SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LIBERAL ARTS
AND THE EDUCATION OF ARTISTS: ART REMEMBERS
Guest Speaker: Barbara Maria Stafford, University of Chicago
Dr. Hendricks: This afternoon I have the pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Barbara
Maria Stafford, the William B. Ogden distinguished service professor at the University of
Chicago. Dr. Stafford specializes in art and imaging theory from the late 17th century to the
Romantics and her focus has been on the intersection between the arts and the sciences in
early modern and modern periods. Her two recent works, Visual Analogy and Devices of
Wonder, help reconcile the diverse elements of the history of western art through the concept
of visual analogy. Dr. Stafford emphasizes the connections—“proliferations” is the term she
uses—and not the chain of cause and effect. Dr. Stafford’s books include, Symbol and Myth,
Voyage into Substance, Body Criticism, Artful Science, Good-looking, Visual Analogy and, with
Francis Turpac, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on Screen. Will you
please welcome Dr. Stafford.
Dr. Stafford: Thank you. It’s a great honor for me to be here in this worthwhile endeavor and I
hope to contribute to the proceeding. I’m going to be using material from the Devices of
Wonder exhibition to reflect on some major themes that I hope that it will intercept rather
nicely with the topics of the conference. Rudolph Arnheim, in an essay that has really been
forgotten from the 1960’s, a plea for perceptual thinking. In it he suggests that optical
technology can become a thoughtful medium. I’m going to suggest that it is not yet become
that. We’re still waiting for that to happen and I’m going to try and demonstrate in my
presentation that contemporary media needs memory.
Contemporary medium needs to recall that vast and sophisticated repertoire of earlier medium,
medium that we’ve just thrown on the junk heap of history to fulfill the potential that Arnheim
saw. Arnheim’s summons in the 60’s in turn was a re-remembering. He is in a way re-casting
some of the prior writings of Abby Warburg writing in the 20s and in the 30s. Now Abby
Warburg, that profound historian of visual culture, proposed that visual images—those
imaginative spatial forms ranging from high art to popular emergent media—roused the eyes at
action, that lovely phrase of his. But these fleeting shapes and mutable figures also excite our
memory, consciousness and desire by their ability to intensify and so alter reality.
Not surprisingly then such vivid apparitions spun merely from light, shadow, and color engaged
the total person at the sensory, psychological and social levels. And again I’d like to say it’s
important that what people like Warburg, like Arnheim, like Kepes, for that matter, were
talking about was not immersive media but rather the ability of media to create personal
coherence at very deep level. I’m going to try to suggest ways in which these older media do
that and what we have not yet achieved today. I’m going to show you some images rather
quickly and then I’m going to ponder them and bring in other ones as we go on.
[The first two slides; both please.] When optical devices such as mirrors and lenses actually
appear, I’m going to be showing you because of the other thing that we’ve forgotten is the
complexity of mirroring; just simply think of mirrors as flat. This is not the case. When mirrors,
lenses here in a zograscope [the next two slides please], magic lanterns, peep show boxes or
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