Calendar
Event Flyer
Stephanie Grimes | Thursday, October 17 | 107 S. Kedzie | 6pm
Stephanie Grimes is an Art Historian and Digital Scholarship Strategist. Grimes creates digital resources for cultural institutions, focusing on the intersection of digital scholarship and public engagement. Grimes is committed to increasing both usability and innovation within the arts and humanities.
For an Institute of Light:
Absolute Film and Beyond at the Bauhaus
7:00pm || Friday, October 18, 2019 || Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum || Michigan State University
547 E Circle Dr, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
In 1926, Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy proclaimed, “give me or the Bauhaus an experimental film laboratory, then we can begin our work.” He sought to put into practice in Dessau the visionary ideals of his own groundbreaking multi-media treatise, Painting, Photography, Film, published the previous year in the school’s Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus books) series. While Moholy’s plan for a film school at the Bauhaus failed to materialize in Germany, the school’s faculty and students experimented widely in film and moving images, ranging from abstract student films and “coloured light plays” to various workshop-based encounters with the materiality of film, evident in “celluloid collages” and the widespread use of the form of the filmstrip in posters, “typophoto” scripts, exhibition design, and architectural publications. The Bauhaus also hosted a range of film screenings and lectures in the 1920s featuring the European avant-garde, as well as scientific, instructional, and animated films. If there was no formal “laboratory” for filmmaking at the Bauhaus, film, and an expansive idea of the cinematic, were omnipresent at the school.
This program gestures to this range of Bauhaus enthusiasm about film by recreating a program of “Absolute Film” first screened at the sold-out, 900-seat Ufa Palast in Berlin in 1925 and later repeated at the Bauhaus the following year. Featuring major works of the European avant-garde that intersected with Bauhaus aesthetic strategies and utopian aspirations, our selections expand on the Absolute Film program to also include a few examples of Moholy’s own filmmaking and film theory, from his early experiments in Germany to a few of the films produced during his rebooting of the Bauhaus in Chicago, beginning in 1937. There and through World War II, Moholy finally realized his ambitions for an “institute of light.”
—Programmed by Justus Nieland & Joshua Yumibe
Films
Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, Germany, 1921, 3m)
Symphonie Diagonale (Viking Eggeling, France, 1924, 9m)
Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, France, 1923–24, 14m)
Lichtspiel Opus 2, 3, & 4 (Walter Ruttmann, Germany, 1921, 1924, 1925, 10m)
Der Sieger (Walter Ruttman, Germany, 1922, 3 min)
Entr’Acte (René Clair and Francis Picabia, France, 22m)
Lightplay: Black, White, Grey (Moholy-Nagy, Germany, 1926–1930, 6m)
Design Workshops, (selections) (Moholy-Nagy, USA, 1940-1944, 10m)
In collaboration with 100 Years of Bauhaus: http://linglang.msu.edu/degree-programs/german/bauhaus
Broad Underground is an ongoing collaboration between the MSU Broad, Film Studies Program, and Department of English at MSU. This year’s partnering venue is The Robin Theatre in REO Town, Lansing, with special thanks to the Lansing Public Media Center.
Alfredo Gisholt | Thursday, October 24 | 107 S. Kedzie | 6pm
Alfredo Gisholt is a Mexican artist and educator based in Boston, Massachusetts. His work is an energetic and layered mixture of abstract and figural language, connecting history and the present. Gisholt is an Assistant Professor of painting and drawing at Brandeis University.
Dr. Karen Mary Davalos | Wednesday, November 6 | 105 S. Kedzie | 6pm
Dr. Karen Mary Davalos is a Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota. She has published widely on Chicana/o art, spirituality, and museums. Davalos most recently published Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata Since the Sixties (2017), The Mexican Museum of San Francisco Papers, 1971-2006(2010) and Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (2001).
Caitlin Cherry |Thursday, November 14 | 107 S. Kedzie | 6pm Caitlin Cherry is an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and maintains a hybrid practice of painting and sculpture installation with reference to history and present-day politics. Cherry carefully renders chaotic figurative compositions on canvases to challenge presumptions about perception, authenticity, and beauty, visually communicate how entangled the individual, and their image-avatar, is with society and technology and merges them into larger multimedia works.
10:00am – Symposium, “Toward an Expansive Definition of Genocide” – John Cox, UNC Charlotte
11:00am – “Can the Spanish Genocide Speak?” – Scott Boehm, Michigan State University
12:00pm – Roundtable Discussion
- Almudena Carracedo, Film Director
- John Cox, UNC Charlotte
- Sebastiaan Faber, Oberlin College
- Cristina Moreiras-Menor, University of Michigan
- Joseba Gabilonda, Michigan State University
Shinto in Contemporary Japan: From Basic Teachings to Anime
From core principles to the ways Shinto is practiced today, this talk will address shrines for sports, fertility and protection from STDs, appropriation by popular culture (such as in anime and advertisements), and new spirituality movements including the power spot boom.
Dr. Stephen Covell
Chair of the Department of Comparative Religion and the Mary Meader Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University. Dr. Covell was the founding director of WMU’s Soga Japan Center and has published widely on Buddhism and other Japanese religious topics.
Sponsored by the Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities, IAH Connecting Pedagogy and Practice Fund, Department of Religious Studies, Asian Studies Center, and MSU Japan Council.
Luis A. Sahagun | Wednesday, November 20 | Broad Art Museum | 7pm
Luis Sahagun is an AAHD Artist-in-Residence: Critical Race Studies. Sahagun’s drawings, sculptures, paintings, and performances confront the palpable inescapability of race and transforms art into an act of reclamation. As a previously undocumented immigrant and former laborer, Sahagun’s work focus on the importance of Latinx cultures and contributions in order to combat the anti-immigration and anti-Latinx national rhetoric that persists throughout the country.
Support for this lecture is provided by the MSU Federal Credit Union, Broad Art Museum, The College of Arts and Letters, and the Department of Art, Art History, and Design.
Dr. Huey Copeland | Thursday, November 21 |MSU Library Green Room | 7pm
Dr. Huey Copeland is Associate Professor of Art History, and affiliated faculty in the Critical Theory Cluster at Northwestern. His writing focuses on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field. Copeland will present the keynote lecture for the 2019 Art History & Visual Culture Undergraduate Symposium.