'Faces and Powers' Lecture

18 August 2003. Free entry.

Presented in Christchurch by The Physics Room and Art & Industry, made possible by the Artspace / Creative NZ International Visitors Programme.

Widely published art writer and theorist, John Welchman will present slides and discuss the renegotiations of faciality in postmodern art practice. Currently a Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of California, San Diego, Welchman is touring New Zealand and will be a keynote speaker at the Cultural Provocations conference in Auckland this month.

He is the author of Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity (Allen & Unwin, 1995); Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles (Yale UP, 1997) and Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (Routledge, 2001). He is co-author of The Dada and Surrealist Word Image (MIT Press, 1987) and of Mike Kelley in the Phaidon Contemporary Artists series (1999) and editor of Rethinking Borders (Minnesota UP, 1996). He has been published in Artforum, Screen, Art + Text, Third Text, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and other journals and art catalogues.

John Welchman is currently finalising two new books on the relation between art, film and the representation of faces (The Celluloid Face and Faces and Powers), which will inform his lecture in Christchurch.