Kirstin Ringelberg, assistant professor of art history, will be presenting her paper “Factory/Memory/Spectacle: Why the Avant-Garde Can’t Give Up” in a multidisciplinary panel at the Cultural Studies Association conference at George Mason University’s Arlington, Va., campus this Thursday.
Ringelberg’s talk will consider representations of the factory as a site for avant-garde critiques of late capitalism. Focusing on three contemporary artists’ use of video techniques and memory in expressing the problems in the shift from local to distant factory production and from production labor to service labor, she hopes to show how avant-garde artists continue to attempt new ways of using and revealing instrumentalized labor and its corrosive effects on people and the spaces (both literal, in the case of the factory, and more ephemeral, in the case of the nation) they occupy.
The panel of which Ringelberg is a part is titled “A Critique of Everyday Articulations: Globalized Subjects and Aesthetics of Fragmented Spaces”; the four speakers will examine different alternative globalized sites of “everyday life” in and around the contested spaces of what Henri Lefebvre details as our continually emerging “urban reality.”