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 A Look Behind the Scenes
Henry Adams and Christopher Pekoc
6:00 p.m.
Recital Hall,
Cleveland Museum of Art, Recital Hall
11150 East Boulevard
Henry Adams is Professor of American Art, Department of Art History and Art; Christopher Pekoc, Lecturer, Studio Art, CWRU.
Includes film screening followed by discussion and a reception.
The Beauty of Damage, by the Cleveland film-maker Tom Ball, was made to accompany a forthcoming national traveling exhibition of the work of Christopher Pekoc, who has taught for some twenty years at Case Western Reserve University, and has achieved national acclaim for his provocative assemblages. Funding for the project was generously provided by Toby Lewis.
The noted American poet Dana Gioia has written:
The first time I saw Christophr Pekoc’s work I knew I was in the presence of a powerful and original artist. Over the years my admiration has only grown. Visually stunning and sensual, his work is in equal parts beautiful and unsettling, which is to say that it transforms our usual sense of the beautiful to include the strange the disturbing, and the mysterious. We hope this showing will be of interest for two reasons: as a celebration of the work of Chris Pekoc and as an invitation to think more broadly about film as a viable and compelling medium of communication.
In the new age of computers and digital imagery, the movie has become a more versatile and more powerful tool of communication than ever before. For one thing, the ways in which movies can be shown have multiplied. Whereas once movies required a screening in a theater or a classroom, now they can also be displayed through television, through DVD, and through websites, and can not only be shown entire but in short clips. In addition, with the shift from film to digital imagery, it has become easier to produce movies of high quality at much less expense than even a decade ago. One person with a powerful computer can produce effects that a few years ago would have required hundreds of technicians and a large, well-equipped studio. As a consequence, a movie made in Cleveland no longer needs to be technically inferior to one made in Hollywood.
A showing of the film (eighteen minutes) will be followed by an open discussion with Chris Pekoc, the artist portrayed, Bernie Sokolowski, who did the animation, and Henry Adams, who worked on the project with Tom Ball as co-producer and co-scriptwriter. They’ll discuss the peculiar, fluid process of creating a movie, from its first inception through the various stages of fundraising, script-writing, research, filming, crafting the sound track, and editing.
Resource Guide
Mary Beth Wetli
October 9, 2008
4:15 PM
Reception to begin at 4:00 PM
Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road
Mary Beth Wetli is Lecturer in the Department of English, Case Western Reserve University.
In his lectures on universal history, delivered at the University of Jena (1789-1792), German dramatist, aesthetician, physician, and historian Friedrich Schiller embraced the common Enlightenment notion that the telos of human history is happiness and autonomy, and offered his own speculative account of this development. Schiller turns to the universal historical significance of the Hebrew nation and its legacy for the Enlightenment in Die Sendung Moses (The Legation of Moses). His account of the Jews’ contribution to the advancement of reason often pushes the twenty-first century reader to the limit: it elides suffering—in the form of plagues, mistreatment, and enslavement—in service of a narrative of progress. At the same time, Schiller attempts to free himself from contemporary prejudice in order to acknowledge Jewish contributions to reason. Together with his lecture on Die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgus und Solon (The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon), he articulates, but does not consistently practice, a practical ethics of historiography according to which human beings must be treated as ends in themselves, never as means. My research provides evidence that Schiller proposed not only a fully developed concept of historical study as well as philosophy of history, but also an ethics of historiography. This project lays the foundation for future considerations of Schiller’s evolving philosophy of history in his aesthetic treatises and later historical dramas.
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Charles Michener
Go to Podcast of lecture
December 4, 2008
4:15 p.m.
Reception at 4:00
Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road
Department of English
Mr. Michener was Senior Cultural Editor at Newsweek for many years, and more recently a Senior Editor at The New Yorker. He is currently working on a book about the reinvention of Cleveland entitled, The Hidden City, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf.
 Robert Spadoni
Monday, February 9, 2009
4:15 p.m.
Reception at 4:00
Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road
The presentation considers the 1935 film Werewolf of London, which has a strong gay subtext that few have examined, probably because it is in many ways so obvious. Once we get past the overt queerness of the text, it becomes possible to see how, less obviously, the film resonates with certain theories concerning the causes and nature of homosexuality that were circulating at the time.
Cheryl Toman
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
4:15 p.m.
Reception at 4:00
Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road
Gabonese author Justine Mintsa writes in French but infuses her text with elements of her native Fang culture and language. While it is common in western feminist literature to equate tradition with oppression, Mintsa defies this notion. Her use of Fang culture can be read as manifestations of a local culture written in a so-called global language.
John Orlock
 Thursday, April 2, 2009
4:15 p.m.
Reception at 4:00
Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road
To set the scene: Central France, Autumn 1945. An Italian refugee – who identifies himself as the last of the great classical clowns – lost, deep in the forest, encounters an older country gentleman of leisure: a regional judge, with a hook where his right hand once was. When the judge extends hospitality, shelter, and the company of his wife – a cellist, long separated from her orchestra – erotic tension fuels a simmering struggle, as the three strive to maintain honor and order. A comic drama of love, lust, and coming to terms with the loss of a sustaining future.
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