28 & 29 MARCH: SESSION WITH STEFANIE SEIBOLD AND MARTA ZARZYCKA
Students discussed their plans for Dublin in June with Stefanie Seibold, who lectured on her special interest in gender and dance. We had a closer look at the history of dance through the example of the dance community at Monte Verità and, additionally, the practice of Trisha Brown.
Still from Trisha Brown's 'Roof Piece', 1971
Marta Zarzycka gave an overview lecture of feminist art history, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Shirin Neshat. According to Zarzycka, feminist and gender studies have helped art history with:

An awareness of how gender shapes looking and the “gaze”
An understanding of terms like gender and patriarchy
A certain reflexivity in the representation of self
A willingness to explore issues of identity and difference
An interest in and engagement with body politics
An ability to read against the grain of a given text

LIST OF ARTWORKS IN LECTURE

Jenny Saville - Closed Contact

Michelangelo - The Creation of Adam

Artemisia Gentileschi - Self portrait

Artemisia Gentileschi - Judith and Holofernes
Praxiteles - Aphrodite of Knidos
Sandro Botticelli - The Birth of Venus
Titian - Venus of Urbino

Edouard Manet - Olympia

Katarzyna Kozyra - Olympia
Yasumasa Morimura - Portrait (Twins)
Julie Rrap - Untitled (after Olympia)
Guerilla Girls - Do Women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?
Judy Chicago - The Dinner Party
Barbara Kruger - Your Body is a Battleground
Marina Abramovic - Rhythm o
Ryoko Suzuki - Bind
Rembrandt - Self portrait as a Young Man
Vincent van Gogh - Self portrait
Cindy Sherman - Untitled #3
Cindy Sherman - Untitled #96
Cindy Sherman - Untitled #222
Cindy Sherman - Untitled #122
Ingrid Mwangi - Static Drift
Renee Cox - from the series Yo Mama’s Last Supper
Leonardo da Vinci - Vitruvian Man
Shirin Neshat - from the series Women of Allah
Martha Rosler - Body Beautiful or Beauty knows no Pain
Dana Wyse - from the series Pills and Remedies

Dancers at Monte Verità, Ascona, Italy
At the end of the nineteenth century, the small village of Ascona saw a steady influx of philosophers, theosophists, spiritualists, pacifists and artists, most of whom were responding to the growing belief that a return to nature was the best remedy for the moral disintegration of Western capitalist society. The artists Henri Oedenkoven and Uda Hofmann established an esoteric, vegetarian artists’ colony on the hill of Monte Verità beside the village. An array of European intellectuals followed, including the famous anarchist Kropotkin, and various practitioners of the new arts of psychology and psychoanalysis.

In 1913, Rudolf von Laban set up his nudist School of Natural and Expressive Dance within the Monte Verità community, attracting Isadora Duncan among others, and during and after World War I artists and pacifists flocked to Ascona from all over Europe. Laban's canon of movement specified dance as a fundamentally essential part of life and education, a defining principle which endeavoured to express a sense of naturalness and corporeality in a pervasive atmosphere of advancing civilisation. Thus, during the strenuous 'work therapy programmes' vegetables for the guests were peeled, diced and sliced to the accompaniment of dance steps. (text by Christine Eggenberg, 2000).
 
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