Event Date
About the Event
I've spent much of my career writing about Japanese popular visual culture--translating the visual material and effects into words. But recently I've been experimenting more and more with forms of criticism that are themselves visual. My most ambitious project along these lines has been Repro Japan, an exhibition of Japanese popular culture that I designed for the Williams College Museum of Art in 2021-22. The show included more than a hundred artworks spanning three hundred years and a wide range of media, from Edo-period woodblock prints and textile designs, through 19th-century photography, to manga, anime cels, cosplay costumes, Lolita fashion, and more. My talk will begin from some of the challenges of exhibiting popular culture in a museum: how do you display an anime on a museum wall, for example, or capture the practice of cosplay in a static display? And can you make an argument about visual culture without written language, simply by juxtaposing objects in a museum gallery? I'll try to answer these questions by discussing some innovative popular culture exhibitions that I have visited in Europe and Japan, then I will conclude with an illustrated tour and some behind-the-scenes details from my own show.
About the Speaker
Christopher Bolton is chair and Edward Dorr Griffin Professor of Comparative Literature at Williams College in Massachusetts, where he has been teaching Japanese literature and visual culture for over twenty years. He is the author of Interpreting Anime (2018) and the co-editor of Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime (2007). He also co-edited the first ten volumes of the Mechademia series, for academic work on Japanese anime, manga, and the fan arts (2006-2015). In 2021-22 he curated Repro Japan: Technologies of Popular Culture, a major museum exhibition devoted to Japanese popular culture at the Williams College Museum of Art.