University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

• Print

• Comments

• 

  A major conference being held next week at UB looks at the “new woman” as an international figure and global visual icon. Download the conference poster.

By JIM BISCO

Published: September 8, 2011

“The new woman was an extremely ambiguous figure that was used as a marker of women’s emergence into public life and their political liberation, but she was also a flashpoint for everything that was wrong with modernity and for the perception that culture was going to hell in a handbasket.”

An intriguing definition by Elizabeth Otto, associate professor of modern and contemporary art, Department of Visual Studies, that also could serve as a provocative coming-attraction narrative for “The International New Woman in Photography and Film,” a conference she is coordinating next week.

The event will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sept. 16 in 112 Screening Room, Center for the Arts, North Campus.

Otto, who received a $5,000 Conversations in the Disciplines grant from SUNY to help fund the conference, notes that this summit of scholars discussing the “new woman” as an international figure and global visual icon was rooted in “The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s” (University of Michigan Press, 2011), a book she co-edited with Vanessa Rocco.

Eight of the 16 authors of essays featured in the book will appear at the conference to present papers and engage in panel discussions.

Otto notes the papers focus on Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, “and offer rigorous analysis of the depiction and self-construction of modern femininity in relation to modernity, art, media, culture and colonialism, among other key discourses.”

The conference’s first panel, “Fashioning the New Woman in Photography, Film and Media Cultures” will begin with Otto discussing the book’s introduction, which she co-authored with Rocco, about the massive power but deep ambiguities of the figure of the new woman that can be traced back as far as the revolutions at the end of the 18th century, and even further.

Kathleen Vernon, associate professor of Hispanic languages and literature at Stony Brook University, will look at fashion in film and magazines during the Spanish Civil War and how it was used to a political end.

Brett Van Hoesen, assistant professor, Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of Nevada, Reno, will consider postcolonial cosmopolitanism in Germany.

Clare Rogan, curator of the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, will discuss the 1920s soft-core lesbian pornography of German photographer Germaine Krull. (“As pornography, they don’t work very well, but that makes them more interesting as images,” Otto points out.)

The panel will be moderated by Leesa Rittelmann, associate professor of visual arts and new media, SUNY Fredonia.

The second panel, “Transforming New Woman Icons,” will begin with Martha Patterson, associate professor of English, McKendree University, discussing the cultural work of the new Negro woman in African-American newspapers of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

Despina Stratigakos, associate professor of architecture in UB’s School of Architecture and Planning, will talk about the media portrayal of pioneering and adventurous women in the early 20th century.

Kristine Harris, associate professor of history and director of the Asian Studies Program at SUNY New Paltz, will consider the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan, woman warrior disguised as a man, as depicted in film from the early silent era through the 1960s.

Co-editor Rocco, visiting assistant professor in the history of art and design at the Pratt Institute, will spotlight “Bad Girls” in German film stills as photographic art.

Otto, who will serve as commentator for this panel, expects both panels to be filled with lively and revealing discussion. Although she notes that the conference is primarily geared toward faculty and graduate and undergraduate students, the event also should be compelling to the general public.

The forum is open to all, with a reception to follow at 4 p.m. A light lunch will be served that requires an RSVP to mamoffit@buffalo.edu by Sept. 9. For more details, visit the conference website.

Otto also has authored “Tempo! Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt” (Berlin: the Bauhaus-Archiv and Jovis Verlag, 2005). She curated an exhibition in Berlin on Brandt’s work, which subsequently traveled to the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University and the International Center of Photography in New York City, where she met her future co-editor Rocco, who was the on-site curator for the Brandt show.

Otto is continuing her study of Bauhaus with a book in progress titled “Haunted Bauhaus: Spirit and Body in the Home of Rationalized Culture,” which looks at the manner in which interwar Europe’s most influential art institution surprisingly engaged with the body in relation to spiritualism and the occult, gender and figuration and the surreal.

She teaches European and American art and visual culture courses on gender and theory, as well as the history of photography. She notes that the conference also is serving as a signature event for the launch of a PhD program in visual studies. Catherine Dawson is the first student in the program.

A UB faculty member since 2001, Otto hails the inspiring environment provided by her colleagues. She resides in the Parkside neighborhood of Buffalo with her husband, Tobias Westermann, an architect whom she met in Germany, and their 4-year-old son, Sascha.