Announcing the 2009-2010 Annual Dorr Lecture in Arts and Ideas:

Art, Eros and the SixtiesJonathan D. KatzWednesday, October 7, 2009, 7:00 p.m. Owen Hall Conference Center Free and Open to the PublicIn the art world of the late 50s and 60s, before difference was particularized, specified, embodied, and made over into artistic identity, a single human capacityEroswas elevated to universal status and made ground for a global politic of social liberation. Invoked as solvent to the Cold War's containment culture and its multiple repressions, the liberatory potential of Eros as a mechanism of comprehensive social dissent turned precisely on its presumed communal and collective capacity to free the mind through a return to the body and its pleasures. As the most direct conduit to the liberatory potential of Eros, a huge percentage of art in all mediums within this narrow historical moment -in painting, film, theater, happenings, performance-turned on the seduction of Eros. For a few short years, a diverse group of artists, female and male, queer and straight, as different as Richard Hamilton, Lygia Clark, Franz West, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann produced an art that, in politicizing the body while obfuscating its signs of differentiation, paradoxically engendered the very specific contemporary social categories like feminist and queer that now obscure Eros' formative and foundational role. Jonathan D. Katz is Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, Honorary Research Faculty at the University of Manchester, Terra Visiting and Professor at the Courtauld Institute in London. Katz was the founding director of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, and founding chair of the very first Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies in the United States, at City College of San Francisco. He co-founded the activist group Queer Nation, San Francisco, and founded the Queer Caucus of the College Art Association, and the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco. Katz is currently completing the book for his groundbreaking exhibition slated to open in October 2010 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery entitled Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiturethe first queer exhibition at a major museum in US history. In 2011 his exhibition Art/AIDS/America will open at the Corcoran and Tacoma museums of art. The Annual Dorr Lecture is made possible through a generous endowment funded by Joyce and Larry Dorr. Additional support for the lecture was given by the Departments of Literature and Philosophy. For further information contact Brian Butler at 808.251.6272.