Amateurism Across the Arts
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 persistently—even obsessively—invoked, 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-Taught Student Music Performance: Judith Peña & the Wolf Girls
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 Vernacular—How 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-organized student hip-hop dance 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