Andrew Uroskie – Selma Last Year (1966): Site-Specificity and the Origins of Expanded Cinema
Abstract: This talk will consider “Selma Last Year,” a largely forgotten multimedia installation that took place during the Winter of 1966 as part of the New York Film Festival’s fleeting interest in Expanded Cinema. A collaboration between the street theater producer Ken Dewey, Magnum photojournalist Bruce Davidson, and Minimalist composer Terry Riley, this groundbreaking media installation juxtaposed large scale projected images, an immersive audio collage, small scale photographic prints, 16mm documentary film, and a delayed video feedback loop to create a series of intentionally disjunctive environments. During the Festival’s Expanded Cinema Symposium, Annette Michelson would explicitly dismiss Dewey’s work as a “revival of the old dream of synesthesia”— insisting upon a Modernist conception of medium-specificity as the only legitimate grounds for aesthetic radicalism. While the success of the “Structural Film” in the years immediately following might be taken as evidence for Michelson’s position, I contend that Dewey’s prescient concern for what would come to be known as “site-specificity” would prove the more enduring model for critical media aesthetics in the decades to come.
The Talk – Part One
The Talk – Part Two
The Class Responds (by Group Number)
The Speaker
Andrew V. Uroskie is Associate Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art, and Director of the Doctoral Program in Modern Art History, Criticism and Theory at Stony Brook University in New York. Broadly speaking, his work explores how durational media have helped to reframe traditional models of aesthetic production, exhibition, spectatorship, and objecthood. He has published in numerous journals and anthologies in the US, England, Italy, Spain, and Brazil, both in English and in translation. His first book, “Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art,” was recently published by the University of Chicago Press.
- Mary Flanagan – Changing the World Through Values at Play - September 15, 2014
- Caitlin Burns – Lessons from the Story Business - October 6, 2014
- Mary Flanagan – Group 1 - October 7, 2014