Elise Archias
Elise Archias’s research and classes center around modern and contemporary art and performance art, asking questions about the relationship between abstract ideals and physical materials and needs in 20th- and 21st-century life and aesthetics. Her book, The Concrete Body – Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci (Yale University Press, 2016), 2015 Miess/Mellon Author's Book Award winner, explores the ways the use of the body as a material in the work of three prominent performance artists revised modernist aesthetics for the 1960s as part of a broader critique of everyday life within spectacle culture. She has presented her work on performance, sculpture, and painting in various venues nationally and internationally, including the Getty Research Institute, the Henry Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, the Archives of American Art, and the Slought Foundation. She received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008 and worked as an assistant professor at California State University, Chico, before coming to UIC in 2012. She was a scholar in residence at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in 2011. She received UIC's ICAH award for collaborative research with graduate student Becky Bivens for a seminar at the Modernist Studies Conference, "Beyond the Autonomy/Relationality Binary" in November 2014. She was a fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in spring 2016, pursuing her research on Joan Mitchell and abstraction in the long ‘Sixties. In winter 2017, she curated Embodiment Abstracted: The Influence of Yvonne Rainer at UIC’s Gallery 400, an exhibition featuring seven artists’ performance and video work from the early 2000s. She has advised master’s theses on Sharon Hayes’s public love letters, public sculpture as a site of performative activism, the abstract painting of Pat Passlof, and Alberto Giacometti’s sculptural argument with Surrealism circa 1929, among others.
less
InterestsView All (7)
Uploads
Events by Elise Archias
About the author: Elise Archias is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Chicago and her book The Concrete Body – Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci was the recipient of a Miess/Mellon Author's Book Award in 2015. Her exhibition, "Embodiment Abstracted: The Influence of Yvonne Rainer," will open at UIC's Gallery 400 in January 2017.
About the interlocutor: Matthew Jesse Jackson teaches in the departments of visual art and art history at the University of Chicago.
Publications by Elise Archias
https://www.chronicle.com/article/administrators-hysterical-response-to-campus-controversy
JOAN MITCHELL’S PAINTINGS from the late 1950s have space in them. They are big surfaces covered with marks, like most Abstract Expressionist paintings made in New York in the same decade, and so they look much flatter than a carefully measured perspectival scene from the 1940s by, for example, Edward Hopper. But compared with almost everything her most productive and now famous peers were doing at the same time, Mitchell’s paintings are practically voluminous. . . .
Part of the Special Issue: "A Symposium on Nicholas Brown's _Autonomy_." Edited by Mathias Nilges. With Frederic Jameson and others.
Embodiment Abstracted: The Influence of Yvonne Rainer gathers together recent works by artists who take up Yvonne Rainer’s experimental approach to the body as a material in the 1960s and explore its political implications with fresh eyes. Rainer's dance in the 1960s showed us what was possible when ordinary movement was made the material of a work of art. These artists mobilize Rainer’s abstracted version of ordinary movement to create situations or tell stories in which the particular ways bodies perform tasks or give in to gravity, or simply the paths through space that their daily lives require, become as much or more significant than markers of cultural identity or difference. The juxtaposition of these varied practices allows the different valences of a broad-reaching conversation about one of contemporary art’s most important ancestors to be heard.
Curated by Elise Archias
About the author: Elise Archias is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Chicago and her book The Concrete Body – Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci was the recipient of a Miess/Mellon Author's Book Award in 2015. Her exhibition, "Embodiment Abstracted: The Influence of Yvonne Rainer," will open at UIC's Gallery 400 in January 2017.
About the interlocutor: Matthew Jesse Jackson teaches in the departments of visual art and art history at the University of Chicago.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/administrators-hysterical-response-to-campus-controversy
JOAN MITCHELL’S PAINTINGS from the late 1950s have space in them. They are big surfaces covered with marks, like most Abstract Expressionist paintings made in New York in the same decade, and so they look much flatter than a carefully measured perspectival scene from the 1940s by, for example, Edward Hopper. But compared with almost everything her most productive and now famous peers were doing at the same time, Mitchell’s paintings are practically voluminous. . . .
Part of the Special Issue: "A Symposium on Nicholas Brown's _Autonomy_." Edited by Mathias Nilges. With Frederic Jameson and others.
Embodiment Abstracted: The Influence of Yvonne Rainer gathers together recent works by artists who take up Yvonne Rainer’s experimental approach to the body as a material in the 1960s and explore its political implications with fresh eyes. Rainer's dance in the 1960s showed us what was possible when ordinary movement was made the material of a work of art. These artists mobilize Rainer’s abstracted version of ordinary movement to create situations or tell stories in which the particular ways bodies perform tasks or give in to gravity, or simply the paths through space that their daily lives require, become as much or more significant than markers of cultural identity or difference. The juxtaposition of these varied practices allows the different valences of a broad-reaching conversation about one of contemporary art’s most important ancestors to be heard.
Curated by Elise Archias
Carlos Museum, Ackerman Hall,
Emory University,
Department of Art History
Symposium: Fluxus │ Film
May 5, 4-8pm, Logan Center Performance Penthouse
May 6, 9am-6pm, Logan Center, Room 201
This symposium will expand the defining attributes of Fluxus film by addressing the problematic role of documentation within Fluxus practices, the documentation of performances as material film objects and the performativity of media, and the politics of presence in Fluxus film and performance. Includes screening of film and video work by Wolf Vostell, Eric Andersen, Nam June Paik, Ludwig Schönherr, Paul Sharits, and Carolee Schneemann, among others.
May 5th – Keynote (4pm), Opening Reception (6pm), Screening (7pm)
May 6th – Symposium (9am-6pm)
Free and open to the public. Reservation requested by not required.
Presented by the Department of Art History, the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Film Studies Center.