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Recap: 2012 IFA In-House Symposium

From left to right: Robert Brennan, Marci Kwon, and Lauren Jacobi at the 2012 IFA In-House Symposium,
January 27th, 2012. Photograph by Nita Roberts.

On Friday January 27th students and faculty filled the lecture hall for the in-house portion of the Institute of Fine Arts—Frick Symposium on the History of Art. A very dapper Alex Coyle, who coordinated the symposium along with Iman R. Abdulfattah, introduced the event as “an opportunity for IFA students to present their original research to the community.” PhD students Robert Brennan, Lauren Jacobi, and Marci Kwon delivered thirty-minute papers that summarized three very impressive—yet very different —scholarly projects. Though several professors were in attendance, I was pleasantly surprised at the strong student turnout. One rarely sees such a degree of IFA camaraderie outside the (cell phone-)friendly confines of the marble room. In this spirit I would like to share my thoughts on each of my fellow students’ presentations as well as the subsequent commentary.

Robert Brennan began the symposium with a compelling and thoughtful paper called “Modernism in the Age of Automation: David Smith in Italy.” Brennan argued that David Smith’s 1962 Voltri sculptures reflect a crisis of modernism in the arts precipitated by the so-called second industrial revolution of the 1950s. In the Voltri series Smith welded together found industrial remnants in order to create sculptures that evoke the human form and allude to art history in a way that is both critical and modern. Brennan treats the components of the sculptures as signs—signs that often signify the human, or at least the relics of humanity, in industrial production that had become increasingly automatized by the early 1960s. I found Brennan’s semiotic approach very effective and, though I usually cringe at psychoanalysis, I was even relatively convinced by his assertion that the Voltri sculptures represent an aesthetic sublimation of human anxiety and desire caused by the dual modernist-industrial crisis. Brennan received warm praise from Professor Nochlin and interesting questions from Kopcke and Slifkin, who both wanted to know more about the role and context of the spectator. My only critique is that I wish Brennan’s voice had been as strong as his argument! Perhaps I have been spoiled by the more intimate round-table format of our seminar courses, but I truly strained to hear Brennan and the other two presenters. Professor Kopcke apparently agreed with me, and took a moment at the end of the symposium to admonish everyone for not speaking slowly or loudly enough.

With Lauren Jacobi’s clever and well researched “Money and Merit: The monti de pietà in Early Modern Italy,” we remained in Italy but moved back in time about 500 years. I found this transition a bit jarring, but so goes the non-thematic symposium. Based on a tremendous amount of original research, Jacobi proposed that changes in monti di pietà architectural style and decoration illustrate the evolution of the monti from Christian charity lenders to institutionalized banks. As a note, the term is now sometimes used to refer to pawnshops. Jacobi’s research demonstrated that the monti underwent a physical transformation in the seventeenth century by adopting more monumental architecture and using the imago pietatis as prominent building decoration. These external and iconographical changes prompted a change in the people’s conception of the monti, institutions which were at once economic and religious, secular and sacred. Jacobi finished by investigating the roles of two early modern cultural systems as they intersected in the monti: Christianity and mercantilism. Both systems involved the exchange of symbolic tokens in order to broker an understanding of abstract concepts such as salvation and wealth, and, as Jacobi argued, a monte di pietà was one of the places in which this exchange took place. While Professor Nochlin brought up an insightful point about the later interaction of money and religion in the context of Protestantism, I found myself stuck on one point in particular. Jacobi mentioned that all monti capped their loan interest rates at 5%. Now, why can’t we just reinstate the monti di pietà for graduate students?

With Marci Kwon’s ambitious “‘Just Free Yourselves’: Robert Rauschenberg’s ROCI China,” we shifted gears both chronologically and geographically, moving to 1980s China. Using documentary film footage from the Rauschenberg archives, Kwon reconstructed and reinterpreted the controversial exhibition. Instead of construing ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange) as an episode of Western paternalism or an instance of Chinese artists merely copying Rauschenberg’s example, Kwon created a kind of transcultural translation metaphor. She asserted, “ROCI China is not a static exhibition but a literal and figurative conversation between Rauschenberg and Chinese artists.” Over the course of this dialogue, Rauschenberg learned from and was influenced by the Chinese just as several Chinese artists absorbed Rauschenberg’s ideas. Kwon elegantly noted that the ROCI China conversation was characterized by the successful translation of some ideas and the “untranslateability” of others. She carefully avoided the word “influence,” but, perhaps problematically, used words like “guided,” “shaped,” and “affected” to describe the impact of Rauschenberg’s exhibition on an entire generation of Chinese artists. Still, Kwon wisely emphasized the ways in which Rauschenberg incorporated Chinese ideas in his work, such as in Summerhall, and the ways in which Chinese artists metabolized and adapted Rauschenberg’s lessons in their work. Thus, Kwon succeeded in maintaining the always-difficult assertion of truly two-sided exchange.

Overall, I was quite impressed by the quality of the research projects and the clarity with which the students presented their work. In addition, I thoroughly enjoyed Professors Nochlin and Kopcke’s candid comments, as well as customary cheese board that followed the symposium. I had hoped the student audience would be a bit more vocal, but must confess that I too remained silent. Nonetheless, a job well done to all and a hearty congratulations and good luck to the student selected to represent us at the IFA—Frick Symposium in April!

Natalie Bunnell is an MA candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

Editor’s Note: Congratulations to Robert Brennan, who has been selected to represent the IFA at the IFA—Frick Symposium on April 20th!

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