Amateurism Across the Arts
Fri Mar 09, 2018
9:30 AM - 6:15 PM
Hearst Museum of Anthropology
Amateurism Across the Arts Conference
Friday, March 9, 2018, 9:30am-6:15pm
Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology
Amateurism Across the Arts is an exploration of vernacular, popular, fannish, kitsch, informal, self-taught, user-generated, and DIY production in music, architecture, literature, the visual arts, dance, and new media especially in relation to raced, classed, and gendered notions of value. How do the implicitly skilled arts rupture and reorganize themselves around hierarchies of taste? And how can critical race and feminist/queer scholarship account for hobbyist that is, extra-institutional, self-organized, or improvised modes of cultural production and circulation? If amateurism has been traditionally disavowed in modernist and avant-garde historiographies, it is at the same time persistentlyeven obsessivelyinvoked, and is hence inextricably woven into those discourses.
The symposium asks how the high and the low are porous constructions by looking at the ways that these charged terms have been deployed and dismantled across several artistic disciplines, particularly as we examine the alternative economies and systems of distribution that attend such forms of making. While it has become commonplace for fine artists to recruit untrained participants into their practices, it is vital to acknowledge that many non-professional forms of making grow out of necessity and survival. In addition, though amateur is frequently used as a shorthand for the unpracticed and/or uninteresting, this conference seeks to understand its connections to its root word amare: a complex outgrowth of critical investment, pleasure, and love.
Schedule of Events
9:30am: Door Open to the Public
10am: Welcome by ARC Director Julia Bryan-Wilson
10:20: Self-organized student hip-hop dance performance
10:30-12:30: Street Modernists: Urban Undoings of High and Low
God is Beautiful and He Loves Beauty
Talinn Grigor, Professor of Art History, University of California, Davis
Modern and VernacularHow Brazilian mid-century architecture problematizes this inherent contradiction
Fernando Luiz Lara, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, University of Texas
Response by Greg Castillo, Associate Professor of Architecture, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley
12:30-1:30: Lunch Break
1:30-3:30: Self-Made: Cultural Production Outside of Industry
Piracy and Fandom: DIY Media Distribution
Abigail De Kosnik, Associate Professor, Berkeley Center for New Media and Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Post-autonomous literature in Latin America: the radical art of poverty
Cecilia Palmeiro, Professor, Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, NYU in Buenos Aires and National University of Tres de Febrero
Response by Natalia Brizuela, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Literature & Culture, Spanish and Portuguese Department, UC Berkeley
3:30-3:40: Self-Taught Student Music Performance
3:45-5:45: Everyday Avant-Gardes and Non-Elite Evaluations
Kenner und Liebhaber Revisited: Advanced Music and Sound since 1950
Benjamin Piekut, Associate Professor, Music, Cornell University
Kaisik Wong: Extravagant Appropriation
Marci Kwon, Assistant Professor, Art & Art History, Stanford University
Response by Stephanie Syjuco, Assistant Professor, Art Practice, UC Berkeley
5:45-6:15: Student DIY Couture Fashion Show, hosted by Derrick Duren (Arts + Design Student Committee)
6:15-7 Reception
Amateurism Across the Arts is an event hosted by the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley, and co-sponsored in part by UC Berkeleys Division of Arts & Humanities, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of Californias Humanities Research Institute, Judith Butlers Maxine Elliot Endowed Chair Funds, the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Additional support is provided by Departments of History of Art, Spanish and Portuguese, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Critical Theory, and the Center for Race & Gender.