Join us for a one-of-a-kind night out—cocktails, great conversation, and the chance to meet new people.
From the back rooms of Charles Ellis Johnson’s late-19th century Salt Lake City photo studio to the glittering neo-burlesque stages of the 1990s to present, the modern spectacle of the female body carries a longer, and often more surprising, history than generally known.
In this talk, art historian @prof.mvigneault begins with a local paradox: Johnson, a photographer who documented LDS church officials and the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple, simultaneously produced some of the most widely circulated risqué stereoviews of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. His double life opens onto a broader story about looking and desire, as well as the economics of image circulation.
Moving across late-19th century cigarette and tobacco cards, hand-held stereoscopes, 1970s feminist performance art, and today’s neo-burlesque revival, Vigneault traces how the boundaries between sacred and scandalous, kitsch and High Art, have never been fixed and absolute. The lecture follows burlesque through its heyday in the early twentieth century, its suppression amid shifting moral and legal pressures in the 1930s, and its reemergence as neo-burlesque in the 1990s, to show how early forms of visual entertainment trained audiences in practices of looking that would shape modern striptease. At the center are the women who moved from object to agent, stepping out from behind the image to claim the lens, the stage, and the terms of their own visibility.
Following the talk, a live burlesque performance brings this tradition into the room!💃
