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Stephen J. Goldberg
Stephen J. Goldberg
Associate Professor of Art History Stephen J. Goldberg presented a paper titled "Oh Father, Where Art Thou? A Bakhtinian Reading of Luo Zhongli's Father" at An Interdisciplinary Conference: The Status of Theory in Contemporary Chinese Film and Visual Culture, held at the University Maryland on Feb. 20.

Goldberg argued for the relevancy of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin as essential to an understanding of contemporary Chinese art. He examined Bakhtin's thought with a specific focus on his dialogical theory of "double-voiced discourse" and "addressivity" through a reading of "Father," a painting dated 1980 by Lo Zhongli, an artist from Sichuan province. In the paper, double-voicing (here redefined as the internal bifurcation of visual modes of address) is be shown to be an implicit strategy in the artist's attempt to offer a counter-memory of the recent historical events during the Cultural Revolution. In so doing, Lo Zhongli's Father posed a challenge to the sovereignty of the Communist-Party state by undermining, through a rhetorical strategy of parodic inversion, two of the principal discursive instruments by which the legitimacy of this sovereignty was inscribed and rationalized: Socialist Realist paintings and political propaganda posters. The paper concludes with a discussion of Yin Zhaoyang's "Yin Zhaoyong and Mao," painted in 2003, that represents both a symptom and critique of the loss authority in a society that remains nostalgic for a past that is no linger firmly grounded in intimate memory.

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