A group of international scholars, historians, preservationists, and designers converged at Bard Graduate Center in September for symposia held in conjunction with Swedish Wooden Toys and Revisions—Zen for Film.

Toys and Childhood: Playing with Design

September 18, 2015

In conjunction with Swedish Wooden Toys, curators Amy F. Ogata and Susan Weber convened the symposium “Toys and Childhood: Playing with Design,” which attracted a substantial audience that included designers, historians, preservationists, educators, and collectors from around the northeast. The speakers addressed toy design, play, and questions about childhood, identity, and social values. James E. Bryan’s (University of Wisconsin) paper on the Nuremberg Kitchen provided a rich visual and intellectual history of a play kitchen that was manufactured in Germany and popular throughout Europe. Megan Brandow-Faller (City University of New York) looked at Austrian examples of Secessionist toy design, designers and the notion of child art. Robert Goldberg (St Ann’s School) presented on the Shindana Toy Company, which manufactured black baby dolls in the turbulent years of the late 1960s and 1970s. Colin Fanning (Philadelphia Museum of Art) presented a paper on LEGO, plastic, and the transformation of the product into the international, multi-media phenomenon it is today. Finally, New York design critic Alexandra Lange took up digital toys and the changing values of toys and toy design.

—Amy Ogata



Revisions: Object-Event-Performance since the 1960s

September 21, 2015

A group of international scholars presented papers at Bard Graduate Center’s symposium, “Revisions: Object—Event—Performance since the 1960s,” following the opening of the Focus Gallery exhibition, Revisions—Zen for Film. Developed by visiting professor Hanna B. Hölling during a two-year Andrew W. Mellon “Cultures of Conservation” Fellowship, Revisions—Zen for Film features Korean-American artist Nam June Paik’s early 1960s work Zen for Film, also known as Fluxfilm No.1. The exhibition treats Zen for Film as a case study, in order to “unfold some of the inspirations, transitions, remediations, and residues that have accrued in the course of the artwork’s existence.” The work itself consists of the screening of 16mm blank film leader for several minutes:

As the film ages and wears in the projector, the viewer is confronted with a constantly evolving work: the visual occurrences on the film leader are caused by the projecting mechanism and random events in the environment, which in turn makes the accumulation of traces on film unpredictable. [The] image of apparent nothingness…oscillates between the immateriality of projected light and the material traces, which slowly obliterate the leader’s transparent surface. Zen for Film shares meaningful aspects of chance, silence, and nothingness with such works as composer John Cage’s 4’33” (1952) and artist Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting (1951).


Accompanied by a robust digital interactive and a publication of the same name, Revisions—Zen for Film fosters broad reflection on conservation and curatorial approaches to multimedia artworks and installations, explored by Hölling and her students from 2013-2015 through coursework, site visits, and the exhibition-making process.

The symposium commenced with Scholars’ Day, a closed event that took place in the Gallery and gathered international scholarly and curatorial voices to critically engage with the concepts of the exhibition. With the participation of Barbara London, Mona Jimenez, Christiane Paul, Gregory Zinman, Michael Mansfield, Ben Fino-Rodin, as well as the symposium speakers, Scholars’ Day generated interesting discussions and synergetic exchanges about and beyond the topic of Paik’s media installations.

Hölling delivered the introductory remarks at the symposium, situating the ongoing transformation of conservation and curatorial discourse in the innovations of the 1960s, when new modes of artistic expression articulated through Fluxus activities, happening, performance, video, experimental film and media art emerged, continually prompting “a rethinking of those museological paradigms that assume fixity and stasis.” To illustrate, Hölling recounted three distinct personal encounters with Zen for Film over the last five years: as a 16mm film projection at Museum Ostwall in Dortmund; a digital projection at Tate Liverpool; and as a leftover of an earlier presentation—an acetate film strip housed in a metal canister. The implications of each distinct iteration speak to contemporary musealization of Fluxus artworks, the status of performance works’ ‘afterlives,’ the liminal place of experimental film between visual and cinematic cultures, and the role of conservation and curation in enabling the continuity of inherently changeable works. These issues provided rich fodder for discussion and debate among symposium speakers, who contributed insights on artwork display and stewardship from their own work in the visual and performing arts, film, media, curatorial, and conservation studies.

—Lara Schilling