Profs and Pints - Nashville

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “A Campy Summer Evening,” on a distinct style and its history, politics, and pleasures, with Stephanie A. Graves, lecturer in English at Middle Tennessee State University and scholar of film, television, and media.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/campy-summer-evening ]

When something is called “campy,” what does that mean? What exactly is camp style, and why does it remain so culturally provocative?

Throw on something outlandish and come to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom to hear answers delivered by Stephanie Graves, whose past talks have earned her a loyal following among Profs and Pints fans.

She’ll look at camp in film, television, fashion, music, and popular culture, moving from Oscar Wilde to Trixie Mattel, from classic Hollywood melodrama to contemporary internet memes.

In defining camp, she’ll describe its association with excess, drama, irony, and artifice. She’ll discuss how it’s evoked in the play with gender and sexuality in Rocky Horror Picture Show, in the visual excess and exaggerated style of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and in art as varied as Wilde’s plays and Lady Gaga’s concerts.

We’ll look at how camp thrives in the spaces where “good” and “bad” taste and “high” and “low” art collapse into one another, such as in John Waters’s Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, in RuPaul’s Drag Race, and in the films of Baz Luhrmann. More than just an aesthetic of flamboyance or kitsch, camp emphasizes stylization, performance, and spectacle in ways that deliberately provoke cultural norms of respectability and decorum.

You’ll learn how the tenets of camp were widely popularized by writer Susan Sontag in her influential 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” In reality, however, camp’s history stretches back much further, emerging from queer subcultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and flourishing in spaces where humor, performance, parody, and coded self-expression became tools of survival for marginalized communities. It was carried forward in the glamour of old Hollywood stars, the theatricality of disco and drag culture, the hyper-femininity of contemporary pop icons, and in the pleasures of cult films and television.

We’ll consider why camp continues to resonate—and why exaggeration, artifice, and “bad taste” still carries surprising cultural power. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Understanding Urban Legends,” an exploration of the tales we tell to terrify each other, with Cory Thomas Hutcheson, folklorist, lecturer at Middle Tennessee State University, and author of New World Witchery: A Trove of North American Folk Magic.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-urban-legends .]

The call is coming from inside Fait La Force! Or if it were, anyway, it would summon you to sit at one of the beloved taproom’s tables for a summertime treat: A talk about that modern folktales that get circulated around campfires, on school playgrounds, and in the dark corners of the internet.

Folklorist Cory Thomas Hutcheson, whose reputation for giving excellent talks has earned him a following among Nashville’s Profs and Pints fans, will give you a deeper understanding and appreciation of urban legends—also called contemporary legends—than you have ever had before.

You’ll recognize something hauntingly familiar as he talks about a hook-handed killer terrorizing teenage lovers out for a drive, or the person who woke up in a tub full of ice possessing one less kidney, or a shadowy figure shown by an ongoing trucker’s headlights to be in the backseat of a car.

But he’ll also lead you deeper into such lore, discussing where such tales come from and the deeper meanings that drive them and keep them alive via word-of-mouth or their online circulation on subreddits.

You’ll gain an understanding of how these stories connect to bigger issues in the culture around us.

You’ll see how anxieties about disease and contagion became stories about food contamination or about vicious ghosts wearing medical masks, and how both teen and adult fears about teens growing up too fast became tales of amorous adolescents pursued by sadistic killers.

You’ll also learn a bit about how these tales change over time with different tellings and tellers, and whether troubling facts lurk within any such fictional accounts. You'll encounter murderous bathroom ghosts, traverse the haunting liminal-space lore that inspired the new hit film Backrooms, and meet the infamous Slenderman.

Just make sure you check your backseat before you start driving home. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: A hatchet purported to have been wielded by Virginia’s notorious Bunnyman. (Photo by KeeferC / Wikimedia Commons.)

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “A Guide to Conceptual Art,” on the origins and evolution of an art movement that produced signed urinals, floating sheds, and wall-mounted bananas, with Jennifer Gagliardi, independent curator and contemporary art lecturer at Middle Tennessee State University and Pratt Institute in New York.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/conceptual-art ]

Few art movements have met with as much buzz and backlash as conceptual art, associated with installations and performances that often leave people scratching their heads or deep in thought.

Come to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom for a talk on conceptual art that will deepen your appreciation and understanding of it. We’ll consider works such as Martin Creed’s empty room with lights going on and off, Maurizio Bolognini’s programming of computers to generate images no human will ever view, and Tracey Emin’s exhibition of an unmade bed, exploring their deeper meaning.

To frame her discussion, Gagliardi will talk about how the history of art is big and wild, with the first work of "art" technically being made around 28,000 BCE. When we think about art, we often consider paintings, sculptures, or digital objects, but Marcel Duchamp sparked a radical shift in the art world by presenting a urinal as art in 1917. After World War II, artist groups began experimenting with the very definition of art, and by the 1970s, the focus had shifted from the finished product to the idea of art itself.

We’ll look at how art and philosophy blended in the 20th century to inspire conceptual artists to transform art from functional object to form of intellectual entertainment, favoring idea over physical product. Gagliardi will discuss Japan’s avant-garde Gutai artists, who ran through paper, as well as works focused on the conceptual definition of a chair.

We’ll talk about Yves Klein’s exhibition of an empty gallery and Clement Greenberg’s theories on avant-garde and kitsch. Attendees will come away with a new understanding of some of contemporary art’s most famous—and seemingly impenetrable—works.

Among the questions Gagliardi will tackle: Is art the concept or is it the finished piece? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs” (Photo by Gautier Poupeau / Wikimedia Commons).