DOCTORAL COLLOQUIUM: KRISTIN POOR + HANNAH YOHALEM
TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2016 / 6 PM
PRINCETON SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE / ROOM N107
KRISTIN POOR, "The Sculptural Prop: Joan Jonas's Cone"
This presentation focuses on Joan Jonas’s use of the form of the cone—which remains a central, recurring prop in her performances to this day—from its first appearance in her 1974 performance Funnel through its 1976 iteration in the installation Stage Sets, Jonas’s first solo exhibition. The role of the cone in this two-year period of Jonas’s practice provides a case study for the broader questions raised by the sculptural prop, including the peculiar, changing status it occupies while in motion as part of a performance and its function as a static component in an installation.
Kristin Poor is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Her dissertation, “The Sculptural Prop and the Activation of the Object, 1960–1979,” examines objects activated in performances by Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris, Franz Erhard Walther, and Joan Jonas. Prior to coming to Princeton, Kristin was Assistant Curator at Dia Art Foundation. Kristin was a 2014-2015 Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her writing has most recently appeared in Aperture and Burlington Magazine and she is the editor of Emily Roysdon, Uncounted: Call & Response, published by Secession, Vienna, and Revolver Press in 2015.
HANNAH YOHALEM, "Bodily Mechanics and Mechanical Bodies: Jasper Johns's Rotating Devices"
By looking at a series of related works that Jasper Johns completed between 1957 and 1962, Hannah Yohalem argues for a shift in Johns’s understanding of the role of the work of art during this period from a record of the artist’s gestures to a mechanistic body/bodily mechanism in its own right. She draws on Johns’s relationship to the dance community in the 1950s, the amateur measuring and recording devices reproduced in the pages of the Scientific American, and Johns’s acquaintance with Marcel Duchamp’s work during this period to better explicate the visual transformations she charts and how they relate to contemporary definitions of the human body in various discourses.
Hannah Yohalem is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University writing a dissertation on the embodied nature of the device in Jasper Johns’s early work. She received her bachelor’s degree in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University. Her primary research focuses on the relationship between performance and visual arts in the United States since WWII. She also works on twentieth century modernism more broadly, dance history, and early American modernism. As a writer in residence for Performa Magazine, Hannah published several reviews of contemporary dance.
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