The Institute of Arts and Science & the San Jose Museum of Art present “Seeing Through Stone”
University of California, Santa Cruz NEWSCENTERApril 10, 2024 San José, California (March 20, 2024) — The Institute of the Arts and Sciences...
Join us for a curatorial talk with Althea Wasow, curator of the film series Ornament and Abolition. This film series takes controversial Viennese architect and cultural theorist Adolf Loos’s 1908 lecture/essay “Ornament and Crime” as a departure point to explore the relationship between ornament and abolition in moving image practice. Loos connects ornamentation with the criminal, the degenerate, the childish, the culturally backward, the racially other, and the morbid. He rails against the “slavery” of ornamentation and the “ornament plague.” “Lack of ornament,” he contends, signifies modernity, efficiency, health, and intellectual superiority.
Ornament and Abolition assembles a wide range of works. They foreground the radical potential of the ornamental, challenge the ways in which race-ornament-criminality have been linked, and underscore the ongoing importance of questions of film form and abolition. Artists reclaim ornament, interrogate the historical role of ornament in racialization and the production of deviance, and forge critical aesthetic experiments beyond ornament.
The film series will be continuously looped and available for viewing in the IAS reception area during regular opening hours between May 14 and May 26, 2024.
Image: Still, Paris is Burning (1990).
Althea Wasow is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Currently, she is developing a Bert Williams essay film, Nobody, and revising her monograph, Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives, which analyzes the complicity and resistance between police power and motion pictures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Wasow’s film credits include the wannabe (writer-director), a fiction film with documentary elements that won Best Short at HBO’s New York International Latino Film Festival. In addition to more than 40 film festivals, her films, including The Whole World Revolved Around Her (featuring Wangechi Mutu), have screened at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Queens Museum of Art. Her collaborations in film and visual culture also include, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (media researcher & consultant, University of Maryland, Baltimore County & Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2010), An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (senior editor & co-writer, Steidl, 2007), Rikers High (co-producer, Showtime/France 2, 2005) and The Innocents (producer & project editor, Umbrage, 2003, 2005).
