BIO

Born in Connecticut in 1949, Anne Wagner was educated at Smith College, Yale University (BA cum laude 1971), Brown University (MA 1974) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1980).  Before coming to Berkeley in 1988, she taught in the Department of Art History, Vassar College and in History, Theory and Criticism, MIT.  Her books include  Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (Yale University Press, 1986), Der Tanz: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989), Three Artists (Three Women):  Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (University of California, 1996) and most recently Mother Stone:  The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2005).

Among her recent published essays are “de Kooning, Drawing and the Double, or Ambiguity Made Clear,” Willem de Kooning:  Tracing the Figure (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, with Princeton University Press, 2002);  “Kara Walker:   “The Black-White Relation,” Kara Walker:  Narratives of a Negress (Cambridge:  MIT, 2003; and  “Splitting and Doubling:  Gordon Matta-Clark and the Body of Sculpture,” Grey Room 14, Fall 2004.  Soon to appear are studies of the implications of Eva Hesse’s titles, the spatial politics of Dan Flavin’s installations, and the ambiguities of Bruce Nauman’s attitudes towards sculpture.  In the last few years, she has also contributed essays and reviews to The Threepenny Review and Artforum.  These forays relate directly to her ambitions for her next book, which will collect a selection of her recent essays, both published and unpublished, in a volume conceived as an alternative, even a corrective, to the interpretive obscurantism and historical obtuseness of much recent criticism.  The working title of this volume, Meaning what?  On art since Jasper Johns, begins to suggest its aims and range.  Wagner also has a strong interest in early video, and a primer introducing the origins, purposes and aesthetics of this influential medium is in the planning stages. 

In describing her research interests, Wagner emphasizes their close relation to her teaching fields:  “I am struck by how many of my recent projects have their origins in the classroom.  Not only graduate and undergraduate seminars, but even large lecture courses, have sparked ideas and lines of enquiry that have eventually made their way into print.  For me, teaching is vitalized by this close exchange, and one aim of my pedagogy is to involve students in the pleasures and excitement of practical criticism and original research.”  In keeping with these aims, her courses incorporate current exhibitions and local collections wherever possible.

Among recent completed and ongoing dissertations supervised by Wagner are studies of John Heartfield’s montage aesthetics; the spatial and gender politics of earthworks; sculptural aesthetics and anthropology, c. 1930;  the implications of the inheritance of slavery for contemporary African-American artists; the significance of David Smith’s photography for the politics and aesthetics of his work; the role of artistic labor in radical artistic discourse and practice, c. 1970; bodily materialisms in performance art; and cybernetics and art of the 1960s and 1970s.