The panel will take place on Wednesday, January 29, 2014, at 5:00 PM, in the Kelsey Museum (directly across the street from the facade) and will again be comprised of faculty from several different corners of our campus:

Kristin Hass (American Culture)
Terrance McDonald (History, Director of the Bentley Historical Library, Former Dean of LSA)
Alexander Potts (History of Art)
Christopher Ratté (Classical Archaeology, Director of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology)
Mark Tucker (Lloyd Hall Scholars Program, Arts Director)
Andrea Zemuglys (English)

This panel is not just about Angell Hall, however. We envision it as having the potential to bring to our attention -- and help us address -- the various problems of monumentality in our own culture at large that we must take time to consider for our own rendering of the edifice's meaning. It has been argued that we in the West have still not quite recovered, on the one hand, from the impact of fascist architecture and the distrust that it brought about regarding monumentality as pure (and dangerous) propaganda. At the same time, on the other hand, we are now also dealing with the epistemological doubts about our control over the meaning of art that have become so prevalent in nearly all disciplines of the humanities. We do not see the facade of Angell with the same eyes, in other words, as when it was built back in the 1920s. And this is an important point that we as Angell's translators will need to take into account if we are to generate something that will not only pay homage to the University's history, but also promote the function of that past in our present and future.

In light of these concerns and objectives, the first step in our translation process will be to perform a close reading of the original "text" in order learn more about the facade's history -- what it meant when it was built, what it has come to mean now. The interdisciplinary lens of the panel will assist the members of the U-M community to read the facade as a text that is more than just the sheer monumentality of its surface. The faculty on panel will provide a series of concise yet nuanced readings that can help us all to reconstruct the meaning of the facade actively, with fresh eyes, by defamiliarizing a structure that too many of us pass by so casually on a daily basis. Monuments are texts that tell more than one story. And it will be a point of this panel to illustrate for us how we can read these intersecting narratives together in order to grasp more fully the constellation of meanings that a structure such as Angell presents.

On Tuesday, April 22, at 9:00 PM, we will then have the opportunity to use the knowledge we have gained about the facade's past and present meanings to advance to step two of our procedure: the full translation of the edifice into our present by inviting everyone to a giant dance party on Angell's front lawn. Mark Tucker -- who is the Arts Director of the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program and the creative director of FestiFools -- has a proven track record of directing high quality performance art events that engage large sections of our community. A major objective of the events that Mark produces is to involve the public in dynamic, educational, collaborative, and entertaining art experiences. And it is this kind of artistic vision that we would like to adopt in order to show our community how we can actually harness the malleability of meaning that monuments offer us, how we can use the facade of Angell, for instance, as a rich backdrop for our own creative impulses, how we can recontextualize it as a stage for a performance that superimposes our own meaning onto the historical structure and thereby translates it wholly into our presen(t/ce). Mark's contribution to the panel will enable our entire community to participate actively in the rendering of Angell's facade into a living and dynamic piece of art through lights, music, and dancing.

This two-step process -- first a close reading of the facade as a text and then a performance that uses it as a stage -- will allow us to produce a translation that will not only conscientiously celebrate the University's past, but also demonstrate how that past can and should be a part of our present. Our work will not end there, though. A website will be dedicated to the documentation of the event, allowing us to pass down the experience of our translating procedure to present and future generations at the University who wish to produce their own renderings of Angell or any other of the monuments here on our campus. This event will help us, in other words, to translate not only the facade of Angell Hall. It will also serve as a model that the members of the U-M community can use to translate into their own present the many other monumental structures of the University as we all approach its third century of existence together.

All presentations and performances will be open to the public.

Organizer and Moderator: Nick Geller, PhD Candidate, Department of Classical Studies