Anatomical Aesthetics:

Catherine Wagner's Photography and Spectral Music

 

 

Thursday, September 22^nd

UC Berkeley Art Museum Theater

2621 Durant Avenue

4-6pm, with a reception to follow

 

                                                       

                       

 

Although working in different media, photographer Catherine Wagner and spectralist composers Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail share two strategies: a reliance on scientific apparatuses that break apart light or sounds into their fundamental components, and an interest in presenting "anatomies" of their materials. In this regard, Wagner and the Spectralists are furthering the disintegration of aura that Walter Benjamin first observed in early cinema by uncovering the elaborate and delicate structure of the material world just beyond the limits of the unaided ear/eye.

 

At this special event, photographer Catherine Wagner and musicologist Joanna Demers will give presentations and hold an open discussion, exploring the role of anatomy and scientific revelation in contemporary aesthetics.

 

The Participants:

 

Joanna Demers is an assistant professor in music history and literature at the University of Southern California, where she teaches classes on twentieth- and twenty-first century popular and concert music. Her book, "Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity" (University of Georgia Press), will appear in Winter 2006. Her current research treats how scientific rhetoric is informing contemporary literature, music, and photography.

 

Catherine Wagner is an artist who works with archetypes of contemporary society and transforms them into conceptual images investigating the construction of culture. For over twenty years she have been a keen observer of the built environment. Ms. Wagner has examined institutions of learning and knowledge, our homes, and all of the ways we display who we are, Disneyland, art museums, science labs and more specifically, human genome research. Her process involves the investigation of what art critic David Bonetti calls "the systems people create, our love of order, our ambition to shape the world, the value we place on knowledge, and the tokens we display to express ourselves."

 

Ms. Wagner has received many major awards, including the inaugural Visual Arts Fellowship from the San Jose Museum of Art, a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowships, and the Ferguson Award. She was named one of Time Magazine’s Fine Arts Innovators of the Year for 2001. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Folkswang, Essen, Germany, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her monographs include Cross Sections, Art & Science: Investigating Matter, Home and Other Stories, and American Classroom.

 

 

 

This event is made possible by support from the Consortium for the Arts, The Townsend Center for the Humanities, The Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, the UC Berkeley Department of Music, and the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice.

 

 

For more information contact: Brian Kane, kanebri@berkeley.edu