Art Dean Lecture Series 2013

Painted in the last decade of the 8th century in the tropical rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico, and brought to modern attention in 1946, the wall paintings of Bonampak reveal the ancient Maya at the end of their splendor. Sterling Professor of History of Art Mary Miller, a specialist in the art of ancient New World cultures explores the ritual artwork of the Late Maya court.Using the most complex and luxurious palette of pigments known from pre-hispanic Mexico, a small group of trained artists rendered the rituals of court rituals, from human sacrifice to the receipt of foreign dignitaries. Using both newly commissioned and newly rediscovered photographs as well as recently completed reconstructions, Professor Miller will bring this ancient spectacle to life.

In film, sound is the partner to the image. The ultimate compliment to sound designers, mixers, and editors is when no one actually notices the work. Sound designer Ren Klyce brings a professional's view to cinematic sound as a subtle, supporting character to the image, and the reasons why it is so often misunderstood and underappreciated. Our work is not just about the aesthetics of understanding how sound and dialogue enhance a film creatively, but it requires an understanding of human audiology, the behavior of sound waves, and the use of a great deal of technology. In this talk, I will play some excerpts from some well-known films, such as The Social Network or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and deconstruct how film sound tracks are made in collaboration with the director. Born in Kyoto Japan, Ren Klyce grew up in Mill Valley, California. He studied Electronic Music at UC Santa Cruz with Gordon Mumma, David Cope, and Peter Elsea and was trained in the traditional tape-based techniques of Musique Concrete. After meeting John Chowning at a lecture series in 1983, Klyce enrolled in the summer workshop at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and composed three pieces on the original SAM Box. Because of his experiences in the Electronic Music course at UCSC, Klyce became increasingly interested in computer music and the use of multiple speakers for playback. He went on to design sound for films such as Se7en, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, and Where The Wild Things Are. He has been nominated for five Academy Awards — most recently for the films The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He is currently working on the hit web series House of Cards and on the upcoming film Oblivion.

The talk will feature a conversation about visual culture, history, and sexuality studies between an eminent film studies scholar, Linda Williams, and a pioneering community activist and writer (and UCSC alum), Susie Bright. Between them, Williams and Bright represent a generation of thought and activism in the popular and scholarly study of sexuality, obscenity in art, and feminism. In January 2013, Bright gave a "Sexual State of the Union" lecture at Cornell University on the occasion of the donation of her personal archives to Cornell's special collections. Williams, Professor of Film & Media and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley, has spent much of her career thinking about the place of pornography and erotic visual culture in academic film study and mass culture. This dialogue takes this year's Arts Division Lecture Series' theme, "Engaging the Mind," as an invitation to consider the place of sexuality and sexuality studies in the arts, and to explore the relationship between art-making, art-viewing, and identity.

In the theatrical arena, actions take place with in vivo urgency while being freed by the artifacts of staging from normal expectations and consequences. "Staging Live Art "is the subject engaging speaker Sally Jane Norman, Professor of Performance Technologies at the University of Sussex. The ways we instate life as art evolve with the artifacts of staging: those used in ancient amphitheatres differ from contemporary devices which complexify notions of presence and immediacy. In settings quickened by biotechnologies and situated robotic intelligence, responsive sensors and mobile data, how we stage live art raises broader questions of how we (re-)define liveness. I propose to look at artistic strategies for staging live action in this wider context.

Dancing connects us to ourselves and to the world. Creating dance—and the study of the thinking behind the doing of dance—is about this connectedness, believes Theater Arts professor Ted Warburton, not so much of the elements of dance, but of bodies and brains, minds and communities enacting dance. By maintaining a “dancerly point of view,” on the issues, problems, and paradoxes that arise when the dance is approached both as creative practice and scholarly investigation, I aim to show how the act of dancing engages the mind-body of dancer and spectator alike, establishing a link between implicit and explicit forms of knowledge that connect two levels of reality.

Richard Taruskin is an American musicologist, historian, and critic who has written about the theory of performance, Russian music, 15th-century music, 20th-century music, nationalism, the theory of modernism, and analysis. As a choral conductor, he directed the Columbia University Collegium Musicum and Cappella Nova. He played the viola da gamba with the Aulos Ensemble from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. Dr. Taruskin received his doctoral degree in historical musicology (1975) from Columbia University. He taught there from 1967 to 1986, when he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1997, he has been UC Berkeley’s Class of 1955 Professor of Music.

Special guest Dr. Åse Vigdis Ystad gives a talk as part of this year's Arts Divison Lecture Series, “Engaging the Mind,” presenting work obtained through a lifetime of research on Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler.) Dr. Ystad is visiting UC Santa Cruz as part of The Gynt Project and the associated conference “Peer Gynt in a Digital Age.” Her visit is sponsored by UCSC's Cowell College and the Gary D. Licker Memorial Chair. The lecture: From the start of his writing career, Ibsen focuses on the human personality as his main theme, but his subsequent attempts to represent love, passion, quest, human morality and ethics as central motives in his work result in dramaturgical problems. This difficulty characterizes Ibsen’s plays from 1850–58 and is not overcome until he suffers a combined personal and poetic crisis around 1860. After the crisis, he stands out as a mature playwright, creating masterpieces like The Pretenders (1864), Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867). The lecture will also examine Ibsen’s great epic poem ”Terje Vigen” (1862) and give short comments on some of his later prose plays. Dr. Åse Vigdis Ystad is a fixture of Norwegian arts and letters, and is one of the world’s leading experts on the playwright Henrik Ibsen. Her lifelong service to Norwegian literature and culture earned her Knighthood in the Order of St Olaf by the King of Norway in 2012. After receiving her PhD in Philospohy at the University of Oslo, she has been a Professor of Scandinavian literature there since 1973. She is an member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters; the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala; the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities; the Norwegian Academy of Language and Literature; the Society of Norwegian Language and Literature; and the Society of Danish Language and Literature. Ystad has presented lectures in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, England, Scotland, China, South Korea, and the United States.