EVENT DETAILS

"The Ineffable, the Unspeakable, and the Inspirational: A Grammar" 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 2:
"The Ineffable, the Unspeakable, and the Inspirational: A Grammar"
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Reception to Follow
Location: Claire Trevor
School of the Arts
4000 Mesa Road
Contemporary Arts Center (Bldg #721) Colloquium Room 3201
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

In the second lecture of the series, “The Ineffable, the Unspeakable, and the Inspirational: A Grammar,” Fineberg sets set out the psychodynamics of form as a language of the unconscious, taking up the psychic mechanisms of visual thinking. Using the revelation of content contained in the materials and practices of the art of Alexander Calder and Joan Miró, he illuminates the work of art as a physical embodiment of psychic processes and content and demonstrate the particular way in which the artist can reorganize the unconscious by consciously reordering the elements in his or her work and then reintrojecting that revised structure back into the unconscious. Professor Fineberg asserts the status of visual thinking as a form of conscious thought that articulates meaning which is nevertheless inaccessible to verbal language.

If we can talk about an iconography in abstract form (the way in which form articulates the ineffable content of the unconscious - lecture one), and we understand that works of art can open the unconscious to a conscious intervention in reorganizing our sense of the self (lecture two), then we can talk in a more profound way about the political and social dimensions of art. Plato remarks in The Republic that “the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions.” Arthur Rimbaud wrote that “the modern poet comes into his own by a systematic derangement of all the senses.”

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.