Event overview
As part of the Visual Cultures Guest Lecture Series, Jonathan D. Katz, a scholar of post war art and culture from the point of sexuality will be delivering a lecture entitled 'Art, Eros and the Sixties'.
This lecture explores why in the art world of the late 50s and 60s, before difference was particularized, specified, embodied, and made over into artistic identity, a single, universal human capacity--Eros--was elevated to determining status and made ground for a global politic of social liberation. This Eros was specifically not genital nor sexual pleasure, but rather, as defined by the influential Herbert Marcuse, something more akin to Freudian notions of polymorphous perversity. Invoked as solvent to the Cold War's containment culture and its multiple repressions, the liberatory potential of Eros as a mechanism of comprehensive social dissent turned precisely on its presumed communal and collective capacity to free the mind through a return to the body and its pleasures. For a few short years, a diverse group of artists, female and male, queer and straight, as different as Richard Hamilton, Lygia Clark, Franz West, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann produced an art that, in politicizing the body while obfuscating its signs of differentiation, paradoxically engendered the very specific contemporary social categories like feminist and queer that now obscure Eros' formative and foundational role.
JONATHAN D. KATZ
Scholar of post war art and culture from the vantage point of sexuality, is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, forthcoming director of its Doctoral Program in Visual Studies, as well Honorary Research Faculty at the University of Manchester, Terra Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute and Guest Curator at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Well known as an activist academic, Katz was the founding director of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University-- the first queer studies program in the Ivy League--and founding chair of the very first Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies in the United States, at City College of San Francisco. Katz is curator of a groundbreaking exhibition entitled Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, opening October 22, 2010 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery as the first major queer art exhibition in US history. Katz is now completing the eponymous book to accompany the exhibition.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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19 Nov 2009 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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