Date: August 28, 1998 For immediate release

Artists Bill Viola and Adrian Piper among 1998-99 Getty Scholars as Year on "Representing the Passions" Continues

Public Lecture Planned for October 28

Los Angeles, Calif-In September, six new Getty Scholars will join five already in residence as part of the 1998-99 Scholar Year exploring the theme "Representing the Passions." The names of six new Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Fellows were also announced today by the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. (See complete list of Scholars and Fellows attached.)

Each year the Getty Research Institute brings together an outstanding group of scholars, artists, and other cultural figures to focus on a particular research theme. This year's group includes artists Bill Viola and Adrian Piper (who is also a philosopher and plans to complete a three-volume work on Kant while at the Getty); art historians Norman Bryson and David Summers; film historian Lesley Stem; and cultural critic Elaine Scarry. Kicking off a series of associated public events, Bill Viola will give a lecture entitled "Technology and Passion" in the Harold M. Williams Auditorium at the Getty Center on Wednesday, October 28 at 7:00 pm; admission is free but reservations must be made by calling (310)440-7300.

"Passions are overwhelming emotions," says Michael S. Roth, the Research Institute's Associate Director and head of the Scholars and Seminars Program. "They move you in ways that you can't control and can't ignore. Here at the Research Institute we are especially interested in how artists and writers have tried to find ways of representing and classifying how people are moved, even torn, by powerful emotions." Roth notes that there is an important social need to name the passions and to distinguish them from one another, and that artists have developed languages and codes in an effort to communicate the power of what seems beyond words. Yet, as these languages and codes become very stable-as they are ritualized into firm cultural conventions-the intensiry and violence of the passions, their ungovemabiliry, may elude artists striving to represent them. "At least since ancient Greece," says Roth, "artists from many different cultural contexts and using different media have struggled with this problem. This year at the Research Institute, we are exploring this relation between passion and conventions of representation-in the visual arts and in the intersection of the arts with music, politics, literature, and other aspects of societies."

While in residence, Getty Scholars and Fellows pursue individual research projects while sharing their ideas with one another in a weekly seminar. This year's group will address the problem of representing the passions in contexts ranging from religious passion in the painting of Van Gogh to histrionics in modern film, from musical dramaturgy in Opera Seria to the visual culture of modern Japan, from the funerary art of ancient Etruria to the use of photography by turn-of-the-century industrial psychologists.

In addition to a number of public lectures and events scheduled throughout the year, the spring 1998 program will feature an invitational seminar on "gesture" in which scholars will focus on attempts within different artistic media to represent strong emotions through the use of gesture.

Since 1985 more than 300 scholars, artists, architects, composers, filmmakers, and writers have been in residence at the Research Institute. They have come from two dozen countries and been among the most dynamic cultural figures worldwide. In doing their work, Scholars and Fellows can take advantage of the Institute's vast Research Library of books, manuscripts, and archival materials, as well as research materials housed at other Southern California universities, libraries, archives, and cultural institutions.

The research theme for the 1999-2000 Getty Scholar Year will be "Humanities in Comparative Historical Perspective."

The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities is dedicated to the production of innovative scholarship in the arts and the humanities and provides a unique environment for research, critical inquiry, and debate. Integral to its interdisciplinary approach is the concept that visual arts and artifacts should not be studied in isolation, but assessed within the broad historical and cultural contexts in which they were created. The Research Institute provides valuable support for scholars through its extensive collections, which include manuscripts, archives, visual materials, and more than 700,000 volumes of books, serials, and auction catalogs; and by inviting groups of interdisciplinary researchers to the Institute to conduct their research as scholars in residence. Scholarship produced at the Research Institute is disseminated at the local, national, and international levels through an active publications and exhibitions program and a wide range of other public programming that includes lectures, performances, and symposia.

Located at the Getty Center, the Research Institute is part of the J. Paul Getty Trust, a private operating foundation dedicated to the visual arts and the humanities. The Institute's Research Library is a resource for scholars, college and university faculty, graduate students, curators, and independent researchers. Drop-in visitors are welcome, but reservations are strongly encouraged; reservations are required for all visitors coming to the Getty Center by car. For more information, call (310)440-7390.

GETTY SCHOLARS 1998-99

New Getty Scholars

Norman Bryson is Professor of Art History at Harvard University. His books include Vision and Painting: the Logic of the Gaze (1983); Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (1984); and Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990). At the Getty Research Institute he will be working on two projects: one concerning the archival aesthetic in 20th-century photography, the other dealing with representation of the body in modern Japanese visual culture. September 1998-June 1999

Martha Feldman is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (1995). In her current book project she applies anthropological perspectives informed by musicology to opera seria in 18th-century Italy--focusing on how musical dramaturgy, social communication, political symbolism, and aesthetic debate operated in this genre of "serious opera" and affected festive practices integral to absolutist strategies of maintaining power. The project is provisionally entitled The Plight of Princes: Opera, Absolutism, and Festivity on the Eve of Modernity. September 1998- June 1999

Philip Fisher is Reid Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous publications, including Making and Effacing Art: Modem American Art in a Culture of Museums (1991); Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (1998); and Still the New World: American Literature and the Conditions of Culture (forthcoming). His project at the Research Institute will explore the role played by anger, fear, and grief in philosophy and literature-from Homer and Plato to Shakespeare and Hobbes, Spinoza and Hume. September 1998-June 1999

Diego Lanza is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Pavia, Italy. His present studies concern Greek myth and memory; at the Research Institute he will address questions about the classification, dramatization, recollection, and social role of passions/pathe in ancient Greece. His publications include La disciplina dell'emozione. Una guida alla tragedia greca (1997); Lo stolto. Di Socrate, Eulenspiegel, Pinocchio e altri trasgressori del senso comune (1997); and Lingua e discorso nell'Atene delle professioni (1979). September 1998-June 1999

Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus is Deputy Secretary at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and author of Wollust und Grausamkeit. Affektenlehre und Affektdarstellung in Lohensteins Dramatik am Beispiel von "Agrippa" (1986); Die akademische Mobilitat zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich 1925-1992 (1994); and Rede, dam it ich Dich sehe! Die Physiognomik der Stimme (1997). His current work deals with visual and acoustic physiognomy; the comparison of vocal performances in drama, art, and political speech; and the theory and practice of the accent. September 1998-June 1999

Adrian M. S. Piper is Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College and a well known artist. Her publications include Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992 and Volume II: Selected Writings in Art Criticism 1967-1992 (1996); "Kant on the Objectivity of the Moral Law" in Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls (1997); and "Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination" in Ethics 101, 4, Symposium on Impartiality and Ethical Theory (1991). During her tenure at the Research Institute she will complete a three- volume work in Kantian metaethics entitled Rationality and the Structure of the Self a critique of the predominant Humean conception of the self and defense of a Kantian alternative. September 1998- June 1999

Elaine Scarry is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value at Harvard. She is the author of The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985); Resisting Representation (1994); and the forthcoming Making Mental Pictures Fly which examines the construction of mental imagery in different media-including painting, sculpture, poetry, and fiction. At the Research Institute she will pursue her exploration of the interior of mental life, studying the nature of color composition and the connection between passive syntax and image-making; she will also be looking at the structure of mental deliberation in acts of consent. January 1999-June 1999.

Getty Scholars Currently in Residence

Debora Silverman is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her published works include Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, psychology, and Style (1989) and Selling Culture: Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America (1986). She is currently interested in the role of religion in late 19th-century European modernism. Her major work in progress, Weaving Painting: A Lfe of Vincent van Gogh, focuses on understudied aspects of Van Gogh's development and self-perception, including his identification with laborers deriving from his Dutch Reformed and evangelical Protestantism. At the Research Institute she will be investigating, in particular, how Protestantism and Catholicism shaped the artistic practices of Van Gogh and Gaugin and their distinctive conceptions of the Passion of Christ as models for their art. January 1998-December 1998

Lesley Stern is a film historian and theorist who teaches Film and Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She has published in the areas of film, theater, photography and cultural studies; recent publications include The Scorsese Connection (1995) and "Meditation on Violence" in Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism & Cinema for the Moment (1995). She also writes fiction and is interested in ficto-criticism. Currently she is embarked upon several projects: one tracing "histrionics" in film; another, a book about smoking and desire entitled Smokescreen; and a third involving both a book and a film about Township Theatre in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe-an extraordinarily physical theatre combining kungfu, dance, music, and drama. January 1998- December 1998

David Summers is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of Art at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Michaelangelo and the Language of Art (1981) and The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (1987), which was awarded the Morris D. Forkasch Prize for the best book of intellectual history of 1987. He is currently completing a major book project entitled Principles of a World Art History and beginning another to be called The Fear of Art. January 1998-December 1998

Bill Viola is an internationally acclaimed video artist now residing in Long Beach, California. His video and sound installations expressing aspects of the human condition in the media age have been exhibited all over the world and have won him many awards, most recently the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Mediekunstpreis. At the Research Institute he will pursue a variety of interests relating to the passions-including the influence of space (natural and architectural) on emotional states and the use of digital video techniques to transform and extend the expressive emotional range of the human form. January 1998-December 1998

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