SLSA Atlanta

Carrisa’s report on the GAEA conference below reminded me that I should blog about the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference I attended the weekend before last. This was the first year I didn’t present a paper, but as it was held in Atlanta this year and is probably my favorite professional conference, it was one I just couldn’t miss. SLSAers are a fun bunch, and the topics tend to be wide ranging. This year was no exception. To give you a sense of the pop-culture scholarship end of it, two of the talks I missed were "Postcolonialism without the Guilt in Joss Whedon's Firefly" and "The Turning Legacy of Decoding and its Relevance to ThunderCats." The sessions I attended this year were almost all about Duchamp in one way or another, dealing either with his art, his sources, those for whom he was a major source, and/or his artistic milieu.

James McManus (California State University, Chico) chaired a session entitled “Beyond Likeness: Propositional Statements—Displacing/Replacing the Recognized Capacity of Portraits to Represent” and presented a paper on “Dr. O’Doherty’s ‘HeArt Machine’: A Portrait of Marcel Duchamp.” Brian O’Doherty is an ex-MD-turned-artist who, in 1966, created portraits—some moving, some still—from electrocardiogram readings he took from Duchamp. Other presenters included James Housefield (UC Davis), “Starry Messenger: Marcel Duchamp and Popular Astronomy ca. 1920;” M.E. Warlick (U. of Denver), “Magritte and Alchemy: Elemental Transformations;” Anne Collins Goodyear (National Portrait Gallery), “Duchamp’s Perspective;” Hannah Wong (UT at Austin), “Portrait of a Lady: Humor and Francis Picabia’s Mechanomorphic object Portrait, Jeune fille américane;” and Kate Dempsey (UT at Austin), “Seeing Double: Ray Johnson and Marcel Duchamp.” James McManus and Anne Collins Goodyear also held a wonderful panel discussion on Jean Crotti’s Portrait sur mésure de Marcel Duchamp. McManus and Goodyear recently coauthored a book, Inventing Marcel Duchamp: the Dynamics of Portraiture (MIT Press, 2009), which I highly recommend.

“Artmaking as an Imaginary Solution: Alfred Jarry as an Intellectual Source for Twentieth Century Art,” chaired by my former UT classmate Peter Mowris, and featuring papers by Fae Brauer (U. of East London) and Michael Taylor (Philadelphia Museum of Art) was another very Duchampian session. Taylor’s Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés exhibition—closing Nov. 29—has been met with deservedly rave reviews. In case you’re not familiar with Jarry (French, 1873-1907), he coined the term “pataphysics,” and is best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), which was a key source for Surrealist poets and artists, and for Duchamp’s “playful physics.” The best description of pataphysics I’ve heard is that pataphysics is to metaphysics as metaphysics is to physics, which suggests to me “mind over mind,” or as the title of the panel puts it, presents “imaginary solutions” to real problems.

“Occultism and Science in 20th-Century Art” was another outstanding session. Linda Henderson (UT at Austin) presented “’Four-Dimensional Vistas’: Claude Bragdon’s Synthesis of Theosophy, Ether Physics, and the Fourth Dimension in the 1910s;” Ashley Schmiedekamp Busby (UT at Austin) gave a paper dealing with the tarot as a visual and conceptual source for Surrealists; and Dante scholar, Arielle Saiber (Bowdoin College) presented “The Architecture of the Afterlife: Paul Laffoley’s The Divine Comedy Triptych.” I’m a big fan of Laffoley—a story for another post—and Saiber’s talk was inspiring. I hope to bring her to speak at GMOA sometime.

Isabel Wunshe presented a paper on the Russian artist and composer Mikhail Matiushin and the properties of crystal growth, which drew me into a remarkable session where fellow speakers Drew Ayers (GA State), Maria Aline Ferreira (U. of Aveiro, Portugal), and Christina Nguyen Hung (Clemson) presented papers on works of art created by using cutting edge science and technology, such as DNA models and lab-grown neurons. The neuron art is particularly awesome. You can see some of Hung's work here.