MFYAY

I recently spent almost a month crafting an abstract-proposal for a graduate student art history symposium on “The Art of Travel” to be held at Rutgers in March. When I first heard about it I was ecstatic and motivated as the symposium topic and my MFA thesis had a lot of overlap. And I happily report they still do as I very slowly whittle away at the written element here in California. So after four drafts and edits from two faculty members and two Tufts MA art history peers I felt confident with my submission. Fast forward two weeks: I just got an email back letting me know my paper was not selected. While I’m sorta bummed about it, huge relief washes over me. Not that I didn’t want to do it, but balancing the crafting of an rigorous art history paper concurrent to thesis production seemed to be a bad idea that grew and grew with the days following my submission. 

So I got nixed. It could have been for many reasons. The abstract could have sucked. Or more optimistically, my topic just did not jive with any of the papers proposed out of the seventy submitted. Regardless, I feel pretty good about the effort and am so relieved I can focus solely on the thesis. Practically speaking it’s for the best as my written thesis steps far beyond the art historical, which I was chained to with the Rutgers paper. Copied below is my abstract I proposed that will give you an idea, in part, to what I’ll be presenting for my thesis. So if you are intrigued, enjoy…

In presenting a modern and contemporary art historical genealogy of those who have championed the non-retinal aesthetic experience, one can begin to construct a framework in which to understand the cultural and psychological associations of the sense of taste that confront the hungry traveler. While the visual unequivocally dominates how knowledge is produced, shared and contested within the arts, there is a potent history of approaching place that extends beyond the limitations of the seen.

Inevitably, the traveler’s hunger pangs affect how they experience foreign place. As a visual artist working towards a spring MFA thesis, my work explores this issue as it affects the Millennial Generation. Born in the 80s and 90s, the Millennial has been raised within a globalized society. As privileged nomads, travel at the professional and/or personal level is assumed and celebrated. Mediated by taste, expectation collides with an anxiety arising from the consumption of “discomfort food”, in other words, the suspect and unfamiliar. At risk is a safe and planned touristic experience, facilitated by the photo-visual. Instead, notions of immediacy, surprise, desire and repulsion, responses intrinsic to taste, can be reimagined as vehicles for education and conversation, making active the traveler’s degree of participation.

Projects from Marcel Duchamp, The Situationists, Natalie Jermijenko and Conflict Kitchen destabilize the assumed dominance of the visual with performative tactics: the organically evolving, the unexpected and the viewer-as-participant. Showcasing these contributions allows us to unpack the polysensorial influences at work to see how we all potentially perform as the hungry traveler. Such awareness, specifically through taste, offers a bodily, reflexive and collaborative opportunity to learn through participating in the social, political, personal and collective qualities that creates the uniqueness of place.