Associated Products
Images Out of Time: How Art Makes History (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Images Out of Time: How Art Makes History
Author: Megan Luke
Abstract: Course Description: “The old light of dead or distant stars was emitted long ago and it reaches us only in the present. Many historical events, like astronomical bodies, also occur long before they appear.”
— George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962)
This course considers how material artefacts travel through time, reshaping our perception and social practices along the way. We will study what happens when images and objects are suddenly at odds with the moment of their appearance, whether they outlived their initial function or lost contact with their original cultural contexts.
Monuments to unjust pasts; icons manifesting fallen gods; ancient ruins in modern structures; replicas and forgeries; old images restored by new technologies: these images force a paradox into view. On the one hand, they endure within continuous histories, linear narratives that trace how they were made, used, viewed, and collected (or destroyed). On the other hand, images can also remain stubborn signs of vanished worlds, out of step with the present into which they have survived. Images in the wrong place at the wrong time have justified the civilizing mission of empire and acts of iconoclasm. Today, they inspire debates about dismantling monuments, repatriating stolen works of art, and the preservation of cultural heritage destroyed by war or exploitation.
When “images out of time” suddenly upset our faith in the march of history, they challenge us to measure our distance from the past, to understand ourselves, and to imagine collective futures. Topics for our discussions will include: strategies for organizing the past into meaningful stories; the definition of art; the history of iconoclasm; the future of museums in an era of decolonization; the importance of copies and facsimiles for preserving and disseminating cultural heritage.
Year: 2022
Audience: Undergraduate
Icons (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Icons
Author: Vanessa Schwartz
Abstract: Course Description: Marilyn Monroe, the Eiffel Tower, John Wayne, Mickey Mouse. Few would dispute the notion that the mass visual media have transformed these people, places, and things into “icons.” Although these phenomena exist apart from their representation, their cultural significance and importance is attached to their status as pictorial representations that are widely disseminated. The term “icon” initially invoked an object worthy of religious devotion; that original meaning now denotes an uncritical and popular devotion. This course poses the question “What becomes a legend most?” That question, made famous by the Blackglama fur ads, conflated “becoming” in the sense of being visually pleasing with “becoming” a legend, a modern process fueled by image-making. We will examine basic ways of thinking about visual symbols by learning about semiotics, symbolic and cultural anthropology, and what art historians have called iconology. This course will trace the interplay between specific icons and the visual culture that made them iconic. Particular emphasis will be placed on technologies of representation such as photography and film and the vital role they have played in the culture of modern icons. This class tests these theories with a mandatory field trip to Disneyland.
Year: 2023
Audience: Undergraduate
Metapictures of Time and Mind (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Metapictures of Time and Mind
Author: Megan Luke; W. J. T. Mitchell
Abstract: Course Description: This seminar is dedicated to “metapictures,” pictures about pictures, vision, and visual media. Our discussions will be organized around three major topics: 1) the iconology of time, with special attention to persisting shapes of time, notions of the epoch and epoché, the problem of contemporaneity, and pre/post history (also known as preposterous history); 2) the iconology of mind/world, emphasizing the relation between individual and collective psychology, especially in forms of madness; and 3) the iconology of the face, surface, and interface. Our fundamental focus will be on the mediation between art and philosophy, pictures and theories, metaphor and metaphysics.
Year: 2022
Audience: Graduate
Images Out of Time (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Images Out of Time
Author: Vanessa Schwartz; W. J. T. Mitchell
Abstract: Course Description: This graduate seminar is an in-depth examination of subjects and themes that have emerged from the VSRI’s ongoing “Images Out of Time” project, which considers how images travel through time, dropping in and out of linear histories and reshaping perception, institutions, and social practices along the way. We will study images and objects that are at odds with the moment of their appearance, whether they outlived their initial function or lost contact with their original cultural contexts. Monuments to unjust pasts; icons manifesting fallen gods; ancient ruins in modern structures; replicas and forgeries; old images restored by new technologies: these images force a paradox into view.
While they endure within continuous histories, they also remain stubborn signs of vanished worlds, out of step with the present. Images in the wrong place at the wrong time have justified the civilizing mission of empire and acts of iconoclasm. They continue to structure debates about repatriating artifacts, dismantling monuments and museums, and preserving cultural heritage destroyed by war or exploitation. When “images out of time” suddenly upset our faith in the march of history, they challenge our ability to measure our distance from the past, to understand ourselves, and to imagine collective futures.
Lectures and readings for the course intersect art history, religious studies, history, anthropology, literature, and film, and cuts across divisions separating premodern and modern, as well as European, Atlantic, and Pacific spheres.
Year: 2023
Audience: Graduate
Simulacral Time: Historical Ethics, Recuperation, and the Byzantine Past (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Simulacral Time: Historical Ethics, Recuperation, and the Byzantine Past
Abstract: Historians are often caught across several distinct temporalities that seek to reframe, contest, or re-assert the distance and alterity of the historical past. Historiographically, these approaches can manifest themselves as recuperations of the past that embrace anachronism or that argue for continuity and development over time, each of which services different ethics of historical writing.
Furthermore, scholars might choose to simultaneously understand how the distant past has been deployed in the present, not simply to contour how past narratives have been shaped, but also to articulate our continued investments in the questions and propositions of distant worlds. In this seminar, Roland Betancourt considers how these various modes of writing have manifested themselves across his research on Byzantium and the Middle Ages, drawing unexpected connections across his work and demonstrating what art historical relations to time and temporality have to offer investigations into the distant past.
Author: ROLAND BETANCOURT
Date: 01/31/2023
Location: Zoom event
Jacques Cousteau: Seeing Underwater and the Making of an Icon of Environmentalism (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Jacques Cousteau: Seeing Underwater and the Making of an Icon of Environmentalism
Abstract: In conjunction with a screening, Professor James Cahill will present a paper titled On the Plurality of Worlds: Jacques Yves Cousteau and Louis Malles’ Le Monde du Silence.
If cinematic media may be understood to have a Copernican potential, whereby they may be used as instruments of scientific discovery and displacement of anthropocentric perspectives, how does such a potential change how one conceives of the world or even constructs—or for the historian reconstructs—new ones?
Drawing from archival research and contemporaneous film criticism and theory (André Bazin, Jean Thévenot, Henri Agel, Jean Epstein), philosophy (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), and anti-colonialist
critique (Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon), this talk traces how filmmakers in metropolitan France began to address these questions through the re-emergence of a cinema of exploration in the late 1940s and 1950s. These films were produced at the very moment when the question of the world as conceived by the traditions of French humanism and its universalist aspirations were called into question by crises of wartime collaboration, the persistence of colonialism,
and coca-colonization (the ascendant American economic and cultural hegemony). Such films participate in these discourses at a sensuous level, while also offering historians unexpected documents for writing a very different history of cinema. Focusing in particular on the production and reception of Jacques Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle’s Le Monde du Silence (The Silent World, 1956), the most popular and aesthetically ambitious production of this cycle of exploration films, Cahill reads this work for the plurality of worlds they simultaneously encountered, destroyed, archived, and reimagined through their cinematography and its lessons for cinema historiography.
Author: JAMES CAHILL; MARGARET COHEN
Date: 04/21/2023
Location: USC School of Cinematic Arts
How, and why, does an image become an icon? And why—or does—this matter? (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: How, and why, does an image become an icon? And why—or does—this matter?
Abstract: Social and cultural theorist Susie Linfield will discuss a wide range of images, from the Spanish Civil War to the current wars in the Middle East and the anti-racism protests in the U.S. What, if any, is the relationship between iconic images and social-political movements?
A professor of journalism at New York University where she helped build the
Cultural Reporting and Criticism program, Susie Linfield writes about the intersection of culture and politics. She is the author of The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (2019) and The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (2010), a finalist for the New York Critics Circle Award. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, Dissent, The Atlantic, and New Republic.
Author: SUSIE LINFIELD
Date: 03/23/2023
Location: USC Dornsife College
Slavery in the Heart of Freedom: Race, Religion, and Politics through the Lens of BDSM (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Slavery in the Heart of Freedom: Race, Religion, and Politics through the Lens of BDSM
Abstract: The Enlightenment’s promises of freedom, equality before the law, and bodily autonomy have generated a sometimes-unconscious craving for the opposite. BDSM shines a light on the nostalgia for anachronistic and physically enforced hierarchy in modern romance, religion, and politics. This talk focuses on parallel but ethically divergent examples of this impulse in three products of the post-Enlightenment state—BDSM, Haitian Vodou, and Trumpism.
J. Lorand Matory is the Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology and the Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project at Duke University. He is the author of Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, Stigma and Culture: Last-Place Anxiety in Black America, and The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make.
Author: J. LORAND MATORY
Date: 10/03/2022
Location: Zoom event
Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time
Abstract: Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Rather than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene, this is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the “new” was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought.
Author: MARIA STAVRINAKI
Date: 09/12/2022
Location: Zoom event
Aniconic Icons: Time and Gender in the Body of Angkor Wat (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Aniconic Icons: Time and Gender in the Body of Angkor Wat
Abstract: This talk approaches a holistic understanding Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple as an ‘aniconic icon,’ a complex architectural body which sublimates anthropomorphic form in an elaborate and exemplary manner. This reading derives from and probes the multiple temporalities at work in the temple’s architectural and sculptural forms, which local devotees have themselves long probed; and second, the gendered and generative tensions operating in the oxymoronic formulation of the ‘aniconic icon’ – that is between apparently opposing modes of representation as they give body to relations between the mundane and the cosmic, the historical and the theoretical.
Author: ASHLEY THOMPSON
Date: 11/28/2022
Location: Zoom event
Images Out of Time syllabus (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Images Out of Time syllabus
Author: Nancy Lutkehaus
Abstract: This is the USC course syllabus for Prof. Nancy Lutkehaus "Images Out of Time" (Core 101) in the Thematic Option program for Spring 2024.
Year: 2024
Audience: Undergraduate
Images Out of Time syllabus (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Images Out of Time syllabus
Author: David Albertson
Abstract: This is the USC course syllabus for Prof. David Albertson "Images Out of Time" (Core 101) in the Thematic Option program for Spring 2024.
Year: 2024
Audience: Undergraduate
Images Out of Time syllabus (Course or Curricular Material)Title: Images Out of Time syllabus
Author: Pani Norindr
Abstract: This is the USC course syllabus for Prof. Pani Norindr, "Images Out of Time" (Core 101) in the Thematic Option program, Fall 2023.
Year: 2023
Audience: Undergraduate
Dioramas, Life-Casts, and the Lives of Sensitive Images: When Was This? And Did It Ever Happen? (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Dioramas, Life-Casts, and the Lives of Sensitive Images: When Was This? And Did It Ever Happen?
Abstract: Life-casts and dioramas perform a complex temporality, mixing past, present, and
future. This talk explores plaster life-casts and more broadly dioramas made in
natural history and anthropological museums in the United States around 1900.
Dioramas are out of time as they are not recommended exhibition devices anymore.
Indeed, they have been rightfully criticized for freezing people in the past and
transmitting racist stereotypes. Since the moment of their creation, moreover, they
have been somehow peculiar creations at the border of art and science. Life-casts
are objects that have a long-lasting time frame. They are rather fragile when they are
made of plaster, a material sensitive to humidity. But their multiplicity and
constant replication and circulation between institutions makes them very present
and active in museums–until today. Produced in a context of colonialism and
oppression, they were made to fix the anthropological knowledge of the time. Their
long life in museums galleries also generated new forms of knowledge, as they were
studied by different generations of scientists for decades.
Author: Noémie Etienne
Date: 9/8/2023
Location: Zoom
Primary URL:
https://dornsife.usc.edu/vsri/past-events/The Crisis of the Museum of Other People (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: The Crisis of the Museum of Other People
Abstract: Museums of Other People are in crisis, and the crisis may be terminal. They are condemned for collusion with imperialism, stand accused of promoting racial stereotypes, and face a clamour for the return of treasures looted from long gone empires.
The crisis is also, and just as fundamentally, an intellectual crisis. These museums failed to reimagine their role in a post-colonial world. Unable to provide a clear and compelling
answer to fundamental questions about their vocation, they are vulnerable to the challenge of identity museums along the Mall in Washington D.C., and struggle to match the glamour of museums of “primitive art” in New York, Paris and Berlin.
What is to be done? Museums of Other People should engage with their own histories, address the historical contexts of empire, and come to terms with a plural world.
Exhibitions should contextualise local histories, trace cross-currents of trade and ideas, reflect on relationships between now and then, and here and there. They must share in the training of curators, mount collaborative travelling exhibitions, even operate as lending
libraries. They need to become cosmopolitan museums.
Author: Adam Kuper
Date: 4/18/24
Location: Taper Hall of the Humanities, THH 309K
Primary URL:
https://dornsife.usc.edu/vsri/past-events/Bousbir, Casablanca’s Colonial Red Light District (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Bousbir, Casablanca’s Colonial Red Light District
Abstract: Bousbir was the red light district of colonial Casablanca. Built in a neo-Moorish style
by order of the French administration for the purposes of urban hygiene and to meet
the “needs” of the colonial troops, the district was inaugurated on May 1, 1924. For
thirty years, Bousbir was the only place where street prostitution was allowed in
Casablanca. The district was a tourist attraction, embodying an orientalist, exotic and
erotic dream. The 12.000 (very) young women who lived and served there had a
different experience. If for visitors Bousbir was an erotic theme park, for them it
functioned as a more or less forced labor camp. The district remained active until the
end of April 1955, when sex workers were expelled from it to house Moroccan
auxiliary forces returning from the Indochina war. Staszak will discuss the exhibition
he curated, which was supposed to open in Casablanca in November 2022. The show
was canceled the night before the official opening.
In this lecture, Staszak will analyze how Bousbir and Bousbir’s sexworkers have been
visualized and how and why – and for which audience - telling the history of Bousbir
and showing its images became so difficult today.
Author: Jean-Francois Staszak
Date: 9/13/23
Location: Social Sciences, SOS 250
Primary URL:
https://dornsife.usc.edu/vsri/past-events/Lenin’s Shadow in Hanoi and Other Responses to Monuments by Contemporary Vietnamese Artists in the Age of Decoloniality (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Lenin’s Shadow in Hanoi and Other Responses to Monuments by Contemporary Vietnamese Artists in the Age of Decoloniality
Abstract: What do monuments to war heroes and victims of colonialism and American
imperialism say to the current generation of Vietnamese, in a country where 80%
of the population was born after the end of the war? As demands for dismantling
monuments that glorified racism and imperialism arose around the globe in the last
decade, how can we consider - or as Mechtild Widrich’s recent book Monumental
Cares evokes - care for and about commemorative statues in contemporary
Vietnam? Are they still relevant in Vietnam’s rapid changing society or are they
merely vestiges of the past? This talk will look at several projects by contemporary
Vietnamese artists that engage with the paradoxical nature of monuments and the
changing perceptions of historical memory in the aftermath of war and colonialism.
Author: Nora Taylor
Date: 10/26/23
Location: Social Sciences, SOS 250
Primary URL:
https://dornsife.usc.edu/vsri/past-events/Images of the A-Visible (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Images of the A-Visible
Abstract: The critical grammatological theory of images focuses on the question of how a-visible
phenomena – such as the mind and the soul, emotions, transcendental ideas and figures – or
acts of adoration or discrimination get re/presented as images. Departing from the governing
maxim of Derrida’s Of Grammatology “Il faut penser la trace avant l’étant”, it is a matter
of different procedures and techniques of ‘imaging’ [Bildgebung] and their history. When
imaging something that is not invested with a physical body, any kind of materiality or
visuality of its own, the scene or moment of ‘making an appearance’ is of special interest:
that is to say the threshold between immaterial phenomena and pictures of any kind – be it
a painting, drawing, an effigies, a photography, or digital produced image. At stake is the examination
of the ways and modes by which an-iconic, non-mimetic images get access to the
visual world and the tradition of iconography. In the light of this approach, one may
discover unexpected correspondences between quite diverse and even vastly scattered
historical constellations, e.g. between images from the history of religion and present days
natural sciences’ labs.
Author: Sigrid Weigel
Date: 2/27/24
Location: Taper Hall of the Humanities, THH 309K
Primary URL:
https://dornsife.usc.edu/vsri/past-events/Housed Treasure: Grace Nicholson, California, and the USC Pacific Asia Museum (Exhibition)Title: Housed Treasure: Grace Nicholson, California, and the USC Pacific Asia Museum
Curator: Nancy Lutkehaus
Abstract: This is a student-curated exhibition of 34 objects was organized by the undergraduates in Prof. Nancy Lutkehaus's "Images Out of Time" course in Spring 2024.
Year: 2024
Monuments Fall: Decolonizing Memory Spaces in the Western U.S. and Europe's East (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: Monuments Fall: Decolonizing Memory Spaces in the Western U.S. and Europe's East
Author: Vanessa Schwartz
Abstract: Our faculty team led by Prof. Vanessa Schwartz co-sponsored this USC conference and contributed presentations.
Date Range: 4/27/2024
Location: Social Sciences, SOS 250
Primary URL:
https://calendar.usc.edu/event/monuments-fall-decolonizing-memory-spaces-in-the-western-us-and-europes-east