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Past & Available Recordings of Talks

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Please see below for a list of past WAF talks.

To access recordings of our past talks, just click on the posters below. If a talk has been recorded, this will take you directly to it.

WAF paul taylor poster.jpg

Abstract

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In a reflection on what she calls “the future of time,” Toni Morrison discusses art that responds to moments of crisis with, as she puts it, “a mourning, a requiem, a folding away of the future.” She goes on to look for redemptive possibilities in expressive culture, on the grounds that “one looks to history for the feel of time [but] one looks to art for signs of its renewal.” I have argued that reading Morrison through Saidiya Hartman reveals signs of this renewal in the refusal of spectacle and the recovery of dailiness in (of all places) the film “Wakanda Forever.” This talk will expand on that earlier argument’s gesture at everyday aesthetics in part by recommending a distinctively Deweyan approach to the everyday.

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Abstract

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This paper draws on a wider project of mine considering an important theme in the aesthetic theorizing and art-making of the 19th and 20th centuries. An oft-expressed ambition is that art will somehow step in and play some of the roles of religion. In this talk specifically, I use Mark Rothko's project of a purpose-built 'chapel' in Houston for 14 of his canvases as a case study of this broader theme. In the process, I consider Rothko's surprising denial that he was an 'abstractionist' and explore his related claim that, in his words, 'the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point.

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