Art History Faculty Lecture | Isabelle Wallace

“Curtains”

Join us for our Art History Faculty Lecture Series. Associate Professor Isabelle Loring Wallace presents “Curtains” on November 18th. This lecture will take place at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in room N100 at 5:30 pm.

“Curtains” — Lecture Details

Completed between 1973 and 1982, while serving as Artistic Advisor to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Jasper Johns’ crosshatch series is among the artist’s most difficult and unforthcoming bodies of work, notable for its opacity, invariability and abstraction. Interestingly, it is precisely these qualities that compelled the artist, who once said of the crosshatch motif, allegedly seen on the side of a passing car, “it had all the qualities that interest me—literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning.”  Attending to Johns’ series, thinking about its connection to the history of art and the medium of dance, this talk takes a second look at the crosshatch works, asking not what these paintings say or mean, but instead, what they, in their opacity, manage to do.

Speaker Bio

Isabelle Loring Wallace’s research focuses on a wide range of objects and images, ranging from mid-twentieth-century American painting to early twenty-first-century photography, video, and installation. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on artists such as Manet, Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Christian Jankowski, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Paul Pfeiffer, and the co-editor of three anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Ashgate/Routledge 2011); Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility, co-edited with Nora Wendl (Ashgate/Routledge 2013); Ventriloquism, Performance and Contemporary Art, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Routledge 2023). In addition, Professor Wallace is also author of Jasper Johns (Phaidon 2014) and is currently completing a second book on Johns that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis. Simultaneously, she is working on a new project that considers recurring intersections between new media art and assorted Judeo-Christian themes. At the School of Art, she teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on postwar visual culture, as well as various thematic courses dedicated to tracing contemporary art’s intellectual and artistic genealogies.