EVENT DETAILS

"Motherwell's Mother: An Iconography in Abstraction" with Jonathan Fineberg

Co-sponsored by the UCI School of Medicine, the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, and the UCI School of Humanities

please join us for

The Language of the Enigmatic Object: Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain
FALL 2013 LECTURE SERIES AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE - OCTOBER 8, 9, 15, 16

featuring

Jonathan Fineberg
Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Art History Emeritus University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

LECTURE 1:
“Motherwell’s Mother: An Iconography in Abstraction,”
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Reception to Follow
Location: School of Medicine 836 Health Sciences Rd.
Med Ed Bldg (#836) Telemedicine Theatre B001
Teleconference available at UCIMC in Bldg. 22A Room 2107
Limited to 60 participants only.

To RSVP for this lecture series, please go to http://www1.icts.uci.edu/fineberg/

LECTURES ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Beginning on Tuesday, October 8, the first lecture, “Motherwell’s Mother: An Iconography in Abstraction,” demonstrates that abstract form can have an iconography, much like representation. Drawing on a friendship and conversations over many years with Robert Motherwell’s Professor Fineberg articulates a specific iconography in his abstraction. But this lecture also endeavors to define what distinguishes the person of the artist (who provides the subject matter) from the work of art, which stands on its own as an object of knowledge.

These four lectures on The Language of the Enigmatic Object: Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain are an effort to make an evolutionary argument for why we need images and to theorize a life’s work dealing with images. The lectures examine how the language of visual thinking works, in what way it is “closer to the structure of the human mind” than verbal thinking, and how it may indeed enhance the creative capacities of the brain. Grounded in the specifics of the daily practice of certain paradigmatic artists, these four lectures frame an understanding of visual thinking and creativity. Professor Fineberg attempts to delineate the language, then parse the grammar of visual thinking in the unconscious, then illuminate the political implications of art on the basis of a deeper understanding of how art affects us, and then finally to speculate on how aesthetic experience may impact the structure of the brain and serve evolutionary and social necessity. In Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, he argued that artists use their art to bring coherence to their experience. These lectures propose an underlying theory of how the language of art enables artists to do this.

Jonathan Fineberg is Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Art History Emeritus at the university of Illinois and a Trustee Emeritus of The Phillips collection in Washington where he was founding Director of the center for the Study of Modern Art. He earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard university, an M.A. from the courtauld Institute in London, and studied psychoanalysis at the Boston and Western New England Psychoanalytic Institutes. He has taught at Yale, Harvard, and columbia universities and among his awards are: the Pulitzer Fellowship in critical Writing, the NEA Art critic’s Fellowship, Senior Fellowships from the Dedalus Foundation and the Japan Foundation, and the college Art Association’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in the History of Art.