From Playground to Fetish: The Identity of (the) Mary Jane

Cartoon characters Buster Brown and his sister Mary Jane both wore Mary Jane shoes in 1905. The style was practical for active children – easy to don and securely fastened to busy feet. Yet by the turn of the 21st century, Mary Jane styles have been adopted by the high fashion industry and fetish culture in forms that are considerably less practical for certain forms of activity. This research traces the transition of the Mary Jane through the twentieth century, from the feet of children to the pages of Vogue and ultimately the couch of Freud. Along the way, this trajectory is analyzed to determine how the functionality of Mary Janes shifts from the playgrounds of childhood to the catwalks of adults

Strange Movements: The Art of Appendages in Contemporary Practice

What is it about limbs – feet, fingers and arms, ears, noses and toes - that capture imagination across all media? This panel seeks to understand ways in which appendages provoke new thought and representations in current art practice. As implements, design components and conveyers of fantasy and erotic appeal, they serve not only as subject matter, but also as instruments of creative production. From plaster cast to erotic fetish, appendages have long played a role in artists’ vision and viewers’ perception. When removed (physically or contextually) from the body, they constitute dynamic components in the theater of human complexity. Expanding to the non-human realm, a fin, a fang, a claw or tentacle immediately calls up frightening fantasy. By way of example, consider images of feet. One has only to view the tortured beauty of Géricault’s “Study of Feet and Hands,” the religious associations of “Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles” (Durer, Tintoretto), or the pastoral bronze, “Boy with Thorn,” to recognize the poignancy of feet as source imagery. The “foot” is delivered as design element in furniture or vessels, both decorative and for structural support. A broader conjecture of foot is revealed as emblem of freedom as the constraint of movement is a primary obstacle to liberation – think “Freedom Walk.” This panel seeks projects, exhibitions or writings relating to walking, dancing, kicking, stomping, grabbing, poking, clutching, grasping and reaching – in short, the actions or symbolism of all things that stick out from the body! Its significance lies in our universal fascination with truncated body parts and the provocative way artists reinvent them. What social constructs are identified through the use of images of appendages? How are roles of class and gender played out through design or decoration? In which ways do shoes and other coverings emerge as signs of identity? How do footprints or other markers connote memory? How do innovations in prosthetic devices and artificial limbs alter our sense of the real and the (im)possible

A Medium to Transform the Power of the Sun: Light, Space, and the Technological Apparatus

This study considers the implications of luminary technology used by artists László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Piene, and Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive installations of light in the 20th and 21st centuries are anchored by visible and familiar apparatuses. The deployment of the apparatus in these works forges ideological and/or social connections with actively engaged viewers, hindering the destruction of the aura by technology as theorized by Walter Benjamin. Analyzing the implications of the technological apparatus through the lens of a contemporary theory leads to the conclusion that while the physical, technological apparatus will necessarily obsolesce and tend toward the status of an artifact, it is the presence and critical engagement of the viewer with that apparatus upon which the aura of the work hinges. László Moholy-Nagy, in the construction of "Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne" (1930) sought to broaden the human sensorium and facilitate social change in a manner similar to that of his contemporary, Bertolt Brecht, who theorized productivity as the goal of the nascent radio. In the development of his "Lichtballette," Otto Piene shifted his positioning of the viewer from passive to active in relation to the apparatus: an evolution that resonates with the theories of Jean-Louis Baudry and Jean-Louis Comolli concerning the ideological and social power of the apparatus. In his intentional creation of larger dispositifs – as outlined by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze – Olafur Eliasson uses the physical technological apparatus as both a tangible connection to this larger system of relations, and as a facilitating aspect of the technological sublime as defined by David Nye. With an analysis of the physical technological apparatus which ideologically represents the artist and mediates the viewer’s experience, this study answers the call for a multi-valent approach to light-based installation works