ARC
The Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture
presents

BODILY CONSCIOUSNESS
An Alchemical Concert

The Recent Video Art
of
Hans Breder

Saturday, Feb 9th, 2008 at
MOBIA
 MUSEUM OF BIBLICAL ART
1865 Broadway at 61st Street, New York, NY

The symposium features an “alchemical concert” involving three recent videos by intermedia artist, Hans Breder, with brief interpretive readings of them by ARC fellows David Jasper and David Klemm. The artist will be present at the symposium in conjunction with an exhibition of some of his earlier work at Gallerie LeLong in Chelsea. The theme of the symposium is the one that spans Breder’s highly productive career, namely, the theme of a mystical sensuousness in which the artist transforms the materials of artistic performance into the intermedia of a mediation on the immeasurable the plenum of wholeness within a broken world.

The three works, “Red Saliva,” “The Passage,” and “Deposit,” each engage bodily consciousness through memory and recollection of infancy, childhood, and adult relationships, as they are transformed by art into embodiments of an integral spiritual consciousness that is at once both historical and personal in depth.

THE SCHEDULE

9:30 a.m.         Registration and Refreshments

10: 00 a.m.      Introductions:

Charles Henderson, President
Danelle Warner, Program Chair

10:10 a.m.       Videos by Hans Breder

Red Saliva
The Passage
Deposit

Readings by David Jasper and David Klemm
                       

1:00 p.m.         Lunch at suggested locations

2:30 p.m.         Participants are invited to join Hans Breder at his current exhibit at LeLong Gallery at 528 West 26th Street
                         

In his works of the mid-’60’s, Breder placed polished cubes on striped surfaces so that reflections would intersect at optically charged angles. In 1967, Rickey observed that Breder had succeeded in joining virtual and real images, eliminating the separation between the two. 

Breder began teaching at the University of Iowa in 1968; there he established a graduate program in intermedia and video art that was to become highly influential for a generation of younger artists. 

In 1970, he videotaped two women lying side by side, visible from the waist down, each holding a large square stainless-steel mirror; the mirror concealed their upper bodies and compounded their legs to a total of eight in the video's virtual (or reflected) world.  Breder titled his photographs involving models and mirrors by location, identifying his collaborators in parentheses.

Edward Leffingwell in Art in America, November, 2004

THE PRESENTERS

Professor, Dr. h. c. Hans Breder created and directed the earliest Intermedia Program and the first to offer the MFA in 1968 at the University of Iowa which he directed until 2000. Over the last forty years, Breder has worked in and between a number of media including painting, sculpture, photography, performance, video, electro-acoustic music, and aesthetic anthropology. His inter-media work has been featured in three Whitney Biennials (1987, 1989, 1991), “Painting Beyond the Death of Painting,” Moscow (1989), “An American Odyssey,” Madrid (2004), “International Bach-Symposium,” Dortmund (2006), and “Live Art on Camera,” Southampton, UK (2007).

Professor David Jasper, Ph.D., DD, is both a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. He is Associate Dean for Postgraduates, Faculty of Arts, and long-time member of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Professor Jasper was the founder of the Centre for the Study of Theology, Literature, and the Arts at that institution.  He was also the founding editor of the journal, Literature and Theology (Oxford University Press). He has published many  books and articles, including his most recent book The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).

David Klemm, is professor of philosophical theology and hermeneutics in the Department of
Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. His publications focus on the German theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher; the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur; and topics in the hermeneutics of religion literature, and the arts. Recently, a new book, co-authored with William Schweiker of the University of Chicago, appeared from Blackwell Publishing: Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism.

Registration information:

Members/Fellows $25
Non-Members  $30; Students $5
Fee includes continental breakfast, lunch and reception.
($5.00 extra at the door.)

To register
 please contact Charles Henderson
chashenderson@mindspring.com or 
Tel: 212-870-2544 or

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More about ARC
including membership information and news about our recently published book:
 The ARC Story

From time to time the Board of Directors elects as Fellows individuals it identifies as having made a distinguished contribution to their respective fields. The list of Fellows elected over a period of nearly four decades thus exemplifies what the Society understands as the necessary and vital connections between art, religion and culture.

ARC Fellows

PROGRAM ARCHIVE

Fall 2007
Continuity and Change in the Arts, Religion and Culture:
Blasphemy, Buddhism and the Bible

Spring 2007
Footpath Spiritpath
Intersections of Pilgrimage Travel
and Spiritual Journey

Spring 2006
The River is a Magic Thing

Fall 2005
Dance, Dance, Wherever You May Be

Spring 2005
Theology and the Arts as Play

Winter 2005
Alpha-bet:
Uncertainty Principles in the Atoms of Language

Fall 2004
Languages that Shape the Soul

Spring 2004
The Moving Image

Winter 2004
Religion and the Visual Arts

Fall 2003
Theology and Music

Spring 2003
Theology and Poetry:
Languages that Shape the Soul

Winter 2003
Tracing the Garden

Fall 2002
Drawing on the Human
Spirit

Spring 2002
MoMA's PAPA:
Alfred Barr and
the Religious Dimension of Modernism

Winter 2002
A Theology of Beauty

Fall 2001
Lifting the Veil

May 2001
Utopia/Dystopia

February 2001
Antigone
Performance and Symposium

November 2000
Illuminations & Transformations:
Cross-Cultural Spiritual Dynamics 
in Music, Text, Dance and Film

May 2000
Alternative Readings: 
Sacred Text Embodied in Visual Art

February 2000
The Meaning of Myth

November 1999
Myth, Ritual and the Mediation of Violence

May, 1999
Writers' Ways with Loving and Dying

February, 1999 
The Divine Image
Implications for a changing image of God.

October, 1998 
Uneasy Constellations of Meaning
Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth Century Europe &
The Religious Art of Andy Warhol

May, 1998 Meeting
AYNI: The Andean Concept of Reciprocity

Webpage design courtesy CrossCurrents
Charles Henderson, Executive Director