17th Annual Undergraduate Art History Symposium

The 17th Annual Undergraduate Art History Symposium took place on Wednesday, April 7th, 2021 from 5:30-7pm over Zoom video conferencing. Presented by the UBC Art History Students' Association, Undergraduate Journal of Art History, and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory.

About the Symposium: We aim to foster a supportive environment for research at the undergraduate level. Students present their research in order to receive feedback and showcase undergraduate research on art history and visual culture. Their abstracts are published in the physical print publication of the UBC Undergraduate Journal of Art History, and the entire essays are made available online.

MATIÈRES RÉELLES: VIRTUAL UTOPIAS OF THE XENOCORE

Lewis Reid

The proliferation of handheld devices, accessible internet, and global social-connective sites in the past decade has necessitated a rethinking of how we understand cyberspace in relation to the ‘real’. Platforms such as Instagram have grown to somewhat contend—rather than compliment—the physical realm. This growth has allowed for any manipulation of images to become reality within cyberspace, opening up the possibilities of a virtual utopia. In her seminal text on posthumanism, Donna Haraway imagines such a utopia built by the cyborg: an ontological being that is responsible for rupturing the previously fixed notions of gender, race, and species. Its primary directive is of progressive political work through the scrambling of societal, economic, and biological borders.

I argue that these cyborgs are most contemporarily expressed in the recent growth of a subculture I call ‘Xenocore’. Following Haraway’s theories, ‘Xenocore’ proponents use makeup, prosthetics, and photo-manipulation software to alter their bodies into resembling grotesque and fleshy agender humanoids. The creation of these humanoids in turn deconstructs the boundaries through their overtly-posthuman appearance. The virtual cyberspace facilitates the creation and dissemination of such humanoids to an exactitude that couldn’t possibly exist in our physical world. Thus, the progressive political work that the cyborgs of Xenocore carry out establishes a virtual, posthuman utopia in the depths of cyberspace.

SHIFTING CONCEPTIONS OF PUBLIC SPECTATORSHIP AND 1970S FEMINIST POLITICS IN MARY MISS’S PERIMETERS/PAVILIONS/DECOYS

Tiffany Huang

Multiple movements characterized the art world of the 1970s. With its inception dating to a decade earlier, earth art was still in development. Second-wave feminist politics were well underway. And there emerged postmodernist approaches that deconstructed master narratives, recognizing that plurality, rather than homogeneity, constitutes culture. Although Mary Miss’s  Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (1977-1978) has been linked individually to each of the movements aforementioned, there have been limited attempts to draw connections between all three of them.

Through the use of visual analysis, this paper will argue that understanding Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys as a piece of feminist earth art requires one to contemplate the shifting conceptions of the public that are embedded in Miss’s work. Elucidating this position requires first and foremost a consideration of the artwork’s basic formal qualities. In particular, I will draw attention to Rosalind Krauss’s emphasis on defining the Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys as a “site construction” rather than a sculpture. Then, the earthwork will be situated within discourses that have attributed its significance to factors beyond denotational initiatives—namely, to redefinitions of public spectatorship. By public spectatorship, I mean the ways in which everyday individuals may experience a work of art in the public sphere. For a start, Miss has stated that the direct involvement of the spectator constitutes a key feature of her oeuvre. In addition to being easily accessible by the public, this priority is evident in the manner she integrates her work into its respective context of a publicly-owned park, as well as in the opportunities that she provides for spectators to physically engage with the pieces. Eleanor Heartney and Sarah Hamill extend Miss’s perspective on public involvement. Heartney articulates public spectatorship as “a realm where communal and private experiences coexist.” It is this co-existence that Hamill underscores in connecting Miss’s earthworks to the context of second-wave feminist politics. During the 1970s, many second-wave feminists aimed to fulfill a shared agenda for women that recognized the plurality of their experiences, despite factors like race, nation and class. With all the redefinitions of public spectatorship that it embodies, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys demonstrates how contemplating intersections between contemporary movements can lead to new ways of interpreting an artwork. 

EXAGGERATION, HUMOUR, AND VULGARITY: A BLACK CAMP READING OF KARA WALKER’S MARVELOUS SUGAR BABY

Neelum Khalsa

Kara Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby, a sugar-coated foam sculpture of a naked Southern mammy, was the central piece of the artist’s 2014 installation at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn. Walker’s ambiguous use of negative racial images has been interpreted as destabilizing the mammy stereotype and ridiculing the black female body. This essay uses Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” as an aesthetic framework for understanding Walker’s techniques of black camp, which include exaggeration, dark humour, and vulgarity. These are visible in Sugar Baby’s monumental scale, impassive features, and graphically sexualized body, while her depiction as a powerful sphinx contradicts her identity as a domestic house slave. Walker compels the viewer to gaze at Sugar Baby with both desire and discomfort so as to question how racist images function. With this site-specific work that was exhibited in a public art venue, Walker exercised a subversive power in provoking visitors with the ambivalent nature of Sugar Baby, which titillated, confused, and entertained her audience. The resulting selfies and video footage created an additional work of performance art and a nihilistic reflection on America’s culture of racism and misogyny.