Visiting Faculty Bring Diverse Experiences to VES Dept.

This year, the VES department welcomes 11 visiting faculty members, hailing from across the U.S., as well as Germany, Portugal, and Sweden. The Harvard Crimson spoke to three of them to get an idea of what they hope to bring to Harvard.



Ted Barron

Ted Barron, film scholar and critic, was the Senior Programmer of the Harvard Film Archives from 2002-2007. He has served on the juries of film festivals including the Newport International Film Festival and is an editor for “The Straddler,” an interdisciplinary culture journal.



The Harvard Crimson: How does it feel to be back at Harvard?



Ted Barron: It’s actually kind of strange and very nice to be back in the Carpenter Center after having worked there for so long. I’ll be teaching the “Art of Film” and the “Sound Cinema” course, which I will enjoy very much, because they’re closely related to my work as a programmer. It’s linked to the act of discovery, putting together films that people aren’t always aware of or putting together different films that will change people’s viewing experience.



THC: Can you tell us about your current work?



TB: I’ve been very busy writing my dissertation; in fact, the paperwork’s going in this week. I’m writing about what I call performative realism in American independent cinema. I particularly focus on post-war realist films that straddle the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, of which Andy Warhol’s films are an example. People acting as themselves in his films often create a sense of uncertainty regarding their role as characters.

The reason I call it performative realism is that one of my goals is to shift the focus to the study of performance. There are always acts of performance going on in the documentary process, but they are often veiled.



Carlin E. Wing ’02

Carlin Wing, who will teach “Introduction to Still Photography” this fall, is currently working at the Open Art Performance Festival in Beijing, bouncing squash balls off Olympic architecture. After graduating from Harvard with a joint degree in VES and Social Anthropology, Wing became a photographer. She currently examines spaces such as elevators or parking lots as sites for play and social interaction and spoke to The Crimson via email.



THC: Can you tell us about your artistic developments after graduating from college?



Carlin Wing: After college I spent some time playing on the professional squash tour. When I started my graduate studies at CalArts I no longer had time to train and compete, but the sport began to make its way into my artwork as subject matter.



THC: What made you participate in the Open Art Performance Festival in Beijing this fall?



CW: When I was young, I wanted more than anything to be in the Olympics. Of course squash wasn’t an Olympic sport then and it isn’t now. But it wants to be, and this connection made it possible to create an iteration of “Hitting Walls” (the title of an ongoing series of works around squash) in Beijing with the Olympics as the connecting thread. When I hit squash balls in hallways or elevators or parking lots it is about stretching the definition of the sport—tying its origins in British prisons and alleyways and boarding schools to its current spectacular global form.



Michele Zalopany

Michele Zalopany is a returning visiting faculty member and will teach her last term of “Watercolor Painting” this fall. Born in Detroit in 1955, her work centers around the social and political themes of her childhood. Her paintings, done in a photographic style, depict American people and iconography. They are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.



THC: How has your Detroit background influenced you?



Michele Zalopany: Growing up there, I experienced the racial riots. My dad was a union worker with United Auto Workers. He was an idealist, he was probably a child laborer, and that’s why he chose the work that he did. Also, he was Hawaiian and grew up in Hawaii. He was a big influence on me.

I look back to things that are really important to me—where I grew up and seeing buildings that were ruined. I would drive through the city, looking at abandoned mansions, and wonder why they were like that or who lived there. And so, originally my work had to do with lamentations of things that were gone—erasures of places.

I also had a big epiphany about this whole idea of Detroit as utopia. My work has a lot to do with utopia and dystopia.



THC: What new projects are you developing?



MZ: On display at the Carpenter Center are three watercolors that were based on depictions of Hawaiian women circa 1860. I was interested in what Hawaiian women looked like before races became mixed in Hawaii, as well as this mythology of the hula girl, which is another paradise, a utopian situation. These pictures are masculine and primitive-looking. I’m also interested in the hegemony of the photographers and filmmakers; they took on the role of imperialists coming into indigenous lands to represent people devoid of a personal or cultural history.

I’ve also just had this flash about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. These guys were hazed and forced to perform sex with each other; the photographs are shocking. And all of a sudden I realized that they’re wearing hula skirts and coconut bras. [The guards are] making this equation with being wild and primitive. It’s a dark side of how white people relate to other cultures.



The New Visiting Faculty Exhibition is on display at the Carpenter Center until September 26.