Elise Archias received her PhD in art history from UC Berkeley in July 2008. Her dissertation, "The Body as a Material in the Early Performance Work of Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer, and Vito Acconci", centers on the role performance played in the art that emphasized "everydayness" in the1960s and early 1970s. In the work of these three artists, the body was shown to be an "everyday object" simultaneously mundane and strange, at times responding involuntarily to its surrounding conditions and, at others, utterly blank. She argues that the body allowed New York art practice to register the human stakes of consumer culture's desensitizing effects on late 20th-century life. Her future work will expand this project to take up the legacy of late 1960s art practice in contemporary exhibitions; the changes 1970s feminism and post-Civil Rights Movement discourses on race brought to broader cultural understandings of the body; and the art and politics of the 1960s in locations beyond the U.S. and Europe. She teaches modern, contemporary, and survey art history courses at CSU, Chico, and her teaching reflects her commitment to close looking.
Courses:
ARTH 102 History of Art Survey: Renaissance to Modern
ARTH 404 International Art: Contemporary
ARTH 433 European Art: Early Twentieth Century
ARTS 489 Student Internship
ARTS 689 Graduate Internship
ARTS 697 Independent Study
Education:
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley 2008
History of Art
Dissertation: "The Body as a Material in the Early Performance Work of
Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer, and Vito Acconci"
Publications:
Article, not peer-reviewed:
"The Body as an Everyday Material in the 1960s: Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton," WRECK: graduate journal of art history, visual art & theory. 3:1 (Fall 2009).
(Forthcoming)http://www.ahva.ubc.ca/wreckCurrentIssue.cfm
Catalogue Essays:
"Memory Lead," in Lynn Criswell (San Francisco: Limn Gallery, 2009.)
"On Structure and Care " and "Interview with Amy Stacey Curtis, " in Currents 4: Amy Stacey Curtis (Waterville, ME: Colby College Museum of Art, 2008.)
Catalogue Entry:
"Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Annemarie and Gianfranco ), 1989, " in 50 Years of Collecting at the Colby College Museum of Art (Waterville, ME: Colby College Museum of Art, 2009).
Art Historical Chronology:
"Chronology of works, writings, and published texts, 1959-2004, "
with Sarina Basta, et. al., in Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2004 ): 432-494.
Invited Lectures:
"Everdayness", April 2009
Humanities Center, CSU Chico
"Anna Halprin: Healing Art", April 2008
Gallery lecture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
"Yvonne Rainer and the Banal Body of the 1960s", March 2007
Reed College, Portland, OR
"From Dancers to Meat: Carolee Schneemann's Early Performance Works", June 2006
The Getty Center, Los Angeles: Movement and the Visual Arts Symposium