pity and piety. This paper will examine the ways in which Zanchi created an embodied viewing experience on the stairwell through his incorporation of the built environment and use of staging techniques developed in the visual and performance arts in seicento Venice.
Grant Mandarino, "Grosz's Haß or: The Art of Class Consciousness"
George Grosz's drawings of the 1920s are heralded for their incisive social commentary and economy of means. Yet they tend to be viewed today as the product of a misanthropic personality rather than a hatred born of political commitment. Originally conceived for an audience radicalized by the turmoil of the immediate post-WWI period and deployed in the pages of Communist-oriented publications, Grosz's images spoke to a moment of profound social polarization. Their ability to translate structural foes into indentifiable enemies made them, in the eyes of partisan critics, uniquely able to foster class conscious ways of seeing. This talk explores the development of an explicitly Communist form of graphic satire during the Weimar Republic and its relationship to the vicissitudes of partisan ideology by looking at how the sardonic vision of artists like Grosz became the very image of class hatred.
Jennifer Gear, "Audience for an Epidemic: Memorializing Plague in Seventeenth-Century Venice"
Thirty-five years after the devastating plague of 1630-31 in Venice, Antonio Zanchi completed his commemorative work for the stairway of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, The Virgin Appears to the Plague-Stricken. This painting, with its scattered corpses and accumulation of contaminated goods, fear-inducing pizzigamorti (body clearers), and triumphant sacred intercessors, is an exercise in dramatic effect. It seeks to elicit a visceral response in viewers, evoking fear and revulsion, pity and piety. This paper will examine the ways in which Zanchi created an embodied viewing experience on the stairwell through his incorporation of the built environment and use of staging techniques developed in the visual and performance arts in seicento Venice.
Grant Mandarino, "Grosz's Haß or: The Art of Class Consciousness"
George Grosz's drawings of the 1920s are heralded for their incisive social commentary and economy of means. Yet they tend to be viewed today as the product of a misanthropic personality rather than a hatred born of political commitment. Originally conceived for an audience radicalized by the turmoil of the immediate post-WWI period and deployed in the pages of Communist-oriented publications, Grosz's images spoke to a moment of profound social polarization. Their ability to translate structural foes into indentifiable enemies made them, in the eyes of partisan critics, uniquely able to foster class conscious ways of seeing. This talk explores the development of an explicitly Communist form of graphic satire during the Weimar Republic and its relationship to the vicissitudes of partisan ideology by looking at how the sardonic vision of artists like Grosz became the very image of class hatred.
| Building: | Tappan Hall |
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| Website: | |
| Event Type: | Lecture / Discussion |
| Tags: | Art, Visual Arts |
| Source: | Happening @ Michigan from History of Art |
