Office: ART 119
Phone: 408-924-4582
Fax: 408-924-4326
Email: dore.bowen@sjsu.edu
My research, writing, and curatorial projects focus on the phenomenology of perception, particularly within the interstices of performance and the lens-based arts. My dissertation concerns Fluxus, the post-war artist network, and the impact of its performative and instruction-oriented aesthetics on photography. More recently I have completed a sound/image project titled “Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women” with Isabelle Massu concerning the representation of Arab women. This project, in alliance with the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, weaves together a number of related topics, such as the transformation of the photograph into a digital—and hence transmissible—image, the Orientalist imagination, and gender as its relates to the archive. The installation was mounted in Marseille in 2006 and travels to San Francisco Camerawork in 2007 with an accompanying journal.
My criticism has appeared in numerous journals including Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Art Papers, Stretcher Journal, and Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts. Catalog essays include those for Scott Macleod (San Francisco Art Institute), Ed Osborn (Klangturm Museum of Sound), and Ben Vautier (Musée d’art moderne et contemporaine, Nice). Most recently, my essay “Imagine There’s No Image (It’s Easy If You Try): Appropriation in the Age of Digital Reproduction” appears in The Companion to Art History Since 1945, Blackwell Press. I have received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Research Library, the College Art Association, the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, the American Photography Institute, and the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies. I hold a Ph.D. from the Visual and Cultural Studies Program, University of Rochester, an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Art from San Francisco State University, and a B.A. in Media Studies from The Evergreen State College.
